Let’s have more More at Four

Wilmington Star News, Editorial

March 19, 2007

North Carolina’s pre-kindergarten program is one of the two best in the country, according to a new report from the National Institute for Early Education Research. But thousands of our children aren’t participating. They deserve that chance at better lives.

Dubbed “More at Four,” the program offers classes for 4-year-olds who face obstacles of income, language, disability or health. About 18,000 children are enrolled. Gov. Mike Easley, who got the General Assembly to create the program in 2001, hopes to enroll an additional 10,000.

To pay for those slots, he proposes fiddling with the lottery, which the General Assembly seems unlikely to do. Then the General Assembly should find the money elsewhere.

Research continues to confirm that early childhood education works, and that it’s particularly effective for poor children. It’s also effective in closing the test-score gaps that, once they open, tend to persist all the way through school.

It isn’t just education professors and other usual suspects who make the argument for high-quality preschool classes. Business leaders do, too. And so does a Nobel Prize-winning professor from the famously conservative economics department of the University of Chicago.

James Heckman contends that it’s much cheaper to educate children when they’re young than to try to help them catch up later. For that matter, it’s also much cheaper to educate them to compete in the global workforce than to hire cops, social workers, drug-treatment counselors and prison guards to pick up the broken pieces of wasted lives.

North Carolina, which has added its own preschool programs to the feds’ Head Start, could do a better job of coordinating and managing its efforts. But they work.

More At Four has become a national model. If we’re wise, we’ll offer its life-changing opportunities to thousands of more children.