Early Education

Education was one of the stars – if not the star -- of President Obama’s State of the Union address last night. The president spent a large segment of the first half of the speech talking about investing in education in tandem with research and innovation to bring jobs back.  

His words signaled that the Administration’s budget request to Congress, expected in mid-February, will likely protect federal education programs even as it pushes for “sacrifice” and cost-cutting measures in other areas to reduce the deficit.

Conventional wisdom tells us that children learn to read in school, but research continues to show how much the skills that influence a child's reading success are being established long before they arrive in those pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classrooms.

“Everybody has been in some kind of a foot race where one group, by reason of a handicap, is given a head start,” Sargent Shriver said in 1990.* Those words capture much of the philosophy behind Head Start, a program Shriver founded in 1965 with hopes of creating a fairer race for children in poverty.

Shriver passed away yesterday at the age of 95.  

It’s a perennial question: What can policymakers do to promote better salaries for teachers of children who are not yet in kindergarten?  A recent report from Massachusetts presents four ideas to reform compensation for teachers in childcare and early education centers and improve the quality of those centers.

A new two-part podcast on the BAM Radio network doesn’t shy away from what has been a long-festering debate in early childhood circles about academic standards and whether they are appropriate for the teaching of young kids. Let’s hope it triggers more pragmatic discussions about how to implement the standards in ways that recognize how young children learn, instead of feeding yet more fears that standards will reinforce a drill-and-kill mentality.

Forty-two states and District of Columbia have now adopted the K-12 standards that came out of the Common Core State Standards Initiative. These standards, which cover language arts and mathematics, are essentially lists of what students should be expected to know or be able to do by the end of the school year.

Rae Pica, the podcast’s host, opens the debate by asking: “Will they do more harm than good?” Then comes the face-off.

A storm that “left a broad – but far from uniform -- trail of wreckage.” That’s how Ed Week is describing the recession’s impact on education budgets last year. The words came in the release of the annual Quality Counts report yesterday, which grades each state on a variety of education policy and performance measures.

Promise Neighborhoods, a competitive grant program, seeks to borrow many of the ideas from the Harlem Children’s Zone and apply them to high-poverty neighborhoods across the country. The HCZ has gained attention in recent years for its “pipeline” strategy to breaking the poverty cycle: Start kids in school early; give them extended days and ample social services, such as health care and truancy prevention, to support their development; and make sure they continue to receive this support until adulthood.

By now, regular Early Ed Watch readers may have noticed our interest in Promise Neighborhoods, the competitive grant program that seeks to borrow many of the ideas from the Harlem Children’s Zone and apply them to high-poverty neighborhoods across the country. The HCZ has gained attention in recent years for its “pipeline” strategy to breaking the poverty cycle: Start kids in school early; give them extended days and ample social services, such as health care and truancy prevention, to support their development; and make sure they continue to receive this support until adulthood. In the fiscal year 2010 budget, Congress appropriated $10 million in “planning grants” to 21 grantees across the country.

You might say it all started with spell-check. In the 1980s, with the introduction of word processing programs like WordPerfect, it became apparent that computerized proofreaders could come to the rescue of struggling spellers and bad typists. Thirty years later, an ever-growing array of assistive technology is available to help students read, write term papers and take tests.

A continuation of our predictions of big issues for 2011...

Will this be the year that policymakers make some true progress in reforming the tax code? President Obama has said that he wants to push for reform, and progressives and conservatives are saying they do too.