Jay Mathews of the Washington Post starts 2007 in a position he's often in, which is way ahead of the competition. Mathews' notes that on the 100th anniversary of Italian physician Maria Montessori opening her first pre-kindergarten, the philosophy is picking up momentum in the U.S. There are about 5,000 Montessori schools nationwide, about 300 of them public. Mathews says Montessori and John Dewey, the Teachers College colossus, were the two most influential 20th-century promoters of a "progressive," child-centered approach to learning. He says Montessori had a much bigger impact because she started schools.

I take issue with a couple points Mathews' makes. He says that the "unstructured" nature of Montessori classrooms is at odds with the "structured" classrooms common today. And he quotes a scholar who says that Montessori believed that kids learned best when they were active and having fun. The implication, then, is that "structured" classrooms, in other words, classrooms where the teacher plays an important role, cannot be fun nor active. I think journalists should keep in mind that the best teachers, especially in pre-kindergarten, have classrooms that are highly structured and intentional. But structure doesn't have to mean regimentation or boredom. Good teachers use structure--of time use, regular one-on-one interactions and lots of conversation--to support and encourage active learning. John Dewey also believed in active learning. But he said that activity for the sake of activity is worthless. Activities, he said, had to be "educative" to be of value. And that implies activities that are carefully planned and, yes, structured.

"The Pursuit of Happyness," the well-reviewed and successful movie starring Will Smith, is worth seeing. Education is a big theme. Chris Gardner is a smart guy who ends up homeless with his young son while he's trying to become a stock broker. He studies day and night to pass a broker's test. Gardner passed, got the job and went on to start his own bond trading firm and become fabulously successful.

In the movie, Gardner takes his son everyday to what he thinks is a good pre-school. He finds out his son spends most of his time watching television. When he confronts the proprietor, she says he can't expect to get anything more for the amount he's paying. Lots of working folks find themselves confronted by the same agonizing dilemma, knowing that this precious time is being wasted but being unable to afford something better.

The other plot point involving a current education issue has to do with that test. Many folks in the anti-testing crowd argue that a) tests can't measure all that a child knows, b) tests are inherently biased, c) some people aren't good test-takers and so on. In the hard, cruel, pragmatic world of work, however, sometimes a test is a hurdle you have to get over to get a job or promotion (think police officers, fire fighters, CPAs, attorneys, doctors, etc.). Learning to study and to do well on tests is not such a bad skill to learn in school.

AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard wrote about a study of obesity among toddlers that got a lot of play nationally last week. Thirty-two percent of white youngsters were overweight or obese compared to 44 percent of the Hispanic children. The only factors researchers could find that seemed correlated were the weight of the mother and whether the toddlers were still going to bed with a bottle at age 3. Authors of the study included Rachel Kimbro of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Teachers College. All of the children studied were poor. Only four percent of the black children and six percent of white children went to bed with a bottle; among Hispanic children, 14 percent did so. Overweight preschoolers have a five times higher risk of being fat at age 12 than do lean preschoolers, scientists reported last fall, according to the AP article.

It would take some delicate reporting. But other journalists could ask the directors of Head Start programs, pre-kindergarten programs and others what they're doing to try to help their young students learn new ways of eating. Another line of inquiry involves asking them what they're doing to help parents learn to feed their children better.

Well, here we are, the first working day of 2007. My resolution is to become more insightful into analyzing journalism about early learning, to work hard to find new brilliant voices out there on the web telling us about early learning, and to be more creative and forward-looking in suggesting ways for early learning to be covered. Oh, and lose 15 pounds and read more.

I really think that 2007 will be a banner year for stories involving early learning. The New York Times reported Dec. 29 that Democrats had picked up more than 350 seats and gained control of 10 state legislatures. That should bode well for increased investment in pre-kindergarten. Moreover, Republicans have been supporters of public funds for pre-kindergarten in many states and devoting public dollars to pre-kindergarten may be a popular issue for Republicans to support, in order to make gains in the 2008 election. This is an emerging story that bears watching.

