The Early Learning Challenge Fund presents states with an opportunity to deliver high quality early childhood programs to the growing numbers of children who enter kindergarten already behind their peers socially and academically. This "school readiness" gap begins before children enter school and places children at risk of failure in school. Yet despite all that is known about the importance of early childhood interventions for at-risk children, the number of economically disadvantaged children enrolled in preschool remains low.

Research shows that access to early learning opportunities can increase a child's success in school and in life. Studies also indicate that an effective preschool program should include solid pre-academic curriculum, a quality teacher, small class sizes, and a specific focus on preparing children for school by providing a rich educational experience that will address the gaps in their cognitive and social skills. Early childhood programs are primarily designed to create learning readiness, not test readiness. So a successful program should integrate policies and practices based on the developmental research for babies, toddlers, and kindergarteners.

To maximize this grant program's impact and effectiveness, the federal government should coordinate with other education programs as well as other social service providers, especially those related to health and nutrition for children and families. Collaborative efforts at the state and local levels are critical to enable prekindergarten programs to be offered in a variety of settings. These efforts can include coordination between schools, Head Start, and other early childhood programs. This kind of teamwork can offer additional support and stability to working families.

All children need and deserve a good start. Attending high quality early childhood programs is an important part of starting early and starting right.

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The Early Learning Challenge Fund presents a new direction in education policy and a commitment to improving the school readiness and, ultimately, the school success of vulnerable children.  Most importantly, the Early Learning Challenge Fund presents a prime opportunity to incentivize states to design early learning systems that meet the needs of all children, including English language learners (ELLs).  For Latino children, this opportunity couldn’t come any sooner.

Early learning standards are the foundation for building a high-quality early learning system.  They create the demand and framework for assessments, curriculum, professional development systems, and classroom instruction; their importance cannot be underestimated.

Currently, only a handful of states have developed early learning standards for ELLs that explicitly outline benchmarks for dual-language acquisition and progress in the native language.  Surprisingly, one of those states is Alaska.  Alaska, having a large native population, did the right thing in developing early learning standards that track progress in a child’s native language.  California, although not perfect, is also on the right track.  They have developed “foundations” in English-language development.  Other states make mention of ELLs, or reference cultural differences in learning, but do not lay out clear targets and examples of how ELLs demonstrate progress in the early years.  All in all, states are not doing nearly enough to ensure the school readiness of this growing subgroup of young children, and so far, no one in the federal government is demanding that they do more.

Federal investments, such as the Race to the Top Fund and the $8 billion being proposed in the Early Learning Challenge Fund, must be used to promote innovation and, in this case, to challenge states not to do business as usual.  Part of that effort must include a clear path for states to redefine (or develop) their early learning standards to include the unique learning needs of ELLs.  Until states create the demand that generates high-quality instruction and assessment for ELLs, we cannot expect that a significant proportion of American children will meet the goals of No Child Left Behind.

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Jim Kohlmoos, President and CEO of Knowledge Alliance (www.knowledgeall.net/), submitted the following:

Requiring data-driven standards simply means finding out what works through research. Currently, benchmarks like oral language and print awareness can be examined at early growth stages, and are thus appropriate. Seen as a part of the greater context of education research, the Early Learning Challenge Fund builds not only a system based on outcomes, but a culture of innovation and exploration where programs can be tried, assessed, dismissed, or reinvented based upon the very data in question.

In coordination with Race to the Top, which aims to improve student outcomes, high school graduation rates, and ensure college and career readiness, the Early Learning Challenge Fund seeks those same successes from the start. If the Department of Education wants to see Race to the Top realized, Early Learning is not simply a challenge, but a mandate. With far reaching effects from social, emotional, and language development to a reduction in crime, early learning is paramount to success at life and learning, and kindergarten is too late to play catch up. 

Furthermore, one aspect of the achievement gap is a gap in expectations.   Currently, urban schools are rife with low academic expectations, and as long as communities, states, and the federal government require no qualitative output, no data or evaluation, the achievement gap – the expectation gap – will persist. The demand for outcomes raises the bar for educational expectations, and in conjunction with Race to the Top along with its demand for continuous improvement and evidence based systems, the Early Learning Challenge Fund will set comprehensive expectations where previous pieces were missing. 
 

This height in expectation and kind of innovation, spurred by knowledge developed from research, is a welcome challenge.

