Early Education

As few as six percent of Illinois pre-K teachers have credentials that qualify them to teach English language learners, according to a new survey from the Latino Policy Forum. As Early Ed Watch has reported extensively, Illinois plans for all pre-K teachers who instruct groups of English language learners (ELLs) to have such credentials by 2014; these credentials are already required for K-12 teachers who instruct large numbers of ELL students.

The Latino Policy Forum surveyed 307 administrators representing 354 state-funded pre-K programs, which serve 64,482 children. The sample was not representative of all programs in Illinois: Respondents were disproportionately from Cook County, the area that includes Chicago and its suburbs and has a higher immigrant population than most other regions of Illinois.

Still, the results paint a useful portrait. While six percent of teacher respondents overall had bilingual/ESL credentials, programs in communities with a high concentration of Latino residents do have a slightly higher proportion of teachers with the credentials — nine percent.

During last night’s Presidential Debate, both candidates linked education into their arguments as a major workforce development issue- rhetoric that is often used by education and labor advocates but less often by presidential candidates, who are more likely to focus on the economy and other top-tier voting priorities.

Romney swung towards the center on many issues last night, and education was chief among them. When it comes to education and student aid, Romney said, “I'm not planning on making changes there.” Once again, he praised Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Race to the Top, and often focused more on what he had in common with Obama’s education policies than where they differ. One big exception, however, came when he touted his “backpack” program, in which students can use Title I and IDEA funds to attend whichever public school they choose. Some have called this a voucher program, though Romney hasn’t used that terminology to describe it.

Obama went after Romney’s approach to balancing the budget, saying that Romney would make cuts that would “[gut] our investments in schools and education.” When Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, the Ryan budget raised eyebrows among many with its drastic cuts in domestic discretionary spending, a pool that includes education. As I and my colleague Clare McCann have noted on Early Ed Watch before, Ryan’s budget could have a big impact on federal education spending—though it won’t necessarily “gut” every education program.

Millions of children are not able to read on grade level by the end of third grade. In response, state legislatures are passing new reading policies, many of which require students to repeat third grade if they are struggling readers.

Florida, an early adopter of literacy policies that include this threat — known as retention — has been joined in recent years by several states with similar policies for holding children back. But is retention an important or even necessary part of the solution to children's reading deficiencies? That is a question left unanswered.

Last week the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL) released its 2013 guide to preschool and K-5 social and emotional learning programs. The guide is an update of the group’s 2003 report, Safe and Sound: An Education Leader’s Guide to Evidence-Based Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Programs. 

Presidential politics made its way into the final day of NBC News’ third annual Education Nation summit Tuesday, with an appearance by Governor Mitt Romney and a taped interview between Today show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie and President Barack Obama. Finally, both candidates got a little wonky and explained their education policy proposals, along with the underlying philosophy that informed them.

After nearly four years of watching President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan in action, the president’s interview offered few revelations to education stakeholders, beyond an interesting and surprisingly detailed exchange on ESEA waivers (which is worth a read, in full). Guthrie asked whether the president was bothered “on a gut level” that some states with flexibility under No Child Left Behind, like Virginia, had set lower performance targets for racial minorities. After replying “of course it bothers me,” Obama explained that his approach would be to emphasize growth and encourage continual improvement toward high standards, rather than set an absolute standard off the bat that schools could not come close to meeting. That’s true, but his answer felt incomplete. He failed to link the growth approach to a strong accountability and improvement system for schools with large achievement gaps. States are encouraged to develop these systems in their waiver proposals, but many are criticizing states’ plans in this area.

The Education Nation appearance offered Governor Romney a chance to go beyond the talking points in his education platform (Cliff’s Notes version: More choice! More transparency!), fill in some of the details and context behind his proposals, and speak to his own ideas on accountability. Romney continues to cling to the naïve idea that soft accountability – like the school report cards with A-F letter grades that Florida uses – will be sufficient to turn around underperforming schools. According to Governor Romney:

“If we had that, then you'd see parents, if they saw their school get a C or a D or worse, those parents are going to be outraged. And they're going to want to gather together, become part of PTA organizations and talk about taking back the school.”

School report cards? That’s so ten years ago. Where are the hordes of parents taking back their schools (other than at the movies)?  And how are these report cards going to be any different than what parents have been getting? In 2012, parents gave their public schools higher marks than they did twenty years ago, according to Gallup’s annual education survey, despite the fact that increasing numbers of schools are labeled as needing improvement on their accountability report cards each year. Transparency needs to be coupled with real accountability and consequences for persistently low-achieving schools.

Governor Romney also answered questions on topics he’s mostly avoided on campaign stops, like Common Core State Standards and early childhood education. In these areas, the Republican nominee shied away from endorsing any significant federal role. When asked by a teacher how he would support schools implementing the new standards, Romney said he wouldn’t. The states chose to adopt them, and so they are “on their own.” Of course, the Common Core is a state-led initiative, but it’s hard to imagine where the effort would be today had the federal government not supported it financially. Between grants to the two assessment consortia and to states through Race to the Top, federal policy built momentum for the initiative. It’s difficult to see how these efforts will be sustained on state budgets alone once the federal grant funding is spent. Even with existing federal funds dedicated to the Common Core efforts, states may need additional flexibility and resources to support educators in their efforts to transform teaching and to build sophisticated testing and data systems that match the standards’ quality.

