Beverly Park Elementary School kindergarten teacher Richard Dunn says he's never had such a great start to the school year ... and, when he said that, the school year hadn't officially started.

Dunn and three other kindergarten teachers at the White Center-area school spent last week at school with many of the school's 76 enrolled kindergartners as part of the new Kindergarten Transition Program. For three hours each morning, kindergartners got know each other, their teacher and what to expect at school, such as how to behave in circle time, where to find the bathroom and how to get lunch. Teachers also visited each family's home to learn more about their students' families, set share goals, and talk about school expectations and ways for families to support learning at home.

Dunn says it's great to have this time with the kindergartners before the "big kids" show up and that it will make it so much easier to jump into the school year. Dunn advocated for the program to come to his school after hearing how successful it has been in Yakima schools.

Watch this Learning for Life as we travel to Beverly Park Elementary to look at the Kindergarten Transition Program. The program first started three years ago in four East Yakima schools as part of the work of Ready by Five, one of two Thrive by Five Washington Demonstration Communities. Beverly Park's Kindergarten Transition Program is supported by the White Center Early Learning Initiative's (WCELI), the other demonstration community.

The Kindergarten Transition Program is funded by The Norcliffe Foundation.

Learning for Life airs every Wednesday on KING 5 Morning News on KONG 6/16 TV between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m.

Please send any story ideas about people, programs and work being done to support children from birth to age 5 to molly@thrivebyfivewa.org. 

Learn more and watch past Learning for Life series and specials here.

  

Red shirting is back in the news, not college football players waiting a season to play but families deciding their child should wait a year to start school or repeat a grade, with the Wall Street Journal reporting more parents are thinking about it.

As usual family reporter Sue Shellenbarger packs her Work & Family column with good information from both sides of the debate. For example, research suggests retention doesn’t offer long term benefits, but there are caveats about that research and applying it to individual students.

A growing number of parents are wrestling with the decision to hold their kids back to encourage their mental, social and physical development. More children are being held back a grade because they have failed standardized tests, fueled in some places by the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

Now, however, being held back a grade is considered less of a stigma by parents who see their kids struggling or performing at average levels and think repeating a grade would put them closer to the top of their class, school officials say. – “The Parental Push to Repeat a Grade,” 8/11/10.

The story sparked an active discussion on the WSJ’s family blog, The Juggle (100-plus comments and counting.)

Check it out.

New Research on Head Start: Debates about Head Start and Early Head Start will continue, and there are new findings about both programs that hopefully will improve the discussion.

• The number of funded Head Start slots fell by 8,000 to 795,776, from 2008 to 2009, according to the report from CLASP.
• In Head Start programs, most preschool teachers, 83 percent, had Associate’s Degrees, and nearly half, 49 percent, held Bachelor’s Degrees or higher degrees, according to the report.
• Yet, teachers earned on average, $27,752, far less than the average salary of U.S. kindergarten teachers, $50,380
• Overall, 90 percent of pregnant women in the Early Head Start program had both prenatal and postnatal health care, CLASP reports.
• In Head Start programs, roughly 13 percent of enrolled Head Start students had a disability.

Check out the full Head Start and the Early Head Start highlights.

The early learning world is full of news today and perhaps the biggest development is a move by a key Senate subcommittee to add $300 million for President Barack Obama’s Early Learning Challenge Fund in the coming fiscal year, CLASP reports.

The decision to fund one of Obama’s signature early childhood education initiatives is a big step forward after a proposal to give the fund billions of dollars was dropped in the final days of negotiations over health care reform.

It also builds on comments made by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that added the funding to its annual spending bill.

"We've got to find a way to get it in this budget cycle," Sen. Harkin said during an exchange with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at a hearing in April. "We hope we can count on you" to help to find a way to include it, Harkin added.  (Duncan essentially agreed.)  (The excellent Early Ed Watch blog reported these comments.)

It is great Harkin is trying to bring the Early Learning Challenge Fund back, but it’s also important to remember the proposal has a long way to go. Right now the money is in the annual funding bill for labor, health and human services programs, which is moving through the subcommittee, CLASP says. The bill has to get through various markups, the full Senate and then an effort by House and Senate negotiators to hammer out a compromise.

But, it is a start. 

Research: Excellent Kindergarten Worth a lot Later in Life: Supporters of the Early Learning Challenge Fund received a big boost today from David Leonhardt’s story in today’s New York Times, “The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers.”

The story explores a new study out of Harvard University that found children who spent an academic year in a high-quality kindergarten classroom were more likely to attend college and earn more as adults. 

Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more. – “The Case for the $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher” NYT, 7/28/10.

It is also a huge development in the fade-out argument, which holds benefits of quality early learning may boost test scores in early grades but often fade by third and fourth grade, because it suggests benefits are there, we are simply testing for the wrong things. We should look at what these children achieve as adults.

The economists don’t pretend to know the exact causes. But it’s not hard to come up with plausible guesses. Good early education can impart skills that last a lifetime — patience, discipline, manners, perseverance. The tests that 5-year-olds take may pick up these skills, even if later multiple-choice tests do not. “The Case for the $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher.”

For an informative view of the research and article check out Ellen Galinsky’s story on The Huffington Post, “It's Not Just the Teacher — It's What the Teacher Teaches, Including Life Skills!”

If you think early learning debates are reserved for teachers, parents, academics and advocates, you weren’t paying attention this campaign season.

At one point in the New Jersey governor’s race, eventual winner Republican Chris Christie compared state pre-kindergarten to babysitting, The Star-Ledger reported. Christie clarified his position that preschool is worthwhile, but there isn’t funding for expansion, according to the newspaper.

Not surprisingly, his opponent, outgoing Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine, used Christie’s comments in a campaign ad.

“He (Corzine) is still putting money in universal pre-k,” Christie is seen saying with apparent surprise during a television interview.

Wait a minute. Whatever your political position, a lot of governors are still putting money into state-supported pre-k, as shown in a report released last week, “Facing Grim Economy, Most State Legislatures Continue to Prioritize Pre-K.” Check out Corzine’s campaign ad on YouTube here.

EarlyStories highlighted political shifts in early learning agendas in “New Jersey, Virginia Could Face Pre-K Setbacks,” posted today.

Raw Data on Kindergarten Test Scores: Last month the Education Department released a report showing children from child care centers scored higher on math and reading tests when they entered kindergarten.

Students who primarily spent their time in non-Head Start child care centers the year before kindergarten scored, on average, 47 points in early reading assessments, while children who had no early care or education outside their parents scored 40 points. On math tests, those center-based kids scored 46 points compared to the parental group who scored 41 points.

Also, children who participated in regular early care and education arrangements the year prior to kindergarten scored higher on the reading and mathematics assessments than children who had no regular experience in early care and education the year prior to entering kindergarten. – “The Children Born in 2001 at Kindergarten Entry: First Findings from the Kindergarten Data Collections of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), First Look.”

Before anyone jumps to conclusions, the report warns against making causal inferences based on its findings. I guess these are simply more tea leaves researchers can scrutinize for clues about benefits of early learning.

Thanks to Child Care & Early Education Research Connections for finding this report.

Washington State News

• Column: To Be Equal – High Quality Childhood Education A Step Closer for All – 9/30/09, The Seattle Medium
• Stimulus, grants fund early-childhood ed district-wide – 9/30/ The Tacoma Weekly

National News

• Op-Ed: Early education vital to health of armed forces – 10/1/09, Morning Sentinel (ME)
• Can Better Child Care Shrink Some Achievement Gaps? – 9/30/09, Education Week Blog: Politics K-12
• Race to the Top Grants: Not Just a K-12 Thing? – 9/29/09, Education Week Blog: Politics K-12
• Parents puzzled why developmental screening for pre-K now being enforced – 9/29/09, New York Daily News
• From Birth, Engage Your Child With Talk – 9/28/09, The New York Times
• Parent to Parent: Finding a play-based pre-K – 9/28/09, The Buffalo News (NY)
• Op-Ed: Ready to learn? – 9/27/09, The State (SC)
• Op-Ed: Kindergarten gives children the best possible start – 9/27/09, The Eagle-Tribune (MA)
• Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self Control? – 9/25/09, New York Times Magazine
• Learning language early – 9/18/09, The Standard Times (MA)
   

Policy

• Texas Children Lose Out on High-Quality Child Care Because of Limited Funding – 10/1/09, National Women's Law Center 
• The New Pre-Schoolers: Tested, and Ready for Business? – 9/30/09, Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media Blog: Early Stories
• From the Big Easy, where pre-k is anything but – 9/25/09, Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media Blog: Early Stories

With most children now back in school, I thought it would be a good time to check on how they make the transition from early learning to the first stage of K-12 and the overall state of kindergarten, which appears headed towards a crossroads.

