Sara Mead's Policy Notebook
Sara Mead was a senior associate with Bellwether Education Partners who wrote about education policy, with particular attention to early childhood education, school reform, and improving educational outcomes for low-income students. This blog is no longer being updated.
Education
Opinion
Young Education Leader Profile: Ethan Gray, CEE-Trust
Urban schools have long been the focus of education reform efforts, because of the shockingly poor outcomes that many large city school systems have produced. Yet a growing number of cities across the country--New Orleans; Washington, D.C.; Denver; and Indianapolis, to name a few--have become models of new approaches to public education that combine vibrant charter sectors, district-level reforms, and a rich network of external human capital and support organizations to drive improved results for students. In these cities, improving education is no longer simply about the school district, but is an "it takes a city" effort in which philanthropic organizations, Mayors, and intermediaries are playing a key role in driving and coordinating a range of bold initiatives and activities designed to improve student learning. CEE-Trust Executive Director Ethan Gray calls these increasingly important organizations "harbormasters," and the organization he leads works to bring these harbormasters together in a national network to help them create vibrant ecosystems for education innovation and reform in their cities.
Education
Opinion
Young Education Leader Profile: Andrew Coy, Digital Harbor Foundation
Educators, parents, and policymakers increasingly recognize the critical importance of developing students' skills and knowledge in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields--both for national economic competitiveness and for the individual opportunities that skills in these fields open up to students. Yet international assessments show that U.S. students lag behind their international peers in science and math, and many schools are ill-equipped to prepare students for a world of increasingly rapid technological innovation.
Education
Opinion
Profile of ClassDojo Founders Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don
Managing student behavior is one of the biggest challenges teachers face. Further, how schools choose to deal with student behavior can have a significant impact on children's character and social-emotional development. ClassDojo is a technology-based classroom tool that was designed to help teachers improve classroom behavior and share information on student behavior with parents and administrators. Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don, two education technology entrepreneurs with experience as teachers, launched ClassDojo in 2011 and have seen it grow to reach more than one million users.
Education
Opinion
Young Education Leader Profile: Sharhonda Bossier
Parents are children's most important teachers and advocates. But parent voices--particularly the voices of parents of underserved students--are often absent from public debates about education reform, and many parents feel powerless to change a system that persistently fails to serve their children. Sharhonda Bossier is working to change that. As the Deputy Director of Families for Excellent Schools, she leads and supports that organization's work to organize and mobilize families in support of aggressive education reform. Raised in the Watts area of Los Angeles, she earned her Bachelor's degree and Master's in education from the University of California Santa Cruz and taught in Austin, Texas and Brooklyn before shifting to organizing parents full-time. She lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Education
Opinion
Katie Beck: Leading Education Innovation with 4.0 Schools
What's next in education? It's an important question today. Over the past decade, ideas like standards-based accountability and charter schools have been at the center of the education reform conversation--and there's some evidence that these reforms have had positive impacts. But even the strongest supporters of the past decade of reform efforts would acknowledge that they haven't produced nearly the results we need to ensure the nation's economic competitiveness or close achievement gaps for low-income students. That has people across the board questioning what the next set of big (and small) ideas needs to be to produce dramatically better results for children.
Education
Opinion
Ten People Who Are Changing Education Today--And Will Be Ten Years From Now
For the last two years, I've published a series of profiles of young education leaders who are helping to transform education today and are likely to have an even greater impact in the coming years. This year's list features ten amazing leaders working in education in a variety of ways:
Education
Opinion
How Principals Can Be Pals for PreK-3rd Alignment
My former colleagues at the New America Foundation write about a new piece by Kristie Kauerz on why elementary school principals should care about the PreK-3rd years and the critical role they play in building PreK-3rd alignment in their schools and communities. I also wrote about this for the Foundation for Child Development a while back.
Education
Opinion
In Defense of Bubble Tests
I'm sure that people far more knowledgeable about higher education innovation than I have plenty of smart and well-informed things to say about Nathan Heller's recent New Yorker piece on elite universities' entry into the MOOC market. So I'll offer only three observations. First, it's refreshing to read an article in an elite media publication that actually acknowledges that there's a lot more to higher ed than Ivy League schools and state flagship universities. Second, while a minor point in the overall piece, I found this discussion of assessment striking, given the widespread derision of "bubble tests" in K-12 education circles:
Education
Opinion
Big HHS Announcement Today: ESEA Waiver Approach Comes to Child Care
Big announcement from HHS today on proposed new regulations that would significantly expand regulation of childcare providers receiving subsidies through the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), a federal program that provides funds to states to help them provide childcare subsidies to low-income parents.
Education
Opinion
Why NIEER is Far From Right About D.C. Charter Schools
I have a post up at the Quick and the Ed today arguing that the District of Columbia, where I live and serve on the Board overseeing D.C. charter schools, is perhaps the best place in the country for 3- and 4-year-old pre-k. Astute readers of that post may be asking themselves, "If D.C. is doing such a good job on preschool, why did NIEER's State Preschool Yearbook rate D.C.'s charter preschool programs as meeting only 2 out of 10 NIEER standards? How can these programs be good if they meet only 20% of quality standards?"
Education
Opinion
Once More, With Feeling: RTT-ELC is Not About Pre-K
In light of the recently released NIEER report showing significant state cuts in preschool funding, I decided to look and see how states that receive Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge Grants from the Department of Education fared in terms of preschool funding and access in 2011-12. After all, Early Learning Challenge Grant funds were supposed to reward state that had made significant commitments to quality early childhood education. So states that got the grants should have been less likely to make funding or access cuts in preschool than others, right? Wrong. A cursory glance shows that several ELC winners made significant cuts in pre-k funding or access in 2011-12. Note that states had already made these funding and access cuts before they were awarded ELC grants--and they still received the grants. California cut preschool spending by $1,009 a child in 2011-12 and cut the number of slots by more than 5,000 (which reduced access statewide by 1 percentage point). Maryland, another RTT-ELC winner, cut pre-k spending per pupil by $946. And North Carolina reduced the total percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-k by 5 percentage points. Another data point showing that ELC was not about preschool.
Education
Opinion
Data Shows First Decline in State Preschool Spending in a Decade
Yesterday, the National Institute for Early Education Research released their annual State Preschool Yearbook, a valuable resource on state preschool programs, spending and enrollment. It's not a pretty picture. Total state spending on preschool was down 7% in 2011-12, marking the first time in a decade that overall state spending on preschool has fallen. To understand why this is so striking, it's important to place pre-k spending trends in longer-term context (see chart below). For most of the past decade, the Yearbook has shown states making progress on pre-k. Even after the recession hit in 2008, the report still found states holding ground on pre-k, thanks in part (but not exclusively) to an infusion of federal ARRA funds, and even showed a funding uptick last year. This is the first time since NIEER started counting that states collectively have actually taken a step backwards on pre-k. Further, pre-k funding levels in 2011-12 were at their lowest point since the recession began in 2008.
Education
Opinion
New Head Start Designations Announced
Over the past year, this blog has covered the Head Start designation renewal process, in which Head Start grantees that fail to meet certain performance measures are required to "recompete" for their grants. In December 2011, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which manages Head Start, notified 132 grantees that they would be required to re-apply for their grants. These grantees, and other agencies wishing to compete for Head Start grants, submitted applications in Summer 2012, but then heard nothing for months--to the considerable frustration of both the programs and early childhood policy analysts who wondered if something had gone off the rails with ACF's designation renewal process.
Education
Opinion
Improbable Scholars?
Earlier today, I moderated a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress on David Kirp's new book, Improbable Scholars. You can watch the full event streaming here.