It is worth noting when the nation’s top central banker talks about things besides interest rates and inflation, and earlier this month Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke took time to urge state policymakers to continue investing in early childhood education. 

The busy Fed chief reminded his audience that while a strong K-12 system is an important factor in building a good workforce, quality early learning classrooms also play an important role.

Research increasingly has shown the importance for both individuals and the economy as a whole of both early childhood education as well as efforts to promote the lifelong acquisition of skills. The payoffs of early childhood programs can be especially high. For instance, investment in preschool programs for disadvantaged children has been shown to increase high school graduation rates. Because high school graduates have higher earnings, pay more taxes, and are less likely to need to use public health programs, such investments can pay off even from the narrow perspective of state budgets; of course, the returns to the overall economy and to the individuals themselves are much greater. – Speech to the Annual Meeting of the Southern Legislative Conference of the Council of State Governments. 8/2/10. (Early learning comments are near the end. See text for footnotes.)

As a journalist who dissected Federal Reserve speeches for key policy changes years ago, I can tell you Fed chairmen don’t waste too many words. And it is great to see Bernanke’s endorsement of quality early learning when he has so many other issues to comment on, including the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession.

Teachers know quality matters, and now research shows quality teachers may matter more than previously thought in helping children reach their reading potential.

A new study by Florida State University researchers found that first grade and second grade students who received excellent instruction “tend to” reach their potential in reading, ScienceDaily reports.

Scholars know that genetics play the biggest role in a child's reading achievement, while the environment – including the classroom experience – plays a smaller role. This study is significant because it shows for the first time that teachers have a direct influence on the genetic variability among children. – ScienceDaily, 4/26/10. "When children receive more effective instruction, they will tend to develop at their optimal trajectory,"( the study’s lead author Jeanette) Taylor said. "When instruction is less effective, then children's learning potential is not optimized and genetic differences are left unrealized."

While the study focused on early elementary grades, it is not a huge jump to suggest a similar dynamic occurs in preschool and pre-kindergarten classrooms, where kids develop the foundations that will help or hinder their later reading. Yet, the quality of early learning teachers often is less consistent than among teachers in elementary schools, where credentials are more uniformly regulated.

What would happen if child care quality rating systems led to a more consistent level of quality among preschool and pre-kindergarten teachers? While higher quality teaching would not eliminate gaps in academic success, it should help in both early learning and elementary school classrooms.

"Putting high quality teachers in the classroom will not eliminate variability among students nor guarantee equally high achievement from all children, but ignoring teachers as a salient contributor to the classroom environment represents a missed opportunity to promote children's potential in school and their success in life," the researchers concluded.

Teacher training is a key element in a quality early learning system, but the new 2009 State of Preschool shows progress on professional development is lagging.

Only roughly half of state-supported pre-kindergarten efforts require teachers to hold bachelors degrees, though the majority of programs, 44 out of 51, require some specialized training, Preschool Matters Today reports.

The National Institute for Early Education Research blog also suggested teacher training could decline in the future.

 “As states continue to deal with large budget deficits, there’s always the danger that current requirements could be watered down and/or eliminated from state policies. Proposals to upgrade teacher qualifications could also be put on the back burner.” – “What the Yearbook Says About Teacher Qualifications.” 

One of the interesting findings is how many public programs, 33, require pre-kindergarten teachers to be paid on the public school salary scale. (Check out state comparisons here.)

And check out the whole story here.

New Large-Scale Child Care Study: Across the Pacific Ocean, Australia has launched its biggest ever early learning study to find out what helps learning in the first years of life.

“We know from studies in North America and the UK in particular that quality early childhood education and care programs increase children’s attainment levels throughout their education and into adulthood. And similarly, lack of a quality program can predict poor progress,” Professor Collette Tayler, who is leading the study of 2,500 three-year-old students and works at Melbourne Graduate School of Education, said in a statement. “But we don’t yet know what program elements make a significant impact on a child’s learning and development. This study will discover what these are, enabling policy makers and educators to make evidence-based decisions into the future.”

Students are failing to reach key reading benchmarks by fourth grade, setting them up for failure later in high school and life, according to a new report that suggested one of the solutions is integrating early learning and the first grades of elementary school.

An incredible 83 percent of students from poor families, and 67 percent of all students, failed to reach proficiency in reading by fourth grade, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation report.  This failure is about more than low scores on fourth-grade tests.