While there isn’t fresh research floating around the internet, there is excellent commentary and reporting that raise important questions about how kindergarten has changed for parents and their kids. What should and shouldn’t we do to help ease the transition? Are kindergarteners and their teachers too stressed out struggling to meet federal and state standards? (How will this influence the upcoming debate over rewriting the No Child Left Behind Act?)

Here is some fodder to chew on:

• Lisa Belkin wonders whether we spend too much time easing our children into preschool over at The New York Times Motherlode blog in “Do Preschoolers Need So Much Phase-In Time?” I agree with Belkin on this topic. We spent a lot of time helping our kids adjust to their new classrooms with shortened days and playdates, even though I thought they were ready to handle more on their own.
• Over at EarlyStories, Liz Willen asks important questions about the pressure we place on kindergarteners and their teachers today in “Kindergarten Rebellion: Let Five Year-Olds Be Five.” It examines a thoughtful story in the North Platte Telegraph, “What should kindergarten be like?”
• Family writer Sue Shellenbarger asks “Do Preschools Need Mental-Health Help?” in the Wall Street Journal blog The Juggle and explored the topic yesterday in a full column, “Therapy in Preschools: Can It Have Lasting Benefits?”

“The specialists' purpose isn't to diagnose or treat mental illness in individual children. Instead, they provide targeted, expert help to teachers, and sometimes to parents, on ways to interact with children and reorganize classrooms that improve behavior and the emotional climate.” – “Therapy in Preschools,” 9/08/09.

• Finally, Swine Flu is on parents’ minds as school begins and the federal Department of Health and Human Services offered a “Know What to Do About the Flu Webcast – Parents and Child Care Providers.” (The department promises to offer an on-demand version shortly.)

Post your thoughts on early learning transitions and the state of kindergarten here or join any of the other forums mentioned above.

 

We are in the middle of an important debate over how to coordinate early learning and the first years of elementary school, and researchers suggest we could learn a few things from Sweden, New Zealand and Germany.

In Germany, for example, they have begun testing “Bildungshaeuser,” which besides being a cool name creates schools for children ranging in age from three to ten, according to “Issues in Education for Children Three to Eight in Six Countries.”

These “houses of education” would create closer local cooperation between Kindergarten and elementary school—not only to improve the transition phase but to include all age groups from three to ten years old in a unified program. In 2008, a large model program for developing and evaluating Bildungshaeuser began in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Sweden, meanwhile, holds a few lessons for U.S. policymakers trying to balance interest in common teaching ideas that cover pre-k to third grade. The northern European country uses a national curriculum for preschool, which teaches kids as old as six, yet doesn’t over stress formal learning, First School researchers wrote.

The National Agency for Education has taken the position that excessive emphasis placed on formal learning at an early stage can have negative consequences.

Before policymakers get too carried away with easing transitions between early learning and grade school, the report offers up an excellent caveat:

…Hans-Guenther Rossbach raised an interesting point of view that challenged our thinking. He said that we think in terms of continuity, but maybe discontinuity is not always bad for children. Children are proud when they make the move to the “big school.” So, maybe we should not be as concerned with eliminating the challenges of the transition as with helping children meet the challenges…In a sense, the discontinuity between settings provides an opportunity for mastery which could contribute to the development of the child’s identity.

The eight-page report is full of food for thought, including these highlights:

• In New Zealand they actively reject the term preschool, but use the term early childhood education.
• (In the U.S.) at the state level, there is a growing recognition that “school readiness” refers not only to the condition of children when they enter school, but also the capacity of schools to educate all children, whatever each child’s condition may be.

The report is worth checking out when you can spare ten minutes.

On the local front, today concluded OSPI’s two day “Starting Strong” conference that focused on informing attendees on practice in four key components necessary for P-3 early care and education efforts: leadership, instructional practice, community coalitions, and collaboration and family partnerships. Attendees heard from national experts and P-3 partnerships in Washington.

I didn’t have to look far for today’s news because Bremerton, Wash., is gaining national kudos for its early learning success, including its ability to integrate pre-k and kindergarten.

Bremerton’s strategy is both simple and comprehensive. It crafted partnerships with the region’s preschools, child care providers and Head Start centers, according to Public School Insights, and narrowed the achievement gap.

The results were impressive.  The percentage of kindergarten students who knew the alphabet jumped from 4 percent to more than 50 percent over the last seven years, the Web site said. (Read Insights for the full story.)

But, the bigger news is that last month Gov. Christine Gregoire asked former Bremerton school chief Bette Hyde, now head of the state’s Department of Early Learning, to work on a plan to ensure all Washington children have access to quality learning as they prepare for kindergarten, and her letter includes a call to include community groups and non-profits.

