The annual political action report from the universal preschool advocacy group Pre-K Now shows spending continuing to rise. The group reports that 36 states have committed an additional $528 million annually to expanding UPK. That brings state spending to $4.8 billion nationally for FY 2008. Only one state plans to cut spending. Which one? Florida. The state was already known for having the stingiest per-pupil spending in the country and for the low-quality of its program. Perhaps because of the low-quality, enrollment in the program was less than expected. So, the state Legislature can brag about raising per pupil spending by $117 while cutting overall spending by $14 million. (That's actually something to be proud of. Some of the states that have gotten credit for increasing pre-k spending in recent years have seen enrollment increases that diluted the effects of the increase and actually reduced per-pupil spending.) If the state keeps quality low enough, no children will participate and the state can really save some dough. By the way, the Agency for Workforce Innovation is the state agency that operates public preschool in Florida. The news release can be found here.

EarlyStories has been on extended hiatus. (This blogging business is harder than it looks.) It's back now. Look for regular entries from now on.

Education Week's Oct. 3 edition had a good roundup of legislative proposals that would expand the federal role in pre-kindergarten. (Article here. Subscription required.) The lobbyist for Pre-K Now, the advocates for universal pre-kindergarten set up by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is quoted throughout. (full disclosure: this site is underwritten by Pew as well). One of the proposals discussed is the $10 billion "Ready to Learn" plan put forth by Sen. Hillary Clinton that would help states expand their existing programs. On the stump, Clinton has talked about a universal program, which is what Pre-K Now advocates. But, according to the Ed Week article, her actual proposal is a targeted program that would expand services to working class families. Bruce Fuller of the University of California Berkeley, who favors targeted programs, said Clinton is proposing "a Head Start program for blue-collar families."

USA Today the other day took note of initiatives from mayors that put books in the hands of preschoolers to encourage them to read. It seems that mayors are getting on board with the movement that to this point has featured governors in the highest profile roles. The piece reported that dozens of cities have citywide book clubs and reading selections. In Jacksonville, Florida; Longmont, Colorado, Charleston, South Carolina and other cities, the city and private funders are providing preschoolers with books. In Jacksonville, every four year old who wants one receives a backpack stuffed with a book, hand puppet, reading blanket, flashcards and other items. The story also pointed out that these programs are universal, meaning they don’t target just poor kids. My only quibble with the story is that it uses the terms “pre-K” and “child care” interchangeably. That may seem fussy but the two terms really carry quite different meanings.

The other article in the volume that should be of interest to journalists is by Harvard Grad School professor and economist Richard Murnane and is called “Improving the Education of Children Living in Poverty.” Despite the ambitious-sounding title, Murnane’s proposal is both more modest and less sanguine about the positive effects that can be expected. He proposes a number of changes to the No Child Left Behind law (some of which already are being discussed) that would make the law’s achievement targets more realistic and meaningful for teachers. He says the feds should provide states with strong incentives to make their high school graduation requirements better reflect the needs of the labor market and also promote interdistrict transfer programs, such as are in place in Boston, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. And, finally—and this is the big one—he says the feds must provide competitive, matching grants to districts and states to improve the quality of teaching through recruitment, compensation, preparation, and professional development. Cost? $2.5 billion a year. The piece does a great job of providing a clear, quick overview of what’s going on in education policy, context often missing from education reporting.

Two of the articles should be of particular interest to journalists interested in how education can help address issues of poverty. One, by economist Greg J. Duncan of Northwestern, Jens Ludwig an economist at the University of Chicago , and Katherine J. Magnuson of the School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, proposes an intensive two-year, education-focused intervention for all three- and four-year-olds that would charge fees on a sliding scale. The article is unusually specific. One key part of the idea is that the feds would offer incentives to states to participate rather than funding the program directly. The authors are more cautious than some advocates and researchers in that they don’t put a ratio on the return on investment. But they do say that the program’s $20 billion cost would be more than matched by the benefits—in the $2 or $3 per $1 spent range rather than the $7 to $14 that economists have calculated for other comprehensive programs in the past. They do, however, say such a program aimed at poor kids would reduce poverty by 5% to 15%, a very healthy gain.

