Webcast at 10 a.m.: Feds to Announce New Grant Competition for Early Learning

Long awaited details on how the new Race to the Top dollars will be used to support early learning will come this morning when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius announce a new competition.  Early Ed Watch will be there to hear the latest. The announcement will be streamed live and you can watch it here at 10:00 a.m.

For the last month, we’ve written about the $700 million allocated for a new Race to the Top competition and Congress’ inclusion of early learning here and here. In a nutshell, we wonder if this new RTTT may be a real opportunity for states to think about how early education should, in fact, be part of their education reform strategies.

Today, we hope to hear some answers to the important questions we raised in our last post: What will states vying for Race to the Top grants be asked to include about their current and proposed early education efforts? How will early education be weighed against the other priorities? If there money is carved out for a separate early education competition, what would it look like? Would it enable states to truly create integrated birth-to-career systems or would it cement the current fragmentation? And how much money would be directed to early education?

We’ll be looking for answers to these questions and will post information later this afternoon. Stay tuned.