Early Ed Watch

Fiscal year 2010 started in October, but Congress is only now wrapping up its work on the FY2010 appropriations bills that fund federal government activities and programs. On Sunday, the Senate passed a $450 billion appropriations bill that combined six of seven unfinished appropriations bills—including the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that funds early education programs. The House of Representatives passed an identical bill this past Thursday, allowing the legislation to go directly to the President, who is expected to sign it into law.

Our Education Policy team here at New America has produced a 2010 Education Appropriations Guide to help you sort through what it means from the Education Department perspective.

Here at Early Ed Watch, we wanted to look more closely at final funding figures for early education-related programs in particular. The chart below shows funding levels for key programs operated by the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as a column showing what President Obama had requested. 

A report released today by the New America Foundation finds that New Jersey has made tremendous strides in improving disadvantaged children's access to high-quality early learning experiences, enabling some districts to nearly erase the achievement gap.

The report, Education Reform Starts Early: Lessons from New Jersey’s PreK-3^rd Reform, doesn’t just focus on New Jersey’s pre-k programs: It provides a blueprint for how to create a high-quality, well-aligned education system that helps children sustain their learning gains up through the third grade and beyond.  And it draws lessons from New Jersey’s experience that can inform federal and state policy efforts to improve quality in early childhood program, raise student achievement, and narrow racial and economic achievement gaps.

But the report also sounds a cautionary note about the fragility of New Jersey’s progress, and urges state leaders to act now to sustain and build on early learning reforms to date -- or risk undoing what the state has achieved so far.

Earlier this week, an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times made a strong argument about how to address a hidden but real problem in elementary schools in California and around the country: the fact that many young children, particularly those in poverty, are missing multiple days of school throughout the school year.

The answer, as with so many things, is to intervene early and get hard numbers on exactly what is going on. The op-ed urges the state of California to do a better job collecting data on exactly which students are missing school. Only with that data can a school district figure out what is keeping these young children from showing up. Is it illness? Transportation problems? A parents' misunderstanding about the importance of school even in these early years? If districts can pinpoint the root of the problem, they can start to solve it.

The op-ed was written by Hedy N. Chang, who directs the Chronic Absence Project, and Yolie Flores, a member of the LAUSD Board of Education and a senior associate at the Chronic Absence Project. In 2008, Chang co-authored a report titled "Present, Engaged, and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades," published by the National Center for Children in Poverty.

"The effects are profound," Chang and Flores write in this week's op-ed. Their research has found:

At some point, most people who spend time around young children encounter a youngster who likes to play the “Why?” game. For those who are not familiar with the “Why?” game, a child asks a question and an adult answers, to which the child asks a second question: Why?

The adult explains the answer and gets the question again: Why?

For a long time, researchers believed that most questions young children ask were being asked in order to prolong a conversation, and not because the child wanted an actual explanation about something. Why? The belief was that children don’t have an understanding of causality until they are between 5 and 8 years old; meaning that they don’t see how one thing can happen or exist because of something else. However, as research continues to dig deeper into the minds of young children, many researchers are starting to believe that very young children—possibly infants—can make causal inferences about the relationship between objects in their environment.