Education in Hawai‘i

As we all struggle with a crisis that is hurting our children’s education, there is also a quiet emergency not getting nearly enough attention. Early education is too often seen as a nice-to-have service — an add-on to the K-12 and university systems. Nothing could be further from the truth.

By age 5, a child’s brain is 85 percent of its adult weight and it is forming 700 neural synapses per second — these are the connections in the brain that allow you to learn. Research shows that by 18 months, disparities in a child’s vocabulary due to the education attainment and income of the parents already appear.

David Brooks, a conservative columnist, summarized the research best: “By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.” We cannot with a straight face call ourselves a land of equal opportunity, aware that children are already facing an uphill battle before they reach kindergarten.

We must take more decisive action to improve our public education system in Hawai‘i. But we must also invest significantly more effort into early education. We already know it pays off, not just in educational gains, but also economically. According to the Good Beginnings Alliance, every $1 invested in early education results in $4.20 of state, federal and social benefits. Investing in early education is economic development.

In Congress, I have always fought for increased funding for the Head Start program, which provides early education for over 3,000 low-income children in Hawai‘i. I am also co-sponsoring legislation championed by our own Rep. Mazie Hirono and supported by President Obama that would provide grants to enhance state-funded preschool programs. For the rest of my term in Congress, I will continue this fight. But according to Good Beginnings Alliance, most of Hawai‘i’s resources for early education come from the federal government. If we really put our children first, we need to do more at the state level. This is exactly the kind of situation that inspired me to run for governor.

One of my highest priorities as governor will be to firmly establish the statewide public-private partnerships required to ensure high-quality early education opportunities for all. We also need to fully reinstate early intervention programs like Healthy Start, which focuses on at-risk families and recognizes that kindergarten is too late to try to have a “level playing field.” Kids need to have equal opportunity at birth. Finally, very young children in particular need their parents involved in their educations, which means we need to have public and private supports to ensure that parents can participate while still making ends meet.

We have immediate issues in public education that need a resolution now. At the same time, we cannot take our eye off of the long-term investments that pay off long after headlines have faded away.

One of the top things we can do to improve education in Hawai‘i is give children ages 0 to 5 the full help, support and resources they deserve. Right now we aren’t, but I know we can and will. We have some of the smartest, most able business people, researchers, educators, social workers, philanthropists, and community advocates working on early childhood issues-really some of the best in the country in my opinion. There is no reason we can’t provide for our young children. What we need now is political will.

Congressman Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat, represents the 1st District of Hawai‘i.