Des Moines Register reporter Megan Hawkins last week provided a comprehensive, timely overview of the status of preschool programs in Iowa and in the Des Moines suburbs. Her anecdotal lead focused on a 4-year-old named Miguel who when he started in preschool did not speak English. A year later, he was performing in a school play, in English. Hawkins also reported the Des Moines district had a long list of children waiting to get in.

On Tuesday, the Des Moines paper ran an editorial urging more state spending on high-quality pre-kindergarten, citing Hawkins' article, and pointing out that a lack of "wrap-around" services prevents many families from taking advantage of the programs of limited duration. Also on Tuesday, the Democrats in the state legislature proposed spending $15 million to expand pre-k programs.

That's results. The issue of low-quality programs and limited access are relevant nationwide and journalists can raise awareness with their coverage.

From the Beijing News comes word that inequality starts early, even in a Communist country. Here's an excerpt of a story from Xinhua news service. At an education "expo" in Guangzhou...

Zhu Jiaxiong, vice-chairman of the China National Society of Early Childhood Education, showed two photographs when talking about fairness in preschool education. One of the photos shows a well-decorated kindergarten [kindergarten is preschool in China--rlc] that cost 200 million yuan (US$25.3 million), while the other features a rural child playing in a muddy field. Professor Zhu said there are insufficient fair-priced kindergartens in the country. The vast rural areas are especially facing shortages of preschool educational institutions. The key factors that decide educational quality are good teachers and a fine teaching mode, rather than big buildings. Thus the extravagant construction of many kindergartens are used to justify high fees. Some kindergartens now charge even more than universities.

The NY Times debuted a new column today that, the description says, "will examine problems teachers encounter in the classroom and how they deal with them." That's great. I've often said that I'd like to see general interest publications explain to readers the intricacies of teaching, the dilemmas, the choices, the strategies. Such information, in my view, counters the widely held notion that teaching is something anyone with the right disposition and motivation can do. The column will be written by Susan Engel, director of the teaching program at Williams College. Her first effort is well-written, clear, specific, direct, compelling.

But (and this is a big but) the first column, in my humble, non-expert, biased and unbelievably naive and ill-informed opinion, totally missed the point. The column is about a kid who can't read. And rather than the teacher actually teaching the kid to read, she has the kid read to her dog. So that's the solution. More dogs in classrooms!!!

Sorry to have been delinquent in keeping this updated. You know, the New Year, the hustle-bustle, the planes, the blah, blah, blah....Or, I could use the newspaper excuse: "EarlyStories has been 'on special assignment.' " That, of course, is code for all sorts of things. Been in the doghouse. Undercover in some mean and nasty place. Drying out in the tank. Lazy. Can't cop to any of those. Will step it up. Lots to report. So, let's get to it!

Good piece in USA Today on Wednesday about parents who want their kids to start learning many languages when they're as young as two years old. Language, we all know, develops early. And it turns out that kids can learn several languages simultaneously and manage to keep them separate and to speak each of them without an accent. Story tells about a child who is four who is fluent in Japanese and Spanish as well as English. I must say I was just a bit dubious about that claim because the girl is the daughter of the proprietor of school where the child learned those languages. The school starts kids as young as six months in a program called Baby Boot Camp, which combines foreign language with strength training, balance and coordination exercises.

You've heard adults go on and on about how kids today don't know how to just go out and "play." Play dates, TV and video games have seemingly replaced just playing in the dirt, digging up the yard, making mud pies? OK, so city kids don't have yards where they can do this. But kids in Manhattan will soon get the chance. Story on the front page of the NY Times Wednesday described plans to create a new type of playground where kids can dig in the sand, move it around, play with water and here's the bonus...the playground will have adult play consultants to help the kids learn this strange new concept of open-ended play, driven by imagination.

Here's the key quote: “Very little time is spent by kids in playgrounds if they have a choice,” said Roger Hart, who...is the director of the Children’s Environments Research Group at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “They limit the repertoire of play to children’s physical activity,” instead of encouraging the kind of social, sensory, interactive and individual fantasy play that children need, Mr. Hart said.

