James Spurlino, a member of ReadyNation and the owner of Spurlino Materials of Ohio, knows two things really well: early education and concrete.
Speaking at the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce’s annual State of the Schools luncheon Wednesday, Spurlino noted that a visitor on the 50th floor of the Devon Tower rightfully has confidence in the skyscraper’s concrete columns. Even so, employees would not feel safe in the building if it were built without a foundation. While they can’t see the below-ground concrete, nobody would trust a huge edifice that lacks a well-engineered foundation regardless of how well the tower was built.
The same applies to public education.
OKCPS trying to invest despite funding woes
Prior to Spurlino’s remarks, Wednesday’s audience of about 500 local leaders had just heard OKC Public School Superintendent Aurora Lora’s overview of the excellent efforts that OKCPS has undertaken. Under Lora’s leadership, a compromise over the KIPP relocation plan has been nailed down. Despite funding and support shortages, the system seeks to raise its attendance rate to 95 percent. Even better, private donations will now fund field trips for fifth and ninth graders. Also assisted by public-private partnerships, the OKCPS is focusing on early literacy and numeracy in pre-kindergarten through second grade.
Owing to $30 million in budget cuts, the OKCPS cut 400 positions. Even so, the district posted a 25 percent increase in the number of students taking advanced-placement courses, and it would like to provide physics and other STEM classes in all of the district’s high schools. A 489-student increase in AP enrollment is barely more than 1 percent of the OKCPS’s student population, however. Significant and meaningful improvements in the nearly 90-percent low-income system won’t be possible until a foundation is laid by creating high-quality early education opportunities.
Spurlino: Early education must come first
Spurlino, the State of the Schools’ keynote speaker, reviewed the cognitive science that explains why we must build an early education system before the efforts of Lora and the OKCPS produce the results needed for competing in the global marketplace.
Between 80 percent and 90 percent of the brain’s development occurs during the first five years of childhood. This is the time when neural synapses are formed and then pruned. Not only is the foundation for language and reading laid during the first years of life, the foundation of non-cognitive skills is also established.
Bob Ross, president of the Inasmuch Foundation, had introduced Spurlino and cited the truism: Before third grade, we “learn to read;” after third grade, we “read to learn.” Another name for that well-established concept is “the Matthew Complex,” based on the principle that, to the children who learn to read for comprehension, “much is given,” and their knowledge and skills continue to grow in school and out. When children learn to “decode” or simply pass reading tests without reading for comprehension, very few of them catch up. Spurlino further explained the science behind this dynamic and the reason why high-quality early education is cost effective.
The most famous research on this topic was based on the Perry preschool project. High-quality early learning investments yielded an annual return on investment of 18 percent! That was about three times more than the gains of the stock market during those years. The biggest cost savings from investing in early learning were due to savings in medical, social-service and criminal-justice spending. Since such a return — per year — seemed impossible, the findings were reviewed by Nobel laureate James Heckman (who attended Harding High School in OKC). Heckman confirmed the numbers and then documented the reasons why non-cognitive, socio-emotional skills are far more important for success in school (and in life) than the academic skills and knowledge that schools test.
Spurlino drew upon the impressive research found in the ReadyNation web site. For instance, it explains the shocking pattern that resulted from the New Jersey Abbott decision. The state Supreme Court ordered increased spending of thousands of dollars per student, per year, in high-poverty, low-performing districts. The school systems that invested in the standard school-improvement policies — better instruction, curriculum and the type of programs that the OKCPS has (often skillfully) implemented — saw little or no gains in student performance. The systems that invested in high-quality preschool (like Union City, to name the most famous example) saw unprecedented and sustained gains. Even the mediocre implementation of early education efforts produced outcomes greater than effectively implemented reforms that stressed teaching quality, leadership, data and accountability. The key to producing incredibly large gains was the alignment and coordination of socio-emotional and literacy efforts.
Oklahoma spends less
During his presentation, Spurlino asked Lora about the per-student investments in pre-K in Oklahoma City. He seemed to be taken aback by the many thousands of dollars per student less that is spent on pre-K through 12th grade schooling in Oklahoma compared to his state of Ohio and to the average expenditures in the U.S.
The real gains come from early education before the age of 5, however, and Oklahoma is not alone for failing to invest properly in those years. On the average, Americans spend about half as much per child on early education as on public education.
After the luncheon, Spurlino discussed the new work of Paul Tough and others that explain why we must shift away from the focus on measurable academic gains that has driven school reform for the last 15 years.
On the other hand, we must be careful to not get carried away with measuring and grading on non-cognitive gains, as some high-profile charter schools currently attempt. Experience has taught Spurlino that it is as hard for government to de-fund old programs as it is to raise new monies for better investments. Too often, the education sector seeks “one size fits all” programs. It wants “silver bullets” to be replicated across the nation. The OKCPS has long been a victim of those test, sort, reward and punish mandates, and it will be difficult for the district to extricate itself from those top-down policies, especially during a time of extreme underfunding.
In other words, the building of high-quality systems for early education will be expensive and hard. On the other hand, the Devon building also came with a hefty price tag, because you can’t leave concrete out of a building’s foundation.
