Early Education

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.

Welcome to the new Education Watch podcast, a spruced-up version of the bi-weekly podcast Early Ed Watch has been recording for for over two years.

The new podcasts will still feature education experts from across the country, and they’ll still dive into early education issues that warrant in-depth conversations. But expect more guests per episode, more news analysis and more updates on what we’re working on at New America, from pre-k up through the college years of education. This will, we hope, make listening more fun.

This week on the podcast: Paul Tough, author of the new book "How Children Succeed," discusses how qualities like grit and curiosity may be critical for low-income students' success in the classroom and beyond. Early Education Initiative Director Lisa Guernsey shares thoughts on teacher evaluation for both sides of the Chicago teachers' strike. Guernsey is joined by one of our research associates, Alex Holt, to introduce a new data project from the Early Education Initiative.

Click here to listen to and download the podcast.

The Senate is expected to vote this week on a continuing resolution (CR), already passed by the House of Representatives, that will continue to fund the government through March 2013. That means that, beginning with the start of the fiscal year on October 1, 2012, all education and early childhood programs will be funded at the same levels they received last year, plus a marginal 0.612 percent across-the-board increase.

This issue brief, produced by the New America Foundation's Early Education Initiative, addresses the dearth of reliable, complete, and comparable data on pre-K and kindergarten in school districts and local communities.

As the Chicago Teachers strike enters into its fifth day, a few reports this morning* indicate that the Chicago Public Schools’ system for evaluating teachers is no longer one of the biggest sticking points.  But even if leaders in Chicago have come to some resolution this week, debates around the country on the wisdom of using student test-score growth to rate teacher competence are not going away any time soon.

Previous research has pointed to bilingualism having cognitive benefits, such as an increased ability to focus and direct attention. Thesebenefits, however, had never been examined on students with low-income backgrounds, a key omission that makes it difficult to use lessons from research on the bilingual brain to better educate America’s large-and-growing population of English language learners.

Though jobs and the economy dominated the stage at the Democratic party’s convention this week in Charlotte, NC, early childhood education and K-12 schools were not left out entirely. In President Obama’s address last Thursday night, he laid out a challenge to the party faithful in attendance and the American people watching on TV:

“Help me recruit 100,000 math and science teachers in the next ten years, and improve early childhood education… You can choose that future for America.”

He wasn’t the only one to mention early education. Julián Castro, mayor of San Antonio, TX, dedicated a portion of his speech to his city’s efforts to expand pre-K. (Mayor Castro has proposed a sales tax increase to support expanding the programs to more than 22,000 children.