The Associated Press and Washington Post report that the House of Representatives has passed by a more than 7-to-1 margin a Head Start reauthorization bill that increases spending by $500 million, increases enrollment, boosts salaries, and expands services. The bill also sets a goal for increasing the percentage of Head Start teachers who have gone to college and raises the income ceiling for eligibility. It also ends the controversial National Reporting System for monitoring program quality and bars programs from using religious beliefs as a factor in making personnel decisions. The Senate is working on similar legislation. The AP reports the White House opposes the bill. The Post puts a finer point on it, saying the legislation rejects the Bush Administration's main effort to make the program more academic.

Maureen Downey in the Atlanta Journal Constitution uses a study by the Economic Policy Institute to argue that the state should abandon two tax cuts--for homeowners and the elderly with incomes of $150,000 or more--to pay to double spending on the state's pre-k program. The money would increase enrollment and increase quality, by raising per pupil spending from $4,000 to $6,300.

The Economic Policy Institute's report "Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation" got lots of ink in papers around the country. Every story I read expressed no skepticism about the state-by-state number crunching, which reported enormous returns from public spending on preschool. Andrew Leonard in a piece on Salon acknowledged up front that he supports public spending to provide high quality preschool to disadvantaged three-to-five year olds. But he bristles a bit at analysis by University of Chicago Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman that spending on pre-kindergarten will create a stronger, more talented, more effective work force. Leonard says public spending on preschool is a good thing, whether it produces economic gains or not." Investing in young kids would be good for them, even if it didn't make society more productive. And that should be reason enough to do it."

Heckman's 98-page report is here. Unlike the EPI analysis, Heckman argues that providing preschool to the disadvantaged produces the greatest returns and poses no tradeoff. But investing public money on programs for higher income kids makes less sense.

Andy Rotherham, the policy analyst and provocateur who is co-founder of Education Sector, gave us ink-stained wretch types a good assignment the other day. Here's the nub of it:

What I'd really like to see is a big picture and long article about where the nation is and where it is going on pre-kindergarten education. It seems to me that through various venues, for instance state initiatives, the Tough Choices report, advocacy groups, and the attention of presidential candidates we're having a national conversation about what amounts to adding a grade to school. To be sure, it won't work like that because the pre-K system is more choice driven and pluralistic than elementary school and different in other ways, too. Yet that would be the effect, a big shift toward another year of school.

Any takers?

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm is in a tight spot. She's caught between a here-and-now plunge in current tax revenues and the need to prepare children of today as best she can to function the world of the future. She wants a $1.5 billon tax increase to offset a deficit over two years of $2 billion. To get the additional revenues, she's threatening to force massive cuts in health care and education starting June 1. State Supe Mike Flanagan has told school districts to start cutting preschool immediately. Actually, that's a shrewd move. Cut those preschool classes and send Michigan parents who depend on them into an instant frenzy, which could pressure the Michigan Legislature to go along with the tax hike Granholm wants. "We can invest in order to pull this state out of this economic slump or we can disinvest and further the spiral downward," Granholm said in seeking to get the Legislature to act.

The National Institute on Early Education Research has weighed in, with an op-ed arguing that cutting preschool is like a farmer "eating his seed corn."

Easy quick-hit story would be for a journalist to go out to one of the school district preschools and talked to a dozen or so parents dropping off their children about what they'd do if, starting June 1st, their kids had nowhere to go.

The Southern Education Foundation today will release a report that will say that the region is ahead of other parts of the country in terms of its pre-kindergarten programs. The report "pulls together and synthesizes the findings of every major independent study of state-supported Pre-K across the South in the last ten years. These reports measure the current and future impact that Pre-K can have in improving Southern education and the region's quality of life." This comes from the Dawson County Times in Dawsonville, Dawson County, Georgia.

Journalists in the South who write on this report should also check other sources of information, such as the National Institute for Early Education Research on quality questions, and reports turned out by the advocacy group Pre-K Now, especially those analyzing the political leadership of governors and others in the states. Also keep in mind that 3-5 year olds can be found in many settings--Head Start, family care, child care centers, preschools in churches, preschools in public schools, for profit preschools and so on.

