Early Ed Watch

Updated 4/10/2013 5:00 PM to reflect newly published information about the state matching portion of the Preschool for All plan.

President Obama released his fiscal year 2014 budget request earlier today, which would include $75.0 billion* over 10 years for his “Preschool for All” proposal. On top of this, the president proposes other boosts for early learning, including funding increases for Head Start, Child Care and Development Block Grants, IDEA special education programs, and the home visiting program. He also proposes budget increases to several other programs under the Department of Education that could support early learning.

In the cover story of this month’s Atlantic magazine, writer Hanna Rosin plunges into the sensitive and scintillating topic of parenting via the iPad.  Memorably titled, The Touch-Screen Generation, the article describes how many middle-class parents feel “pinched,” caught between being dazzled by the multitude of easy-to-use apps that engage even very young children and fearful that too much time with these screen-based devices could spell harm. “Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease,” Rosin writes.  

Just as the Atlantic magazine arrived, the March issue of the ZERO TO THREE journal was released with nearly the entire volume devoted to “Media and Technology in the Lives of Infants and Toddlers.”  I was asked to write one of the pieces, and I decided to focus on the looming question of how electronic media may be affecting language development. 

Last week, the National Institute for Early Education Research released new data on the impact of preschool from a study of New Jersey’s state-funded pre-K program. By following children’s progress for more than six years, researchers determined that even in fifth grade, kids who had attended pre-K were still doing significantly better than their peers on a variety of academic measures. Those academic results alone make a strong case for better investments in pre-K, but let’s consider one finding that deserves special attention in debates about the cost of pre-K: The children who attended the publicly funded pre-K program were also less likely to repeat a grade.

The study showed that even by fifth grade, the chance of retention (the jargonny word for being held back or repeating a grade) was reduced by 40 percent if children had attended the state’s Abbott pre-K program.

Here at Early Ed Watch, we’ve written about the importance of full-day kindergarten, especially in helping children keep up with the more rigorous demands set forth by the new Common Core State Standards. Yet kindergarten remains vulnerable to annual budgeting processes. Most states do not guarantee by law that children will have access to a full day of kindergarten, and six states don’t require districts to offer any type of kindergarten.