In the remote Mohonpur village, home to just 140 families, children are benefitting from a free preschool founded by a development NGO that promotes early childhood education in rural Bangladesh. Credit: Mahmuddun Rashed Manik/IPS

By Naimul Haq
JAMALPUR, Bangladesh, Feb 4 2015 (IPS)

Shanta* is only four years old, but already she loves school. Every morning, her mother walks her to the small pre-primary facility in Mohonpur village, about 140 km away from Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, and leaves her in the care of a young female teacher, who oversees the day’s activities: storytelling, drama, reciting poetry.

The little girl’s mother, Mosammet Laily Begum, is a housewife of humble means. She and her husband, a rickshaw puller who earns about 100 dollars each month carting passengers back and forth, live in a thatched-roof home. They grow vegetables in the garden to supplement their income, and between them only just manage to scrape together the funds to feed and clothe their three kids.

Bangladesh has made huge strides in improving education in the last two decades. It currently has one of the largest primary schooling systems in the world, with an estimated 20 million pupils between the ages of six and 10 years old, along with some 365,000 teachers working in over 82,000 schools.
Education is a luxury, one that – in a different time and place – they would have had to forego in favour of life’s necessities.

But the preschool located close to their home is free. Before Shanta, Laily’s two older children also passed through these classrooms, where they learned the alphabet in both English and Bangla. They have gone on to do very well in elementary school. She credits their love of lessons to the foundation they received here in Mohonpur.

“My daughter now plays with nothing but her school books at home,” Laily tells IPS. “She would rather do that than play with other children in the neighbourhood.”

This family is lucky; unlike scores of others across rural Bangladesh who have no access to preschool facilities, they live within walking distance of one of the several thousand schools run by BRAC, one of the world’s largest development organisations that focuses on early education for kids between the ages of three and five.

Laily knows that her children could easily have fallen into the same category as the 3.3 million ‘out-of-school’ youth in Bangladesh. Until 2012, the government offered no options for families like hers, that couldn’t afford private preschooling.

This meant that the roughly 45 million Bangladeshis who subsist on less than 1.25 dollars a day had little chance of preparing their offspring for mainstream education.

This fueled a vicious cycle: poorer children who couldn’t get a head start lagged behind their more privileged peers, with inequities continuing on into the secondary and tertiary levels.

Many of these disadvantaged youth make up the bulk of Bangladesh’s unemployed, who constitute some 4.5 percent of the population of 156 million people.

Organisations like BRAC have attempted to level this uneven playing field.

With 12,450 pre-primary schools across the country, which provide schooling for nearly 360,000 students each year, the BRAC (Pre-Primary) Education Programme (BEP) is the largest free preschool programme in the country.

Altogether, over 5.2 million kids have benefited from these facilities since BRAC first rolled out the initiative in 1997.

Easing the transition into mainstream schooling

Standing inside the small tin shed that serves as her classroom, 27-year-old Rowshanara Begum is in her element. She handles a group of 30 kids, 18 of them girls – a 50-percent female enrolment rate being a top priority for BRAC – and she knows she is making a difference.

For two-and-a-half hours a day, six days a week, she painstakingly takes her charges through the alphabet, peppering the tedious process with drawings, nursery rhyme recitals and games. The flexible, informal structure keeps families coming back for more.

“There is tremendous pressure from parents to open another such free school for the children here in Mohonpur village,” she tells IPS.

Poor families can seldom afford the cost of private preschooling. They rely on free education provided by NGOs like BRAC to give their children a leg-up in life. Credit: Mahmuddun Rashed Manik/IPS

Teachers are trained to nurture a child’s creativity, which in turn encourages better communication, language and social skills. Equal emphasis is placed on improving motor ability, using exercises such as free-hand drawing and painting.

In short, the whole curriculum is geared towards easing the transition into the public education system.

This is no small undertaking in a country where the average child takes 8.6 years to complete the five-year primary school cycle. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) chalks this up to low standards in public institutions, and the fact that 24 percent of all teachers in government-run or registered non-government schools are untrained.

The NGO has a lot to show for its efforts. A senior BRAC official who did not wish to be named stated that they have achieved a “remarkable” transfer rate of students from preschool into primary school, touching 99.14 percent.

Still, this is only half the battle won.

Bangladesh has made huge strides in improving education in the last two decades. It currently has one of the largest primary schooling systems in the world, with an estimated 20 million pupils between the ages of six and 10 years old, along with some 365,000 teachers working in over 82,000 schools.

Since 1990, it has raised its enrolment rate from 72 to 97 percent and its completion rate from 40 to 79 percent. The number of primary schools receiving free textbooks has increased from 32 percent in 2010 to over 90 percent in 2014.

According to Rasheda K Choudhury, executive director of the Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE) – a network comprised of over 1,000 NGOs working on education issues – Bangladesh has also lowered the dropout rate from 33 percent just a few years ago to 20 percent in 2014.

