Seattle public schools chief Maria Goodloe-Johnson gave the PreK-3rd movement a boost today, endorsing a move to a PreK-12 system as the most powerful step education policymakers could take.

“I believe that the single most powerful change we’re going to make…the one that’s going to have the largest and most long lasting impact on our kids…is to switch us from a K-12 system to a PreK-12 system,” Goodloe-Johnson said in draft speaking points to be delivered at an event in Seattle today.

The event focused on Seattle’s draft plan to integrate prekindergarten and early elementary grades. The idea is to improve coordination among these grades by expanding access to quality pre-k and universal kindergarten, improving quality across these grades, aligning standards, data and assessment tools, improving transitions between grades and providing better support for students with the greatest needs.

Seattle and Washington State have emerged as leaders in the PreK-3rd movement, and today’s event is one of four the National League of Cities is supporting around the nation to promote the effort. At today’s workshop, “PreK- 3rd Grade Partnership: An integrated, Aligned System for Education Achievement,” national and local leaders are planning to discuss Seattle’s Draft PreK-3rd Action Plan.

Yesterday Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn offered support.

“Yes, we should work together to improve our high schools and middle schools, but for many students, our efforts at those ages are too little, too late.  Their education struggles began very early, and we now know that students who start school behind almost always stay behind,” McGinn said in a draft of speaking points prepared before the event. “…We will no longer be satisfied with building systems for kids and families that are adjacent to one another.”

The federal government could play an important role in Seattle’s and other efforts to align prekindergarten and elementary school by changing federal rules to allow easier blending of Head Start, Title I and special education funds, which would make it easier for prekindergarten classrooms to be in public schools or administered in coordination with school districts, according to one observer.

Senior leaders at the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services are already working on better coordination of early learning work spread among the two agencies.

Goodloe-Johnson made it clear Seattle will soon have far better coordination between prekindergarten and elementary school.

“The co-located but un-linked preschool is about to be a vestige of the past,” Goodloe-Johnson said.

A new documentary is hitting theaters this fall that looks like a must-see for anyone trying to help improve the nation’s approach to education.

If the trailer is any indication, “Waiting for Superman” is a powerful look at the broken U.S. public school system through the lives of five families and with often depressing data on the system’s failings. The movie made it into the Sundance Film Festival and is already getting good reviews.

As he follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, Davis Guggenheim (director of “An Inconvenient Truth”) undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying “drop-out factories” and “academic sinkholes,” methodically dissecting the system and its seemingly intractable problems.

However, embracing the belief that good teachers make good schools, and ultimately questioning the role of unions in maintaining the status quo, Guggenheim offers hope by exploring innovative approaches taken by education reformers and charter schools that have—in reshaping the culture—refused to leave their students behind. “Waiting for Superman” website.

• Check out the trailer here.
• Read Variety’s review.

Thanks to the Erickson Institute  (@earlychildhood on Twitter) for highlighting this new film.

Researchers have learned a lot about the way the brain acquires language. They know that when children are between 9 and 15 months old their brain is focused on sounds. They know that a real life teacher has a much bigger impact than a DVD. And, they know that elementary school students who have a second language score higher on achievement tests.

Watch Jackie Friedman Mighdoll, founder of Seattle-based Sponge, a school that offers language classes for young children, talk about the research that supports exposing young childrento one or more languages, the best way to help children learn a new language and the options are available for older children.

Watch online. 

One of the tougher decisions working parents face is whether to send their son or daughter to child care if they appear slightly under the weather. They don’t want to spread illness around the classroom, but they also don’t enjoy that mad dash to find care if it’s unnecessary.

They have one more thing to consider because child care directors may be too quick in sending children home with mild illnesses, a new study released Monday suggests.

Child care directors excluded, on average, 57 percent of children with mild illnesses that didn’t require exclusion under health guidelines, according to a study of 305 directors in Wisconsin.  Other studies have also found students were unnecessarily sent home with mild illnesses, according to the story, which will appear in the May issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (You can read a summary here.)

The research findings are intriguing, if not surprising, because parents often talk about the other side of this decision: When moms and dads send sick kids to child care and potentially infect classmates. Now it appears directors may err on the other side, sending kids home too quickly.

These findings also suggest many working parents may sometimes have an unnecessary element to juggle, one that also creates headaches for their bosses and doctors.

