Maggie Severns: All Related Content

As we've noted many times on Early Ed Watch, Head Start, the federal government's pre-K program, is at a crossroads. 

In the midst of budget threats and an ongoing debate over whether Head Start creates lasting academic gains in children, Head Start has embarked on its largest reforms in decades to improve the quality of its grantees. The reform process, called “re-competition,” forces Head Start providers that are found during audits to be low-quality to compete with other agencies in the same geographic area for future Head Start grants. 

Why are so many toys today labeled "educational"? How could parents be more empowered to size up toys and choose the ones that will be best for their children's play and learning? In honor of holiday shopping, Early Education Initiative Director Lisa Guernsey and Claire Green, President of Parents' Choice, discuss trends in children's toys.

When Michelle Rhee was chancellor of DCPS, one of her chief accomplishments was negotiating a new contract with the teachers union that included a new teacher evaluation system. The system, called IMPACT, was designed to keep good teachers in the classroom through incentives like merit pay and weed out the bad by giving the district the power to fire teachers who were repeatedly ranked at the bottom.

IMPACT rates teachers on a variety of metrics, from their students' test scores to classroom observations. It has been both controversial and held up by education reformers as a model for how other districts could begin evaluating teachers in a holistic way. In some ways, the methods for observing teachers are similar to those of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), the Danielson Framework for Teaching and other evaluation systems that are catching on in the early childhood world in that it both evaluates teachers and gives them opportunities for feedback and mentoring. 

DC has been using this system since 2009, so two school years have passed since it began. This month, The New Teacher Project released a report that addresses important questions about how the new teacher evaluation system is playing out. In this podcast, Dan Weisberg of The New Teacher Project and Anne Hyslop of the New America Foundation discuss the new report and what it says about the future of the teaching workforce. Maggie Severns hosts.

Click here to listen to the podcast. You can also subscribe to our podcasts in iTunes, and download previous podcasts from our online archive.

What might President Barack Obama’s second term mean for education? In short: four more years. Education Secretary Arne Duncan—a member of Obama’s Chicago circle, with whom the president played basketball on Election Day—has indicated he would like to stay in his job, and Obama’s campaign trumpeting of education policies such as Race to the Top show the administration’s aggressive approach to competitive grant programs, meant to cajole states and districts into embracing favored reform strategies, will likely continue.

Early learning advocates will be pleased programs such as Head Start are less likely to be severely cut with a Democratic Senate and White House to help safeguard them. And the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education now have the chance to continue to forge needed links between their agencies. But those who thought Obama’s early education policies were “too little too late” might remain disappointed. The president made almost no effort to outline a plan for early learning during this campaign, especially compared to the promises of 2008, and has not specifically indicated what he proposes to do for the youngest learners. That said, there are murmurs from Obama insiders that a broad-spectrum approach to early childhood education, including the often-forgotten early grades (K-3) of elementary school, could emerge as a theme in the second term. A Tuesday night press release from the nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, hinted at a desire to hold the president accountable for making headway on early childhood investments. “Throughout the campaign,” the statement said, “the president pledged to invest in education—especially in early childhood education—and to make higher education more affordable.” 

More than 20 states have recently passed legislation establishing new systems for how they evaluate teachers. In this week's podcast, Sara Mead of Bellwether Education Partners and Laura Bornfreund of New America discuss the potential consequences of these rapid policy changes. Clare McCann of New America breaks down the education issues driving the Virginia senate race. Maggie Severns hosts.

This week on Slate, I wrote about a new twist to an experiment many Early Ed Watch readers are likely familiar with: the Stanford Marshmallow experiment, a classic measure of childhood willpower in which kids who managed to sit at a table with a marshmallow in front of them and not eat it for 15 minutes were rewarded with a second marshmallow.

On June 21, 2012, Maggie Severns gave a presentation on Illinois's strategy for young English language learners at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) annual conference in Orlando, Florida.

During last night’s Presidential Debate, both candidates linked education into their arguments as a major workforce development issue- rhetoric that is often used by education and labor advocates but less often by presidential candidates, who are more likely to focus on the economy and other top-tier voting priorities.

Romney swung towards the center on many issues last night, and education was chief among them. When it comes to education and student aid, Romney said, “I'm not planning on making changes there.” Once again, he praised Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Race to the Top, and often focused more on what he had in common with Obama’s education policies than where they differ. One big exception, however, came when he touted his “backpack” program, in which students can use Title I and IDEA funds to attend whichever public school they choose. Some have called this a voucher program, though Romney hasn’t used that terminology to describe it.

Obama went after Romney’s approach to balancing the budget, saying that Romney would make cuts that would “[gut] our investments in schools and education.” When Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, the Ryan budget raised eyebrows among many with its drastic cuts in domestic discretionary spending, a pool that includes education. As I and my colleague Clare McCann have noted on Early Ed Watch before, Ryan’s budget could have a big impact on federal education spending—though it won’t necessarily “gut” every education program.

Welcome to the new Education Watch podcast, a spruced-up version of the bi-weekly podcast Early Ed Watch has been recording for for over two years.

The new podcasts will still feature education experts from across the country, and they’ll still dive into early education issues that warrant in-depth conversations. But expect more guests per episode, more news analysis and more updates on what we’re working on at New America, from pre-k up through the college years of education. This will, we hope, make listening more fun.

This week on the podcast: Paul Tough, author of the new book "How Children Succeed," discusses how qualities like grit and curiosity may be critical for low-income students' success in the classroom and beyond. Early Education Initiative Director Lisa Guernsey shares thoughts on teacher evaluation for both sides of the Chicago teachers' strike. Guernsey is joined by one of our research associates, Alex Holt, to introduce a new data project from the Early Education Initiative.

Click here to listen to and download the podcast.