Early childhood education models and outcomes

Essay Prompt:
2 PAGE POSITION PAPER  - UTILIZE SUMMATIVE PROPOSAL TO WRITE POSITION PAPER.
TITLE:  write a 2-3 page position paper outlining the need for more funding to support ECE for underserved communities. with a 1 page reflection
EPS: 516 Education and Society

Early childhood education is a critical element within underserved communities. For one, it provides critical infrastructure needed to help the parents. Within the underserved communities, many children are born out of wedlock to unmarried women. These women need adequate childcare services so that they can work to maintain an adequate income for the household. ECE helps to facilitate this process by allowing women to work while also teaching their children the skills needed for tomorrow. ECE allows single mothers to better prepare their children with the skills needed to be successful in a rapidly changing environment as well. These two elements provide a basis in which ECE should continue to be used in underserved communities

To begin, ECE provides a critical service needed to teach children the skills need to be successful in a much more competitive market place. For one, to be successful, students will now need access to more skills and abilities than prior generations. These skills will heavily depend on science, math, technology and engineering. Many families in underserve communities do not possess theses skills and are therefore less likely to promote them to their children. In addition, the skills that parents in these communities have are often common. With lack of skills, many in underserved communities are employed in lower paying often routine jobs such as restaurants, construction, and other manual labor jobs. These jobs are typically lower paying and therefore doesn’t allow many individuals in underserved communities to develop adequate skills. In addition, to send their children to premium programs, many of the individuals need to have much higher income levels. Through affordable ECE programs parents can better afford to send their children to these programs while also providing a stable household environment in which the children can live. Affordable ECE is a means of supplementing underserved communities with the proper education infrastructure that will allow them to succeed in the future irrespective of socio-economic status.

From the child’s perspective ECE is critical for their overall development. As noted above, the jobs of the future require a unique and high trained skill set. This skill set consists of hard skills that require an expertise in science, math, technology or engineering related field. It also requires soft skills as it relates to leadership, communication and other areas of social interaction. The earlier a child can learn these skills and technique, the more time they have to practice and hone their respective craft. It also provides children with an opportunity to gain exposure to these elements at an early age to better determine what careers they would like to pursue in the future.  Early education also helps children in underserved communities gain exposure to subjects earlier, thus allowing them to build confidence within their ability to learn and master the subjects. This element of confidence is critical to many within the underserved communities. Many students, primarily minorities, fall behind in courses during their elementary and middle school years. This learning gap tends to compound over time resulting in children having a very large learning gap for many of the critical subjects we discussed above. By the time these children arrive at high school, they are often far behind in many of these subjects compared to their peers. This gap often feels insurmountable by these children and they instead lose hope in attempting to rectify the situation. This ultimately results in lower confidence, lower grades, and the lower ability to perform for the jobs and industries of the future. By having ECE, children have an opportunity to make mistakes, learn, and grow with these subjects prior to middle school and high school. This allows them to become familiar with the subjects while also building their own self-esteem and confidence (Suggate, 2013)

More funding is need is these areas as they are often woefully underfunded. Teachers are often underpaid relative to their importance, and critical services are need within underserved communities, particularly those of color. This is essentially an investment in the future of America as minorities will soon have a much large role with the overall population of the United States. To maintain the competitive position of the United States, more investment will be needed in education to foster growth in high growth industries. Likewise, social problems such as high poverty rates, high minority incarceration rates and income inequality will be address through ECE programs. In addition, parents can better focus on their own skills and income potential as it relates to their ability to earn higher wages.