Putting the Spotlight on Young Children: NAEYC’s Week of the Young Child

April 23, 2012

This week marks the annual Week of the Young Child celebration, sponsored by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). This year’s theme is “Early Years Are Learning Years,” a sentiment we fully endorse!

NAEYC’s website has a treasure trove of materials for the Week of the Young Child, particularly as associated with six focus areas. We encourage you to view their suggested activities and related materials, but we also include some additional relevant resources for each area below.

Raising Public Awareness

Public Policy and Advocacy

Reading and Writing

  • NIEER’s policy brief on early literacy includes a review of the literature and recommendations.
  • Dorothy Strickland, NIEER Distinguished Research Fellow, testified before the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on early literacy learning experiences. Read her full testimony here.
  • Dr. Strickland’s presentation for NAEYC on what makes a good book can be downloaded from NIEER’s website.
  • This NIEER blog post includes additional information and resources on literacy.

Violence and Child Abuse Prevention

  • Preschool interventions can have the greatest influence on reducing childhood aggression and preventing youth violence, as described in this report from the Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development.
  • High-quality early childhood education can reduce future crime and victimization, as explained in this blog post from NIEER and the National Center for Victims of Crime.
  • The Week of the Young Child also corresponds this year with National Crime Victims’ Rights Week. The Office for Victims of Crime within the U.S. Department of Justice has more information on this important observance.
  • Fight Crime: Invest in Kids has been highlighting child abuse prevention in their 1560 Campaign.

Child Health

  • This week is also World Immunization Week; find out more about state policies on pre-K immunizations in this blog post.
  • Children’s health is inextricably linked with their diets. Find our more about the growing epidemic of childhood obesity in these blog posts.
  • Because of the connection between children’s nutrition and their ability to function in a classroom setting, many state programs have policies related to meals in pre-K.
  • Early childhood education has been proven to provide better outcomes not only on children’s health while enrolled in preschool programs, but also on their health later in adulthood.
  • For a global perspective, become familiar with advocacy organizations that support child health initiatives and early learning opportunities, such as Shakira’s Barefoot Foundation or UNICEF.

Creativity and Play

  • Arts education can help preschoolers develop in other domains including math, language, critical thinking, and social-emotional, as explained by NIEER’s own Judi Stevenson-Boyd and a group of experts on Caucus: New Jersey.
  • NIEER’s Kim Brenneman provides ideas on how science-based lessons could be delivered through everyday life activities, such as playing with Mr. Potato Head or engaging in a game of golf.
  • The Ultimate Block Party is an event that highlights the importance of play-based learning for young children.
  • NIEER examines the role of technology in children’s play in this blog post and the interaction between play, intelligence, and learning in another post.
  • Learn more about the best ways to use technology to benefit young learners in this position statement from NAEYC and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College.
  • This presentation from NIEER’s Shannon Ayers and Ellen Frede discusses the importance of learning through play against the backdrop of preschool assessments.

For the Week of the Young Child, we’ll be working on NIEER’s pre-K research, listening to the voices of early childhood and education advocates, and spending time with the young children in our lives. How will you observe this important week?

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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Giving Kids a Shot at Success: World Immunization Week

April 20, 2012

Beginning April 21, the World Health Organization (WHO) is launching World Immunization Week, a global awareness campaign about the importance of vaccines in preventing diseases like measles and polio.  According to WHO’s website, “immunization is one of the most successful and cost-effective health interventions and prevents debilitating illness, disability and death from vaccine-preventable diseases.” An estimated 2 to 3 million deaths are prevented annually due to vaccinations but, as of 2010, 19.3 million infants were not up to date on their immunizations. And, according to the United Nations Foundation, of the nearly 8 million children worldwide under the age of 5 who die each year from preventable diseases, a quarter of those deaths could have been prevented with proper vaccination.

Part of the play therapy center of Drottning Silvias barn- och ungdoms-sjukhus (Queen Silvia Children's Hospital) in Göteborg, Sweden.

