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In Quotes

March 2, 2012 by Irene Sege

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house,
All that cold, cold, wet day.

“The Cat in the Hat,” Dr. Seuss (on the anniversary of his birth, March 2, 1904)

Posted in Quotes, Reading proficiency | Leave a Comment »

The Income-Based Achievement Gap Widens

March 1, 2012 by Irene Sege

Massachusetts snapshot: Achievement gap, by income, third grade reading (Click on image to enlarge)

Mention the achievement gap, and discussion often turns to a gap based on race. Yet the gap between white and black children in the United States has actually narrowed over the last several decades, The New York Times reports, while the gap based on income is widening.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist, tells the Times.

Reardon, in a recently published study, finds that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students has grown about 40% since the 1960s. This is double the gaps between whites and blacks, the Times reports. Continue Reading »

Posted in Achievement gap, Research | Leave a Comment »

Pediatrician Group Adopts Policy to Mitigate Toxic Stress

February 29, 2012 by Irene Sege

Brain research tells us that children’s early experiences affect the physical architecture of the brain. Playful, loving, language-rich interactions between parents or caregivers and young children have a positive impact on the wiring of the young brain, laying the foundation for literacy and other healthy development. Conversely, toxic stress – stress so unrelenting the body doesn’t return to a calm baseline – has a deleterious affect on children’s growing brains and bodies.

This is the science behind a new policy on toxic stress adopted recently by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Among the authors of the new policy is Dr. Jack Shonkoff, the pediatrician who heads the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard and whose landmark 2000 book “From Neurons to Neighborhoods” helped revolutionize the way we think about the complex relationship between nature and nurture. (See above video of a forum at the Harvard School of Public Health with Shonkoff, AAP President Robert Block, and Roberto Rodriguez, White House special assistant to the president on education policy. Read Boston Globe interview with Shonkoff.)

“Toxic stress might arise from parental abuse of alcohol or drugs,” Nicholas Kristof writes in The New York Times. “It could occur in a home where children are threatened and beaten. It might derive from chronic neglect — a child cries without being cuddled. Affection seems to defuse toxic stress — keep those hugs and lullabies coming! — suggesting that the stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector. Continue Reading »

Posted in Health, Research | Leave a Comment »

“Creating a Culture of Quality” for Early Education

February 28, 2012 by Irene Sege

Amy O'Leary visits Boston preschool (Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children)

My colleague Amy O’Leary, director of our Early Education for All Campaign, tells a story that illustrates how far the field of early education and care has come over the past several years.

Amy has been going to meetings of the Boston Alliance for Early Education  since she was a preschool director in Boston’s South End neighborhood in the 1990s. “It was originally designed as a support group for directors,” Amy recalls. “The conversation often focused on overflowing toilets and the day-to-day logistical challenges of running a center.”

Much has changed since then, not the least of which came in December 2011 when Massachusetts was named one of only nine states awarded a federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge grant. Back in 2005, Massachusetts merged its child care and early education agencies to create the nation’s first consolidated Department of Early Education and Care. The same year it established the Early Childhood Educators Scholarship. In 2006, the state created the Universal Pre-Kindergarten grant program to support and sustain quality. Head Start and the National Association for the Education of Young Children, an accrediting body, started to phase in bachelor degree requirements for early educators. In 2011, Massachusetts launched an evidence-based Quality Rating and Improvement System, which defines tiers of quality that include teacher education and training, curriculum, and assessment.

With these changes, the conversations have changed, too. Continue Reading »

Posted in Dept. of Early Education and Care, Early educators, Early Learning Challenge, Head Start, NAEYC, Professional development & preparation, QRIS | Leave a Comment »

“Sidewalk” Field Trips Boost Children’s Early Literacy

February 27, 2012 by Irene Sege

When Dao Krings, a second-grade teacher at P.S. 145 in New York City, asked how many students had never been inside a car, Tyler Rodriguez was one of several students who raised their hands. “I’ve been inside a bus,” the boy said. “Does that count?”

The anecdote illustrates why teachers at the Brooklyn school regularly take the children in their classrooms on “field trips to the sidewalk,” according to a terrific story in The New York Times that shows how teachers in a high-poverty school increase the background knowledge, vocabulary and comprehension skills of their young students. In the process, the field trips prepare the children to become strong readers.

Reading, as outlined in “Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success,” is a complex process that is as much about comprehension as it is about decoding words on the page. The  background knowledge and vocabulary a reader brings to a text are critical ingredients of comprehension. Consider, the Times notes, that “by age 4, the average child in an upper-middle-class family has heard 35 million more words than a poor child.” And one-third of kindergartners from the bottom fifth of the income distribution are read to every day, compared with two-thirds of kindergartners in the wealthiest 20% of households.