Pre-K Now, the advocacy group underwritten by The Pew Charitable Trusts, has put out a helpful, dispassionate report that provides journalists and policy makers with very helpful tools for analyzing the many studies that calculate precise economic benefits of high quality preschool. What I like about the report, by Albert Wat, is that it gives journalists these analytical tools in a way that even non-economists can understand. It's a good resource that you should keep on your desk. (I know, under that enormous pile of other reports that seems like it's always about to slide off into your lap, burying you forever--or, at least until your editor comes over looking for you.)

'The story Tracy Jan published in the Boston Globe about a month ago on the frank and disturbing study of preschools and kindergartens in the city got a lot of attention, as it should have. I've been waiting to find a copy of the full report to link to but so far haven't. I'll keep looking.

According to Jan's story, which was followed up by a hardhitting editorial, the study by the Wellesley Centers for Women found "mediocre instruction, unsanitary classrooms, and dangerous schoolyards." The study also found that the quality of about 70% of the classrooms were not good enough to achieve the goal of closing gaps in kindergarten readiness between white and Asian children and Latino and African-American children.

A couple points from the Globe story to emphasize: The teachers in the classrooms studied all had bachelor's degrees but a fifth of them didn't necessarily have degrees in early childhood education. One school of thought in early childhood education insists on college degrees as a measure of quality. An alternative view is that teachers in preschools need to be highly skilled. It sounds like the same point but it's not. If preschool teachers can gain critical skills and knowledge of how young children learn and how best to help them learn in community college or in a special training program, then what's the purpose of insisting on a bachelor's degree? It's heartbreaking but the researchers found that many of these kids were sitting in their seats in kindergarten and preschool, being lectured to and responding to flash cards. No wonder these preschools aren't helping much.

Another point to emphasize comes from Elizabeth Reilinger, a member of the Boston Schools Committee. She commented that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had pushed to expand preschool too quickly. Is this a problem around the country? Is the pressure so great to expand pre-k spending as quickly as possible causing the creation of poorly funded, poor quality programs that are accomplishing little?

One other observation. Yes, these were the conclusions of researchers. But couldn't journalists have made some of these same observations by visiting a lot of classrooms? A journalist who knew a little bit about how young chldren learn would have noticed that kids were sitting still too long and doing worksheets instead of engaging in purposeful, creative activities that involved a lot of conversation, right? I hope so.

In the Hartford Business Review, reporter Diane Weaver Dunne examines the partnership between Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell and two of the state's top advocates of economic development. The story also traces the evolution of business interest in early education nationally, going back to the work of Art Rolnick, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Rell is proposing spending $63.7 million over the next two years to promote school readiness.

Southern Education Foundation reports that the South is leading other regions in the quality of pre-k programs and the number of children enrolled. The press release to the report says that "The report also analyzes the uneven development of Pre-K within the South and identifies common challenges that Southern states will face in taking Pre-K to scale across the region." The Foundation previously had done a number of studies of state programs in the region. The report received a lot of attention from both publications and television outlets.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to add $50 million on top of the $50 million added a year earlier for publicly funded preschool. The advocacy organization Preschool California is quite happy about it. Their reaction ishere.

The Bergen (N.J.) Record's 2006 series on waste, corruption and misuse of public funds meant to improve preschool in New Jersey continues to win plaudits. The series by Kathleen Carroll and Jean Rimbach just won the $10,000 Clark Mollenhoff Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting from the Institute on Political Journalism. Earlier this month, Carroll and Rimbach won the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting from the Education Writers Assn. The series published last April relied on state audits as well as old-fashioned buttonhole reporting and identified preschool operators who were taking the taxpayers of the state for a ride. Instead of providing high quality preschool, some private operators spent money on luxury cars, vacations, and gambling while refusing to pay their teachers' benefits or provide good quality settings. The series also won the prize for the best investigative series in the 100,000 to 250,000 circulation category from the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization.

As in New Jersey, most of the states investing in pre-kindergarten are spending money on private as well as public school settings. The series highlighted the need for states to oversee how those funds are spent.

One of the greatest challenges of education policy and, frankly, education journalism, is that accurately measuring education quality is very difficult. So, instead, we pay attention to what's available to us: spending, class size, teacher experience, teacher test scores, graduation rates, college-going, test scores. All of those are proxies for what really matters--the interactions between teachers and students. But how do you measure the quality of those interactions? How do you measure whether they will help children not just learn facts but understand, think, question, grow in their confidence as learners and speakers and do-ers?