In early childhood education, Governor Romney’s favored approach isn’t really a policy initiative at all: get parents involved, especially if children can be in two-parent households  with “one parent that stays closely involved with the education of the child and can be at home in those early years of education.”  In this case, Governor Romney isn’t ten years behind federal policy, he’s sixty.

Instead of lamenting the breakdown of the 50’s-era nuclear family, Governor Romney could have elaborated more on specific federal early childhood programs with a parent involvement component but didn’t. While he mentioned Geoffrey Canada’s work in Harlem three times, Romney didn’t say if he would support expanding funding for Promise Neighborhoods, the federal grant competition to replicate efforts like the Harlem Children’s Zone. With limited funding and disputed results, many are skeptical of the program’s sustainability and long-term impact. Governor Romney also offered few details regarding Head Start. While supporting early learning programs that are evaluated and proven to be effective, he did not specify if this extends to Head Start recompetition and other public early childhood programs. And although Romney repeatedly mentioned his unsuccessful effort to offer parent education classes for low-income parents in Massachusetts, he did not relate this to federal policies to improve parenting skills in the early years, like home visiting programs and the parent involvement requirements within Head Start. 

Even with the domestic policy-focused presidential debate fast approaching on October 3, this may prove to be the most we hear about each candidate’s education plans during the election season. Kudos to Education Nation for raising the issue.

Take a guess: What is the single most important year of an individual’s academic career? The answer isn’t junior year of high school, or senior year of college. It’s third grade.

Last week, the Newark Star-Ledger's Linda Ocasio asked me why our presidential candidates should be talking about early learning and child care -- the lead topic in an open panel discussion hosted by the Early Education Initiative and the Workforce and Family Program in W

Video, TV, interactive books, screen-based games: Young children today are practically bathed in this stuff as young as toddlerhood. What is the impact? As a parent who is simultaneously fascinated by and worried about the impact of electronic media on my children─and as a journalist and researcher specializing in education, technology, and social science─I have been digging for answers. Along the way I’ve come upon several research findings that overturn conventional wisdom. Here are five common parental assumptions that the research does not necessarily support.

This post also appeared on our sister blog, Early Ed Watch.

Even as the availability of data on K-12 education programs has exploded over the past decade, the American education system suffers from an acute lack of some of the most basic information about publicly funded programs for young children. Data on funding and enrollment for these programs at the local level have not been publicly available, obscuring the public and policymakers’ basic understanding of these services. Until now.

Today, the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative and Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) announced an expansion of the FEBP database to include pre-kindergarten data at the state and school district levels. The FEBP database is the only centralized location that makes this information available to the public, the media, and policymakers.

But the data are far from perfect. Accompanying the release of the data is a report, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level, which details the continued shortcomings of early education data. The report finds that some states with state-funded pre-K programs do not make data available on some of the most basic information, such as how many children are enrolled in a given district. And even those that do provide such data are missing details on whether their pre-K programs are full- or half-day programs.

The data also illustrate the difficulty in providing a full picture of local pre-K access when many pre-K programs are run by community-based organizations (CBOs), such as non-profit child care centers, that are not organized along school-district lines. FEBP provides education data by school district, the common unit of measure for education at the local level, and not by city or county. This structure means that the vast majority of FEBP data can only reflect district-run state-funded pre-K programs, district-run Head Start programs and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) services provided by school districts. With the exception of Florida (an exception explained in the issue brief), FEBP does not include district-level data on programs operated by CBOs unless they receive funding from local school districts or use teachers paid by the districts. This is a large omission, as many CBOs receive public funds to operate Head Start centers and state-funded pre-K programs and are a critical part of pre-K delivery in the United States.

The authors, Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative, and Alex Holt, a program associate for the Education Policy Program, also find that kindergarten, assumed to be an integral part of public schools, is plagued by a lack of information and comparable data. District-level data are unavailable on funding specifically for kindergarten or enrollment that distinguishes between half-day and full-day programs.

This lack of data carries serious consequences for equity in educational opportunities and could affect children’s academic growth. For example, if teachers and school leaders don’t know what interventions children receive before they enter kindergarten, it is difficult for them to best target their instruction to students’ needs. While FEBP’s pre-K expansion is a good start, states must invest in comprehensive data systems that allow for comparisons between districts.

Readers can head over to www.edbudgetproject.org to view pre-K data for their states and school districts. The Federal Education Budget Project has provided data on funding, demographics, and achievement for states, PreK-12 school districts, and institutions of higher education since 2007. The pre-kindergarten expansion includes funding and enrollment information for state-funded pre-K programs, Head Start programs, and federal IDEA preschool services at the state and school-district levels.

To read the full report, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level, click here. To view the data in the FEBP database, click here.

The database expansion and report were made possible with grants from the Foundation for Child Development.

This post also appeared on our sister blog, Ed Money Watch.

Even as the availability of data on K-12 education programs has exploded over the past decade, the American education system suffers from an acute lack of some of the most basic information about publicly funded programs for young children. Data on funding and enrollment for these programs at the local level have not been publicly available, obscuring the public and policymakers’ basic understanding of these services. Until now.

Today, the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative and Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) announced an expansion of the FEBP database to include pre-kindergarten data at the state and school district levels. The FEBP database is the only centralized location that makes this information available to the public, the media and policymakers.