Early Ed Watch

Preguntas, Preguntas: What Do We Know About Dual-Language Learners in Pre-K?

Lisa Guernsey — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:53:00 -0500

A symposium in Arlington on Tuesday brought together some of the most well-known researchers in the field of early childhood to dig into a tough and timely question: How do we help young children in the United States who know very little English?

The day-long symposium, "Investigating the Classroom Experiences of Young Dual Language Learners," was hosted by the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education, based at the University of Virginia. Designed to link together current research while also jumpstarting more probing studies, the symposium was peppered with lively discussions about how to gather and decipher evidence of what works in pre-K classrooms. NCRECE intends to publish a collection of the day's papers.

Recent studies have shown that dual-language programs -- roughly defined as programs in which teachers give half of their instruction in a child's home language and half in English -- are effective at improving the school readiness of young children for whom English is a second language. But there is still vast uncharted territory for researchers to determine exactly what that these programs should look like in practice, what kinds of skills teachers need to teach dual-language learners, and what policies should be enacted (or scrapped) to turn classrooms into more appropriate language-learning zones.

The day was not billed as a seminar on research about children from Spanish-speaking homes specifically -- children arrive in early childhood centers speaking dozens of different languages -- but the Latino population was a main focus of discussion.

Among the many, many questions:

Current thinking assumes that Latino parents are less likely to seek out pre-K programs for their children. Is that still true, or is it a supposition based on old research? Are we starting to see a shift in which Latino families are more comfortable, or have more access to, center-based programs and are starting to seek out more pre-K experiences for their children?
How do we determine a child's first language? Just because a child comes from a home where Mom speaks Spanish, does that mean that the child's first language is Spanish or could he be gaining his first language skills from other adults or siblings in his life? Should we rely on the reports of parents and teachers to categorize children's language proficiency?
Are Quality Rating and Improvement Systems taking language-learning into account? These systems use trained observers to rate the quality of early learning centers (giving them, say, a 1, 2 or 3 star rating.) Should those observers be measuring whether child care centers and pre-K programs are helping to support children's home languages as well as helping to teach them English?
What words should we be using to describe children who come to classrooms without strong English skills: dual-language learners or English-language learners? Both? If we call them ELLs, are we ignoring the importance of them continuing to build their home-language skills? If we call them DLLs, will we get confused between categories of children and descriptions of formalized dual-language classrooms (in which half the day might be taught as an immersion in one language, and the other half in English?).
How do state policies that favor English instruction, such as those in California for K-12 systems, impact what early childhood educators do in pre-K classrooms? What happens when a child transitions from a dual-language program into a kindergarten classroom where teachers speak only English?
How should language skill be measured in determining "child outcomes," i.e., how well students are gaining new knowledge and skills? In other words, should we rely on a child's English-based math or English reading scores in determining whether he is learning math or language arts? Can proficiency in reading or answering qusetions in a home language be part of the picture? How do we tease apart what a child actually knows from how a child responds to an English-based test?

Ideas for how to support English-language learners have been trickling forth this year. For example, earlier in 2009, the Society for Research in Child Development published a policy report and accompanying commentaries on the needs of Hispanic children. One of the commenters in that series -- James A. Griffin of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development -- has been urging social scientists to go even further, noting the "paucity" of research on what interventions make the most difference to these English language learners.

Sounds like he's right, given that there are still so many questions hanging out there like those above. Much more needs to be investigated before we can speak definitively about how to prioritize resources and enact better policies to support young children's first language and help them master English. Hopefully the report from Tuesday's meeting will provide a better foundation for building pre-K programs that do the most good.

In the meantime, however, it's worth repeating one of the mantras that came out of Tuesday's symposium: "Good quality is good quality." No matter what a child's language background, we see mounting evidence that 3- and 4-year-old children benefit from teachers who converse with them, ask them about what they are seeing or doing, and respond to and elaborate on their questions. Rich language experiences, whether they happen in children's home language or in second language or both, are a cornerstone to a high-quality learning environment.

