Impact of Low-quality Child Care Continues into Adolescence

This post is written by Amy Fain. A new research study finds children who have received poor childcare are impacted negatively for many years, even after they leave the low quality care environment.  This study looked at 1364 children from varied background and found a similar patterns to their behavior as old as fifteen.   The [...]

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Challenges, Social Connections, and Early Childhood

We here in the Innovation Lab recently launched our second “Innovation Challenge” to CAP employees. These challenges are meant to leverage the creativity of all of our staff so that we can identify problems and solutions that would never have occurred to us in the safety of the group cube. Our last challenge sought ideas [...]

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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 [...]

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US House Heeds Quote of the Day

Congressman George Miller (D-CA), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, has proven himself an avid reader of our little blog! You see, in response to my highlighting of this morning’s Quote of the Day, about how the most important reform in post-secondary education is the advancement of early education, the good Chairman has [...]

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Quote of the Day

“The most important ‘post-high school’ education and training reform is a strong early childhood and elementary and secondary education system.” – From the Council of Economic Advisors report “Preparing the Workers of Today for the Jobs of Tomorrow“ By the way, you are owed a substantive post from me and you shall get it. Get [...]

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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 [...]

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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: [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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