One Big Idea: Universal Preschool
For their series "The Campaign for Big Ideas," my friends at GOOD magazine asked me what one policy proposal ought to be part of the national political debate, but has been mostly left off the table. I suggesteduniversal preschool:
Guaranteeing universal access to preschool would benefit children, of course, but also their parents and the overall economy. First, extending the social contract to 3-and-4-year-olds would acknowledge that our public education system can no longer run on a pre-feminism model that assumes mothers of young children don’t need or want to work. Second, improving lifetime educational achievement by reaching all children as early in their brain development as possible would increase economic mobility. And third, universal preschool would create many new jobs for early education teachers and teachers' aides. Those jobs might be especially attractive to low-income, single women, who raise some of the most vulnerable