Make Way for Morning Math: A Modest Proposal for Lifting Math Achievement

Lisa Guernsey — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:12:00 -0500

The Washington Post's "Answer Sheet" just published a commentary I wrote about how to improve children's grasp of math in the early years. It's a call to parents to build math moments into the morning routine, just as book reading is part of the bedtime drill. To make something like this work, we'll need preschool teachers and elementary school teachers to help parents recognize their own capacity for helping their kids, providing them with creative ideas that make math accessible and easy. I've included some of those ideas in the post below, but I'd love to find more. Please don't hesitate to add your feedback and ideas to the comment section below or at the Answer Sheet site, where parents are chiming in.

Bedtime = book time. Parents know that equation by heart, or at least they're supposed to. The drill goes like this: Just before the goodnight kiss, we snuggle up with our young kids, open a book, and read with them. Okay, so maybe at first we have to beg them to just settle down. And maybe the baby is more prone to eat the pages than look at them. But still, we try. We're the ones responsible for these little human beings. It's part of our job.

Mathematics, on the other hand, that's not on the must-do list. Reading may be part of the raising-kids routine. Math -- not so much.

But maybe it should be. Our children's mediocre performance in mathematics has been a running theme. Reports stream forth on the need for educators to pay more attention to young children's math skills. Last month, new data out of the U.S. Department of Education showed that fourth-grade students are in a math slump. After nearly two decades of watching fourth graders make steady progress, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress seemed to hit a wall. The average math score hasn't budged since 2007.

Theories abound on why this might be. For one, we don't recognize that young children can grasp more mathematics concepts than we give them credit for. A report from the National Academies of Sciences earlier this year pointed out that "although virtually all young children have the capability to learn and become competent in mathematics," most of them don't have good opportunities to do so. Teacher preparation programs are partly to blame too. Many teachers admit to being uncomfortable with math themselves - let alone prepared to make it fun and interesting for young kids.

So, yes, the educational system can do a lot more, but isn't it time for numbers to get the nod in households too? Could mathematics for young children become embedded in family's daily routines as deeply as bedtime books?

Here's my proposal: Make way for morning math.

Now don't take this the wrong way. This is not a call for yet more hyper-parenting. You won't need preschool math tutors or 1+1 flash cards. Hang up the phone and put those away. A sure-fire way to make math miserable is to force a 4 year old to memorize what the number 10 looks like without giving him anything concrete to help him relate to those strange symbols and what they are supposed to represent.

Nor is this a proposal that only mathematical geniuses can pull off. This isn't about doing differential equations at the dining room table. It doesn't require pencils and paper, calculators or measuring sticks.

This is about helping to lay a foundation for children in their youngest years, when doing math is about finding fun, playful moments to introduce numbers, shapes, measuring, grouping and sorting.

Rummage through the sock drawer with your 4 year old, encouraging her to find a matching pair. Voila. You've covered one math concept already. Go to the freezer and pull out the frozen waffles for your 6-year-old. "You want one-and-a-half? How about three halfs instead?" Wink, wink, another concept down the hatch. Ask your 8-year-old to pour the juice so that the glasses are 75 percent full. Aha. A good opening for a chat about fractions.

Two years ago, in an influential article in the journal Developmental Psychology, researchers reported that mathematics skills trumped reading skills as one of the best predictors of success in the later school years. As policy makers and educators continue to search for the best ways to close the achievement gap, you can bet that math education for young children will be attracting more and more attention.

So let's make math count in the home as well as at school. On the literacy front, we've had decades of reading research to remind us about the importance of that bedtime book-reading routine. Public service advertisements, kindergarten homework assignments and family literacy programs all urge parents to read a book with their kids.

Imagine what might happen with a similar campaign that suggests ways for parents to do math in the morning with their children. Look for numbers on cereal boxes. Talk about the score of last night's ball game. Point out patterns on their hats and mittens as you dress them for school.

At the very least, this morning math concept should be an idea worth pondering while we sip our morning coffee -- after we've challenged our kids to estimate how many cups are still left in the pot.

Photo courtesy of flickr user Mario Bellavite under the Creative Commons license.

