The American dream of rising from the bottom to the top is actually harder to do in America than in Western European countries. The new international study confirms what working Americans and the Occupy movement have experienced first-hand. In America, the rich are getting richer--and they're passing that advantage on to their children at the expense of everyone else.

The report offers one glimmer of hope: quality preschool education gives children of low-income parents a step up into the middle class.

According to the report's findings, "Preschool exposure can have lasting positive effects....... especially for low- and middle-income children."

SEIU members have lobbied congress, written letters to legislators, and worked to elect leaders who would support early education funding for the past several decades, including efforts during the past two years that have resulted in maintaining recent increases in Head Start funding in the 2012 budget.

"Remember that the country's future depends much on us, the early age educators," said Tami Mendez, a child care provider from Massachusetts. "One of the children in my day care could be the president, or a principal, or a great citizen, husband and father."

As for the sobering news about the challenges of rising out of poverty, SEIU has been waging a "Fight for a Fair Economy" for good jobs for the rest of us.

Unmentioned--and perhaps unexamined in the study--were how union membership and quality job training help low-wage workers move into the middle class.

Child care providers in 16 states have formed unions to address this very issue, and providers in Massachusetts like Tami Mendez are now working through their union to expand child care provider programs.

The full report from Pew's Economic Mobility Project can be found here [pdf.]

This past week, the media remembered to care about the poor, shocked as they were by the Census Bureau's news that 1 in 7 Americans now lives in poverty.

It's not a surprising outcome when middle class jobs are going away and families that used to be middle class are having to learn new survival strategies.

Disturbing as this is, 1 in 5 American children now lives in poverty and as this article by Amy Novotney in this month's Monitor on Psychology points out, this can have a serious impact on a child's entire learning career. The cognitive and scholastic impairments can even persist for the long term if their families' incomes improve.

Maggie Cary recommends calling a square box a cube, and using other geometry terms to talk about everyday things, to help get children used to the words before they need to use them in a math class.

Jenifer Monroe has to get four kids ready for school every day. As you might expect, she's put some thought into this:

7) Stick to the either/or rule: "Red jacket or blue today?" "Pigtails or ponytails?" rather than, "Which jacket do you want?" or "How should we do your hair?"

... Before it's time to get the kids up, I get up and get myself 100 percent ready to walk out the door. This is the same principle as when you fly and the attendant stresses the value of placing your own oxygen mask on before assisting others. I almost always get a few things done for work while my house is still quiet, so my cushion is about two hours. ...

A young person's brain will still be developing executive function, the processing skills that allow people to focus and sustain attention as well as manage their emotions, throughout the teen years and perhaps into the early 20s.

Without a well-developed internal 'executive', children lose focus more easily and have a harder time overcoming minor frustrations. For that, for many years, they'll be reliant on (often harried) parents and caregivers to keep them on track.

So, until they get a little older, it's important to give them choices that both let them feel in control while staying on task. That just helps everyone have a better day.

An editor at Wired took another look at the economic study of the benefits of a good preschool program for low income children, particularly the conclusion that "for every dollar invested in preschool for at-risk children, society at large reaps somewhere between eight and nine dollars in return."

Improvements in self-control and self-discipline are credited with the better high school graduation rates and life outcomes, including lower arrest rates, of a group of students given a good quality preschool education and followed by researchers through the age of 40, compared with a control group of similar children who had no preschool education.

This squares with what early education advocate Ellen Galinsky has pointed out on a number of occasions, that life skills such as sustained attention, patience and good manners have been consistently shown to have a large impact on both school performance and long term success.

The economic research just puts a price tag on the extra value returned to society: an 800 to 900 percent return on investment.

But who gets that profit? Here's where everything gets tricky. When government saves money on intervention, jails and law enforcement and gets increased tax revenue from higher wages, those benefits accumulate over such a long period of time and are spread among so many people that it's been hard to organize around making the investment in the first place. So in times like these, when states are cutting back on spending, the easiest thing to cut is often early education money.

Children don't vote, and they can't pay for their own education. If they come from low income families, their parents can't pay for it, either. The government can afford to pay for it, but organized business activists often insist that government invest taxpayer resources in speculative finance, corporate welfare, tax cuts for the rich and other dubious schemes before looking after the well-being of vulnerable citizens.

Business activists can offer politicians the enticing carrot of immediate campaign contributions for themselves, and the threatening stick of campaign contributions to a politician's opponents, in order to get their way, and their money, immediately. The opportunity cost to society is large, but the loss may not be realized for decades. By which time, the politicians and their business activist friends will probably be long retired.

Educators and parents have tried to encourage the government to take the longer view in investing public money, but the fashion in politics has been to move ever closer to the pop economics fads of the stock market. In stock market terms, an investment that doesn't mature for 30 years is one barely worth making.

