Pre-K

This is the second post in our seven-part series, "What's Ahead for Head Start?"  Join us here for a web chat on this topic on Sept. 22, 2009 at 12:30 p.m. EDT.

More than 18 months have passed since the laws governing Head Start got their most recent make-over. The Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act, which President Bush signed into law in December 2007, includes several major reforms to the Head Start program, most of them designed to improve the program's quality and accountability.

What is the impact of these changes? Agencies are hiring more teachers with post-secondary degrees, as required by the law. But data does not yet exist to help us detect other signs of quality and accountability improvement. Some of the law's deadlines are still years away and some requirements went unfunded until this year. At least one initiative is already months behind schedule.

Today we begin a multi-week blog series, reported by Lisa Guernsey and Christina Satkowski, on the future of Head Start. Join us here at Early Ed Watch for a Web chat about the series on September 22^nd at 12:30 p.m., hosted in partnership with Politico.com.

Head Start, the largest federally funded program for children under 5, has been offering free preschool and health services to poor children and their families for nearly 45 years. It has seen growth and stagnation, controversy and quiet. Today, with the Obama Administration signaling its intent to increase federal funding to support young children, one might think that Head Start was poised to enter one of its most expansive periods ever.

But there are several huge unanswered questions about Head Start's future. In recent years, parents and politicians have found themselves drawn instead to state-funded pre-K programs. Indeed, by 2008, more children at ages 3 and 4 were enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs than in Head Start. State programs enroll about 1.1 million preschoolers, while Head Start serves about 920,000 in that age range.* As Georgetown University researcher William Gormley wrote last year, "A silent revolution in early childhood has occurred."

In August, the Gates Foundation and Thrive by Five announced grants totaling $8 million for two early learning programs in the state of Washington. The White Center Early Learning Initiative and East Yakima's Ready by Five program will each receive $4 million over the next year to continue supporting children and their families as they prepare for kindergarten.

This is a second round of funding for these initiatives; last year White Center received $11.7 million and Ready by Five received $5 million.

It's reassuring to see programs like these receiving funding, especially as the economic crisis forces some states to cut back investments in early childhood programs. It also shows that the state of Washington is establishing itself as a strong player in early education reform. Earlier this month, Washington's SeaTac area was the site of the national Starting Strong conference. And as we described in July, some promising outcomes related to the PreK-3^rd approach are emerging from Bremerton, Wash.

On Friday, I answered five questions about children's early years on the Inside Pre-K blog.

In one of my answers, I summarized a recent conversation I'd had with the mother of a prospective Head Start student in Alexandria, Va. Her story reminds me of why our current non-system of early care and education has so many holes to fill -- and why it's so necessary to build policies and systems that integrate, link and expand the current hodgepodge of early childhood services out there today. Here's a recap:

Tomorrow is the deadline to submit comments on the Department of Education's proposed guidelines for Race to the Top, the new grant program created under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  Secretary Duncan released draft guidelines for RTT last month, and with more than 650 comments submitted so far, he is getting plenty of feedback on his vision.

Race to the Top gives the Secretary unprecedented discretion to dole out $4.3 billion in grants to states over the next year.  But the money doesn't come free. States have to be looking pretty good in Duncan's eyes even before they apply for the money. What's more, if they want their applications to have any shot of being competitive, they will have to show that they are already making progress on many fronts, including working toward common standards, allowing for the creation of more charter schools and using longitudinal data systems to track students' performance.

Early education advocates in Illinois are breathing a little easier this month after Gov. Patrick Quinn restored over $85 million in funds for early childhood programs that the Illinois State Board of Education had eliminated during deliberations on the 2010 budget a few weeks ago. The board's cuts represented more than 32 percent of the 2009 budget and would have had disastrous results for state-funded preschool programs. But even with the governor's reparation, the early childhood budget will lose 10 percent of its budget -- a loss which could affect thousands of children in the state.

Anthony D. Pellegrini, an educational psychologist at the University of Minnesota, has been studying the whys, whens and hows of children's playtime for decades. He is an authority on recess, helping to remind all of us of why it's crucial for academic and social growth. And he just published a new book, The Role of Play in Human Development, that explores the role of play in our evolution as a species.

So when Pellegrini pens an article titled "Research and Policy on Children's Play," it's time to perk up and pay attention. The piece was just published this month in Child Development Perspectives, a semi-annual journal of the Society for Research in Child Development.

The piece makes two important points. It starts by reminding us that the word "play" needs to be defined more precisely before educators, parents and child development specialists can have a fruitful conversation about what is missing in children's school routines. And it ends by pressing for more research on exactly what kinds of benefits children derive from play at various stages of their young lives.

As regular readers of this blog know, Montgomery County Public Schools has done a good job capturing our attention with its PreK-3^rd alignment effort and high-quality early childhood programs. Now a new book, Leading for Equity, argues that Superintendent Jerry Weast's approach to management, which emphasized equity and excellence for all, was the key to success in MCPS.

This substantive but somewhat colorless book was written by three people who specialize in education leadership: Stacey M. Childress and David A. Thomas, who currently teach at Harvard Business School, and Denis P. Doyle, the chief academic officer of SchoolNet, which produces instructional management software.

Jay Mathews at the Washington Post recently skewered the authors for relying too much on education jargon in their analysis of MCPS' success, which they summarized as six lessons. Early Ed Watch helpfully translates for the common man: 1) adopt common, rigorous standards, and differentiate instruction rather than lowering expectations by placing struggling students in lower tracks, 2) focus on critical stages of the K-12 path, especially early childhood and the last years of high school, 3) hold everyone accountable and include everyone in the decision-making process, 4) persuade people of all students' ability to excel by requiring the use of programs that increase student achievement, 5) hire and retain people who believe that minority and low-income students can achieve at a high level and 6) always pursue equity and hold it as a top priority.

Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman has been popping up all over the news this week, first in a Boston Globe article downplaying the significance of IQ, and again yesterday in an interview with NPR. "It's this inequality in early conditions which perpetuates inequality into the next generation and the generation after that," said Heckman on NPR's "Tell Me More."

Heckman believes America is gradually fragmenting into "two societies," one affluent and one impoverished, and the gap in access to high-quality early learning is hastening that development. But early intervention can make the difference. He was quoted in the Boston Globe saying that successful preschool programs give students a boost in non-cognitive skills, like "self-control and grit," that will ultimately lead to success later in life.

The first Harry Potter book has become part our family's bedtime reading this summer, and my 7-year-old daughter is even more entranced than I was when the young wizard came into my life at age 29. But in returning to the book now, as a parent, something is gnawing at me about the dear boy: Given what he had to suffer through in his early childhood, how did he manage to come out so well-adjusted?

For deprived adults who haven't read the book, let me explain. Harry spent the first 10 years of his life in a cupboard under the stairs. His parents died suddenly when he was a baby, so he was left to grow up in a house with his aunt, uncle and roly-poly bully of a cousin, Dudley. His aunt and uncle barely paid him any mind, but when they did, their growling responses were always negative. He was, in essence, verbally abused and ignored, not to mention half starved. It was a tough way to grow up. And yet he turned out to not only be a hero, but also a thoughtful, kind and productive person. You wouldn't call Harry happy-go-lucky, but you wouldn't describe him as depressed either.

Yes, I'm being a little facetious. I'm aware that Harry is a charming bit of fiction, at least to us muggles.

But the fact that author J.K. Rowling could endow him with such astounding resilience strikes me as an example of how adults tend to become oblivious to the importance of children's social environments at very young ages.