What Kindergarten Readiness Means to Kindergarten Teachers

Lisa Guernsey — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:48:00 -0500

Data from a survey of kindergarten teachers in California's Santa Clara County adds to the mounting evidence that kindergarten readiness is not as simple to define as you might think.

Contrary to popular conceptions of what it means for a 5-year-old to be ready for kindergarten, most kindergarten teachers are not wishing for rooms full of children who can already identify the letters of the alphabet. What they want instead are children who have learned how to regulate their impulses, follow through on a difficult task and have the self-control to listen to the teacher's directions for a few minutes.

This was one of several messages that emerged in Sacramento last Thursday during a presentation of recent data from the Santa Clara County Partnership for School Readiness, a collaborative of public, private and non-profit organizations in Silicon Valley. The presentation was part of the forum at which the New America Foundation released our report on early education in California. (For more about the report, see last week's post, the executive summary and the full report.)

Researchers for the Santa Clara County Partnership surveyed 36 kindergarten teachers in 2008, asking them multiple questions about what they believed entering kindergarteners should to be able to do in the domains of self-care and motor skills, self-regulation, social expression and kindergarten academics. Loretta Burns, director for the partnership, showed this slide at the California event to explain how these domains build on each other:

(If the slides are hard to read on your monitor, you may want to open the larger versions by clicking on the attachments at the end of the post.)

While kindergarten academics is at the top of the pyramid, most kindergarten teachers did not report that children need to come in with a strong base in academic skills if they want to have a successful kindergarten year. Instead, the teachers gave top billing to self-care and motor skills followed by self-regulation.

Teachers said that it was easiest to help students develop their academic skills and hardest to make an impact in developing their self-regulation skills. In fact, they said they had to spend the most time in the classroom focusing on self-regulation. This slide below tells the story:

This highlights the importance of designing interactions in the preschool years that are developmentally appropriate. Worksheets that force 4-year-olds to trace the outline of the letter A are a far cry from the types of experiences young children really need in the preschool years.

The slide also raises a key question: How can preschool and kindergarten experiences help children learn to self-regulate? Research on the importance of building self-regulation skills in young children has been accumulating over the past few years, and some of it is starting to zoom in on the significance of playtime, particularly pretend play scenarios that are child-led but feature teacher input. For example, the Tools of the Mind approach, which we've written about several times, incorporates pretend play in classroom settings and has been shown in scientific research to improve children's executive function and self-regulation skills.

Burns' presentation about the Santa Clara project was valuable on several other levels too. It provided a view of kindergarten readiness assessment that may help to dispel concerns about inappropriate testing of preschoolers. As Burns explained early in her presentation: "This is not about standardized tests for 4-year-olds."

The assessments in Santa Clara collect information from parents, teachers and observations of children in classroom settings. They are not used to determine where children should be placed or what schools they should attend, nor are they used to evaluate teachers or for other high-stakes purposes. The observations are done by trained teachers who look for signs of children's progress on multiple levels. Some examples of what they look for:

Can the child operate zippers or work with crayons?
Can the child follow one- or two-step directions?
Can the child engage in symbolic play with others (like playing house or fire station)?
Can the child count 10 objects correctly?

The appendix of Santa Clara's September 2009 report provides a sample of the observation sheet used for recording children's development in these and several other areas.

Santa Clara has been conducting these assessments since 2004, and the data is providing new insights to better prepare teachers for the children coming through their doors. Besides demographic and skill-based information, the data tells schools and teachers how many children are arriving with some experience in early learning environments like preschools and high-quality child care centers.

Collecting information like this is critical to ensuring that early education systems provide what children need. We hope that, as states continue to build out more robust and accessible systems of early learning for young children, well-designed and appropriate kindergarten readiness assesssments like this one continue to be part of the picture.

New Report: On the Cusp in California

Maggie Severns — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:28:00 -0400

As a recent TIME cover story notes, California is a state teeming with problems: Facing a 35 percent budget gap earlier this year, the state teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. It has a notoriously dysfunctional legislature and the nation's fourth-highest unemployment rate.

