Advancing Preschool for All: The Highlight Reel
By SVP Board Member, Charlie Gilkey
SVP hosted an “Advancing Preschool for All” Dinner at a the home of our Board Advisor, Linda Hassan Anderson. We didn’t know it then, but we were walking into a rich conversation that was beautiful in both its mayhem and its insanity. Here’s what we learned:
Early childhood education is a puzzle. The early childhood education (ECE) system is a puzzle, and we’re all coming together with different pieces. Organizations who serve our children often have an abundance of one resource, and a deficit of many others.
Children are missing from the puzzle. As ECE planners and enthusiasts come together, we’re often so busy focusing putting together things like costs, funding and infrastructure, that we don’t even notice that we’re neglecting the core of our objective altogether. Bureaucratic, logistical, and administrative battles wage on, and the kids we’re seeking to serve are forgotten—often without access to quality early learning experiences.
As soon we were given boundaries, we shifted our focus. We were given other pieces of the puzzle, and told that we needed to create something that worked. Then, we were told that we needed to do it with specific constraints. That’s when the exercise got complicated.
Molly Day, Director of Early Learning Multnomah, commented, “There are so many people trying to build a system…that’s early childhood!” And those people are often trying to build a system that has to fit a square, but they don’t often don’t even know what the square is due to poor guidance, policies, and support.
Early childhood systems are asked to make impossible choices. Partner Christyn Dundorf shared that we’re presented with a trilemma in ECE: choosing between cost, quality, and accessibility. At best we get to pick two, but often we only get to pick one. It feels like an impossible, if not unconscionable, choice. To create an accessible program, we have to lower cost. To lower cost typically means lowering quality. Lowering costs also means squeezing early childhood educators out of a living wage and decent benefits. These are the choices that ECE decision makers regularly have to face.
The system disadvantages our kids. Approximately 14,000 kids from our priority population don’t have access to quality early childhood educational experiences. They start off behind, stay behind, and end up with worse economic outcomes after high school, if they even finish. Despite that troubling reality, programs that seek to support our priority populations face more scrutiny and are required to deliver more tangible results to justify their continued existence. That puts a spotlight on our kids—either as evidence of a program’s shortcomings, or the continued strain of having to prove its merits. This serves to “other” our priority children, and further separate them from their peers in a way that ultimately prevents them from being seen as full members of the community and from being prioritized when policy makers have to make their own political decisions. Our kids deserve better because all kids deserve better, and the only way to get better is if we work to change the systems that keep them in this cycle.
What SVP is doing to Advance Preschool Experiences for All
Social Venture Partners is working to deliver on our name—bringing partnership to all levels of the ECE decision making sphere (because let’s be honest: it’s more complicated than a circle). Here’s how:
SVP is in conversations with policy makers. We’re making conscious efforts to collaborate with people like Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson and organizations like Early Learning Multnomah and United Way. We know that public programs are going to be a part of how we can ensure our kids get quality early learning experiences.
SVP serves as a megaphone and amplifier. We help organizations working on ECE within our priority populations get heard. We’re taking a more active role in sharing the stories and outcomes of our Community Partners, including creating resources to help them share success.
SVP hosts the hard conversations. We know systemic inequity is an uncomfortable conversation. Rather than dancing around the elephant in the room, our role is to host the hard conversations so that we can see what’s keeping our kids stuck in the cycle. We do this via equity training and community events like the Preschool for All Symposium, and our upcoming Inspiration and Innovation Night.