Early Education

Nearly 900 local educational agencies (LEAs) – 893, to be exact – recently notified the Department of Education of their intent to apply for a piece of the $383 million available in the Race to the Top-District (RTT-D) competition.  Until applications are in, it is impossible to judge how early education fares in the competition.

In 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million donation over five years to help the Newark Public Schools in New Jersey (assuming that another $100 million in matching funds could be found). From that contribution, the Foundation for Newark’s Future was born. Its mission is to make grants to initiatives to improve the district's schools. Last month, staff members for the Early Education Initiative sat down with Greg Taylor, the foundation’s CEO and a former program officer at the Kellogg Foundation, to learn about his priorities for improving early education in the city and throughout the school system. The following is an edited and abridged version of that conversation.

Q: I understand that early childhood is one of the priorities laid out for the Foundation’s vision. Tell us more.

When I came on board in June of 2011, early childhood education actually wasn’t one of the top strategies. What happened initially was many folks invested in the foundation were really focused on teachers, principals and school options, both district and charter. And one of the things we tried to do was to broaden the initiative. There are now six areas:  early childhood education, out-of-school youth, teacher quality and principal leadership, helping the district to effectively implement the Common Core standards and tie them to early childhood education, school options (We want to grow the number of high-quality school options for Newark families. We’re agnostic on the question of charter-district dynamic; more than 50 percent of our investment goes to the Newark Public School System), and community engagement.

Last week’s National Journal Education Experts blog asked about strategies for better educating young English language learners, and highlights a new series of white papers from National Council of La Raza that outline best practices for teaching young ELL’s.

As is becoming evident, Mitt Romney choosing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate in the 2012 presidential election campaign will give a lot of ammunition to the Obama campaign, which immediately took aim, saying that Ryan has engineered budgets that “proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid.”

Inevitably, some of the spin coming out of the Obama campaign will be very true and some will be a stretch. But contrary to some of the media's reports, the claim that a Romney-Ryan ticket would devastate education spending, Head Start in particular, is a stretch.

As Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) walked across the stage last week for his first introduction as former Governor Mitt Romney’s (R-MA) running mate, child and student advocates were revisiting Ryan’s more-than-13-year career in the House of Representatives for details about his stances on education issues. One of the biggest indicators may be found in his 10-year budget proposal issued in March 2012.

The spotlight in school reform turns now to school districts instead of states with the U.S. Department of Education’s release Friday of its invitation for a new $383 million Race to the Top competition.  Districts can compete for up to $40 million each, with awards based on their sizes and abilities to personalize learning for students, become transparent in how they are spending money, engage community groups and implement systems for evaluating teachers and leaders based in part on student test scores.

The department, which said it would make 15 to 25 awards, asked districts to let it know by August 30 if they intend to apply. [UPDATE: On September 4, the department announced that 893 districts said they would.] Applications are due October 30 and winners announced in December.

The competition provides openings for school districts that recognize the need to pay more attention to the PreK-3^rd grade years.

Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University and now a senior fellow at New America, wrote a thoughtful column for Foreign Policy recently on the pay and benefits structure in the U.S. military. The country spends an estimated $768 billion per year on defense, Brooks estimates, and a portion of that cost goes to decent pay for military personnel (according to the Congressional Budget Office, the average member of the military is paid better than 75 percent of civilian federal workers with comparable experience) and solid benefits. Among these benefits are free health care, low- to no-cost higher education and housing, and retirement with pension after 20 years of service.

As Brooks rightly points out, all these extra benefits reflect the esteem we as a society have for those who serve in the military. Still, there are some lessons that the public could borrow from this so-called “socialist” military workforce. Chief among these lessons is another military perk that Brooks doesn’t mention in her piece: child care.

This week's National Journal Education Experts Blog drills into two perennial questions: If policymakers and the public have come to understand the importance of early education, why is it never an election issue? And how can advocates make it a bigger priority?

In my response, I note that education is rarely a big election issue, but elections aren't the only way to make early ed a priority. I use an idea which we've discussed on Early Ed Watch before, formula funding pre-K, as an example of one way to make early education a long-term priority. Some states, such as Oklahoma, have already chosen to do so.

Read the post here.

On Thursday this week, the Early Education Initiative and the Future Tense project at Slate magazine will kick off the back-to-school season with an event here in Washington, D.C. designed to shake up typical notions of elementary school. Today's young kids are now using technology to express themselves, make things, and share ideas. What do they have to teach us about the way they learn? 

Getting Schooled by a Third Grader: What Kids’ Gaming, Tweeting, Streaming and Sharing Tells us About the Future of Elementary Education

Have you heard about Minecraft, the computer game that uses virtual building blocks and teems with opportunities for creative problem-solving? Have you yet been swept into the myriad Minecraft conversations by today’s tweens and teens about rocks and minerals, sand and glassmaking, jungles and deserts, urban planning and railroad lines, nighttime zombies and daily survival?