The coverage by the New York Times and the Associated Press of the newest report from the nation's longest running study of child care got picked up by news organizations everywhere. The report gave top billing to the positive effects of high quality care on vocabulary although it also acknowledged a slight increase in problem behaviors among fifth graders, apparently correlated with the amount of time they spent being cared for outside the home.

The Associated Press produced a Sunday story follow-up that also was widely carried. This is a story any news organization could have done. Why do it? Try, survival? A blog called World Views posted a four paragraph excerpt from the Times' first day story. At last count, the item had attracted 65 comments. Many of the comments are thoughtful and even anguished considerations of the tradeoffs facing families with children needing two incomes.

The Times carried six letters in response to the story. Here's an excerpt from one:

We live in a country in which most women work outside the home and are also responsible for child rearing; ours is also one of the only developed countries with no national policy on maternity leave. It is no surprise, then, that we have no coherent philosophy for day care.

As money is poured into studies, American day care continues to morph into an increasingly unstable structure, one with no real foundation or plan.

By the way, Sharon L. Ramey, the Georgetown University professor who was one of the authors of the child care study, and her husband, Craig T. Ramey, have produced a wealth of research on early childcare education that journalists should consult. Here's one article that is a great, readable summary of a lot of research.

Here is a list of what the Rameys call: Essential Experiences in Early Learning Years:

What are the crucial experiences needed in the early years of life? Does early caretaking or experience really affect brain development? Are these effects important or lasting? In recent scientific articles and books for parents, we have summarized a vast body of scientific evidence in terms of seven types of experiences that are essential to ensure normal brain and behavioral development and school readiness:

1. Encourage exploration.
2. Mentor in basic skills.
3. Celebrate developmental advances.
4. Rehearse and extend new skills.
5. Protect from inappropriate disapproval, teasing, and punishment.
6. Communicate richly and responsively.
7. Guide and limit behavior.

Greg Toppo of USA Today directed me to Emily Bazelon's thoughtful analysis on Slate last week of the study of child care. (I refuse to use the term "day" care. It's children being cared for, not "days.") She spoke with one of the authors who pointed out that in the sample of children studied there was a correlation between amount of time children spent in child care prior to age four and a half, the quality of the care received by those children, and the very, very slight increase in problem behaviors observed in the fifth grade. Those who were in child care for more years received, on average, lower quality care and had more problems. Bazelon astutely reminds us that infant care is not only the most difficult to do well and the most expensive to offer but also that infants benefit least from the group interactions that characterize good child care for slightly older children. (All of this reintroduces the question that many private child care centers have about publicly funded preschool: the older kids in such centers subsidize the infants. When the older kids are siphoned off by free programs, that makes the economics of private child care for infants even more tricky.) Here's a quote:

It's useless to rail at the press for leading with the bad news and for ignoring the researchers' caveats that no cause-and-effect conclusions can be drawn from their data. Still, coverage like this feels designed to twit working parents. And it turns out that in the case of day care, the headlines and the stories really were alarmist—even wrong.

Bruce Fuller, the author of "Standardized Childhood" just out from Stanford University Press offers this measured and thoughtful response to my entry a few days ago about his book:

I’m miffed by friend Richard Colvin’s instantaneous commentary on my new book, Standardized Childhood, just out from Stanford University Press, coauthored with Margaret Bridges and Seeta Pai. Richard ends his blog-spray by admitting, “I confess I haven’t read the book.” [Disclosure: the rules of evidence or substantiation in the blog world remain a mystery to me.]

The book offers readers a concise historical tour, illuminating the age-old debate around how elites and institutions eagerly push to define the inner nature and proper upbringing of other people’s children. Sure, it takes a village. But the pivotal question moving forward is, who gets to call the shots across America’s diverse villages, and what are the ethics and evidence on the proposition that what’s best is a more homogenous way of raising and instructing young children are best?

Earlier feminist and child care movements stressed options for parents and children. But now influential born-again preschool advocates [disclosure: who are financially supported by the same national foundation that pays for Colvin’s blog site] have converged on a singular remedy: free preschool, preferably attached to public school bureaucracies, for all families, no matter how rich or poor.

