Pre-K

The spotlight in school reform turns now to school districts instead of states with the U.S. Department of Education’s release Friday of its invitation for a new $383 million Race to the Top competition.  Districts can compete for up to $40 million each, with awards based on their sizes and abilities to personalize learning for students, become transparent in how they are spending money, engage community groups and implement systems for evaluating teachers and leaders based in part on student test scores.

The department, which said it would make 15 to 25 awards, asked districts to let it know by August 30 if they intend to apply. [UPDATE: On September 4, the department announced that 893 districts said they would.] Applications are due October 30 and winners announced in December.

The competition provides openings for school districts that recognize the need to pay more attention to the PreK-3^rd grade years.

This week's National Journal Education Experts Blog drills into two perennial questions: If policymakers and the public have come to understand the importance of early education, why is it never an election issue? And how can advocates make it a bigger priority?

In my response, I note that education is rarely a big election issue, but elections aren't the only way to make early ed a priority. I use an idea which we've discussed on Early Ed Watch before, formula funding pre-K, as an example of one way to make early education a long-term priority. Some states, such as Oklahoma, have already chosen to do so.

Read the post here.

On Thursday this week, the Early Education Initiative and the Future Tense project at Slate magazine will kick off the back-to-school season with an event here in Washington, D.C. designed to shake up typical notions of elementary school. Today's young kids are now using technology to express themselves, make things, and share ideas. What do they have to teach us about the way they learn? 

Getting Schooled by a Third Grader: What Kids’ Gaming, Tweeting, Streaming and Sharing Tells us About the Future of Elementary Education

A recent working paper from public policy researchers at Duke University examines one potential unintended consequence of the school accountability era: Is it possible that accountability testing, which under No Child Left Behind begins in the third grade, has given elementary school administrators an incentive to cluster their strongest teachers in third, fourth and fifth grade classrooms, thus depriving younger students of more effective teachers?

According to the study, by Sarah C. Fuller and Helen F. Ladd, this may be the case. In North Carolina between the years of 1995 and 2009, teachers who were average or less effective at improving test scores were more likely than their peers to be reassigned from 3^rd-5^th grade classrooms to kindergarten, first grade and second grade. A teacher one standard deviation above the mean for student test scores in reading was 74.5 percent as likely as an average teacher to move from teaching 3^rd-5^th grade to teaching earlier grades. Teachers with above-average math scores were 70.1 percent as likely as an average teacher to move down into the early grades.

A red-hot ed-tech marketplace is creating a feeling of urgency among decision makers in state agencies and local school districts – and early education is no exception. In a world of increasing fiscal constraints, state leaders are under pressure to capitalize on new technologies to improve productivity and help children excel. But without thoughtful adoption, leaders are at risk of spending public dollars on products that sit unused, lock districts into specific brands or platforms, or get in the way of promoting the positive, face-to-face interactions with adults that young children need.

To help state leaders see past the hype, I was commissioned to write a policy brief for the Education Commission of the States. It is being released this week at the commission’s annual forum in Atlanta. The brief, Technology in Early Education: Building Platforms for Connections and Content that Strengthen Families and Promote Success in School,  is part of a series underwritten by GE called The Progress of Education Reform. (Other issues in the series have examined digital citizenship, the implications of defining college readiness, and the intricacies of state school funding.)

Read the headlines about the federal government’s early education competitions among states, and you might think there is only one game in town: the Early Learning Challenge that is part of Obama’s signature education reform initiative, Race to the Top.

But three other statewide grants could also have an impact on children’s learning in early childhood from birth through third grade: Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy grants; Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) grants; and the original Race to the Top, which is labeled a K-12 program and therefore explicitly includes the K-3 grades and could implicitly impact public schools’ pre-K programs as well.

This week, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released their proposal for funding five states that narrowly missed winning the 2011 Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge. Under the proposal, those states -- Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin -- could receive up to 50 percent of what they were eligible to win in the original competition.

Yesterday, I 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. The presentation was based on Starting Early with English Language Learners: First Lessons From Illinois, a paper we published this spring.

President Obama’s announcement Friday that his administration will stop deporting eligible undocumented people under the age of 30 is certain to provide fodder for more election-season debates over immigration.

On May 11, 2012, Lisa Guernsey gave a talk at Harvard University's PreK-3rd Institute on the federal government's role so far in reforming early education to enable better alignment across the pre-K, kindergarten, first, second and third grades (PreK-3rd). The presentation examines the Obama Administration's top-level education agenda and its early learning policies and describes how new and existing federal programs and funding streams are influencing the work of states and school districts in creating better early education systems for young children.