The Leaky PK-16 Pipeline

Louisiana has the most extensive and concentrated network of oil and gas pipelines in the world. We wouldn’t put up with losing 85 percent of the oil through leaks in the pipeline along the way. But we lose 85 percent of children in the education pipeline before completing post-secondary education — technical school, community college or the university.

That’s Dr. Phillip Rozeman, a member of the Louisiana State University-Shreveport Foundation Board, writing in the Shreveport Times. One of the reasons that we lose so many children from the educational pipeline today is that the pieces of that pipeline aren’t properly connected to one another: early childhood programs aren’t aligned with pre-k, which isn’t aligned with early elementary school, where curriculum, standards and teaching techniques often aren’t aligned from grade to grade. That creates gaps in the educational system and in children’s learning as they progress from grade to grade–and too many children slip through those gaps in our educational system. How to respond? Alignment: building connections between learning expectations and children’s experiences in each grade with the grades that preceded and follow, so learning builds seamlessly on what children already know, and children master the knowledge and skills they need before they move on to the next level of schooling.

Of course, alignment is tough when whole pieces of the educational pipeline are missing to begin with. Louisiana does better than most states when it comes to early education: The state supports three different pre-k programs, all of which rate well in terms of quality, and cumulatively these programs serve one-quarter of Louisiana’s four-year-olds. That makes the Louisiana better than average when it comes to pre-k, but it still leaves a lot of children unserved–including all the state’s three-year-olds. Our prescription for Louisiana’s leaky educational pipeline? Invest in pre-k as part of an aligned P-16 system, with a particular focus on quality and alignment in the PK-3 years.