“I am asking you to work on a proposal about the state’s role in providing early learning opportunities to all children birth to five, their families, early learning caregivers and educators. I believe children should have early learning opportunities from birth,” Gov. Gregoire wrote in the letter sent to Hyde and Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn in June.

Since she picked Hyde only four months before sending the letter, it’s obvious she wants Hyde to draw on her experience and success in Bremerton.

It is also clear Gov. Gregoire isn’t wasting much time. She wants Hyde and Dorn to send her a plan by December 1.

Finally, for budget hawks out there, Bremerton’s success offers another lesson in the economics of early learning.

According to [Linda] Sullivan-Dudzic [Bremerton School District’s director of Special Programs], while a set of curriculum materials costs the school district $2,000, the district saves $2,500 for every kindergartener who does not need remedial reading services. “All I need is one kid coming out of that preschool who does not need remedial help to make up that first year’s investment,” she says. – Public School Insights, Jan. 13, 2009.

(Thanks Early Ed Watch Blog for picking up this news and Public School Insight for covering the developments.)

It appears a lot of kindergartners are skipping school and that is hurting their performance as they move through grade school.

In kindergarten classrooms, one out of two students could be chronically absent – miss 10 percent or more of school with excused and unexcused absences – the new Web site Addressing Chronic Absence in Schools reports. Among kids from across the income spectrum, this behavior is linked to worse performance in first grade, and it is a warning sign of poor performance in fifth grade for kids from low-income families, according to the research and advocacy site.

The site doesn’t provide details about why so many kindergartners aren’t showing up for school, but it does say that “large numbers of chronically absent students could indicate systemic problems that affect the quality of the educational experience (e.g., high teacher turnover or the lack of an engaging curriculum,) and/or the healthy functioning of an entire community (e.g., unstable and unaffordable housing, high levels of community violence, inadequate access to health care or environmental challenges causing chronic illness.)”

In some communities, chronic early absence can affect a quarter of all Kindergartners through third-grade across an entire school district. – “Why Addressing Attendance and Chronic Absence Matters: A Call to Action for School Board Members & District Superintendents,” 5/09.

One of the problems is school districts don’t always know how big of a chronic absence problem there is, according to the site, run by the manager of the Applied Research Project on Chronic Early Absence, Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

High overall school-wide attendance rates can easily mask significant numbers of chronically absent students. Even a school with an average daily attendance rate of 95 percent, for example, could find that 30 percent of its students are chronically absent. The level depends on whether absences are distributed evenly across most of the students in the school or concentrated among a smaller but still significant number of students.

The Web site is full of interesting reports, presentations and promising programs, including the idea that educators might be able to use funds from the federal Economic Stimulus package to deal with chronic absences.

(Thanks to The Tulsa Initiative Blog for highlighting this resource. If you haven’t bookmarked this thoughtful and data-packed early learning site, think about adding it today.)

Researchers discovered a child’s attention problems in kindergarten can signal problems later in school and life, according to a study released this week.

Using data that spanned decades, the authors examined three types of challenges - children who act out or "externalize," students who struggle with depression, anxiety or other “internalizing” and kids with attention problems, according to the University of California Davis School of Medicine study.

Inattentiveness "was the only behavior that consistently predicted lower scores on reading and math achievement tests administered more than a decade later," according to a research summary.

"In our study, a child's inability to pay attention when they start school had the strongest negative effect on how they performed at the end of high school - regardless of their IQ (intelligence quotient)," Joshua Breslau, assistant professor of internal medicine at UC Davis School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said in the summary.

It is an important finding because it could help teachers and parents notice and deal with the problem, which can be tied to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, poor nutrition or lack of sleep, instead of waiting to see if the child outgrows the behavior, researchers said.

"The study adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests that attention problems can inhibit learning and that early onset psychiatric disorders are in part to blame for later failure in high school," the resarch summary said.

Researchers said more study is needed, but they urged policymakers to act.

"Providing school-based mental health professionals should be a priority for education policy makers, because classroom interventions, counseling and — in some cases — treatment for psychiatric disorders, could mitigate these attention problems," co-author Elizabeth Miller, a UC Davis assistant professor of pediatrics, said in the summary.

The research was published in the June issue of Pediatrics, though you have to pay to read it.

Further free reading:

• Attention Problems in Kindergarten Could Spell Long-Term Academic Trouble, HealthDay News, 5/26/09.
• Poor attention in kindergarten predicts lower high school test scores, UC Davis researchers find, FirstScience.com, 5/26/09.