Happy 2011!
Let’s start the New Year with ...
Some food for thought: A report card on President Barack Obama’s early learning record, a new book on the importance of early learning and a call to pay early childhood teachers more.
Over at PolitiFact.com, there is the Obameter. This scorecard shows the promises President Obama made to the nation’s children that he has kept, broken or compromised on so far. The report also shows what promises he is still working on and what ideas are stalled. These promises range from preserving tax credits for families with children to increasing funding for education of young anglers and hunters. (The president broke that promise, according to the scorecard.)
One of the more interesting results is how many promises the president has kept, everything from expanding eligibility for the State Children’s Insurance Fund “to expanding the Nurse-Family Partnership to all low-income, first-time mothers,” the scorecard said.
Of course, Obama had notable failures during his first two years in office, such as the death of his effort to start the Early Learning Challenge Fund in December.
(Thanks to EarlyStories for highlighting this report.)
A New Book: There is a new book about the importance of early learning in building human capital, the National Institute for Early Education Research reports.
It is ironic that in this day and age, the human capital rationale for investing in more and better early education continues to receive short shrift in this most capital-oriented of countries while China and other rising powers forge ahead of us on this front. Could it be that our policymakers are not sufficiently persuaded? If so, “Childhood Programs and Practices in the First Decade of Life: A Human Capital Integration,” recently published by Cambridge University Press, provides all the evidence even the skeptics among our political leadership will need in a single volume. In it, leading scholars in human development and early childhood education discuss the effects and cost effectiveness of the most thoroughly studied model early childhood programs as well as state and federal programs. – “Early Education Seen in a Human Capital Framework,” NIEER. 12/23/10.
Better Pay in Child Care: And there is an inspired call to pay early childhood teachers more over at the Huffington Post, “Kindergarten Teacher Pay: Let's Change the Calculus for the Stewards of the Next Generation.”
The bottom line of How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings released last month: If we look beyond test scores and consider a broader set of measures -- including future earnings -- the long-term outcomes for children justify considerably greater investment in the early childhood workforce. ...
Out of the nearly 800 occupations annually surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 18 report lower average wages than child care workers, who make less than bellhops, tree trimmers and animal trainers. -- Susan Ochshorn, 12/29/10.
It’s a short read and worth checking out.