Maggie Severns: All Related Content

Thirty-five states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico submitted applications for the $500 million Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge, the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announced today. As we've reported, the federal government will distribute grants of up to $100 million to winning states by the end of this year to improve early learning to the states.

A new study suggests that the state of California may have massive problems in the way it identifies English Language Learner students in its public schools. In California, where one quarter or 1.6 million students are English Language Learners, this misidentification could be costly for schools and students alike.

Educators have long gone to battle over homework. Mostly, their debate revolves around the amount of homework schools assign to kids and whether or not they gain anything from completing it. But what if we could actually boost the effectiveness of homework without making it any longer, harder or more tedious for kids?

Congress is under increasing pressure to pass a stopgap spending bill this week, as the current continuing resolution will expire at the end of September. Late last night, the House passed a funding bill the Senate was quick to veto this morning due to disagreements over funding for environmental programs.

On a Monday morning last month, a crowd packed into the Brookings Institution auditorium in Washington, D.C., for a little-publicized event on early education reform. At the center of the event was Steve Barnett, a professor of education economics at Rutgers University and co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, who was there to raise questions on whether Head Start is an effective early childhood program, and how we might improve it.

Yesterday, the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services released the application that tells states what they must do to win a grant in the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC). The application strikes most of the same notes that came in the draft guidelines earlier this summer, but with a few key shifts that could change the game for states when they apply for a piece of the $500 million:

Two new surveys of teachers were released last week, one from the National Center for Education Information and another from Education Next. Both surveys found that American teachers continue to favor tenure, unions, and higher pay. Despite the changing economy and the high-stakes public debates on these topics in many states, teachers’ opinions on these issues have remained consistent over the last five years.

Countless studies have linked poverty and low socioeconomic status to low test scores, but some schools with children in poverty still do better than others. Resilient schools, as they are called, have better reading scores and higher poverty levels. New research in the July issue of American Behavioral Scientist looks carefully at factors that correlate with poverty, as well as school resiliency among 270,000 students in over 250 schools in Broward School District in Broward County, Florida. The author, Sara Ransdell, a professor in the Department of Health Science at Nova Southeastern University, had a twofold mission: tease out some of the conditions correlated with poverty to see how much they affect student performance, and target resilient schools and try to determine why they are outperforming their counterparts.

The results of the first part of study are almost disappointingly straightforward: Poverty was, by far, the biggest predictor of whether a child could read in the Broward School District at large.

Other factors, such as a child’s English Language Learner status or whether the child engaged in risky behavior, made “minor and often redundant contributions” to how a child performed in Ransdell’s analysis. After controlling for a myriad of different school- and child-related factors, including class sizes, teacher resources, and student ethnicity, the author was pointed back to the simplest explanation for why some children read better than others in school.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Education released applications for the second round of Promise Neighborhoods grants, the fledgling competitive grant program designed to replicate the famous Harlem Children’s Zone in communities across the country.

Once again, Secretary Arne Duncan is calling for Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known as No Child Left Behind, by the end the summer. During a visit to St. Paul with Senator Al Franken (D-MN) last week, Duncan called the law an “impediment” to academic success.

Yesterday’s announcement of the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge -- a $500 million grant competition for states -- presents a historic opportunity to improve early education, but it’s a bittersweet moment too.

When President Obama chose to focus on immigration reform in El Paso last week, minds turned to new policies that could address the rapidly rising Hispanic population in the United States.

But politicians say little about policy for immigrant kids in our public schools—despite current research indicating that the future of our workforce may depend on it. According to a recent study by Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, immigrants and their children will provide virtually all growth in the labor force over the next 40 years.