“Failure to read proficiently is linked to higher rates of school dropout, which suppresses individual earning potential as well as the nation’s competitiveness and general productivity.” – Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters, 5/18/10.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation lays out a plan to address the problem, and early learning plays a key role.

“They need to be present at school because they can’t learn if they aren’t there. And they need to have high quality learning opportunities, beginning at birth and continuing in school and during out-of-school time, including summers, in order to sustain learning gains and not lose ground. For millions of American kids, these conditions are not met.” Early Warning. “The system we envision would promote a widely shared focus on the target results of: children born healthy; children healthy, thriving, and developing on track (no untreated health conditions or avoidable developmental delays), from birth through third grade and beyond; children developmentally ready (cognitively, socially, physically, and emotionally) to succeed in school at the time of school entry…”

The good news is Thrive by Five Washington is already working on solutions highlighted in the report. For example, Thrive by Five’s Culture of Literacy initiative is based on the idea that literacy begins in infancy. Plus, Thrive regularly supports the role of parents as their children’s first teachers.

But, the report makes it clear there is a lot of work left. So, the Annie E. Casey Foundation is launching a ten-year campaign to boost reading proficiency.

“…Our 10-year goals are to (1) “close the gap” between the children of low-income rural and urban families and their higher-income counterparts; (2) increase by 50% the number and proportion of students who are grade-level proficient readers by the end of third grade; and (3) “raise the bar” so that these readers truly are proficient by the rigorous standards that will put them on track to graduate from high school and to compete with the rest of the world.”

Check out the plan and entire report here.

An all-day Head Start program in Maryland recorded impressive results preparing its students for kindergarten – they scored better on reading and other tests than other students.  But, the report’s more interesting finding is the program cut down on special education services.

Students in Montgomery County’s all-day Head Start classrooms “required half as many special education services per week as their peers” who weren’t in the pre-k program, once both groups were in kindergarten, according to a release from the Montgomery Public Schools.  

This is the latest finding about how early learning can influence special education, which is expensive. (Pennsylvania Pre-K Programs Cut Special Ed Enrollment, Get Students Ready to Learn) It raises the idea that special education may sometimes be unnecessary if a student receives a top-quality early education, and that this connection is worth more research.

The latest report explains how this progress translates into real money.

“(The costs savings is significant, as the average annual cost for kindergarten students receiving special education services during the 2008-2009 school year was $16,230.)”

The study also found students in the all-day program were more likely to hit reading benchmarks than students in a half-day program.

“This positive effect on reading performance was particularly strong among African American students in the full-day program, who were 94 percent more likely to meet the reading benchmark than their MCPS (Montgomery County Public Schools) peers in the half-day pre-K programs. Students in full-day pre-K who received free and reduced- price meals (a measure of poverty) were 60 percent more likely to meet the benchmark than those in the half-day pre-K classes.”

You might recall the Montgomery County Schools as the district that was lauded for its work and success in early learning last year in the new book, “Leading for Equity.”

Thanks to The Hechinger Report, a brand new education news service that is packed with information and has a link to the EarlyStories blog post about the new report.  Check it out.

One of the more thoughtful education and psychology writers on Twitter is Dr. Laura Kauffman, who has a link today to a fascinating BBC report on why Finland’s more relaxed approach to elementary and secondary school works.

The story explores the general approach of the Finnish school system, which includes teaching both struggling and advanced students in the same class, and how it gets incredible results.

“Children here (at the featured school) do the least number of class hours per week in the developed world and get the best results.” – Finland’s Education Success, BBC, 4/6/10. “The first lesson about school in Finland is relax, take your shoes off when you arrive. And when you get into the classroom call your teachers by their first name.”

These results are found throughout the Finnish school system, according to the BBC.

The report adds that unlike publicly-supported schools in the United States and United Kingdom, Finnish schools are not based on competition.

“There is no such thing as a failing Finnish school.” – BBC.

Students also do not start formal school until age seven.

Dr. Kauffman also highlighted findings from researchers in the United Kingdom about why play matters in early childhood education. In a study released this week, researchers found that adults who engaged in more active play as kids were more likely to have healthier diets and engage in regular exercise, according to the British Psychological Society.

"Having the freedom and opportunity to play is important for all aspects of child development and is a right that is often overlooked. It is something that most children want to do, and do naturally, but its importance is not always recognised by adults, particularly policy makers,” Tony Cassidy, one of the researchers and a professor at the University of Ulster, said in a statement.

The research was scheduled to be presented today at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference.

Check out Dr. Kauffman’s Tweets under the name @ChildPsych.

