Holding kids back in the early grades: An expense to be avoided or a useful intervention?
Holding children back to repeat a grade in the early primary years costs the state of North Carolina more than $167 million a year. A blog post at North Carolina’s Smart Start highlighting this statistic suggests that a new focus on aligning the curriculum between those early grades could help alleviate those costs by avoiding [...]
Some states move toward publicly funded PreK-12 continuum
A new report in Education Week‘s annual Quality Counts project looks at the changing landscape for prekindergarten policy across the states and suggests that there is a trend to incorporate PreK into K-12 budgets. The article also recaps an earlier report by PreK-Now, which found that, despite the dire economic situation most states are facing, [...]
Rating system in Minnesota
Beth Hawkins at MinnPost writes about a new rating system for early childhood programs called Parent Aware: “Ratings, which are issued in the form of zero to five stars, are based on data evaluating programs’ safety records, staff education and opportunities for ongoing training, mechanism for measuring and tracking pre-K learning, the availability of good [...]
Teaching parents to talk to their babies to close the achievement gap
NPR has a story today about a new study that trained low-income moms to talk to their babies in order to close the vocabulary gap that begins very early in children. (This is the much-cited gap found in the Hart and Risley study in the 1990s.) In the study, researchers taught parents to use more [...]
Common state standards for kindergarten now going into implementation mode
A recent BAM Radio podcast discussion on the appropriateness of state standards for kindergartners got somewhat heated at points between Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Edward Miller, at the Alliance for Childhood. The point of contention: Are standards necessary to create a guide for teachers on what kids should know [...]
The news is bleak in New Jersey
The achievement gap is alive and well in New Jersey. New numbers out yesterday show that more than half of African American and Hispanic third graders failed the state reading tests. The Bergen Record quotes Jessica Donaldson, who helped write Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters: “Third-grade reading is a [...]
Testing younger children in Utah
An interesting bit of news out of Utah: The state is now requiring that schools test the reading proficiency of students from first to third grade. From the Park City Record: “To combat the growing number of Utah students who do not read at grade-level, almost 25 percent state-wide, legislators passed Senate Bill 150 last [...]
Latino children left out of early childhood programs
A study out of Illinois today highlights a national issue that doesn’t always get a lot of attention: Latino children are much less likely to enroll in preschool or childcare than their black counterparts.The study, funded by the McCormick Foundation, found that one in three Latino parents enroll their children in preschool, compared to two [...]
Obama stalls on his birth-to-five promises
Has Obama followed through on his campaign promise to “launch a Children’s First Agenda that provides care, learning and support to families with children from birth up to 5 years old”? PolitiFact’s “Obameter” rules that this promise is stalled: “The budget request of $800 million — “part of a down payment on the President’s Zero-to-Five [...]
No extra money for early learning and Head Start this year
The death of a big spending bill in Congress last week means federal government won’t be funding an Early Learning Challenge Fund, meant to spur innovation in the early years of education as Race to the Top did for K-12. This is not terribly surprising, but early education advocates are upset. They say the bill’s [...]
