The lead story in the New York Times on Monday reports on a series of studies showing that achievement gaps are not closing much, despite NCLB. The generally gloomy story implies that schools alone cannot be expected to wipe out such gaps. But the story does note that experts think expanding prekindergarten to more kids will help. One such bright spot is Edwin E. Weeks Elementary School in Syracuse where the gap between black and white students has narrowed. The Times story says that the school's principal, Dare Dutter, credited a prekindergarten program and a school health clinic that helped keep poor students from missing class.

Now comes a Wisconsin task force to say that the state is not doing enough to assess the outcomes of its state pre-school program for four-year olds. "There's no study or determination of whether we are getting for our dollars' worth and...whether or not four-year-old kindergarten is a cost-effective means by which we can educate our children," said the incoming Speaker of the Wisconsin House, Republican Representative Mike Huebsch. According to a report on WKBT television La Crosse, the task force wants monitoring of whether children are learning English, test scores, and whether state spending on special education is dropping. The broadcast quoted a pre-k center director who says, "I think the standards are important as guidelines but, it is very difficult in early childhood to say, 'You have to have a "C" or above average in whether you can tie your shoe or not."

Good way to show the limits of "assessing" four-year-olds. It would also be good for the story to have noted that Wisconsin spends about $4,200 a year on a half-day program, according to the National Institute of Early Education Research. (state profiles available here). That's not even half the amount the state spends per pupil on K-12 education and, though it seems paradoxical, high quality pre-k costs more, not less.

I mentioned a few days ago the new blog from Sophia, a New Jersey pre-kindergarten teacher, who describes what goes on in her classroom. As a journalist, I find her entries to be quite enlightening, giving me a sense of what to notice in classrooms and what to ask pre-k teachers about.

One example: in an entry headed "Wow!" she talks about one of her student's progress toward learning letters and their sounds. It reminded me of a point made by a Hechinger Institute seminar about assessment. "If you ask a good teacher how a particular student is doing, you'll never hear her say, 'I don't know. I don't have her test scores back.' " That's because good teachers always know how they're students are doing, and what they need help with. Good point for journalists to ponder.

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.

Report by Leslie Postal in the Orlando Sentinel says entering Florida kindergartners are more ready than they were in the past to begin to learn to read. That's according to results on the school readiness test used by the state. Florida uses those results to judge the performance of preschools from the state's program for 4 year olds.

Advocates of high quality pre-kindergarten often say Florida's program falls far short of the mark. The Sentinel story also illustrates that when such evaluation data is available, it will be reported. The data does allow a conversation to take place about quality. But it's important for journalists and policy makers to keep in mind that the outcome measures are, to a large extent, determined by the characteristics of the children who attend

The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss broke the story Sunday that the Democratic Congress is likely to vote to end the National Reporting System, the test that's been given twice a year to a sampling of Head Start students to measure the effectiveness of the program. The story does a good job of explaining a difficult but essential concept of testing--that assessments need to be field-tested to determine if they measure what they're supposed to measure. Concerns have been raised in many quarters about the validity of the National Reporting System. Even the Bush Administration, which pushed for the assessments and which wants the tests to continue, acknowledges the problems.

One of the most vocal critics has been Sam Meisels of the Erikson Institute, and Strauss quotes him in her story. Meisels, who is a member of a national task force on accountability convened by the Pew Charitable Trusts, has twice spoken at Hechinger Institute events about his concerns. He illustrates his criticisms with a description of a test item that he argues is developmentally inappropriate and contains a distinct class bias.

The teacher giving the test shows the child four line drawings--including a wine decanter, a trophy "cup," an ice bucket, and a vase. The testgiver is supposed to ask the kid which of the drawings is a flower "vahz," pronounced to rhyme with "oz." Meisels likes to quip that he's probably used each of the objects as a vase. But he also objects to the preferred pronunciation. Meisels talks about a test item that shows four drawings of faces and the child is asked which one shows "horrified." It's difficult, he says, for a child to distinquish between afraid or angry and "horrified." Sounds like Congress is starting to listen to Meisels and others, who include Edward Zigler.

Joanne Jacobs picked up on the item I posted the other day about the pushback in Congress that may lead to the demise of the Head Start National Reporting System. I noted the criticisms of the technical quality of the test, which has led many experts to say that it doesn't answer the questions it was intended to: in other words, how well are Head Start programs helping children develop skills they need to be ready to learn to read.

You can read a dispassionate overview of the NRS here. One of the criticisms of the test is that it does not evaluate Head Start's performance in helping children develop socially and emotionally. It turns out that the NRS this year is adding an assessment of those domains. Information on that can be found here.

The anti-test position of the National Head Start Association can be found here. The far right opposition to the test is here.

