Early Education is the First Pillar in President’s Education Plan

Today, President Obama gave a major education reform speech laying out his administration’s vision and agenda for improving public education in the United States. The first pillar in that agenda: investing in early education.

Here’s what the President said today:

[Eliminating funding for ineffective programs] will help free up resources for the first pillar in reforming our schools – investing in early childhood initiatives. This isn’t just about keeping an eye on our children, it’s about educating them. Studies show that children in these programs are more likely to score higher in reading and math, more likely to graduate from high school and attend college, more likely to hold a job, and more likely to earn more in that job. For every dollar we invest in these programs, we get nearly ten dollars back in reduced welfare rolls, fewer health costs, and less crime. That is why the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act I signed into law invests $5 billion in growing Early Head Start and Head Start, expanding access to quality child care for 150,000 more children from working families, and doing more for children with special needs. And it is why we are going to offer 55,000 first-time parents regular visits from trained nurses to help make sure their children are healthy and prepare them for school and life.

Even as we invest in early childhood education, let’s raise the bar for early learning programs that are falling short. Today, some children are enrolled in excellent programs. Some are enrolled in mediocre ones. And some are wasting away their most formative years. That includes the one fourth of all kindergartners who are Hispanic, and who will drive America’s workforce of tomorrow, but who are less likely to have been enrolled in early education programs than anyone else.

That is why I am issuing a challenge to our states. Develop a cutting-edge plan to raise the quality of your early learning programs. Show us how you’ll work to ensure that children are better prepared for success by the time they enter kindergarten. If you do, we will support you with an Early Learning Challenge Grant that I call on Congress to enact. That is how we will reward quality, incentivize excellence, and make a down payment on the success of the next generation.

We’re pleased to see early education take such a prominent position in the President’s education agenda, and we’re also very pleased to see a clear focus on early education quality here. As President Obama mentions, research does show that early education programs can have long-term, positive impacts on children’s lives. But it’s also clear that only high quality early education programs have such benefits. While states have dramatically expanded early education investments in the past decade, and the federal government also makes substantial early education investments, many of the programs they fund are not of sufficient quality to improve students’ learning over the long-term or prepare them for school. And with state budgets under increasing fiscal pressure, legislators in many states may be tempted to reduce the quality of their pre-k programs even further. Obama is exactly right to focus new investments on creating incentives for states to improve the quality of their early education programs.

A White House press release accompanying the speech provides a few additional details about the adminsitration’s early education agenda:

· President Obama is committed to helping states develop seamless, comprehensive, and coordinated “Zero to Five” systems to improve developmental outcomes and early learning for all children.

· In the 2010 budget, Early Learning Challenge Grants will encourage states to raise the bar on the quality of early education, upgrade workforce quality, and drive improvements across multiple federal, state, and local funding streams.

· Incentive grants to states will support data collection across programs (Head Start, child care, Pre-kindergarten, and other early learning settings), push for uniform quality standards, and step-up efforts for the most disadvantaged children.

We particularly like that the state incentive grants will support data collection across diverse early learning programs. Right now children are served in a hodge podge of programs that often don’t coordinate data, so it can be difficult to obtain an accurate picture of how many children in a state or served, and where and how well they are being served. Improving data collection and coordinating data across programs would be a valuable improvement and an important first step towards improving coordination between programs in order to better serve all children in early education, regardless of setting or funding streams.

In addition to early education, the education agenda the President laid out today has four other components: 1) supporting world class standards, assessments, and data systems; 2) recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers; 3) promoting innovation; and 4) providing every American with a quality higher education. It’s clear that the administration views the first three of these ideas as focusing primarily on the K-12 education system, but it’s important to realize that the same issues–the need for high standards and good data; the primacy of quality teachers; and the need for innovation–also apply in early education. For instance, states should ensure that new data systems they establish for elementary and secondary schools are integrated with data they collect on early education, so that educators can track students’ progress from preschool through elementary and secondary schooling. Similarly, efforts to recruit and reward high-quality teachers should include pre-K, as well as K-12, educators. And, as we’ve noted previously, the early education field has in many ways been more innovative than K-12, so efforts to advance innovation in the public education sector should be informed by innovation that’s currently taking place in early childhood.

The President’s speech today took an important stand on the importance of early education and laid out some parameters for what the administration’s early education approach will look like. He also laid out a strong vision for elementary and secondary school reform. As the administration works to enact and implement this agenda, they must also ensure that their early education and broader school reform agendas are integrated with and support one another. Early Ed Watch will continue to keep a close eye on these policies as they develop further.