On top of that, California's schools, once among the nation's best, now rank among the bottom of all states-- 46^th nationally in 4^th grade math, and 47^th in reading. Equally troubling large achievement gaps between white and black or Hispanic fourth-graders. These problems begin even before children enter kindergarten. Only 31 percent of the state's 4-year-olds are enrolled in state-funded preschool or Head Start-and many early care and education settings fall short of high quality standards. These figures are particularly troubling considering that the state is host to one in every eight children under the age of eight in the country.

But, as a new report from the New America Foundation's Early Education Initiative argues, there are reasons for hope. Despite budget shortfalls, California is on the cusp of making real improvements in its early education system.

On the Cusp in California: How PreK-3rd Strategies Could Improve Education in the Golden State, written by long-time California education reporter Linda Jacobson, explains that key state officials, along with early childhood advocates and school reformers, have taken some important first steps to better integrate early childhood programs and move towards the more seamless PreK-3^rd early education system in California. Now policymakers and advocates need to exert leadership to create a sense of urgency around PreK-3rd reform as a strategy for improving California's education system.

PreK-3^rd reforms-- which combine high-quality pre-k and full-day kindergarten with a high-quality, aligned early elementary learning experiences that seamlessly build children's skills and knowledge to bring them to proficiency by the end of third grade-have tremendous potential to help California narrow achievement gaps and raise student learning across the board. The report seeks to help policymakers and advocates in California understand the promise of PreK-3^rd PreK-3rd strategies as well as the hurdles, and the steps the state can take to overcome them.

The report recommends 13 steps to getting this done - many of which are not budget-busters and may even help California compete for federal education grants, such as the Race to the Top program and the proposed Early Learning Challenge fund. For example, the report recommends that the state:

Replicate and scale up effective PreK-3rd models,
Implement a comprehensive early childhood data system,
Integrate pre-k funding into broader conversations about reforming the state's school finance system,
Continue working to develop and fund a voluntary Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS), and
Create a PreK-3^rd teacher credential for early childhood educators.

The report also includes recommendations to improve coordination and quality among existing early care and education programs in the state and to address the needs of California's growing population of English language learner and Hispanic students. For the full list of recommendations, check out the report here. Today in Sacramento, New America is presenting details from the report to a gathering of policymakers and stakeholders.

The report was funded through generous grants from the Foundation for Child Development, the W. Clement adn Jessie V. Stone Foundation, and the Strategic Knowledge Fund, co-funded by the Foundation for Child Development and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Duncan and Blair Speak Out on Community Schools

Maggie Severns — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0400

"The interesting thing about education reform is that we actually do know what works," former Prime Minister Tony Blair said during an event at the Center for American Progress yesterday. "The difficulty is in implementing it."

Blair was speaking about Britain's decision to convert all of its 23,000 public schools into community schools, which stay open longer and provide a range of activities and support to their local communities, between 2004 and 2011. Legislation enacted in 2004 provides over $3 billion in start-up-funds to help schools create partnerships with community organizations during the 8-year transition period. Blair spoke with confidence about Britain's educational change, stating that he never regretted making bold decisions when it came to education reform.

The United States is host to a small number of community schools, but there has been little effort or support to scale-up successful community school programs. However, a number of current policy developments-- the Obama administration's Promise Neighborhood program, prospective funding through Race to the Top grants, and community school legislation recently introduced in the House by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and in the Senate by Ben Nelson (D-Neb.)-- suggest that community schools are gaining momentum on this side of the pond as well.

There is no single model of a community school, but all of these schools seek to improve the quality of education by partnering with community organizations to provide resources and services, such as health care, school facilities, and parental involvement, that schools often lack. Though the range of services provided by community schools varies, many feature on-site Early Head Start or Medicaid programs. Having schools co-located with these programs can help leverage federal and other funding streams that are available to both the partnering organization and the school, such as Medicaid funding. No extensive research has been conducted on the extent to which community schools have succeeded in improving the lives of their students, though anecdotal reports are promising.

