PreK-3rd

President Obama announced this week that 10 states will receive waivers of some of the most punitive provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), kicking off a year of focus on how and if states will start changing their systems to align with the administration’s priorities.

This week and next, the STEM acronym will get some major airtime, as the Obama Administration tries to drive home the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics in its new budget proposals.  The President kicked off the conversation in his State of the Union Address, and he provided some memorable visuals two days ago when he gleefully launched marshmallows from student-invented cannons at the second-annual White House Science Fair.  

All this talk of science and innovation might lead one to think that literacy and early education are sliding down a notch on the Administration’s priority list.

Decades ago, as researchers began to study what young children might learn from educational TV, they often found that "co-viewing" -- the act of parents and children watching together -- was strongly associated with children learning from what they watched.  Today, although TV is still the number-one type of media used by young children, new forms of media are begging new questions.

Several new projects and papers have emerged lately that emphasize the need for building continuous systems of high-quality education from pre-k through the third grade. Because PreK-3^rd reform ideas are so comprehensive and multi-faceted, they can be challenging to grasp at first; it’s not always easy to know where to begin. So we’re glad to see a host of different organizations pulling resources together to help. 

Here are some of the latest:

As digital media and new technologies start to capture the attention of early educators, it’s important to ask: Do we know whether any of these gadgets and gaming programs actually help children learn? 

In an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times yesterday, Susan Ochshorn and I argued for injecting some fresh ideas into the national education debates by looking at new approaches for observing and evaluating teachers.

The assessment of children in the early years and early grades has always been a controversial topic, but now the issue is moving to the forefront of early education debates. Assessment is a pivotal piece of the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge, and the larger education debates on evaluating teachers are tied to data on student achievement.

Watched a teacher lately? Anyone? Anyone?

Each January, Early Ed Watch predicts the hot spots for the coming year -- issues that will dominate discussions in early education policy and trigger halleluiahs or handwringing from advocates of better investments in early learning, birth through third grade.

Debates over how to improve teacher preparation have been central to the education reform conversation over the past several years. Researchers, reformers and stakeholders called for a number of exciting, yet sometimes contradictory ideas: improving coursework on child development; moving to a model that includes more meaningful practice for prospective teachers in diverse classroom settings; holding teacher prep programs accountable; strengthening state regulatory rules for teacher prep programs; opening the doors for more alternative certification options; and more. Here at New America we joined the conversation, releasing a paper that focused on how to improve the preparation and licensure of prospective early grades teachers (PreK-3rd), and recommending that states reduce the overlap between early childhood and elementary teacher licenses.