Look for EarlyStories Bigger and Better in the New Year
Happy Holidays. Blogging will return January 5.
Obama and Another Good Source on Early Learning
As the economic crisis deepened in late December, Obama indicated that early education would be part of the recovery package, along with school construction, and tuition assistance. Details to come in January, perhaps before the inauguration. Congress will get involved. Look for strong support. But, as everyone knows, the child care-early learning-preschool landscape is a [...]
A Guide to Reporting on Early Education on Obama’s Watch
Sam Dillon’s front-page piece in today’s New York Times offers education journalists a guide to the early care and education stories that will bear watching in the coming year and also a list of some of the key experts and resource people. Over the past few weeks I’ve talked to a number of Washington education [...]
Gladwell, “Success” Guru, Turns His Attention to Teachers (and Quarterbacks)
The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, whose new book on successful people, “Outliers: The Story of Success, is atop the New York Times’ bestseller list, writes in this week’s edition about how hard it is to tell in advance who is going to make a good teacher (or NFL quarterback.) All the usual proxies and requirements–certification, [...]
Avoiding a new “reading war”
When George Bush became president in 2001 he championed programs that emphasized the importance of paying systematic and explicit attention to teaching children that words were composed of sounds, letters represented those sounds, and that facility with the relationship between letters, sounds and words enabled children to “decode” new words. Decoding, it was asserted, had [...]
Stories on the recession and early childhood education
So, with headlines about the nation’s economic problems dominating the front page, what are some early education stories that might get on the front page? In no particular order: 1. Are companies that now provide child care at the job site reducing their support? Charging families more? Closing programs altogether? 2. How are private programs [...]
What President-elect Obama will not cut
Linda Darling Hammond, who is heading up the Policy Working Group for the Obama transition team, said at a National Academy of Education gathering in Washington Nov. 18 that Obama would hold true to what he said during the campaign regarding spending on early childhood education. Asked during debates which of his initiatives would have [...]
Pre-K as economic stimulus?
With new evidence every day that the U.S. economy has run off the rails, there apparently is much talk in D.C. education circles about including a big federal investment in early childhood education as part of the Obama administration’s stimulus package. Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk fame surfaces the idea here. He wonders, however, whether spending [...]