Community schools have real potential to improve PreK-3^rd alignment and early education opportunities for disadvantaged youngsters. Aside from the obvious benefits of co-locating Early Head Start, Head Start, and preschool providers with elementary schools, schools that are able to connect children and their families with medical, mental health, and social services can more effectively support the development of "the whole child"--which is critical during the preschool and early elementary years. Community schools that offer parenting and adult education classes on site may also be better able to engage parents who would not otherwise have the time or transportation resources (or, for that matter, babysitters) to access several different community programs. And that increased parental education and engagement in turn produces benefits for children.

At the event yesterday, Blair and Secretary Duncan discussed the merits of community schools as opportunities for improving students' lives and maximizing the potential of school and community resources. Duncan drew heavily on his experience creating community schools in Chicago to speak about how the transitions to community schools can be made in the U.S. "I don't know why we continue to build Boys & Girls Clubs and YMCA's," Duncan said. "I think we should put these scarce resources straight into schools."

Duncan also spoke about community schools as a mechanism for increasing parental involvement. "We are not welcoming parents into schools," he said. "They're supposed to drop them off in the morning, and pick them up later. This is a fundamental change." Often times, community schools, like those Duncan supported with the Chicago Public Schools Community Schools Initiative, offer adult education and/or ESL classes to parents.

Congressman Hoyer, who has been working to expand funding opportunities for community schools for over 15 years, expressed hope that community schools will gain more support from policymakers in the coming years. Yesterday, he remarked, "My expectation is that under President Obama's leadership, and Secretary Duncan's leadership, we will start making much more progress." We at Early Ed Watch hope that Hoyer and other community schools proponents will keep a strong focus on early ed, ensuring that expansion of community schools also brings expansion in children's access to high-quality early learning opportunities aligned with the public elementary schools.

Home Visitation: Looking Closely at What Works

Lisa Guernsey — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:44:00 -0400

There are significant differences between the various health care reform bills currently moving through the House and Senate, but here's one thing they all have in common: each would provide a substantial infusion of federal funding for home visitation programs that provide information to pregnant women and disadvantaged or first-time mothers about how to keep their babies healthy and safe.

Advocates cheer this potential expansion, pointing to the decades of research showing the effects of the Nurse Family Partnership program, started in 1977 in Elmira, N.Y., and now available in at least 26 states. But NFP is hardly the only model of home visitation programs out there, nor is it the only one that the new federal program would support. Do other models have strong research evidence showing they produce positive outcomes for children and mothers? What exactly are those outcomes? Are some models of home visitation more or less cost-effective than others?

Two new research reports show that the answers aren't as clean-cut as advocates suggest. Kimberly S. Howard and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, writing in the latest issue of The Future of Children, review the body of literature on various home visiting programs from across the United States and abroad and find mixed results. And a SRCD Social Policy Report by Jennifer Astuto and La Rue Allen of New York University provides a historical overview of home visitation programs and an analysis of research findings.

Howard and Brooks-Gunn's article, "The Role of Home Visiting Programs in Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect," reviews the literature on nine home visiting programs: the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP); Hawaii Healthy Start; Healthy Families America; the Comprehensive Child Development Program; Early Head Start; the Infant Health and Development Program; the Early Start Program in New Zealand; a program in Queensland, Australia; and a program in the Netherlands. Each program uses slightly different means to arrive at slightly different ends. The NFP program and the Queensland program, for example, employ registered nurses. Many of the others use trained paraprofessionals instead. Researchers evaluating the programs also focused on slightly different outcome indicators, including effects on child abuse, child health and safety, home environment, parenting sensitivity and responsiveness, parenting harshness, depression and parenting stress, and child cognition. Most studies looked at only some of these indicators.

The results, not surprisingly, are mixed. (Howard and Brooks-Gunn summarize the results in this helpful grid.) The NFP program in Elmira reduced child abuse, improved child health and safety, and improved parenting practices, but didn't seem to affect parenting stress or depression and had mixed results for child cognition. By contrast, Healthy Families in San Diego reduced harsh parenting practices and reports of child abuse and neglect, but had no impact on child health and safety or the home environment. And the differences between those two programs are just two examples among many.

