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Harvard Releases Early Literacy Resources for Policymakers, One Memo At A Time

November 26, 2012

Clare McCann
This post originally appeared on Early Ed Watch.

This fall, the Harvard Graduate School of Education is publishing a series of one-page memos for policymakers and early learning leaders on how to improve young children’s literacy. Using evidence from research on reading and its precursors, these Lead for Literacy one-pagers are designed to help leaders avoid common mistakes in their early education programs. Nonie Lesaux, a Harvard education professor and reading expert, leads the research group behind the project.

For one, Lesaux’s group says, the success of a program should be measured by its effects on literacy rates – not simply on how many children are enrolled in the program, or how satisfied their families report being. And literacy programs need to be centered on early interventions and prevention if they hope to see success.

In Mississippi, Solutions Follow Funding Setbacks For Early Childhood | The Hechinger Report

November 23, 2012

Lisa Guernsey, director of the early education initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy group based in Washington D.C., said collaborations between school districts and Head Start operators run the gamut: Many are ...

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Tech Gadgets For the Holidays | The Kojo Nnamdi Show

November 20, 2012

Guests

David Pogue

Tech Columnist, New York Times

Lisa Guernsey

Director of the Early Education Initiative at the New American Foundation; Author of Screen Time: How Electronic Media – From Baby Videos to Educational Software – Affects Your Young Child

Original article

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NewsHour Highlights Pre-K, Kindergarten Disparities and ‘New Breed’ of Pediatrician

November 19, 2012

Lisa Guernsey
This post originally appeared on Early Ed Watch.

A recent segment on PBS NewsHour creatively knit together two oft-forgotten elements for ensuring that more children learn to read: the power of the pediatrician and the disparities in access children face not just in preschool but also in full-day kindergarten.  

The show highlighted a “new breed of pediatrician,” who is part doctor, part teacher. PBS correspondent John Merrow talked with a pediatrician at the Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City who described how doctors should be talking with parents of toddlers and preschoolers about their children’s language development and pre-reading skills. Shots of storytime in the waiting rooms of Bellevue’s offices highlight the doctor’s office as a great place to introduce parents to the importance of read-alouds and exploration of books.

A Recommendation for a First Step Toward Better Pre-K and K Data

November 19, 2012

Alex Holt, Lisa Guernsey
This post originally appeared on Early Ed Watch.

Currently, it is impossible to know how many children are enrolled in publicly funded pre-K within the boundaries of any given district. This is a serious impediment, not just for local superintendents and principals who are in the dark about the educational backgrounds of their schools’ incoming kindergarteners, but also for policymakers, who can’t effectively discuss issues of equity and access without good data to make comparisons. 

The Early Education Initiative released a report in September entitled Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level, which showed that, as of now, there are major holes in pre-K data collection. The findings in the report emerged from our efforts at collecting data from states on funding and enrollment for state-funded pre-K programs, IDEA Preschool, and Head Start that could be analyzed at the school-district level.  The data we collected are available in our database.

Our paper recommends convening a national task force of experts on pre-K and K-12 data systems to determine what states and the federal government can do “to create a more logical, systematized approach to early education data at the district level.” This recommendation is similar to that of Don Hernandez in his 2012 policy brief from the Foundation for Child Development, "PreK-3rd: Next Steps for State Longitudinal Data Systems."

What Early Education Advocates Are Saying About Mike Pence’s Preschool Plan | StateImpact NPR

November 19, 2012

Clare McCann researches early education funding for the New America Foundation. She says the lack of a uniform option can become a problem down the road for kindergarten teachers. “Students who are in those programs might be going to a school district where most of the kids probably didn’t come from a similar background in early learning,” says McCann. “You have no way of controlling for the quality of those programs, and you have no way of knowing before those students get there what kind of early learning situation they were in.”

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NewsHour Highlights Pre-K, Kindergarten Disparities and ‘New Breed’ of Pediatrician

  • By
  • Lisa Guernsey
November 19, 2012

A recent segment on PBS NewsHour creatively knit together two oft-forgotten elements for ensuring that more children learn to read: the power of the pediatrician and the disparities in access children face not just in preschool but also in full-day kindergarten.  

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A Recommendation for a First Step Toward Better Pre-K and K Data

  • By
  • Alex Holt
  • Lisa Guernsey
November 19, 2012

Currently, it is impossible to know how many children are enrolled in publicly funded pre-K within the boundaries of any given district. This is a serious impediment, not just for local superintendents and principals who are in the dark about the educational backgrounds of their schools’ incoming kindergarteners, but also for policymakers, who can’t effectively discuss issues of equity and access without good data to make comparisons. 

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Map: Election Results from PreK-12 Races Across the Country

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
  • Clare McCann
  • Nick McClellan
November 14, 2012

There was a lot of education-related activity in the states this election season, from a ballot initiative in San Antonio that will raise the sales tax to help pay for pre-K, to the race for Indiana superintendent, where controversial incumbent Tony Bennett lost to challenger Glenda Ritz, who reportedly got more votes in the race than Governor Pence did.

We put together this interactive map to help readers peruse some state-by-state results of key races that will affect early education in the states in coming years. Scroll over states to find out more about who ran, who won and where there could be big policy changes afoot.

State-by-State Results of Key Early Ed-Related Races and Ballot Initiatives

A special thanks to Megan Carolan of NIEER, who contributed research to this map.

Update: The Washington gubernatorial election was called for Inslee (D). Voters in Washington state also approved Initiative 1240 to allow charter schools.

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Podcast: New Findings on D.C. Schools' Education Reforms

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
  • Anne Hyslop
November 13, 2012
Publication Image

When Michelle Rhee was chancellor of DCPS, one of her chief accomplishments was negotiating a new contract with the teachers union that included a new teacher evaluation system. The system, called IMPACT, was designed to keep good teachers in the classroom through incentives like merit pay and weed out the bad by giving the district the power to fire teachers who were repeatedly ranked at the bottom.

IMPACT rates teachers on a variety of metrics, from their students' test scores to classroom observations. It has been both controversial and held up by education reformers as a model for how other districts could begin evaluating teachers in a holistic way. In some ways, the methods for observing teachers are similar to those of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), the Danielson Framework for Teaching and other evaluation systems that are catching on in the early childhood world in that it both evaluates teachers and gives them opportunities for feedback and mentoring. 

DC has been using this system since 2009, so two school years have passed since it began. This month, The New Teacher Project released a report that addresses important questions about how the new teacher evaluation system is playing out. In this podcast, Dan Weisberg of The New Teacher Project and Anne Hyslop of the New America Foundation discuss the new report and what it says about the future of the teaching workforce. Maggie Severns hosts.

Click here to listen to the podcast. You can also subscribe to our podcasts in iTunes, and download previous podcasts from our online archive.

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