In the United States, the statistics are more uplifting – according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2011, 95 percent of parents reported that their children got or would get all of their immunizations. However, approximately 5 percent of parents opted to decline some vaccines while 2 percent were not inclined to vaccinate their children at all, despite research from the American Academy of Pediatrics finding no long-term negative consequences to receiving all recommended immunizations.

As parents of preschoolers can attest, most centers require that children’s immunizations be up to date before enrolling. In addition, many programs require other health screenings before or during the preschool years. Pre-K is an important early opportunity to detect vision, hearing, and health problems that may impair a child’s learning and development. With this in mind, NIEER’s quality standards checklist includes a requirement that state-funded pre-K programs provide vision, hearing, and health screenings.  Along with our benchmarks on nutrition and support services, screenings and referrals support children’s overall well-being, including their physical and mental health.

Assuring that children are immunized is one element of comprehensive health screening (the others are health/weight/BMI, blood pressure, psychosocial/behavioral, and full physical exam). For The State of Preschool 2011 report, we specifically asked states about their pre-K policies regarding immunizations. The good news is that 40 state pre-K programs (out of 51 across the nation) require preschool students have immunizations; in addition, the District of Columbia’s two pre-K programs also require immunizations. The remaining state programs typically leave decisions about screenings up to local district discretion. (For more information about screening and referral requirements, see page 178 of Appendix A.)

Figure 1. State Pre-K Programs That Do Not Require Immunizations in State Policy*
California Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts
Florida South Carolina 4K
Kansas Pre-K Pilot Vermont Act 62
Massachusetts Vermont EEI
Nebraska Wisconsin 4K
Nevada

*This figure does not include states that do not have a state-funded pre-K program. Those states are: Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

Figure 2. State Pre-K Programs Requiring Immunizations
Alabama New Jersey ECPA
Alaska New Jersey ELLI
Arkansas New Mexico
Colorado New York
Connecticut North Carolina
Delaware Ohio
Georgia Oklahoma
Illinois Oregon
Iowa Shared Visions Pennsylvania EABG
Iowa SVPP Pennsylvania HSSAP
Kansas At-Risk Pennsylvania K4 & SBPK
Kentucky Rhode Island
Louisiana 8(g) South Carolina CDEPP
Louisiana LA4 Tennessee
Louisiana NSECD Texas
Maine Virginia
Maryland Washington
Michigan West Virginia
Minnesota Wisconsin Head Start
Missouri D.C. PEEP
New Jersey Abbott D.C. Charter

Still, there are 11 states without state-funded pre-K, and children in those states may be missing out on disease-preventing immunizations until they reach kindergarten or even first grade. The same is true for children who are shut out of state-funded pre-K due to the limited access to programs in many states. A rise in the spread of measles in 2011 indicates that there’s still more work to be done to protect all of our citizens, especially for those traveling internationally where vaccination rates are lower.

As immunizations increase across the globe, more and more children are being offered the chance to grow up healthy. This, in turn, improves their health, happiness, and ability to learn and succeed in school and later in life.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

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A Life Devoted to Healthy Development for All: J. Fraser Mustard

November 28, 2011

The Toronto Star recently reported the sad news that Canadian physician and researcher Dr. James Fraser Mustard died in his home at age 84. In addition to being a part of the research team that discovered aspirin could help reduce the likelihood of heart disease, Dr. Mustard studied early childhood development with his research influencing his home province’s education policy. His Early Years Study was used by the Ministry of Education in Ontario when it established a program to offer full-day kindergarten throughout the province. His broader body of work influenced early childhood policy around the globe.

Dr. Mustard was a strong global disseminator of the science base for public investments in early childhood development.  He was expert in tying together diverse research from medicine, neuroscience, and social science so as to make clear to virtually any audience the connections and implications. Dr. Mustard had a keen understanding of the impacts of early brain development on later outcomes including adult health.  He also understood the importance of showing policymakers and the public that the relationship between socio-economic background and human development is a gradient—a smooth continuous slope—and that the level and steepness of these slopes varies considerably across nations depending on their public policies.  As he wrote in 2010:

“Results from developmental neurobiology studies and animal and human studies provide strong evidence that early neurobiological development affects health (physical and mental), behaviour and learning in the later stages of life. Countries that provide quality universal early development programs for families with young children tend to out-perform countries in which the early development programs are chaotic.”

