FAIRMONT - A group of Minnesota philanthropic leaders announced plans this week to call for a statewide early education overhaul.
The group is lobbying lawmakers to coordinate and streamline what they consider the state's disjointed early childhood education system.
The School Readiness Funders Coalition, as the group is known, wants to establish greater accountability, access and quality, according to Frank Forsberg of Greater Twin Cities United Way.
The coalition calls Minnesota's early childhood education system fragmented and not well coordinated.
"We will not see progress on K-12 without fixing early childhood education," said Sandy Vargas, president and CEO of The Minneapolis Foundation. "Currently only half of Minnesota's children enter kindergarten ready to learn. That means our kids and our educators are behind before they even reach the starting line."
The group says its plans will mean all children will be ready for kindergarten by 2020.
Five "domains of school readiness" - physical development, arts, personal and social development, language and literacy, and mathematical thinking - would be a standards by which student readiness would be measured.
Currently, children are required to undergo a screening process before they begin school - typically at 5 years old - but how and when they are tested varies considerably, according to Karen Kelley-Ariwoola, vice president of community philanthropy at The Minneapolis Foundation.
Parents can begin screening their students in Fairmont as early as 3 years old, the age Kelley-Ariwoola believes is ideal for all children in the state. But in many areas, students are screened "as they walk in the school door."
"There is a lot of variation across the state," she said. "Five is too late to identify problems."
The screening not only tests children on their knowledge of letters and numbers, but can identify needs in hearing, seeing, and speech, as well as potentially pick up signs of learning disabilities that can be helped with early intervention.
The coalition believes that with leadership, accountability and funding, Minnesota's children will have a better chance at succeeding in school.
The group proposes creating a statewide cabinet office that would be held responsible for the leadership and accountability aspect of the program, which would also include implementing a standard four-star rating system for early childhood programs and preschools to help parents choose programs for their children.
Forsberg said the state collectively spends $1.6 billion on early childhood programs -with $1.2 billion coming from parents.
That puts poor children at a distinct disadvantage, Kelley-Ariwoola said.
She said the plan would take financial and ethnic diversity into consideration to create culturally appropriate methods to reach every child.
The groups plans to fund the proposed state office and its programs partly with its own resources, and partly with state funding it believes is critical to the proposal's success.