Chapter 5: Child Advocacy and Its Application to Education Professionals: International Symposium on Early Childhood Education and Care for the 21st Century

Policymakers around the globe are increasingly concerned with the widening wage and productivity gap between highly educated workers and those with less schooling. Both government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have spent millions of dollars on an array of school reform and job training initiatives to reduce this inequality. If they had been asked, educators could have told the policymakers that the greatest potential for positive impact was in the arena of early childhood education. Recently, both economic and educational research has validated what educators have always known: “Early learning begets later learning and early success breeds later success just as early failure breeds later failure” (Heckman, 1999, p. 5).