Pre-K

States this year have been faced with tough budget choices, and Pennsylvania certainly did not hurry in making its decisions. At long last, however, stakeholders in early education can relax: the 2009-2010 Pennsylvania budget is in, and early ed was not a victim of this year's budget crunch.

Gov. Ed Rendell signed the budget into law last Friday, thus ending the longest budget delay in any U.S. state this year. It was passed 42-7 in the state Senate, after a 101-day stand-off in the legislature.

The $2.62 billion budget slashed $500 million from 2008-2009 state spending levels and includes a $300 million spending increase in general education funding. This boost in education funding, along with the lack of broad tax increases in the 2009-2010 budget, may prove the most popular piece of the new budget.

Few people would disagree that how kids learn is connected to where they learn. Those wondering about how a school's physical environment enhances learning will relish The Third Teacher, a new book on school and classroom design. Published as a collaborative project by architects, designers and a furniture company, the book explores how schools and classrooms can be built in smarter, greener, and more imaginative ways.

The book itself is a beautiful piece of construction -- over 200 colorful pages of interviews, graphics, case studies and meditations that are grouped into 79 suggestions for improving school buildings and classrooms. With its visual ingenuity, the book suggests how powerful good design can be.

The authors are OWP/P | Cannon Design, a Chicago-based firm that has over 50 years of experience with school design; VS Furniture, a German company that specializes in educational furnishings, and Bruce Mao Design studio in Toronto and Chicago.

New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to increase the number of charter schools in the Big Apple has generated a lot of buzz since Bloomberg announced it last week. Charter schools are independent public schools that are publicly funded, publicly accountable, and free of charge to students, but operated by independent nonprofit boards, rather than school districts. In late September, Harvard researchers released a study showing that predominantly disadvantaged students who attend New York City’s public charter schools are making more progress towards closing the achievement gap with their suburban peers than a control group of NYC students who remained in NYC public schools.

Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a number of steps to expand the number of charter schools in New York City, including raising the state cap on the number of charter schools, raising additional funding for charter school facilities, and co-locating charter schools with public housing projects.

Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most states are keeping public child care programs afloat near last year's levels. But a handful of states are not providing the same level of assistance to poor families even with the federal help.

Those are a few of the messages in the 2009 report on states' child care policies, released yesterday by the National Women's Law Center. The center surveyed representatives of all 50 states this summer about how they would use funds from the stimulus bill, known as ARRA, which provided an additional $2 billion in funding for 2010 and 2011 through Child Care and Development Block Grants. Thirty states reported that they were using that money to maintain services, avoid or lessen waiting lists and open their services to more parents in search of work. But several others, including Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania, said they will be cutting funding and tightening eligibility requirements for childcare subsidies.

The center also asked states where they stood in February 2009 (exactly a year from the date of last year's survey) on a range of policies, such as how they determine income cut-offs for assistance, the size of the co-payments they require families to make, and how they reimburse child care center and other providers who enroll qualifying children. Updates on state's waiting lists are also included.

Paul Tough's article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine puts the spotlight on Tools of the Mind -- a teaching strategy that encourages children to engage in make-believe play in the classroom. The idea is that by letting young children adopt and act out roles -- whether it's doctor or daddy or doughnut maker -- these children will be indirectly learning skills of inhibition and self-control. They must stay in character and plan out their next move. What's more, they have to work out how to share the "stage" with their classmates and adapt to the movements and desires of different characters around them.

Research has shown for years that placing 3- and 4-year olds from low-income families in high-quality early education settings can curb the relationship between growing up in a low-income family and underperforming in school. Now a new study in the September/October 2009 issue of Child Development goes a few steps further, linking quality child care settings at even younger ages to school achievement up to fifth grade.

The study, led by Eric Dearing, an associate professor at the Lynch School of Education of Boston College, uses longitudinal data from a national study that tracks children from birth up to fifth grade. It includes children from high-, middle-, and low-income families in a variety of childcare environments that ranged from maternal care to structured preschool facilities. The dataset also included information on children's cognitive and academic performance, along with the quality of various childcare settings they attended, as measured by observation-based records of the care-giving environments.

Many thanks to everyone who has provided comments on our seven-part series on Head Start and to those of you who participated in our web chat on Tuesday. 

For your convenience, we've combined all of the posts plus the chat transcript into a PDF document for easy reading. Keep the feedback coming!

This is the final post in a seven-part series on the future of Head Start. Please join us for a web chat on this topic tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. EDT here at EarlyEdWatch.org in partnership with Politico.com. We invite you to email us questions to get the chat rolling.  

We started this series with a train metaphor, describing early education programs as trains moving down various tracks to deliver children to elementary school ready and eager to learn. More than a decade ago, when a few states started developing new paths for publicly funded preschool, the tracks already laid by Head Start seemed outdated and distant from what states were constructing. The unspoken, yet as it turns out, overstated, assumption was that state pre-K was aiming for literacy and kindergarten readiness, while Head Start was pointed toward children's health and social well-being.

Jumpstart, a non-profit organization dedicated to early literacy, released an analysis last Thursday that presents some new data and zooms in on some of the more note-worthy findings in recent studies on literacy and children. In a new poll of 504 American adults, it found that 95 percent of Americans recognize that early childhood literacy is "a very important issue," but only 18 percent of Americans are aware that children who lack early literacy skills are less likely to succeed as adults.

The report focuses on the gap in early literacy skills between children from low-income families and those who come from middle- and high-income families, as well as the lack of public awareness about early childhood literacy issues in the United States. Most experts now believe that children who are introduced to literacy in their early years -- through exercises like alphabet awareness, one-on-one book reading with adults and the practice of writing their names, not to mention knowledge of content -- have a better chance for strong academic performance in higher grade levels.

Sept. 8: Competing, Collaborating and Evolving
Sept. 9: Seeking Signs of Change Since 2007
Sept. 11: Checking Assumptions on School Readiness
Sept. 15: A Tilt Toward Literacy
Sept 17: The Case for 'Comprehensive Services'
Today: The Benjamin Buttonization of Head Start
Sept. 21: Future Tracks
Sept. 22: Web chat (email us your questions)

This is the sixth post in a seven-part series on the future of Head Start. Please join us for a web chat on this topic on Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 12:30 p.m. EDT here at EarlyEdWatch.org. We invite you to email us questions to get the chat rolling. 

Head Start may be about to turn 45. But you could argue that it's younger than ever.

Though many people think of Head Start as a program aimed at 4-year-olds, it actually enrolls children at 3 and 4 in the hopes of immersing them in two full years of early childhood services before their arrival in kindergarten. Lately, Head Start's enrollment has started to shift, serving an increasing proportion of 3-year-olds and a decreasing proportion of 4-year-olds. In 2008, 3-year-olds comprised 36 percent of Head Start's enrollment, up from 28 percent in 2006. At the same time, enrollment of 4-year-olds dropped to 50 percent from 56 percent over those two years.

In 1995, when Early Head Start was introduced, the program started to reach for even younger children -- targeting infants, toddlers and pregnant mothers. With the influx of stimulus money, the number of children and pregnant mothers served by Early Head Start programs is set to nearly double in size -- with money available to serve 117,000 babies and pregnant mothers instead of the 62,000 participating last year.

Could these new growth areas lead Head Start to become known as the program for pre-preschoolers? Are we witnessing the Benjamin Buttonization of Head Start, a program getting younger with each passing year?