Journalists, local activists, and state policy makers – as this movement unfolds – must wrestle with key issues. First, in the context of No Child Left Behind many kindergarten teachers are under enormous pressure to drill-and-kill information into children’s heads, to pump-up their test scores. The book takes readers into several preschool classrooms where teachers now feel the same pressure. So, let’s get clear on the risks and potential benefits of attaching three and four year-olds to public schools in the present environment of top-down accountability.

Spent the week at the American Educational Research Assn. meeting in Chicago (16,000 attendees, sessions at most of the downtown hotels, big receptions, and a program that weighs more than 2 pounds. Many of the hundreds of research papers presented at the annual meeting offer detailed examinations of very specific situations, many are political rants that sound the same year after year, some repeat the obvious, and others examine issues, such as testing, NCLB, school choice, literacy and so on in often helpful ways. This year there were many sessions with an international perspective. Every year I attend AERA I learn a lot and meet some very smart people doing interesting research on important issues.

One of the most memorable sessions this year was a lecture by Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the dean of the University of Michigan School of Education and a former elementary school teacher. Ball is a big star in the education research firmament and for good reason—she’s smart, talks about complex ideas in very clear ways, and can be counted on for a fresh, non-ideological perspective that she’s subjected to her own rigorous thinking process. (Her main area of research involves mathematics teaching and what teachers need to know.)

Anyway, she gave the DeWitt Wallace lecture this year, and she analyzed the often sharp criticism of education schools and the research they do going back almost a century. She tried out various responses to those criticisms to justify the need for Ed schools. One argument would be that schools of education are needed to train teachers. But she said that argument, on its own, is insufficient, especially in a research university. So she made the case that education schools can justify their existence most persuasively if at least some of the research done by education professors focuses on the heart of the educational enterprise.

New report from the University of Albany, SUNY draws on data from the 2000 Census to conclude that immigrant children “account for 20 percent of all children in the United States, and their numbers are growing faster than any other group of children…The proportion of children in immigrant families falls below 5 percent in only 11 states, and that proportion rises to 10 percent or more in 22 states and the District of Columbia…” The report says four of five of the children are U.S. citizens and three out of four are fluent in English. “At the same time, children of immigrants are less likely to be enrolled in preschool programs, putting them at a disadvantage when it comes to the cognitive aspects of school readiness and English-language fluency.”

Would like to see a story out of a neighborhood with many immigrant children about the quality and availability of preschool. Often, such preschools need to put a lot of effort into recruiting immigrant families. Those efforts, too, are worth a story.

A committee of the Missouri legislature decided it would be unfair to rate private preschools and child care centers based on education quality and to provide those rated higher with more state funding. But the committee said it would be just fine to subject the sliver of programs operated by the public schools to those rules it rejected for the privately operated programs. The legislature also loaded up the bill with a raft of controversial provisions unrelated to preschool: a measure making it easier to fire teachers who go on strike, one making it easier to start charter schools; and one allowing professionals to become teachers without a degree. Matt Franck has the story in the Post-Dispatch.

Be interesting to see what oversight or regulation, if any, that your state performs over private child care and preschool programs. Usually, the only regulations deal with health and safety rather than educational or developmental quality.

Looks like Iowa will be investing millions over the next four years to ensure that every Iowa four year old has a chance to attend preschool. The AP reports that a Senate measure looks like it will pass, the House is on board and so is the governor. The story reports that the $15 million plan will make "quality" preschool available for 28,000 children. Do the math and that's $535 per child. I know there's something I'm missing here. But so are readers and listeners in Iowa.

Pre-K Now's annual legislative roundup reports that 29 governors made it a priority this year to increase their state's spending on pre-kindergarten education. The report also said, however, that 12 states either kept the funding the same as last year or cut spending below the cost of living. The National Institute on Early Education Research reported a few weeks back that while
total state spending for prekindergarten had increased to nearly $3.3 billion, spending was not keeping up with enrollment growth and inflation. Funding per child fell to its lowest level since NIEER began collecting data five years ago.

Bill Gates Sr. told the Ounce of Prevention Fund that the failure of the U.S. to invest more in pre-kindergarten is "bad business and it doesn't take long to see the consequences piling up." Also at the luncheon,
Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc. Chairman Terrence Duffy announced that the Merc’s charitable arm would donate $1 million to the Fund to be used in programs for at-risk infants and toddlers.

Business, increasingly, is seeing the value in investing in early childhood education. A story?

Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk and Education Sector fame and Richard Whitmire, the highly respected USA Today editorialist on education (currently on leave), give presidential candidates a 10-point plan on education on the new The Politico website. Point Eight:

8. Open the door to pre-kindergarten education. Academically focused pre-kindergarten programs help close the racial and economic achievement gap. Such programs are expensive, but taxpayers actually recoup the money in savings down the road because these programs help keep kids out of special education and out of trouble.

One purpose of the annual "Leadership Matters" survey by the advocacy group Pre-K Now is to praise governors going along with the plan of adding more public dollars for preschool and to spank governors who are wavering, have jumped off the bandwagon, or who haven't yet climbed aboard. The report released this week praised Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana who has announced she won't run for reelection, and The Daily Advertiser of Lafayette, Louisiana took note. On the other hand, Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina was taken to task for his "evaporating" support for universal pre-kindergarten and the Post and Courier of Charleston took note. (Full disclosure: Pre-K Now, like this blog, is supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which advocates for public spending for universal pre-kindergarten.) In each of these stories, the reporters quoted people in the states unaffiliated with the national report and used it as a hook for a status report on pre-k in the state. What I didn't see in either story, however, was any attempt to connect the Pre-K Now report to the earlier report by the National Institute for Early Education Research on the quality of state programs. I also didn't see any mention of how much the states are spending per pupil. Quantity has to be matched by quality, otherwise these programs will have little if any effect.

The Honolulu Advertiser tackled an important story today, examining why seats in publicly funded preschools were not being filled. The piece got right to the point: "The state has money to help needy parents defray the costs of preschool. Now it just needs more parents to apply." The story quotes a parent who says the program makes it possible for her to send her daughter to an accredited pre-school rather than leave here with a babysitter. "I would go to some homes that just had a blank white wall, no toys and 10 kids," the mother said. "You just don't feel comfortable leaving your child there."

The piece notes that cultural resistance is a factor in what preschool experts call the low "uptake" for services. "Hawai'i continues to be the type of society that we let our parents or grandparents or aunties and uncles take care of the young," said Henry Oliva, the deputy director of the state agency that administers the program.

This is not only an issue in Hawaii. It is an issue in many mainland cities, especially those with large Latino populations. What are the programs in the cities you cover doing to make sure families know what services are available and how to access them? Are they getting the word out in Spanish-language and other ethnic publications? Are they going door to door? Does the state subsidize outreach efforts? My guess is that there are many neighborhoods where good programs are not being full utilized.

Suzanne Perez Tobias of the Wichita Eagle Beacon reports that the Kansas Health Foundation is spending $400,000 to develop an assessment of how ready five-year-olds in the state are to start school.The Kansas Health Institute will develop the assessment. "Until now, we haven't really had a systematic way of understanding how 'school-ready' children are," Robert St. Peter, a pediatrician and president of the Institute, told the paper. "This will give us some look at how we're doing, but even more importantly, the ability to track it over time."

Tobias did what many reporters writing such stories do not: she included some specific details of what it means to be "ready" for school. " 'Ready to learn' means using the bathroom by yourself, sharing a toy, listening to a story, being curious. It means holding a pencil correctly, treating books gently, asking questions and taking turns."

She also, however, reports that researchers contend that at least a third of American children are not ready to learn. And she implies that children's brains are virtually complete by the age of five, meaning that their capacity to keep learning is established and set by that age. I'd like to see journalists temper such statements: all children, regardless of their circumstances, are "ready to learn." They simply can't help it. Humans are learning machines.And they keep learning until they die. At least I hope they do.

She also noted that the results of the asssessment would be ready prior to the 2008 legislative session in the state. Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius made investing in pre-k a centerpiece of her re-election campaign but offered only modest programs in her legislative agenda. Tobias reports that even these timid efforts are unlikely to be approved. The results of the assessments will no doubt be used to justify more spending. Journalists need to make sure they don't get caught up in campaigns, no matter how worthy.

The respected liberal Economic Policy Institute is holding an online press conference for journalists on May 2nd to release a new book that makes the case that investments in high-quality pre-kindergarten would improve educational outcomes and reap billions of dollars in savings in state and federal budgets over the next few decades. According to the announcement of the event, the book, "Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation" by Robert G. Lynch, will argue that either targeted programs aimed at the poor or universal programs available without regard to family income will produce big gains. That's interesting because most of the economists and activisits in the field of early childhood education argue either "universal" or "targeted," not both. Journalists need to sign up for the news conference and they'll get access to embargoed state-by-state material.