Astuto and Allen's report is titled "Home Visitation and Young Children: An Approach Worth Investing in?" And that question mark reflects continuing uncertainties about what exactly works when it comes to home visitation. The article reviews major studies of programs in the United States and highlights areas that are ripe for future research, such as how to scale up programs without losing critical elements that made them effective. But, the authors argue, simply relying on home visitation is not the answer. Rather, "Movement away from the notion that home visitation alone is a panacea for addressing the ills of poverty towards a more integrated, system-level approach to intervention and prevention is an idea whose time has arrived."

There's wisdom in that admission. A better scenario is to imagine a robust and well-coordinated system connecting many different high-quality services that offer parents choices depending on their family's needs. The proposed federal Early Learning Challenge Grants should help stimulate state efforts to create or improve that coordination. Thus it's good timing that Congress is addressing both pieces of legislation now.

At Early Ed Watch, we see ambiguities in the literature on the effectiveness of home visiting programs not as an indictment of those programs but as an important reason for states to carefully scrutinize the home visitation programs they and other entities within their borders already fund. This will be all the more important as new federal funds come into the states for home visiting.

For example, the home visitation program in the Senate Finance Committee's health reform bill would require states to measure the effectiveness of home visiting programs and track progress in six areas: maternal and child health, childhood injury prevention, school readiness, juvenile delinquency, family economic factors, and coordination with community resources. If states fail to show improvement in at least four of these areas after the third year of the grants, they would be required to receive technical assistance.

Clear definitions for what qualifies as "effective" will be important, given how many variations in outcomes already apparent in the current research.

Done right, new federal investments in home visiting could have the potential not just to expand funding for home visitation, but also to encourage states to focus existing funds on models that produce the greatest bang for the buck.

Note: The Society for Research in Child Development has also published a series of policy briefs on home visitation, including how to implement evidence-based programs and how to reach disadvantaged families.

No Clear Victory for Early Education in the Virginia Governor’s Race

Maggie Severns — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:16:00 -0400

On November 3, voters in New Jersey and Virginia head to the polls to select their states' next governors--the only two states with major statewide elections this year. Earlier this week Early Ed Watch took a look at early education in the New Jersey governor's race. Today we turn to Virginia.

The latest poll in Virginia's gubernatorial race shows Democratic former state senator Creigh Deeds trailing Republican Attorney General Bob McDonnell by 12 points.

Early education has been trailing in the Virginia election as well. In a race that has been dominated by debate over transportation, taxes, and social issues, education has been relegated to the background. This may be because neither candidate has taken a polarizing stance on education issues. Both Deeds and McDonnell would like to raise teacher salaries—which average $48,655—to the national average of $54,170. Both favor charter schools. And both would like to increase spending on education.

But calling for better education is an easy (and popular) stance to take in an election. What is difficult (and, at times, unpopular) is deciding how to make improvements to the school system, and with what funds. Deeds has managed to secure the endorsement of the Virginia Educators Association. He is also the only candidate to release a detailed plan for improving early education—a plan that predominantly builds off of current Gov. Kaine's Virginia Preschool Initiative. Deeds says he would set a goal of having 90 percent of all children enter kindergarten school-ready (currently, that number is at 85 percent) and expand the current preschool system to reach more 4-year-olds.

McDonnell has not specified his views on VPI funding or expansion, though he did vote in the legislature for legislation that established the program. Rather, McDonnell's education platform focuses on his plan for financing educational investments from within the existing education budget, rather than increasing total education spending through tax raises. McDonnell promises to increase the amount of education spending that goes "to the classroom" and to teachers from 61 to 65 percent by decreasing the funding for education-related administrative costs. But he has provided few details about how he will accomplish this or what specific expenditures should be cut.

An editorial in the Washington Post last month criticized both candidates for lacking more substantive plans to improve education in Virginia, saying, "neither [candidate] has fully developed proposals that he is really pushing."

Despite the economy, Virginia was one of 13 states that increased funding for early education in the 2010 fiscal year. According to yesterdays' Pre-K Now report, this 17 percent increase in funding is estimated to serve 5,5417 more children next year, bringing the total number of children enrolled in the Virginia Preschool Initiative to 21,072. These changes are a testament to current Governor Kaine and to the Virginia legislature's commitment to Pre-K. Unfortunately, neither candidate's platform on education tells us much about how early ed will be handled during the next administration.

