Shaping dreams, one early childhood at a time

You might not have predicted that Marquan Hamilton would end up where he is. His parents hadn’t finished high school. They wanted great things for their children, but they couldn’t afford private preschool or other enrichment services near their home in Shelby.

Marquan caught a break. Through a range of services he received via a public-private partnership, he learned math and reading and gained confidence. Some of his friends weren’t so lucky. “If you live in a rural or poor area,” he said earlier this week, “the odds are sometimes stacked against you. I saw how others were struggling. But I walked in knowing my math, knowing my letters, and it launched me.”

He’s being modest. Today, Marquan is a sophomore at N.C. State with an infectious enthusiasm that makes you hopeful for the future – for his future. He wants to be a lawyer “to change lives.”

There’s a long history in North Carolina of investing in early childhood development. On a state level, we required statewide kindergarten in the early 1970s; we launched Smart Start in the early 1990s. We expanded services to 4-year-olds in the early 2000s; our current General Assembly has passed measures designed to increase the number of children who are reading by third grade. On a local level, there have been numerous community-driven coalitions like the one in Shelby for the past 25 years.

During the Emerging Issues Focus Forum recently at N.C. State, we heard from Democrats and Republicans, left-leaning and right-leaning thinkers alike, business leaders, brain scientists, even corporate site selection experts. They didn’t necessarily concur on how to do it, but they all agreed that investment in early childhood development makes a big difference in workforce improvement.

We learned about a bipartisan Early Childhood Caucus in the General Assembly, a coalition of statewide business CEOs, big new philanthropic initiatives, emerging strategic recommendations from a group of stakeholders called NC Pathways to Grade-Level Reading, and creative, multisectoral community coalitions in places as different as Mecklenburg and Transylvania counties.

There’s abundant evidence that the right kind of hard work can pay off. A new study by Duke professor Ken Dodge of more than 1 million North Carolina students found that quality early childhood programs resulted in higher reading and math scores, as well as fewer students being placed in special education classes through at least fifth grade.

Economist and Nobel Laureate James Heckman has calculated that every dollar invested in quality early childhood development can have as much as a 13 percent annual return on investment when you calculate improved salaries, decreased crime, improved health and other factors.

State Sen. Jeff Jackson, one of the founders of the General Assembly’s Early Childhood Caucus, summarized the issue this way on our podcast, “First in Future”: “For folks on the left (early childhood development) has the promise of breaking the generational cycle of poverty. For folks on the right who are fiscal conservatives, this has enormous return on investment – really greater return on investment than any other government expenditure.”

There’s no active opposition to strengthening early childhood development – no Coalition for Early Childhood Ignorance. The challenges are how to get more quality assistance to more young people, so that fewer students start off behind in their first school setting and can’t catch up, and then how to pay for it: What’s the role of state government; local government; the business community; nonprofits; health care; parents?

That’s the work we do next. The Emerging Issues Focus Forum identified some of the people who can answer those questions and kicked off a two-year process of looking for answers. On a state level, legislators, businesses, nonprofit and agency leaders will be trying to determine the role each plays in improving early childhood development. On a local level, we’ll be looking to create models for how communities can both improve efficiency and rally new resources.

But we’ll need more.

We need everybody to think about the impact Marquan’s experience had on him and his family. Inspired by their boy’s success, Marquan’s parents returned to class, completing their high school degrees. Now, Marquan’s younger brother and sister are dreaming big too.

As our state tries to plan for a jobs future that is uncertain at best, the only thing we can be sure about is that we can’t afford to leave any of our youngest citizens behind. If we do, we might miss the next Marquan.

This story was originally published February 10, 2017 at 7:45 PM with the headline "Shaping dreams, one early childhood at a time."