I decided to look back at a website that I used in week two of this course. The website was from the National Institute for Early Education Research. Website: http://nieer.org/resources/newsletter/index.php
Through the National Institute for Early Education Research website I found a article that was interesting to me as it relates to availability, accessibility, and affordability. The article dealt with pre-k disparities: What You Get Depends on Where You Live.
In this article they analyzed the data for The State of Preschool 2010, and find a disturbing trend that was noticed in the previous year continued to happen. During these very difficult economic times, disparities among states in providing high-quality preschool education are growing larger. Consequently, children’s access to and quality of experiences in preschool vary drastically depending on where they reside. “For instance, a relative small percentage of children (6 percent) in Alabama have access to a high-quality program 9meeting all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks) while their peers to the south in neighboring Florida have a better chance of having access (68 percent) to a lower quality program (meeting only three of the 10 benchmarks). Alabama’s neighbors to the west in Mississippi have no state-funded preschool program at all to attend. This problem is not limited to the deep South- patterns like this repeat across the country. And tight state budgets are only exacerbating the problem.
The insight I gained from this resource as it relates to the studies this week is that there are so many states that still do not have access to high quality early childhood programs. As a future professional and advocate of young children I want to set the bar high for myself and try and make sure all the children in the state of Mississippi have the opportunity to take part in a high quality early childhood program. I know it want be easy to accomplish, but with a lot of hard work and help from local and state legislators we can hit the ground rolling.
Reference:
The National Institute for Early Education Research [NIEER], 2010
Website: http://nieer.org/resources/newletter/index.php
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