Pre-K Now Reports on the States

Maggie Severns — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:23:00 -0400

This morning, Pre-K Now released its annual Votes Count report, which summarizes state legislative action on pre-k during the 2009 legislative session, including pre-k funding in states' fiscal year 2010 budgets. This year's report focuses on which states have maintained and even increased pre-k investments despite budget shortfalls caused by the past year's economic pinch, and which states are falling behind.

Overall, Pre-K Now says that "the news for young children is surprisingly good." 27 of the 38 states that had state-funded pre-k programs in fiscal year 2009 (as well as the District of Columbia) managed to either increase pre-k funding or maintain current funding levels. That adds up to $187 million dollars of new money for pre-k in fiscal year 2010. Further, of the 10 states with the biggest budget shortfalls this year, seven managed to either increase or maintain their pre-k spending for the 2010 year.

The report groups states into 5 main categories:

State champions: Alabama and New Jersey earned Pre-K Now's top praises for their pre-k efforts.
States new to pre-k: Despite budget shortfalls of their own, Alaska and Rhode Island both approved their first state-funded pre-k programs for the 2010 fiscal year, bringing the total number of states investing in pre-k to 41.
States that came close: In Texas and Washington, legislative measures to improve pre-k quality and increase funding were thwarted by gubernatorial vetoes.
States that struggled: Pennsylvania and Michigan had their share of hiccups while trying to negotiate FY2010 budgets. Ultimately, Michigan averted a budget that would have devastated pre-k funding, but still decreased its investment in pre-k by about 7 percent. Pennsylvania flat-funded its major pre-k programs for the coming year, but a drawn-out budget battle-the state legislature just completed work on the fiscal year 2010 budget last week -forced many providers to delay or cancel programs this fall.
The state of Ohio: If Alabama and New Jersey get gold stars, Ohio gets the biggest frowny face for its pre-k funding record this year. Even though Ohio's 5 percent budget shortfall of 5 percent was far more mild than those in many states, the state "chose to decimate" its pre-k system, according to Pre-k Now, and will serve at least 12,000 fewer low-income children (a decrease of more than 50 percent) during the coming year.

Votes Count 2009 also looks at progress and funding strategies in the eight states (as well as the District of Columbia) that have committed to work towards universal, voluntary pre-k. The report commends Oklahoma, D.C., Iowa, West Virginia, and Georgia for being "on track" towards achieving universal pre-k.

To find out more about how states fared under the Pre-K Now study, read the full report.

Content Knowledge in the Pumpkin Patch

Lisa Guernsey — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:58:00 -0400

We're in the thick of pumpkin patch season. Children around the country have been heading out on field trips with their classes and families, bumping along on hay rides to find the plumpest pumpkins they can get their hands on.

Good teachers know how to turn these field trips into curiosity-driven moments of learning for themselves and their students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds who finally have a chance to hear, see, use and interact with objects and concepts that they rarely come across in their everyday lives. As a New York Times story highlighted yesterday, for some children a trip to the pumpkin patch means being able to hold and touch what is essentially a foreign object. When a classroom of 25 children at Harlem Success Academy 3 were asked how many had ever held a pumpkin, only two raised their hand.

The importance of content knowledge in children's reading comprehension has been a favorite topic on this blog, and field trips can be powerful conductors in this realm. A child who has explored a pumpkin patch will have a much easier time in the future when he or she comes across paragraphs about vines and tendrils, maturing fruit and harvest time. And it's not just children's reading skills, of course, that can improve. Their grasp of science and social studies becomes more sophisticated too.