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Structuring this as a challenge fund is definitely the right way to go—and even more so because the proposal has two explicit tiers of competition. One set of awards for states that are already blazing a trail, and a second set of awards for lagging states that are given a clear pathway for making themselves competitive for funding by stepping up with a sound plan. The challenge approach is important precisely because the politics of pre-K education at the state level is complicated by the powerful interests of existing providers in both the private and public sector both of which tend to see the transparency and accountability of a pre-K quality rating system as counter to their interests. A federal challenge grant provides a lot of air cover to advocates of reform—as we’re seeing already with all the buzz around Race to the Top in state capitals across the country. 

Second, as Checker said, Sara Mead’s earlier posting is right on the money—it is crucial to link early learning investments to reforms in the K-12 education system, and a strong pre-K data system is a linchpin in this effort. This doesn’t mean bubble testing 3 and 4 year olds as critics sometimes suggest—it is most definitely possible to create developmentally appropriate instruments and through the Governor’s Early Childhood Cabinet here in Connecticut, we’ve recently put into place a “skills inventory” for incoming kindergartners that has the potential to be mapped back to the pre-K program from which they came. Connecticut Kindergarten Skills Inventory.

After all, pre-K is a part of our educational system where public and private providers co-exist, and where parents of all income levels often have a much wider array of choices than they do in the K-12 public system. But as Rick Hess points out in his piece After Milwaukee, school choice doesn’t necessarily do much to drive systemic reform unless it’s connected to a robust consumer information infrastructure—and that’s what this challenge fund seems designed to encourage in the pre-K space across the states.

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Lisa Keegan precisely describes the problem with Headstart, the solving of which should be the Obama administration's (and the Congress's) top early-childschool priority. (If you want more on this, read the Headstart chapter in my book, "Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut.") Congressman Kline makes some excellent points, too, and Sara Mead is spot on when it comes to aligning pre-school with K-12, particularly as regards academic standards and performance. It's absolutely sound to try to reformat pre-schooling in America into a "standards-based, outcome-driven" undertaking with a laser-like focus on preparing for success in school those children who need help in that regard--a subset of young Americans, deeply disadvantaged, many of them the children of young single moms, and a far cry from the "universal" approach that the major advocacy organizations have been pressing for. But the standards have to be right--most of those in widespread use in early-childhood education in America today are not--and the major "outcome" that needs to be measured is kindergarten readiness. This can be done, this should be done, but the federal government's abysmal record with Headstart these past 45 years suggests that it probably cannot lead the requisite makeover. (On the other hand, it's done a pretty good job with the big, voucher-style CCDF day-care program, though that has more to do with parents working than with prepping kids for school.)

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Bravo! to the Early Learning Challenge Fund. It’s the right strategy to turn scattered programs of uneven quality into a system of support that begins before kids are born and stays with them until they’re ready for school.

During the past decade, the action on the early learning front has been at the state level, with substantial investments in early learning and development—and, just as important, a shift in attitudes about society’s responsibility to watch out for its youngest members.

The good news is the numbers. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia now fund prekindergarten. Programs for infants and toddlers, which used to be a political third-rail (“it’s a communist plot to steal infants from hospitals!” was a frequently-heard cry), are up and running, even in unlikely places like Nebraska and Oklahoma. There’s widespread support for good parenting programs like the Nurse-Family Partnership and Triple P.

The bad news is that these programs are fragmented and of unequal quality. That’s no system—and, as you learn in Management 101, unless there’s a system, there’s no way of assuring that what’s being provided is consistently good. Moreover, politicians are habitually inclined to deliver services on the cheap, because quantity (how many children are being served). Even as pre-k enrollments have risen, funding-per-child has fallen. On average state support is less than $5000 a child, and so it’s impossible to hire the well-qualified teachers and offer the small classes that kids need.

What the challenge grants provide is a goad and a goal—a goad, in the form of new dollars…and a goal, interlinked programs of quality, with a glide-path that connects parenting, child care, education for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. In the realm of early learning and development we’re at a potential tipping-point moment, and the challenge grants could nudge states into doing the right thing.

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Either the new spending will be done in accord with the lessons of research as described below, or else it will be no more effective than the myriad of other early childhood programs that have been established over the years.  We keep multiplying the programs instead of making existing programs more pervasively  and enduringly effective.  

So, yes, I doubt the new program. Why?  It is so much easier to pass and appropriate for programs than it is to make them work.

 http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/27149734.html

 Every child's "intellectual highway" is under its fastest paced construction in the first years. Most everything they learn later will be limited or advantaged by the number and quality of well worn pathways available to travel down. Children can enter school with a virtual brain superhighway, complete with multiple off-ramps, intersections and available routes for new information to travel...or not.

This is literally a neurological reality we can see reflected in brain scans. If children are not exposed to rich, varied and extensive vocabulary and interaction, they simply will not develop the infrastructure they need for later learning.