I had a chance the other day to listen in to a "webinar" put on by two of the great minds on preschool quality--Robert C. Pianta of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University and Barbara Bowman, the Chief Early Education Officer of the Chicago Public Schools and the founder of the Erickson Institute in Chicago. (The event was sponsored by Pre-K Now and a link to the slides for the call as well as the slides for previous calls with experts on a variety of topics can be found here.
Bowman made the point that children have a "natural predisposition to develop" and they do so through exploration of their senses, relationships, language, play and self-regulation. But school learning is different. School learning requires what she called "decontextualized language," meaning, for example, the words for categorization of objects. School learning also involves symbolic skills, small muscle control, social skills, complex grammar, a large vocabulary, clear enunciation and other things. The point is that those who say "kids learn naturally" are right. They do develop and learn some things naturally. They're programmed to, though at different rates. School learning is different. And it requires intentional, thoughtful, planned learning opportunities and interactions. What a useful way to break down that old teaching vs. development argument! It's also useful for journalists, to help them better understand child development and schooling and how they are similar and different.

Bowman's point also leads right into what Pianta had to say. Pianta's research involves lots and lots of observations of classrooms. His observations have led to the development of a scale that measures the quality of teachers' interaction in pre-school and kindergarten classrooms with their children. Pianta says that scale predicts quite accurately how much children learn. Unfortunately, it also demonstrates that the quality of those interactions is often not very good. Pianta wrote a piece in the journal Education Next a while back. In that piece, he asserted that only about a quarter of the pre-k classes and classes studied provided students with the high levels of emotional and instructional support needed to maximize learning.

Fortunately, however, Pianta and his colleagues have developed some training tools that help pre-k teachers get better. He asserts that it is the skill and knowledge of the teachers--not their degrees or certifications--that matters. In fact, his data show no correlation between degree attainment and teacher performance. What does matter is training and professional development tied to knowledge and skill about teaching in actual classrooms. A "webinar" caller asked about that. If there's no connection between B.A. degrees and children's learning, the caller asked, doesn't insisting on college degrees for preschool teachers just raise the cost of those programs?

Advocates for higher quality such as Libby Doggett of Pre-K Now acknowledge that the evidence that children who have teachers with more formal education learn more is ambiguous. But she said in response to the caller that degrees have to be required if the teachers are to be paid a professional salary and be regarded as professionals. In other words, it's about positioning pre-k as part of the formal education system, which requires formal degrees and credentials. That may be the right strategy. But one hopes that somewhere along the line the teachers, whatever formal degrees they have, also get the kind of training Pianta is talking about.

Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton announced in a New York Times' story widely carried that part of the education agenda in her campaign would be a $5 billion federal committment to promote state investments in pre-kindergarten programs. The federal government's role in early childhood education has been primarily in supporting Head Start. (And funding for Head Start has never been sufficient to serve all children eligible.) But pre-k is seen differently--it's not just for poor kids, it's perceived to be more explicitly educational, and designed to get kids ready for school. Clinton's proposal doesn't offer up a federal program but instead offers to match dollar-for-dollar the state commitment to pre-k, and states would not be allowed to reduce their spending if they wanted federal money.

States are upping their spending, adding $1.2 billion on new dollars over the past three years. So far this year, 29 governors have proposed increases--20 Democratic governors and nine Republicans. Biggest state to sign on this year is Iowa.

It will be interesting to see how the coverage of this goes. If only political reporters cover it, the stories are likely to focus on political strategy and positioning. That's not unimportant, because the politics of an expanded federal role in a program serving young children are tricky, even more so than other federal efforts, such as the No Child Left Behind act. But the outline of the Clinton program--requiring all teachers to have bachelor's degrees and special training, standards, use of certain curricula and so forth--have educational implications. (Just one: where will all the well-trained teachers come from? There isn't much a of a pipeline to produce such teachers.) So, one hopes that education writers will jump in as well.

Clinton isn't out there on her own. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding a forum on pre-kindergarten and early childhood education this week; the New America Foundation is holding a symposium; and many prescriptions from think tanks and others for improving education are calling for more attention to younger kids. Lots of work for journalists!

