This is a story about a small experiment … with potentially large implications for the future of Memphis.

In the late nineteen-sixties, the psychologist Walter Mischel wanted to find a way to measure the ability of young children to delay gratification. To do this, he designed a simple experiment. Three-year-olds were shown a tray piled high with marshmallows, and were given a choice: they could have one marshmallow right away or – if they could wait for a few minutes while the researcher ran a quick errand – they could have two marshmallows when he returned. The children were then left alone with the tray of marshmallows.

Not surprisingly, the minute the researcher left the room, many of the children helped themselves to a couple of fistfuls of marshmallows. More surprisingly, nearly a third of the children were able to hold off on enjoying the sweets until the researcher returned. This group of children was able to overcome their desire to help themselves to the treats; they had somehow learned how to delay gratification.

Skills Begets Skills

For most children, skills associated with self-regulation begin to develop somewhere around the age of 3. But human brains develop over time, and are built from the “bottom up.” The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through a process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Young children learn by interacting with their environments and with the people in their lives. Skills beget skills, and higher order brain functions, such as self-regulation, delay of  gratification, feeling compassion, and compassionate emotion, all emerge after the brain’s more basic wiring (including the sensory pathways) is in place.

In this sense, the group of children who were able to wait for their reward had learned to engage in a higher order of cognitive functioning than their classmates who couldn’t wait. Even more striking are the differences that emerged between these two groups later in life. By the time they reached high school, Professor Mischel identified significant differences between the low-delayers (the nursery schoolers who couldn’t wait to eat the marshmallows), and the high-delayers (who had successfully fought back the urge to sneak a marshmallow).

By high school, the low-delayers, as a group, exhibited a much higher rate of problem behaviors. They earned significantly lower scores on standardized exams and they had a much more difficult time managing stressful situations. When the researchers evaluated the two groups  again when they reached age thirty, the differences between the cohorts had become still more striking: As adults, the low-delayers had significantly poorer health,  higher rates of obesity and more problems with substance abuse.

What factors lead some children to perform better on delay of gratification tasks? Over the years, Professor Mischel has tried versions of this experiment with many different groups of children. Time and again, he has found striking differences between groups of children based on their economic and social conditions. As a group, children from low-income families tend to score far below average on delay of gratification tasks when compared to their more financially secure peers. In turn, low-income children are more susceptible to a broad range of diminished later life outcomes.

Toxicity

Decades of research demonstrates that children born into poverty and children whose parents have low levels of education are at greater risk for poor life outcomes. The marshmallow study helps us understand part of the dynamic that underlies this connection. Children who are born into poverty spend their early childhoods dealing with the toxic stress of residential transience, chaotic home lives, family fragility, and uncertain health, nutrition, and safety. As the facets of their surroundings shape their developing brains, these children are learning to survive in their environments. They are not practicing the higher order cognitive functions that they will be called upon to successfully navigate higher education or a knowledge-oriented job market.

The association between economic class and the capacity to delay gratification stands to reason. A child who grows up poor has few opportunities to practice delay. The increased chaos and stress of an impoverished household undermines the regular schedules and consistent and high expectations that teach delay of gratification. Without a set dinner time, for example, children aren’t taught that snacking will spoil their appetite for dinner. Without high academic expectations, including regular homework hours, they don’t learn that TV needs to wait until after homework is done. Without an expectation of presents under the Christmas tree, children aren’t confronted with the classic call to stay off Santa’s Naughty list.

But what if we could teach children simple ways to jump-start their capacity for self-regulation? This has been the focus of much of Professor Mischel’s recent work, including teaching children to use “mental tricks” – such as pretending the marshmallows are only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame. These tricks seem to work dramatically when it comes to improving children’s self-control. Imagine what difference it would make if more parents and teachers understood the importance of teaching children these skills, as early as possible.

Scenarios

What does any of this have to do with the future of Memphis? Actually, it suggests two possible futures:

The first of these futures follows from the link between poverty and poor performance on delay of gratification measures. Every year, more than half of the 15,000 children born in Shelby County are born into poverty. Approximately 6,000 of these children are born into families living in dire poverty (on incomes of less than $10,700 a year for a family of four). These children will enter kindergarten five years from now. If current trends continue, only about 60 percent of these children will graduate from high school in 17 years or so.

