Ladder of Success: Covering Early Childhood Learning
CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS
Twenty journalists were chosen to gather at the University of Maryland September 13-15, 2009 to learn from top experts on one of education reform's most critical issues: early childhood education.
Fellows' Biographies
Speakers' Biographies
September 13, 2009
Opening Reception and Welcome
Opening Remarks
Gena Fitzgerald, executive director, Journalism Center on Children & Families
Kevin Klose, dean, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland
Ralph Smith, executive vice president, The Annie E. Casey Foundation (pictured at right)
Phil Sparks, vice president and co-founder, Communications Consortium Media Center
Featured Presentation
The Learning Ladder: The Science of Early Childhood Development
Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder, Families and Work Institute
Galinsky shared previews of and knowledge gleaned from the institute's "Mind in the Making: The Science of Early Learning," an unprecedented and unparalleled collaborative effort to share the science of early learning with the general public, families and professionals who work with children and families. Over the past eight years, the institute has filmed researchers "in action" -- showing actual experiments and presenting the science of early learning an accessible, engaging and inspiring way. The institute is creating a wide array of materials -- including a book and a film -- designed to help diverse audiences bridge the gap between knowledge and practice.
September 14, 2009
Morning Panel Discussion
Early Intervention: What can help young children overcome obstacles?
Shana Brodnax, senior manager, Early Childhood Programs, Harlem Children’s Zone
Harlem Children’s Zone was created to address all the problems that poor families face. It works to ensure that parents have what they need in order to ensure that their children are safe and can be successful in school. HCZ is based on the belief that in poor communities, nothing is a single issue: Children need a web of support, and all systems must function effectively. While the organization attends to multiple goals in child development, it perceives graduation rates as the number-one indicator of success. It is based on and dedicated to data and evaluation: It includes an in-house evaluation department, and its teaching staff is held personally accountable: program outcomes are correlated with jobs and salaries. Furthermore, HCZ is currently in the midst of a longitudinal study to evaluate its programs over time. A crucial point is that the impact of data is not only to show that programs are effective, but also to inform instruction and suggest improvements.
Karen Howard, director, Policy and Government Affairs, Nurse-Family Partnership
What is a truly effective intervention for children and families? The basic premise of the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) is that supporting motherhood benefits children. NFP provides and trains nurses to develop positive, life-affirming bonds with first-time mothers, namely through home visitation. It was created based on research suggesting that mothers prefer intervention and have better outcomes through nurses rather than paraprofessionals and social workers. Its clientele consists of young, low-income mothers – particularly those between the ages of 18 and 19, with incomes well under 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Many clients have experienced abuse, neglect and mental health issues. The program has three main goals: To improve health outcomes of mothers; teach, mentor and educate women on proper childcare; and life-course development to help mothers realize their own goals.
Walter Gilliam, director, Zigler Center in Child Development & Social Policy, Yale University
The Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy works to create and disseminate research that can be used to inform legislative and other policy efforts on behalf of children and families, as well as to train future generations working at the intersection of research and policy development. Of particular significance are the National Pre-Kindergarten Study and the Perry Preschool project. The preschool project, which began in 1964, suggests that preschool attendance yields high benefits in later life outcomes, including greater earnings, higher likelihood of further education, lower likelihood of arrest and a less need of social services and welfare.
Gilliam underscores the importance of evaluating statistics based on class size, teacher credentials and child-teacher ratios. For example, research suggests that high child-teacher ratios are correlated with high job stress and high rates of expulsion and that teacher access to behavioral staff support predicts decreased expulsion. Ultimately, evaluation and policy analysis are critical to ensuring that early intervention programs deliver the outcomes that they promise taxpayers.
Morning Panel Discussion
Funding Early Childhood Programs in a Recession
Joan Lombardi, deputy assistant secretary and inter-departmental liaison for early childhood, Administration for Children and Families
With President Obama placing a strong emphasis on early learning programs, both the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services are currently active in preparing to implement a proposed Early Learning Challenge Fund. If approved, the new competitive grant program would bring $8-$10 billion over the next 10 years into the states for building high-quality early-childhood systems for 0- to 5-year-olds.
“We have leadership developing in both departments,” said Lombardi, the new deputy assistant secretary and inter-departmental liaison for early childhood in HHS. “We are working together in partnership.”
The Obama administration took over at a time when federal funding for early care and education programs had been “flat funded” for several years, while states were moving ahead with increasing spending on pre-K and working to improve quality. Now, with states in a recession, the federal government is poised to take a stronger role in early-childhood programs, across the 0-8 age range, and connecting them to other programs to support families. She advised reporters to “not think of early-childhood as just a program. It’s the quality of life of families where children live.”