Any journalist interested in understanding how policies related to poverty, health, mental health and education affect children should make sure they see the quarterly publication called “The Future of Children.” The theme of the current issue is “The Next Generation of Antipoverty Policies” and it focuses on solutions and the progress made in reducing poverty over the past 40 years. Our current political climate downplays the potential for public policy and investment to address entrenched poverty. The articles in this volume are edited by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, both of whom are senior editors of the publication as well as scholars at the Brookings Institution. Here’s the web page.

I didn't know it and you may not have either but, in the blogosphere, yesterday was "attack John Edwards Day." At least, that's what I'm surmising from the deepening pond of bile and name-calling in right-wing blogs fed by an article in the Concord Monitor.

Here's the lede of the article:

John Edwards says if he's elected president, he'll institute a New Deal-like suite of programs to fight poverty and stem growing wealth disparity. To do it, he said, he'll ask many Americans to make sacrifices, like paying higher taxes.

Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina, says the federal government should underwrite universal pre-kindergarten, create matching savings accounts for low-income people, mandate a minimum wage of $9.50 and provide a million new Section 8 housing vouchers for the poor. He also pledged to start a government-funded public higher education program called "College for Everyone.

In reaction, cries of socialism and all manner of other sins suddenly appeared here, here, here, here, and here. The entries were rife with name-calling of Edwards, the most progressive of the three leading Democratic contenders for the presidency who is, according to media pundits and polls, running third behind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Apparently they all got the memo that said Edwards' plans to address poverty would drive away investment capital, undermine the family, coddle those who are lazy or stupid or just plain unlucky, and result in brainwashing of the children. Note to the memo-writers, two red states--Oklahoma and Georgia--have universal pre-school programs that others are trying to emulate and Republican legislatures and governors support expanded investments in pre-k.

Speaking of presidential candidates and publicly funded pre-kindergarten, Hillary Clinton was in a Miami Beach preschool yesterday touting her plan for the federal government to spend up to $10 billion a year to match state spending on pre-kindergarten. This is the AP article in the Washington Post. According to the article, Clinton praised Florida for its preschool program even though most experts and advocates consider it to be a low-quality, on-the-cheap effort that will accomplish little. According to the advocacy group Pre-K Now, Florida actually cut spending this year because fewer that expected students enrolled.

Talk to early education researchers for a few minutes and you're likely to hear an acronym that sounds like "eckles", rhyming with "freckles." What they are referring to is one of the sets of data known as the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, that are gathered by the federal government's Institute of Education Studies. The latest in the series was released this month and it's a good statistical snapshot of U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds during 2005-2006.

Some interesting data:

* Only 20% of children are cared for only by their parents. (Therefore, the conservative cry that expanded public investment in preschool is equivalent to yanking kids out of their parents' hands is silly. The vast majority of children already are cared for outside the home.)
*Preschools and pre-kindergartens, public and private, serve more than three times the number of children than does the Head Start program. (So this sector merits more attention.)
*About two-thirds of these children are know their shapes, numbers, and colors when they go to school. But math proficiency is more highly correlated with income than is language development. (Makes sense. Math is primarily developed in school and the more money a family has the more likely they are to be in preschool centers and less likely they are to be in Head Start programs.)
*Hispanic children are least likely to be served in centers and most likely to be cared for by relatives. The numbers for white children show the opposite.

Good descriptive data to feed into political and policy stories on pre-kindergarten. Also looking at the data may give rise to questions that may, with a little more work, lead to good solid stories in your community.

Douglas Besharov, a well-known scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, came out last week with a new study that found that the true cost of early education--when the cost of increasing the quality of current programs, providing others services, and administering the programs is added in--are much more expensive than the figures usually used by policy makers and advocates. Here are the amounts he and his co-authors calculated:

* For center-based child care, about $8,908--not the widely cited $4,388 to $6,582.
* For pre-kindergarten/preschool programs, about $14,026--not the widely cited $3,551.
* For Head Start, about $21,305--not the widely cited $7,467.

A blog called BlueNC that says it is "community-driven website that promotes progressive values and policies in North Carolina" has what appears to be a comprehensive analysis of the positions of the Democratic presidential candidates on issues of child care and preschool. Hillary Clinton's position has been talked about a lot but this breakdown looks at all the candidates.

Two reports within days about the South that, in a way, show two sides of the same coin. A report from the Southern Regional Education Board notes that the 15-state region leads the nation in offering publicly funded preschool and then quantifies that claim. Mississippi's Jackson Sun editorialized about the report. The Southern Education Fund this week issued a report saying that a majority of students in the region are poor. Seems like one is related to the other.