The marshmallow studies suggest that when children start life at a profound disadvantage, as our children are starting life, they are at much greater risk for poor developmental outcomes, diminishing their prospects for success in school and into adulthood. As a group, these children are more prone to behavior problems, they run a higher risk of poor school performance, poor health, drug addiction and teen parenting. This configuration of factors paints a bleak scenario for the future of our workforce, our tax-base, our neighborhoods, our academic achievement profile, our teen pregnancy rate, and our crime statistics.

An alternate future is also suggested by Professor Mischel’s experience in introducing young children to simple self-regulation skills. In this scenario, Memphis becomes a community that recognizes the importance of fostering brain development during the first years of life not only for the adults our youngest children will become, but also for the community that we will become as a result of the decisions we make today and in the near future.

With a shared vision of the future that we would prefer, we have access to a half-century of careful research on the long-term implications of patterns of development in early childhood. This research tells us quite clearly what small steps to take today to move the next generation in the right direction. No doubt, this will mean raising the level of shared understanding in the community, as well as changing the attitudes and behaviors of individuals, families, neighborhoods, businesses, and governments. But the payoff is significant:  By promoting and supporting optimal early childhood brain development, including delay of gratification and other higher cognitive functions, we place more children on a stronger pathway.

In this scenario, our shared metric for success as a community becomes the number of at-risk children who beat the odds to become the neighbors we trust, the parents we admire, the workers we employ, and the men and women in whose successes we take great pride.

More:

For more on the long term implications of the developmental well-being of young children in Memphis, visit Urban Child Institute.

Jonah Lehrer:  “Don’t! The secret of self-control.” The New Yorker magazine, May 18, 2009.

Talaris Research Institute, “Self-Regulation.”

Bruce Perry, “Self-Regulation, the Second Core Strength.”

But what a difficult question to answer! In one sense, all 5 year olds in Memphis are “ready for kindergarten” in the sense that they are all (or at least are supposed to be) enrolled in kindergarten. In this sense, the true policy question might be: “are schools in Memphis ready to educate the kindergarteners they will inherit?”

But I suspect my friend really wanted to know if our children were prepared to successfully make the transition to formal schooling. Again, though, this is a tough question, and one that we don’t currently have the right kind of information to answer. A number of years ago we assessed kindergarten readiness in Memphis using a diagnostic measure called the Developing Skills Checklist (DSC), which asked children a series of questions designed to evaluate their cognitive development.

Scores on the DSC painted a bleak picture. On some dimensions of the test, only a quarter of our children scored in the range considered “ready” for kindergarten. But what does this mean? Where they used the same exam, nearly all large American cities have similarly low rates of school readiness.

In an effort to know more about the specific skills that children need to work on when they reached kindergarten, Memphis City Schools has since built a different measure of kindergarten readiness (the Kindergarten Readiness Indicator, or KRI), which assesses children’s pre-reading and pre-math skills.

But the KRI doesn’t really let us answer my friend’s question either. This is because the measure isn’t (yet) tied to children’s later academic achievement, and it isn’t calibrated (or normed) to other districts. As a result, we can’t use this measure to talk about the likely strengths and struggles that our children will have as they make their way through school. Consequently, it’s a difficult measure to use if we want to talk about whether our children are reaching school ready to learn – either in terms of how they are likely to fare, or in comparison to other places, or in comparison to our own past.

At the same time, the KRI does give us meaningful insights into the relative readiness of different cohorts of children (for example children who attended a strong curriculum based program such as Head Start or Pre-Kindergarten as compared to children who were at home up until they reached kindergarten). As we would suspect, children who attend a high-quality, center-based early learning program the year before they start kindergarten score significantly higher on measures of kindergarten readiness than children who did not attend such a program.

Maybe a better question would be: What does it mean to be ready for school? School readiness involves health as well as social, emotional and cognitive development. Kindergarten teachers tell us that social and behavioral skills are equally, if not more, important as cognitive skills for success in school. How kindergartners fare on each of these dimensions, in turn, are reflections of the full range of their experiences during the first years of life.

This is because the first five years of life are a period of astonishing brain development, and young children learn through their interactions with their environments and through their relationships with family and other caregivers in their lives. Everything that happens to those children, both good and bad, contributes to the architecture of their developing brain. In turn, it is this brain architecture that provides the foundation for children’s later readiness for school and their subsequent academic success.