What: Grand opening celebration.
Where: Educare Early Learning Center, 625 SW St., Seattle WA 98146
When: Saturday, March 27. 1 to 4 p.m. Ceremony with remarks will be from 1 to 1:45 p.m. Open House for children and families will be from 2 to 4 p.m.

Washington will take another big step in its effort to improve early learning in the state Saturday when a center modeled after some of the country’s best child care and preschool officially opens it doors in the Seattle area - the first resource of its kind in the Pacific Northwest.

The 44,000-square-foot state-of-the art Educare Early Learning Center in White Center, a community south of Seattle, will offer some of the best child care in the nation – three staff members for every eight infants and toddlers – and top quality preschool for 134 students in all-day programs that run throughout the year.

The center is the 10th of its kind in the country. Started in Chicago 10 years ago, the Educare model is known for its small classes and high staff/child ratios, emphasis on social-emotional development and language and literacy, research-based practices and strategies, continuity of care, family support and highly trained staff.

The center is also now the hub of a larger community-wide effort that began two years ago to help more children in this diverse community start school ready to succeed. With public and private partners working together, the White Center Early Learning Initiative (WCELI) is creating a comprehensive web of early learning services that cover everything from prenatal nutrition and birthing and outreach doulas to quality pre-kindergarten and teacher training.

And with the Educare Early Learning Center now open, a new level of services and supports can be offered. In fact, a weekly Play & Learn group in Vietnamese is already meeting and a growing number of families are learning about how to turn everyday grocery items into toys, good nutrition for their children or what quality child care looks by attending “Wednesdays with WCELI” after drop-off in the morning or before pick-up in the afternoon. And the center will help more than those living in the White Center and nearby Boulevard Park neighborhoods where it operates because its classrooms will serve as models of quality teaching and child care for providers around Seattle and the state.

In one sense, this center is the new heart of the White Center Early Learning Initiative effort.

“We are creating a beacon of light and hope for a community, for the children in the community … by giving them a great foundation for their primary schools,” Rafel Hart, director of the Educare program, said in an interview. “It is setting them up to be very productive citizens…”

Watch and listen to learn more:

• This week’s Learning for Life segment on KING 5 TV features a walkthrough and overview of the new Educare Early Learning center.
• KUBE 93’s Street Beat OnDemand – Tony Benton, community affairs director at Clear Channel Radio Seattle and Thrive by Five Washington board member, interviews Rafel Hart, director of the new Educare Center; Leilani Dela Cruz, director of WCELI; and Vanessa Manaao, Community Learning Director. Find out what they had to say about the country's 10th Educare center, the larger effort in White Center to make sure all children get a great start in life and school and how we all stand to benefit from what White Center is doing and learning. 

The White Center Early Learning Initiative is one of two Thrive by Five Washington Demonstration (link to our Web site) Communities in the state, modeling strategies and approaches that can be replicated in other communities to improve early learning statewide.

Quality early learning is a powerful poverty-fighting tool that helps narrow achievement gaps among children. Researchers spend a lot of time focusing on those gaps in preschool, but there is not much work on these divides in babies and toddlers, a new report says.

A Child Trends report begins to change this with a study of data on 11,000 children that shows the achievement gap - differences in cognitive skills, behavior and health – actually shows up as early as nine months.

Researchers discovered many of these gaps widened by the time children were two years old. Poverty and low education among mothers were the two most prevalent risk factors, though they found gaps in two other demographic areas: racial/ethnic minority status and non-English home language.

This is a major finding for the early learning community because it’s further evidence of the importance of quality infant and toddler care. If the achievement gap starts so early, quality child care has to start as early.

This important study underscores a key truth: if a price tag could be put on future workforce productivity in our country, the growing number of children in poverty is very expensive. Very soon, the line of credit we have been using by not investing wisely in children from an early age is going to bankrupt us, – Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund, wrote at Change.org on Friday, “Leaving the Littlest Ones Behind.”

The report also offers ideas on how to deal with these early achievement gaps, and one of them is “Improve the Quality of Early Care Settings.”

Two promising ways to address the quality of early care environments would be to focus on curriculum development and professional development within both home-based and center-based settings that serve infants and toddlers. – “Disparities in Early Learning and Development: Lessons from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth Cohort.

The report was released by Child Trends last summer and funded by the Council of Chief State School Officers. It is worth checking out.

We have a lot of research on early learning’s long-term returns – more college degrees, better salaries and higher homeownership rates – but a new report says there are more immediate reasons for states to invest in preschool and pre-kindergarten.