Danielle Ewen, director, Child Care and Early Education, Center for Law and Social Policy
Ewen followed up with suggestions on how reporters can take a deeper look at the stories in their states and communities. A story she read about children staying away from child care centers because fewer parents are working could be “re-jiggered” to focus on whether children are really receiving the high-quality early childhood education they need, whether or not their parents are working. Stories about a drop in attendance at a child-care center could also look at the economic impact of providers losing jobs or child-care centers closing.
“Every issue that comes across your desk is an early-childhood story,” she said.
Many stories have also been written about cuts in funding for state pre-K programs, but reporters should also look at what is happening in other programs for young children. “Children aren’t born at 4,” Ewen said.
While many states are also using federal stimulus funds to plug holes in early learning programs, but those funds run out in 2011. Looking at how states plan to sustain programs once the “unsustainable dollars” run out is story that reporters need to be following.
Luncheon Address
The Economic Ladder: Investing in Early Education
Gene Steuerle, former vice president, Peter G. Peterson Foundation; former deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis, U.S. Treasury
View video of the speech.
Steuerle has done extensive work – particularly with the Urban Institute and the Pew Charitable Trusts – on the budget for children’s services. Overwhelmingly, he has found, children have not been a priority in our national budgets.
Despite recent claims to the contrary, Steuerle argues that our country is quite wealthy. The U.S. spends about 50 percent more on social welfare now than during the Reagan era, so it could indeed provide a better educational system, particularly in regard to quality early childhood learning. However, the nation has developed a policy that Steuerle refers to as “two Santa Clauses at the same time,” or the notion that everyone is entitled to everything: Democrats and Republicans both fight for lower taxes and higher spending, while no one pays for either. In the end, the nation squeezes basic functions, and children are the biggest losers.
Investment in children has never been a federal priority. The U.S. currently spends about $20,000 per capita on the elderly and $4,000 per capita on children. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security continue to be well-funded, yet child poverty is much higher than the poverty rate among the elderly.
The squeeze on children’s programs is extraordinary, Steuerle said. This is exacerbated by the fact that we currently have a deficit of $1.4 trillion, which is constantly gaining interest and shifting enormous resources away from new opportunities – especially investments in children and early learning. We’re at the point where – unless you cut something else – there exists absolutely nothing to spend on discretionary funds. And that’s what children get in our national budget, he said: the leftovers.
Afternoon Panel Discussion
New Challenges for Head Start
Yasmina Vinci, executive director, National Head Start Association
Even though Head Start is more than 40 years old, there are still many untold stories about the federal program for poor children, Yasmina Vinci, the executive director of the National Head Start Association, told the fellows.
Even though some policymakers have grown ambivalent about the benefits of Head Start, Vinci says that there is “still great public will about it among people who remember what Head Start was meant to be.”
One important development that reporters should watch for is the next Head Start Impact Study, which is used by both sides of the political spectrum to argue that the program is effective or is having disappointing effects. Reporters, she said, should not just read the Op-Eds and instead “go beyond the study” to look at how Head Start children’s skills compare to those from similar low-income communities.
The stimulus funding is helping programs make up for some of the cuts they have experienced, but Vinci says it will be difficult to find out exactly how those funds are being spent because of the reporting requirements and because not a lot of the funds were dedicated for increases in quality. New challenges for Head Start, she said, include building relationships with state agencies and responding to pressures to make sure children are ready for school.
Harriet Dichter, deputy secretary, Office of Child Development and Early Learning, State of Pennsylvania
Dichter discussed how Head Start fits into a broader system of early childhood programs. Early learning advisory councils, which were required for states by the 2007 Head Start reauthorization, can serve as a forum for different early childhood programs to coordinate their efforts, maximize resources and discuss issues such as standards, professional development, financing and other topics affecting the field.
“We’re building a system, so we’re not just a bunch of silo programs out there,” Dichter said.
Reporters, she added, should also become more familiar with how their states are governing early childhood education efforts. Some states have created new departments or beefed up existing departments to encompass the broad range of programs for young children.
“There is nothing more dangerous than pitting the Head Start program against the state pre-K program against the quality rating system,” Dichter said. “You’ve got to bring the programs together in more thoughtful ways.”
