From the blog post:
Our new issue brief, Reforming Head Start: What 'Re-competition' Means for the Federal Government's Pre-K Program, is our attempt to answer these questions clearly and consicely. Before now, much of this information has not been available for public viewing nor has it existed succinctly in one place for policymakers and the public to digest. The paper explains the inner workings of the new re-competition system so far.
It also includes information that will be of interest to those who are more familiar with Head Start, such as brief stories about what triggered re-competition procedures for three grantees in New York, Oklahoma and Ohio.
]]>Using data from the Head Start Program Information Report (PIR), CLASP has developed two new fact sheets providing a look at the Head Start preschool and Early Head Start programs in the 2010-2011 program year. These new fact sheets explore the characteristics of children and families served by the programs, as well as the programs themselves and their staff.
Related:
Early Head Start Participants, Programs, Families and Staff in 2011
This interactive worksheet comes from CLASP's Putting it Together: A Guide to Financing Comprehensive Services in Child Care and Early Education. States and communities embarking on financing partnerships to expand access to comprehensive services can use this worksheet to begin mapping the need, available resources, and potential partnering strategies that will help them move forward. This document may be downloaded, edited, and saved.
]]>From the press release:
Today, CLASP and ZERO TO THREE (ZTT), released the new report Expanding Access to Early Head Start: State Initiatives for Infants and Toddlers at Risk, which highlights current state initiatives to expand and enhance Early Head Start (EHS) services for infants, toddlers, and their families.
CLASP and ZTT found that 23 states are using at least one of four approaches to build on the federally funded EHS program:
- Nine states have initiatives that extend the day or year of existing EHS services
- Nineteen states have initiatives that expand the capacity of EHS programs to increase the number of children and pregnant women served
- Two states provide resources and assistance to child care providers
- Six states support partnerships between EHS and center-based and/or family child care providers
From the summary:
CLASP's newly released Putting it Together: A Guide to Financing Comprehensive Services in Child Care and Early Education aims to help states look beyond the major sources of child care and early education funding and consider alternative federal financing sources to bring comprehensive services into early childhood settings. Comprehensive services like preventive health care, developmental screenings, and family support are critical to the success of children - especially those who are most at risk for developmental challenges and delays. Yet the sources of child care funding historically available to states have limited supply and allowable uses, and are insufficient to provide comprehensive services in most child care and early education settings....CLASP's financing guide walks early childhood stakeholders through the steps of building financing partnerships, and provides critical information and resources related to specific federal funding streams that support comprehensive services for children. The guide includes funding examples from state and local communities and technical details on the allowable uses of funding streams to support comprehensive services.
States Perform provides users with access to interactive, customizable and up-to-date comparative performance measurement data for 50 states in six key areas: fiscal and economic, public safety and justice, energy and environment, transportation, health and human services, and education. Compare performance across a few or all states, profile one state, view trends over time, and customize your results with graphs and maps.
]]>From the press release:
First Focus today released a report finding that, for the first time since the children's advocacy organization began its budget analyses in 2008, "discretionary" spending (the budget decisions made by Congress through annual appropriations bills) on children has declined for two consecutive years. Children's Budget 2012 observes that less than 8 percent of the federal budget is invested in children.... Children's Budget 2012 is a detailed analysis of more than 180 federal investments in children. They range from investments children benefit from every day like education, to acute problems such as child abuse and neglect prevention. The analysis also includes initiatives not traditionally recognized as investments in children, like federal affordable housing initiatives and Social Security. Discretionary spending on children has declined by about $2 billion since 2010....
See also:
Abstract
Slide Show
ChildrensBudget.org
Minneapolis Fed economists Art Rolnick and Rob Grunewald advocate an investment in early childhood development programs. These programs are rarely viewed within the context of economic development, but the authors think that is a mistake, that such an investment would result in high economic returns.
The website includes articles and a list of other related websites.
]]>Politicians from both sides of the aisle agree: early childhood education plays a crucial role in ensuring America's global competitiveness. Even amid challenging fiscal climates, states have advanced innovative approaches to early learning policies, and new federal initiatives are trying to sustain their momentum and expand their reach. What's next for early learning, and what can the White House and Congress do to support it?
