Kindergarten

Here at Early Ed Watch, we’ve written about the importance of full-day kindergarten, especially in helping children keep up with the more rigorous demands set forth by the new Common Core State Standards. Yet kindergarten remains vulnerable to annual budgeting processes. Most states do not guarantee by law that children will have access to a full day of kindergarten, and six states don’t require districts to offer any type of kindergarten.

Building on the momentum of President Obama’s call to expand preschool access, the first months of the 113^th Congress have seen the reintroduction of a number of bills addressing early education.

Last week, Early Ed Watch described two surveys that shed light on what teachers are thinking about the Common Core State Standards, which will soon affect what and how teachers teach in K-12 classrooms throughout country. This week's education podcast -- available through iTunes and the In the Tank blog -- discusses those survey results with Lindsey Tepe, our program associate at the Education Policy Program and a former elementary school teacher. Tepe dug into the results and found several surprises. Listen in to learn more.

Last week's National Journal Education Experts blog asks whether the president’s plan to expand all 4-year-olds access to high quality pre-K is a step in the right direction.

I say yes. His plan gives weight to the idea that we should no longer think of education as a K-12 system, but instead as a PreK-12 system.

This morning, The Atlantic published a commentary I wrote with my colleague Laura Bornfreund about facing up to "fade-out." The article describes why, if Obama's preschool plan is to gain momentum, it would be smart to proceed with a two-pronged approach: give children deep learning experiences in their birth-to-five years and make improvements to the K-3 grades of elementary school.

An under-examined aspect of President Obama’s new early childhood education plan is his proposal to encourage states to create more full-day kindergarten seats – though only after states are able to guarantee access to pre-K for all 4-year olds from low and moderate-income families.

The Equity and Excellence Commission, a board established by Congress in 2010 to study school finance issues, released its final report this week, For Each and Every Child.

In President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday, he called on Congress to expand high-quality early learning opportunities to low- and moderate-income children. Today, with the release of a White House document and a speech at a Decatur, Ga. pre-K center, Obama sketched more of the plan’s details.

Last week we alerted our readers to a call from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the U.S. Department of Education, for comments on their proposal to collect data for the annual State of Preschool Survey. The National Institute for Early Education Research has administered this data collection, which they have used in their invaluable pre-K “yearbooks,” since 2003.

Until I became immersed in research on child development, I thought learning to read was a project confined to the years of kindergarten, first and second grade. But as countless studies have shown, preparing the brain to read starts long before a child has formal reading instruction. No wonder, then, that our country is full of campaigns to encourage parents to read books with their toddlers. No wonder parents today are told to engage their kids in back-and-forth conversations about pictures on the page.