Oh, it's so painful for me to realize, now that I'm middle-aged, how much I missed as a child. Just think how much I could have accomplished, how much happier I'd be, had I been as lucky as 3-year-old Elliott Baines of Guttenberg, N.J. Alexander Russo linked the other day to a story in the Wall Street Journal that reported on the adventurous travel vacations families are taking their young children on to give them enriching experiences. Little Elliott, for example, "has already cleared customs in Israel, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, France and Canada. His parents...say they believe the experiences are shaping Elliot's personality even at this early age. For instance, when Elliot and a group of children were pretending to fly in their gymnastics class, other youngsters said they were going to Florida, while Elliot said he was en route to Paris." All my family ever did was drive one time from Ohio to the East Coast to visit family friends, and we weren't even allowed to stop at the Mystery Spot along the way.

But, seriously, articles such as these are what I like to call "rich porn" and are a staple of the Journal, the Times, Vanity Fair, and other publications aimed at the elite. Those of us who spent our childhood catching tadpoles and playing baseball with kids in the neighborhood instead of flying off to Thailand to ride bikes through the jungle love to be voyeurs observing the lives of people with so much money it skews their judgment of what's important. A little skepticism about whether such trips actually put kids ahead of their peers, and a little context as to how few families actually take such vacations would be nice. But that would make such stories far less entertaining.

Leann Holt in the Albuquerque (New Mexico) Journal picks up on the theme the Honolulu Advertiser explored a few days ago: efforts to enroll the children of immigrants and low-income parents in preschool. It's often said that Latino immigrants are less likely to enroll their children in preschool because they prefer family care or non-school settings. But Holt reports something I've not seen elsewhere: preschool is free in Mexico and 81% of children attend.

Education Week's Linda Jacobson offers a well-reported, thoughtful roundup of the issues facing Head Start. [free registration required] Journalists in states where state-funded pre-kindergarten is expanding should set this aside electronically or in hard copy as a reference document and story list. How is the expansion of pre-k creating competition for Head Start? What is the culture clash in Head Start centers that also receive state money? [Hint: preschool teachers have to be persuaded to brush the teeth of four-year-olds.] Is the expansion of state pre-k causing greater racial and economic isolation in Head Starts? Is gentrification in cities undermining Head Start programs? Are Head Start programs failing to serve children speaking Spanish, African languages, Asian languages? No shortage of good stories.

Barbara Kantrowitz of Newsweek explored the overselling of baby technology in an article in the April 23rd edition.Here's her lede:

You see them everywhere: harried parents hauling their little ones off to classes in Mandarin, gymnastics or classical violin. At home, they're filling nurseries with "educational" rattles and mobiles. It's all for a worthy goal: making the most of the first three years of life, when critical changes in brain structure determine whether little Madison or Matthew will one day enter the Ivy League. At least that is what a growing number of parents have been led to believe. Sadly, it may all be a waste of time and money.

Newsweek also has an audio chat with Sara Mead on the topic.

Brainy Baby® does acknowledge some of the issues on its web site. The company says its "products always work best when adults use them interactively with their child. When using a DVD, for example, watch it with your child, talk about what you see, and repeat the names of new things, just as you do when reading a book together. Interaction between parent and child is a key ingredient to getting the most out of our Brainy Baby® products.

I missed this when it first came out but Sara Mead of Education Sector has put together one of her typically smart, dispassionate, let the chips fall where they may discussions of the evidence. This time her focus is on the overselling of the importance of the birth to age three window for brain development. It's a paper that all journalists interested in child development and education should read. Brains keep developing and learning throughout life. Plus, trying to hard-wire intelligence by sitting toddlers in front of a screen to watch a video runs against what we know about how young children learn best--through social interactions with those who love them and make them feel secure. Mead's analysis doesn't mean that what goes on early isn't important. It certainly is and the body of evidence showing the value of such programs as David Olds' Nurse Home Visiting Program is building. But it does mean that later investments are also crucial and that there isn't the trade-off between zero-to-three and pre-k and kindergarten that some people pose.