Sara Mead: All Related Content

Research shows that education investments in the earliest years of life make the greatest difference in the educational outcomes of children and can have a long-term impact on the workforce and citizenry of the United States. Yet today's education policies do not reflect that understanding, nor do they do nearly enough to prompt improvements in the primary years of our public education system.

President Obama said relatively little about education (and nothing about pre-k or early childhood) in his State of the Union address last night—and most of that focused on higher education—disappointing some education observers who had expected to hear more about the administration’s agenda for Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization. D.C.

A new report from Children Now, a California-based children’s advocacy group, paints a dismal picture of how the state’s children are faring. Since 2006, Children Now reports, 100,000 additional California children have fallen into poverty, and 680,000 have lost health insurance provided by their parents’ employers.

In November 2009, Sara Mead gave a presentation on funding streams for PreK-3rd at a Harvard Graduate School of Education PreK-3rd Institute. The presentation offers a good primer on the federal policy climate for PreK-3rd reforms, providing a comprehensive overview of the federal funding streams that states, schools, and ECE providers can use to support PreK-3rd work, as well as a look at the recent and upcoming federal policy developments that create potential opportunities for PreK-3rd reformers. Updated January 2010.

A report released today by the New America Foundation finds that New Jersey has made tremendous strides in improving disadvantaged children's access to high-quality early learning experiences, enabling some districts to nearly erase the achievement gap.

The report, Education Reform Starts Early: Lessons from New Jersey’s PreK-3^rd Reform, doesn’t just focus on New Jersey’s pre-k programs: It provides a blueprint for how to create a high-quality, well-aligned education system that helps children sustain their learning gains up through the third grade and beyond.  And it draws lessons from New Jersey’s experience that can inform federal and state policy efforts to improve quality in early childhood program, raise student achievement, and narrow racial and economic achievement gaps.

But the report also sounds a cautionary note about the fragility of New Jersey’s progress, and urges state leaders to act now to sustain and build on early learning reforms to date -- or risk undoing what the state has achieved so far.

Today, the Brookings Institution released a new report on media coverage of education. The report’s title—Invisible: 1.4 Percent is Not Enough—pretty much gives away its big finding: education stories account for only 1.4 percent of all national news coverage. That’s a pretty striking statistic.

But the big investments haven't necessarily been done within a meaningful framework, says Sara Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation ...

One of our favorite cognitive scientists, Daniel Willingham, is introducing a new recurring feature, "Hall of Shame," on the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog. His point is to debunk the claims made by the marketers of "educational" products, curricula and technologies that are rooted in flawed "science" -- or none at all.

Last week, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) introduced the Literacy Education for All, Results for the Nation (LEARN) Act, a comprehensive literacy bill designed to overhaul the federal role in supporting literacy from preschool through high school.

In a speech earlier this week at the University of Virginia, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan harshly criticized the nation’s education schools. “In far too many universities, education schools are the neglected stepchild," Duncan said. "Too often they don’t attract the best students or faculty." He added: "Many ed schools do relatively little to prepare students for the rigor of teaching in high-poverty and high-need schools.”

Duncan has a point. Numerous studies and reports have documented the failures of our nation’s system for preparing prospective educators. In brief, our education schools enroll some of the least academically promising students; provide them with little practical teaching experience or grounding in evidence-based practice; don’t prepare them to work in high-poverty schools or serve students with special needs; and are not accountable for the performance of their graduates in the classroom — or whether they even make it there at all. While there's substantial disagreement in education policy circles about many issues, the shortcomings of our approach to preparing and training the nation's teachers are one issue that critics both across the policy and political spectrum can agree on -- although they have radically different prescriptions for how to fix the problem.

New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to increase the number of charter schools in the Big Apple has generated a lot of buzz since Bloomberg announced it last week. Charter schools are independent public schools that are publicly funded, publicly accountable, and free of charge to students, but operated by independent nonprofit boards, rather than school districts. In late September, Harvard researchers released a study showing that predominantly disadvantaged students who attend New York City’s public charter schools are making more progress towards closing the achievement gap with their suburban peers than a control group of NYC students who remained in NYC public schools.

Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a number of steps to expand the number of charter schools in New York City, including raising the state cap on the number of charter schools, raising additional funding for charter school facilities, and co-locating charter schools with public housing projects.