All of my colleagues have made some terrific points, from Steve Peha’s “measure twice, cut once” analogy, to Delia Pompa’s hopeful message of increasing help for English language learners, to the excellent work of New Jersey’s Abbott Preschool Program mentioned by David Sciarra.

I’m intrigued by the last question posed by the editor – the one that asks, “Are there adequate measures to assess how early learning programs are performing. The short answer is “yes.”

Improving kindergarten readiness rates through more serious investments in early learning and development is one of the top priorities of the Strive Partnership, the cradle-to-career initiative that works to bring all of a community’s resources to bear to solve its most pressing education issues. Based on the strong results achieved in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, the framework for the initiative is now being expanded in nine other U.S. cities as the Strive Network.

The measurement tool comes in the form of a road map which tracks a child’s progress based on a number of key points on his education journey, including kindergarten readiness and 4th-grade reading and math proficiency. One program associated with the partnership conducts home visits to the parents to of at-risk and low-income children under the age of 3 to help them establish a creative and healthy learning environment for their child.

We are seeing strong results over the past five years, including a 9 percent increase in kindergarten readiness in Cincinnati, and fourth-grade reading and math proficiency have increased 7 percent and 14 percent, respectively. You can view an example of the “report card” by clicking here.”

We know that 90 percent of the brain is fully developed by age 5; yet the majority of education dollars (federal, state, local, philanthropic) are spent on kids after the age of 5. We’ll continue to make small gains, or no gains, if we don’t get serious about early learning.

We should welcome this year’s RT3 focus on high-quality learning programs because of what we all know about their positive long-term implications of improving outcomes for students. Children with a strong early childhood education foundation stand a better chance of succeeding in nearly every relevant social and economic indicator.

At its core, greater investment in early learning is merely an investment in a more secure future where there are more seats at an ever-expanding table.

Administration officials seized this opportunity to advance what has been a longstanding priority of theirs because they understand what a raft of scientific and economic evidence has long made clear: early learning is essential for achieving better short- and long-term educational outcomes. Plus, it’s also one of the most cost-effective investments of taxpayer dollars. We know this, and yet we have failed repeatedly to truly act on it at the federal level, despite the fact that birth to five public early learning programs are far more dependent on federal funding, relatively speaking, than K-12 programs. So from an early learning perspective, this is long overdue.

Ask a kindergarten teacher how much class time he or she has to spend on children who haven’t had the benefit of quality early learning. Imagine how much easier it might be for third, fourth, and fifth grade teachers to reach their own student achievement goals if they’re not spending half their time contending with children who never learned how to control their emotions, who don’t have a strong work ethic, who don’t know how to work well in groups, or how to listen. The earliest years is the time when those fundamental behaviors, skills and attitudes – along with basic cognitive skills – are best learned. Wait, and it gets harder, not to mention costlier.

Secretary Duncan talks about “Getting out of the catch-up game.” He’s right.

This isn’t so much about boosting enrollment. Instead, the focus is on creating more of a coherent, aligned system out of a mish-mash of programs, giving them a strong backbone so that every early learning experience parents choose for their children has a common focus on quality and learning. The early learning field desperately needs this investment in infrastructure and systems-building. Of course, for this initiative to be effective, we still need to make sure the federal funding streams that give children access—namely Head Start and child care—are sustained too. That will be a daunting task given the budget picture moving forward in the House of Representatives, which has potential to be disastrous for early learning, and for children and families. As grateful as the early learning community is for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, we can’t let Congress think they “checked the box” for early learning—there’s still plenty of work to do when, for example, only about 3 percent of eligible infants and toddlers have access to Early Head Start.

While there are some shining star examples, there is vast room for improvement in just about every early learning setting. I suspect many states out there have very similar priority lists for what they’d like to work on: standards and assessments, professional development for early learning educators, data systems, and governance structures to make the crazy-quilt non-system that is early learning into a truly cohesive and functional system.

It’s true that up until now the field has focused too much on measuring inputs. But we’ve come a long way. Not only is there more clarity about which inputs matter (caregiver interactions and classroom environments, for starters), but the early learning field is, I think (and hope!), finally ready to overcome its fear of assessment. The law makes it clear that any assessments must take into account a full range of developmental domains and not be punitive or “high stakes.” It’s also possible the initiative could allow for states to form a consortium to work on standards assessments together, which could be a good way to harness the best thinking and move the field forward on this important topic.