As a college student, I had the wonderful opportunity to major in lingusitics,and to study language aquisition. While this convinced my father that I may never actually work for money, I suprised him by entering the field of neurological speech pathology, where I learned to be awed by the brain's power....and later devastated by how seldom we successfully engage its potential in service of our children.

The importance of language interaction to a child's development cannot be overstated. Just being in a room with other toddlers and adults does little to expand a child's learning capacity. We know this, and the new federal preschool programs being proposed reflect that we know it. Teaching babies and toddlers is a discipline. Teachers must themselves have substantial vocabularies and an understanding of how to expand a child's knowledge base. Being safe at the end of the day is good, better than what some children would have without their "preschool", but it is not nearly enough.

The fact that the requirements for including some key benchmarks are now being proposed in an entirely new program speaks volumes about the poltical bastion we have created in Head Start. As Congressman Kline points out, the Bush administration tried to set virtually these same goals in Head Start, and was met with horror by those who claimed that preschool is for play, not academics.

This is an argument that clearly demonstrates that Head Start is being run not as a preparation program, but as a day care. Of course preschool is for play...everything is play when you work with babies and toddlers. But play is their work, language aquisition is their work; and it is either meaningful and thought provoking...neural pathway provoking...or it isn't. Sitting in front of television...isn't. Playing all day with interesting toys but no adult commentary on the action...isn't.

Our problem is that we have a huge percentage of our children destined for a politically untouchable Head Start progam that should actually be the entity demanding this kind of quality. Instead, the intractability of the national Head Start organizations has apparently convinced everyone that a demand for quality instruction in preschool can only be made in an entirely new sector.

This is not an advance, this is a retreat. Sure, we will be able to claim that new preschool programs must prove their high quality, but we will also know that most of the country's youngest and most vulnerable chidlren will never see these effective practices, and they will enter schools with the same dirt road, one lane pathways in their heads that we are building for them now.

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Once again, we’re asking the right questions at the wrong time. The Early Learning Challenge Fund could fundamentally reshape early childhood education at both the state and federal levels, yet Congress failed to hold a single hearing on the program before slipping it into a broader piece of financial aid reform legislation. We began to scrape the surface of these issues in a pair of hearings held earlier this year, but neither hearing specifically analyzed the proposed Early Learning Challenge Fund or the basic questions raised in this blog.

The proposal requires states to create standards-based, outcome-driven systems in order to receive funding, yet we don’t know how the federal government will decide which systems are the right ones. Our knowledge about brain development and early learning is constantly evolving. While this program is intended to encourage the most up-to-date strategies, we need to ask: Could a federal approval process actually stymie innovation? Isn’t it possible that federal guidelines will fail to keep pace with the changing science?

And what about Head Start? National Journal is right to ask the question, and it’s a question Congress should have answered before creating this new program. Head Start has been the foundation of federal early childhood efforts for more than 40 years. Along with Early Head Start, it is the key program that serves disadvantaged children before they enter kindergarten. Will the Early Learning Challenge Fund create a bifurcated system that continues to place low-income children in Head Start while moving higher-income children into new federally approved, data-driven programs? This seems likely only to exacerbate the readiness gap Congress has been trying to close.

If the goal is to improve coordination between Head Start and state-based early childhood systems, it might be instructive to look back at reform efforts first championed by Republicans in 2003. Back then, we argued Head Start ought to be aligned with and integrated into existing, high-quality state early childhood education programs. Our proposal was rejected almost immediately by many of the same individuals now supporting this Early Learning Challenge Fund. I have to ask – what changed?

These are just a few of the questions that should be asked before a proposal like the Early Learning Challenge Fund is enacted. Early childhood education is incredibly important. States are making great strides in both quality and availability. We need to ask whether federal meddling might undermine all the important work that is being done. At a minimum, this is an issue that deserves a real debate – as this blog discussion proves.

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In comparison with the Race to the Top, the Early Learning Challenge Fund seems more reasonable with regard to the criteria states must meet, the amount of money available, and the long term nature of the grant. At the same time, we know far less about educating kids from 0-4 than we do about educating them K-12. Therefore, vital to the success of this program will be this aspect:

“An evidence-based system of professional development to prepare an effective and well-qualified workforce of early educators, including appropriate levels of training, education, and credentials.”

Currently, the culture of pre-K education in America holds low expectations for kids, especially in academic areas like reading, writing, and math. In my own teaching, I’ve had wonderful experiences helping three and four-year-olds learn to read, write, and do simple things with numbers. But I notice that when I mention this to people who work regularly with pre-K children, the typical response is, “Oh, our kids aren’t ready for that!”