What's going on the playgrounds at school or in the park? Is play part of the curriculum in elementary school? Or, are those scare stories about recess being cancelled for first graders in favor of "drills" really true?

My friend Joanne Jacobs was kind enough to take note on her blog of yesterday's rant on the column in the NY Times heralding a teacher who brought to her classroom her pet dog as an audience for a reluctant reader. Joanne added something I should have said. By the end of 3rd grade, the boy the teacher was trying to help had progressed to reading picture books on his own. So, as Joanne notes, he's now where he should have been in the fall of first grade.

Apropos of the NYTs frontpager on playgrounds and play, came across a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics saying that the rush-rush, overscheduled, academically stressful lives of children are preventing them from playing. The report says play isn't really playtime. In fact, "free and unstructured play is healthy and essential for helping children reach important social, emotional, and cognitive developmental milestones as well as helping them manage stress and become resilient." Reminds me of a phrase I heard once: "The work of children is play." In other words, there's lots of learning going on on the playground, in the activity areas of pre-k's, on the floor with Mom and Dad with building blocks.

The new report could be a hook for journalists to go into some pre-k's and kindergartens and see what kids are doing and asking teachers how they deal with playtime. Some might talk about the pressure to make their schools more academic. That would likely to be the case in Mobile, Alabama. Such a story could use the new report as a hook. The report is called "The Importance of Play in Promoting Healthy Child Development and Maintaining Strong Parent-Child Bonds" and can be found here.

USA Today story the other day reported on how early foreign language instruction is soaring in popularity and focused on private language academies. Story in the San Jose Mercury News reports on the organized opposition to starting an immersion program for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten kids in a couple public schools in Palo Alto. Opponents won by saying such programs served an affluent, elite minority and that Chinese shouldn't be given higher status than other languages. I thought all residents of P.A. were affluent, given the million-dollar pricetags for 900 sq. ft. fixer-uppers.

Howard Blume has a good, sophisticated piece in the Los Angeles Times that profiles an elementary school in Compton that seems to be making it. Compton is thought of in California as a stereotypical, struggling, minority community, with all that connotes. But Bunche Elementary School has test scores on par with those in Beverly Hills, Blume reports. And he gives us some snippets of demanding lessons, illustrating the school's expectations. (Though I'd like to have gotten some sense of how teachers are actually teaching. Conversation? Lecturing? How do they help students acquire learning behaviors?)

Such celebratory pieces often are unquestioning. Blume notes that it's a bit difficult to judge the school's gains, because its early success has attracted successful students from elsewhere. (I don't think this is a problem at all. A bigger group of successful students gives less engaged and accomplished students role models and changes the school culture. But it muddies year-to-year comparisons.) He also acknowledges that the highly structured program and strict discipline at the school may not fly in middle class schools. He reports that Bunche still suffers from high turnover among the young, bright Teach for America teachers it hires. Still, one gets the sense that the high expectations at the school make a big difference.

The transcript of last week's online Education Week chat with Sara Watson of the Pew Trusts (full disclosure: underwriter of this blog) and two economists with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is a good resource for anyone wanting an overview of pre-kindergarten issues. Chat covered financing, access, quality, accountability, and much more. Lots of helpful links to organizations doing good work.

The Fed has come up with a specific proposal regarding how to invest in expanding pre-kindergarten.Here's how economist Art Rolnick of the Fed summed it up: "We propose to provide every at-risk child with a parent mentor and scholarships to attend a high quality early childhood development program. The scholarships will be funded at a level to encourage quality programs, including high quality teachers." Rolnick says such a program would cost about $90 million in Minnesota annually. The idea of "parent mentors" starting prenatally was explored in a brilliant piece last year by the New Yorker's Katherine Boo.

