Early Ed Watch

Monday evening, for the first time, the Romney campaign offered some much-needed clarification on what Governor Romney would or wouldn’t do for early learning if he were elected president: Speaking at a mock debate hosted by the Columbia Teachers College, Phil Handy, a  co-chair of Romney's Education Policy Advisory Group, said that Romney would make Head Start more of an educational program, and criticized the current programm, saying it functions “more as a social experience.”

His statement is likely an interpretation of recent studies on what gains Head Start kids do and don’t make when in the program. Currently, while many of the  gains of Head Start have been shown to “fade out” by third grade, research suggests that thecognitive and social-emotional gains children make in high-quality pre-K settings could be replicated in Head Start.

But calling Head Start a “social experience” is both patronizing and off-target. Head Start is in need of improvement, which the Obama administration is pursuing through its recompetition program. But what does Handy mean by “educational”? Is he suggesting the program focus more on academic skills like pre-reading and math? The Obama Administration’s Head Start reforms will soon incorporate the Classroom Assessment and Scoring System, also known as CLASS, to augment the administration’s evaluations of Head Start providers. That tool, which is already employed by Head Start programs to figure out which teachers need additional training, should help boost teacher quality and make the program better at preparing kids for school. But it’s unclear whether Handy or Romney are aware of these reforms, and whether their stress on academics would translate into classroom instruction that is developmentally appropriate  for young children—not to mention the fact that the social-emotional gains children are making in Head Start are crucial.

States are starting to enact laws that retain third graders who are unable to score at proficient levels on states’ reading assessments. In 2002, under the leadership of Governor Jeb Bush, Florida instituted one of the first such policies as part of its comprehensive reading law. And that is key – the retention policy is just a piece of the law. Florida has made significant investments in literacy, PreK-12, and has seen improvements in children’s reading proficiency since the law’s implementation.

Last week, the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative and Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) rolled out a major expansion to FEBP’s education database. For the first time, the site includes data on pre-K in states and school districts. In collecting the data, we found that states and districts face significant obstacles in collecting reliable, comparable pre-K data. But we also found that one state deserves a closer look for its organized state of information on funding and enrollment at the district level: Florida.

Most states­–Florida is no exception–fund pre-K programs run by public schools as well as programs run by community-based organizations (CBOs), which are typically private non-profit or for-profit groups. The problem with this structure, from a data-gathering perspective, is that it is very difficult to collect data on how many children are in publicly funded pre-K programs within the boundaries of a school district. States tend to report data on district-run programs separately from data on CBOs, and data on enrollment in programs run by CBOs are likely to include children who live in different school districts. A new report that accompanied the release of the data, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level,examines the plethora of issues preventing good data collection efforts and thus hindering good policy.

But it’s not all bad. In the course of collecting data and writing the report we discovered that Florida has found a way to track children enrolled and funding allocated to both district-run programs and CBOs within the structure of the school district.

As few as six percent of Illinois pre-K teachers have credentials that qualify them to teach English language learners, according to a new survey from the Latino Policy Forum. As Early Ed Watch has reported extensively, Illinois plans for all pre-K teachers who instruct groups of English language learners (ELLs) to have such credentials by 2014; these credentials are already required for K-12 teachers who instruct large numbers of ELL students.

The Latino Policy Forum surveyed 307 administrators representing 354 state-funded pre-K programs, which serve 64,482 children. The sample was not representative of all programs in Illinois: Respondents were disproportionately from Cook County, the area that includes Chicago and its suburbs and has a higher immigrant population than most other regions of Illinois.

Still, the results paint a useful portrait. While six percent of teacher respondents overall had bilingual/ESL credentials, programs in communities with a high concentration of Latino residents do have a slightly higher proportion of teachers with the credentials — nine percent.