Afternoon Panel Discussion
Teacher Quality in Early Childhood
Marci Young, project director, Pre-K Now, The Pew Center on the States, The
Pew Charitable Trusts
Many people, Young notes, think that teaching a classroom full of preschoolers must be an easy job. But she asked the fellows to imagine all of the aspects involved with planning a birthday party for a 3- or 4-year-old: The transition from play to cake, how to interact with parents, what games are appropriate, etc. Then she asked them to imagine all of the skills and experience required if that party were to last a full eight hours.
The message: Early childhood programs need highly qualified teachers in order to be effective. According to Young, this is why four out of 10 of the quality education indicators developed by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) involve teacher credentials. Research suggests that either a bachelor’s degree or specialized training alone can improve childhood outcomes, but a combination is the most effective. Furthermore, there are a number of repercussions for a lack of professional requirements for teachers. The lack of requirements fuels low pay, which in turn leads to a high teacher turnover rate.
Young argues that in order to provide effective care, early childhood programs must set realistic and defined timelines for teachers to earn their credentials. The most effective programs phase in the education requirements over time. In 2000, for example, the Supreme Court ordered all teachers in New Jersey to acquire bachelor’s degrees within four years. At the time, less than half of teachers held the degree. But the state legislature provided assistance, and by the end of 2004 nearly 90 percent of New Jersey teachers had a bachelor’s degree. Other programs – such as the Early Childhood Project, which awards scholarships for teachers to return to school – reveal how incentives function to raise teacher standards.
Pilar Torres, founder and executive director, Centro Familia
According to Torres, who entered the field based on her personal experience as a mother, the public is often confused or misinformed about family child care. Family-care or home-based child care providers who care for children outside their own families, are in fact licensed and regulated by the states.
Data on high-quality family child care and school readiness, Torres says, suggests that its quality is slightly higher than that of Head Start. California, Chicago and Massachusetts have model family care programs similar to Torres’ Centro Familia program in Maryland, which uses community empowerment and development techniques to train child care providers and neighborhood leaders in a community where many families were using unregulated child care providers.
Regulations vary from state to state and differences can be dramatic. Nationally, there are approximately 164,000 licensed family child care providers. According to Torres, the big news regarding family child care is that providers are increasingly becoming unionized.
Before entering kindergarten, most low-income children have been in more than one type of care since birth, including more than one type of care at a given time. So family child care, Torres notes, is really always present. Data suggest that most low-income children prefer family care. In fact, the majority of Latino children, regardless of income, are involved with family care rather than centers.
She says family child care is appealing for a number of reasons: It offers continuity of care and community building; enables siblings of different ages to be grouped together; it is a cultural transmitter for ethnic families; it’s flexible, especially for shift/night workers; and its smaller groups and individualized attention make it particularly beneficial for children with special needs.
According to Torres, critics argue that family child is isolating, providers tend to have less education and lower standards, the pay is low and the benefits are few, and varying state regulations breed inconsistency. Torres points out, however, that family child care uses an alternative definition of quality: While it upholds the traditional factors -- teacher quality, regulations and licensing, curriculum, intensity and duration, and outcomes -- it also assigns equal value to parental involvement, culture and language, and trust and community connections.
September 15, 2009
Morning Panel
Connecting Early Childhood to Success in the Early Grades
Sara Mead, senior research fellow, Education Policy Program and Workforce and Family Program, and director, Early Childhood Initiative, New America Foundation
Mead emphasized “Ready kids, ready schools,” the notion that something about elementary school – particularly the transition from early education programs -- needs to change so that children can reap the benefits of early learning. “Early childhood doesn’t end at age 5,” Mead said. Instead, she sees early childhood learners as including infants through age 8. Mead is a proponent of full-day kindergarten and universal preschool. She argues that time for play and social development is highly beneficial for child development and should be included in kindergarten programs. She highlighted the importance of ensuring that early childhood teachers are specifically educated in early learning.
It is crucial, she believes, that standards, curriculum and assessment are all aligned both vertically and horizontally: Vertically, meaning building from grade to grade, and horizontally, across teachers and providers.
According to Mead, one of the most important components of the pre-K through third grade system is a sense of shared responsibility among teachers, principals, supervisors and other providers. “Everyone,” said Mead, “must be invested in ensuring that kids read at grade level by the end of third grade.”
Brad Strong, director of education, Children Now
Strong spent 10 years working on K-12 reform efforts and helped create EdVoice, a California nonprofit that works to improve the states’s public schools, especially in regard to standards and assessments. He uses this prior experience to advocate for making connections and bridging the gap between early childhood education and K-12.