Others have taken positions in favor of the keeping the test. The Fordham Foundation's Checker Finn offers a rousing and rhetorically edgy defense of the test here. In a strange way, Finn and Head Start icon Edward Zigler aren't that far apart on this. Both think that Head Start should help kids get ready to succeed in school.

I'll repeat that I'd like to see a story done this spring that tells me how the NRS actually works in practice, by going out and observing the administration of the test.

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.

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.

Florida newspapers, television stations and bloggers all reported on the release of the state's so-called accountability system for the mostly private pre-kindergarten programs that get public money. Leslie Postal in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel came closest to calling the state accountability system what it is: a mess. As she points out, the state set an artificial limit of 15% on how many schools can be low-performing. That means, in reality, that 15% of the schools will be labeled substandard no matter how they do and schools that may be weak against an objective set of standards, but not as weak as others, will get a seal of approval. But there are two even bigger problems with the so-called accountability system: 1. It doesn't take into consideration the characteristics of the kids served or the size of gains they made. Not surprisingly, as Postal notes, "low performing" preschools had more poor, disabled, and Spanish-speaking kids. 2. It tests kids in kindergarten and attributes their performance to the preschools. What about the rapid development of kids that age? What about all the other influences in a child's life that are more significant?

Sure, we all want all kids to be the same. But can 540 hours (which is what the state pays for) of relatively low-quality preschool really make it so? Florida's preschool program satisfied only four of 10 quality criteria established by the National Institute of Early Education and Research and the state spends only $2,163 per child on the program (when part-year attendance is taken into consideration.) The effect of this so-called accountability system will be to discourage these private schools from accepting the very kids who need help the most.

The CBS affiliate in Tallahassee got right to the point. The Gainesville Sun did not take note of any of the shortcomings of the rankings. The Gradebook, the education Web log of the St. Petersberg, noted that the system was unfair but that so was life. The state says it is holding preschools accountable. Journalists should hold the state accountable for at least acknowledging that their accountability system is "low performing."

Staci Hupp of the Dallas Morning News did a comprehensive job of examining a new certification system for public and private preschools in Texas. She included many different voices, including parents and skeptical preschool operators.

But based on what I could find out about the certification system, the story makes it seem a bit more scientific than it probably is. Centers apply for certification and then submit information about the center's teachers and learning environment. Children from the center are tested in kindergarten and their scores, combined with the self-reported information, determines certification. Susan Landry of the Texas State Center for Early Childhood Development, which developed the certification system, is quoted saying it will be able to identify classroom practices which predict kindergarten success. Attributing causation in education is a very, very tricky thing.

Secondly, the story had only a smidgeon of (one graf, down low) context. States are spending more on preschool and so are trying to find ways to measure quality. Head Start has been struggling with accountability for several years now using tests and the tests, which were not useful for centers or anyone else, are likely to go away in the Head Start reauthorization. Several states give letter grades. Also, Florida tests kindergartners and judges the preschools they attended by the results. Most observers think that method is badly flawed.

Sharon Lynn Kagan of Teachers College gave an excellent overview of early childhood education and accountability and assessment at the Hechinger Institute seminar for editorial writers in June. She offered a really nice image, saying that, regarding assessment, early childhood education is moving from caring teachers who wore smocks and carried cards in their pocket to write down loving observations about children to be "highly standardized, highly regulated, and much more consistent." She said she didn't think that was necessarily bad but that it's difficult to do and that the necessary assessment tools do not yet exist. Would have been good to talk to someone like Kagan for this story.

Determining whether pre-kindergarten or Head Start or other programs are serving their children well and helping them to develop socially, emotionally, and cognitively is fraught with challenges. Obviously, testing kids by asking them to read and bubble in the answers is silly. To wrestle with this issue, the Pew Charitable Trusts (full disclosure, a financial backer of the Hechinger Institute, which I run), the Joyce Foundation (another backer), and the Foundation for Child Development formed an accountability task force and named Sharon Lynn Kagan, a professor and associate dean at Teachers College, to chair it. The task force issued recommendations this week. A press release is here.

The task force took its task seriously and issued ambitious recommendations that go far beyond just assessment to providing a blue print for a "system" of early childhood education where one currently does not exist. Among the recommendations: develop standards, assessments, data reports, and training programs that are common to state pre-k's, Head Start programs, and so on; build grades K-3 on that same foundation, so that what happens before kindergarten builds toward what happens after kindergarten; make sure the assessments are good; make sure non-English speaking ahd disabled children are assessed properly and included in programs; invest the money to do all this.

I've just sketched the recommendations. Were I still writing for a newspaper or magazine I'd compare what the task force recommended with what my state is already doing in this area. In Florida, for example, kindergartners take a test and the state grades preschools based on the result. What are other states doing or not doing?