Among those reasons is that quality early learning offers big savings by supporting prepared students and parents, the Partnership for America’s Economic Success suggests in its issue brief.

For example, home visiting and mentoring programs alone could

• “…Help decrease by half the incidence of low-birthweight births, saving between $28,000 and $40,000 per low-birthweight birth averted…”“
• “…Save states collectively some of the $33 billion in annual child abuse- and neglect-related costs, such as hospitalization and law enforcement.”

The report’s argument for quality pre-k is also interesting, suggesting it leads to better kindergarten students, which in turn boosts teachers’ effectiveness, reduces staff turnover and cuts special education costs.

Quality pre-k savings also include:

• “Parents whose children are in reliable, quality care work more productively and rely less on public assistance. Those who are out of work can search for jobs and participate in training programs.”
• “States generate roughly two dollars in local spending for each federal childcare dollar spent. These “multiplier effects” range from 1.92 in Ohio to 2.08 in California and 2.17 in Pennsylvania.” (See the report for research sources. The Partnership for America’s Economic Success, which released the report, is a division of The Pew Center on the States.)

On the heels of this issue brief, Michigan’s school superintendent released another report today saying school readiness investments over the last 25 years saved the state $1.15 billion in 2009, Grand Rapids News reports.

Thanks to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies and the National Institute for Early Education Research for finding this news.

The federal government ignited a fresh debate over whether benefits of quality early education fade over time by releasing a report this week that found few measurable cognitive or social-emotional benefits among a group of Head Start students once they reached first grade.  

In a four-year study that is the talk of the early learning world, researchers found by first grade Head Start students and those in a “control group…were at the same level on many of the measures studied.” The study, however, found Head Start helped prepare kids for school.

Overall, the report raises more questions than it answers.

It offers one stage in the evolution of our understanding of quality early education’s impact. We won’t truly understand fade out until we measure, if we can, its effect in adults, such as better jobs and lower incarceration rates, other research suggests.

The New America Foundation raises an excellent point: Where does this fade out come from, Head Start, the quality of the kindergarten and first grade classrooms these kids entered, the fact that kids need quality support from pregnancy through Head Start, not a single year?

“What this study does, among many other things, is present us with a big question mark about the quality of the primary grades in the public schools that these Head Start children attended. There’s so much we still don’t know,” Lisa Guernsey, director of the Washington, D.C.-based foundation’s Early Education Initiative, wrote during an email interview.

All these questions mean the idea of fading benefits likely will play an even bigger role in future debates over early learning. Fade out was mentioned several times in a television special that aired over the weekend, “Learning for Life: The Path to Better Early Learning" and is certain to play a role in the Obama administration’s ambitious early education agenda.

“Issues of fadeout at specific points in the education process are not new. Previous studies have shown ebbs and flows in achievement from grade to grade throughout the educational experience. In spite of the ups and downs in achievement, long-term studies continue to reach the same conclusion:  significant improvements in a wide variety of educational and life outcomes,” the National Head Start Association said in response to the report.

In fact, one of the longest running studies of quality preschool, the Perry Preschool Project, has shown long-term gains, everything from better jobs to higher homeownership rates. It is neatly summed up in a single finding: The total investment of $15,166 in one Perry Preschool education pays back $244,812 in benefits to society, American RadioWorks reported.

The experiment also suggests the true impact of quality early ed may not be found in raw test scores.

"Now you're getting into something really deep," economist James Heckman said in the RadioWorks story. "How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation?"

"It's true that IQ wasn't raised by the study," Heckman added later. "But it is true that achievement was. And I thought that was amazing."

Overall, the latest Head Start report contains a lot of bad news and good news to digest.

“However, the advantages children gained during their Head Start and age 4 years yielded only a few statistically significant differences in outcomes at the end of 1st grade for the sample as a whole.” – “Head Start Impact Study Final Report, Executive Summary, 1/13/10.

 There are plenty of other findings to chew on, including Head Start’s impact on mom and dad. Maybe impacts on better parenting are more obvious once kids grow up.

“It is possible that these benefits in the parent-child relationship are both related to earlier improvements in behavior and may lead to longer term benefits for children. However, this is only one hypothesis, and the issue requires further analysis.”

This latest report will surely become fodder for sound bites that often pass for debate on Capitol Hill. But, its findings are a big step, but only a step, toward finding out what works and what doesn’t work in early learning.

Any thoughts?