Here’s my glass-half-full prediction (ok…hope): A year from now, a winners of the RTTT-Early Learning Challenge will be well on their way toward improving the way early learning programs are coordinated, designed, and implemented. Winning reform plans will be scrutinized by other states looking for ways to improve quality and spend existing dollars more efficiently. And many more of America’s youngest and most vulnerable children will have a better shot at success in kindergarten and beyond that benefits all of us.

There was a time in this country when investing in kids was not only the right thing to do—it was also an easy decision to make. Deficits, debt, inflation, recession, and other economic challenges have always been part of our national discourse, but we’ve never skimped on a high-quality education for our nation. We’re now in danger of making that mistake.

Unfortunately, in this austere economic climate, education spending is often characterized as a frivolous use of taxpayer dollars that flies in the face of limited government and prevents communities from exerting local control. A quick survey of the news from various state governments confirms the national mood over which of our priorities to fund. Consider Texas, for example, where the legislature is about to slash $4 billion from school districts all over the state. Or Michigan, where the new governor, Rick Snyder, has proposed cutting millions from the state’s public education system. The situation there has become so severe that one school superintendent proposed turning his schools into prisons so that his students might benefit from the same amenities offered to inmates. His version of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal is tongue-in-cheek, of course, but his actions underscore a very real sentiment about the future of public education in America.

Given the mood in state legislatures to gut public education, it was somewhat of a surprise, albeit a welcome one, when President Obama announced last week that his administration would invest $500 million in early childhood education with another round of Race to the Top early learning challenge grants. A good early childhood education sets the foundation for the rest of a child’s life and the Latino community especially benefits from quality early childhood education programs. However, states still have a long way to go. Latino children now constitute almost 24% of the child population in America under the age of five and are the fastest-growing subgroup of children. Yet Hispanic children are least able to access formal early care and education programs and have low levels of school readiness. In addition, it is not clear that Latino students are benefiting from the administration’s signature education policy, the first round of Race to the Top funding, when one considers that the states with large numbers of Latino students, including Texas, California, Illinois, and New Jersey, have not received funding to support needed education reforms. These new grants must be designed in a way to reach children in those states.

Our country may be mired in fights over deficit reduction, but when it comes to early childhood education, the administration has made clear its commitment and should be commended for it. There is an opportunity to do some very good work, especially for Latinos, but it must be done well right in order to maximize potential. NCLR has laid out some critical recommendations for doing this in our white paper, Responding to the Needs of Young Latino Children: State Efforts to Build Comprehensive Learning Systems, which should be applied as criteria for states that receive Race to the Top funds. Those include requiring states to improve services provided to young English language learners and incentivizing states to do right by and for Hispanic children and families.

Back when I was making software, it was hard to get any money from anyone (a venture capitalist, a friend, my boss, my grandmother) unless I could describe exactly what I was doing and show that it worked—or that at least it had a very strong chance of working.

Forgive me for asserting my past experience from a different industry but I catch myself wondering here—yet again—if it makes sense to spend money on things when we don’t really know what they are or if they work.

Some of the folks who’ve gone before me—like Ms. Guernsey and Mr. Sciarra—indicate that the money is going to scale up programs deemed already successful. If so, this makes sense. Extending high-quality learning opportunities to our youngest learners is the best educational investment we can make. But it will only work if we’re clear about the quality of the programs we invest in, and if those programs can maintain their quality as they scale.

On that note, Ms. Guernsey raises a good point about how hard it is to know how effective a given program may be: “We need better tools to look across the full spectrum of children’s learning experiences, from birth up through college. The tools mentioned above, in which third-parties score teachers’ ability to interact with children, are essential.”

So how can we put money into high-quality programs if we don’t have tools that help us identify high-quality programs? Wouldn’t it make more sense to invest a fraction of the money now in a process that creates measurement tools and identifies effective programs first so we’ll know where to spend the much larger amount of money that would be left later?

I would call this the “carpenter’s strategy” based on the old saw, “measure twice, cut once.” What if, as a general policy, we allotted 5% of any appropriation at the beginning to a measurement tool development and program identification process, and another 5% to measuring results and analyzing successes and failures at the end? We could call it, “measure twice, fund once.”

We’re very big on educational measurement, of course. But it seems we’re more inclined to take measurements only after the checks have been cut, the funding is exhausted, and there is little to do but walk through some kind of post-mortem blame game.

Clearly, most of the money we spend on education is non-discretionary. We need a certain amount just to keep the doors open, the buses running, the heat on, and a teacher at the front of the room. But when we appropriate extra funding, we should be clear about what we’re buying and the return we can expect on our investment.

With hundreds of millions of dollars going to early childhood programs, it’s a safe bet that some of it will go to programs that produce stunning results. But this is likely to be a small amount if the past is any indication. As Mr. Finn notes, “the early-childhood world has been characterized by a bad habit of gauging program quality by inputs, resources, ratios and credentials and avoiding both explicit learning standards and rigorous evaluations of outcomes.”

If Mr. Finn is right (and he often is), and we don’t mend our ways, most of the money will probably go to programs that get the same results they do now. If those results aren’t the results we want, then the best we can hope for is that more kids get enrolled who would otherwise have no access at all. This is a win. But it does not make the most of this most important funding opportunity.

In some areas of early learning, particularly in reading, we have good models of highly effective programs. For example, we have extensive research on early reading instruction from Diane McGuinness which we can find in her book, Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us About Teaching Reading.

In this comprehensive text, and its companion, Language Development and Learning to Read: The Scientific Study of How Language Development Affects Reading Skill, McGuinness points to instructional approaches that get even 4-year olds reading in 2-3 months. To the extent that we’re funding stuff like this, I’m all for it.

Funding specific things that have good track records makes sense—especially for very young children. But like Ms. Guernsey, I wish we were putting serious money into effective programs in the primary grades.

What we’re doing now reminds me a little of Reading First. In that situation, we spent, I believe, $6 billion on a set of theories with little hard evidence and a lot of conjecture behind them. (See McGuiness’ work cited above for an excellent overview of what really happened with the research base that launched Reading First.) I’m not here to argue whether the theories were right or wrong, but to reflect on the process and the results.

It appears that Reading First had little or no positive impact. (Ms. McGuiness shows that the research base at the time predicted this.) I’m aware that the results of Reading First can be debated on several levels. But what is not debatable is that we still lack conclusive proof that $6 billion spent only on early reading instruction made a significant and conclusive difference. Will we repeat that situation again here?

The problem is the process we use of investing big dollars in unproven ideas (often, I suspect, as Mr. Finn suggests, simply to fulfill campaign promises). When we appropriate large amounts of money, and then invite people to apply for it based on certain criteria, what we get is a lot of people grubbing for green by conforming their work to meet program guidelines. Even when the guidelines are good, the conforming might not be; people often claim that what they have is both effective and appropriate when neither is true.

The competitive grant model used for RTTT and i3 might yield better results. But then again, it might not. We still don’t know. And we didn’t take a carpenter’s approach in those programs either. The process here is highly dependent, once again, on untested theories of what works, what doesn’t, and how well someone’s application conforms to program guidelines and is eventually executed. Measuring only once, at the end, and identifying successful programs retrospectively, is often quite a let down.

Is it great to have all this money to spend? Yes. But it’s not great to spend it so heavily in such narrow ways when we’re not sure those ways are effective. If we don’t like the “carpenter’s strategy”, we could try a high-tech style “rapid iteration” approach with several quick rounds of measurement, identification, and funding. This would allow us to learn from our mistakes and plow new knowledge, along with new dollars, into better decision making.

I’m sure there are at least a hundred amazing early learning programs in our country (like the Abbot Preschool Program mentioned by Mr. Sciarra). Maybe there are even 500. But I also know there are thousands of places where little kids go every day and not much learning happens at all. Then, too, there are millions of kids with no place to go, so perhaps getting them in anywhere will be the best we can do. Yet I think we can do better with only slight modifications to our funding process.

Will better standards help? Not without better support for early childhood educators. Just because we set high standards doesn’t mean we get high standards—especially in an area as varied as early learning where, as Ms. Guernsey suggests, we need “better professional development for teachers and more attention to the way they work with children on a day-to-day basis.”

Is the idea of putting more money into younger kids a good one, in general? It sure is. We get more value per dollar spent on 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds than we get on 13-, 14-, and 15-year olds. It costs less to teach kids to read by 3rd grade than it does to support them from 4th grade on up if they aren’t good readers. Kids who enter kindergarten already reading have the best chance of all and are also the least expensive to educate. Kids learn more when their brains are growing more. So money spent earlier in life is, in theory, the best money we can spend.

In practice, however, this money only spends well on programs that are designed and executed well. Have we identified the best programs and targeted only those for funding? As Ms. Guernsey points out, we currently lack the tools to do this.

If DOE is funding great programs, then this is a great move. But if DOE is simply moving RTTT money around, then maybe it’s not so great. Like RTTT itself, there’s simply no way to know until the job is over, the carpenters have all gone home, and we're left to measure their work.

This is a guest commentary from Lisa Guernsey, Director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation

It’s smart for the Administration to focus on early learning in this year’s Race to the Top, but the competition is not exactly what people may think. To help explain, let me take the National Journal’s questions in turn:

Given the scarce resources, did the Education Department make the right choice in focusing on early learning?

Yes. Children who don’t have high-quality, language-rich experiences in their first five years of life will struggle in school. This is an education reform strategy of significant magnitude.

Did grades 3-12 get the short shrift? No, but K-3 did. This new competition will only provide money for programs that serve children from birth to age 5. There is no federal focus of any kind on kindergarten (which is sorely underfunded; in some districts parents are required to pay out-of-pocket for full-day programs), nor does it provide any impetus for improving the quality of the untested grades of K-2.

What can states do to boost their enrollment in early learning among disadvantaged kids?

This competition not about boosting enrollment in any kind of general way – it’s about boosting enrollment of disadvantaged children in high-quality programs. This could be done by zooming in on and improving the quality of what children are already experiencing in childcare centers and pre-k programs around the country. Doing that will require better professional development for teachers and more attention to the way they work with children on a day-to-day basis.

How can child-care centers and pre-K programs improve such that the kids are ready for kindergarten?

They should be focusing on interactions in the classroom instead of simply counting the number of adults present or making sure that there are alphabet letters on the walls. There are new tools available for third-party observers to measure and score how well teachers are engaging children in thought-provoking conversations and introducing them to new concepts. These tools are a key to determining what isn’t working and upgrading the experience that young children receive.

Are there adequate measurements to assess how early learning programs are performing?

No, but nor are there in K-12 programs. We need better tools to look across the full spectrum of children’s learning experiences, from birth up through college. The tools mentioned above, in which third-parties score teachers’ ability to interact with children, are essential.

My previous post on this topic has apparently been taken down per a complaint from another contributor -- assumedly someone particularly enthusiastic about the recent decision to give most of the RTTT money to early childhood, or someone who's sense of decorum is superior to mine. Too bad, since my post -- a repeat of the mashed-up Hangover movie poster I published last week plus some text to explain its purpose -- is clearly a form of commentary, amusing or not, meant to spice up the conversation. Truth is, I'm not at all opposed to funding early childhood at much higher levels and have reported on ECE developments several times in recent weeks (the inclusion in RTTT as a priority, the changes in Head Start). I was just trying to capture the K12 reaction to the announcement, which was dismay, and to help bring life to the comment thread which currently has just three responses and has dwindled in recent weeks. I'm not sure who made the request, or what the basis was, or whether NJ has a policy on taking contributors' posts down. If it only takes one complaint and no particular merit, then I plan to complaint about other contributors' posts in the near future, many of which are predictable boilerplate, which I find to be extremely off-putting and no doubt contributes to the lethargy here.

If the goal is to improve outcomes for the nation’s growing numbers of at-risk students, targeting RTTT2 funds to expanding access to preschool is a prudent choice.

It’s time we admit that closing stubborn K-12 achievement gaps among student subgroups is simply not feasible unless, at a minimum, every low income child and all children in high need communities, is enrolled in a well-planned, high quality preschool program, beginning at age three. This is the norm in the education systems of other high performance nations.

We know that “high quality preschool for all” will require a huge, long-term effort by the 50 states. The small amount of RTTT2 funding could serve as a catalyst for this effort, but only if implemented as the beginning of a 10-15 year national campaign to close the glaring gaps in school readiness.

The RTTT2 competition could set the groundwork for a new, coherent federal policy on early education. First, to win a grant, the state must commit to establishing uniform standards for high quality, full day, full school year preschool programs. The state standards must include, at a minimum: small classes (15-18 children), staffed by a Pre-K certified teacher, using developmentally appropriate content, linked to the state’s K-12 curriculum standards. Second, states should be offer grants to local school districts to build a delivery system that includes not just public school Pre-K classrooms, but classrooms in child care providers and Head Start that are “capable and willing” of meeting the state’s rigorous quality standards.

Third, states must augment public school, Head Start and child care funding streams with additional state dollars to ensure program quality, preferably through their K-12 finance mechanism. Fourth, the states must build effective systems to train, recruit and retain a qualified pre-k teacher work force, and strong evaluation protocols to measure both program quality and the school readiness of participating children on an ongoing basis.

Finally, the RTTT2 competition should serve as the launching pad for new legislation to unify the HHS child care and Head Start programs and DOE public school pre-k programs at the federal level, driving forward the long-term restructuring of early care and education we want, and must have, in the 50 states.

Fortunately, there are large scale models in place, most notably New Jersey’s path breaking Abbott Preschool Program. A visit to any of the 31 urban communities, and the hundreds of classrooms in child care centers, Head Start programs, and public schools, in the Abbott program demonstrates, in real time, the direction for the rest of the nation.

The key to the Abbott program, and other successful programs, is bringing together the three now separate strands of early education delivery at the local level – child care providers, Head Start and public school programs -- around a strong set of state quality standards, supported by adequate, blended funding. Let’s hope RTTT2 begins us down that road.

If the Education and HHS departments are serious about the "clearer learning standards" elements of early-childhood education and about alignment of standards between pre-school and K-12, then this could turn out to be a worthy investment of taxpayer dollars. But the early-childhood world has been characterized by a bad habit of gauging program quality by inputs, resources, ratios and credentials and avoiding both explicit learning standards and rigorous evaluations of outcomes. Nowhere has this problem been worse than in the federal government's own largest and costliest early-childhood effort, the iconic Head Start program. Time will tell whether this latest initiative is a serious move to reform the field so that needy youngsters truly do enter kindergarten with the academic "headstart" they need or whether this is just a move to keep a 2008 campaign promise to direct more federal dollars into early childhood programs of the usual sort.

The Obama administration’s announcement last week that it is launching a $500 million early learning competition, the latest in its Race To The Top grant opportunities for states, is welcome news.

The need for high quality early learning, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are the focus of the competition, is increasingly clear. Early exposure to vocabulary is key to successful learning trajectories. But only 40 percent of the nation’s students are pre-schooled and they tend to be from more privileged circumstances, increasing the readiness gap between students from families that give kids ample language experiences and those from backgrounds where poverty and low parental education constrict students’ learning from their earliest days. The pre-schooling that poor kids do get is often glorified child care delivered by poorly educated and badly trained providers.

So the administration’s focus on the readiness gap is a good thing. And if the creation of new funding competition gets states’ attention as effectively as its previous Race To The Top and Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) competitions, there’s a chance that the feds can leverage some significant state steps with its modest $500 million investment.

The administration is taking an earlier-the-better approach to the competition; rather than focusing on traditional pre-school programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, the new Race To The Top—Early Learning Challenge encourages states to expand the number and percentage of low-income and disadvantaged students enrolled in high-quality early learning programs from birth. In the past, conservatives would have cried foul, claiming that the federal government was encouraging parents to have others raise their children. But that’s a tougher argument to make with the rise in single-parent families and the importance of quality child care to getting the working poor into the workplace.

In declaring that it wants to see the creation of statewide systems of early learning, complete with state learning standards, the administration is continuing to support the centralized benchmarking that it endorsed under the first RTTT competition (by funding the creation of common state standards in reading and math and multi-state student achievement tests) and that is typical in other industrialized countries with high achieving educational systems. This departure from the nation’s tradition of “local control” in education, where 14,000-plus school systems establish their own standards, began in earnest nearly a decade ago when President George W. Bush signed the federal No Child Left Behind Act into law. With many Congressional Republicans now wanting to move the center of educational gravity away from Washington, the administration stresses that such standards-setting and benchmarking must be done at the state rather than federal level.

The big challenge here is that such steps require much more leadership and expertise from state education agencies that have traditionally been staffed mostly to pass state and federal monies to local school systems. Reinventing these largely inert bureaucracies as standard-setters and agents of accountability isn’t going to be easy, especially in today’s dismal fiscal climate.