That was the headline on an editorial in the Pasadena (CA) Star-News the other day. (except without the question mark.) I know that the longitudinal study of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program showed that the Ypsilanti kids in that high-intensity program more than four decades ago were less likely to get involved in gangs later on. But gangs are killing people in Los Angeles and surrounding areas in the here and now. (See recent frontpager in the New York Times.)

I worry about overpromising. I was asked to give a talk this week about media coverage of pre-kindergarten at Yale University's Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy. Over lunch, Dr. Zigler, the father of Head Start and perhaps our most important scholar in this field, agreed that he was worried about overpromising as well. He's a huge believer in universal pre-kindergarten. But he also says that what happens in one or even two years of preschool doesn't end a child's poverty, completely change the family dynamics, or ensure that he or she will remain healthy and attend a high quality elementary, middle, and high school. End gangs? That seems like a big burden to shoulder a preschool with.

(I'll share more of my conversation with Dr. Zigler soon and look for an interview with him as well.

Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty has a terrific overview of the early childhood policies that research has found to be most effective in narrowing the achievement gap between poor children and their more affluent peers. One crucial element, the center's report says, is what it calls an "intentional curriculum."

The report defines this as a curriculum that is:

content driven, research-based, emphasizes active engagement with children, includes attention to social and regulatory skills, and is responsive to cultural diversity and children just learning English. An intentional curriculum is directive without using drill and kill strategies; it is fun for young children and promotes positive peer and teacher interactions. An intentional curriculum is developmentally appropriate.

Whole report gives a very concise helpful overview of the research on this crucial question. Good one-stop shopping for the press.

Austin American Statesman this week profiled a "preschool" that celebrates letting kids "learn about the uglier side of life" by giving them a chance to roll around in mudholes, run around in their underwear, never say "please" or "thank you," and have disco parties. Disco parties? Yes, they were ugly. Shouldn't inflicting disco parties on innocent toddlers be some kind of crime? Even in Texas? Anyway, the school's director also is resolutely against teaching kids their ABCs. One more example of the school of thought that learning and establishing limits on kids' behavior are painful. There are lots of folks out there who believe that. (And from the article it appears that many of them are professionals.) But why does the press have to repeatedly buy into it? Shouldn't reporters at least seek out an expert in child development who might take a different point of view? Shouldn't they be willing to simply state what the folks at Columbia conclude about what kind of curriculum is most appropriate? (See next post.)

The story got quite a reaction. It was posted on a site called "FreeRepublic" and immediately generated 30 comments--about two-thirds of them negative.

The state pre-kindergarten program in Florida is generally derided for covering only three hours a day during the school year and not spending enough money to make the program all that effective. But, still, it's something. The Miami Herald reports that even though Broward County officials have placed ads on buses, on the radio, cable television and the newspaper, a lot of parents say they knew nothing about the program. ''It's not surprising, but it's a little disappointing how many people still haven't heard about it,'' said the coalition's executive director, Penny Westberry. Shows that newspapers can play an important role in telling parents about the services that are available and helping them learn how to sign up.

The Orlando Sentinel takes state leaders to task for failing to increase funding for the state's pre-k program enough to keep up with demand. And the paper also gigs the school board in Osceola County for raising fees for the supposedly free and universal program. The editorial says some kids are already being priced out.

Now for a dose of juicy and satisfying voyeurism of the rich. So many of Manhattan's superrich who send their kids to the superexclusive preschool at the 92nd Street YMCA on the Upper East Side use chauffeured vehicles that they have to double- and triple-park outside the school in the morning and in the afternoon. Folks not familiar with the city's geography would not know that many of these cosseted children live within 10 to 15 blocks of the school. The problem's become so bad the Y's director has sent out a letter threatening the harshest possible treatment--she will consider telling the super-exclusive kindergartens these children apply to that their parents don't play well with others. Horrors!

