Katie Belk works with kindergarteners and first graders in her gifted enrichment class at N.B. Cook Elementary
School of the Arts in Pensacola, Fl., Monday, February 2, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

Every child benefits from early learning, whether it’s practiced in a formal school setting or at home with parents or caregivers.

But there is growing concern that childhood educators aren’t able to help little children learn because of their own learning deficiencies.

As many as 1 million state-licensed and nationally credentialed early childhood educators are at risk for functional illiteracy; their reading and writing skills leave them unable to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level.

That’s according to Elizabeth Gilbert, coordinator of the “Learn at Work Early Childhood Educator Program Labor” in the Labor Management Workplace Education Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Gilbert outlined her findings in a column she wrote last year for the Washington Post. Education writer Valerie Strauss reprinted Gilbert’s post in her blog, “A critical problem affecting America’s Childcare System (but ignored by policymakers).”

In her column, Gilbert laments that too many early childcare educators “mirror” the disadvantages that the children they teach have:

Childcare systems across America can be viewed through a Preponderance of Mirrors. Mirrors provide cogent evidence of the real-life consequences of “pairing vulnerable young children with underpaid, under-educated, and under-valued childcare teachers (early childhood educators).

Preparing children for kindergarten and helping them along the way through high school graduation and beyond is crucial to this community’s economic health and overall quality of life.

Kindergarten readiness and high school graduation rates are among the key metrics in the Studer Community Institute’s Pensacola Metro Dashboard.

Objective benchmarks are critical to measuring progress and identifying areas that need improvement.

It’s sobering to see what education looks like for some of our children who start out behind in school and never catch up by graduation day.

It’s no coincidence that only 66 percent of children in an Escambia County public school are ready for kindergarten, and 66 percent graduate from high school on time.

What that means is, a third of children aren’t ready for to start school and don’t finish on time.

The correlation between kindergarten readiness and high school graduation is real. It should not be ignored.

It points to the importance of making education a priority because it has to be first and foremost in our hearts and minds — and money.

Experts say that people are talking more about early childhood education than ever before. But so far the discussion hasn’t translated to an increase in programs or attendance or increased training and education for the teachers in charge.

Growing research shows that much of what you need to succeed in life is established before you enter kindergarten. During that time, the human brain undergoes rapid development; it’s a period when a child builds cognitive skills — the foundation for reading, math, science and academics — as well as character skills, social-emotional growth, gross-motor skills and executive functioning, which includes everything from impulse control to problem solving.

While parents play a significant role in early learning, so do early childhood educators.

Children today spend so much time in early education settings. Low-income children spend more hours a week in childcare than in quality time with their parents.

Despite the increased attention that early education is getting, the response to improving it has lagged, especially in regards to regulations, training and education for teachers.

Gilbert wrote in another column, “The famous ‘word gap’ doesn’t hurt only the young. It affects many educators, too,” points out that most states require very low levels of education for childhood teacher licensing:

No state in the nation measures or ensures the basic adult literacy competence of non-college early childhood educators.

In 32 of 50 states, a half-million non-college early childhood educators are licensed as lead teachers and hold a high school diploma or less.

To put this in perspective, a high school diploma in no way ensures adult literacy competence, event at tenth-grade competence. In 2014, 31 percent of American high school graduates met “no” college readiness benchmarks in English, reading, writing, math and science on the ACT.

Why do state license low-literacy early childhood educators? The main reason is money. States pay early childhood educators without degrees near-poverty wages. Who else could or would work for so little? Certainly teachers without degrees whose literacy competence must be proven through rigorous state testing before being able to work as public preschool teachers.

With millions of children needing care, there are few options to serve them if there is no money to pay for more educated staff members.

According to a report by The Institute for Women’s Policy Research and Early Childhood Policy Research, quality childcare cost $9,076 per student per year. And not many places are willing to invest that much in early education.

In 2005, universal prekindergarten became a constitutional right in Florida, but the costs never met the need and benefits. The state spent a little more $2,200 for each 4-year-old in 2013-14, mostly by hiring underpaid and poorly trained teachers.

Florida wasn’t alone in skimping on early education. The New York Times reported that during 2013-14 school year, the 41 states that provide prekindergarten spent an average of $4,125 per child.

That’s not much more than a decade earlier, and a little more than a third of the average per-student coast for kindergartners through 12^th-graders.

If we’re serious about closing the word gap for low-income children, we must also be serious about closing the word gap for functionally illiterate early childhood educators, Gilbert writes:

By implementing professional development strategies that use adult literacy testing to assess and then develop low-literacy early childhood educators, we will not only help to help to transform the “juxtaposed inequalities” of these educators and the children in their care, we also will help to close the achievement and opportunity gaps of both.