It is a new year and news is already piling up around here. We will get to developments tomorrow, but first let’s catch up on what happened during the holiday break:

Now What? The Race to the Top continued to make news. Education Week has an excellent analysis of what “Challenges Lie Ahead for Early-Learning Grant Winners.” 

The story looks at hard work the nine winners of early learning grants now face. (It doesn’t have a lot of Washington state-specific analysis, but it’s a good overview.)

By awarding millions of federal dollars to the states with winning bids for the Early Learning Challenge grants, the U.S. Department of Education is providing opportunity for - and exerting high-profile pressure on - California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Washington state to prepare more of their low-income and at-risk children for success as they enter kindergarten. -- Education Week. 1/3/11.

What Does the Race Mean? At Investing in Kids, economist Timothy Bartik raises important questions about the impact the race will have on early learning. 

My view is that the goal should be for early childhood programs to be of sufficient scale and quality to significantly affect the economic development of our local and national economies, and to significantly affect the distribution of economic opportunities in the United States. I think it highly unlikely that this goal will ever be achieved through a centralized federal program.
 …
 In my opinion, these programs’ ultimate success rests on the extent of grassroots political support for these programs. Are a majority of voters willing to support increased state and local taxes for these programs? -- “National initiatives and grassroots political support for early childhood programs.” 12/23/11. 

Scores in the Race: I have not spent enough time with Sara Mead’s spreadsheets on Race to the Top Early Learning scoring to understand them. But, it looks like the education analyst produced an interesting spreadsheet “of each state's scores on each subsection of the ELC application. This can be used to identify the states that scored the best on particular sections and shows where states gained and lost points,” she wrote on her Education Week blog.

Importance of Play in Closing the Achievement Gap: Finally, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report on the importance of play for students from low-income families. Education Week writes about the report in “Pediatrics Academy Stresses Low-Income Students' Need for Playtime.”