Pre-K

On a day that many educators and office workers are madly finishing tasks or already traveling to prepare for the holidays, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released results from a long-awaited study on whether children's gains from Head Start still show up four years after students have exited the program. 

Before taking a holiday break, Early Ed Watch has a tradition of looking back at the most significant issues we have covered over the past year.  Many of these topics generate worry and a feeling of discouragement, especially over the lack of funds to improve children’s access to high-quality pre-K and full-day kindergarten programs. But some signal hope, providing educators and policymakers new ideas for making improvements despite constrained resources.

Jacqueline Jones, our country’s first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Early Learning, left her post at the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month. Early Ed Watch had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Jones. Below is the complete interview, edited for typographical errors only.

Yesterday the Early Education Initiative issued a new report by Maggie Severns, “Reforming Head Start.” In addition to this issue brief on Head Start “recompetition,” readers can also access our new Head Start background and analysis page, which was released in September as part of our pre-K expansion of the Federal Education Budget Project.

The Education Watch podcast this week covers a lot of ground that pertains to early education. We talk about a forthcoming Head Start brief, news from the U.S. Department of Education on Race to the Top (including five new winners of Early Learning Challenge grants) and new commentary in Ed Week on half-day kindergarten and the mismatch with the Common Core. 

They are both red states with conservative legislatures. But when it comes to investments in pre-K, Mississippi and Oklahoma have taken entirely different approaches. While Oklahoma has invested in universal voluntary preschool to all families that want to enroll their 4-year-olds, Mississippi is one of the few states in the country that doesn't spend a dime on preschool education for its population, not even for the neediest.

Today the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announced five winners for the second round of the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge: Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin. These states join nine others that received grants in 2011: California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington.

As we've noted many times on Early Ed Watch, Head Start, the federal government's pre-K program, is at a crossroads. 

In the midst of budget threats and an ongoing debate over whether Head Start creates lasting academic gains in children, Head Start has embarked on its largest reforms in decades to improve the quality of its grantees. The reform process, called “re-competition,” forces Head Start providers that are found during audits to be low-quality to compete with other agencies in the same geographic area for future Head Start grants. 

Anyone who has grappled with questions of what to do with data from child assessments – whether based on observations of children's development over months or simple snapshots of early literacy learning – will want to tune in to the next webinar coming from the PreK-3rd Grade National Work Group.

Currently, it is impossible to know how many children are enrolled in publicly funded pre-K within the boundaries of any given district. This is a serious impediment, not just for local superintendents and principals who are in the dark about the educational backgrounds of their schools’ incoming kindergarteners, but also for policymakers, who can’t effectively discuss issues of equity and access without good data to make comparisons.