“Improved teacher trainings, a narrower gap in the student-teacher ratio [which now averages 49:1, compared to 67:1 in 2005], and provisions for stipends for students are among the reasons for its success,” she told IPS.

But there are gaping holes that need to be filled. Policy makers insist that the current allocation of 2.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) on the education sector must be upped to at least four percent in order to truly provide high-quality education for all.

Much work also needs to be done to improve access for the 71 percent of the population living in rural areas, as well as for indigenous communities who dwell in the country’s remote hill districts and residents of ‘chars’ – little islands formed from sedimentation that dot the country’s largest rivers.

According to Johannes Zutt, the World Bank’s country director for Bangladesh, the government is reaching out to those left behind by educational reform, “including slum dwellers, working children, indigenous children and children with disabilities.”

But unless programmes’s like BRAC’s BEP are rolled out on a massive scale all around the country, Bangladesh will continue to nurse a patchy educational track record, and the goal of universal primary education will remain out of reach.

*Not her real name

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

In the United States, African American children continue to face more barriers to success than any other race, new research suggests.

A new report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation lists 12 categories that can contribute to a child’s success, including enrolment in preschool, living with two parents and distance from the poverty line. Under these metrics, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders scored highest (with a total score of 776 out of 1000), followed by whites (704).“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.” -- David Osher

African American children not only scored the lowest under this ranking, but with a score of just 345 they were found to have less than half of the indicators for potential success as other races in the United States.

“We know that the current status of poor kids is bad, the current status of black kids is bad, and the combination of poverty and racial discrimination is particularly toxic,” David Osher, vice-president of the American Institute for Research, told IPS. “But we also know enough to make a difference, like the emerging understanding that kicking kids out of schools is not a good solution.”

Osher refers to new civil rights-related data released by the U.S. Department of Education last month. These findings suggest that African American students are being suspended from school at inordinate levels, even at the very earliest grades.

While a fifth of public preschool students in the United States are African American, nearly half of all preschool students who received more than one out-of-school preschool suspension are African American. White students, on the other hand, represent 43 percent of public preschool enrolment but make up just 23 percent of preschoolers given out-of-school suspension.

“This data collection shines a clear, unbiased light on places that are delivering on the promise of an equal education for every child and places where the largest gaps remain,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on releasing the new data. “In all, it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed.”

The study marked the first time that a federal initiative known as the Civil Rights Data Collection included preschool, but the numbers reflect similar trends at all levels of lower and secondary school.

“Black children are not behaving worse,” Jim Eichner, the managing director of programmes at the Advancement Project, an advocacy group, told IPS. “But they are being punished and punished more severely.”

Zero tolerance

While the reasons children are suspended in preschool are not reported, anecdotally such actions appear to be being taken for relatively minor infractions, such as like “not paying attention, being late or talking back,” Eichner says.

Out-of-school suspension has multiple and varied negative impacts on the student and school community. Not only do students miss class time, but they tend to receive the message they are not welcome in school.

Such actions also tend to create new mistrust between the student and teachers that can challenge future learning.

In addition, out-of-school suspension can jeopardise a family’s income if a parent needs to leave work. Or, if a parent cannot leave work, the child may not be sent to a well-supervised home.

Finally, some advocates worry that excluding a child fails to teach him or her how to manage the behaviour that originally caused the problem.

Suspending children at such a young age comes from a “zero tolerance” discipline policy. Such an approach stems from anti-drugs policy adopted by the U.S. criminal justice system during the 1980s, and brought into schools as an attempt to combat increased violence and school shootings.

Yet the broader approach has been seen as something of a failure by the U.S. criminal justice system, a view increasingly being adopted by those working in the school system, as well.

Both Osher and Eichner, for instance, are involved in studying and promoting alternatives to zero-tolerance policies. Eichner particularly points to restorative justice techniques that have students work together to mend any problems, adding that punitive atmospheres have been found to harm all students.

Implicit bias

Although the Civil Rights Data Collection does not investigate why these disparities occur, Osher and Eichner both explain that this is one effect of overarching social, economic and political structures.

“There are disparities in all aspects of youth life: education, juvenile justice and corrections, health. When you control for any of the explanations people come up with, they don’t work,” Osher says.

“It’s not just poverty, not just that black kids are worse behaved. It is important to see that there is something going on that is pervasive, chronic and systematic.”

He notes that here are several characteristics related to classrooms from which more kids are suspended. These include class size, the ratio between teachers and students, teacher stress levels, and the availability of mental health consultation.

Both Osher and Eichner also note the role of implicit bias in teachers.

“People can be very well-intended, but in moments of stress they can make a subtle set of calculations that are probably intuitive on whether to get more help or whether to tell the kid to get out,” said Osher.

