Early Ed Watch

A Blog from New America's Early Education Initiative

HHS Proposes New Child Care Rules

  • By
  • Conor Williams
May 20, 2013
Kathleen Sebelius Presents New Rules at CentroNia

Conor Williams recently joined the Early Education Initiative as a Senior Researcher. He's just completed a PhD in Government at Georgetown University, a degree he pursued after teaching first grade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Conor's research addresses the challenges immigrant families face in the American education system, educational equity as a means to increased social mobility, and the history of education in the United States.

In an era of Washington gridlock, there’s almost nothing quite as gratifying as seeing big policy changes that echo one’s recent arguments. Along those lines, Thursday was a great day for advocates of more and higher-quality child care in the United States. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new Obama administration proposal to raise the federal baseline for subsidized child care centers across the country. She introduced the new rules at CentroNía, a bilingual community center in Washington, D.C. that includes early childhood programs, a PreK-5 charter school, and parent outreach initiatives.

An Ocean of Unknowns in Using Student Achievement Data to Evaluate Early Grade Teachers

  • By
  • Laura Bornfreund
May 14, 2013
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More than 20 states now require measures of student achievement to carry significant weight in teachers’ effectiveness ratings – even in the earliest grades, in which children do not participate in state standardized testing. As a result, states and school districts are struggling to find sound methods to measure young students’ learning.

Podcast: Rating Early Elementary Teachers When Reliable Data Don't Readily Exist

May 13, 2013
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As a sneak peek to her policy paper to be released this week, we talked late last week with senior policy analyst Laura Bornfreund about how schools are experimenting with rating teachers' effectiveness in the PreK-3rd grades.

Questions About How the Sequester Is Affecting Low-Income Children

  • By
  • Clare McCann
May 13, 2013

On March 1, 2013, federal agencies were directed by the White House budget office to cut spending for the remainder of the 2013 fiscal year, through Sept. 30. The cuts, known as “sequestration” in Washington parlance, apply evenly to almost every program, so agencies do not have much leeway to protect certain programs at the cost of others. Now, two-and-a-half months later, the big question is how the cuts are affecting people on the ground. The answer: We have anecdotes, but no firm numbers.

A New Way to Track Pre-K—Hourly: Part 2

  • By
  • Alex Holt
May 10, 2013
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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.

Head Start Exceeds Requirement That Half of Teachers Earn BA in Early Childhood

  • By
  • Clare McCann
May 9, 2013

According to recent budget documents from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Head Start program has surpassed a statutory requirement that half of Head Start teachers have bachelor’s degrees in early childhood by September 30, 2013. In fact, according to the Department, 62 percent of teachers had earned the degree by fiscal year 2012.

A New Way to Track Pre-K—Hourly: Part 1

  • By
  • Alex Holt
May 7, 2013
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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. 

At National Journal: Assessment Lessons from Early Childhood

  • By
  • Laura Bornfreund
May 3, 2013

This week, the National Journal’s expert blog asked writers to respond to a series of questions about assessment. I zoomed in on several lessons from early childhood assessments, PreK-3rd grade, that educators can and should integrate into 3rd – 12th grade standardized assessment practices.

iPads in the Classroom and Media Mentors

  • By
  • Lisa Guernsey
May 1, 2013

Is it just me, or has there been a shift lately in the way people talk about technology and young children? In addition to the still-lingering questions of "whether" screen technologies have any role in children's learning, parents and teachers seem to be hungry for more on the "how" -- How should iPads be used? How could apps fit with what I want to show or have children explore? How can I find out what works and what doesn't?

Last Year the “Worst in a Decade” for High-Quality Pre-K, Annual Report Finds

  • By
  • Alex Holt
April 29, 2013

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.

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