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!”