“Affordable Child Care: The Secret to a Better Economy”

Of the 24 million children under 6 in the United States today, some 12 million need day care, because both parents work or a single parent is the breadwinner. Yet most working families can’t afford good care — if they can even find it in the first place. In 2006, a federal study gave a…

The Merits of Reading Real Books to Your Children

How do we think about a distinct role for paper, for “book-books” in children’s lives? My own pediatric cause is literacy promotion for young children. I am the national medical director of the program Reach Out and Read, which follows a model of talking with the parents of babies, toddlers and preschoolers about the importance…

To Teach a Child to Read, First Give Him Glasses

“A community school is both a place and a set of partnerships with local organizations intended to deliver health, social and recreational supports for students and their families. The idea of a school that serves as a neighborhood hub holds widespread appeal, and 150 school districts, including Chicago, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Albuquerque, Tulsa, Okla., and Lincoln,…

Atlantic Monthly: Boston’s Preschools a Model for Later Grades

After a relentless focus on quality in the early years, the city is even bringing lessons learned to later grades … Changing all of early elementary school in a methodical and purposeful way to better resemble the student-centered structure of preschool would be a much bigger win than just proving that preschool helps students do…

K-3 Quality Matters Too, Says New Policy Report

As important as preschool is, the quality of the early elementary years is also critical and shouldn’t be ignored, says a new report by the Education Commission of the States, a education policy think tank. From Education Week’s Early Years blog: http://goo.gl/KsEDts

Child Care Expansion Takes a Toll on Poorly Paid Workers

While the scramble to find affordable child care has drawn a lot of attention, prompting President Obama to label it “a must ­have” economic priority, the struggles of the workers — mostly women — who provide that care have not. Yet the fortunes of both are inextricably intertwined. “You can’t separate the quality of children’s…

Why Handwriting Is Still Essential in the Keyboard Age

Do children in a keyboard world need to learn old-fashioned handwriting? There is a tendency to dismiss handwriting as a nonessential skill, even though researchers have warned that learning to write may be the key to, well, learning to write. And beyond the emotional connection adults may feel to the way we learned to write,…

Preschool “Works” When Instruction Is Good to Excellent, Study Finds

Preschool teachers must offer high-quality instruction to change academic outcomes for their students, according to a new analysis of eight large preschool studies conducted by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Preschoolers in center-based care showed larger gains in reading and language when their teachers spent…

High Population Turnover in Neighborhoods Undermines Parent-Child Relationships

Living in neighborhoods with a high turnover of people damages parent-child relationships, particularly among ethnic minorities, according to our pioneering study of over 3,000 US families. The findings, from research in Chicago, are worrying because millions of people live in neighborhoods with considerable residential flux. Indeed, residential transience has increased since the Great Recession—home ownership…

Building a Citywide Birth—3rd System: One City’s Plan

We are aware that building a coherent system is more time consuming and less flashy than just adding more slots or more dollars to an existing system. But we have an opportunity to … build a system that coherently knits together our existing resources and thoughtfully brings in new resources to meet the needs of…