This National Journal policy summit featured a panel of experts exploring how the two presidential candidates' visions for early education might translate into policy and the impact these policies might have on the nation's long term economic health. The discussion also examined the current early childhood education policies at work in the states and offered a range of policy solutions to guarantee American children have the tools they need to succeed in a global economy.
Early Childhood Education's Impact on the Economy from National Journal and National Journal on FORA.tv
]]>From the summary:
...In this report we describe how conflicting expectations, misaligned system requirements, and programmatic firewalls on the federal level create formidable barriers to the operation of a well-coordinated system of high-quality early childhood education for children from birth to 5 years old. This lack of coordination means that our federal investments are neither operating as efficiently nor as effectively as possible. As a result we are missing the opportunity to increase the number of young children who enter kindergarten with the skills, knowledge, and dispositions necessary for school and lifelong success.
Currently, there are four federal funding streams--Head Start, the Child Care Development Block Grant, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act--investing approximately $13 billion annually in early childhood programs focused on boosting early learning outcomes. Most of the resources from these funding streams, which we describe later in this report, are targeted to at-risk children. But despite laudable intentions, challenges naturally arise when multiple federal agencies are working relatively independently of one another in pursuit of a common goal....
]]>From the abstract:
The role of subsequent school contexts in the long-term effects of early childhood interventions has received increasing attention, but has been understudied in the literature. Using data from the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP), a cluster-randomized controlled trial conducted in Head Start programs, we investigate whether the intervention had differential effects on academic and behavioral outcomes in kindergarten if children attended high- or low-performing schools subsequent to the preschool intervention year. To address the issue of selection bias, we adopt an innovative method, principal score matching, and control for a set of child, mother, and classroom covariates. We find that exposure to the CSRP intervention in the Head Start year had significant effects on academic and behavioral outcomes in kindergarten for children who subsequently attended high-performing schools, but no significant effects on children attending low-performing schools. Policy implications of the findings are discussed.
From the abstract:
Service integration for foster children has recently improved following scholarly recommendations (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2001) that sparked federal action to integrate child welfare services with intervention services for children with special needs, as well as with local education and Medicaid agencies (P.L. 110-351, 2008). However, integration with early care and education (ECE) has lagged behind despite the potential of such efforts to help child welfare agencies fulfill their mandate to ensure children's safety, permanency, and well-being (P.L. 105-89, 1997). Research aimed at informing the integration of ECE and foster care is also lacking, as these two areas of investigation have developed along largely parallel tracks. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for understanding the potential roles that ECE can play within the foster care system that can, in turn, guide a systematic, policy-focused research agenda. We introduce the paper with a discussion of federal policy barriers to ECE and child welfare service integration, and close with a specific recommendation that the Children's Bureau and the Office of Child Care take steps to encourage research aimed at filling the knowledge gap at the intersection of these two core services for vulnerable children and families.
From the summary:
The 2011 State Preschool Yearbook is the newest edition of our annual report profiling state-funded prekindergarten programs in the United States. This latest Yearbook presents data on state-funded prekindergarten during the 2010-2011 school year as well as documenting a decade of progress since the first Yearbook collected data on the 2001-2002 school year. Tracking these trends is essential to ensuring states prioritize early childhood education, which influences how successfully America's future generations will compete in a global knowledge economy.
Twenty-eight percent of America's 4-year-olds were enrolled in a state-funded preschool program in the 2010-2011 school year, indicating the importance of ensuring quality in existing programs and expanding access to all children. The National Institute for Early Education Research has developed the State Preschool Yearbook series to provide information on the availability and quality of services offered through these programs to children at ages 3 and 4 and serve as a resource to policymakers and educators seeking to start all young learners on the right foot.
]]>From the summary:
The Pew Economic Mobility Project's fact sheet, Does America Promote Mobility As Well As Other Nations?, previews selected key findings from a multi-country study of economic mobility led by the Russell Sage Foundation with additional funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Sutton Trust. Researchers in 10 countries investigated how socioeconomic advantage, as measured by parents' education, is transmitted over the course of one's life. The results show that in the United States, there is a stronger link between parents' education and children's economic, educational, and socio-emotional outcomes than in any other country investigated.