Friday, June 14, 2013

Private Preschools See More Public Funds as Classes Grow

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Nathan Weber for The New York Times
Amanda Lindsey, a preschool teacher at the Academy of St. Benedict the African in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, talked with Charlotte Pettigrew, 5, during breakfast there in May.
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Published: June 13, 2013 110 Comments
CHICAGO — The preschoolers who arrived at school early for free breakfast on a recent morning quietly ate granola bars and yogurt as middle school students recited part of the rosary over the public address system.

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Nathan Weber for The New York Times
Preschool students played in the gym during recess at the Academy of St. Benedict the African in Chicago.

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Almost none of the 4- and 5-year-olds attending the Academy of St. Benedict the African, a parochial school here in the poverty-stricken Englewood neighborhood, are Catholic. But virtually all of them pay little or no tuition, which is subsidized by public funds.
Starting this fall, under an expansion led by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the number of Catholic schools in the city receiving taxpayer money for preschool will nearly double. Across the country, states and districts are increasingly funneling public funds to religious schools, private nursery schools and a variety of community-based nonprofit organizations that conduct preschool classes.
According to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, about one-third of students enrolled in state-financed preschool programs attend classes conducted outside the public schools. In some states, the proportion is much higher: in New Jersey, close to 60 percent of students in publicly financed preschool are enrolled in private, nonprofit or Head Start centers, and in Florida, about 84 percent of 4-year-olds in state-financed prekindergarten attend classes run by private, faith-based or family centers.
Now, as President Obama pushes a proposal to provide public preschool for all 4-year-olds from families with low or moderate incomes, his administration acknowledges that many children will attend classes outside the public schools.
Advocates say that with standards for the educational credentials of the teachers, class sizes and the quality of curriculum, such arrangements can work.
“High-quality pre-K can happen in church basements, community centers or within the Y.M.C.A., as long as the standards are there,” said Lisa Guernsey, the director of early education at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit policy institute.
At a time when more lawmakers and activist groups are pushing to direct public money to parents through vouchers or tax-credit scholarships, some say the preschool financing structure could set a precedent for the rest of formal public schooling.
“K-12 is heading to where early childhood has always been,” said Harriet Dichter, the executive director of the Delaware Office of Early Learning who helped set up Pennsylvania’s public preschool program when she was an education official there. “It’s always been in this market kind of thing.”
Last fall, Mr. Emanuel invited traditional public schools, charter schools, religious schools, community-based groups and Head Start centers to bid — and in some cases rebid — for public financing for preschool.
In all, more than half of the publicly financed classes in Chicago, serving about 44,600 children, will be run by organizations that are not part of the public school district. Just over one in 10 students will attend preschools operated by faith-based groups.
“I wanted to use competitiveness to reward the best in the class,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview, “and not just say because you’re a Head Start or a public school, you win by default.”
The patchwork nature of preschool across the country has evolved, driven by private initiatives and a welter of federal, state and local child care financing streams, including Head Start.
Frequently overcrowded public schools do not always have the space to add preschool classrooms. And many preschool classes — particularly those that serve low-income working families — are embedded in broader day care centers that operate longer days than a typical public school.
Experts in early education say that states and school districts need to supervise private preschools regularly. Across the country, practices vary: only four states received top marks from the National Institute for Early Education Research for the quality standards they set for preschools.
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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Progress At Work, But Mothers Still Pay a Price

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By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Published: June 8, 2013

HERE’S an old riddle: a boy and his father are in a car crash and the father is killed instantly. The boy is airlifted to the best hospital in the region and prepped for emergency surgery by one of the top surgeons in the country. The surgeon rushes in, sees the boy, and says “I can’t operate on this patient. He’s my son.” Who is the surgeon?
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Will Reissner
Stephanie Coontz
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Marion Fayolle

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When I heard this riddle as a teenager back in 1962, I was totally stumped. Had the boy been adopted, and the surgeon was the birth father?
It never occurred to me that the surgeon might be his mother.
How far we have come. Last month I attended my son’s graduation from medical school, where more than half the members of his graduating class were female.
And yet last year, when the Boston University researchers Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle posed the same riddle to students there, 86 percent of those who had never heard the riddle still could not figure out that the surgeon was the boy’s mother! It is an ironic indication of how far we have come in another direction that a higher number of students guessed that the boy had two gay fathers.
There is no denying that we have made great progress toward gender equality. Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, which was signed into law on June 10, 1963. At that time, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women earned less than 60 percent of what men made. According to Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist, a female college graduate at that time, working full time year round, made less than the average male high school graduate.
Today women earn about 80 percent of what men make for full-time work, and education now outweighs gender as a determinant of wage rates. Because women now earn the majority of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, we can expect the wage gap to narrow further in the future.
But it’s not all good news, according to a report released Friday by the Council on Contemporary Families, of which I am co-chairwoman. It is a collection of papers assessing the progress toward gender equity in the last half-century. In one, by the economist Heidi Shierholz, we learn that more than a quarter of the convergence in wages has been a result of men’s wage losses rather than women’s wage gains. Even so, according to the economist Stephanie Seguino, the remaining wage gap means that on average, a woman has to work 52 years to earn what a man makes in 40 years. And at every educational level, women continue to earn less than men with the same credentials.
New calculations by the sociologist Leslie McCall show that most of the recent wage progress for women has occurred in the top 20 percent of earners (although they remain greatly underrepresented in top corporate leadership positions, as the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg reminds us).
Much of the progress that women have made in income parity has gone to childless women. Motherhood, writes the sociologist Joya Misra, is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender in the United States. According to her research, conducted with Michelle Budig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, motherhood imposes about twice the earning penalty in the United States compared with what women face in countries that have expansive publicly financed child care systems.
But the motherhood penalty is not just related to the tendency of mothers to cut back their work hours because of lack of child care or other family support systems that allow them to continue working full time. The sociologist Shelley Correll at Stanford University points out that mothers earn 5 percent less per hour, per child, than comparable workers who are childless women. They are also less likely to be hired if they leave or try to change jobs.
Between 2004 and 2006, Professor Correll, then at Cornell, with her colleagues there sent fake résumés to employers who advertised high-status job openings. When a résumé indicated that the applicant was an officer in an elementary school parent-teacher association, thereby implying that she was a mother, employers were half as likely to call her back.
Today issues of gender equity are more complex than the blatant discrimination that the Equal Pay Act and its follow-up legislation addressed. We still lack comparable work legislation, so that jobs traditionally held by females are paid less even when they involve equal or more skills and training than traditionally male jobs. Both men and women still doubt women’s capabilities, as the responses to the riddle show.
But we also face increasing inequality among women, so we need to not just hammer against the glass ceiling but also to raise the bottom floor on which so many low-income women remain stuck.
Stephanie Coontz, a guest columnist, teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.
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