Pre-K

This is the final post in a series on winners of the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC), the Obama Administration’s competition to spur improvements in early learning for children up to age 5.  Two weeks ago, we wrote about states’ plans to develop the workforce. Prior to that, we dove into states’ plans to improve early learning standards, birth to 5. The first two posts in this series described states’ plans to use and evaluate quality rating & improvement systems. Earlier this week we explored states’ plans for kindergarten entry assessments. In this post, we’ll revisit the invitational priority for sustaining and building upon early learning outcomes throughout the early grades of elementary school.

Last December, we wrote about states that included plans for either pre-K through third grade or birth through third grade improvement in their RTT-ELC applications. Today we’ll focus on the winners’ plans under this optional invitational priority. Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington focused on sustaining gains into the early grades, while two other winners, California and Minnesota, chose not to participate.

Three years ago, the Community Action Project in Tulsa discovered it had an attendance problem in its Head Start centers.  Almost two-thirds of children were “chronically absent,” meaning they had missed more than 10 percent of school days.

The non-profit organization was fortunate in one way, though: It had collected data that enabled it to see which children were not arriving at school.  Armed with new information, the organization, known as CAP, jumped into gear to address the problem.

The last time the National Association for the Education of Young Children took a position on teaching with technology it was 1996.  The Web was only a few years old, portable music meant the Sony Walkman, and Einstein was still that physics genius with the mustache, not a line of DVDs for babies.

Last month, the Government Accountability Office published a report examining the compensation and credentials of teachers and child care workers in early education. While many of the findings echo long-held concerns within the early childhood world, the implications are stark: State and federal programs do not sufficiently address the problems of workforce quality for young kids.

Among the growing pile of influential studies on early education, a few have become landmarks.  They have tracked children over not just one year or two years, but into their mid 20s, and even at age 40, giving us important information on how participants have fared now that they are adults. The Abecedarian Project – an early childhood program for children from infancy through age 5 -- is one of these famous studies.

So far, Race to the Top has been a competition between states. In both the K-12 version and the Early Learning Challenge, states have been the ones developing plans for reforms that would trickle down to school districts or organizations running pre-K, child care and other early learning centers.

On January 26, 2012, the Early Education Initiative presented its findings and recommendations from New America’s latest paper on teacher effectiveness, Watching Teachers Work: Using Observation Tools to Promote Effective Teaching in the Early Years and Early Grades.  Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative, led the presentation as part of a panel discussion at the New America Foundation's office in Washington, D.C.  Susan Ochshorn, founder of ECE Policy Works in New York and c

It’s that time of year when the education policy team here at New America prepares a list of questions about the Obama Administration’s proposed federal budget. The budget, released yesterday, is not expected to become law anytime soon – many pundits say there is no chance Congress will pass it. But it does set important benchmarks for what the Administration would like to see in education spending.

Here are our two questions that relate most directly to early education:

This week and next, the STEM acronym will get some major airtime, as the Obama Administration tries to drive home the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in its new budget proposals.  The President kicked off the conversation in his State of the Union Address, and he provided some memorable visuals two days ago when he gleefully launched marshmallows from student-invented cannons at the second-annual White House Science Fair.  

All this talk of science and innovation might lead one to think that literacy and early education are sliding down a notch on the Administration’s priority list.

Decades ago, as researchers began to study what young children might learn from educational TV, they often found that "co-viewing" -- the act of parents and children watching together -- was strongly associated with children learning from what they watched.  Today, although TV is still the number-one type of media used by young children, new forms of media are begging new questions.