Hyperventilating Heritage

Heritage is shocked, SHOCKED, that someone would want parents to have the option to bring trained professionals into the home to help their children develop. Isn’t there a T.V. show with this theme?
Section 440 of the House bill – Home Visitation Programs for Families with Young Children and Families Expecting Children – would provide grants [...]

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The Enormous Cost of Education Gaps

Gaps in educational achievement between the U.S. and other countries, between black and Hispanic students and white students, between low-income students and middle and upper-income students, and between low-performing states and the rest essentially amount to a permanent national recession, according to a recent report by McKinsey & Company.  The economic cost of these gaps [...]

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Pre-K Teacher Brings the Knowledge

The organization Pre-K Now has a blog called Inside Pre-K that shares the stories and experiences of actual pre-K teachers. The advocacy organization already does very good policy work and an excellent daily newsclipping email, and the Inside Pre-K is a very creative contribution to the advocacy world. They should be congratulated on recognizing the saturation in [...]

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Closing the School Readiness Gap

Rand Corporation evaluated the California pre-school system (pdf) to see how it could be made more efficient and effective at closing the gap in children’s school readiness at kindergarten. It suggests that the strategy depends very much on how you frame the goal:

“If the goal is to raise student achievement in absolute terms for Latinos and [...]

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Pre-K Fades Out in High Poverty Schools

Early Ed Watch, covering the fan-favorites of emerging early childhood research, examines new findings on the “fade-out” effect of early education programs. Studies show that many of the positive academic impacts of a high-quality pre-kindergarten experience fade out over the course of elementary school. Aleksandra Holod and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn investigate why.
Take it away EEW:
The study [...]

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Pew Study Released on Majority of Governors Increasing or Protecting Pre-K Funding

According to the report, governors are increasing and/or protecting current investments in pre-k programs.
Highlights of this year’s analysis include:

Fourteen governors are proposing to increase investment in early education.
Thirteen governors are proposing to “flat-fund” early education programs, preserving current investment levels.
The governors of Alaska, North Dakota and Rhode Island — states that currently do not fund [...]

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Tulsa World Digs into DHS Child Care Ratings

(Note: I kind of buried the lede here. Make sure you see the second-to-last paragraph.)
The Tulsa World spent the last two days investigating the ratings and inspection process DHS uses for child care and early education providers. DHS has documented 400 violations in routine inspections of 3-star providers in Tulsa County since January 2007. Although [...]

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Score One for Tulsa Initiative

Not that my post had anything to do with it, but my picks for which recent research papers Early Ed Watch should cover were among the top 3 receiving votes. For refreshers, they are:

“Do Elementary School Characteristics Influence the ‘Fade Out’ of Preschool Cognitive Gains?” by Aleksandra Holod and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
“Early Academic Outcomes for Children [...]

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Let Your Inner Wonk Vote

Early Childhood Watch, an indispensable font of early education research, policy, and commentary, just got back from the conference of the Society for Research in Child Development, and they want to know what you want to know.
Read their blog entry for a list of 10 areas of emerging research and vote on the two that you [...]

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Early Education Stimulates More than the Brain

Cornell University published a paper in 2004 that measured the stimulative effect of early education spending in each state’s economy. It found that for every dollar invested in early childhood programs in Oklahoma, $1.97 of additional economic activity was generated. In 2007, the state spent an estimated $121 million on pre-K and Head Start (very [...]

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