Mustard was born in Toronto, Ontario and attended the University of Toronto. He later conducted postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge before returning to the University of Toronto as a research associate. He was also involved with the National Heart Foundation of Canada, the Canadian Heart Foundation, and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, amongst others. Dr. Mustard was a founding member of both the McMaster Medical School and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a multidisciplinary nonprofit that has conducted research on topics such as economic growth and policy, experience-based brain and biological development,  human-environment interactions, human development, population health, and successful societies.

Beginning in the 1980s, Dr. Mustard became more involved with research on early childhood development and learning. He became the head of the Founders’ Network, a group dedicated to studying economic and social impacts on health and human development, with an emphasis on early childhood. Dr. Mustard’s research work produced the 1999 report on the Early Years Study commissioned by the government of Ontario and follow-up reports in 2002 and 2007. Collectively, the reports criticized Canada’s commitment to preschool learning and called for national early childhood development initiatives on par with K-12 education as a means to promote lifelong healthy outcomes. In 2004, Dr. Mustard co-founded the Council for Early Childhood Development, an organization whose goals include promoting the message of the Early Years Study and further studying early childhood development.

We are heartened that Dr. Mustard’s work proceeds on. Less than a week after his death, a third report based on the Early Years Study was published, recommending that children as young as 2 years old should have access to voluntary prekindergarten education. And, the full-day kindergarten initiative in Ontario continues to roll out, with final implementation slated for September 2014.

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

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Eating Right, Learning Right

October 10, 2011

The important link between children’s health and their education is being highlighted this week with the celebration of National School Lunch Week. This year’s theme is “School Lunch – Let’s Grow Healthy,” as part of a three-month long campaign by the School Nutrition Association to highlight the importance of school lunch programs. Common sense tells us that children with empty stomachs can’t concentrate on classroom learning or homework. With this in mind, schools and pre-K programs often offer snacks and meals throughout the day to make sure children are fully prepared to learn and excel. The federal Child & Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), administered through the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), provides guidelines for serving nutritious meals and snacks in child care centers and afterschool programs. In addition, providing nutritious meals to children is a key component of the federal Head Start program’s services to low-income children and families.

Each year, NIEER gives state pre-K initiatives a rating based on meeting 10 quality standards benchmarks, which address a variety of quality components including services such as meals. As we stated in The State of Preschool 2010, “these items are included because children’s overall well-being and success in school involves not only their cognitive development but also their physical and social/emotional health.” In order to meet our benchmark on meals, state programs must require by policy that all programs, regardless of hours of operation, offer at least one meal each day.

Unfortunately, in the 2009-2010 school year, only 24 of 52 state-funded pre-K programs met the benchmark of at least one meal being required in state policy. (See Table 1 for a list of the programs meeting the benchmark for required meals.) Twenty of these 24 programs specifically mention lunch in their meal requirements.

Table 1. State programs requiring at least one meal in all pre-K classes

Alabama Louisiana LA4 Oregon
Alaska Louisiana NSECD Pennsylvania HSSAP
Arkansas Maryland Rhode Island
Delaware Minnesota South Carolina CDEPP
Georgia New Jersey Abbott Tennessee
Iowa Shared Visions New Mexico Washington
Kentucky North Carolina West Virginia
Louisiana 8(g) Oklahoma Wisconsin Head Start

However, only five programs – Pennsylvania EABG, Pennsylvania K4 & SBPK, Vermont Act 62, Vermont EEI, and Virginia – reported that no meals or snacks are required by state policy. The remaining 23 programs either reported that snacks were required and/or that meals are required for full-day programs but not half-day programs.

