Huffington Magazine Issue 11 | Page 67

HUFFINGTON 08.26.12 SMART START? poor families and received a full day of care every weekday from infancy to the age of five. Their education consisted of “games” (blocks figured prominently) and emphasized the development of strong relationships between children and teachers. Reading and numbers were considered essential, but not to the exclusion of listening and playing and sharing. Researchers interviewed and tested the children every few years, comparing them with a control group, and found them more likely to graduate from high school and college, more likely to work consistently throughout their lives, and less likely to use public assistance. This year, the oldest of these children turned forty. One of the beneficiaries of this experiment was Latesha Foushee, a woman who had such fond memories of her time at the Institute that she pursued a career in early childhood education and eventually got a job there. As Gallagher expounded on the blur of activity in the courtyard, Foushee stood over the tub, watching a small boy navigate a pirate ship through an ocean visible only to him. When Foushee was growing up in Raleigh, she said, she had two best friends. They were all from poor families, but of the three, only Foushee lucked out and was accepted into the Institute. One friend now drives a forklift for the Keebler plant where she’s worked since dropping out of high school, and the other recently posted something on Facebook about gastric surgery. “She was extremely obese,” Foushee said. “She must have been 500 pounds.” Foushee graduated from high school on time, received her childcare certification from a community college, and spent her 20s working as a preschool teacher and leading a youth group at her church. She got a job at Frank Porter Graham in her 30s, and she’s now finishing her associate’s degree while raising two kids of her own. She’s also in the process of adopting a 15-year-old neighbor whose grandmother died recently. Even a critic of the Institute— and there are many—would agree with the basic point of Foushee’s story: preschool can help children overcome great obstacles. When conservatives in North Carolina want to justify cutting the preschool budget, they refer to the work of scholars like Eric Hanushek, at Stanford University, and Chester E. Finn Jr., formerly of the Reagan administration and now of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Ohio. Finn argues that public pre-