The truth is that kids enter kindergarten reading, writing, adding, and subtracting all the time. In general, these are kids who’ve had a lot of academic stimulation at home. My own experience teaching kids of this age is that the same results can be created by outside influences – the kind that might occur in a well-run, academically-oriented pre-school.

The truth of successful K-12 teaching is the same as the truth of successful pre-K teaching: It takes good teachers to create good learners. And, right now in the United States, we do not have a significant corps of well-trained pre-K teachers. If the money from the Early Learning Challenge Fund is to foster true success, it can’t be spent on typical daycare. It has to be used to make a fundamental shift in pre-K teaching toward a more academically-oriented approach.

Traditionally in our country, we have believed that the first years for learning to read and write came in K and 1. But research of the last 20 years shows that small children are much smarter than we thought. This research-based reality, however, has not infused the efforts of the majority of pre-school practitioners. In order for the Early Learning Challenge Fund to be successful, this aspect of pre-K teaching culture will have to change.

Another challenge many states may face is that of finding space to educate higher numbers of pre-K children. Most elementary schools are full to bursting. And I don’t see any money in the grant language that can be made available to construct new buildings.

Despite these concerns, it would be difficult to dispute the positive potential of the Early Learning Challenge Fund. At the same time, like most federal education programs addressed to certain states, the success will have more to do with what happens on the ground than what happens in Washington. The real future of this type of initiative is the move toward universal pre-school and whole day kindergarten. We still have a long way to go to reach these goals, and the Early Learning Challenge Fund is hardly even a drop in the bucket. But a definite drop it is, and if at least one state can change the culture of pre-K education, and develop approaches to teaching that produce academically advanced kindergarteners, we will at least be one step closer to showing what little kids can do – and how we should go about helping them do it.

 

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A raft of recent scientific and economic research makes a compelling case for the importance of high quality early education, particularly for our most at-risk children. Key to attaining all the powerful outcomes - from higher high school graduation rates to lower crime and better health prospects - is quality. Unfortunately, there's not nearly enough of it. The Early Learning Challenge Fund aims to add coherence and raise quality in our nation's hodgepodge of early learning programs.

States are just beginning to develop early learning systems as a way to ensure greater quality education from birth to five. Progress, however, is all over the map. Some states, like Illinois, have more developed systems, aided by active agenda-setting state panels called Early Learning Councils. But most states have miles to go.

The need for high standards and data to measure outcomes is as essential to birth through five systems as they are to K-12. It's just more complicated because infants, toddlers and preschoolers aren't able to fill in bubbles on standardized tests with No. 2 pencils. They require more developmentally-appropriate (i.e. time-consuming) assessments by trained professionals. Yes, it will be involved, but the field desperately needs a more understandable, meaningful assessment to determine whether a child is ready for kindergarten. Figuring out what the tool actually looks like is difficult. This legislation contains support to build on recommendations by national research panels. The Challenge Fund also would create a commission to oversee the necessary research to create the actual assessment tools.

Whatever assessments are used, and whichever data get collected, both should be used only for improving programs, providing professional development and determining the need for support services. The Early Learning Challenge Fund legislation calls for this and that is right on. No assessment should be used to impact individual children or particular programs.

When Congress reauthorized Head Start in 2007, it required each state to develop a State Advisory Council on Early Care and Education to better coordinate services and assess needs of young children and their families. To receive a Challenge Fund grant, a state must coordinate early childhood efforts based on the recommendations from its State Advisory Council.

The goal of the Early Learning Challenge Fund is to coordinate, rather than duplicate, current efforts in states. That applies at the federal level, too. Coordination and collaboration between the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services will be essential for success.

A stronger, more coherent early learning system will lead to better outcomes in the K-12 years. A growing number of school principals and superintendents know this first-hand. When a child arrives in kindergarten unprepared - having never scribbled with a crayon or flipped through a book - it's that much harder and costlier to catch up later.

That is why it also makes sense to include early childhood services as a competitive priority in the Race to the Top Fund, and why Title I funds should be even more accessible for early learning activities, even though they already are an allowable use. Execution of the legislation will be a challenge but the goal is unassailable.

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The Early Learning Challenge Fund, currently under consideration in Congress, represents an important development in federal policy on early education. For most of the past decade, early childhood policy debates at the state and federal level have focused on expanding the number of publicly funded slots or on mandating that providers implement a narrow set of quality measures. This program uses federal policy to drive the creation of state-based systems that provide high quality care and learning opportunities for young children while increasing affordability and flexibility for parents. But to make the program all it can be, we need to make sure it is knitted more seamlessly into the K-12 system.

