Early Ed Watch

Tuesday night's Democratic presidential debate featured yet another extended exchange between Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama about the merits of their respective health care plans. Health care's gotten a lot of attention in this campaign, with good reason--it's one of the biggest economic challenges facing our country, and both candidates have big, aggressive plans on it.

Yet we rarely hear much these days about another issue on which the candidates both have big, aggressive--but contrasting--plans: Early Education. Sure, the candidates toss early education into their answers to questions on other issues, and it's part of the list of policy areas where they say they'll make change. But, in all the 24 debates Democratic candidates have had so far this primary season, there hasn't been a single question specifically about early childhood education.

A new Pre-k Now report on pre-k finance highlights the increasing use of state school funding formulas as a vehicle for pre-k funding. When Pre-K Now produced a similar report in 2006, it identified only 6 states that funded pre-k through their state school funding formulas. The 2008 report identifies 11 states that do so, including some national leaders on pre-k.

This is good news. There are lots of benefits to using state school funding formulas to pay for pre-k. For starters, it's simple: States simply allow school districts and charter schools to receive state per-pupil funds for four-year-olds, as they already do for older students. Because state school funding formulas and the bureacratic systems to operate them already exist, this approach requires little in the way of additional bureacracy. That's particularly important as more states start thinking about scaling up relatively modest existing targeted pre-k programs: A grant program that works well when you're serving less than 10% of children--as more than half of states currently do--becomes a lot more unwieldy when you're trying to serve all 3- and 4-year-olds in a state. That's borne out by the fact that, of the top 10 states serving the most 4-year-olds in pre-k, 6 use the state school fudning formula to do so.

Texas is currently in the process of revisiting its "Pre-kindergarten Curriculum Guidelines"--a name that's something of a misnomer, because the guidelines are really more like a set of standards for what prekindergarteners should know and be able to do, as opposed to specifying a detailed curriculum. Vanessa, a Texas pre-kindergarten teacher who blogs at Inside Pre-k, thinks this revision is well overdue, because the current guidelines are insufficiently ambitious in their expectations for pre-kindergarteners' learning.

Vanessa's comments raise an important point. It's not enough for states simply to have standards for what young children should know and be able to do. Pre-k standards must also be aligned with K-12 standards --and both pre-k and K-12 standards must be sufficiently rigorous.

Governors in TN, VA Defend Pre-K Programs

Tennessee governor Phil Bredsen (D) says it would be a "terrible, terrible mistake" if the state legislature rejects his plan for an additional $25 million in pre-k spending, which would move the state towards universally available pre-k for all four-year olds by 2011. Lt. Gov Ron Ramsey (R) says the program is too expensive in a year when the state faces a $182 million shortfall. Meanwhile, Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D), who is dealing with a $1.8 million budget shortfall, is fighting to protect his $25 million plan to expand the state pre-k program to cover all four-year olds eligible for free and reduced school lunches. [slideshow]

Plan in Georgia to Extend Pre-K to 3 Year Olds

Debate is heating up in Georgia about a plan to extend the state’s universal pre-k program to include three-year-olds. Democratic lawmakers in the state house proposed using $25 million from the state lottery fund to create pre-kindergarten classes for 5,000 three-year-olds. More than 72,000 four-year-olds are enrolled in the state’s pre-k program, the nation's oldest universal pre-k program.

Pre-K Increases Economic Mobility

 Education policymakers are increasingly concerned about how to turn around chronically underperforming schools. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), states and school districts must restructure schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for five years—and they’re looking for strategies to do so. At the same time, policymakers are focusing on early education—36 states increased pre-k funding in 2008. Yet these two policy strands rarely intersect.

They should. Research shows that quality pre-kindergarten can boost student achievement and narrow achievement gaps. While NCLB doesn’t require states to assesses students until grade three, the foundational skills that support students’ later learning are already in place by then. Therefore, efforts to improve chronically low-performing elementary schools must start early.

Two very different op-eds in the New York Times last week illustrate the emerging bipartisan consensus on the importance of high-quality early education. Writing just two days apart, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a liberal, and conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks lay out very different policy agendas in response to our increasingly troubled economy. Yet, amidst substantial disagreement, Reich and Brooks sounded one common theme:

Here's Reich:

Over the longer term, inequality can be reversed only through better schools for children in lower- and moderate-income communities. This will require, at the least, good preschools, fewer students per classroom and better pay for teachers in such schools, in order to attract the teaching talent these students need.

And here's Brooks:

The second group of policies [the federal government should adopt to support human capital development] would involve early-childhood education. There could be nurse-home visits for children in chaotic homes so that they have some authority in their lives. Preschool should be radically expanded and accountability programs put in place.

Happy President’s Day! On a day that honors our nation’s history, it’s fitting to take a moment to consider how we’re passing that history down to our youngest students. When we think about the skills and knowledge children need to master in PK-3, our minds tend to go first to language and literacy--with good reason, because language and literacy are gateway skills that open to door for children to master further learning, and these are critical years for language and literacy. We also tend to think about social and emotional development and, sometimes, mathematics.

But that doesn’t mean PK-3 education should neglect children’s learning in the content areas--including history. As E.D. Hirsch argues persuasively in The Knowledge Deficit literacy isn’t simply a matter of accurately decoding text--to be truly proficient readers, children need to develop an extensive vocabulary and content knowledge, in order to understand what they’re reading and place it in the framework of what they already know. That means that elementary school students need to become familiar with basic content in science, history, geography, and so on.

Unfortunately, American public education has a poor record of teaching history to early elementary school students. Historian Dianne Ravitch writes,

A study in the current issue of Child Development investigates how neighborhood influences affect young children's behavior and verbal abilities:

The present study used Canadian National Longitudinal data to examine a model of the mechanisms through which the effects of neighborhood socioeconomic conditions impact young children’s verbal and behavioral outcomes (N = 3,528; M age = 5.05 years, SD = 0.86). Integrating elements of social disorganization theory and family stress models, and results from structural equation models suggest that both neighborhood and family mechanisms played an important role in the transmission of neighborhood socioeconomic effects. Neighborhood disadvantage manifested its effect via lower neighborhood cohesion, which was associated with maternal depression and family dysfunction. These processes were, in turn, related to less consistent, less stimulating, and more punitive parenting behaviors, and ultimately, poorer child outcomes.

Voters in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, including we here at Early Ed Watch, go to the polls today to express their choices for the 2008 Democratic and Republican presidential nominations. So we thought this is a good time to look at what the candidates have proposed on the early education front.

Here’s the good news: We’re seeing some pretty ambitious proposals on early education from the Democrats in the field. Senator Hillary Clinton would provide funds to help states create universal pre-k programs for all 4-year-olds that meet high quality standards, starting at $5 billion and ramping up to $10 billion annually in five years. She would also increase funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Senator Barack Obama has pledged to invest $10 billion annually to help states create and implement comprehensive early learning systems to serve children from birth through age five, improve Head Start and childcare quality, and expand Early Head Start. He would also make the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit partially refundable for low-income families. And both candidates have some smart ideas about supporting work-life balance to help parents spend more time with their young children. Despite some differences, both candidates are proposing serious investments that could make a real difference for American children.

Efforts to improve quality in early education frequently focus on raising requirements for pre-k teachers—to a BA or certification in early education. That’s a good thing, because teacher quality is key to high-quality early education, and the discrepancy that currently exists between standards for K-12 and pre-k teachers in many states, or between pre-k teachers in different settings, undermines quality early education. But policymakers must be thoughtful in how they implement new early education credential requirements.