Early Education

This week’s question on the National Journal Education Expert’s blog asks if policymakers should focus on providing pre-K for every child.

In my response, I discuss three reasons why universal pre-K should be the goal. Here’s one:

Each January, Early Ed Watch predicts where we will see the most action, innovation and consternation in the year ahead. Here are the hot spots we see for 2013. Notable is the absence of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act, otherwise known as No Child Left Behind. Prognosticators don’t give the bill much chance of making progress this year, given stalemates between the two houses of Congress.

The Child Care Development Block Grant, on the other hand, could see some action on Capitol Hill.  Debates on how to evaluate teachers will likely continue to dominate, as they did in 2011 and 2012. And at least one topic has popped up consistently since 2010 when we started this exercise: Head Start reform via the new "re-competition” process.

Congress pulled the country back from the edge of the fiscal cliff late Tuesday night when the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass an agreement urgently negotiated and passed by the Senate on New Year’s Day. But the possibility of sequestration, the across-the-board cuts to virtually all federal programs scheduled to occur on January 2, 2013, remains unresolved.

On a day that many educators and office workers are madly finishing tasks or already traveling to prepare for the holidays, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released results from a long-awaited study on whether children's gains from Head Start still show up four years after students have exited the program. 

Before taking a holiday break, Early Ed Watch has a tradition of looking back at the most significant issues we have covered over the past year.  Many of these topics generate worry and a feeling of discouragement, especially over the lack of funds to improve children’s access to high-quality pre-K and full-day kindergarten programs. But some signal hope, providing educators and policymakers new ideas for making improvements despite constrained resources.

Save the date for Turnaround 2.0:  School Improvement Strategies that Tap the Potential of the PreK-3rd Grades, an event on January 14, 9-11 am, at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. We will highlight small and large-scale PreK-3^rd initiatives that are helping to transform elementary schools and to improve learning outcomes for students.

Join us for an engaging discussion on what needs to be in place to scale-up and replicate initiatives that have promising results. More details to come in early January.

As research continues to highlight the benefits of early childhood education, the Obama administration’s reforms to Head Start are shaking up the 45-year-old preschool program for children in poverty. This issue brief explains why some Head Start programs are competing for funding for the first time, how quality teaching is emphasized in future grant awards, and what to watch for in 2013.

Jacqueline Jones, our country’s first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Early Learning, left her post at the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month. Early Ed Watch had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Jones. Below is the complete interview, edited for typographical errors only.

As touchscreen tablets become the hot holiday gift for children—even for tots still learning to walk and talk—parents can be forgiven for feeling a little confused and skeptical about this new trend, especially when it comes to claims about education. The iTunes App Store boasts more than 700,000 apps and, as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center discovered earlier this year, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling paid apps in the education category are aimed at children. Many of these apps make claims about helping children learn to read.

Yesterday the Early Education Initiative issued a new report by Maggie Severns, “Reforming Head Start.” In addition to this issue brief on Head Start “recompetition,” readers can also access our new Head Start background and analysis page, which was released in September as part of our pre-K expansion of the Federal Education Budget Project.