For the 2009-2010 school year, we also asked states to report on whether meals and snacks need to meet nutritional guidelines and found that all but 10 programs require this. (See Table 2 for a list of those programs not requiring programs to use nutritional guidelines.) Of those meeting nutritional guidelines, all were using federal nutrition guidelines set by the United State Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Table 2. State programs not requiring the use of nutritional guidelines

Florida Pennsylvania K4 & SBPK
Illinois Pennsylvania Pre-K Counts
Nevada Rhode Island
New Jersey ELLI Vermont Act 62
Pennsylvania EABG Vermont EEI

The federal Head Start program’s nutritional guidelines play a role here as all five state programs that are Head Start supplements met the benchmark for meals. This is particularly noteworthy in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the states’ other pre-K initiatives do not meet the meal requirement benchmark while the Head Start supplements do.

As with any other of the quality standards we report on in the State Preschool Yearbook series, it is important to remember that we are discussing policy here and not necessarily practice. While not every state policy requires that all programs offer at least one meal, some, or perhaps even all, of those programs may exceed the policy and do so. Still, with only 24 state pre-K programs on the record with a commitment to providing their students with at least one meal a day, we have a long way to go before we can truly celebrate school nutrition.

Child nutrition is of increasing concern as childhood obesity rates increase while food insecurity also spreads. President Obama’s proclamation of this week pointed to the need for collaboration throughout communities to bring students healthy food every day at school, a goal toward which we still work. At a time when Sesame Street has created a new Muppet to address the issue of food insecurity—the 17 million children in families who don’t know where their next meal comes from—it is clear that providing nutritious, consistent meals to children in school can go a long way to improving their daily lives.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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Childhood Obesity: A Growing Problem

September 27, 2011

Obesity, especially beginning in childhood, has become a growing problem in the United States. The rate of childhood obesity has been increasing at a breakneck speed so that currently a third of children are obese (16.4 percent) or overweight (18.2 percent), according to a recent report from the Trust for America’s Health. Childhood obesity is linked with numerous negative effects that can follow a person throughout their lifetime, including greater risk for other health problems such as asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. Given the risk of these negative outcomes, early intervention is seen as paramount by many. With that in mind, President Obama made a proclamation on August 31st, declaring September to be National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. To that end, the federal government’s Let’s Move! initiative encourages children and families to make healthier choices regarding exercise and meals. But as President Obama noted in proclamation, “Everyone has a role to play in preventing and reversing the tide of childhood obesity.” This does not exclude preschool programs and, indeed, in the past research has found that a preschool program’s choices of daily activities and menu selection could play a role in reducing childhood obesity. For more on the role of preschool in promoting healthy lifestyles, stay tuned for NIEER’s upcoming brief on health policies in pre-K.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

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Child’s Play: Should Preschoolers Engage with Technology or Good-Old Fashioned Fun?

June 30, 2011

As Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole in children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she grabs at a jar of orange marmalade and, having no place to put it when she is done, watches it fall. With the touch of a fingertip, a child reading pulls the jar of orange marmalade back to the top of the page and lets it plummet back down again. The child can also dangle the white rabbit’s pocket watch, stretch Alice taller when she partakes from the bottle labeled “Drink Me,” and so on. This is the Alice app for Apple’s iPad tablet, hailed as a new kind of pop-up book for young readers, that enables children to manipulate images to encourage interactive reading. It’s only one of countless apps designed for children, including numerous ones that appear to have the preschool-age audience in mind.

Apps for smart phones and tablets are just the latest digital media to offer up entertainment for children. They compete for screen time with television, the Internet, and computer and video games. And there is no shortage of technology-based toys, including pretend cell phones and laptops for infants and toddlers and even functioning digital cameras for preschoolers.

But is all this technology appropriate for the youngest children?

Organizations that study the effects of technology on children are hard-pressed to keep on top of the rapid updates that occur on a seemingly daily basis. Some are finding the need to re-evaluate previous positions on the subject. For instance, earlier this year, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media posted a draft revision of the NAEYC position statement, Technology and Young Children—Ages 3 to 8, which has not been updated since 1996. After reviewing public comments on the draft, the two organizations will update the position statement, re-name it Technology in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8, and release it in the fall of 2011.