For an example of how pumpkin picking can provide kids with a strong foundation of content knowledge, check out this video from a first-grade teacher who goes by the name of Wojtera and runs a class blog:

Not only are these children having a chance to see, up close, what tendrils are and how the fruit gains shape, color and heft over time, their teacher has extended the experience as a science lesson in the classroom, giving children a chance to see what pumpkin vines, flowers and seeds look like under a microscope. As students see and ask questions about pollen magnified 60 times or a tendril at 10 times the size, they gain more facility with the words and concepts of biology and horticulture. As cognitive scientist Dan Willingham writes in his book, Why Children Don't Like School and explains at the Core Knowledge blog, without this content knowledge, students may never fully comprehend what they read. They may be able to artificially pick their way through a paragraph about a farmer checking her pumpkin crop or a scientist peering into a microscope, but they will not have enough content stored in their long-term memory to be able to really make sense of what the paragraph means.

By the way, I came across the video of this field trip while reading the comments that accompanied one of the posts on The Early Years, a blog published by the National Science Teachers Association. The blog is written by science teacher Peggy Ashbrook, who last week was looking at state and national-board science standards as she grappled with what is a tough balancing act for early educators: being sure not to underestimate what children can learn about the relationships in natural systems, nor overestimate their cognitive abilities to understand abstract and tricky concepts like the importance of sampling sizes in conducting science experiments. In the post, she posed a great question: "Is anyone very satisfied with their state or program content standards for preK-grade 2 science?" Anyone with experience in teaching science in the years from pre-kindergarten through third grade should chime in.

Pumpkin on vine photo by flickr user John Carleton reprinted under Creative Commons license.

The N.J. Governor’s Race: Comparing the Candidates

Maggie Severns — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:49:00 -0400

This November, only two states will be electing new governors: New Jersey and Virginia. Political commentators frequently view these two off year races as harbingers of political winds to come, so we at Early Ed Watch are keeping a close eye to see what implications these races may have for early education.

There is a lot at stake for early education in New Jersey: As Early Ed Watch has discussed, New Jersey has made significant investments in preschool and PreK-3rd as a strategy to narrow achievement gaps between students from high-income and low-income families, and the state is seeing some successful results in several school districts.

Since Jon Corzine was elected Governor in 2005, he has made pre-K a pillar in his education policy . Last year's School Funding Reform Act, included plans to phase in state-funded full day preschool for all low-income 3- and 4- year olds in the state over the next eight years, and to expand universal pre-K from 31 Abbott districts to an additional 84 districts statewide, with the goal of providing preschool for an additional 30,000 children by the 2013 school year.

School construction was a major part of Corzine's economic recovery plan. As part of a July 2008 law, the School Development Authority is spending $3.9 billion constructing and expanding New Jersey schools, the largest state school construction program in the country.

Chris Christie, the Republican nominee, entered the race after spending six years as New Jersey's U.S. Attorney, the chief federal law enforcement officer in the state. During a heated campaign, Christie has criticized Corzine's education spending, saying in official statements last month that the governor has a "blind eye to waste" with a "failed record when it comes to promoting successful school alternatives," a reference to the fact that Corzine-appointed Commissioner of Education Lucille Davey approved only one new charter school in 2008.

Christie has specifically attacked Corzine's record on early education spending, referring to preschool as "babysitting" in an October 6 interview with New Jersey pundit Steve Adubato. Corzine is using the clip as part of an escalating cycle of attack advertisements between the two camps. Christie says he did not intend to use the word "babysitting" pejoratively.

Christie's stance on education emphasizes the need for improved job readiness and more choices in New Jersey's public school system. He is in favor of authorizing more charter schools and establishing a private school voucher system, both of which Christie says would give parents the choice to send their children to more successful schools.

Last week, the New Jersey Education Association's political action committee unanimously endorsed Corzine. The NJEA, which has over 200,000 members from New Jersey's education community, says that Corzine "made significant progress in implementing the progressive, pro-public education agenda he ran on in 2005," and praised him for increasing education funding despite the harsh economic climate during his term as governor.

The race itself has been close, with Christie and Corzine usually falling within a few points of each other in the polls. Chris Daggett, the Independent candidate, has had a recent increase in support, but still trails significantly behind the other two candidates.

Early Ed Watch will continue monitoring the New Jersey race in the coming weeks. Watch later this week for our rundown of the Virginia gubernatorial race as well.