Will a child develop a rich vocabulary? Will he become a strong reader? Is she likely to be held back a grade, or will she graduate on time and enroll in college? The foundation for each of these aspects of the student and adult a child will become is established long before he ever reaches school. In fact, there is strong evidence that suggests that as much as half of the academic achievement gap that separates children in high school was present long before those children ever entered kindergarten.

Another promising way to think about school readiness is in terms of pathways to early childhood success. Can we identify and grow experiences and interventions that lead to stronger early social, emotional, behavioral and cognitive brain development for children in Memphis?

To do this, we need to combine a clear understanding of the early experiences of our children with reliable measures of their school readiness. (Ideally, we would look beyond just cognitive measures to include the dimensions of health, social, and emotional well-being). If we’re careful about how we do this, it becomes possible to connect these pieces of information in order to identify the types of early experiences and interventions that help to protect children from the risks in their environment, helping us to understand what efforts to promote in order to support developmental well-being and school readiness. On this front, we can look to the path-breaking efforts of a number of other cities and states for ideas about how to collect and connect these pieces of information.

At the same time, kindergarten readiness means ready families. We want to grow the level of understanding among families in our community about how early childhood experiences matter for children’s development, school readiness and academic success. Ready families would understand how parenting matters, the difference that early experiences can make in the lifetimes of their children, what to look for – and insist on – in early childhood care and education, how to help their children successfully make the transition to school and to reading. Moreover, ready families would be excited about school readiness, would understand how readiness will be measured, and would work to help their children get ready.

Ready schools are the third key part of this story.  Our goals on this dimension include a vision of a continuum of children successfully transitioning from pre-k into kindergarten, and successfully progressing through elementary and secondary school, on to graduation and into college. Ready schools acknowledge that children come from a wide range of backgrounds and with wildly different levels of preparation and development. Ideally, ready schools meet these children where they are in order to nurture their capacity to be learners. Ready schools are eager to work with parents and other community groups to change curricula and methods to respond to evolving cohorts of children. Jerry Weist, superintendent of schools in Montgomery County Maryland, describes successive waves of pre-kindergarteners as “rolling thunder,” demanding instructors at each grade level tear up their existing curriculum and their expectations in an effort to better respond to the needs of increasingly better prepared cohorts of young children.

What a great goal to strive for!

This statement is certainly true, and there is a world of difference between those two realities when it comes to the early developmental experiences, school readiness, academic success and later life outcomes of our children.

Roughly half of children in our community live in the first of these two worlds: Their parents hold living wage jobs, are able to cover mortgage payments, and these children will likely grow up in relative safety and security. Across the county, these families are disproportionately located in the suburbs, are much more likely to be White, and are much more likely to grow up with both parents present.

Meanwhile, the other half of children in the County are born into a very different world: they will live in poverty during the critical years between birth and kindergarten entry. These children are much more likely to be Black, to live within the city, and to live with a single-parent. In Memphis, nearly 1 in 4 young children (age five or younger) actually live in dire poverty – equal to about $10,000 a year for a mother and child. These children will know first-hand the crushing configuration of uncertainty, chaos and toxic stress associated with grinding poverty in early childhood.
Poverty in early childhood has effects that last into adulthood. A careful review of some 30,000 American families over the last four decades shows that children who live in poverty during the first five years of life are likely to finish two fewer years of school than are children born into middle-class families. As adults, these same children will earn about half as much each year as their peers born into middle-class families. Early childhood poverty also doubles the risk of health and psychological problems in adulthood (Duncan 2009).

My colleague John Gnuschke, Director of the Sparks Bureau for Business and Economic Research at the University of Memphis, offers a thoughtful perspective on the shifting demographics of poverty in the city:

“… white and higher income families of all races with children are fleeing the city and leaving behind older upper income professionals and poor families with children who cannot afford to access the quality housing and school systems in newer suburbs. This has been promoted by transportation opportunities, school construction patterns, housing development patterns and taxing patterns.

…If taxes are too high and the cost of private schools is too high, middle class and affluent families are much better off to flee and seek both lower taxes and better public schools. New housing is also an attraction for newly minted middle class families of all races. Employers and employment opportunities flow to those areas of recent growth. … the flight to safety and security has many stages and one of them is to move to the city and the second is to move to the suburbs. This has always been a pattern for Delta families seeking employment and income opportunities.