This implicit bias appears to be particularly notable when dealing with young black preschool students. Researchers have found, for instance, that people tend to overestimate the age of black students, adding as much as three years, thus perceiving the student as less childlike and less innocent.

The first step in ending implicit bias is to name it and talk about it, scholars say.

Some are working on “peer coaching” models, for instance, in which teachers film themselves teaching. Peers can then point out ways a teacher might be acting with bias – and recommend ways to overcome it.

New approaches like this make Osher optimistic that ongoing today’s racial disparity can be decreased.

“These indicators don’t have to be predictors of the future,” he says. “Rather, they’re indicators for what public policy should do.”

High-quality pre-school programmeshave been shown to improve early literacy, language and math skills by almost 50 percent. Credit: Cathy Stanley-Erickson/cc by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, May 30 2013 (IPS)

Over 300 business, civil society and academic groups here are urging U.S. lawmakers to support early childhood education, months after President Barack Obama hinted that his administration would be pushing for a change in U.S. policy to support universal preschool.

Organisations supporting an open letter sent Wednesday include Macy’s, a national department store chain, the Committee for Economic Development and the University of Miami.“The bigger challenge for me is most politicians, regardless of party, are wired to think short term and for the next election." -- Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

“The letter is specifically about getting the business community, both organisationally and individually, to demonstrate that there are groups outside of the typical parent organisations that care about this issue,” Colleen Wilber, vice-president of media relations at America’s Promise Alliance, the U.S.’s largest partnership dedicated to improving the lives of children, told IPS.

In February, during his annual State of the Union Address, President Obama outlined his administration’s plans for overhauling early childhood education. In the United States, only around 30 percent of four-year-olds are currently thought to be enrolled in high-quality programmes.

“Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for private preschool,” President Obama stated. “And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives.”

According to the PEW Center for States, a research group here, children from disadvantaged homes can start kindergarten as far as 18 months behind, after which point it has been found to be extremely difficult for them to catch up. High-quality pre-school programmes, on the other hand, have been shown to improve early literacy, language and math skills by almost 50 percent.

Those groups involved in Wednesday’s open letter are now pushing for pre-school education for prenatal to five year olds, as well as home visits for families considered “at risk” starting at pregnancy, better teacher training and smaller teacher-to-student ratios.

“Many of us compete in the global marketplace. We see other countries investing in their young children both for the long-term benefits of a stronger workforce and the current benefits that come from enhancing the productivity of parents. To compete, we have to do the same,” stated the ReadyNation open letter.

Though there is still work to be done, Sarah Watson, director of ReadyNation, a part of America’s Promise Alliance aimed at emphasising business leaders’ support of early childhood development, which organised the new letter, says President Obama’s proposed reforms would constitute the largest expansion of the country’s early childhood development programme in a decade.

“It would be an enormous leap forward for the country,” she told IPS.

“It’s important to note that even if the entire plan were enacted, children would still have other needs. But the important point is that this is a very ambitious proposal, and if we enact even a significant proportion of it, it would make a huge difference.”

Need to coordinate

ReadyNation’s initiative is placing a significant focus on business perspectives. This move has allowed the group to compare the returns on investment in education to other expenditures.

Watson says that being able to offer such hard economic data made a huge difference in bringing together the business community and other constituencies. Studies have shown a return of seven dollars for every dollar spent on early education and development.

According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, speaking on Wednesday, many in the U.S. have yet to realise these economics.

“The United States badly lags behind other nations supporting early learning development,” Duncan said at a panel discussion here. “That’s an embarrassment and a missed opportunity for a huge return on investment.”

The Preschool Initiative, a large expansion to early childhood education programmes and home visits proposed by President Obama, though available to all U.S. children, is specifically aimed at struggling single parents and teenage parents.

Yet early education has been found to improve high school graduation rates by up to 16 percent, and college attendance by more than 50 percent, according to the PEW Center for States study.

According to Nancy Johnson, a former member of Congress, taking an inventory of successful early education and kindergarten programmes would now allow both state and the federal government to better understand what needs to be done to achieve this goal.

“What I worry about is that little rural school, and that [Preschool Initiative money] isn’t making it down to those schools,” Johnson said Wednesday, speaking alongside Duncan. “Both parties talk about smart government, but nobody does anything about it.”

Despite this new momentum, legislative progress for Obama’s plan still looks very complicated. Immediately after the president floated the reforms proposal in February, Republican members of Congress rejected it out of hand due to its expense.

Many Republicans expressed interest in fixing already existing initiatives, as opposed to created new ones that will cost an estimated 90 billion dollars. Several Republicans could not spot the difference between this new proposal and Head Start, a programme that has failed in the eyes of many. Obama appears to have a bit of an uphill battle in pushing this proposal through Congress.

“The bigger challenge for me is most politicians, regardless of party, are wired to think short term and for the next election,” Duncan said. “And this is the ultimate long-term investment.”