Washington State going forward with early learning
Money for early childhood education may have stayed relatively stable last year, despite the fiscal crisis hitting many states, but there are concerns that this year the bottom could fall out as states grapple with growing deficits and the end of federal support via the stimulus. In Washington state, however, it looks like there are [...]
Grading parents from pre-K to third grade
A Florida bill that would require teachers to grade parent performance on their children’s report cards is causing an outcry this week. Does it make sense to judge parents on how well they’re doing given the importance of parental involvement, or is it counter-productive? The bill is meant to “set standards for parental accountability,” and [...]
Harlem Children’s Zone idea spreads in New Jersey
The state of New Jersey is funding a third effort to replicate Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, this time in Paterson. Already, the state had put money behind two partnerships between the HCZ and groups in Newark and Camden. Last fall, the Newark and Camden groups visited the HCZ, which is intended to provide a [...]
The Chinese mother strategy – missing social emotional development?
So a lot of people have had a lot to say on Amy Chua’s “Chinese Mother” manifesto published in the Wall Street Journal this month, but I have been most intrigued by the response in today’s David Brooks column. He argues that sleepovers, which Chua forbid her two daughters to attend, are actually much more [...]
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 [...]
All work and no play? No way, kindergarteners say
Just how hard should kindergarteners be pushed to learn? For years, the debate has raged about whether kindergarten has become “the new first grade.” EarlyStories has seen countless studies and articles on the topic, and listened to many arguments about why the new accountability and standards in vogue in education mean that the youngest learners [...]
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 [...]