I must have been too busy shopping just before Christmas to follow the back-and-forth over the accuracy and fairness of a report in the Dallas Morning News on the early evaluation of a Texas program to raise the quality of Head Start and public and private preschool programs. The newspaper said the evaluation of the first 18 months of the now five-year-old program found that it "has yet to deliver on the investment." That language seems harsh, given that the evaluation report said its design and timing limited its power to make such statements that early in the program. Most of the evaluation had to do with implementation, rather than quality, questions. The evaluators wrote a letter to the Texas Education Agency disavowing the newspaper's conclusion. In fact, the report found that with one year of training provided through the state-funded program teacher performance improved significantly and those who received two years of training improved even more. Although the report acknowledged it was not possible to tell whether overall student performance improved the evaluators did detect gains in three important literacy related skills: rapid letter naming, rapid vocabulary naming, and phonological awareness (an understanding that words can be dissected into discrete sounds).

As journalists, we love rendering judgments, which is an important oress function. But good evaluations are tools for improving programs, as much as they are tools for rendering judgments. It's important that we not overinterpret such work--mistaking recommendations for improvement for fatal flaws. In addition, it's important that we step back and look at what is actually being evaluated. If a report looks at the first 18 months of a program that's operated for almost five years, and if the program today is dramatically different (it served 1,600 students in 03-04 and 27,000 today), caution is warranted.

The Daily Telegraph of London reports on a Cambridge University review of primary education that found schooling there too stressful, rigid, and oriented toward "performativity." English kids start school at age 4. The study found too much emphasis on testing young children.

Jeff Solochek's blog The Gradebook in St. Petersburg says a state auditor's report suggests revising the method by which schools participating in the Voluntary Pre-K program are evaluated to take better account of the gains children make. But linking to this entry also let's me run this photo from the blog, which shows the 2007 "graduating" class of the Li'l Camper's Academy.

An editorial in the Charlotte Observer followed up on the excellent reporting by Ann Doss Helms earlier this month on Bright Beginnings, a program aimed at helping at-risk children succeed later on by giving them preparation for kindergarten and helping them learn to read.

School officials in Charlotte-Mecklenberg told the paper that tracking the children in the program so they could analyze its long term impact had not been on their radar screen.

It should be, noted the editorial, pointing out that any data gathered could shed light on how pre-kindergarten programs can help close the achievement gap -- and illuminate the value of public investment in pre-kindergarten.

It falls to the press sometimes to make such arguments on behalf of the public. At a time when public investment in pre-kindergarten has moved front and center, the public needs details of what works -- and what doesn't.

Information, the editorial noted, is power.

The New York Times' Elissa Gootman reports today on an unannounced initiative in NYC schools to assess children academically starting as early as kindergarten. Schools are not required to participate but the district is encouraging them to do so. Those who sign on can choose among five assessment options, including one in which children are asked to take timed paper and pencil tests. The story is predictable, warning as it does in the first paragraph about "standardized tests of children as young as kindergartners." All tests are "standardized," in the sense that there is some measure or scale to evaluate responses. But reporters and anti-testing folks love to use the word "standardized" to apply to any test, because it implies that children are being forced into a single mold. There's little about the program itself in the article. But it does provide the author a chance to recap a number of controversies related to assessment, and to make sweeping statements about "a Bloomberg penchant for quantifying."

There are legitimate concerns about testing, how to do it well, and the use and misuse of results. But given the small scale of this program and its exploratory purpose the "outrage" the reporter turned up in calling around and asking for reaction seems overblown. A thoughtful discussion of the assessment of young children was done last fall by a committee headed up by Sharon Lynn Kagan of Teachers College. The report of the task force she headed can be found here.

Early Stories posed some questions this week about how pre-kindergarten students are tracked and assessed, a topic that came up in Maryland Governor O'Malley's education speech. Turns out there are many ways, and one revealing answer came from reading an excellent story by John Higgins of the Akron Beacon Journal.

Higgins examined a pilot program that aims to teach parents ways they can get their children ready for school even before they begin kindergarten. The program, sponsored by the W.K. Kellog Foundation, is successful enough that it will soon be replicated in other cities. The program relies on parent "mentors,'' who visit students in their home before they start school. They also provide advice and support to parents on how to help the children acquire pre-reading and other learning skills.

The program exists in a state where students are falling behind even before they enter kindergarten, based on the results of an Ohio assessment test that measures a child's ability to process and understand language and identify letters, rhymes and sounds. The story noted that those who scored echelon lower (In Akron, some 24 percent) tended to need special help when they get to school with everything from holding and gripping a pencil or crayon to interacting with other children. Such skills develop better with guidance and encouragement.

Data from the University of Akron's Institute for Health and Social Policy tracked the children in the program, known as SPARK, and found significant improvement on the same kindergarten assessment tests after they had completed the program.

