Community-Based Organizations

The release of the President’s fiscal year 2014 budget provides a clearer picture of the quality standards states would have to meet to receive funds under the Obama administration’s “Preschool for All” proposal. The most notable benchmarks are pre-K teachers with bachelor's degrees and salaries for pre-K teachers that are comparable to K-12 teachers’ wages.

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. 

Today the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announced five winners for the second round of the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge: Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin. These states join nine others that received grants in 2011: California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington.

Currently, it is impossible to know how many children are enrolled in publicly funded pre-K within the boundaries of any given district. This is a serious impediment, not just for local superintendents and principals who are in the dark about the educational backgrounds of their schools’ incoming kindergarteners, but also for policymakers, who can’t effectively discuss issues of equity and access without good data to make comparisons. 

In September the Early Education Initiative added pre-K data from the state and school-district levels to the Federal Education Budget Project database -- already the only comprehensive, centralized database for funding, demographic and outcome information for every state, school district and higher-education institution in the country.

Last week, the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative and Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) rolled out a major expansion to FEBP’s education database. For the first time, the site includes data on pre-K in states and school districts. In collecting the data, we found that states and districts face significant obstacles in collecting reliable, comparable pre-K data. But we also found that one state deserves a closer look for its organized state of information on funding and enrollment at the district level: Florida.

Most states­–Florida is no exception–fund pre-K programs run by public schools as well as programs run by community-based organizations (CBOs), which are typically private non-profit or for-profit groups. The problem with this structure, from a data-gathering perspective, is that it is very difficult to collect data on how many children are in publicly funded pre-K programs within the boundaries of a school district. States tend to report data on district-run programs separately from data on CBOs, and data on enrollment in programs run by CBOs are likely to include children who live in different school districts. A new report that accompanied the release of the data, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level,examines the plethora of issues preventing good data collection efforts and thus hindering good policy.

But it’s not all bad. In the course of collecting data and writing the report we discovered that Florida has found a way to track children enrolled and funding allocated to both district-run programs and CBOs within the structure of the school district.

Last week, the Newark Star-Ledger's Linda Ocasio asked me why our presidential candidates should be talking about early learning and child care -- the lead topic in an open panel discussion hosted by the Early Education Initiative and the Workforce and Family Program in W