Education Week - May 10, 2017 - 32

COMMENTARY
INSIDE

All of these efforts will
be more successful if
communities start in
the earliest years of
children's lives."

Robert Neubecker
for Education Week

BLACK TEACHERS MATTER.
SCHOOL INTEGRATION DOESN'T

HOW WE STOPPED SENDING
STUDENTS TO JAIL

LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR

Q&A WITH PEGGY ORENSTEIN:
LET'S TALK TO K-12 GIRLS
ABOUT SEX

A Purple Agenda for (Early) Education

By David Jacobson
ducation policy has become as
polarized as the rest of American politics. In the new administration, disagreements
over standards, funding,
school choice, and students'
civil rights are sure to intensify. Yet despite this polarized
state of affairs, liberal and conservative education priorities are converging in a number of
important respects, driven in part by mounting research findings. Common ground is
emerging where conservative commitments to
character formation, strong families, and local
solutions meet liberal commitments to services
that help low-income families overcome obstacles to improving their quality of life.
Borrowing a term from the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, I suggest that
a number of educational priorities, described
below, are "purple"-they resonate with both
red and blue constituencies. Further, these priorities animate a powerful reform movement
that is spreading across the country.
1) Address the whole child. Last May,
eight U.S. representatives-four Republicans
and four Democrats-introduced a bipartisan
resolution calling for a whole-child approach
to education to ensure that children are
physically and emotionally healthy and safe.
Supporting the whole child means providing
additional supports for children's health and
social-emotional skills while continuing to improve the teaching and learning of cognitive
and academic skills. This is a high bar, and as
the resolution recognizes, it requires coordination among education, health, and social services. Research, however, increasingly shows
the importance of reaching this bar.
It is easy to see how physical and mentalhealth issues interfere with a student's ability
to learn, and in recent years, interest among
liberals and conservatives in noncognitive
skills has soared. In his 2012 book How Chil-

dren Succeed, Paul Tough synthesizes exciting
new research on the importance of character
skills, including social-emotional and executive-function skills, grit, and conscientiousness.
Psychologists have shown that these skills are
both valuable and malleable. Further, the relationships and practices found in high-quality
programs have been shown to make a significant and long-term difference in the lives of
children and youths.
2) Deepen family engagement and support. In a 2015 New York Times op-ed essay,
Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin
suggests that a truce has been called in the
"war over family" whereby conservatives acknowledge that a changing economy is taking
a toll on families and liberals acknowledge the
value of marriage for child-rearing. Both sides
agree that family stability is declining among
low-income families and that this decline has
negative consequences for children, an agreement that opens up the possibility of bipartisan solutions.
Schools, preschools, and community organizations can play a key role in promoting family stability by deepening partnerships that
encourage family engagement and provide
support services and parenting education.
One promising approach that can appeal to
both sides of the aisle is the Strengthening
Families framework produced by the Center
for the Study of Social Policy, which includes
free curriculum and professional-development resources. Used in more than 30 states,
Strengthening Families is based on researchsupported protective factors, including parental resilience, social connections, and knowledge of parenting and child development.
3) Strengthen neighborhoods and
communities. Inspired by the Harlem Children's Zone and similar initiatives, so-called
cradle-to-career partnerships of schools and
social service agencies are proliferating. These
partnerships are premised on the conviction
that addressing poverty requires improving
schools and improving the delivery of existing

32 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 10, 2017 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

social services. A recent Wallace Foundation
report suggests that such partnerships move
past the debate between conservative-leaning
proponents of no-excuses school reforms and
liberal-leaning advocates for bigger, bolder social services.
Cradle-to-career partnerships fit with the
emphasis found in both conservative and
liberal thought on local decisionmaking and
strengthening neighborhoods and communities. They attempt to improve the quality and
coordination of services and relationships
within a defined geographic area to create a
concentration of mutually reinforcing activities.
4) Start early. All of these efforts will be
more successful if communities start in the
earliest years of children's lives. Here, too,
there is strong consensus. The First Five Years
Fund reports that 78 percent of Donald Trump
supporters and 97 percent of Hillary Clinton
supporters favored federal action to increase
access to early-childhood education. James J.
Heckman's well-known research on the economic returns of investment in high-quality
early education and other researchers' work
on the importance of the early years for young
brain development undergirds this consensus.
An extensive body of research also shows
that preschool alone is not sufficient. Improving the quality and continuity of children's experiences throughout the entire continuum,
beginning with prenatal care and extending
through 3rd grade, is critical to improving outcomes for children in poverty.
These four purple priorities go hand in hand:
Family stability is critical to addressing the
needs of the whole child, community partnerships are required to coordinate multipronged
approaches to serving children and families,
and early childhood is the ideal time to begin
this work. These priorities form the spine of a
growing movement to create P-3 partnerships
devoted to improving children's experiences
along the entire prenatal-through-3rd-grade
continuum.

P-3 partnerships bring together school districts, community-based preschools, homevisiting programs, and other early-childhood
programs. They implement a coherent set
of strategies to build the capacity of their
member organizations to improve quality
and align services with a core set of goals in
mind: academic learning, good health, socialemotional learning, and family engagement
and support.
School districts in Union City, N.J., and
Montgomery County, Md., have produced
some of the best results raising achievement
for low-income students in the country. Integral to their approaches were P-3 initiatives
to align standards, make deep improvements
to curricula and professional development,
and develop strong partnerships with families and community-based organizations.
States across the country, supported by a
number of federal initiatives, have embraced
P-3 approaches and are supporting local P-3
innovation and cross-community learning.
These partnerships are not a quick fix that
makes for snappy partisan sound bites. The
community-by-community approach that P-3
partnerships represent may not satisfy liberal
desires for a bold federal program, and they require more government support for education
and social services than some staunch fiscal
conservatives may condone. But they do bring
together purple education priorities in ways
that should appeal to pragmatically minded
superintendents, mayors, city council members, state legislators, and governors.
Spanning political and organizational
boundaries, purple partnerships that support
whole-child development in stable families
and strong communities represent one of our
greatest opportunities to improve the lives of
low-income children and their families. n
DAVID JACOBSON is a senior project director at the
Education Development Center, in Waltham, Mass., and a
senior adviser at the Center for Enhancing Early Learning
Outcomes. He writes the P-3 Learning Hub blog.

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Education Week - May 10, 2017

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