Besides the country you’re born in, the most important factor in determining the outcome of your life is whether you were born out of wedlock. Out-of-wedlock children are more likely to have lacked proper prenatal care, early childhood services and effective parenting. It will take the government prioritizing programs that support families to repair the damage. Cradle to the Classroom is one such program.
For all racial and ethnic groups combined in 2022, an appalling 39.8% of births in the United States were to unmarried mothers. According to the Pew Research Center in 2019, almost one-fourth of children in the U.S. younger than 18 live with one parent and no other adult, which is the highest rate in the world. It hasn’t always been this way. In 1940, the Black illegitimacy rate was less than what it is for white people now.
Dealing with the consequences requires we acknowledge that it is the disintegration of the family unit, the increasing number of pregnancies out of wedlock and teen pregnancies specifically that are the root causes of our intractable social economic problems.
It will take new programs and strategies that protect and support the family, that discourage teen pregnancies and address the child-rearing needs of out-of-wedlock teens to turn the tide. Cradle to the Classroom is a program that can be transformational. I supported it when I was CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
Chicago’s Cradle to the Classroom program in the 1990s inexplicably ended in 2004 despite extraordinary success, and it cost significantly less than traditional preschool programs. It reduced the dropout rate and second pregnancies.
No program has been more effective at closing the academic achievement gap, increasing graduation rates and preventing repeat pregnancies. No program I am aware of is more effective and affordable for closing the academic achievement gap and helping break the cycle of poverty.
Cradle to the Classroom includes prenatal care and parent coaching and mentoring. The program assigns pregnant teens a “parent coach,” ensuring the teen receives proper prenatal care to ensure the child is born healthy; the mother and child have access to ongoing health care; and the child is exposed to reading, math and vocabulary. These are essential components to closing the achievement gap.
Young mothers continue to be coached and mentored from the prenatal phase until the child enters kindergarten. The goal is to ensure that every parent is equipped to ensure that the child’s early nutrition, health care and early education needs are addressed. Trained parent coaches, supervised by early childhood administrators and teachers, provide the bulk of the home outreach.
These coaches are most often parents from the same community, both accomplished and motivated, with the ability to communicate and relate to the children, often based on common experiences. As the child grows older, mentoring services can be provided to help compensate for the absence of a second parent and male role models, which for too many communities is in short supply.
The Cradle to the Classroom program does not require the child to be in preschool to guarantee success, which makes the program affordable and scalable. The key to the Cradle’s success was reaching the pregnant teen in the prenatal phase and providing monitoring, coaching and social service support for the mother.
Because it’s a home-schooling program, it can be quickly brought to scale and sustained at a fraction of the cost of a universal full-day preschool program. Additionally, funding can be secured through more effective Medicaid billings, the use of school Title I dollars and the accessing of only a small portion of the additional funding President Joe Biden’s administration has provided for child care.
Any increase in expenditures will be more than offset by the savings from having far fewer children starting school with special needs that require special education services as well as government savings at large from having far fewer dropouts and repeat pregnancies. Savings will be enormous as they are compounded over time.
The program has proved to be highly effective at providing employment and potential career opportunities for hardworking mothers, who are recruited and trained to serve as parent coaches. They receive the training opportunities needed to not only become effective paraprofessionals and early childhood providers but to also ascend career ladders to more advanced training and employment opportunities.
The Chicago Cradle program employed 475 family advocates from the community who served 2,500 pregnant teens. Almost all were on public assistance. The combination of salary and benefits provide these working mothers with a livable wage and an opportunity to pursue a career.
In conclusion, the Cradle to the Classroom is one program that can repair the damage done by an ever-increasing number of children being born out of wedlock and being raised in single-parent households. Significant savings will be realized over time to taxpayers, through a reduced reliance on social services, progress on narrowing the achievement gap and a dramatic increase in high school graduation rates, as well as the positive effects of healthier children and parents.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2024 and 2019 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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