PreK-3rd

You might not immediately associate former Sen. Bill Frist -- the former Republican majority leader and transplant surgeon -- with calls for more spending on high-quality childcare and early education opportunities. But at a forum on health policy earlier this month, his dedication to these issues was unmistakable.

"We have to start early to make sure that all children have high-quality childcare," Frist said. "A lot of time in Washington it gets bogged down in partisan rhetoric. But we got to flat out go to the science, go to the data and cut through to that fact."

He continued: "That's one area that will require a commitment of new resources, because the science is fairly new, the data is fairly new and people have not given it sufficient attention in the past."

In a recent Education Week commentary, Gordon MacInnes notes that one major challenge to improving children's access to high-quality early learning opportunities is that school district leaders often don't recognize the strong relationship between quality preschool and stronger literacy skills in the elementary grades. We agree that education leaders' failure to recognize the important role pre-k can play in improving student achievement, and the need to build connections between these programs and the elementary schools children attend following pre-k, is a major problem.

Former New Jersey Assistant Education Commissioner Gordon MacInnes has a great commentary in this week's Education Week making the case for expanded pre-k investments as part of a broader strategy for improving educational outcomes at scale in high-poverty districts.

MacInnes, who was responsible for overseeing the New Jersey Department of Education's implementation of Abbott v. Burke, one of the nation's most-famous and longest running school finance equity cases, draws several lessons from the experiences of high-poverty districts that effectively used Abbott resources in order to significantly improve student learning:

You voted. We investigated. In a blog post last month, we asked you to choose what research most piqued your interest among 10 relevant posters released at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. The top 3 vote-getters: Research on "fade-out" in the elementary school years; social behavior in preschool; and early academic outcomes for children in family-based care, center-based or public pre-K. Our final post in this series describes the fade-out research, which is clearly a topic of great interest among our readers, receiving more votes than any other. Thanks again for your input.

Researchers have long puzzled over why poor children who acquire significant cognitive benefits from preschool tend to lose that academic edge by 3^rd grade -- a phenomenon known as "fade-out." Research presented last month by Aleksandra Holod and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University's Teacher College fills in another piece of the puzzle, showing that one factor is whether the child's elementary school serves a population that is mostly poor.

Today the National Center on Education Statistics released results from the 2008 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)-Long Term Trend, a federally administered assessment, also known as "The Nation's Report Card," designed to provide an independent picture of what America's students know and can do.

The report's findings are a mixed bag. First, the good news: 9-year-olds enrolled in our nation's schools have made significant progress in reading and math, both since the assessment was first administered in the early 1970s and since the last administration in 2004. This is good news since we know that whether or not students can read and do math on grade level by the end of third grade is a strong predictor for later academic achievement and educational attainment. These gains in 9-year-olds' skills likely reflect both education reform efforts focused in the elementary grades and increased access to pre-k and other early education programs. Thirteen-year-olds also seem to have made gains in reading and math, both since the early 1970s and since 2004. Gains for 13-year-olds were not as strong as those for 9-year-olds, however. In another piece of good news, math and reading achievement gaps for African American and Hispanic students, relative to white students, have narrowed since the 1970s, and African American and Hispanic students have continued to narrow the gap in reading since 2004.

How much does it cost? And, how are we going to pay for it? Debates about improving quality, access, and alignment in early education programs often hinge on these two questions. No matter how much researchers demonstrate that investments in quality early education today pay for themselves in future benefits and taxpayer savings, today’s policymakers must still find the resources—out of current budgets—to pay for those investments. That’s especially challenging in today’s tight fiscal climate.

A new set of resources from the Foundation for Child Development seek to provide an answer to the question of “how much does it cost” to provide all children with access to a high-quality preK-3^rd early education program. Lawrence O Picus, Allen Odden, and Michael Goetz are nationally recognized school finance experts whose work has played a role in school finance adequacy litigation in states across the country. Their evidence-based approach to estimating the costs of an adequate education provides the basis for school finance systems in several states.

The National Association of State Board of Education has a new resource for anybody thinking about PreK-3^rd alignment. It's the report of their Early Childhood Education Network, a three-year initiative to improve PreK-3^rd alignment in six states: Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oregon, and Virginia.

The report outlines the states' experiences going through three phases:

1) Defining quality in early childhood, including the development of early learning standards and a revamping of teacher certification methods and accountability systems so they are better aligned with the K-12 system.

2) Continuing to build an aligned PreK-3^rd system, with a special focus on classroom practices and teacher training, in order to ensure a smooth, developmentally informed continuum.

3) Working to bring more research-based practice into classrooms and to strengthen assessment and teacher preparation programs. (With systems in harmony and core principles in place, the six states are now in this third stage.)

In a new book, In Plain Sight: Simple, Difficult Lessons from New Jersey's Expensive Effort to Close the Achievment Gap, former New Jersey assistant commissioner of education Gordon MacInnes describes what the New Jersey Department of Education and some of the state's highest poverty districts did to narrow the achievement gap for disadvantaged youngsters. Abbott districts are 31 high-poverty school districts involved in the Abbot vs. Burke litigation, the longest-running school finance equity lawsuit in the country. In 1998, the New Jersey Supreme Court mandated a number of education reforms designed to improve the achievement of disadvantaged youngsters in Abbott districts, including high-quality, universal pre-k for all 3- and 4-year-olds in these districts and improve quality curriculum and instruction from elementary through high school. As a result of the ruling, the New Jersey Department of Education has partnered with Abbott districts to implement a aggressive preK-3rd reform strategy that pairs high-quality pre-k with intensive early literacy and other supports in the early grades, to ensure that students are readind and doing math at grade level by the end of 3rd grade. This approach has led to substantial narrowing of the achievement gap in several Abbott districts.

In 1972, the Frank Porter Graham (FPG) Institute for Child Development in North Carolina launched the Abecedarian Project, a high-quality early education initiative for low income children in the state. The Abecedarian program, which produced some of the first evidence to show long-term cognitive, economic and social impacts of early education, has helped fuel the growth in early education programs over the last two decades. Now FPG researchers are asking the question: what more needs to be done?

"What's evident is there's a pretty fast moving train in terms of pre-k in schools," said Sharon Ritchie, a senior scientist at FPG, in a recent video. "But what is equally evident is that there is not a lot of complex thought in terms of what that could or should mean for schools."

FPG's answer is FirstSchool, an initiative to design the ideal elementary school experience where traditional notions of "early education" (pre-kindergarten) and "elementary school" (kindergarten through third grade) are woven together in a seamless and dynamic PreK-3^rd system.

DENVER -- Preliminary results unveiled yesterday from three new education studies show some surprising and complicated connections between young children's math and attention skills and their ability to do well in school. The studies also highlight how difficult it can be to draw a straight line from one skill at age 4 or 5 to strong test scores or good learning practices in later school years.

The findings, which have not yet been published, rely on data collected in national surveys of thousands of children throughout the United States. The papers were presented on the first day of the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, one of the premiere conferences for research on how children develop and learn.