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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Elementary Absences and School Achievement

I feel like I’ve posted on this before, but my searches have been fruitless. Anyway, the National Center for Children in Poverty released a report a while back on chronic absenteeism in elementary school, called “Present, Engaged, and Accounted For: The Critical Importance of Addressing Chronic Absence in the Early Grades.”
The report finds that children who [...]

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Positive Focus Boosts Grades

A new study in the journal Science found that a confidence-building exercise in the seventh grade lifted the grade point averages of low-performing black students through the end of eighth grade. The New York Times reports: 
The researchers, led by Geoffrey L. Cohen, a social psychologist at the University of Colorado, had seventh graders in suburban [...]

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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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April 16 Thursday’s Child Forum

Mark you calendars:

Kids, Families, and Tax Policy:
Best Friends Forever?
 
April 16, 2009
Attend in person in Washington, DC
9 a.m.-10:30 a.m. ET
Urban Institute
2100 M Street N.W., 5th Floor
Register
Listen to a live audio webcast
9 am ET / 8 am CT / 7 am MT / 6 am PT
Program length: 1.5 hours
Register

For many concerned about the well-being of children [...]

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Stress, the Brain, and Poverty

The Economist reports on a new study linking stress to intergenerational poverty.  Research conducted a few years ago demonstrated that the “working memories” of children in poverty had less capacity than those of middle income children.  This in turn impeded the ability of children to learn, since they cannot store as much information in their RAM [...]

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Numbers We Need

Oklahoma Policy Institute puts out a monthly publication called Numbers You Need, capturing key economic and budget trends in Oklahoma. It’s a good quick way to keep track of conditions in our state.
Their February report (PDF) indicates that the state is faring better than the rest of the nation, with key indicators moving more mildly [...]

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Microloans and Milestones

Last week the Tulsa World was one of many papers to publish a press release from Sam Daley-Harris, director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign, celebrating more than 106 million microloans in 2007.  In 1997 when a goal was set to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families with microloans by 2005, it had to be [...]

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