Children who are excluded from child care place a significant economic burden on parents, businesses, and health care resources. Mild acute illness accounts for the majority of child care exclusions, many of which have been described as not medically indicated. – Pediatrics, “Unnecessary Child Care Exclusions in a State That Endorses National Exclusion Guidelines,” 4/19/10. (See the full story for footnotes.)

In an interesting twist, centers in areas that had more women heading households and those that had more students on state assistance were less likely to exclude children with mild illnesses, according to the study.

When do folks keep their kids home from child care? Have you read American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American Public Health Association guidelines, which were used in this study? Do you think you are too quick to keep your kids home or to send them to child care?

The early learning world is full of shiny new studies, proposals and expanding ambition. But Washington State’s own city of Bremerton offers a reminder that success is often built on what exists in child care and preschools rather than on completely new models and mindsets.

The Bremerton School District has made stunning progress getting kids ready for kindergarten. The percentage of kindergarten students requiring specialized services has dropped to 2 percent from 12 percent, while the percentage of first grade students able to read at their grade level has jumped to 73 percent from 52 percent, according to Public School Insights.

Bremerton’s story may be known to some, but what isn’t as well known but arguably much more important is its 5,500-student school district scored these successes by working with what many schools and teachers were already doing, Insights reports.

 “So instead of saying we need to go do our own preschool, we got our partners together to look at the data and ask what we could do about this. And we made an effort to say we want to increase the quality and services for children in all preschools in Bremerton, not just in special ed or blended preschools. So instead of reaching a few kids, we now reach 570 kids before they come into kindergarten,” Linda Sullivan-Dudzic, the Bremerton School District’s head of special programs told Public School Insights in a question and answer.  “We wanted to value what people were already doing. If you have a childcare in Bremerton or a preschool and you feed into our schools, we wanted to support you.”

Check out the extensive interview. It is well worth reading.

Bremerton’s success also offers hope to the rest of Washington because one of its architects, Bette Hyde, is now one of the leaders building a statewide early learning plan as head of the Department of Early Learning.

Vaccination News: Despite the apparent hysteria over vaccine safety, more U.S. kids received all of their shots in 2008, the Centers for Disease Control found in a new study, Reuters reports.

We are tracking the Great Recession’s impact on state early learning budgets and a new report suggests lawmakers should spend more not less in that arena because kids falling into poverty during downturns can struggle for years with work and school, while also reporting poorer health.

Plus, children who become poor in a recession are more likely to remain poor once they are adults, the Center on Law and Social Policy reports this week, referring to a First Focus study released earlier this year.

Children who fall into poverty during a recession will fare far worse along a range of variables, even well into adulthood, than will their peers who avoided poverty despite the downturn in the economy. These children will live in households with lower overall incomes, they will earn less themselves, and they will have a greater chance at living in or near poverty. – “Turning Point: The Long Term Effects of Recession-Induced Child Poverty.”

The study examined two different populations, which lived through separate post-war recessions, the first from 1972 to 1975 and the second from 1980 to 1982. Researchers found lessons for policymakers dealing with the current recession: Now is the time to invest in programs that could help an estimated 3 million kids on the edge of the poverty line.

“This makes a strong case for investing in children in times of economic downturn. Yet, revenue shortages in many states are causing investments in children and families to be cut,” CLASP added in its analysis of the report.

That is the bad news. The good news is that Pre-K Now found many states are preserving spending on early learning, though often not spending more.

This week official and more casual advocates of more money for children and family programs got help.  Zero to Three created a virtual toolbox to help you “understand the ways your state budget and tax system impact policies for infants, toddlers, and their families.”

There is a thought that family moves can create problems for a child in school, but new research suggests mobility in the early years can be good or bad.

The Foundation for Early Child Development examined mobility among young kids and found that while multiple moves can be associated with academic problems, it can also help kids, particularly if a family moves to a better neighborhood and school.

Like it or not, family mobility is a fact of life. Instead of tackling it as a public policy problem to be eradicated, we should give parents and their kids more tools to cope with change that can sometimes help not hurt their development, suggests Ruby Takanishi, president of the New York-based Foundation for Child Development, which participated in the “Workshop on the Impact of Mobility and Change on the Lives of Young Children” held June 29 and 30 in Washington, D.C.

“The kind of knee jerk reaction is to say mobility is bad and bad for kids,” Takanishi told me in an interview this morning. “I think that one of the things that came out of the workshop, which I think is quite valuable, is the notion that mobility is not necessarily bad.”

