Early Ed Roundup: Week of July 7 – July 11

Hawaii, Illinois Make Steps Towards Enhanced Pre-K

Hawaii’s Keiki First Steps program just cleared a big hurdle. The Hawai’i legislature, in a special session Wednesday night, voted to override Gov. Linda Lingle’s (R) veto of the program, which would create an Early Learning Council to expand pre-kindergarten for 6,000 more students and coordinate early childhood services in the state. Gov. Lingle objected to the program because of its administrative burden on existing agencies and the projected cost ($170 million over 10 years) but insists that she supports pre-k initiatives in the state. Meanwhile, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) signed legislation on June 30 to extend funding for the state’s pre-k program, Preschool for All, through 2010. This is good news for Illinois, which is already a national leader in pre-k. The Preschool for All initiative, begun in 2006, serves 27 percent of 4-year olds and 19 percent of 3-year-olds in the state and is working to become a universal program for 3- and 4-year-olds by 2012.

Boys Do Better in Preschool With More Girls Around

Boys get a developmental boost when they share preschool classrooms with girls, according to a study by Arlen Moller, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Early Childhood Research Quarterly. Moller and his colleagues studied 806 low-income children in 70 preschool classrooms in Rochester, N.Y. and found that boys did better on assessments of thinking skills, social abilities, and motor proficiency in classrooms with more girls than boys. Girls’ performance on the same measurements, on the other hand, did not appear to be affected by classroom composition. Moller said that more research is needed, especially when considering performance of children from different ethnic groups, but added that his data should throw caution to arguments for greater sex segregation in early education.

Head Start in Figures

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) has released state-by-state profiles of Head Start services across the country including program composition, enrollment figures, and data on family services. The reports, which draws data from the 2006 Head Start Program Information Report (PIR), follows the release last month of data about the national trends in enrollment and teacher quality.