By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: October 19, 2011

Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.

Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.

“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.

“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”

One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator.

Maybe it seems absurd to propose expansion of early childhood education at a time when budgets are being slashed. Yet James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has shown that investments in early childhood education pay for themselves. Indeed, he argues that they pay a return of 7 percent or more — better than many investments on Wall Street.

“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”

One of the most studied initiatives in this area was the Perry Preschool program, which worked with disadvantaged black children in Michigan in the 1960s. Compared with a control group, children who went through the Perry program were 22 percent more likely to finish high school and were arrested less than half as often for felonies. They were half as likely to receive public assistance and three times as likely to own their own homes.

We don’t want to get too excited with these statistics, or those of the equally studied Abecedarian Project in North Carolina. The program was tiny, and many antipoverty initiatives work wonderfully when they’re experiments but founder when scaled up. Still, new research suggests that early childhood education can work even in the real world at scale.

Take Head Start, which serves more than 900,000 low-income children a year. There are flaws in Head Start, and researchers have found that while it improved test results, those gains were fleeting. As a result, Head Start seemed to confer no lasting benefits, and it has been widely criticized as a failure.

Not so fast.

One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.

Professor Deming found that in these life outcomes, Head Start had about 80 percent of the impact of the Perry program — a stunning achievement.

Something similar seems to be true of the large-scale prekindergarten program in Boston. Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Christina Weiland, both of Harvard, found that it erased the Latino-white testing gap in kindergarten and sharply reduced the black-white gap.

President Obama often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda.

That’s sad because the question isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it. We can pay for prisons or we can pay, less, for early childhood education to help build a fairer and more equitable nation.

We were very happy to learn that one of our new children’s music albums, Imagination Generation, was named a Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner.  The Parents’ Choice Foundation is a prestigious children’s media reviewing group who is very selective in their accolades.  We hope that this recognition will enable us to raise our awareness among parents and teachers and allow us to share our music with a wider audience.

The recognized album, Imagination Generation, has received rave reviews from children and caregivers alike.  This wacky collection of educational songs were specifically written to help children develop the important skills of creativity, ingenuity, investigation, problem-solving, mental-flexibility, and imagination.

Parents’ Choice Foundation strives to provide parents with reliable unbiased information about tools to help their children learn, to explore new challenges, to discuss ideas and to pursue dreams.  Their purpose is to search out and recommend products that help kids grow – imaginatively, physically, morally and mentally—fairly priced products that are fun, safe and socially sound.  Parents’ Choice reviews books, toys, music, television, software, videogames, websites, and magazines for children and families of all achievements and backgrounds.

To listen to the songs from this wonderful album, visit http://shop.childreninc.org/album-imagination-generation-c-102.html.

We pack our luggage for life’s journey in the early years. We learn the language with which we will communicate with family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. We learn to read so that we can read to learn; achieving the knowledge and skills with which we will earn a living, give back to our community and raise the next generation. And very importantly, we become aware of ourselves and our feelings. We learn to control both our inward experiences and our outward expressions. These are the tools which we’ll use to make peace with ourselves, make ties to our friends, make love with our spouse and make the future with our children. If we don’t pack these social and emotional (SE) skills into the luggage of early childhood, the journey to adulthood becomes challenging.

How do we learn these social and emotional skills? It happens through both experiences that emerge naturally within loving families, and the experiences that are orchestrated intentionally in early childhood education.  Unfortunately, for the most part, early childhood education has lacked the strategies for effectively teaching these critical skills. Traditionally the social and emotional emphasis in early childhood classrooms was to find and fix the children who were out of control or who were at risk. The emerging research on social and emotional development and its importance to early childhood education had not yet impacted the way teachers nurtured those strengths in the children in their care. Now as the importance of social and emotional learning has become not only widespread, but widely mandated, the field seeks new paradigms to effectively nurture these skills.

We suggest music as a unique teaching strategy for SE learning. Early childhood educators and parents are well aware of songs as powerful teaching tools with young children. It seems safe to assert that almost no child has learned the alphabet without the accompaniment of the ABCs lyrical melody. And the use of songs in early education has evolved as a staple of every language and cognitive skill curriculum. However, early education’s embrace of SE learning has not seen a comparable emergence of song as a SE teaching tool.

Music and lyrics represent a very effective means of SE learning in early childhood. Very specifically, four types of songs can be key to instilling SE knowledge and skills.  These are: 1) “Self-talk” Songs; 2) Experiential Songs; 3) Story Songs; and 4) Concept Songs.

