Early Ed Watch

Cutting edge technological innovation isn’t typically the first thing that comes to mind when we think about early education. Many of the things we associate with young children’s learning—caring adult-child interactions, alphabet blocks, the caterpillar-in-the-jar—are decidedly low-tech. For better or for worse, early education seems like one area unlikely to be revolutionized by the kind of technology-driven productivity increases that are transforming modern life.

In 2005 Yale researcher William Gilliam found that pre-kindergarten programs expell children with disturbing frequency. Pre-k programs expell nearly 7 out of 1,000 students annually--that's 3 times the rate at which public schools expell K-12 students. This shocking finding gained national news coverage, and raised important questions about how well our patchwork of public, private, and community-based pre-k providers is equipped to serve children with behavior and other problems.

Early education programs fared poorly under the fiscal year 2008 omnibus appropriations bill signed by President Bush in late December. Of 9 federal programs that provide support for early education, only one—Title I—received a significant funding increase—$1 billion, bringing Title I funding to $13.9 billion for 2008. But, because Title I funds are used to improve education for disadvantaged students from preschool through high school, only a fraction of this increase will go to early education.

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