Early Education

One of the least-discussed federal special education programs is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part C grants for infants and toddlers. IDEA Part C is a $443 million program housed in the Department of Education. It currently offers early intervention (EI) services to 350,000 infants and children between birth and age 2.

This week's National Journal Education Experts blog asks about the big takeaways from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's MET study on effective teaching. My colleagues Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative, and Anne Hyslop, education policy analyst, weighed in. 

In a post for the Huffington Post's Education blog, I wrote about the Early Education Initiative's event on January 14 that highlighted three promising strategies for turning around low-performing schools: FirstSchool, AppleTree's Every Child Ready and Cincinnati's

January is often when governors signal what they plan to do in the coming year, and education is a perennial topic in “State of the State” addresses. What can they say they haven’t said before? Plenty.  A white paper published by the National Governor’s Association last fall has loads of ideas for what to say -- and do.

This is the second of a two-part series written by guest blogger Megan Carolan, policy research coordinator for the National Institute for Early Education Research. Yesterday, Megan spotlighted problems with questions about preschool in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Today’s post explores the roots of the issue, describes how often the questionable data are cited and suggests how to start fixing the problem.

This post was written by Megan Carolan, policy research coordinator at the National Institute for Early Education Research, who will be providing consulting support to the Early Education Initiative and the pre-K side of the Federal Education Budget Project this year. We are happy to have her on board as a guest blogger for Early Ed Watch.

This week’s question on the National Journal Education Expert’s blog asks if policymakers should focus on providing pre-K for every child.

In my response, I discuss three reasons why universal pre-K should be the goal. Here’s one:

Each January, Early Ed Watch predicts where we will see the most action, innovation and consternation in the year ahead. Here are the hot spots we see for 2013. Notable is the absence of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act, otherwise known as No Child Left Behind. Prognosticators don’t give the bill much chance of making progress this year, given stalemates between the two houses of Congress.

The Child Care Development Block Grant, on the other hand, could see some action on Capitol Hill.  Debates on how to evaluate teachers will likely continue to dominate, as they did in 2011 and 2012. And at least one topic has popped up consistently since 2010 when we started this exercise: Head Start reform via the new "re-competition” process.

Congress pulled the country back from the edge of the fiscal cliff late Tuesday night when the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass an agreement urgently negotiated and passed by the Senate on New Year’s Day. But the possibility of sequestration, the across-the-board cuts to virtually all federal programs scheduled to occur on January 2, 2013, remains unresolved.

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.