Yesterday, the Obama administration announced its nominations for several subcabinet level positions in various agencies, including its nomination of Dr. Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana for Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education. Dr. Melendez de Santa Ana is currently Superintendent of the Pomona Unified School District in California.
Although the post for which she is nominated is called “Assistant Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education,” the role is also an important one for early education, too. The Department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education oversees a number of programs relevant to early education, including Title I and the Early Reading First program. New incentives that the administration has proposed for school districts to devote more Title I funds to pre-k will likely increase the Office’s role in early childhood. More importantly, as the administration considers more ambitious investments in building states’ early childhood infrastructure, through the proposed Early Learning Challenge Fund, the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education will need to play an important role in ensuring that federal policies and programs support alignment between early childhood programs and the early elementary years, so that schools continue to build on and sustain gains children make in pre-k. As a result, it’s important that the Assistant Secretary have a strong understanding of the importance of quality early learning programs, as well as a commitment to supporting alignment between early childhood and K-12 programs.
Does Dr. Melendez de Santa Ana have this understanding and commitment? Right now, we don’t know enough to say. A few things we do know: Nearly all elementary schools in Pomona Unified start with pre-k, so Dr. Melendez de Santa Ana does have experience overseeing pre-k programs as part of the district she manages. And she received her Ph.D. from the University of California’s Rossier School of Education Program in Literacy, Language, and Learning, which focuses on sociocultural diversity and bilingualism, language and literacy development and instruction, and learning and assessment—central topics in the critical preK-3rd years. She is also a graduate of the Broad Superintendents’ Academy and previously worked with the Stupski Foundation. We’ll be keeping our eyes and ears open to learn more about Dr. Melendez de Santa Ana’s views on early education. And if anyone reading this blog has experience working with her or with the Pomona Unified School District on early education issues, we’d love to hear from you.
Also yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, speaking at the NewSchools Venture Fund annual summit in Los Angeles, announced that NewSchools Partner and COO Joanne S. Weiss will lead the Department of Education’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Race to the Top funds will be awarded to between 10 and 15 states that are making dramatic progress on the administration’s four education reform goals—establishing college- and career-ready standards, creating longitudinal student data systems that track student from pre-k through high school (and beyond), improving teacher quality and a more equitable distribution of highly skilled teachers, and turning around low-performing schools. As we’ve written elsewhere, each of these goals is clearly linked with policy and practice changes that would also help advance aligned systems of high-quality preK-3rd early education. As Weiss steps into her new role leading Race to the Top efforts, we hope she’ll carefully consider the importance of quality early education to each of these four goals and reward states that are moving towards high-quality, aligned preK-3rd education reforms in service to these four goals.