As it is currently drafted, the new statement begins by affirming that digital media and technology can be viewed as “learning tools that, when used in intentional and developmentally appropriate ways and in conjunction with other traditional tools and materials, can support the development and learning of young children.” This is not a surprising conclusion, especially noting how frequently digital media tools mimic typical childhood activities. For instance, children can turn the pages of a picture book on an e-reader, use a stylus to color and draw on a tablet, and play electronic versions of card and board games on smart phones.

(It should be noted that the two organizations view only interactive digital tools in this manner—more rigid and static media, such as television, does not hold any potential in their opinion. Low-quality day care centers, recently found in a study to be placing children in front of TV screens on average four times per month, should be put on notice.)

NAEYC and the Fred Rogers Center’s position statement goes on to provide guidelines for selecting and using appropriate technology-based and digital media applications for classroom use. The two organizations are not alone in promoting digital media literacy – among others, PBS provides suggestions for teachers on how to use a variety of technology-based tools in pre-K through high school classrooms. And it’s not just teachers that are being encouraged to engage with children as they interact with technology and digital media. Organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and even the television station WETA encourage parents to make television viewing and video game playing into interactive family events; to talk to and ask questions about what children watch and play with; and to play alongside children with mobile apps to facilitate learning and communication.

These suggestions seem to acknowledge that technology is a pervasive fact of modern life; indeed ABC News last month reported on a study indicating that 75 percent of mothers allow their children to play with smart phones. And, the news program noted, schools are purchasing tablets for children in kindergarten.

Some, however, are not convinced that there is any benefit to allowing children to play with technology. The American Academy of Pediatrics continues to recommend that children age 2 and under have no screen time at all and older children be exposed to no more than one or two hours of screen time per day. These recommendations seem valid considering that numerous studies (although generally focusing on non-interactive TV viewing) point to a link between increased screen time and negative consequences including attention deficit, behavioral problems, higher psychological difficulty scores, less physical activity, obesity, irregular sleeping patterns, impaired academic performance, violence, and less time for active and imaginative play.

It is this last point that is of particular concern to early childhood educators when planning classroom activities and dovetails with the question of whether children should engage in play with technology-based tools or be left to their own devices for creative play. As noted above, some technological tools available do appear to be mimicking traditional childhood activities such as coloring, reading, and game-playing so the choice may becoming less of an either-or situation. But in general, technology-based tools tend toward adult-scripted, rule-based activities versus child-directed, unstructured play. And the latter has been found to be incredibly influential in children’s healthy development. Among the benefits of this kind of play are learning self-control and how to plan ahead, becoming problem-solvers, and working out emotional and social issues such as anxiety and sharing.

Indeed, NIEER has long looked at child-directed, imaginative play as a means for young children to learn both intellectually and socially. We are not alone in this approach – the books A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play and A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence provide anecdotal and research evidence to back up the power of play and its potential in early childhood education classrooms.

Imaginative, creative play was brought to the forefront of the public’s mind this fall with the Ultimate Block Party, an event that stressed the importance of play in a day-long festival of child-friendly activities. Play will also be receiving academic treatment in 2012 when Routledge begins publishing the International Journal of Play, a multidisciplinary effort to examine all aspects of play across the globe.

These are encouraging developments and suggest that some have been heeding the words of psychologist Carl Jung, “Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.” Even with a boundless supply of new technological toys for children, we should provide children with plenty of time to explore their own creativity through imaginative, child-directed play for future innovations in technology and beyond.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

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This Memorial Day: A Time to Reflect on the Past … and the Future of Armed Forces

May 20, 2011

How Early Education Can Support Our Military

Source: 2nd Infantry Division US Army

As Memorial Day approaches and Americans collectively prepare for the start of summer it is easy to lose track of the purpose of this day — to honor and remember those Americans in uniform who have died in the service of their country. Unfortunately, recent reports indicate that the American education system may be doing too little to honor their sacrifice by failing to adequately prepare the next generation of men and women in the U.S. Armed Forces. The military relies on a well-trained force of capable individuals who must meet certain requirements to enter the service. However, a combination of low educational attainment, health concerns, and criminal convictions disqualifies a large number of young adults who wish to enter the service.

