Teach your children to memorize! Their ability to quickly pick up anything you repeat often enough is nearly miraculous. This teaches poise, articulation, the art of speaking up, standing still, keeping the hands relaxed, etc. The same thing could probably be accomplished with a pretend microphone-an ice cream dipper, for example. She has each child stand up at one end of the living room while the others sit in a row like an audience and listen to him recite a verse, a hymn, a poem, or make a short speech. This same mother bought a microphone and small public address system. This may not sound very intellectual, but the orderly doing of household chores forms habits of an orderly life, and orderly lives and orderly minds go together. She has a chart showing each child’s chores. The whole family learns the hymn and verses. How can parents encourage intellectual pursuits with their children?Ī friend who has four boys, the oldest of whom is eight, prints a different hymn and several Scripture verses each week and posts them on a large, stiff cardboard in the breakfast nook. prepares for the future of early care and education, early childhood districts offer a new administrative and governance model that can help lead the country forward.Teaching Modern Children from Ancient Principles by Elisabeth ElliotĪll the passages below are taken from Elisabeth Elliot’s book “ Keep a Quiet Heart” It was published in 1995. In some cases, new laws or regulations will be required to provide districts with the authority necessary to meet objectives.Īs the U.S. Co-creating districts with practitioners and parents will be important to avoid inequities and keep children and their families as the focal point of these efforts. To set up early childhood districts, state policymakers might consider convening existing early childhood stakeholders to address implementation challenges. The Denver Preschool Program, Louisiana’s Ready Start Network and Neighborhood Villages in Boston all exhibit important aspects of robust local or regional governance. There are already proofs of concept for many elements of the district model. These districts could also unburden state agencies by allowing subsidy and facility funding to flow to the regional level, which could create a more proactive and democratically responsive access point for parents. However, early childhood districts can align these resources under one umbrella that is universally known by parents, thus creating more cohesion and equity. Readers may note that many of these features currently exist in other forms - child care resource and referral agencies, shared service alliances, hubs and the like. Eventually, other early childhood services such as home visiting, which supports pregnant people and parents with young children, could be included in this structure. These districts could take on the responsibility of ensuring the facilities in their area are prepared for the influx of children, for aiding in the recruitment and training of the workforce, and for creating an easy interface for parents to find and select the child care program they want. Structurally, depending on state laws, the districts could either be set up as a new layer of local government or as an empowered nonprofit agency.Įarly childhood districts are valuable because a single entity is assigned to govern child care and pre-K within a region and is provided with the resources to do so. Unlike almost all existing coordinating ECE bodies, districts would act with governmental or quasi-governmental authority. States may want to consider a new layer of local governance altogether with the creation of early childhood districts, which I’ve proposed in a brief published by the think tank Capita.Įarly childhood districts would be very similar to school districts but, in most cases, would have a regional geography rather than direct alignment, given the inequities inherent in the way many school district boundaries have been drawn. This would eventually ensure that all 3- and 4-year-olds (in states that opt in) have access to free preschool while all families making under 250% of state median income have significant child care subsidies.Įven if the bill does not pass, the slow rollout of American Rescue Plan Act funds suggests that our current early care and education infrastructure is not up to the task of running an optimal system. All views in guest posts are those of the author.Ī new day may be approaching for early care and education as Congress considers a reconciliation package that would inject approximately $390 billion into early childhood education (ECE) over six years. This guest post comes from Elliot Haspel, program officer of education policy and research at the Robins Foundation.
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