Pre-K

In education policy, where so much of the focus is on how much is wrong with today’s schools, it’s refreshing to see examples of something going right. In an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times, David Kirp writes about what he found after spending a year in Union City, N.J., where children are achieving at a very high rate despite coming from poverty and living in families where English is a second language.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the U.S. Department of Education, is proposing to collect data for the annual State of Preschool Survey, which for the last nine years has been administered by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).  Public comments on this proposal are due February 12.

Until I became immersed in research on child development, I thought learning to read was a project confined to the years of kindergarten, first and second grade. But as countless studies have shown, preparing the brain to read starts long before a child has formal reading instruction. No wonder, then, that our country is full of campaigns to encourage parents to read books with their toddlers. No wonder parents today are told to engage their kids in back-and-forth conversations about pictures on the page. 

For nearly a year, the PreK-3^rd Grade National Work Group has hosted free webinars on how to reduce the achievement gap by focusing on children’s early years: pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first, second and third grades. The last of these webinars, Scale and Sustainability: Implications for State and District Policy, will be held this Wednesday, Jan. 30, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. EST.

As President Obama gave his second inaugural address yesterday, many of us couldn’t help but linger over these words:  “We are true to our creed,” Obama said, “when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.” 

This week's National Journal Education Experts blog asks about the big takeaways from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's MET study on effective teaching. My colleagues Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative, and Anne Hyslop, education policy analyst, weighed in. 

January is often when governors signal what they plan to do in the coming year, and education is a perennial topic in “State of the State” addresses. What can they say they haven’t said before? Plenty.  A white paper published by the National Governor’s Association last fall has loads of ideas for what to say -- and do.

This is the second of a two-part series written by guest blogger Megan Carolan, policy research coordinator for the National Institute for Early Education Research. Yesterday, Megan spotlighted problems with questions about preschool in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Today’s post explores the roots of the issue, describes how often the questionable data are cited and suggests how to start fixing the problem.

This post was written by Megan Carolan, policy research coordinator at the National Institute for Early Education Research, who will be providing consulting support to the Early Education Initiative and the pre-K side of the Federal Education Budget Project this year. We are happy to have her on board as a guest blogger for Early Ed Watch.

This week’s question on the National Journal Education Expert’s blog asks if policymakers should focus on providing pre-K for every child.

In my response, I discuss three reasons why universal pre-K should be the goal. Here’s one: