School Board News

BoardBuzz came across an interesting report via the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) evaluating states on their pre-school programs. The report called The State of Preschool 2007 for the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) compared states on the access and quality of preschool programs they provide to their 3 and 4 year-olds.

The report found that the majority of 4 year-olds across the country still do not have access to state-funded pre-school programs. The good news is, however, that the percentage has almost doubled from just 12 percent in 2002, the first year of the NIEER survey, to 22 percent in 2007. Oklahoma led the way by enrolling 68 percent of their 4 year-olds (not including head start) followed by Florida, Georgia, and West Virginia. Although Tennessee was not a top state in providing state-funded preschool, they did increase their enrollment by 50 percent from 2006 to 2007. A huge step in the right direction.

However, BoardBuzz knows its one thing to provide access to preschool programs and yet another to provide quality preschool programs. The NIEER report compared states on quality as well and found that Alabama and North Carolina had the highest rated quality preschool programs in the country based on NIEER’s 10 standards for preschool quality. (Click here for more information on how states were compared)

BoardBuzz is well aware that starting and expanding state preschool programs are not easy and the educators, school board members, other policymakers and the taxpayers should be commended for their desire to ensure all students start school ready to learn.

Fortunately, our friends at the Center for Public Education and the state school boards associations in Kansas, Ohio, and Texas are busily at work finding ways to bring high-quality pre-k programs to more children in their states. CPE continues to report on these activities along with research, data, and resources to help get communities behind this important effort.

As SREB Vice President of Education Policies Joan Lord stated, “Children who are not prepared for school are the ones most likely to drop out, to find only low-paying jobs, to become unemployed and to face a lifetime of problems.” By helping every child become school-ready, pre-kindergarten is more than a good educational program, it’s a good investment for the community.

Find more information on pre-kindergarten at the Center for Public Education. While there, sign up for CPE’s monthly e-newsletter, Pre-K Primer, which features news and practical information, strategies, and policies for expanding pre-k at the state and local levels. You’ll also find the Center’s Round-up of National Report Cards that simply explains how states are ranked in this and 11 other National “Report Cards” on education quality.

BoardBuzz was happy to see the Pre-K debate simmering over at USA Today. The paper took the pro-Pre-K stance, while Darcy Olsen of the Goldwater Institute stands against it.

USA Today puts forth a number of compelling points in favor of providing Pre-Kindergarten education to students.

States have good reasons to aspire to universal preschool, especially high-quality programs with good teachers and low student-to-teacher ratios. Universal preschool can help fill a void: Poor families have access to Head Start. Well-to-do families pay for quality preschools out of their pockets. In between are lower-middle class families whose children badly need the readiness skills that preschool provides.

Oklahoma educators credit their decade-old preschool program with pushing up reading and math scores in the lower grades, and with raising achievement by low-income children.

Elite preschools — such as the experimental Perry Preschool in Michigan, where researchers followed the poor and minority children who attended that school well into adulthood — return more than $16 to society (in the form of lower crime and higher employment) for every dollar invested, according to the non-profit High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. Even decent-quality preschools produce gains in the $4 to $10 range, other researchers found.

On the other hand, a weak argument, without much sense or direction is posed by Olsen.

All but a few parents go to great lengths to seek out the best for their children. The strength of our early education system is that it can respond with as many options as there are children. For families struggling with job loss, single parenting or other challenges, federal and state governments have programs to help in hard times.

It’s difficult to understand, then, why so many states are pushing to add preschool to their docket of free programs. Last year, California voters overwhelmingly rejected a universal preschool plan. Three-quarters of parents, conservative and liberal, say that one parent at home is the best arrangement for their young children.

The abundance of options available to families reflects the best of America. Do we really want lawmakers deciding how every 4-year-old should prepare for school? Rather than take over preschool, governments should lower taxes and adopt policies that increase parents’ purchasing power and keep family decisions where they belong.

No one is proposing compulsory Pre-K. In fact, only a handful of states have compulsory kindergarten (in most states, districts have to provide it, but parents don’t have to send their children). The argument that universal Pre-K will squash diversity of services is, in our view, utter nonsense. Universal voluntary Pre-K will, however, give low- and middle-income families access to high-quality Pre-K for their children — something many of them don’t have now. And if K-12 benefits by saving money, so be it Sounds like a win-win to us.

For more information on the merits of Pre-K education, visit the Center for Public Education‘s section on Pre-Kindergarten.

