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Working for early education
Georgetown Record, March 13, 2008

GEORGETOWN - Georgetown resident Douglas Baird believes our country is falling behind the rest of the world in the education of our youngest population, and he is one of the people working to turn that trend around.

“We really have become stuck here in the United States compared to the rest of the world,” says Baird. “Europe, Asia and Australia have learned that if they want to compete in a global economy, they have to start educating their children early. We are just beginning to get to that in the U.S.”

Baird says Americans still live in a false dichotomy where we separate out education from childcare, thinking of the two as completely separate. Education is perceived as a public good and appropriate for using taxpayer funds to support, while childcare is perceived as a family matter that should be paid for by the family.

“The trouble is, these two things are one and the same,” says Baird. “The day a child is born, that child begins learning. What we provide them as experiences during the first five years will shape the trajectories of their lives … The brain is growing during the first three years of life at a pace you will never experience again for the rest of your life.

“Research proves that if you provide children with access to words at an early age, you give them a gift you can never take back after that. Children not read to have one-tenth the size of the vocabularies of children who are read to.”

Baird has spent most of his life working to improve the education of young children in this country, and on Feb. 13 he was honored in the Mass. House of Representatives for his tireless efforts on behalf of young children locally, nationally and internationally.

Margaret, his wife of 39 years, sent a letter to friends when her husband was honored.

“Few of you know how hard [Doug] has worked over the years to ensure that all young children have a chance to succeed,” wrote Margaret. “He has joined with the other all too few voices who speak for those children who have no voice ... It is a task that is far from completed, but a task that would have failed if not for Doug’s voice and the all too few other colleagues who have and continue to fight the good fight … [Doug] continues to work without need or desire of recognition, but with hope that he can make a difference in the lives of children.”

For Baird, a very special moment in presentation from the House was the presence of State Rep. Jeffrey Sanchez, who “graduated” from an Associated Day Care Program in Mission Hill years ago. Baird spent 27 years working as the CEO of Associated Early Care and Education program, which was originally established in 1878.

Baird doubled the number of children and families served by Associated to 1,100 and developed comprehensive services for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. He was a driving force behind the construction of five new early childhood centers in Boston and Cambridge between 1989 and 2000, serving all children in Boston’s lowest income neighborhoods.

Baird established a first of its kind Quality Assurance Department in 1994, to raise the quality of Associated and hundreds of other community programs. He also established a first of its kind Research and Policy Department for early childhood programs and policy.

He was one of the founders of USA Child Care, the first national membership organization for nonprofit childcare organizations.

Baird was one of the leaders in closing virtually all locked facilities for delinquent adolescents all over Massachusetts and replacing them with small residential homes, including residential homes in Worcester.

He founded the Mass. Council of Human Service Providers in 1975, serving as CEO for four years.

In 1978 he was part of a small group that designed what the commonwealth’s Department of Social Services [DSS] “was going to look like,” and was later hired as the first Deputy Commissioner of DSS.

Those are just some of his accomplishments the House proclamation honored him for.

The early years

Born in Boston and raised in Lexington, Baird went through the public school system in Lexington, and spent two years at the University of Arizona before graduating from Boston University.

He met Margaret when she was a nursing student at McLean Hospital and he was a ward attendant there. The couple married in 1969, and planned an interesting life leading charter tours in the Caribbean on their boat, the Crow’s Nest IV, featuring sailing, swimming, snorkeling, gourmet lunches and shore tours. Baird became a licensed boat captain. That venture only lasted six months, because tropical underwater saltwater insects found their 52-foot wooden sailboat, built in New England in the 1930s, absolutely delicious.

“Every dollar we made on the tours went into the upkeep,” says Baird of those early adventures. “We fixed the boat and sailed it back to New England.”

The boat ended up in Marblehead Harbor and the Bairds ended up at Concord Community Mental Health Center, where they worked with the at-risk adolescent population.

“These adolescents needed attention, and they needed adults to set limits,” said Baird.
Baird got an offer to open a center for delinquent adolescents in Worcester, and his wife continued to work in Concord as a therapeutic nurse with very young children.

“My wife has been working with young children longer than I have been working with young children,” says Baird. “Most of what I know about young children I learned from my wife. It’s been a real family affair.”

Now well settled in Georgetown after moving here in 1998, the couple has two grown sons. Ethan, 27, works in information technology at Raytheon and also writes, plays, and records acoustic folk rock with his band Pesky J. Nixon. The name is a combination of Red Sox players Johnny Pesky, Jason Varitek and Trot Nixon. Eli, 24, works in construction.

Baird runs the Georgetown-based Baird Associates, Inc., working with about 50 nonprofit organizations ranging from small to large. He has recently initiated a new division of Baird Associates, providing management consulting, organizational effectiveness and efficiency, program evaluation, policy evaluation and development for these companies.

Baird says he has great hopes for the future of Georgetown.

“With our new leadership among the selectmen, police, the School Committee and its professional staff, I’m think the town is a healthier town with a much greater sense of vision for the future,” says Baird.

He is also optimistic for the future of early childhood education in America.

“It’s beginning to dawn on us that when we don’t provide that early childhood education, we end up with a college grad who is not prepared to compete in the global economy we are so excited to have,” says Baird.

Baird cites a 2007 study done at the University of Chicago by Nobel Laureate and PhD James Heckman, which calculated the return on investment in early childhood education. The Heckman study showed that children well educated from an early age live more stable lives, are more likely to attend college, get better paid jobs, cost local schools less in special education costs, and cost the juvenile and adult justice system less.

“The study calculated that the actual return on an investment in early childhood education is $16 for every dollar spent,” says Baird. “This is a nation of tire kickers when it comes to the education of young children. We’re very hesitant to invest money in the education of young children. In the United States we are very far behind Asia and Western Europe in the way we educate young children.

“Our U.S. graduate programs are filled with science and technology students from other countries. The U.S. isn’t producing its own population. You can’t change this all by providing early education, but we can, in early childhood education, elicit and support curiosity and the fundamental tools that ultimately become the tools of scientific discovery.”

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