Before now, too little attention has been given to the broader systemic and structural issues: How do states create incentives for providers to participate in ongoing quality improvement? What kind of accountability and governance arrangements are needed to effectively oversee and ensure quality across diverse providers? How can we support the development of effective markets that enable and aid parents in making quality choices? Addressing these questions is critical to ensuring the long-term success and effectiveness of early childhood investments.

The proposed Early Learning Challenge Fund zeroes in on these long-neglected structural issues, giving states funding and incentives to develop state-level systems of early care and education that include measures and oversight to hold providers accountable for quality and infrastructure to support ongoing quality improvements. Both components are necessary to drive improvement in quality and access across the diverse range of providers who currently form our early childhood sector.

That said, I’m concerned about the Early Learning Challenge Fund’s “birth to five” approach to building state early childhood systems. Certainly, state policymakers need to broaden the focus of investment and policy beyond pre-k to include programs serving children from birth through school entry. But it’s not enough to focus on the birth to five years alone. Policymakers need to ensure that early childhood initiatives are well-integrated with a larger school reform vision that builds connections between child-care providers, pre-k programs, and the elementary schools that will serve children after pre-k. This means aligning standards, curriculum, and instructional strategies across children’s early childhood and elementary learning experiences; and uses high-quality pre-k programs to drive improvement upward as children move through the public school system.

The legislation currently before Congress takes some steps to do that—for example requiring states to have early learning standards that are aligned with standards for kindergarten through third grade. But it could do a lot more to drive integration between the early childhood and K-12 systems.

“PreK-3rd” isn’t a crazy idea: Montgomery County, Maryland, and several of New Jersey’s high-poverty Abbott school districts are among a growing number of districts across the country that have implemented successful PreK-3rd reforms that start with high-quality pre-k at ages 3 and 4, narrowing achievement gaps before children get to kindergarten. They then sustain pre-k learning gains with full-day kindergarten and a well-aligned instructional program in the early grades that uses data to drive instruction and provides the additional support needed to ensure that disadvantaged youngsters can read on grade level by third grade—a critical milestone for children’s long-term educational success.

The administration is staking a lot of political capital on the Race to the Top strategy to drive school reform at the K-12 level, and it’s also making significant investments in early childhood programs through both the proposed Early Learning Challenge Fund and the ARRA investments in child care and Head Start. But despite the effort devoted to both these initiatives, and their natural synergies, the administration has done surprisingly little to marry the two, to link early learning investments with its broader school reform agenda. The guidance that the administration released recently on Race to the Top says virtually nothing about pre-k—even though each of the four school reform areas that RTT focuses on has an obvious pre-k connection.

How can Congress and the administration better integrate Early Learning Challenge Fund and Race to the Top efforts so that these reforms work together across the entire P-16 system to improve children’s learning outcomes? Here are a few ideas:

• Give priority for Early Learning Challenge Grants to states that have integrated early education into a larger vision for P-20 reform that focuses on narrowing achievement gaps, increasing the percentage of children reading at grade level in third grade, and increasing the percentage of young people who graduate high school on time and college- or workforce-ready.

• Require states that receive Early Learning Challenge Grants to use funding to improve alignment of standards, curriculum, and instructional practices across child care, pre-kindergarten, and early elementary school programs, in order to create a seamless PreK-3rd early education experience that prepared all children to read at grade level by the end of third grade.

• Require the longitudinal data systems, which states must build as a condition of receiving Race to the Top funds, to include data on children’s pre-k experiences. Children participating in state or district-funded pre-k programs, Head Start, or receiving state child care subsidies should receive unique student identifiers that will follow them from preschool into the K-12 system, allowing state policymakers to track the long-term outcomes of these different programs.

• Demand that voluntary, national standards and assessments begin with high-quality, developmentally appropriate, and comprehensive common pre-k standards and school readiness assessments aligned with K-3 standards, rather than just K-12 standards and assessments.

• Where possible, ensure that Race to the Top criteria recognize pre-k is increasingly part of our public education system: : For example, a number of criteria focus on whether charter schools receive equitable access to funding, including facilities funding. Criteria should also address whether charter schools have equitable access to state pre-k funds and create incentives for states to provide charter schools with per-pupil funding for pre-k students. Alternative routes to teacher certification and equitable distribution of teachers are other areas in which the criteria should incorporate pre-k.

• Add implementation of high-quality early childhood programs, and of comprehensive PreK-3rd reforms that align standards, curriculum, and instruction in the early grades, to the list of interventions for chronically low-performing schools provided in RTT guidance.

These are just a few ways in which the administration and Congress can better align Early Learning Challenge Fund and Race to the Top and ensure that the two programs work together to generate long-term benefits for children. I look forward to seeing what others recommend.

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