…The only ones really harmed by the movement are the families that are left behind with few opportunities to overcome their position in life. The decaying infrastructure is more than just poor schools and abandoned factories, it is the destruction of the American adventure based on hope for a brighter future.

Children with little or no hope of a promising future are an image that few people can envision. It is the image of Sugar Ditch brought to the city.”

Additionally, the conference was an eye-opening experience in terms of public investment in early childhood development. Early childhood
(particularly the period between 0 and 3) is the period of most rapid brain development, and it is the period in which targeted public investments
generate the greatest financial and social returns.

While we in the United States tend to think about education as starting at kindergarten or first grade, the Mexican state of Puebla is pushing to begin
their educational process much earlier. They envision a universal system of center-based education for children between the ages of 3 and 7 (the period
of basic education). Meanwhile, they are developing a curriculum for initial education between a child’s birth and age 3.

The OAS conference drew speakers from Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Bolivia, the United States, and
Canada, and it was striking to see the common ground shared across each of these national contexts.

First, there was a keen sense of the challenges confronting the entire hemisphere. Futurists tell us that the kindergarteners entering school next fall will emerge from the educational
system in a dozen years or so into a world far different from the present; they will apply for jobs that don’t yet exist; and will be expected to master technologies that have yet to be invented.

Moreover, the odds of maintaining a competitive position in the workforce of the future are daunting, given worldwide population trends. To see this, we
need only compare the number of children in North America with the number in India in China. There are roughly ten times as many Indian and Chinese
children as there are North American children. (In other words, there are as many third graders in the top ten percent of the class in India and China as
there are third graders in all classrooms in the U.S. and Canada combined; and the same is true for every grade).

How then do we best prepare our children for the world they will inherit?

Here, again, the presenters in Puebla shared a similar message: The seeds of academic and life-long success are sown long before children reach school.
Rightly, we lament the achievement gap that emerges between ethnic and racial groups, and between children of the poor and children of the
middle-class, with lasting implications for individuals, families, and communities. But much of this achievement gap has its origin in early
childhood development. In other words, to a large degree, a child’s success in school is a product of their early childhood experiences and early brain
development – all of which takes place long before children enter kindergarten.
The scholars at the OAS conference were quick to highlight the good news in this story: First, a half century of careful research on early childhood
brain development helps us to understand how to improve the developmental well-being of children.

Second, these early years present an extraordinary opportunity to shape the future not only of children – but also of societies. This is because there is tremendous plasticity in the developing
brain.

Third, the research is equally clear that – as a cohort, children who experience strong and nurturing early childhoods are likely to do better over the long term, both in school and in other facets of life.

And here is the best news of all: by maximizing the likelihood that young children will develop to their full capacity, societies have the greatest chance of shaping their own futures in the face of growing uncertainty.

According to the report, the shift was fueled by influx of Latinos and the return of Blacks to the South in recent years. These trends have exacerbated the demographic shifts which began with the flight of White families to the suburbs during the 1970s and 1980s.

As communities across the South struggle to grow productive, highly educated work forces, they  face daunting challenges given the lower achievement rates among poor and minority students, who – too often – reach school at a social, emotional and cognitive disadvantage. By 36 months of age, a child from an impoverished family may have a vocabulary a third the size of a child from a professional family. This inequality tracks with children as they progress through school, and low income children are much more likely to be held back a grade, and to drop out.

According to Michael Rebell, executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, the implications of this trend are enormous: “When we realize that the majority of graduates of our schools are going to come from backgrounds with educational deprivation, it makes it imperative that schools be improved.” It also becomes imperative to understand that deprivation begins long before children reach the school house doors.

These trends are well-recognized in Memphis, the largest school district in the state of Tennessee, and 21st largest district in the country. More than 80 percent of students in Memphis City Schools are low-income and a similar percentage of students are ethnic minorities.

“Parents always know who the best teachers are in a school. Students who have them know, and guess who else knows?” Cash said. “Teachers know. It’s a holy grail issue. “We’re going to be all over this. We have the data. It’s irresponsible not to talk about it (Roberts, November 29, 2009).”