Winsler and colleagues (2009) provide a comprehensive review of research on the importance of self talk or private speech in children’s development.  Early in life children use and internalize self talk that becomes the basis of strongly held beliefs about themselves, other people and the world in general.  This self talk reinforces their perception of their own abilities or limitations, other people’s benevolence or malice, and

the overall safety or threat of the world in which they live.  We maintain that the early childhood educator is in a potent position to influence this self talk toward the positive.

Our “self talk” songs are designed to be “over-learned” so that the child so internalizes their message that it is automatically invoked in the face of a challenging task or a disappointment.  For example, the song, I Can Do It, repeats this phrase often with the stipulation, “I put my heart and my mind to it.” We have often seen children who have learned this song sing the words softly to themselves when they encounter a difficult problem.

This internalized self talk becomes the basis for a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006).  With a growth mindset, the child has truly internalized an association of effort with eventual success.  She believes that her knowledge and intelligence grows with effort and perseverance.  The child with a fixed mindset on the other hand believes that intelligence is fixed and effort is associated with failure.  He avoids challenging tasks and gives up when a problem requires effort.  He becomes more concerned with how he “looks” to others rather than how successfully he masters a skill.  It is easy to see how the internalization of mastery self talk becomes an essential component of school and life success.

Another type of song that is effective in teaching SE skills is the experiential song.  This type of song allows children to experience and practice the very skill we want them to acquire.  For example, there is a critical skill developed in early childhood called effortful control or inhibitory control.  It is the ability that when a child is “primed” to do a certain behavior, he is able to stop on cue and chose a sub-dominant behavior.  This skill is not present in children with problems of impulse control.    The song, Self Control, begins in a brisk upbeat tempo with the words, “I go fast, fast, fast.  Fast, fast, fast is the way I go; and then I stop!  Put it on hold, I got self control.”  Then the music slows to a crawl.   The song gives children an intensely stimulating behavior followed by the requirement to inhibit that behavior.  Similarly, games like, Red Light, Green Light and Simon Says require the ability to effortfully exert control in inhibiting a primed behavior.  The importance of effortful control to learning and school success has been well documented (Blair et al., 2007).

The third type of song are Story Songs.  These are songs designed for children to listen to in order to help them experience the circumstances and emotional reactions of others, the beginning of empathy.  For example, the song, Be Careful, tells the story of Chris, a little girl being bumped and hassled by other children.  She describes the situation and her reaction and asks the others to be respectful of her space.  The song shows children how to see the perspective of another child, to understand feelings and reactions that may be different from their own, and to comply with requests from others to modulate their behavior.  These are complex social skills essential to adapting within a cooperative community.

Finally, there are Concept Songs.  Concept songs directly teach key ideas that may contradict existing attitudes or beliefs. For example, the song Sometimes It Takes a  Few Mistakes teaches children how making mistakes can actually help us learn.

While there is a tendency to think of, and perhaps dismiss, children’s songs as cute diversions; we hope that this description of self-talk, experiential, story and concept songs demonstrates their versatility in teaching SE concepts and skills to young children.  While we often become preoccupied with the “emotional baggage” from early childhood that we drag through life, we fail to acknowledge the early years as a time when critical SE capacities are packed in life’s luggage to help us adapt along the way.  Songs taught and enjoyed in the context of a loving relationship with a parent or teacher are a means of giving a child the SE proficiency for school and life success. Let’s sing for their future.

References

Blair, C., Knipe, H., Cummings, E., Baker, D., Gamson, D., Eslinger, P., et al. (2007).  A developmental neuroscience approach to the study of school readiness. In R. Pianta, M. Cox, & K. Snow (Eds.), School readiness and the transition to kindergarten in the era of accountability. Baltimore:Brooks.

Dweck, C. (2006).  Mindset: The new psychology of success. N.Y.:Random House.

Winsler, A., Fernyhough, C., & Montero, I. (2009). Private speech, executive functioning, and the development of verbal self-regulation. NY: Cambridge University Press.

About Growing Sound

Growing Sound develops research based children’s music that promotes social and emotional development.  While many products focus on managing children’s problem behaviors, Growing Sound is a proactive, strength-based approach to helping children discover the goodness in their lives and in themselves.  Growing Sounds’ creative productions are led by David Kisor, an award-winning singer, songwriter, composer, performer and teacher.  The music of Growing Sound can be purchased by visiting www.growing-sound.com.