Category: P-3

Why focus on Lancaster County’s youngest kids could break cycle of poverty

lancaster article

Last week I posted Thomas Friedman’s article about civic renewal in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. On Sunday Lancaster’s newspaper published an article about the county’s new P-3 initiative (which I’ve been supporting). Reporter Jeff Hawkes does a nice job using local examples to introduce P-3 improvement. See in particular:

  • How Hawkes follows a family receiving home visiting services to discuss the importance of P-3.
  • The important roles played by the United Way and the Community Action Partnership (CAP) as intermediary/backbone organizations.
  • How Jill Koser, a former elementary school principal and the current head of education and child development at the CAP, is able to use her experience to help bridge early childhood and elementary school education.
  • The connection between P-3 and 2 Generation programs as Anna Rodriguez participates in Parents as Teachers and a GED program.

You can find the article here.

Survey Finds Majority of K-3 Teachers Feel Unity With Preschool Educators

Marva Hinton of Education Week writes:

“Sometimes there seems to be a disconnect between educators who work with children prior to elementary school and those who teach in the early grades, but new survey results find a strong connection between the two groups.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC, recently released results from a survey of more than 530 current or recent K-3 teachers. The group also conducted online, in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 K-3 teachers.

On average, two-thirds of the teachers who were surveyed viewed themselves as “early-childhood educators.” The numbers were highest among kindergarten teachers with 93 percent agreeing with that statement, while it dropped to 52 percent among 3rd grade teachers …

The survey also found that 76 percent of K-3 teachers supported the creation of a unified and aligned system of early-childhood education from birth to age 8 …

Those surveyed indicated that a unified and aligned system has several potentially important outcomes such as more developmentally appropriate standards for students (92 percent) and higher wages for teachers (88 percent).”

Pre-K isn’t an inoculation: What comes next matters

Important new research out of the University of Virginia. Provides additional support for P-3 approaches. The New America Foundation has a nice summary blog post. A few excerpts:

“In a new study out of the University of Virginia, The role of elementary school quality in the persistence of preschool effects, the authors find that the quality of the elementary school students matriculate into matters for whether pre-K gains persist. Which makes sense, right? It is unrealistic to expect the benefits gained in any one year of schooling to be maintained in a low-quality setting. In fact, the authors suggest that to believe so would be ‘to believe in magic.'”
…
This study is a welcome reminder that as it states, ‘preschool programs do prepare children academically for kindergarten, validating contemporary policy initiatives that focus on investing early,’  but that ‘we must pay careful attention to what is realistic to expect from one year of preschool education and the conditions under which its benefits persist or diminish.'”
…
When we talked to Rolf Grafwallner, program director for Early Childhood Initiatives at the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), he explained that ‘you have to look at this period [PreK-3rd] as a block. You can’t piecemeal it.'”

How a School-Based Early-Learning Program Boosted Later College Attendance (Ed Week)

“Preschool may be be good at offering short-term academic gains for kids, but a program that provided services starting at preschool through 3rd grade showed benefits for children that boosted their college attendance rates years later, according to a new study.

Researchers examined the life outcomes of nearly 1,000 children who attended the Chicago Child-Parent Centers as preschoolers in the early 1980s. On average, children who attended the program completed more years of education than a control group of children. And those effects were amplified the longer that they remained in the program.”

https://go.edc.org/29ke

“Want to Beat the Stock Market? Bet on Early-Childhood Education”

I’m posting this from Normal, IL. Over the next couple of days I’ll be visiting two of the CPC P-3 Centers that University of Minnesota professor Arthur Reynolds discusses below in an excerpt from a recent Education Week commentary. I look forward to sharing what I learn as part of an ongoing study of Place-Based Collaboration on Early Education funded by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

As Reynolds says,

“After five decades and more than 250,000 families served, the CPC program is arguably one of the nation’s most effective social programs. Now in its third generation as a P-3 school-reform model, the program and its unique success provide an approach and set of action steps to innovate in education to produce even better investment returns. Collaborative leadership, engaged learning, small classes, and comprehensive family and instructional supports are core elements.

In fact, CPC has one of the highest economic returns of any public or private financial investment. Cost-benefit analyses have shown that for every dollar invested, more than $10 is returned in cost savings in the areas of remedial education and criminal justice, coupled with an increase in economic well-being and tax revenues. That is an inflation-adjusted annual return of 18 percent over a child’s lifetime, a cumulative return of 900 percent. In the 2013 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama even cited the research into CPC’s return on investment as a major basis of his Preschool for All initiative.”

See the full article: https://go.edc.org/rndt

Addressing ACEs through P-3 Partnerships

This past summer I did a presentation at the National Academies of Medicine on how P-3 Partnerships can serve as ideal platforms for preventing and addressing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). This two-day workshop on the Neurocognitive and Psychosocial Impacts of Violence included presentations by researchers from the health, behavioral science, criminal justice, and education fields. You can find the workshop agenda and a number of the presentations at the meeting webpage.  The National Academies has also made audio of all the presentations available at the bottom of the page (the audio requires a large download of each day’s sessions).

For easy reference, you can find my slides here, and I’m posting the audio from my session below (I pick up the pace as I get rolling a few minutes in). You will see a small square of video in the top right corner. Unfortunately there is no way to make the video larger.