Consider the fact that many families move as they climb out of poverty and off welfare, two moves that should benefit parents and their children.

“Mobility is only bad if children move to a worse situation that would be compounded by a residential move to a worse situation,” Takanishi added.

Instead of trying to keep families put, school districts and states can help parents. For example, districts can give parents options to keep their kids in a good school even if they move outside that school’s lines, according to Takanishi. Family support programs and family resource centers also can help parents and their kids adapt to moves, she added.

“What is next is that we really need to think about particular education policies that a school district and state education (system have) that really take into account the fact that there are very high rates of school mobility, particularly among African American and Latino children,” Takanishi said.
  
Note: Ruby Takanishi is one of the featured speakers at the upcoming “Starting Strong” Conference to be held Aug. 10 and 11 at the Doubletree Hotel SeaTac. The conference is for anyone who works with or on behalf of children from birth to age 8 and is being supported by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Washington State Department of Early Learning, Foundation for Early Learning, Thrive by Five Washington and Washington State University. Click here for more conference information and to register.

A leading policy group issued a detailed call Monday for greater cooperation between early learning and the first grades of grade school, suggesting the economic stimulus package created opportunities for the groups to work together.

The call came in the form of a policy brief, “Building a Solid Foundation”, which focused on PreK-3rd, which is a reform effort dedicated to improving the first stages of learning. A big part of this reform is about creating a more seamless movement from pre-K to third grade.

The brief suggests everything from aligning standards between the two learning stages to bolstering teacher training. One of the most interesting ideas is turning failing elementary schools into PreK-3rd Early Education Academies.

Even in this current budget crisis there is money for these investments: $48 billion already flowing from the economic stimulus package, New America Foundation’s Sara Mead writes.

 “The danger is that states and school districts may squander these funds on ill-conceived projects or use them simply to maintain the status quo,” Mead states. “Therefore, school districts, which will receive the bulk of ARRA education funding, must take a leadership role in improving the quality of and expanding access to pre-K programs. This is a substantial shift from recent trends, and some early childhood advocates fear that school districts may be unwilling to invest in pre-K programs, or that those who do invest in them may not work collaboratively with existing community-based pre-K providers.”

One of the brief’s trickier ideas is to create standards, assessments and curriculums for pre-K and the earlier grades. While Mead says this idea is not about pushing elementary curriculums into preschools, I wonder how you avoid slipping down that testing slope. I am not an expert, but tests already are moving into kindergarten classrooms.  

Check out the brief. It is packed with ideas, thoughts and insights, making it an important read for nearly anyone in the early learning field.

I am a big supporter of the power of play in preschools and grade schools as standardized tests take up more time in those classrooms. Now one interest group is warning of a play-deficit crisis.

Tests are crowding out playtime in kindergarten and creating problems in school, U.S. News & World Report’s Nancy Shute reports this week.

But kindergarten tests are almost certainly counterproductive, according to a new report from the Alliance for Childhood, an advocacy group in College Park, Md., called "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School." Pushing children to perform at a level they aren't old enough to handle increases behavior problems and failure rates and takes away from a focus on the importance of play, which is what 5-year-olds really should be doing. – On Parenting, U.S. News & World Report, 4/7/09.

These days benefits of play are increasingly well-documented, even as the amount of playtime shrinks. Kids lost roughly eight hours of play — an entire workday — and 12 hours of basic outdoor and free time over the last 20 years, David Elkind writes in The Power of Play: How Spontaneous, Imaginative Activities Lead to Happier, Healthier Children.

What I liked about Shute’s story was that it went beyond the latest report and offered parents a lot of tips, such as: 

• Tell your child that tests do not measure how smart, able, or good a person is. 
• Consider requesting that your kindergartner not be tested.

The power of play isn’t crystal clear, and the Alliance for Childhood clearly has an agenda to encourage more playtime. Over at The Early Ed Watch Blog Lisa Guernsey points out we need more research on the benefits of playtime. (Guernsey’s post offers an excellent review of current writing and research on play and school, while also promising to track the issue in the coming months.

Where does the play debate fit in the broader dialogue on early learning. While advocates, teachers and academics are talking about it, when will it rise to the level of serious policy debate? Perhaps when Congress and the Obama administration tackle the No Child Left Behind Act.

Any thoughts?