Pre-K

While there is little doubt that excellent early education sets students up for long-term academic success, the definition of “excellent” varies along with communities’ diverse needs. This is nowhere truer than with dual language learners.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on New America's In The Tank blog.

The average childcare worker in the U.S. earns less than a janitor. Sure, some daycare centers pay well, but the average parent can’t afford those high-end centers that can cost as much as public university tuition.

Piling on to that: The daycare industry is largely unregulated with low standards on quality of care. At an event this week based off of a recent New Republic article, The Hell of American Daycare, panelists showed how that painful reality -- a broken system full of tales of toddler deaths and injuries – can also have dire consequences for our economy.

In a blog post from earlier this week I examined the issues of funding streams and dosage. We currently have no way to track a state-funded pre-K center’s level of funding or the different ways it is funded. We also have no reliable way of measuring how some pre-K programs supervise children for much longer than others because we rely on a vague binary measurement of “half-day” versus “full-day”. In this post I will explain how we can fix these problems.

In today’s blog post, I will examine some basic problems with current data collection processes in pre-K, kindergarten and across the PreK-12 landscape. Look for Part 2 later this week, when I’ll propose hourly tracking -- an outside-the-box approach to solving some of these issues. 

State pre-K funding shrunk by over half a billion dollars from the 2010-11 to the 2011-12 school year. That was the largest one-year decrease in the last 10 years, leading the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) to declare it the "worst year in a decade” for high-quality pre-K access across the United States.

Last week, the National Journal Education Experts blog asked if funding pre-K with cigarette taxes was a good idea.

I argue that seeking out new and creative funding streams has merit and that the tobacco tax is worth talking about. But I also caution that such a tax should not and cannot realistically be the long-term solution:

Earlier this month, President Obama proposed a new program that would provide funding for states to offer pre-K to all 4-year-olds from low-income families.

This guest post was written by J.M. Holland, a Head Start teacher in Richmond, Va., recent graduate of the educational leadership doctoral program at Virginia Commonwealth University, and blogger at The Future of Teaching. 

At the start of this month, the Office of Head Start named 160 preliminary winners in the Obama’s administration’s new “re-competition” process for determining which institutions deserve continued funding to run Head Start and Early Head Start programs. These winners were a combination of 100 providers who had already been administering Head Start and Early Head Start grants and 60 “new” providers. Of those new grantees, only a handful -- three, by my calculation -- are organizations not involved in Head Start services before.

The release of the President’s fiscal year 2014 budget provides a clearer picture of the quality standards states would have to meet to receive funds under the Obama administration’s “Preschool for All” proposal. The most notable benchmarks are pre-K teachers with bachelor's degrees and salaries for pre-K teachers that are comparable to K-12 teachers’ wages.