Early Ed Watch

Just before Labor Day, the Texas State Education Agency released its biennial appropriations request to the legislature, which puts forward the amount of funding the agency is seeking to support its activities in the 2010 and 2011 fiscal years.

A recent report from Human Rights Watch documents the extent to which corporal punishment is still employed in America's classrooms. According to the report, twenty-one states, many in the South, still allow corporal punishment -- especially paddling -- in schools. The report identified more than 223,000 reported cases of corporal punishment across the United States in the 2006-07 school year and estimates that thousands more did not go reported.

Annie Evans is a writer for Sesame Street. Martin Robinson is a puppeteer who brings Snuffy, Telly, and Slimey the worm to life on the show. Last week, the two, who are long-time friends and colleagues, were married last week in a ceremony on the Sesame Street set that included a cameo appearance by Oscar the Grouch.

Those British accents sure make them sound intelligent, but are preschoolers in England smarter than American preschoolers? Associated Press reporter Nancy Zuckerbrod posed the question last week. Zuckerbrod and her family just moved to London, and she was surprised to find that her charming 5-year old daughter was "behind" academically according to the standards of her prospective English primary school. Back in Washington, D.C., where Zuckerbrod's daughter attended publicly funded pre-k, she had been a star student: curious, played well with others, an all-around good kid. Meanwhile, peers her age in England, the school told Zuckerbrod, were expected to be reading by themselves and understand fractions.

So are early education standards really higher in England? Early Ed Watch took a look at the English Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, which has been operating in English preschool ("reception") classes since 2002. We compared those standards with those from two U.S. states--Georgia, which has the nation's oldest universal pre-k system, and Massachusetts, which is generally regarded as having some of the nation's strongest academic standards (and is now en route to universal pre-k)-as well as the District of Columbia, where Zuckerbrod's daughter had previously attended pre-k.