How does the TVAAS system work? As explained by the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), TVAAS works as follows. Statewide tests are administered to students in grades three through eight in mathematics, reading and language arts, science, and social studies. Data is extracted at the student level, meaning that scores can be linked to the student’s demographic characteristics, special status as an English language learner or special education student, teacher, and school.

The data collected from these assessments are then analyzed using value-added analysis. Value-added analysis is a statistical mixed-model methodology whereby inputs prior to the school year of interest are controlled for, and thus, academic gains are the subject of analysis. All data are standardized to reflect valid distributions and minimize testing error.

Significantly, TVAAS allows for a comparison of students as they move through the system. Each year, as a new cohort of children enter a class-room, TVAAS data tells us how far those children progressed the previous year, and establishes a baseline for understanding where they are starting the current academic year.

We applaud the district for their willingness to assess system performance using student’s achievement test data. We would also encourage Supt. Cash to consider extending the TVAAS system to include pre-kindergarten. More than half the achievement gap between low and middle income children identified in high school is present before children enter kindergarten, and investments in our children’s earliest years can build the developmental foundation that will set them on a path to success.  Early investments will reduce rates of grade retention, improve academic achievement, and increase graduation rates for the district.

Last month, as we reported here, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke about the need for outcomes’ based system reform for pre-kindergarten to 3^rd grade continuums. Traditionally, pre-K reform efforts have been discussed in terms of improving the “inputs” such as teacher training or student to teacher ratios to student performance (Duncan, November 2009). However, MCS is poised to put Secretary Duncan’s suggestions about “outcomes” based reform for early childhood education into practice. Using student outcomes data to assess and reform pre-K to 3^rd systems may also help the district get increased funding for its pre-kindergarten program through the federal Early Learning Challenge Fund (Duncan, November 2009).

Sources

Duncan, Arne. November 18, 2009. The Early Learning Challenge: Raising the Bar — Secretary Arne Duncan’s Remarks at the National Association for the Education of Young Children Annual Conference. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education. [Accessed December 3, 2009]

Roberts, Jane. November 29, 2009. “The Masters of Education,” Commercial Appeal < http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/nov/29/the-masters-of-education/> [Accessed December 7, 2009]

This is a glimmer of extremely good news.

If there is one lesson we should draw from more than 40 years of scientific research, it is that high quality early education makes a world of difference for children. This is because the first few years of life are a period of profound brain development. During this period, children learn what they live, and a child whose early years are filled with encouragement, praise, and opportunities to learn, is much more likely to succeed in school and life.

The economic meltdown means that we need to be more careful than ever about where we spend scarce public funds. No wonder we periodically hear grumbling that pre-kindergarten is no more than glorified baby-sitting. This perception isn’t helped by a recent report out of the Comptroller’s office that says that the gains made by children in Pre-Kindergarten fade over the first few years of elementary school.

Looking Below Surface

It would be a mistake to take these findings at face value. The report doesn’t tell us what assessments were used to examine children’s performance in kindergarten, first or second grade.  As a result, we have no way of knowing what in the world the report means by kindergarten readiness or academic success. My phone calls to try to gain more insight into these measures have gone unreturned.

Second, while many states have a shared measure of kindergarten readiness, no such measure is used in Tennessee. Instead, individual districts are left to come up with their own measures of academic achievement for young children, making it impossible to compare curricula, teachers, or settings.

Finally, the best national information that we have on the benefits of pre-kindergarten tell us that it is particularly helpful for low-income children. Yet no children from Memphis City Schools (MCS) were included in the study. This is an astonishing oversight when the largest concentration of low-income and minority children in the state – those most likely to benefit from the program – are in Memphis.

ROI

The best national data shows that there are a wealth of benefits for young children and their communities when we invest in pre-kindergarten. Middle and upper income children do better when they reach kindergarten. Much more dramatic improvements are made by lower-income children.

If we look only at the dollars, pre-kindergarten makes good sense. Evaluations of the financial benefits of pre-kindergarten indicate that these programs generate between $4 and $7 for every dollar invested. Significantly, these returns don’t come right away. Instead, they are seen in higher rates of high school graduation, higher rates of college attendance, lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of reliance on welfare, and lower rates of criminality.

Is it a good idea to invest in pre-kindergarten? Absolutely.

Good public decision making requires good data, and the best available data makes it crystal clear: high quality pre-kindergarten is among the very smartest public investments we can make.