Early Ed Watch

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New Reports Analyze Federal and State Investments in Children

  • By
  • Clare McCann
July 30, 2012

The economic recession has thrust more families into poverty and slowed federal, state and local revenue. A new report out this week from First Focus, “Children’s Budget 2012,” examines the amount of federal dollars directed toward children in this challenging climate.

Although total federal funding for children rose over the past five years by about 17.5 percent ($46 billion), the report finds this is primarily due to increased eligibility for entitlement programs such as the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. The annual discretionary funding Congress appropriates for children’s programs has fallen in each of the past two years, and dropped in inflation-adjusted terms by 1.5 percent between 2008 and 2012.

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Fordham Hosts Debate on GOP Education Policy

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
July 27, 2012

At a discussion Thursday at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C., Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings spoke with moderator and Fordham President Chester Finn, Jr. about the Republican Party’s direction on education policy.

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A First Look at the Department of Education’s Sequestration Plans

  • By
  • Clare McCann
July 26, 2012

This January, across-the-board cuts in federal spending could be applied to most fiscal year 2013 appropriations, a process known as sequestration. According to the Department of Education, school programs will experience significant losses if Congress allows sequestration to move forward.

A Senate subcommittee examined the issue in detail this week. Using a Congressional Budget Office estimate that says agencies’ budgets could be cut by 7.8 percent, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Chairman of the Subcommittee Tom Harkin (D-IA) each issued post-sequester predictions. (Harkin’s report also includes Health & Human Services programs like Head Start.)

Both agreed the cuts would be dramatic. Title I, the federal government’s main funding stream for the education of poor children, would be awarded $1.1 billion less than in the current fiscal year. There would be $900 million less in special education grants to states. Almost 100,000 children would lose access to Head Start, and another 80,000 would be cut from Child Care and Development Block Grant subsidies. Special education preschool grants would lose nearly $30 million.

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Duke Researchers Find Effective Teachers Clustered in Tested Grades

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
July 24, 2012

A recent working paper from public policy researchers at Duke University examines one potential unintended consequence of the school accountability era: Is it possible that accountability testing, which under No Child Left Behind begins in the third grade, has given elementary school administrators an incentive to cluster their strongest teachers in third, fourth and fifth grade classrooms, thus depriving younger students of more effective teachers?

According to the study, by Sarah C. Fuller and Helen F. Ladd, this may be the case. In North Carolina between the years of 1995 and 2009, teachers who were average or less effective at improving test scores were more likely than their peers to be reassigned from 3rd-5th grade classrooms to kindergarten, first grade and second grade. A teacher one standard deviation above the mean for student test scores in reading was 74.5 percent as likely as an average teacher to move from teaching 3rd-5th grade to teaching earlier grades. Teachers with above-average math scores were 70.1 percent as likely as an average teacher to move down into the early grades.

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New Study Shows Volunteer Reading Tutors Get Limited Results

  • By
  • Alex Holt
July 20, 2012

A new study by Sarah Miller, Paul Connolly and Lisa Maguire of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland suggests that while volunteer tutors can be effective at helping students improve their reading speed and ability to read aloud, volunteers with little to no training are unlikely to help a child improve his or her reading comprehension or reading confidence -- skills that may be more effectively taught by professional educators.

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Brookings Event Outlines Benefits of Wired Classrooms

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
July 19, 2012

At a Brookings Institute panel discussion Tuesday, two experts in educational technology -- James Werle, director of the non-profit Internet2 K20 Initiative, and Eric D. Fingerhut, vice president of education and STEM learning at the research organization Battelle -- discussed opportunities to deploy technology in the classroom. The conversation brimmed with optimism.

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Child Well-Being Report Paints Picture of Struggling Families and Kids

  • By
  • Clare McCann
July 18, 2012

Here at Early Ed Watch, you usually find us writing about education policy. But as we have often written, education is most powerful when it is combined with high-quality health care, parenting, child care, and nutrition. Last week, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, a 22-agency team that collects and reports data on child and family welfare, released a new report, “America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being.”

The report highlights some shifts in child well-being indicators and metrics, many of which carry implications for education policy. According to the report, there were 73.9 million children in the United States in 2011 -- up from 1.5 million kids in 2000.  Of those, 24.3 million were aged 0 to 5.  That means children make up almost a quarter of the population, and very young children make up nearly 8 percent.

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Report Argues for Improving the Quality of For-Profit Child Care Programs

  • By
  • Clare McCann
July 12, 2012

Here at Early Ed Watch, we write a lot about publicly funded early childhood programs, including state funded pre-K and federally funded child care, special education and Head Start. In many cases, these programs are run by non-profit organizations. But for-profit childcare is a $20 billion industry that plays a significant role in providing care for the nearly 11 million U.S. children under five in child care.

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Federal Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against Head Start Recompetition

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
July 10, 2012

In April, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched its highly anticipated Designation Renewal System, which will redistribute federal funding away from low-quality Head Start and Early Head Start providers and favor providers with more proven track records. HHS was met with pushback from the media, individual Head Start providers, and from state Head Start associations--most notably, the Ohio Head Start Association, which filed a lawsuit against HHS claiming the “recompetition” process was arbitrary and unfairly penalized providers for past infractions that may have been corrected.

A federal judge dismissed the suit yesterday, leaving little doubt that Head Start providers in Ohio and elsewhere will participate in the new Designated Renewal System.

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Harnessing Technology to Support Young Families: What States Can Do

  • By
  • Lisa Guernsey
July 9, 2012
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A red-hot ed-tech marketplace is creating a feeling of urgency among decision makers in state agencies and local school districts – and early education is no exception. In a world of increasing fiscal constraints, state leaders are under pressure to capitalize on new technologies to improve productivity and help children excel. But without thoughtful adoption, leaders are at risk of spending public dollars on products that sit unused, lock districts into specific brands or platforms, or get in the way of promoting the positive, face-to-face interactions with adults that young children need.

To help state leaders see past the hype, I was commissioned to write a policy brief for the Education Commission of the States. It is being released this week at the commission’s annual forum in Atlanta. The brief, Technology in Early Education: Building Platforms for Connections and Content that Strengthen Families and Promote Success in School,  is part of a series underwritten by GE called The Progress of Education Reform. (Other issues in the series have examined digital citizenship, the implications of defining college readiness, and the intricacies of state school funding.)

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