Your tax-deductible gift will help bring promising new voices and ideas into our nation's discourse, and help shape the future of vital public policies.
The mission of the New America Foundation's Education Policy Program is to develop ideas that advance the cause of equity, access, and excellence in education. The program proposes comprehensive education policy changes from pre-kindergarten to graduate school with the goal of closing multiple opportunity and achievement gaps nationwide. The Education Policy Program spans three separate initiatives: The Early Education Initiative, the Federal Education Budget Project, and Higher Ed Watch.
The Early Education Initiative develops, analyzes, and advances policy solutions to improve access, quality, and alignment in early education for children from birth through elementary school, with a focus on the years from pre-K through 3rd grade. The project hosts the Early Ed Watch blog.
The Federal Education Budget Project serves as a non-partisan, authoritative source of easily accessible information on federal education funding for the media, policymakers and staff, state and local officials, non-profit organizations, and the public. The project hosts the Ed Money Watch blog.
The Higher Ed Watch policy blog provides analysis, reporting, and commentary on the world of higher education, with a focus on access, affordability, and quality.
Sign up to receive email updates from any of these initiatives.
Bedtime = book time. Parents know that equation by heart, or at
least they're supposed to. The drill goes like this: Just before the
goodnight kiss, we snuggle up with our young kids, open a book, and
read with them. Okay, so maybe at first we have to beg them to just
settle down. And maybe the baby is more prone to eat the pages than
look at them. But still, we try. We're the ones responsible for these
little human beings. It's part of our… more
At the age of forty-three, Martine Leveque decided it was time to start
over. For several years, she had worked in the movie business, writing
subtitles in Italian and French for English-language films, but her
employer moved overseas. She then tried her hand at sales, but each
time the economy dipped sales tumbled, along with her income, and as a
single mother with a teenage son, she wanted a job that offered more
security. She decided to pursue a career in nursing, a high-demand
field where she… more
From the Editors: "Where the Wild Things Are," a film based on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, hit theaters on Friday. The book is loved by 4- and 5-year-olds, but this PG-rated movie may well be too scary for them.
Child development experts debate whether, when it comes to the big screen, live-action films are easier for preschoolers to identify with and enjoy than complex animation. But the live-action G-rated movie seems increasingly rare these days.
A few years ago, Newsweek called kindergarten "the new
first grade." This month, as I watch my 5-year-old settle into her
classroom, it's clear the trend hasn't abated. In May, she was kneading
Play-Doh in preschool. Now she has an assigned seat and "guided
reading" lessons.
Treating children that way is like giving a lion their food without making them hunt for it.
Jacinth Thomas-Val writes the sentence on the blackboard in her classroom at Sacramento City College, then asks her students what's wrong with it. "What does ‘them' refer to in this sentence?" she asks one young woman. The young woman doesn't know, shakes her head, then gets up and leaves the classroom without explanation, not returning for the rest of the period.
Today, preschool and other services
for young children are delivered through what is widely recognized as a
non-system, with programs like child care, pre-kindergarten, special education
services and Head Start operating in separate policy silos, each with differing
objectives and different funding streams. This uneven and uncoordinated
character of early childhood policy can impede access, quality, and return on
investment to these programs. Indeed, stories
of avoidable dysfunction-of low-income parents who are unaware that their child
If children are the future, then looking at a state's
educational system is like peering into a crystal ball. California is a state teeming with young
children -- 4.7 million under age 8, to be exact. One in every eight young
American children lives in California.
And many of these children come from minority ethnic and racial backgrounds and
speak languages other than English. If Americans want to get a glimpse at our
future as a "majority minority" country they don't have to look beyond California.
Each year, the federal government guarantees billions of dollars in loans disbursed through the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program, a public-private partnership that provides financial aid to students attending institutions of higher education. Despite the significant investment of taxpayer dollars, the actual administration of the FFEL Program is largely handled by participating lenders and a group of 35 non-federal guaranty agencies across the country. Guaranty agencies perform a number of administrative functions, such as disbursing federal default insurance provided… more
Teachers with the least experience and fewest credentials
teach in our poorest schools, putting low-income students at a disadvantage. School
finance disparities in teacher spending within school districts are a major
cause of this problem. However, school district budgeting techniques mask these
intra-district disparities, allowing administrators and policymakers to ignore
them.
In May of 2008, Congress passed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act (ECASLA) in response to concern that credit market conditions could disrupt federal student loan availability. The law gives the U.S. Department of Education temporary authority to purchase federally backed student loans made by private lenders, effectively providing a secondary market for the loans. Congress opted to leave the new purchase authority largely undefined in statute, giving the Department considerable discretion to design and administer it.
As California struggles to close persistent achievement gaps, it is increasingly apparent that these gaps exist at school entry and that efforts to improve the early education systems (PreK-3rd) are warranted.
Please join us in the release of "On the Cusp in California: How PreK-3rd Strategies Could Improve Education in the Golden State," a policy paper from New America's Early Education Initiative that highlights key strategies for creating a more seamless system for early learning in California.
On Monday, June 8, the New America Foundation's Federal
Education Budget Project released "Equitable
Resources in Low Income Schools: Teacher Equity and the Federal Title I
Comparability Requirement" at an event on Capitol Hill. This event
featured representatives from the White House, Representative George Miller's
committee staff, and the National Education Association to discuss teacher
equity and the comparability requirement in the law.
Early education is the subject of unprecedented bipartisan interest from both Capitol Hill and the Obama administration. Advocates herald the lifetime savings of effective pre-k interventions, which have been calculated between $7 and $10 for every dollar invested. But what does “quality” mean in terms of closing the achievement gap? And what are the implications for policy?
On Tuesday, March 31, the New America Foundation's Education Policy Program hosted "The Future of Federal Student Loans." This event featured representatives from the Obama administration, the student loan community, and New America's Education Policy Program to discuss the pros and cons of the President's proposal to stop guaranteeing federal student loans and to instead make the loans directly.
It is a stark, indisputable fact that many of America's high
school graduates are not ready for the rigors of college. While the
nation's secondary schools bear much of the responsibility, colleges and
universities have done a poor job of communicating the skills expected of
incoming freshmen and an even worse job of providing effective remediation and
extended support services to ensure that underprepared students eventually
graduate. Only 30 percent of students who take remedial reading courses go on
Testimony on Future of Higher Education
Michael Dannenberg • Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education • Financial Aid and Higher Education Access • February 24, 2006
