How States Can Support the First Decade of Children’s Lives

[wpvideo mq1WlvRC] Sponsored by the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists on October 17th, this webinar explores the implications for state policy of the recent study, All Children Learn and Thrive: Building First 10 Schools and Communities.  This report looks at innovative schools and communities that combine alignment across early childhood and elementary education and care (children’s first…

New America on First 10 Panel and All Children Study

New America’s Elise Franchino draws on a recent panel event at New America as she reviews key findings and take-aways from my study, All Children Learn and Thrive: Building First 10 Schools and Communities. Here are a few excerpts, or head here to read Franchino’s article: First 10 Schools and Communities: Helping All Young Children…

Reading Aloud to Young Children Has Benefits for Behavior and Attention

“It’s a truism in child development that the very young learn through relationships and back-and-forth interactions, including the interactions that occur when parents read to their children. A new study provides evidence of just how sustained an impact reading and playing with young children can have, shaping their social and emotional development in ways that…

New Analysis Finds Long-Lasting Benefits to Early-Childhood Education (Ed Week)

“High-quality early-childhood programs boost graduation rates, reduce grade retention and cut down on special education placements, according to a new analysis of several other early-education research studies that adds fresh fuel to long-running policy debates about the effectiveness of pre-K. ‘These results suggest that the benefits of early-childhood education programs do in fact persist beyond the preschool year,’…

“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…

The Important Role of the Transition to Kindergarten for Low-Income Children

Drawing on his new report, Connecting the Steps: State Strategies to Ease the Transition from Pre-K to Kindergarten, New America’s Aaron Loewenberg writes in Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity:  “Transition activities such as teacher home visits; parent orientation sessions; and collaborative meetings and trainings between principals, child care center administrators, and pre-K and kindergarten teachers are…

New Consensus Statement on Effects of Pre-Kindergarten

A task force of social scientists from Brookings and Duke University has produced a consensus statement on what we know about the effects of pre-kindergarten. Brookings introduces the statement and a report on the current state of scientific knowledge on pre-kindergarten effects here. Education Week’s coverage is here. The Task Force agreed on six consensus statements. The…

“How Child Care Enriches Mothers, and Especially the Sons They Raise”

  From today’s New York Times: “As many American parents know, hiring care for young children during the workday is punishingly expensive, costing the typical family about a third of its income. Helping parents pay for that care would be expensive for society, too. Yet recent studies show that of any policy aimed to help…

Economists Highlight Another Benefit of Investing Early: Encouraging Work

As Paul Reville says, “What we actually have now is a felicitous dovetailing of our moral obligations and our economic imperatives.” Here is another case in point countering the idea that all social services discourage work. From “Supply-Side Economics, but for Liberals” in the New York Times: “Economists have often taken it as a given that…

New Case Studies: PreK-3rd Alignment

The U.S. Department of Education recently released a set of case studies of PreK-3rd Alignment and Differentiated Instruction. The case studies are of the Boston Public Schools, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers, Early Works, FirstSchool, and the SEAL program. The alignment efforts in these programs all emphasize developmentally-appropriate instruction and focus on building students’ vocabulary, oral language…