Litmus Test for ‘Education President’ : Child care: There is more at stake here than parental peace of mind: Good early care can make the difference in success at school and in life.

President Bush has indicated that he is considering a veto of the child-care legislation passed by the House of Representatives last Thursday if it reaches his desk in its current form. In making his decision, the President will have to ponder the damage a veto could do to his popularity, since the bill promises to relieve millions of ordinary American families of at least some of the worries caused by lack of available and affordable child care. It would also provide sorely needed income supplements to additional millions of poor parents.

But something still more fundamental is at stake.

The link between a child’s early experiences and the adult he or she becomes is clear. The foundations for success at school are laid long before school entry, when children learn that their world is comprehensible and predictable. You can’t care for young children without educating them, nor can you educate them without caring for them. Children who don’t learn at a very young age that “when I cry I will be comforted” or “when I am hungry I will be fed” are also not learning about cause and effect, about now and later, about trust and reciprocity. The children who don’t learn these simple lessons because they live amid persistent poverty, random violence or despairing and overwhelmed adults are unlikely to bring to school the social capital required to become well-educated.

So President Bush’s decision also will determine whether he turns his back on his stated aspiration to be the “Education President.” For good child-care legislation--perhaps more than any other single federal action--can improve the educational prospects of disadvantaged children. In the absence of quality child-care legislation, we will not achieve the goal recently adopted by the President and the nation’s governors, that every American child reach school prepared to succeed.

This legislation, along with the proposed expansion of Head Start, now before Congress, have the potential to ensure that every young child gets a decent start on school and on life.

Because the preschool basics can be learned outside as well as inside the home, high-quality child-care and enrichment programs can make the difference between a good or a very poor chance of school success. Risk factors for delinquency, dropping out and teen-age pregnancy include untreated childhood health problems, lack of language, reasoning and coping skills at school entry and failure to develop trusting relationships with reliable adults early in life.

Whether child-care programs will in fact improve the odds of school success for vulnerable children will depend on their capacity to collaborate with parents, to recruit and retain a stable, well-trained staff and to maintain ratios of staff to children that are high enough and group size that is small enough to assure each child of a relationship with a caring adult.

The tax credits that are part of the child-care bill are important income supplements, but will not themselves result in greater availability of quality child care. Assistance to states to improve the quality of child-care programs is an essential component of any national policy. Adequate funding is imperative. The consistent lesson from both the successes and the failures of past attempts to improve the chances of vulnerable children is that if we skimp, if we try to cut corners, we we will surely pay much more later.

When they passed their respective bills, both the House and the Senate were responding to widespread concern about the stability and morale of today’s work force and about the well-being of children of working parents. A coalition of child advocates, citizen groups, churches, parents and business interests agreed that out-of-home child care is too important to the nation’s future to be left to families to grapple with on their own, and that effective legislation must ensure care of high quality with adequate funding.

President Bush has frequently declared the urgent need to improve education on the grounds that America’s prosperity tomorrow directly depends on the skills developed by those who are young children today. He must know that investments in early education and child care will pay off not only for this generation of Americans but also for the next. By signing the child-care bill into law, the President would not only be giving parents a little more peace of mind; he would also be taking a giant step toward realizing his dream of a decent future for every American child.