According to Strong, children who lack early childhood education – especially those who are disadvantaged – “miss the boat”: “It can’t all be done once children arrive [to elementary school], even in kindergarten. We need to start early.” Strong argues that even the earliest and greatest start cannot be sustained unless the K-12 system is effective. “It has to be both; its not either/or,” said Strong.
Early on in the K-12 reform movement, said Strong, the focus was on standards and alignment – especially regarding reading before grade 3. Currently, however, there is a focus shift to the back-end: High school exit exams, drop-out rates, etc. According to Strong, an effective educational system must pay attention to both of these areas -- early learning and later schooling – with a particular focus on the pipeline and the transitions between programs.
A study by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that indicators predicting future high school drop-out among fourth graders were as accurate as those surveyed among ninth graders. “Those kids arrive with those gaps, and they’re sustained over time,” stresses Strong. “If we can identify early, we need to remediate sooner.”
In regard to the policy horizon, Strong recommends that journalists pay careful attention to the role of early childhood education in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as well as current grant work underway for the Early Learning Challenge Fund.
Janine Bacqui, director, Division of Early Childhood Programs and Services, Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools
According to Bacqui, one of the seven keys to college readiness is advanced reading in grades K-2. Advanced reading in those grades starts before kindergarten; data suggest that children who attended pre-K fare better in kindergarten in regard to reading and math.
There are 140,000 children enrolled in Montgomery County schools. Since 1999, the county has seen a 33 percent increase in children coming from poor households. Currently, pre-K and Head Start serve 2,533 students from families living in poverty.
Montgomery County’s pre-kindergarten programs offer both full- and half-day classes, which are especially helpful for low-income children. Pre-kindergarten programs, she said, also offer breakfast and lunch, free transportation, medical and dental screenings, and partner with Health and Human Services to facilitate family social services. This last factor is key, as collaborating with community-based partners in crucial in creating a united focus on school readiness.
Bacqui stresses that counties should create early success performance plans, particularly those that link pre-K with first and second grade. An early success performance plan should include a standards-based curriculum, professional development, diagnostic assessments, an instructional management system, parental involvement, full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes and extended-learning opportunities.
Morning Panel
Educating Young Children From Immigrant Families
Don Hernandez, professor, department of sociology, Hunter College
Hernandez says children of immigrants should get reporters' attention because they are the nation's fastest-growing population, they account for more than one in five of all children in the United States and they are leading the nation's racial-ethnic transformation.
Hernandez notes that children of immigrants confront several major challenges: Thirty-one percent have a father who has not graduated from high school, and difficulties in finding fulltime work translate into low wages and high poverty rates.
Children with parents who are non-English speakers face poverty rates two to four times greater than those from native-born families. Those with English-fluent parents, however, are about as likely with whites to be poor. Hernandez noted that 65 percent of English-fluent children of immigrants are enrolled in school at age 4, compared to 54 percent of children with mixed fluency and 49 percent of English-language learners.
According to Hernandez, these low enrollment statistics can be explained by cultural preferences and socioeconomic barriers. Many non-English-speaking parents cannot afford to pay for early education. In addition, there are often too few early education openings near their homes, there is little or no outreach in home languages, programs are not culturally competent or parents may not know how to achieve access. Data suggest that socioeconomic barriers can account for at least 50 percent – and for some groups 100 percent – of all enrollment gaps.
Public policies, however, could close these gap. Hernandez suggests additional funding to assure program access, outreach in foreign languages, two-generation literacy programs and research on bilingual fluency.
Hernandez urges reporters to highlight that, although they face barriers, many non-English-speaking parents possess a strong work ethic and high aspirations for their children’s educational attainment.
Margaret Freedson, assistant professor of early childhood, elementary and literacy education, Montclair State University
Freedson presented facts reporters should know when covering English-language learners:
- Young children have to work hard to develop a second language. “We shouldn’t be lulled into the belief that learning a second language is easy for young children,” she said.
- Contrary to popular thought, studies indicate that immersing ELL children in an English language preschool environment does not automatically lead to successful English and literacy learning. Fortunately, researchers are increasingly finding programs primarily in English but with some translation in children’s home languages.
- Young English-language learners can easily lose their first language.
- Children who start kindergarten with only non-English home language rarely catch up to bilingual or English speaking peer; doing so requires more than one year’s worth of gains.
All else being equal, bilingual children have cognitive advantages over monolingual children: Having a strong base in the home language facilitates learning English, and many literacy skills transfer from one language to another. It is important to keep in mind, said Freedson, that preschoolers have not yet consolidated their home languages, and their language skills are in fact still developing.