A recent study pegs the percentage of men and women between the ages of 18 and 24 who are unqualified for military service at 90 percent in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Statistics released by the Pentagon indicate this figure is 75 percent nationwide. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has responded to these startling figures by calling for changes in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that allow for increased local flexibility and federal incentives to invest in early childhood education. While early education is not the expected response to an armed forces problem, Secretary Duncan is not alone in making the connection between kindergarten preparedness and military preparedness.

The organization Mission: Readiness, working with a coalition of 200 retired military officers, has issued research on the military preparedness (or lack thereof) in each state and concluded that the best intervention is an early one — early childhood education programs that help prepare at-risk students for school so as to help avoid a number of disqualifying problems by the time children are 18. While military brass and preschool students may seem an unlikely partnership to some, it is one that is gaining steam as pre-K programs prove their worth during tough budget times. To find out more about Mission: Readiness, read the Preschool Matters interview with Lieutenant General Norman Seip of this organization.

Meanwhile, a report from the Pew Center on the States also shows that child care and pre-K programs are an important issue for current active duty and reserve military personnel and their families. While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) allotted $240 million for additional child development centers on military bases, families often lack access to quality child care and preschool programs on bases or in their areas. As indicated in Figure 1 below, Pew found that child care was a critical daily need for military families, more pressing even than health care services. That need only increased further when a service member deployed.

Figure 1: Day-to-day needs of military families

Source: The Pew Center on the States. (2011). On the home front: Early care and education a top priority for military families.

States could do more to help. The State of Preschool 2010 found that only 12 state-funded programs out of the 54 included in the study require or allow program administrators to make eligibility decisions based on a child’s parent being on active military duty. Young children’s development may particularly be affected by the frequent moves common to military families. Yet the combined resources of military child care and state-funded pre-K fail to adequately provide early education services for these children to aid in their healthy development.

Increased funding for state-funded preschool education programs can expand access and improve quality for those children whose parents currently serve in the military while also improving life outcomes for those who may enlist in the future. In the 2009-2010 school year, both total state funding and per-child spending nationwide fell for these programs, representing a step back for young learners. Combining state, federal, and local sources, $6.2 billion was spent on pre-K programs for the 1,283,890 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled. NIEER estimates that an additional $7.5 billion could expand access to quality pre-K to fully cover the 40 percent of children estimated to start school unready to succeed. Representing only slightly more than 1 percent of the $670.9 billion budget requested by the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2012, this is a small price to pay for improving military readiness in years to come while supporting families of our active duty service members.

Indeed, an April report released by two senior members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff argue that America is currently channeling too much funding to military operations at the expense of human capital investments that make for a strong military and civil workforce in the future. Investing in pre-K could help strike a balance. As General Seip told NIEER, “It just pains me to think that there are so many young people out there, for whom the job and the service would mean so much — for whom it’s a ticket to the middle class and the American dream — who do not have the skills or the training to qualify.”

So this Memorial Day when you honor the heroic deeds of service members past and present, also take a moment to consider the armed forces in years to come. Are our future heroes getting the education they deserve?

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER
- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER

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Forget the Tea Party — The Milk Party Has Arrived!

December 9, 2010

Think the Children’s Movement of Florida is just another garden variety advocacy effort? You’re likely to think again after watching what could be the most compelling 15 minutes of video ever produced making the case for putting children at the top of our priority list. It incorporates five issues of the movement’s focus, the 4 ½-minute “I Am Florida” video, a portion of the CNN national story seen by millions of people, and highlights from the Milk Party rallies in which 15,000 Floridians participated.

Anyone who has worked with David Lawrence, Jr., the children’s advocate, retired publisher of The Miami Herald, and spark plug behind the movement knows he is an able executive. Here we see Lawrence and his fellow advocates crisscrossing the state aboard the smartly decked out Children’s Movement bus that served as a mobile command center for the milk party tour. The milk party designation the group chose was an inspired move. It speaks both to the grassroots nature of the movement and the impressive momentum Lawrence and his associates built as they pulled into town after town to the enthusiastic support of large crowds. Some have wondered if the milk party might spread to other states — possibly even become a national movement. Only time — and the actions of other advocates and concerned citizens across the country — will tell.

