Early Education

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.

This is the second post in a series on winners of the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC), the Obama Administration’s competition to spur improvements in early learning for children up to age 5.  Earlier this week, we wrote about states’ plans to use quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS). In this post, we’ll look at how states plan to evaluate those systems. Later posts will explore plans to improve early learning standards, develop the early childhood workforce and implement kindergarten entry assessments.

State and federal policymakers seem to have bought into the idea that rating systems are the best mechanism to encourage early learning programs to improve their quality and assist parents in selecting centers that will best prepare their children to learn.

This is the first post in a month-long series examining the nine winning states in the 2011 Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) and their plans to improve the quality and coordination of early childhood programs.

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 his State of the Union Address last week, President Obama focused on building a more skilled workforce. One of the proposals he made was for “states to require students to stay in school until they graduate or turn 18.” It was a surprising and an ill-advised suggestion, and while it may not immediately sound like an early education issue, it does have some bearing on how we educate young children.

School choice continues to be seen as an important strategy for improving public education, and last week’s focus – “School Choice Week” ended on January 27 – brought out more reflections on why it works. In early education, the concept of choice is already a given, since parents are expected to choose preschools, childcare and other early learning centers for their children. When it comes to affordable, high-quality programs, though, choices remain limited for many parents.

Teacher wars are raging across the nation. One side blasts the "bad" teachers, waving around student test-score data and demanding accountability. On the other side are teachers: Defensive, closing the doors to their classrooms — and to the promise of improving their practice.

How do we halt the teacher-bashing, as President Obama urged in his State of the Union address, and still improve the quality of teaching? The answer is to radically change the evaluation conversation. A focus on watching teachers work — on how they actually interact with students — is long overdue.