Atlanta poised to lead early learning

By Dennis Lockhart and Beverly Daniel Tatum


Recent opinion pieces in this newspaper have focused on how educational improvements can help produce a highly skilled workforce, which has important implications for the long-term viability of the Atlanta metro region.

We couldn’t agree more, which explains why it was easy for us to answer the call of the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta to co-chair a new Early Education Commission.

The commission sees a need to expand the focus of our educational reform efforts from grades k-12 to pre-k through 12.

Nationally-recognized school superintendent Dr. Beverly Hall — a member of the Early Education Commission — also recognizes the importance of pre-k education to the future success in leading a well-regarded reform effort in the Atlanta Public Schools.

Overwhelming research-based evidence suggests that high-quality early education matters in overall educational outcomes. Children lacking language, reading and social skills when they reach kindergarten are highly unlikely to be prepared to read in third grade, when reading to learn is critical and a good predictor of their likelihood of graduating from high school.

Economic, education and neuroscience research clearly indicates the need for increased investment in early childhood education as an effective method to reverse negative outcomes such as remediation costs, high dropout rates, poverty, homelessness and incarceration.

Simply put, high-quality education dramatically increases the odds that people will successfully contribute to society. And the economic value of these contributions is many times greater than the cost of the education.

This benefit is particularly true for early childhood education, where studies inspired by the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman show that the highest return on investment is achieved by investing in children at the earliest ages.

In Heckman’s words, “skill begets skill, and learning begets more learning...early advantages accumulate, just as early disadvantages do.” It is therefore in our collective self interest to promote school readiness among all children in metro Atlanta.

The Early Education Commission has been meeting monthly since October 2008, learning from experts across a wide spectrum of early education topics (e.g., economic development implications, brain development, quality standards, and implementation models).

The group is moving toward a consensus that bold actions are needed to ensure appropriate investments in early childhood education in metro Atlanta. Only then will other investments in k-12 and post-secondary education be optimized and the overall impact on the economic prosperity of our community improved.

The good news is that we aren’t starting from zero. Bright from the Start, the Georgia pre-k program for 4-year-olds, is providing a total of 82,000 pre-k slots in metro Atlanta for the 2009-10 school year. The Georgia pre-k program is “universal” in that there are no income eligibility requirements.

However, demand currently exceeds capacity. In the 2008-09 school year, more than 8,000 children were on waiting lists around the state at some point during the year. More than 4,000 of these children were in the 13-county metro area.

There are also a number of other early education efforts in the metro area, including programs provided under the auspices of the United Way’s Smart Start and federally funded Head Start and Early Head Start programs.

Despite these efforts there is a general lack of awareness of the return on investments in early education. And we have not achieved a coordinated approach to improving the availability of high-quality early education in the region and the state. An early education movement has been spreading across the U.S. and throughout the world.

The Early Education Commission intends to deliver recommendations by the end of the year that promise to position Atlanta as a leader in this movement and lay the groundwork for business leaders, policymakers, and the funding community to rise to the occasion of implementing the recommendations. Only then can we develop our own pipeline to a high-quality workforce and increase the long-term sustainability of metro Atlanta.

Dennis Lockhart is president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Beverly Daniel Tatum is president of Spelman College.