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What Can Colombia Teach Us About Early Education?

October 28, 2010

So much of what we know about the effects of early childhood education is based on research conducted in North America where we have been fortunate enough to have studies like those conducted on the Perry Preschool Program. Of course, repeating the Perry study 40 years later would be difficult if not impossible here in the U.S. That’s because over the decades out-of-home child care and preschool have become so prevalent that any large sample of children against which researchers compare the early education treatment is far less likely to have attended no type of early childhood program. This complicates matters when measuring the true effects of access to quality preschool since it is difficult to gauge to what extent the “impure” control group affects the outcome.

That isn’t the case in Colombia where I grew up. There, preschool education as we in the U.S. have come to know it is far less prevalent. Colombia has about 4.9 million children under age 5 and sadly only 30 percent of these receive early childhood services. Currently, Colombia is experiencing a large, smooth expansion of its early childhood provision, increasing access and/or quality through public provision and through public-private partnerships. This makes Colombia a good place for conducting high-quality randomized studies, working with larger samples of children than the Perry researchers had at their disposal, and for impacting early childhood development (ECD) policy and growth in access through such research.

At NIEER we have begun a randomized study in partnership with AeioTU, a well-regarded preschool program whose mission is providing high-quality early education to children in poverty. Working with a sample of about 1,200 children in two sites, our research team will investigate child growth and development in the cognitive, socio-emotional and health areas. Over time, we will estimate children’s outcomes at primary school entry and throughout primary and secondary school, and program cost-effectiveness. We believe the results will not only update the field in terms of the impact of high-quality ECD, but also be relevant for ECD policies being implemented all over the region. Our project now counts on the collaboration of Los Andes, a leading university in Colombia and a wonderful local PI, Dr. Raquel Bernal, as well as the Jacobs Foundation in Switzerland and the Inter-American Development Bank.

NIEER co-director Steve Barnett and I recently visited the AeioTU centers participating in the study, and met with our local evaluation team to assess solutions to issues that have arisen in the fieldwork. To say the Colombians are enthusiastic about the study would be an understatement. The presentation we did on the study was profiled in leading newspapers in Colombia. In addition, we are able to count on wonderful support from community leaders, local government, and the national government. In Santa Marta, one of the cities where we gave our presentation, the mayor presented Steve with the keys to the city!

Milagros Nores
Principal Investigator
Assistant Research Professor, NIEER

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Investing in Children

October 11, 2010

On Wednesday, October 13, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings and the National Institute for Early Education Research will release a new collection of papers that assesses the field of early childhood education and child care. Edited by Senior Fellow Ron Haskins and W. Steven Barnett of Rutgers University, Investing in Young Children: New Directions in Federal Preschool and Early Childhood Policy focuses on Early Head Start, Head Start, and home visiting programs. The editors recommend promising reforms for all three programs, including closing ineffective Head Start centers or giving other program operators the opportunity to compete for Head Start funds. Other recommendations include offering a few states broad regulatory relief to innovate and coordinate Head Start with other state preschool educational programs and child care. To view the full report, visit nieer.org.

To address these issues, the Center on Children and Families will host a discussion featuring Haskins and Barnett. A panel of experts and program administrators will offer their views on the analysis, especially on the recommendations to reform Head Start.

Speakers and panelists, listed below, will take audience questions. To register, click here: https://www.cvent.com/EVENTS/Register/IdentityConfirmation.aspx?e=3e34ba9a-fc57-46cc-9e93-2ded83732c5e.

Welcome: Ron Haskins
Senior Fellow, Economic Studies, Brookings Institution

Overview: W. Steven Barnett
Professor and Co-Director, National Institute for Early Education (NIEER), Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Panel:
Ben Allen
Director, Public Policy and Research, National Head Start Association

Harriet Dichter
National Director, First Five Years

Roberto Rodriguez
Domestic Policy Council, The White House

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst
Senior Fellow, Governance Studies

Nicholas Zill
Educational Consultant

Leave a Comment » | Child Development, Early Head Start, Economics, Head Start programs | Permalink
Posted by NIEER

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