Good thing parents and teachers don't think like stockbrokers, and here's to hoping their opinions become more popular with politicians.

Before the age of 3, gaps can already be evident in children's language skills depending on their environments:

[Ross Thompson, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis] described how advantaged children are steeped in a language environment with rich back-and-forth conversations, new vocabulary words, rhyming games and intimate moments in which both the adult and the child are jointly focused on a new discovery or object. Those experiences are less likely, he said, among babies and toddlers whose caregivers and parents are under economic stress, and who may not have the strong language and education backgrounds that enable those conversations.

As many providers who chose to work in early education have observed, interventions during the teenage years are often too late to make up for the care low-income children didn't get because their families were having a hard time just keeping them fed, clothed and housed. Though there's no good reason children should be deprived of care we know they need, simply because their parents had too little education or time to spend at home.

Good early education outside the home can begin to make up the difference.

A recent economic study has even pegged the value of a good kindergarten teacher at $320,000 per year, which is the present value of the students' increased lifetime earnings.

Those findings about the worth of good early education were no surprise to Ellen Galinsky, of the Families and Work Institute. She says that her extensive research reviews are full of evidence that the social, life and concentration skills that are taught in a warm, interactive and stimulating early care environment are strong predictors of whether children will go on to have good reading, vocabulary and math skills.

As we learn more about what makes for a good early care environment, it can no longer be acceptable to tolerate educational outcomes based more on parents' incomes or time budgets than on students' own abilities. Particularly when the recession is throwing record numbers of families into poverty.

When teachers have confidence in their own teaching skills and offer emotional support to their students, children seem to pick up language skills better and form larger vocabularies.

The study results, sponsored by the US Department of Education, also showed that elementary school teachers tended to be more confident, while preschool teachers often became disillusioned with their abilities the longer they'd been teaching. Though as one of the co-authors suggests, the job of teaching pre-K children is daunting.

For Head Start teachers and other child care workers who deal with children from at-risk backgrounds, the task can seem especially daunting. The children may be hungry, they may be sick or exhausted. Their parents may either have very little time away from work, be in an unstable housing situation, or be inexperienced and in need of mentoring and support.

Though it seems clear that children benefit when their caregivers are confident in their abilities and enough at ease that they can offer emotional support to others.

Sounds like a good reason to keep organizing for better early education working conditions.

Putting children from low-income and at-risk backgrounds in full-day preschool seems to boost reading skills and reduce the need for special education services.

While the authors of the report on children's outcomes in Montgomery Country, Maryland schools emphasize that there seemed to be no difference in math scores and not all children showed better school readiness than half-day counterparts, a literacy boost counts as good news in our books!

Why do so many people remain poor?

It's a burning question these days, as state and federal legislators struggle to deal with their constituents falling wages, the rising tide of unemployment and the gradual slide into poverty for many long term underemployed, unemployed and their stressed out families. Corporate profits are up, even though employment is down, but because wages are a bigger source of tax revenue than investing, governments are facing smaller budgets with which to serve the needs of the newly poor.

The argument made by many conservatives is that doing things like extending unemployment benefits discourages people getting jobs, rather than, say, the fact that there's only one job for every five applicants nationwide. It's all about personal responsibility, they say.

Indeed, it would take 12.5 years worth of having 200,000 new jobs per month to get the unemployment level back down to pre-recession levels. And right now, 9 percent unemployment through 2011 is a cautious estimate; an unemployment level that high would have been considered intolerable only two years ago and now it's the new normal.

Which is the problem with denying that anything at all but people's personal choices and traits may affect the outcomes of their lives: when they don't do well, there's no other explanation besides an innate flaw.

Though in reality, people's success may be significantly affected by their circumstances, as demonstrated in a 37 year study on the effects of household income on children. The analysts explain:

... Children born in poor families are significantly more likely to live in persistent poverty than children born in higher income families. Approximately 40 to 60 percent of children in the former group go on to live in poverty throughout their childhoods compared to 5 to 9 percent of children in the latter group.

... The longer a child lives in poverty, the worse their adult outcomes. For example, more than 30 percent of persistently poor children continue to be persistently poor in early adulthood compared to only 1 percent of non-poor children. ...

Some of these outcomes are due to the exhaustion and illness poor children often face because of inadequate food and housing. Without assistance, or better, good jobs for their parents, many children raised in this new wave of poverty probably won't be able to climb out.

Bill Stritzler, a chair of the Vermont Business Roundtable lamented the capping of human potential that occurs when high quality early education programs have their attendance capped far below local needs.

"Regretfully, in our society, by the time children turn five we can predict with remarkable accuracy who will graduate high school and college - and those who won't," Stritzler said in a recent interview on Vermont Public Radio. He added that, while we know how to improve children's chances in life through early education, half the children in his state show up at kindergarten unprepared to learn.

Link courtesy of Amanda Korte.