Month: April 2010

It’s no surprise that the K-12 Common Core State Standards posted for comments by the Center for Best Practices at the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers received plenty of them from early childhood professionals. After all, this effort in standards-making, when complete, will directly impact teaching and curriculum, if used as intended, and clearly affect state policy pertaining to kindergarten and the early grades. If what we know about the way young children learn and what they know isn’t sufficiently taken into account, new standards could also have unintended negative consequences for the preschool years.

Please visit National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) for the complete blog post.

Congratulations are due Raquel Rutledge of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel who took home a Pulitzer Prize for her series “Cashing in on Kids” that exposed deception and fraud in the $350 million Wisconsin Shares program. Besides being compelling reading, Rutledge’s series is a cautionary tale for policymakers and administrators of child care programs. That’s because, in addition to outright fraud, Rutledge documents ways in which the program’s system of rules and regulations, along with lax enforcement, enabled some parents and providers to abuse the system in ways that were perfectly legal. One such example is an arrangement by which sisters or other relatives were able to stay home, swap kids, and receive taxpayer dollars.

Please visit National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) for the complete blog post.

Over the years, the ranks of those advocating for expanding public pre-K have grown as economists and business leaders made the case that providing all kids with a high-quality early education is essential to America’s future competitiveness. Now a growing list of the nation’s top military leaders say doing so is also a matter of national security. Having served as a Lieutenant General in the Air Force, including a command of 46,000 airmen assigned to 12th Air Force, General Seip is intimately acquainted with what it takes to organize, train and equip our armed forces so they can defend against threats to our nation. He is also a leader of a relatively new organization, Mission: Readiness, which advocates for improving the quality of and access to preschool education.

Please visit National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) for the complete blog post.

So much that’s written about preschool education these days comes from “on high” that we run the risk of forgetting how much it is, at its core, a series of close encounters between teachers and the likes of Kevin the serial anti-sharer, Alan the artistically inclined, and Ali the perpetually dancing cheerleader. In her engaging new book Good Morning, Children: My First Years in Early Childhood Education, Sophia Pappas provides an antidote to that and a window into the world that is her New Jersey Abbott Preschool Program classroom. Along the way, we become acquainted with Kevin, Alan, Ali, and their classmates and more important, what spells success for this teacher and the renowned pre-K program of which she was part.

Please visit National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) for the complete blog post.