“When a new shipment of books arrives, Rhonda Levy, the principal, frets,” the Times reports. “Reading with comprehension assumes a shared prior knowledge, and cars are not the only gap at P.S. 142. Continue Reading »

Posted in Developmentally appropriate practice, Language development, Play, Pre-K to 3, Reading proficiency | 1 Comment »

In Quotes

February 24, 2012 by Irene Sege

“If we want [children] to graduate high school and go to college, we need to have them reading at grade level by third grade. That’s not a magical number. It’s what the data tells us…. We can’t wait for the third grade MCAS scores to tell us whether a child is on track or not. In fact, waiting for kindergarten is too late.”

John Bissell, Greylock Federal Credit Union, Berkshire Eagle, February 21, 2012

Posted in Assessments, Quotes, Reading proficiency | Leave a Comment »

Aligning Early Education with the Common Core

February 23, 2012 by Irene Sege

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

Across the country, early educators face questions about how best to align early childhood programs with the academic rigor of the Common Core State Standards adopted by 46 states (including Massachusetts) and the District of Columbia. The answer, experts say, lies in developmentally appropriate practice and understanding what research tells us about how young children learn.

“We have to be careful that those standards, particularly as they extend downward, appropriately recognize these important social, communication, and self-regulation skills that are really as critical for kids’ learning in those early and later years as whether they know the alphabet,” Robert C. Pianta, the dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, tells Education Week.

For young children, this means play and art and hands-on activities. It means fostering social and emotional development and executive function as well as laying the foundation for literacy, numeracy, science and other academic areas.

“With young children, art and physical movement aren’t a frill,” Gillian D. McNamee, professor of teacher education at Chicago’s Erikson Institute, tells Ed Week. “They are the disciplines that offer resources for the expression and the development of ideas.”

According to a 2007 review of states’ policies published in the journal Early Childhood Research & Practice, all states have preschool guidelines that cover multiple developmental domains. Continue Reading »

Posted in Pre-K to 3, Standards and curriculum | 1 Comment »

At the February EEC Board Meeting

February 22, 2012 by Irene Sege

The Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care last week unanimously approved a measure to align the Massachusetts Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) grant program with the Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) that the commonwealth launched in January 2011. (See UPK-QRIS PowerPoint.)

The board also approved the annual report to the Legislature from the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC), discussed progress toward creating a Massachusetts Kindergarten Entry Assessment, and reviewed the goals and priorities of the Coordinated Family and Community Engagement  network.

UPK grants, which were established in 2005, are designed to support and sustain quality in early education settings for preschool-aged children. The grant program currently serves about 6,400 children in almost 400 classrooms across the state. The QRIS defines tiers of quality in early education and care and out-of-school-time programs for children from birth to school age.

In public testimony before the board vote, Amy O’Leary, director of Early Education for All, a campaign of Strategies for Children, supported the proposal but sounded a few cautionary notes. Continue Reading »

Posted in Assessments, Dept. of Early Education and Care, Family engagement | Leave a Comment »

How Early Education & Care Fares in Obama’s Budget

February 21, 2012 by Irene Sege

Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

The fiscal year 2013 federal budget that President Obama released last week contains cause for at least cautious optimism, as summarized by the National Institute for Early Education Research, CLASP, the National Women’s Law Center and the First Five Years Fund. “Early education,” says NIEER, “is clearly an administration priority, though perhaps not as high a priority as we would like.”

Here are some highlights, culled from their reports:

  • Child Care Development Block Grant. An $825 million increase, to $3.417 billion, with $300 million of discretionary funding going to quality improvement grants.
  • Head Start. An $85 million increase, to $8.054 billion, which the administration says is enough to maintain current enrollment.
  • Race to the Top. $850 million, with a “significant portion” – as yet unspecified – going to early learning, according to a U.S. Department of Education news release.
  • Child care subsidies for children in low-income families. An additional $7 billion over 10 years.
  • IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Act). A $20 million increase, to $452.7 million, in services for infants and toddlers; and level funding at $372.6 million of grants to states to support early education for 3- to 5-year-old children with disabilities.

See a table tracking federal spending on early education from Early Ed Watch, a blog of the New America Foundation. The foundation also poses a number of questions about Obama’s budget, among them questions about the Early Learning Challenge and whether funds for extending school hours could be used to expand half-day kindergarten programs to full day.

One final note. Obama’s budget is viewed more as a blueprint of his vision going into the 2012 election than as a springboard for timely action on Capitol Hill. As Birth to Thrive Online notes, “The Obama administration’s budget is only the first move in a high-stakes game that will be complicated this year by presidential and congressional politics.”

Posted in Federal | 2 Comments »

In Quotes

February 17, 2012 by Irene Sege

“I work with preschoolers. They sort colored beads, sequence a story they just heard, make elaborate designs with pattern blocks, and figure out how to equitably divide cars with their friends. We know they are learning important math concepts. They call it playing.”

Kathleen Klofft, Letter, Boston Globe Magazine, February 12, 2012

Posted in Quotes, Science & math | Leave a Comment »

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