Head Start

As is becoming evident, Mitt Romney choosing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his running mate in the 2012 presidential election campaign will give a lot of ammunition to the Obama campaign, which immediately took aim, saying that Ryan has engineered budgets that “proposed an additional $250,000 tax cut for millionaires, and deep cuts in education from Head Start to college aid.”

Inevitably, some of the spin coming out of the Obama campaign will be very true and some will be a stretch. But contrary to some of the media's reports, the claim that a Romney-Ryan ticket would devastate education spending, Head Start in particular, is a stretch.

In April, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched its highly anticipated Designation Renewal System, which will redistribute federal funding away from low-quality Head Start and Early Head Start providers and favor providers with more proven track records. HHS was met with pushback from the media, individual Head Start providers, and from state Head Start associations--most notably, the Ohio Head Start Association, which filed a lawsuit against HHS claiming the “recompetition” process was arbitrary and unfairly penalized providers for past infractions that may have been corrected.

A federal judge dismissed the suit yesterday, leaving little doubt that Head Start providers in Ohio and elsewhere will participate in the new Designated Renewal System.

Read the headlines about the federal government’s early education competitions among states, and you might think there is only one game in town: the Early Learning Challenge that is part of Obama’s signature education reform initiative, Race to the Top.

But three other statewide grants could also have an impact on children’s learning in early childhood from birth through third grade: Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy grants; Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) grants; and the original Race to the Top, which is labeled a K-12 program and therefore explicitly includes the K-3 grades and could implicitly impact public schools’ pre-K programs as well.

This week, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released their proposal for funding five states that narrowly missed winning the 2011 Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge. Under the proposal, those states -- Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin -- could receive up to 50 percent of what they were eligible to win in the original competition.

On May 11, 2012, Lisa Guernsey gave a talk at Harvard University's PreK-3rd Institute on the federal government's role so far in reforming early education to enable better alignment across the pre-K, kindergarten, first, second and third grades (PreK-3rd). The presentation examines the Obama Administration's top-level education agenda and its early learning policies and describes how new and existing federal programs and funding streams are influencing the work of states and school districts in creating better early education systems for young children.

On May 17, 2012, Lisa Guernsey gave a talk at the Education Writers Association annual meeting in Philadelphia on new trends in watching and measuring good teaching that was based in part on the New America paper, Watching Teachers Work: Using Observation Tools to Promote Effective Teaching in the Early Years and Early Grades.

On April 15, 2012, Lisa Guernsey was part of an invited symposium at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Vancouver, Canada.

Today, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) posted the remaining 97 funding opportunities for community-based organizations, city agencies and school districts that wish to compete with current Head Start providers for Head Start funds. The new grant-making process, known as recompetition, aims to move funds away from Head Start and Early Head Start providers that were found to be deficient during recent government audits and redirect grants to new providers that appear to meet higher standards.

Early educators and child advocates continue to stress the importance of children learning to read by the end of third grade.  Legislators in several states are signaling their interest in this too by proposing third-grade retention policies that keep children from graduating to fourth grade until they can pass a reading test. Is this a smart approach?

Early educators and child advocates continue to stress the importance of children learning to read by the end of third grade.  Legislators in several states are signaling their interest in this too by proposing third-grade retention policies that keep children from graduating to fourth grade until they can pass a reading test. Is this a smart approach?