Starting next fall, babies as young as 6 weeks will get to experience the New York City public-education system. On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced the launch of a new Educare facility in Brownsville that will cater to children from infancy through pre-K.
And you thought “nanny state” was just a metaphor.
The city will spend about $10 million up-front for the facility to provide low-income families with up to 10 hours a day of child care. Running the program will cost about $3 million a year, with some funds supplied by private foundations and the rest from federal, state and local coffers.
And what can we expect from it? The mayor says “You’re not going to teach them calculus at that age.” No kidding. We’re lucky if kids in New York get taught calculus at any age.
Rather, he says, “The first thing is to teach them to deal with other kids and how you cooperatively work together.”
Hmm. Jay Belsky, a UC Davis professor of human development and one of the authors of the definitive study on the effects of long-term non-maternal care on young children, finds Bloomberg’s formulation “a little strange.”
Babies don’t need to learn cooperation, obviously. Maybe the mayor was simply referring to the toddlers, but what babies need is qualitatively different — as Belsky puts it, a lot of “affection” from attentive adults.
And even that may not be enough. Belsky worked on the landmark 2001 National Institute of Child Health and Development longitudinal study of day care. It found that the more hours children had been in the care of someone other than their mothers, the more likely caregivers were to describe them as “aggressive” when they reached kindergarten. (“Aggressive” included “gets in a lot of fights” and “cruelty” toward others.)
But, for all the risks associated with day care, Belsky says it’s possible that the environment created by the city will be better than the one these very-low-income kids face at home (if an adult could even be home with them).
But how good will Educare be? The model has been tried in Chicago, where it showed moderate success in making students more prepared for kindergarten than they might otherwise be.
Belsky wonders if a large bureaucracy like the city Department of Education can really make this work. “Is this going to be a unionized shop?” If you just hire a bunch of “unemployed women” to sit around, rather than trained professionals, and you “can’t get rid of people” who turn out not to do a good job, then it’s going to be a problem.
Sophia Pappas, the executive director for the city’s Office of Early Childhood Education, says Educare will contract with a local group to run the program. That contractor will control hiring, and personnel won’t be part of the city teaching corps.
So for the time being, they may escape the mediocrity that comes with unionization. But if these programs are part of the education system, it’s hard to imagine them remaining outside the reach of the expansive United Federation of Teachers — which already has the right to unionize child-care providers.
The Bloomberg administration promises that the city is “investing in programs that will prepare our youngest students for a lifetime of success.” Citing research showing that much of our brain-development happens between birth and age 3, Pappas argues that the program will help close the achievement gap and even aid in “college preparedness.”
“You want to take advantage of those years,” she says. Great — if Educare works.
The best kind of care for infants is presumably the kind mothers have provided from time immemorial— affection and individualized attention. And the Bloomberg folks no doubt intend to do their best to mimic that. But the history of large bureaucratic social programs isn’t promising.
In other words, itseems unlikely that a city facilityfocusing on babies’ college preparedness will help them feel the love.