“Little School” is an early childhood program we founded and help run in Harlan County, Kentucky
J.D. Vance loves to be provocative to get attention – it has garnered him millions from his book, “Hillbilly Elegey,” and subsequent movie. I grew up in and live in the rural mountains of Appalachian Kentucky. Vance is not as popular here, because most folks think the occasional summers at his grandmother’s house as a child do not qualify him to speak to the experiences and values of Coal Country. Although I am not a fan of Vance, I find his story compelling and have never had an issue with him capitalizing on his narrative until he used his platform to speak out against early childcare and education. His recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal made it clear that his current life working at a think-tank in Washington, D.C. has left him completely out-of-touch with the needs of families in rural and working-class America. His argument that funding early education and care would hurt families is what we, in Appalachia, like to term “hogwash.” At least when we are using polite language.
Amongst the many ways that the government is paying for an economic recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down our country, funding early education and care seems like the most obvious and least partisan. After all, economists are often one of the greatest champions of early education, as a small investment in early experiences has been showed to pay off more than two-fold in reduced problems later, including reducing Special Education placements and lessening criminal behavior[i]. But Vance argues that an obsession with work is part of the values of a liberal elite, who are trying to force the nation’s children into sub-par, government-run “institutions,” when working class families would prefer to have their children at home. He also references one small part of a study by the NIH that showed (temporary and very small) differences in behavior for some children who attended daycare.
Families were active participants in Little School. Here, the Bookmobile driver reads a story to children.
But the real question is, what is best for rural and working-class Americans? And what do they want? This is an issue I can speak to from great personal experience, as both a working mother, researcher, and someone who attended numerous programs aimed at helping children living in poverty. I grew up in a small town in Appalachia, the fifth of seven children, and I qualified for Federal Free lunch every single year of school. I also attended a preschool that was funded by government dollars. Since those days, I went off to Yale for college, became an elementary teacher on the Navajo Nation, and then went to complete my doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, because I had first-hand understanding of how powerful early educational experiences can be in transforming lives. While at Harvard, I studied the way small children learn and grow at home and at school in rural Appalachia, and my field work was conducted in Harlan County. Now, I have returned to my home. My family and I live in a coal-employing community in Central Appalachia, where our children attend Title 1 public schools, and have only just aged out of early childcare programs. We rub elbows with other families trying to make it in one of the most economically disadvantaged regions of the country, and not with wealthy folks in D.C. who aspire to run for office and influence policy.
Healthy food — some of which was grown on-site — was a big part of Little School
The unfortunate reality is that there is a shortage of childcare options in rural America. Fifty-nine percent of rural communities are what can be considered a “childcare desert,” meaning that there are at least three children for every one slot available—if there are any options for early care at all[ii]. The greatest shortage is for infants and toddlers. For example, in rural Oregon, there is only childcare capacity for 14.7% of the infant and toddler population. This shortage is not due to lack of demand, and particularly in poor communities. While we may assume that people are poor because they do not work, research tells us that even in rural America, mothers of children under 5 work an average of 22 hours a week outside of the home, regardless of whether they are considered very poor, near poor, or not poor at all[iii].
I sit on the board of the Appalachian Early Childhood Network, and one of the hardest issues we work on is helping childcare centers survive the challenge of serving families with meager incomes and uncertain job hours. Those who live in rural America are intimately familiar with the conundrum faced by mothers who work minimum-wage jobs. Here in Kentucky the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. How does a mother who is paid minimum wage for hourly work come close to affording childcare? What would Vance have her do? If she does not have family or a partner who can participate in childcare, her only option is to try to live off government assistance. It seems that Vance has forgotten that government dependence is not exactly in line with our hillbilly values.
Children riding on a wagon after picking pumpkins in the field
The article is particularly tone-deaf for someone dedicated to the issue of opioid addiction. In places like Eastern Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic has left many single-mother households and grandparents acting as caregivers, having a stay-at-home parent is rarely an option. Childcare is what allows women to earn a paycheck, or become trained for skilled work in health care and education. In fact, early childcare provides increased job opportunities, and particularly for young women who want to be close to their children. Vance tells gripping stories of his own mother while she was in the throes of addiction, socially isolated and stressed out, putting her child in danger. Perhaps if she had the social connection of preschool and had been able to safely leave her child for a few hours she would have had an easier time working on her addiction and found a pathway to recovery sooner. If nothing else, it might have added some stability and positivity to his childhood.
Vance might refute this, saying that early education is low quality and harmful to children, but a large body of research across multiple fields of inquiry finds otherwise. The consensus amongst scholars is that high quality early experiences can be life-changing, and children living in families with modest incomes or facing stress benefit the most[iv]. No matter your party politics, we all want happy, healthy children and strong families. When we all focus on the well-being of children, we can ensure that they have a broad network of people who can help them be resilient in the face of adversity and overcome trauma. Vance wrote about his own experiences with finding an “outsider” to help him create new and positive patterns in his life, something that happened for him when he met his now wife at Yale Law School. So often families learn new ways to encourage their children, discipline them, and work with them through observing what happens at preschool or childcare. I am baffled that Vance, himself the father of young children, would deny that option to other people’s children under some notion that families function best as islands that must be separated to maintain their values. Early education and care is hardly an all-or-none proposition where either families are raising their children or handing them off to government institutions. For example, I started an early childcare program in Harlan County that included caregivers and provided enrichment opportunities for a few hours a day, several days of the week. These types of opportunities are difficult for parents to create themselves and are often missing in rural America.
Our own children have attended a variety of preschool programs, including those at our local schools
For someone who promotes a narrative that children should be able to overcome no matter the hardships they face, early education and care should be one area where Vance should at least be quiet if he doesn’t have anything helpful to say. Unless, perhaps, Vance’s one goal is to shape a system in which he remains singularly exceptional. Perhaps the real issue here is that he believes he can hold onto his celebrity if he ensures he is the only one to make it through. Otherwise, his op-ed simply makes no sense. It flies in the face of decades of research and the careful analysis of economists who seek to understand the best investments to strengthen our country. Instead of arguing against early education and care, we should be building from a strong research base to create even better models of early care and education, using new funds towards innovation and high-quality programming. After all, if our goal is strong American families, our children are our most promising path forward.
[i] James J. Heckman, “Invest in Early Childhood Development: Reduce Deficits, Strengthen the Economy,” Heckman Equation, December 7, 2012, https://heckmanequation.org/www/assets/2013/07/F_HeckmanDeficitPieceCUSTOM-Generic_052714-3-1.pdf.
[ii] Rasheed Malik and Katie Hamm, “Mapping America’s Child Care Deserts,” Center for American Progress, August 30, 2017, http://search.proquest.com/docview/1946287280/?pq-origsite=primo.
[iii] Lynne Vernon-Feagans and Martha Cox, “The Family Life Project: An Epidemiological and Developmental Study of Young Children Living in Poor Rural Communities,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 78, no. 5 (2013): 1–126, doi:10.1111/mono.12047.
[iv] Hirokazu Yoshikawa et al., “Investing in Our Future: The Evidence Base on Preschool Education,” Society for Research in Child Development, October 2013, http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/detail?accno=ED579818.
Get to Know Us
Sky and Geoff Marietta live in Appalachian Kentucky and are passionate about promoting rural America. They are the authors of Rural Education in America: What Works for Our Students, Teachers, and Communities published by Harvard Education Publishing Group.