We know all of this because the New York Times devoted a lot of reporting time to figuring out who owned those big black cars parked outside the school. (This is the same school that Wall Street analyst Jack Grubman crowed had admitted his twins because he'd inflated his rating of a particular stock that was of interest to his boss, Sanford Weill.) This is a variant on a story that appears frequently in the New York media. Striving, image-conscious, nouveau-riche Manhattanites do whatever they can to get into a handful of expensive preschools because they think the schools will guarantee their kids a quick-trip to the Ivy League and we make them look silly in the bargain. Old story. Easy target. But beyond its obvious entertainment value, does it matter?

Edweek's ace pre-k reporter Linda Jacobsen has a roundup of current action to expand state spending on preschool. (I'm having trouble logging in but the story is at www.edweek.org, under pre-k). New Massachusetts Gov. Deval L. Patrick favors a $100 million downpayment on what advocates say they hope will eventually be a $500 million statewide program. Arkansas, Connecticut, and New York look like they'll be boosting pre-k spending this year too. Jacobsen says the national debate over whether such programs should be universal or targeted to poor kids continues. Margaret Blood of Strategies for Children in Boston "agrees that the research is still mixed on the benefits of public preschools for middle-class children." Steffanie Clothier of the National Conference of State Legislatures says sliding scale fees might be the way to go, financially as well as politically.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was in D.C. at the National Press Club this week to talk about a package of anti-poverty measures. The package includes the creation of education savings accounts, in which the government would match private investments. Another piece of the package involves a big federal investment in pre-school. Governors have heretofore taken the lead on the pre-k issue. Mayor Bloomberg's on board. Maybe mayors will be taking the lead. Also interesting that pre-k is being framed as part of an anti-poverty program.

New research into the lives of children seems to debunk the widely held idea that parents are harming their children by pressuring them to participate in too many activities. A trio of researchers from Yale, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas found that, in fact, children benefit academically, socially, and developmentally from participating in activities. Joseph L. Mahoney of Yale says we should worry less about the 60 percent of children who participate in activities and more time worrying about the 40 percent of children who do not.
Study can be found here.

Seems to me, this would make a good weekend, Lifestyle section story that goes against the grain of common wisdom. Those highly pressured, stressed out kids who just want to kick back? Actually, they like being busy. (Someday we might see a study that finds that learning doesn't stress young children out either!)

Steve Barnett, the director of the National Institute on Early Education Research, has a commentary in his organization's Preschool Matters newsletter that acknowledges the major contributions of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman. Friedman was the first to say that the government should give parents vouchers that could be cashed in to pay tuition at public or private schools. Of course, vouchers have made almost no inroads in K-12 education. But Barnett points out that vouchers are used widely in child care and also in state pre-k programs. Journalists should keep this idea in their minds when they write about vouchers dismissively. The article can be found here.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe wants to spend $40 million more on state pre-school programs and he's looking to a study from the National Institute for Early Education Research to bolster his case. NIEER, which judges the Arkansas Better Chance pre-school program to be a good one, concluded that the program had helped the poor children it serves to make significant gains in vocabulary, math, and what's called "print awareness." In the past, the Arkansas program was funded largely with a 3 cent tax on beer. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee had said that tax had to continue to keep the program going or expand it. Beebe hasn't yet said whether he'll continue to tap the wallets of beer drinkers to give more kids a good start on their educations. By the way, the Committee for Economic Development has a helpful overview of how programs are financed here.

In reading the National Institute on Early Education Research report on the positive effects of pre-kindergarten in Arkansas, I found myself confused by the method of statistical analysis, which is called "regression discontinuity." Steve Barnett of NIEER and the main author of the Arkansas study patiently responded to repeated emails from me over the weekend, trying to help me understand. Basically, it's a way to control for selection bias, when it's not possible to establish an appropriate "control group," as would be needed for a truly scientific experiment. RD, as the statistics pros call it, depends on being able to establish two groups that are similar, based on some sort of deciding factor or "assignment variable." One such variable might be a study participant's birthdate, when used to determine eligibility for a program or a "treatment." In this case, the "treatment" is pre-kindergarten.