She recommends that journalists explore innovative programs in their community colleges or local universities that work to recruit or maintain young professionals with bilingual skills, or track other programs that are working in any way to help the needs of English-language learner who are children. Helpful resources on high quality preschools for for this group include the National Institute for Early Education Research and the Center for Applied Linguistics.
Featured Speaker
The Community Ladder: Building a Movement
Dave Lawrence, president, Early Childhood Initiative Foundation; former publisher, The Miami Herald
“We need to build a movement for children,” Lawrence said. “This country spent billions on bringing democracy to Iraq and we can’t furnish health care for our children?”
Lawrence stressed to the fellows the importance of their work, especially in regard to the crucial nature of reporting on early childhood education. Lawrence said that if he were running a newspaper, he would have a fulltime staffer devoted to quality education – questioning and analyzing accreditation, pre-kindergarten, assessments, standards and scientific research. "I have the deepest respect for what you do," he told fellows. "I hope you go back and get a lot of stories that speak to the issues that have been raised in the last few days – those of which are among the most important in this country.”
Lawrence stressed how important early education is. Two-thirds of states, he said, don’t require kindergarten. In Pennsylvania, children do not legally have to attend school until age 8. He believes this especially startling given that research suggests that children can be disastrously behind by age 4. Language development during ages 0-3, for example, is stunning. “You’ve got to be investing up front," he said. Early learning programs "won’t work less you put real money into it.”
Afternoon Panel Discussion
Universal or Targeted: The ongoing debate over who should attend public preschool
Chester E. Finn Jr., president, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Libby Doggett, deputy director, Pew Center on the States, The Pew Charitable Trusts
In a spirited discussion, Pew's Libby Doggett and Chester E. Finn Jr., of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute focused on the debate over whether public preschool programs should be reserved for the neediest children, or provided to children from all families.
Finn said most families already send their children to preschool or child care and called universal preschool an unnecessary bill that taxpayers shouldn't have to pay.
While he said he and Doggett agree that poor children need a lot of help before they get to school, he believes universal programs are too weak to benefit the neediest children. He called the studies used to measure pre-K effectiveness disappointing, and said measures need to focus more on results, not just inputs such as teacher qualifications.
Doggett countered by calling pre-K for all children simply a smarter policy as well as one that is cost effective. She pointed to long-running studies and more recent research that show gains made by children who attended early-childhood programs.
She also highlighted research showing that programs serving children from mixed-income groups benefit all the children in the programs. Targeted programs simply do not address these issues, she said.
Final Panel Discussion
Telling the Story: Coverage ideas
Greg Toppo, education reporter, USA Today
“If I write a story called 'how much preschool is good for kids,' no one will read that,” Toppo said. The solution? All papers love lists and quizzes, he said. “I could foresee a reporter just [writing a list] saying 'this is what kids need to know for the first day of kindergarten.' ”
The statistics on the return on investment in pre-K education are impressive, Toppo said. However, reporters who take a closer look at the preschools from which these stats are derived might find that they are not your average schools. “So that’s a question that you want to ask,” he said. “If we’re going to get this incredible return, what do we need?”
Toppo recommended his favorite resources for finding story ideas. He suggested that reporters follow New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch blog and read the book "Whatever It Takes” by Paul Tough. He also highly recommends that reporters explore resources by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media. Toppo said that its director, Richard Lee Colvin, is invaluable in helping journalists find good stories, and its Early Stories Web site is particularly helpful. According to Toppo, the institute helps publish stories by reporters who had trouble getting their work into their papers. It is also responsible for publishing a list of things reporters should look for when walking into a pre-K classroom.
Leslie Walker, Knight Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland
Walker urged the fellows to embrace digital media to enhance their storytelling and expand their audiences. She suggested a few tools for them to try right away, including Google Maps to outline the counties or school districts in their jurisdictions; ManyEyes, which allows users to enter data sets into a dozen different data visualization tools to which they can later link; and Vuvox, which allows users to build interactive timelines. She led the fellows in brainstorming about how their news organizations could make use of tools like these to better tell early education stories.
Walker suggests that reporters utilize social media, particularly Twitter. “I’m a huge advocate that social media adds value to reporting,” she said. She points to the emergence of “socialitics” – or the study of online social networks – adding that software programs are already being created to analyze online behavior online. “If you’re not using [social media],” she told the fellows, “you’re missing the boat.”
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The Journalism Center on Families & Children thanks the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for funding this conference on a compelling and complex education issue, and The Annie E. Casey Foundation for its additional support.