Hilary Clinton's proposed federal investment in pre-kindergarten for four-year-olds comes the week after David Brooks argued in his New York Times' column that Republicans needed a set of big ideas on how to develop "human capital" if they were to have a chance of halting the party's "death spiral." Brooks called for a program of tax breaks for low-income workers, child tax deductions, encouragement of marriage, school choice and...wait for it...investment in preschool.

Here's Brooks' take on the politics: ...

politically, a human capital agenda exploits the divisions between liberal populists and independents. Liberal populists, about 26 percent of the country, believe in redistribution policies. Conservatives and independents do not. Liberal populists believe the global economy is so broken all the benefits of it go to the top 0.01 percent. Independents and conservatives observe that hard work still leads to success. Liberals emphasize inequality. Moderates and conservatives believe inequality is acceptable so long as there is opportunity.

Clinton's proposal is for "universal" preschool--free for the poor, sliding scale for the rest. Brooks was talking about free preschool for what he called the most "disorganized" poor families.

Clearly, the politics of preschool are interesting and worth exploring by journalists. It's not as simple as liberals wanting a social program and conservatives opposing it. The details of the proposals matter--a lot.

All Gregory Mankiw, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, did was post on his blog the headline "Preschool Pays" and link to the Joel Waldfogel Slate entry mentioned just above. That touched off a flurry of comments, pro and con. Many of the comments wrestle with the economic analyses themselves, especially what can be concluded from the Perry Preschool study of the effects of high quality preschool designed to serve the most disadvantaged. But some reflect the fears referenced by Waldfogel, that good quality voluntary preschool undermines the family and replaces parents with "government agents." (One has to think that if preschool teachers really were government agents they'd be earning a lot more money!).

In any case, I urge economists or journalists who are examining the economic returns of investing in preschool to start with the superb "Dollars and Sense" report to gain perspective. Although put out by a group that advocates for universal preschool, the report examines the strengths and weaknesses and generalizability of various analyses of economic returns from preschool. It also acknowledges the bias of Pre-K Now, which issued the report.

Joel Waldfogel, a business prof at the Wharton School, bases a commentary on Slate on the James Heckman/Dmitri Masterov analysis of the economic returns of preschool from high quality programs serving the disadvantaged. He says government programs are needed to make up for the weakness of many families, which makes them unable to function as caregivers and nurturers of children. He concludes:

A sales problem remains: These programs invade the traditional province of the family, and in Heckman and Masterov's conception, they would target disadvantaged populations that are disproportionately minority. Wanted: a credible and sympathetic pitchman. Paging Barack Obama

Obama, the Illinois Senator running for president, has yet to announce his position on expanding the federal role in pre-kindergarten. Hilary Clinton, the New York Senator and presidential candidate, though, supports phasing in a $10 billion federal fund to match new state investments in high quality preschool.

The Title I Monitor has been out front on the allegations of conflict of interest among the Reading First program's technical advisors, several of whom also had significant financial ties to publishers of reading materials. Earlier this month, Sen. Ed Kennedy's staff produced a report that detailed those ties and the alleged conflicts, based on emails and other information provided by the four advisors who are being scrutinized. Today, however, the Monitor produced a thorough piece that questions several points made in the highly critical report. In the case of Doug Carnine, for example, he received royalties for a language arts program he authored that was geared to middle school students--not the K-3 students served by Reading First. The report also alleged a conflict related to a meeting where Carnine was to be a speaker--except he never attended. Other flaws are documented as well.

Much of the coverage of the Reading First story has tried to fit a very complex, ethically murky situation into formula that is both easy-to-understand and easy-to-communicate: greedy government contractors ignore good practice and cynically steer contracts to themselves and their friends and pocket big dough. Conflicts of interest--real or apparent--are serious. But much of the coverage in mainstream publications, television and even some blogs has failed to point out that the reading experts involved all were highly reqarded in the highly specialized area of interventions for young children far behind in reading at a young age. The coverage also has underplayed the fact that the Reading First program was independently judged to be successful. Finally, the most vocal people to raise conflict of interest charges had their own economic interests at stake. So, as I say, it's a murky situation. One that the Title I Monitor has worked hard to explain.