As children pine for toys they see in store circulars and on TV, parents want to please. But they also wonder: will this toy keep my child occupied or get tossed in the back of the closet after 10 minutes? One piece of information that might help has less to do with the toy itself and more to do with what’s happening around it.

Maggie Severns
This post originally appeared on Early Ed Watch.

As we've noted many times on Early Ed Watch, Head Start, the federal government's pre-K program, is at a crossroads. 

In the midst of budget threats and an ongoing debate over whether Head Start creates lasting academic gains in children, Head Start has embarked on its largest reforms in decades to improve the quality of its grantees. The reform process, called “re-competition,” forces Head Start providers that are found during audits to be low-quality to compete with other agencies in the same geographic area for future Head Start grants. 

At the Early Education Initiative, we field questions about Head Start from all directions-- Capitol Hill, colleagues at New America who work in other policy areas, and newsrooms across the country. Our new issue brief, Reforming Head Start: What ‘Re-competition’ Means for the Federal Government’s Pre-K Program, is our attempt to answer these questions clearly and consicely. Before now, much of this information has not been available for public viewing nor has it existed succinctly in one place for policymakers and the public to digest. The paper explains the inner workings of the new re-competition system so far.

Alex Holt
This post originally appeared on Early Ed Watch.

The U.S. Department of Education has released some preliminary results on the effectiveness of the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, a $545 million annual program into which the Obama administration poured an additional $3 billion in 2009 stimulus funds to “turn around” failing schools. Our Ed Money Watch colleague Anne Hyslop has an excellent rundown of the SIG data, but we wanted to highlight a few key pieces on how early education seems to have fared.

The big news for the early education world is that “A larger proportion of elementary schools posted gains in the first year of the SIG program, compared to middle and high schools, and they were less likely to see declines.” But talking about the implications of this finding, a healthy dose of skepticism is required.

Here the thing: One year’s worth of data on turning around a failing school is not very valuable. Keep in mind that it’s too soon to be able to judge the effectiveness of the program. These schools were failing, after all, so everyone should temper their expectations about what can happen in a year. With that massive caveat, here are some other issues with the data that Hyslop points out:

We have no idea whether the data issued by the Department are statistically significant.  We also have no data on other harder-to-measure aspects of a schools’ climate and potential changes to the community in which its students live.

Anyone who has grappled with questions of what to do with data from child assessments – whether based on observations of children's development over months or simple snapshots of early literacy learning – will want to tune in to the next webinar coming from the PreK-3rd Grade National Work Group.