Sara Mead's Policy Notebook

I'm pretty fascinated with these NPR charts comparing adults' professions and earnings today with their families' incomes when they were children (even though my own profession is too obscure to show up in them)! But dang, the information on childcare workers in these charts is depressing. Of all the professions included, childcare workers tend to come from families with some of the lowest earnings--and their economic status is worse as adults. In other words, childcare is downwardly mobile work, even for people from relatively disadvantaged backgrounds to start with. What a sad reflection of how we as a society value the people who take care of our kids. And what a huge challenge for improving the quality of early care and education. 

Charter supporters nationally are focusing on New York City, where recently-elected Mayor deBlasio seems to be making good on campaign promises to oppose charter co-locations and charge charter schools rent (never mind charter parents are city taxpayers, too...)--a potentially a significant blow to the city's charter sector that has garned significant national criticism for the Mayor. While lots of smart folks have written on this, I can't help be struck between the contrast between what's going on in New York right now--and the consternation among charter supporters leading up to last year's election there--and the current D.C. Mayor's race. 

Today's weather has schools closed throughout the DC area. This year's high number of snow- and cold-related school closures along the East Coast has frustrated a lot of parents and teachers--who are particularly concerned about how districts are going to make up for the high number of closures, which has already exceeded the excess days many school systems built into their calendars this year. I spoke to one teacher recently whose school district has chosen to make up days by holding Saturday classes, and others frustrated that they may have to cancel planned (and paid for) spring break trips due to make-up days. My colleague Andy Rotherham and Matt Yglesias both have interesting things to say about snow days generally, but the thing that strikes me about this is how starkly it illustrates that we still think about the school year and school outcomes primarily in terms of seat time. Isolated snow days don't seem to hurt student learning, and adding days back at the end of the school year doesn't necessarily help student learning much either (particularly since the last part of the school year tends to be light on educational activities in many communities, particularly at the elementary level). But because state laws define a set number of days that students must attend school each year, districts have to make them up unless states decide to give a waiver. With the growth of technology enabled personalized learning, I wonder if districts, schools, and states can identify more creative ways to help accelerate learning and make up for the impacts of snow days during the regular year, rather than adding Saturdays, cutting into planned breaks, or extending the school year further into June.  

Interesting piece by Matt Yglesias on recent arguments that the growth of free stuff on the internet creates social benefits that fail to be captured by GDP. I'd just note that this problem is nothing new--GDP numbers have never captured the unpaid home and childcare work done by (mostly) women. E.g.: If a woman stays home to take care of her 2-year-old, she's not contributing anything to GDP. But if she pays someone else to watch her 2-year-old while she works, the money she pays that person is counted towards GDP.

Great new report from the Early Childhood Data Collaborative highlights the gaps and disconnections in states' early childhood data systems. Only one state--Pennsylvania--can link child-level data across all the state's early childhood programs and connect it to the state's data system. As a result, policymakers and other key stakeholders often lack the data they need to answer fundamental questions about how well a state's or community's early childhood programs are serving children or where the gaps and need are (and are not). As someone who works with both early childood and K-12 policy issues and clients, the gaps in early childhood data are a major source of frustration. Questions that are simple to answer in the K-12 context--Where are children in this community being served? How many children are underserved?--often cannot be answered in the early childhood context, or can be answered only through elaborate extrapolation from existing data sources or intensive on the ground data collection. Moreover, some of the data that do exist cannot be easily accessed or linked to other data sources. While it's not sexy, addressing this problem is critical to enabling smart policy to improve services for young children. 

Mike McShane thinks education reformers care too much about bad schools. 

David Brooks and Gail Collins also discussed pre-k in their Opinionator web dialogue series this week. I'm not sure that David Brooks really knows much about Head Start (his comment that the program needs to provide more "many more wraparound services" suggests he's unaware of Head Start's core and long-standing focus on comprehensive child development, including nutrition, health, and family services). But he does have one really key point: "Head Start needs to see the same reform energy that K-12 is seeing." Yet, Head Start has been largely ignored by K-12 reformers, even though it's an $8 billion annual program that serves nearly a million of the nation's poorest preschoolers. It's time that changed.  

With both Senate and House committees holding hearings on pre-k, the issue's gotten some attention this week, including able coverage from my Politics K12 colleagues.  A few thoughts: 

In their great NYT op-ed today on what policymakers should do to maximize the impact of pre-k investments, Dan Willingham and David Grissmer make two equally key points: 1) Policymakers need to do a better job of ensuring that pre-k standards and quality definitions actually implement what research tells us makes a difference for preschool learning (hint: lots of programs don't do this), 2) That said, we don't know as much as we should about how to do pre-k well, and policymakers can--should-- design pre-k expansion in ways that enhance our knowledge so that further expansion can have even greater impact. Good pointers in thinking about how the administration should use the $250 in pre-k RTT funding included in the 2014 Omnibus legislation--the pre-k program Obama was talking about in his SOTU Tuesday night. But also key in thinking about how to improve the federal Head Start program and implement the $500 in funding for early head start expansion or EHS-childcare partnerships also included in the Omnibus. Read the whole thing here. 

All this talk about pre-k in New York and New Jersey reminded me of Sophia Pappas' great book Goodmorning, Children. Sophia started out her career as a teacher in an Abbott-funded pre-k program in New Jersey, and currently runs early childhood programs for the New York City Public Schools. Her book is a great resource for anyone who wants the teacher's and kid's level perspective on what good preschool looks like--and the difference it makes in kids lives .

I'm got a new piece up at Slate urging New York City Mayor Bill deBlasio to learn from New Jersey's Abbott pre-k program and prioritize quality, data, curriculum, and diverse providers as he seeks to expand pre-k access in New York

As I mentioned in this previous post, the Omnibus appropriations bill includes $500 million for expansion of Head Start services for infants and toddlers. Under the language of the bill, these funds can be used for expansion of Early Head Start programs, conversion of existing Head Start to Early Head Start slots, or new discretionary grants for Early Head Start-Child Care partnerships proposed by the administration in its FY2014 budget proposal. While funds will have to be used for these purposes, my understanding is that the administration has significant discretion in how to prioritize and develop a process for allocating/awarding them. 

As numerous media outlets are reporting, early childhood education, and particularly Head Start, are looking like winners in the ombnibus appropriations agreement reached by Congressional negotiators last night. A quick summary of what you know: 

Great piece by Anya Kamenetz on all the problems with the push to implement "brain-based" approaches in education. While it's indisputable that modern science is dramatically enhancing our understanding of how the brain works and how it develops, and much of what we've learned is incredibly exciting, it's also true that trying to apply these findings to educational practice or policy is much more complicated than often assumed--and neuroscience findings often don't translated into clear implications for policy or practice. The misuse of brain science is one of the things that frustrates me most about the ongoing "boy crisis" debate about gender in education, and I'm also uncomfortable with some of the brain-based arguments I hear early childhood advocates making, too, although I clearly understand the temptation.