TKW Consulting

Businesses advocate investing in early childhood education
BY PATRICIA LOPEZ
MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

MINNEAPOLIS - Picture an educational system for preschool children in which parents can figure out at a glance whether their child care will help prepare their child for school.

Imagine a program that would give even home child-care providers the tools to foster early learning.

Consider what it would mean if kids were tested for readiness gaps before they started to fall behind.

Whose starry-eyed daydream is this?

Oh, only about 200 of the most hard-nosed, bottom-line businesspeople in Minnesota.

"In business you're trained not to look at symptoms, but at root causes," said Al Stroucken, president and CEO of H.B. Fuller, a $1 billion-a-year manufacturing giant, and chairman of Minnesota Business for Early Learning.

When Stroucken and others look at root causes, they see a large pool of younger children who could be the next generation of skilled, motivated, socially adaptable workers. Or not.

"We have too many kids who get in trouble, who don't get ahead, don't get turned on, become a drag on society," said Malcolm McDonald, a retired banker and businessman who has become an advocate for early learning.

"From the business perspective, it's absolutely essential to reach those kids," he said.

To reach at-risk kids, business executives would like legislative help. But they're not holding their breath. And they're not waiting.

Businesses already have added several million dollars in contributions to the $1 million given by the state last year to create the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation.

Duane Benson, a former legislator who now heads the foundation, said the organization needs about $20 million to set its plan in motion. "We hope to have a partnership with the state," he said. "But our intent is to raise as much as we can on our own -- maybe even all of it. We might have to.

"The political process has become too difficult to depend on," Benson added. "We're intent on getting the job done."

Why so much determination? "If we don't," McDonald asked, "where will the qualified workers come from?"

"What's lacking is targeted, effective funding and a measurement system," said Charlie Weaver, head of the Minnesota Business Partnership, an organization of Minnesota CEOs, and former chief of staff to Gov. Tim Pawlenty. "We don't really know what works."

But the need for answers, Weaver said, becomes apparent among adolescents. "The dropout numbers just knock you for a loop," he said. "We're losing 15,000 kids a year."

Not only does society lose the benefit of their talents, Weaver said, but "some of them will go to prison or wind up on our welfare rolls." Intervention programs in high school are well-intentioned, Weaver said, but years too late.

The lineup of heavyweights behind this effort reads like a Who's Who in Minnesota business: Cargill, 3M, Target, Best Buy, Ecolab, General Mills, Hormel and a host of others large and small.

Art Rolnick, senior vice president and research director of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, has led the efforts to bring business on board, noting that the latest analysis show a $17 return for every dollar invested in high-quality early learning.

But, Rolnick said, the key is not to pour money into some top-down planned system. Instead, Rolnick and others favor a bottom-up, market-based system that would foster well-trained providers, low teacher-child ratios and extensive parent education and involvement.

His dream? A prototype that would target at-risk populations, use public-health nurses to work with parents before their children are born and provide parent mentoring afterward, along with a scholarship to proven, high-quality child care centered on school readiness.

"We don't want to fund programs," Rolnick said. "We want to fund mentors and scholarships and let the market work."

// posted by Tammy Wachter @ 4:42 PM