The effort is not funded by taxpayers, but that did not stop irate readers from posting comments at the bottom of Higgins' story, complaining about the idea of giving parents guidance to help get them ready for school.

What happens to the children ultimately, the story noted, will depend on how involved parents remain with their children's education -- long after kindergarten.

Has kindergarten become too "rigorous?"

EarlyStories could not help but wonder at the meaning behind a recent headline: "Increased academic rigor in kindergarrten questioned.''

The word rigor is one of the new buzz words in education, and it is often misused. The Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media produced an entire guide aimed at understanding academic rigor.

But the idea of a kindergarten being academically "rigorous,'' left much to ponder. Turns out, though, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review , that many schools now expect kindergartners to read and write complete sentences and count to 100 by ones and tens. And of course, the story included the stock phrase EarlyStories sees way too often: "Kindergarten has become the new first grade."

Is it reasonable in the post No Child Left Behind era to expect so much of five and six-year-olds, if indeed those expectations aim high? The topic has been getting a fair amount of debate lately, particularly with the release of "Crisis in the Kindergarten,'' by the Alliance for Childhood -- which included a plea for more play time.

The Tribune Review story noted that "the impact of academic rigor in kindergarten is not yet well-researched.''

But first, what evidence exists that kindergartens throughout the U.S. have indeed become more rigorous? And what specifically does academic rigor look like for the five and six-year-old set? EarlyStories would love to see some examples.

EarlyStories has heard journalists say they don't know how to figure out what is happening when they visit an early childhood classroom. In a room filled with toys and toddlers, it can be difficult to tell what kind of learning, if any, is happening.

That's why it was so refreshing to read the excellent piece by Cathy Grimes of the Daily Press in Newport News, Virgina, which described in great detail how one school district weaves assessment of its littlest learners in its early childhood centers.

The topic, in the era of No Child Left Behind and standards, is extremely important to parents, educators and the public. And any mention of testing little children can arouse opposition and misunderstanding.

"From the moment they walk in the door until the time they leave, students are gauged on their mastery of a wide range of skills outlined in Virginia's Foundation Blocks for Early Learning, sometimes called the PreK Standards of Learning,'' Grimes wrote in a story that truly explains what kind of skills are important for the age group and how they are monitored.

Preschool teachers, Grimes notes," watch for more than budding academic ability. They also keep tabs on the students' social, emotional and physical development. That includes large and small motor skills, self-control and self-reliance, and the ability to work with classmates and communicate.''

The story notes that ""Even activities such as dress-up or playing with puppets are linked to skills.''

In other words, the play is purposeful; designed to help teachers see what students need to progress to where they should be.

Not all early childhood classrooms are as purposeful or as structured as the one Grimes visited. And journalists don't get inside them enough to let the public know what is happening. The story Grimes did -- which will be part of a series -- is aimed at describing what testing, or assessment, looks like across the grades.

If the rest of the stories are as descriptive and telling, the public will get an excellent glimpse at what is happening inside their public school classrooms. The school district should also be commended for giving a reporter access -- such stories cannot happen without it.

EarlyStories managed to miss an excellent series on math education in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that included an interesting look at how math can and should be introduced to the littlest learners.

Talking to young students about math, it turns out, is very important. So is counting, and introducing shapes, all part of "teaching preschoolers in a deep, interesting and systematic way, with lots of activities and without textbooks,'' according to the story, which leans upon a report by the Committee on Early Childhood Mathematics, and the work of Herbert Ginsburg at Teachers College.

Education journalists get caught up in covering math scores and math wars, not realizing what to look for in a high quality early childhood program and how critical it is to math success later on. Locating the excellent series in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette served as a reminder of the good work that can be done on this important topic.

Shameless plug -- the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media has a new guide for journalists on covering math education that includes an extensive interview with Ginsburg on early childhood and math, and is filled with tips, resources and story ideas.

You can download "Math Matters: A Journalist's Guide,'' on the Hechinger Institute website.

Can how well a baby crawl yield information about how well they learn once they reach kindergarten? A recent story from the BBC about new research on the topic in England found that babies who did not reach expected milestones in areas like crawling and holding objects were more likely to have learning and behavior problems once they started school.

The research from London University's Institute of Education looked at 15,000 children in the United Kingdom and concluded that delays in the first year of their lives had a significant impact on their behavior and cognitive development. The researchers also found a gap in ability "between children growing up in persistent poverty and those in families that had never received means-tested benefits."

The researchers noted that similar conclusions had been reached in previous research, but said their new work showed for the first time that development delays -- along with the "psychological characteristics of the mother and the quality of her relationship with the child,'' are tied into both cognitive and behavioral development, even in poor families.

Some of the research is included in a new book by The Policy Press, Children of the 21st century, available here: