Sara Mead's Policy Notebook

Interesting NYT article examines why, even as girls are pulling ahead of boys in measures of academic achievement--not just in New York, but across the United States and even internationally--boys significantly outnumber girls at New York City's elite, exam-based public schools, such as Stuyvesant, The Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. This is one of the more interesting issues in the current evolution of gender and educational achievement in America: Over the past few decades, women have caught up with and then surpassed men in indicators of educational attainment, and girls (on average) tend to do better in school than boys. At the same time, boys and men tend to remain over-represented in some of the highest ranks of educational and professional attainment, for a mix of reasons that are in some cases obvious and in others not well understood at all. For its part, The New York Times doesn't seem to come up with much of an answer explaining the phenomenon it describes, although I suspect NYC Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky captures the key point in this paragraph:

Smart, brief report from ACT (with whom I've worked in the past on K-12 issues) looks at why early childhood education matters and what is most important for children to learn in preschool, kindergarten, and the early elementary grades. I particularly like this report for several reasons: First, it looks at the early years as a learning continuum, not just preschool or early elementary school. Second, it maintains a strong focus on the early skills and knowledge that research indicates are most predictive of children's later school performance. This is helpful to lay people and K-12 educators and policymakers who often feel flummoxed by apparent disagreements in the early childhood field about the relative importance of different types of skills and experience for young children.

New results from the longitudinal study of children who participated in New Jersey's Abbott pre-k program (a universal pre-k program for 3- and 4-year-olds in 31 of the state's highest poverty districts) find that gains from participating in Abbott pre-k persist through at least 4th and 5th grade. Gains were both statistically and educationally significant (equivalent to as much as 20-40 percent of the black-white achievement gap for children who attended 2 years of preschool).

Yesterday Russ Whitehurst and I participated in a debate on the federal role in early childhood education, hosted by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Video of the full debate is now available online here.

Education insiders overwhelmingly believe that President Obama's universal preschool proposal is going nowhere fast.

According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board: "The feds are going to educate your toddler no matter the evidence." If the WSJ editorial board can't even be bothered to understand what the President called for on preschool last week I'm not sure why anyone should care what they think of the proposal. (For the record, the administration is proposing a state-federal funding partnership to expand pre-k access using existing community- and school-based providers, not a federally-run program.)

Great piece by Matt Yglesias calling into question the logic and value of early childhood advocates' "return on investment" rhetoric. As is likely clear from this post, I've long been very frustrated with the constant focus on cost-benefit analyses from pre-k advocates and insistence that "pre-k pays for itself." I think early childhood advocates think they're being clever by making the economic case in this way: "See, this is such a valuable thing we can't afford not to do it, and by the way, it will generate so much savings it won't really cost anything! How can elected officials say no?" It's like some kind of progressive version of the Laffer Curve.

It's a very good thing that the administration's definition of pre-k quality includes quality curriculum and not just teacher qualifications and class sizes. Rich content is an important and woefully overlooked component of quality pre-k experience (see here for more on that). But including the words "a rigorous curriculum" for 4-year-olds was a mistake. Quality pre-k programs absolutely need a clearly articulated, intentional curriculum that focuses on rich language experiences and content that predicts school readiness and includes teacher led instruction as one component of a context that also emphasizes play, center time, and small group activities. And lots of current preschool programs do fall short on the content and instructional component. But calling high-quality pre-k curriculum "rigorous" only feeds into a set of misapprehensions about both what quality pre-k advocates are trying to do (no, we don't want to eliminate play from pre-k or push an exclusively academic focus), and what quality preschool looks like. That's problematic for two reasons: First, because it raises people's hackles and creates an objection to quality pre-k that didn't need to exist here. Second, because an under-acknowledged quality program in pre-k today is that a lot of well-intentioned but inadequately prepared pre-k teachers sincerely want to improve their students' school readiness and equate that with worksheets, sitting at desks, and drilling in ABCs. That's not, though, what quality pre-k means or what advocates of quality pre-k want and it's not helpful to suggest that it is. I hope the administration clarifies that one soon.

In addition to a new state partnership for universal pre-k, the Obama administration's more detailed early childhood agenda released yesterday appears to call for an expansion of Head Start. This is interesting for two reasons: First, it seems to take the $7 billion in Head Start funds off the table as a potential offset for part of the costs of new pre-k investments. In general I think that's a good thing: For all the challenges it faces, Head Start is just about the only funding stream for any kind of preschool for poor kids in states like Mississippi, and eliminating it or shifting it to a state pre-k program would leave adrift very disadvantaged kids in the states that do least for poor kids. This proposal also seems to imply that the Obama administration wants to transition Head Start to a program for infants, toddlers, and three year olds, with pre-k as the primary program serving four-year-olds. The administration's recent opening of new joint 0-5 Head Start-Early Head Start funding opportunities in a limited number of geographies could be seen as a strategy to build a bridge in this direction. In a sense, this feels to me like another kind of "pass the buck" strategy on Head Start--we don't know how to make it highly effective for four-year-olds, so let's push it down to infants and toddlers (because we think it will work better with this group? because we think mediocre performance won't matter as much with babies?). But the reality is that Head Start remains the biggest single public funding stream for pre-k, and the only source of pre-k for low-income kids in some states, and if we're serious about improving low-income kids' access to quality pre-k in this fiscal environment, we've can't afford to ignore or pass the buck on this program.

Via Matt Yglesias, more details on the universal pre-k proposal from Tuesday's state of the union address. But still no word on the big question: How much does it cost, and how does the administration propose to pay for it? (apparently, we have to wait for the full budget proposal to find that out). Without a clear answer on that question--and offsets that are attractive to House Republicans--this isn't going anywhere.

With last night's State of the Union proposal to expand pre-k access, there's a lot of buzz out there on pre-k today--and, as always with D.C. or the internet, a lot of misconceptions. I want to clear up a few common myths about the evidence on pre-k. The following statements are not true.

My colleague Andrew Rotherham is an astute analyst of education politics, and his analysis of the significant obstacles facing any federal push on pre-k coming out of tonight's State of the Union is pretty dead on. I would quibble with one point is his analysis, however. Andy writes:

Big early childhood proposal in President Obama's State of the Union address:

If you haven't yet, you should definitely read David Kirp's NYT op-ed on Union City, New Jersey's approach to education reform and his forthcoming book on the same. A few years ago I had the opportunity to spend some time learning about Union City's work on pre-k and early literacy and was duly impressed by their success there. Union City's embrace of quality pre-k and systematic effort to create a truly language-rich learning environment and effective literacy instruction across all their elementary schools are truly worth learning from. And their success educating a primarily immigrant and English language learner population is particularly relevant given our nation's changing demographics. The story of how Union City got there is also fascinating, and David deserves credit for deeply immersing himself in both the city's schools and political and education culture in order to tell it.