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In 2008, a group of civic leaders convened an inspiring brain trust of educators, lawmakers, philanthropists and business leaders to make up the Early Education Commission. The United Way of Greater Atlanta asked the Commission to take a hard look at the status of early childhood education and child care in Georgia. I co-chaired the Commission with Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, the former president of Spelman College.
I came to the project with an economist’s perspective. I was interested in assessing the potential return to Georgia of further investment in young children. I also saw child care as an economic necessity without which many parents could not participate in the workforce. Without child care, many talented young adults could not fully develop their skills by extending their education. Without child care, the economy suffered diminished engagement of some of our potentially most productive workers.
Over the course of 18 months, my colleagues on the Commission and I listened and learned from some of the nation’s experts on brain development and early education. I became a convert to the conviction that high-quality child care and early education are critical determinants of an individual’s lifetime economic prospects. Early education enhances language and literacy acquisition. These early interventions shape a child’s cognitive, social, and emotional development and longer-term physical and mental health.
According to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, babies form more than a million new neural connections every second. In the first three years, a child’s brain will grow faster than at any other time in life. A child’s experiences during the foundational early years have a profound influence on lifetime development. And sadly, the Commission’s research 15 years ago…
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