Pre-K

Louisiana Governor proposes paying for pre-K with federal hurricane recovery dollars

California Governor stumps for tax increase to avoid massive education budget cuts

Expansion to University of Missouri’s medical program dependent on tobacco tax hike

Former Pennsylvania governor says surplus should have gone to education budget instead of Rainy Day fund

Louisiana Governor proposes paying for pre-K with federal hurricane recovery dollars

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has proposed paying for part of the state’s free preschool program for at-risk youth with federal hurricane-recovery money. The entire pre-K program costs $75 million a year, and the governor’s budget proposal shows $20 million coming from the hurricane fund. The pre-K program funds 16,000 four-year olds from low-income households and the $20 million would go to parishes that suffered hurricane damage. The U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development will need to approve the plan before Governor Jindal can move forward. More here...

California Governor stumps for tax increase to avoid massive education budget cuts

California Governor Jerry Brown continues to stump for a proposition that would raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 and increase sales tax by one-quarter of a percent for four years. The proposal would generate $6 billion dollars in revenue. If the measure fails it would trigger $5.4 billion in cuts this fiscal year to public schools and community colleges as well as $500 million from California’s public universities. One of Brown’s advisers suggests that the tax hike would not only restore funding to K-12 and community colleges, but it would increase per pupil spending by $2,500. Without the new revenue, districts will receive $1,300 less per student than they do currently. There is a worry that the measure will fail, especially because there is a competing proposition to raise taxes, which analysts worry will confuse voters to the point that they will vote for neither. More here...

Expansion to University of Missouri’s medical program dependent on tobacco tax hike

A $43 million expansion to Missouri University’s medical program depends on the passage of a ballot initiative to increase the state tax on tobacco. The new revenue would be used to increase enrollment in the program by 30 percent and build a new medical education building and a “clinical campus” where students would spend two years doing clinical work. Proponents argue that the expansion will help address Missouri’s current shortage of physicians. One economic impact study suggests that the expansion could eventually lead to 300 new physicians in the state, as well as 3,500 other jobs, and a boost for Missouri’s economy overall. Should the initiative pass, the tax per cigarette would increase by $0.0365. More here...

Former Pennsylvania governor says surplus should have gone to education budget instead of Rainy Day fund

Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell criticized Governor Tom Corbett for not restoring cuts to public school funding and suggested a correlation between declining funding and declining test scores in Pennsylvania. Specifically, Rendell said that it made no sense to put nearly $1 billion into the state’s Rainy Day fund from this year’s surplus without restoring full funding to public education. "‘I think the (recently announced) decline in test scores shows that it's pouring in Pennsylvania right now. Not just raining, but pouring’" said Rendell.  More here...

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

States around the country have big plans to improve the collection and coordination of data on young children, including data dashboards, scorecards and tools for tracking the well-being of children from the day they are born. But how -- and if --  these plans turn into reality depends on whether they can win support from federal  grants, state funds or private philanthropy, according to a report released today by the Early Childhood Data Collaborative.

Video, TV, interactive books, screen-based games: Young children today are practically bathed in this stuff as young as toddlerhood. What is the impact? As a parent who is simultaneously fascinated by and worried about the impact of electronic media on my children─and as a journalist and researcher specializing in education, technology, and social science─I have been digging for answers. Along the way I’ve come upon several research findings that overturn conventional wisdom. Here are five common parental assumptions that the research does not necessarily support.

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.

This post also appeared on our sister blog, Early Ed 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.

But the data are far from perfect. Accompanying the release of the data is a report, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level, which details the continued shortcomings of early education data. The report finds that some states with state-funded pre-K programs do not make data available on some of the most basic information, such as how many children are enrolled in a given district. And even those that do provide such data are missing details on whether their pre-K programs are full- or half-day programs.

The data also illustrate the difficulty in providing a full picture of local pre-K access when many pre-K programs are run by community-based organizations (CBOs), such as non-profit child care centers, that are not organized along school-district lines. FEBP provides education data by school district, the common unit of measure for education at the local level, and not by city or county. This structure means that the vast majority of FEBP data can only reflect district-run state-funded pre-K programs, district-run Head Start programs and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) services provided by school districts. With the exception of Florida (an exception explained in the issue brief), FEBP does not include district-level data on programs operated by CBOs unless they receive funding from local school districts or use teachers paid by the districts. This is a large omission, as many CBOs receive public funds to operate Head Start centers and state-funded pre-K programs and are a critical part of pre-K delivery in the United States.

The authors, Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative, and Alex Holt, a program associate for the Education Policy Program, also find that kindergarten, assumed to be an integral part of public schools, is plagued by a lack of information and comparable data. District-level data are unavailable on funding specifically for kindergarten or enrollment that distinguishes between half-day and full-day programs.

This lack of data carries serious consequences for equity in educational opportunities and could affect children’s academic growth. For example, if teachers and school leaders don’t know what interventions children receive before they enter kindergarten, it is difficult for them to best target their instruction to students’ needs. While FEBP’s pre-K expansion is a good start, states must invest in comprehensive data systems that allow for comparisons between districts.

Readers can head over to www.edbudgetproject.org to view pre-K data for their states and school districts. The Federal Education Budget Project has provided data on funding, demographics, and achievement for states, PreK-12 school districts, and institutions of higher education since 2007. The pre-kindergarten expansion includes funding and enrollment information for state-funded pre-K programs, Head Start programs, and federal IDEA preschool services at the state and school-district levels.

To read the full report, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level, click here. To view the data in the FEBP database, click here.

The database expansion and report were made possible with grants from the Foundation for Child Development.

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.

This issue brief, produced by the New America Foundation's Early Education Initiative, addresses the dearth of reliable, complete, and comparable data on pre-K and kindergarten in school districts and local communities.

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.

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.