Cradle-to-Career Education

This morning, The Atlantic published a commentary I wrote with my colleague Laura Bornfreund about facing up to "fade-out." The article describes why, if Obama's preschool plan is to gain momentum, it would be smart to proceed with a two-pronged approach: give children deep learning experiences in their birth-to-five years and make improvements to the K-3 grades of elementary school.

The Equity and Excellence Commission, a board established by Congress in 2010 to study school finance issues, released its final report this week, For Each and Every Child.

In education policy, where so much of the focus is on how much is wrong with today’s schools, it’s refreshing to see examples of something going right. In an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times, David Kirp writes about what he found after spending a year in Union City, N.J., where children are achieving at a very high rate despite coming from poverty and living in families where English is a second language.

For nearly a year, the PreK-3^rd Grade National Work Group has hosted free webinars on how to reduce the achievement gap by focusing on children’s early years: pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, first, second and third grades. The last of these webinars, Scale and Sustainability: Implications for State and District Policy, will be held this Wednesday, Jan. 30, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. EST.

As President Obama gave his second inaugural address yesterday, many of us couldn’t help but linger over these words:  “We are true to our creed,” Obama said, “when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.” 

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 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.

As we've noted many times on Early Ed Watch, Head Start, the federal government's pre-K program, is at a crossroads. 

In the midst of budget threats and an ongoing debate over whether Head Start creates lasting academic gains in children, Head Start has embarked on its largest reforms in decades to improve the quality of its grantees. The reform process, called “re-competition,” forces Head Start providers that are found during audits to be low-quality to compete with other agencies in the same geographic area for future Head Start grants. 

Last week the National Journal Education Experts blog asked about Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s first term legacy.

In my response, I highlight Duncan’s work to set the stage for improving early learning from birth through 3rd grade. I also suggest priorities for Duncan should he get the opportunity for a second term:

A commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “School at Age 3. No More 12th Grade” has sparked a round of discussion among many of us here at the Early Education Initiative – but not because we necessarily agree with the sentiment.