So it turns out, according to a new study, that parking your kid in front of the television may not be good for their cognitive development. Go figure.

Perhaps we are oversimplifying a little. An editorial in today’s USA Today notes, using quite possibly, one of BoardBuzz‘s favorite analogies ever, “Rather than creating a Baby Einstein . . . you could be creating Baby Homer Simpson.” The paper also points out, “The study by researchers at the University of Washington concluded that babies who spent hours watching baby DVDs and videos learned fewer new words than babies who had never watched them. The biggest impact was on babies from eight to 16 months old, an age when language skills are starting to develop.”

So what can parents do to combat the electronic babysitter? USA Today suggests reading to them instead. And BoardBuzz knows of at least one great opportunity to do just that — Read for the Record. We told you about it last week, here.

Brand new from the Center for Public Education–a monthly pre-k e-newsletter. The Pre-K Primer is a lively, monthly e-newsletter addressing successful strategies and key issues in expanding access to high-quality pre-k. It also includes the summaries of the latest pre-k news and trends.

To get this great resource, simply go to the Center for Public Education’s Web site here, fill in the form in the left hand column, and check the Pre-K newsletter box. Pre-K Primer is published by the Center under a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. You can also get additional pre-k information from the Center here.

NSBA and the Center for Public Education (CPE) have received a two-year $448,000 grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to launch a far-reaching initiative on high-quality pre-kindergarten education. CPE will work in partnership with the state school board associations from Kansas, Ohio, and Texas to inform local school board members, state policymakers, and the general public about the benefits of pre-K education and effective pre-K policies and programs.

The initiative is composed of three parts: making the case for pre-K education; intensifying efforts to generate pre-K awareness in the three partner states; and reaching out broadly to other states and nationally through the NSBA Annual Conference as well as the state association conferences.

The campaign is designed to result in newspaper editorial coverage; a cadre of districts to act as ambassadors on effective pre-K programs; reports disseminated through various NSBA networks; presentations at national and state conferences; large volume research downloads from the CPE Web site; and CPE hosted webinars and discussion groups.

Read news release here.

With new studies out that show investing money in kids before kindergarten increases their chances of graduating and staying out of jail, Stateline.org is reporting that nearly half of governors this year are pushing for more funding for preschool education.

Californians are voting June 6 on Proposition 82, which will fund partial-day preschool for all 4-year olds in the state. Currently, the state provides preschool to only about one in five 4-year-olds. Last week, Illinois lawmakers approved a plan for preschool for all 3-year olds. California and Illinois are following the lead of Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma, the only other states currently offering preschool to all 4-year-olds.

According to Stateline.org,

Opponents of California’s universal preschool proposal, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and conservative taxpayer groups, say it is too costly and would take money away from K-12 schools and other state services. They also argue that less than 9 percent of funding from the program would go to enroll “high risk” children in preschool — those from lower-income families or who historically have shown achievement gaps.

Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, said targeting low-income students is not enough to boost student achievement in states such as California.

“Californians’ incomes are above average nationally, and yet their students are scoring nearly dead last with states like Mississippi. That’s not just poor kids having trouble, it’s also poor performance of middle-class kids dragging state achievement down,” Barnett said.

To read the entire article from Stateline, click here.

A new census report released today indicates that nearly half of all children under the age of five are racial or ethnic minorities. The percentage is increasing mainly because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly. These numbers could potentially have broad implications for early childhood education.

The Washington Post reports that in parts of the country like Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, and the Washington D.C., area, minorities are the majority of children younger than five. Additionally:

In some suburban communities, government officials face a cultural generation gap as they weigh demands from older white residents for senior citizen centers, transportation and other aid against requests from younger, mainly minority residents for translation assistance, preschools and other services.

Experts say immigrant families are becoming more concerned with the quality of their children’s early education, aware that it can affect their future academic success.

State legislators should sit up and take notice of a new study that shows high quality state prekindergarten programs improves children’s early language, literacy, and math development regardless of ethnic background or economic circumstances. The study, published by the National Insitute of Early Education Research, showed improvements far greater than found in a recent national study of the federal Head Start program.

The report explored state-funded preK programs in five states: Michigan, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia. Key findings include an 85 percent increase in growth in print awareness and a 44 percent increase in math skills among children who attended preK vs. those who did not.

These kinds of findings should be good news to governors such as Virginia‘s Tim Kaine who is pushing for a similar program as one of his first initiatives.