Accuracy of Kennedy “Reading First” Report on “Conflicts” Questioned
The Title I Monitor has been out front on the allegations of conflict of interest among the Reading First program’s technical advisors, several of whom also had significant financial ties to publishers of reading materials. Earlier this month, Sen. Ed Kennedy’s staff produced a report that detailed those ties and the alleged conflicts, based on [...]
A Job for the Government
Joel Waldfogel, a business prof at the Wharton School, bases a commentary on Slate on the James Heckman/Dmitri Masterov analysis of the economic returns of preschool from high quality programs serving the disadvantaged. He says government programs are needed to make up for the weakness of many families, which makes them unable to function as [...]
Economists Gone Wild
All Gregory Mankiw, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, did was post on his blog the headline “Preschool Pays” and link to the Joel Waldfogel Slate entry mentioned just above. That touched off a flurry of comments, pro and con. Many of the comments wrestle with the economic analyses themselves, especially [...]
A Human Capital Agenda
Hilary Clinton’s proposed federal investment in pre-kindergarten for four-year-olds comes the week after David Brooks argued in his New York Times’ column that Republicans needed a set of big ideas on how to develop “human capital” if they were to have a chance of halting the party’s “death spiral.” Brooks called for a program of [...]
Clinton Proposes New Federal Role in Pre-K
Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton announced in a New York Times’ story widely carried that part of the education agenda in her campaign would be a $5 billion federal committment to promote state investments in pre-kindergarten programs. The federal government’s role in early childhood education has been primarily in supporting Head Start. (And funding [...]
What Makes for Quality? The Interaction of Teachers and Students
One of the greatest challenges of education policy and, frankly, education journalism, is that accurately measuring education quality is very difficult. So, instead, we pay attention to what’s available to us: spending, class size, teacher experience, teacher test scores, graduation rates, college-going, test scores. All of those are proxies for what really matters–the interactions between [...]
Prize-winning Journalism
The Bergen (N.J.) Record’s 2006 series on waste, corruption and misuse of public funds meant to improve preschool in New Jersey continues to win plaudits. The series by Kathleen Carroll and Jean Rimbach just won the $10,000 Clark Mollenhoff Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting from the Institute on Political Journalism. Earlier this month, Carroll [...]
$50 Million More for Preschool in California
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to add $50 million on top of the $50 million added a year earlier for publicly funded preschool. The advocacy organization Preschool California is quite happy about it. Their reaction ishere.
Southern Education Foundation report on Pre-K
Southern Education Foundation reports that the South is leading other regions in the quality of pre-k programs and the number of children enrolled. The press release to the report says that “The report also analyzes the uneven development of Pre-K within the South and identifies common challenges that Southern states will face in taking Pre-K [...]
Business Interest in Early Ed Explained
In the Hartford Business Review, reporter Diane Weaver Dunne examines the partnership between Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell and two of the state’s top advocates of economic development. The story also traces the evolution of business interest in early education nationally, going back to the work of Art Rolnick, an economist with the Federal Reserve [...]
