Pre-K

Still thinking about how to spend your stimulus dollars? Earlier this spring, I visited an elementary school in Montgomery County that offers a great model to ensure the greatest academic bang for your ARRA buck. Hint: It has something to do with PreK-3rd Alignment. (See our video, released today, for more details.)

For the past two years, researchers at the RAND Corporation have been mapping the quality and availability of preschools in California, home to the nation's largest population of preschoolers.

You might not immediately associate former Sen. Bill Frist -- the former Republican majority leader and transplant surgeon -- with calls for more spending on high-quality childcare and early education opportunities. But at a forum on health policy earlier this month, his dedication to these issues was unmistakable.

If you grew up watching early episodes of Sesame Street, like I did, you may not want to know that the show turns 40 years old this year. Who needs more reminders that middle age is on its way?

On May 7 the Office of Management and Budget released the President’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2010.

Checker Finn, a former assistant secretary of education in the George H.W. Bush administration, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post calling on advocates and policymakers to "slow down the preschool bandwagon."

If you read this blog regularly, you probably know that quality is critical in early education programs. While high-quality pre-k programs have been shown to produce significant learning gains and long-term benefits for participating children, poor quality programs do not produce such results.

You voted. We investigated. In a blog post last month, we asked you to choose what research most piqued your interest among 10 relevant posters released at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. The top 3 vote-getters: Research on "fade-out" in the elementary school years; social behavior in preschool; and early academic outcomes for children in family-based care, center-based or public pre-K. Our final post in this series describes the fade-out research, which is clearly a topic of great interest among our readers, receiving more votes than any other. Thanks again for your input.

Researchers have long puzzled over why poor children who acquire significant cognitive benefits from preschool tend to lose that academic edge by 3^rd grade -- a phenomenon known as "fade-out." Research presented last month by Aleksandra Holod and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University's Teacher College fills in another piece of the puzzle, showing that one factor is whether the child's elementary school serves a population that is mostly poor.

Put on your bill-tracking hats, because Congress is back with more pre-k legislation.

Last month, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) reported that states made progress in increasing preschool access, quality, and funding in 2008. Meanwhile, Pre-K Now has been checking the pulse of state governors to see if those gains can be sustained through 2010.