Obama wins the crucial 5-17 year-old voting bloc. On this day of speculation and hype, that’s about all the real election news you’re going to get.
The Post story even quoted one ten-year old who cast his vote based on education policy:
Taylor Irwin, 10, is an Obama supporter who has been following the candidate’s education plan.
“He [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Early Childhood Education'
Early Voters
Sara Returns
Former Education Sector staffer Sara Mead not only authored many of this blog’s best posts in its first year of existence, she also came up with the name. I’ve always harbored a secret, irrational hope that she’d come back to the Q&E fold but now that she’s launched a brand-new early education blog at the [...]
Preschool in the Primaries: Score one for Senator Clinton
Campaigning in Florida today, Senator/Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton put forward an ambitious policy proposal to move the U.S. towards universal preschool education. This is the first major education proposal rolled out by the Clinton campaign, and it’s a good one. The plan would provide states with matching grants (starting at $5 billion federal investment and [...]
Making Nice with Newsweek
Over the past year or so, you could sort of say that a significant share of my work has focused on criticizing Newsweek: Andy and I wrote a paper questioning their ranking of “America’s Top High Schools,” a Newsweek cover story on the “boy crisis” got me to look into the issue and eventually write [...]
ES Interview: The "Godfather" of Head Start
Edward F. Zigler is one of the nation’s leading experts on and advocates for young children. Trained as a researcher in the 1950s, a key member of the group that founded Head Start in the 1960s, Zigler remains, at 77, a prolific scholar and committed advocate for young children.
Hechinger Institute director and Education Sector Senior [...]
Blogroll Addition
Richard Colvin’s got a new blog about early childhood education and media coverage of it. Good stuff, now in our blogroll. (Thx to Andy for pointing this out to me.)
Universal Coverage, but not Universal Preschool
So last week Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney vetoed a bill to create universal preschool for all three- and four-year-olds in the state, arguing that the proposal would be too costly. Right now Massachusetts is sort of in the middle of the states in terms of preschool–about 8 percent of Massachusetts 4-year-olds and 7 percent [...]
Parental High Anxiety
In addition to the usual materials about nutrition and health care, new parents are apparently also getting glossy four-color brochures titled “Your Child is Only in the 30th Percentile and Getting Dumber By the Day,” which opens up to a second page headlined “25th Percentile…20th….Panic Would Be Appropriate Right About Now” and concludes with “Don’t [...]
More Munchkin Love
A new CED report makes the economic case for greater public investment in universal preschool, looks at how much different policy alternatives here would cost, and also discusses some interesting alternative funding mechanisms. Some of this will not be new to early childhood geeks, but the analysis around policy and funding alternatives is worth [...]
Pre-KPalooza
Lots of action on the Pre-K front this week:
A new report from Pre-K Now summarizes state governors’ preschool proposals for the 2007 fiscal year. Additional analysis from Stateline here, along with some coverage of the debate over Proposition 82, the California ballot initiative that would establish voluntary universal preschool in that state. Californians are scheduled [...]
Anecdotes, Suspicion, Discrimination, and How Gender Sterotypes Hurt Early Learning
I think this Tampa Tribune article (hat tip to the EdWonks) about the suspicions unfairly cast on male kindergarten teachers is pretty silly. For starters, it’s a prime example of the non-education education story, to steal a phrase coined by Kevin. In March, a local male kindergarten teacher was arrested on charges of “sexual [...]
Three Things You Should Read
I’m going to strongly recommend two new reports out this week.
One is the final report of the Teaching Commission, an independent commission established by former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner to identify and promote reforms that modernize the way American public school teachers are prepared and hired, the conditions in which they work, and how they [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.