The 500th Edition of our Early & Elementary Education Update

Today marks the 500th edition of the Early & Elementary Education Weekly Update. Thank you for reading it, sharing it, and letting us know what you think about it! Over the last 500 newsletters (roughly 10 years), our team has changed and grown and our work at New America has evolved. At the same time, early care and education has gained more public and policy attention at the federal, state, and community levels.

On our EdCentral blog and through our newsletter, the Early & Elementary Education policy team has documented new programs and investments; we’ve analyzed state and federal policy implementation and what changes might mean for children, families, and educators. We’ve highlighted promising practices and delved into persistent challenges. Our team has published several blog series on topics most relevant for our readers. Below are some of our most read and our team’s favorite blog posts and series over the last few years. We hope you enjoy and still find them relevant and useful in your work!

In case you missed these posts:

• In If We Care About Early Learning, We Cannot Ignore Teacher Well-Being, Abbie Lieberman shares her early experience working in a child care center and makes a case for how important pay and benefits are to making early childhood education a viable career path.
• In Why Training Teachers in Social and Emotional Learning is Just as Important as the ABC’s, our California writer, Sarah Jackson of HiredPen, highlights an effort in San Jose’s Franklin-McKinley School District to build pre-K, kindergarten, and early grade teachers’ skills in early literacy and social emotional development.
• In New Study Links Kindergarten Social-Emotional Skills to Long-Term Success, Aaron Loewenberg writes on a study offering additional evidence of the high costs of entering kindergarten without important social-emotional skills.
• In 3 Practices and 3 Policies Indispensable for High-Quality Pre-K, Lisa Guernsey and Laura Bornfreund discuss the results of an effort to distill years of research on what it takes to provide a quality pre-K experience for three- and four-year-old children.
• In Make Sure Every Kid Counts in the 2020 Census, Cara Sklar and Rachel Alexander write about the importance of the census, especially for allocating resources to programs serving children, and what organizations are doing to make sure children get counted.

Series worth checking out:

• Moving Beyond False Choices for Early Childhood Educators, edited by Stacie G. Goffin engages diverse viewpoints on what needs to be considered for the field to address: preparation and education, compensation and status, and diversity and inclusivity.
• Early Ed in ESSA: Helping Every Child Succeed, in partnership with the Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes (CEELO), discusses how states have included early learning in their state ESSA plans and how those plans and ideas have turned into action.
• Building Early Education Leaders: A Closer Look at How States and Districts are Equipping Principals to Support Young Learners, by Abbie Lieberman and Laura Bornfreund, details visits to three programs around the country that are investing in professional learning for principals to equip them to strengthen pre-K and the early grades.

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