Anyway, I mention all of this because RD has been used in a number of key evaluations of pre-k programs and probably will be used in lots more. One such study is the frequently cited work of William T. Gormley and co-authors who evaluated the Oklahoma state pre-k program, and found positive effects. Journalists, as we all know, became journalists because they couldn't handle math. But we are increasingly being called on to report on (or to choose not to report on) program evaluations. We ought to know enough about statistics to at least be able to ask good questions.

Barnett sent me a several good links that clearly explain RD: They are here, here, and here.

Gov. Brad Henry of Oklahoma announced a plan to increase education spending in the state by about 10%, or $360 million. He's also said to be on the verge of announcing an increase in spending on the state's pre-kindergarten program, which is highly regarded for quality. That program reaches 70% of the four-year-olds in the state, tops in the nation.

This forward-looking story from an Iowa television station tells us why the eligibility criteria for Head Start matters. The story says that a recently enacted hike in minimum wage in Iowa will make some families ineligible for Head Start. This is certainly a thread that journalists ought to be pulling to figure out the implications of the current minimum wage debate in Congress.

The "father" of Head Start, Yale University professor emeritus Edward Zigler, predicted yesterday that the reauthorization bill "will pass this time" now that Democrats hold the majority of seats in both houses. The first time the Bush Administration tried to get Head Start reauthorized the bill would have given experimental "block grants" to eight states to run it. That bill eked through the House with a one-vote majority but didn't stand a chance in the Senate. Even Republicans were reluctant to undermine the federal program. Zigler, now in his 70s, fought to block it.

"I spent a lot of my time trying to defeat that plan. The key reason is quality. I'm convinced that Head Start is superior in quality to most state programs. As soon as the states demonstrate they can do it as well as the Feds have done it, I'll switch."

He now is advising Congress on the reauthorization bill but, he said, "the problem is money again. They want to raise the eligibility up to 130% of poverty to serve the working poor. But they've never served all the kids eligible at 100% of poverty. What makes them think they'll make 130%? I don't see the money for it. They will also recommend that a third of the Head Start teachers have bachelor's degrees. But I'm opposed to unfunded mandates."

Stay tuned. This came from a Q&A I did with Zigler and as soon as I'm done editing it I'll post it here and possibly elsewhere.

Still in the early stages of EarlyStories and I'm working on getting the word out. So, have signed up for Technorati"

New NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer's first budget proposal includes phasing in full funding of the state's universal pre-k program, with a price tag of $645 million, by 2010-2011. OK, so it's three years away, and out of a budget of $120 million, maybe it's not a big deal, dollarwise. But, still, wouldn't it at least merit a mention? It is new, after all. I read most of the 63 stories about the budget announcement that a Google search turned up and I could find only one that devoted even a line to it. Lots of speculation about the politics, about the cut in property taxes, about the increase in education spending. But nary a word about a proposed major increase to a program that would benefit many poor, middle, and working class families. Now, if we were talking about $20,000 per year preschools for rich kids...then we'd see some ink on it. [OK, my bad, an editorial in the Buffalo News had these words as part of a list of Spitzer's proposals: "universal pre-kindergarten." So, it WAS mentioned after all.]

I keep coming back to my conversation this week with Yale emeritus professor extraordinaire Edward Zigler, one of the father's of Head Start. One of the things Ed said really bothered him was the idea that a good preschool program only had to serve four-year-olds. He said preschool, in his mind, should mean from birth to kindergarten. But, at the very least, he said, preschool should serve 3 and 4 year olds. Now comes Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry who this week proposed to spend a modest $15 million to run a pilot pre-k program for 3 year olds in the public schools and another $15 million to add programs for 3 year olds in private settings. Oklahoma high quality program reaches nearly 70% of its 4 year olds, mostly in public school settings. This would expand it. The Norman, Oklahoma paper has the story here.

Here's an excerpt:

"It's an investment that will pay huge dividends not tomorrow, not by the next election cycle, but in five years, 10 years, 15 years down the line -- a generation down the line," Henry said at a news conference Monday. "It will make a tremendous difference for the state of Oklahoma."