Kindergarten

Three years ago, the Community Action Project in Tulsa discovered it had an attendance problem in its Head Start centers.  Almost two-thirds of children were “chronically absent,” meaning they had missed more than 10 percent of school days.

The non-profit organization was fortunate in one way, though: It had collected data that enabled it to see which children were not arriving at school.  Armed with new information, the organization, known as CAP, jumped into gear to address the problem.

The last time the National Association for the Education of Young Children took a position on teaching with technology it was 1996.  The Web was only a few years old, portable music meant the Sony Walkman, and Einstein was still that physics genius with the mustache, not a line of DVDs for babies.

This new map from the Children’s Defense Fund shows  which states require school districts to provide a full day of kindergarten. Especially during years where budget cuts often hit education programs in the states, funding for a full day of kindergarten can get cut—except in states where law mandates that districts must make it available at no charge to parents.

Full Day Kindergarten in the States

Click here to see the map and fact sheets on full-day kindergarten in every state.

Properly determining a young English Language Learner’s proficiency in English is crucial to putting that student on the right track in school. A child who is placed in a regular classroom too soon is bound to struggle. But a child who is kept in a program for ELL students for too long is wasting time that could be spent moving ahead in math, science, or other academic subjects.

Over the next three years, a group will be developing a new set of assessments for English Language Learners that it hopes will be both accurate and developmentally appropriate for students in kindergarten through 12^th grade. (Unfortunately, pre-K versions are not funded through this grant, though WIDA is exploring how to create better assessments for pre-K students as well.) The intent is to give schools better options for evaluating students’ progress so that they can be matched with the instruction they need.

Among the growing pile of influential studies on early education, a few have become landmarks.  They have tracked children over not just one year or two years, but into their mid 20s, and even at age 40, giving us important information on how participants have fared now that they are adults. The Abecedarian Project – an early childhood program for children from infancy through age 5 -- is one of these famous studies.

So far, Race to the Top has been a competition between states. In both the K-12 version and the Early Learning Challenge, states have been the ones developing plans for reforms that would trickle down to school districts or organizations running pre-K, child care and other early learning centers.

On January 26, 2012, the Early Education Initiative presented its findings and recommendations from New America’s latest paper on teacher effectiveness, Watching Teachers Work: Using Observation Tools to Promote Effective Teaching in the Early Years and Early Grades.  Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative, led the presentation as part of a panel discussion at the New America Foundation's office in Washington, D.C.  Susan Ochshorn, founder of ECE Policy Works in New York and c

It’s that time of year when the education policy team here at New America prepares a list of questions about the Obama Administration’s proposed federal budget. The budget, released yesterday, is not expected to become law anytime soon – many pundits say there is no chance Congress will pass it. But it does set important benchmarks for what the Administration would like to see in education spending.

Here are our two questions that relate most directly to early education:

This week and next, the STEM acronym will get some major airtime, as the Obama Administration tries to drive home the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in its new budget proposals.  The President kicked off the conversation in his State of the Union Address, and he provided some memorable visuals two days ago when he gleefully launched marshmallows from student-invented cannons at the second-annual White House Science Fair.  

All this talk of science and innovation might lead one to think that literacy and early education are sliding down a notch on the Administration’s priority list.

Decades ago, as researchers began to study what young children might learn from educational TV, they often found that "co-viewing" -- the act of parents and children watching together -- was strongly associated with children learning from what they watched.  Today, although TV is still the number-one type of media used by young children, new forms of media are begging new questions.