Early Ed Watch

A Blog from New America's Early Education Initiative

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3 Reasons Why Early Learning Deserves More Attention in This Election

  • By
  • Lisa Guernsey
September 25, 2012

Last week, the Newark Star-Ledger's Linda Ocasio asked me why our presidential candidates should be talking about early learning and child care -- the lead topic in an open panel discussion hosted by the Early Education Initiative and the Workforce and Family Program in W

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Upcoming Event: What the Presidential Candidates Should be Saying About Child Care and Early Learning

  • By
  • Clare McCann
September 20, 2012

As the school year starts again, parents across the country are concerned with finding reliable, safe and affordable child care. But with the presidential elections in full swing, neither President Obama nor Governor Romney has made much mention of child care or early learning.

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New Pre-K Data Resource Available, But Challenges Remain

  • By
  • Alex Holt
September 19, 2012
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This post also appeared on our sister blog, Ed Money Watch.

Even as the availability of data on K-12 education programs has exploded over the past decade, the American education system suffers from an acute lack of some of the most basic information about publicly funded programs for young children. Data on funding and enrollment for these programs at the local level have not been publicly available, obscuring the public and policymakers’ basic understanding of these services. Until now.

Today, the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative and Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) announced an expansion of the FEBP database to include pre-kindergarten data at the state and school district levels. The FEBP database is the only centralized location that makes this information available to the public, the media and policymakers.

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Podcast: Is Intelligence Really the Key to Success?

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
September 18, 2012
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Welcome to the new Education Watch podcast, a spruced-up version of the bi-weekly podcast Early Ed Watch has been recording for for over two years.

The new podcasts will still feature education experts from across the country, and they’ll still dive into early education issues that warrant in-depth conversations. But expect more guests per episode, more news analysis and more updates on what we’re working on at New America, from pre-k up through the college years of education. This will, we hope, make listening more fun.

This week on the podcast: Paul Tough, author of the new book "How Children Succeed," discusses how qualities like grit and curiosity may be critical for low-income students' success in the classroom and beyond. Early Education Initiative Director Lisa Guernsey shares thoughts on teacher evaluation for both sides of the Chicago teachers' strike. Guernsey is joined by one of our research associates, Alex Holt, to introduce a new data project from the Early Education Initiative.

Click here to listen to and download the podcast.

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Federal Funding Update: A Stop-Gap Measure for 2013 And Looming Cuts from Sequestration

  • By
  • Clare McCann
September 17, 2012

The Senate is expected to vote this week on a continuing resolution (CR), already passed by the House of Representatives, that will continue to fund the government through March 2013. That means that, beginning with the start of the fiscal year on October 1, 2012, all education and early childhood programs will be funded at the same levels they received last year, plus a marginal 0.612 percent across-the-board increase.

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Measuring Student Learning in the District-Level Race to the Top

  • By
  • Laura Bornfreund
September 17, 2012

Many policymakers are thinking about different ways to measure and use student learning outcomes. In this post, I’ll zoom in on how the Department of Education is thinking about learning outcomes in its new Race to the Top competition, which asks school districts to look at outcomes in three ways: using student performance measures, tracking student growth and capturing student performance data.

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Notes on the Chicago Teachers’ Strike: Watching How Teachers Teach

  • By
  • Lisa Guernsey
September 14, 2012

As the Chicago Teachers strike enters into its fifth day, a few reports this morning* indicate that the Chicago Public Schools’ system for evaluating teachers is no longer one of the biggest sticking points.  But even if leaders in Chicago have come to some resolution this week, debates around the country on the wisdom of using student test-score growth to rate teacher competence are not going away any time soon.

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Study on Low-Income ELL Students Shows Benefit of Bilingualism: Better Self-Control

  • By
  • Maggie Severns
September 13, 2012

Previous research has pointed to bilingualism having cognitive benefits, such as an increased ability to focus and direct attention. Thesebenefits, however, had never been examined on students with low-income backgrounds, a key omission that makes it difficult to use lessons from research on the bilingual brain to better educate America’s large-and-growing population of English language learners.

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Democratic Convention Includes Mentions of Early Childhood and K-12 Education

  • By
  • Clare McCann
September 10, 2012

Though jobs and the economy dominated the stage at the Democratic party’s convention this week in Charlotte, NC, early childhood education and K-12 schools were not left out entirely. In President Obama’s address last Thursday night, he laid out a challenge to the party faithful in attendance and the American people watching on TV:

“Help me recruit 100,000 math and science teachers in the next ten years, and improve early childhood education… You can choose that future for America.”

He wasn’t the only one to mention early education. Julián Castro, mayor of San Antonio, TX, dedicated a portion of his speech to his city’s efforts to expand pre-K. (Mayor Castro has proposed a sales tax increase to support expanding the programs to more than 22,000 children.

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A Conversation with Greg Taylor, CEO of the Foundation for Newark's Future

  • By
  • Lisa Guernsey
September 6, 2012

In 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million donation over five years to help the Newark Public Schools in New Jersey (assuming that another $100 million in matching funds could be found). From that contribution, the Foundation for Newark’s Future was born. Its mission is to make grants to initiatives to improve the district's schools. Last month, staff members for the Early Education Initiative sat down with Greg Taylor, the foundation’s CEO and a former program officer at the Kellogg Foundation, to learn about his priorities for improving early education in the city and throughout the school system. The following is an edited and abridged version of that conversation.

Q: I understand that early childhood is one of the priorities laid out for the Foundation’s vision. Tell us more.

When I came on board in June of 2011, early childhood education actually wasn’t one of the top strategies. What happened initially was many folks invested in the foundation were really focused on teachers, principals and school options, both district and charter. And one of the things we tried to do was to broaden the initiative. There are now six areas:  early childhood education, out-of-school youth, teacher quality and principal leadership, helping the district to effectively implement the Common Core standards and tie them to early childhood education, school options (We want to grow the number of high-quality school options for Newark families. We’re agnostic on the question of charter-district dynamic; more than 50 percent of our investment goes to the Newark Public School System), and community engagement.

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