The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is launching what officials of the federal agency term the most comprehensive study to date of the impact of day care on infants.
The five-year study will examine the emotional, cognitive, and social development of about 1,200 infants being cared for by adults other than their parents in a variety of day-care settings.
The study will follow children’s development during their first three and a half years. It will involve infants representing a cross-section of geographic locations and socioeconomic backgrounds.
Growing numbers of mothers of young infants are entering the labor force, noted Sarah Friedman, a health-science administrator at the institute.
The study will explore “whether this has an impact on child development and what the specifics of the impact are,” she explained.
The project is the most ambitious attempt so far to draw together data from a variety of day-care settings and study a wide range of characteristics of nonparental care, according to Ms. Friedman.
Efforts by nine school districts to place more authority in the hands of teachers and principals are profiled in a new National Governors’ Association report.
“Restructuring in Progress: Lessons from Pioneering Districts” was researched with the assistance of the Center for Policy Research in Education and written by Jane L. David, director of the Bay Area Research Group in Palo Alto, Calif.
It focuses on four districts--Jefferson County, Ky.; Dade County, Fla.; Poway, Calif; and New Orleans--that have undertaken substantial efforts to reorganize the way they do business in order to improve teaching and learning.
Some of the changes include reorganizing middle schools into “mini-schools” of roughly 150 students each; providing schools with a lump-sum budget, to spend as they see fit; and creating new governance structures at the school site.
The report also analyzes common problems in approaching structural change and how districts have overcome such barriers.
Copies of the report are available for $7.50 each, prepaid, from nga Publications, 444 N. Capitol Street, N.W., Suite 250, Washington, D.C. 20001.
Teachers in six Southern states earn an average of $10,000 a year less than other college graduates in the region, according to an annual survey by theSoutheastern Educational Improvement Laboratory.
Despite gains in recent years, the study noted, the typical Southern teacher’s $24,572 annual pay was far behind the $34,455 earned by other graduates.
Copies of “An Analysis of the Comparability of Teacher Salaries to the Earnings of Other College Graduates in the Southeast: 1988 Update” are available for $12.00 each from the Southeastern Education Improvement Laboratory, P.O. Box 12748, 200 Park, Suite 200, Research Triangle Park, N.C. 27709-2748.
