So it begins: The Department of Health and Human Services today officially announced Head Start funding opportunities in 97 geographic areas across the country where current grantees have been identified for designation renewal. Applicants, including current grantees, will have 90 days to prepare th... Read Full Post >
My colleague Andy Rotherham has a new TIME column looking at early childhood education and the cuts that states have been making in pre-k in recent years. Andy doesn't mention it, but states have also made sharp cuts in childcare funding, which enables low-income parents to work and helps some of th... Read Full Post >
So, it appears that the grant announcements for the 132 Head Start grants identified for designation renewal (aka, recompetition), which were forecast to be posted on Friday, March 23, have not, as of this blog post, yet been posted. It's possible that this is just an example of the federal governme... Read Full Post >
I feel a little churlish picking at Simon van Zuylen-Wood's recent TNR piece on Head Start recompetition, given that TNR is actually covering early childhood issues that are typically woefully under-covered by the media, and that van Zuylen-Wood actually does unearth some legitimate issues with how ... Read Full Post >
It's awfully telling that the administration's new Education Blueprint: An Economy Built to Last document includes sections on Higher Education and K-12 reform but not early childhood. To be sure, the document gives some lip service to the Early Learning Challenge Fund, but it doesn't list administr... Read Full Post >
Will there be a second round of federal Early Learning Challenge Grants to help states build their early learning and development systems? It's a big open question. In December 2011 the Department of Education awarded grants to 9 states, using $500 out of just under $700 million in funding appropria... Read Full Post >
Marguerite Roza and Paul Hill put the smack down on critics of their work on educational productivity in this post on the CRPE website. In December, a Colorado-based think tank issued a report challenging Secretary Arne Duncan's calls for schools to focus on doing more with less in response to "the ... Read Full Post >
Last year, when the administration announced that it was going to devote $500 million in Race to the Top funds to the Early Learning Challenge Grant competition, a bunch of K-12 reform folks asked me about the "pre-k Race to the Top." And I always had to start out by explaining that, "actually, Ea... Read Full Post >
As states that submitted Early Learning Challenge applications await word of their success or failure later this month, I'm increasingly skeptical that this program is likely to deliver much in the way of lasting results. The reasons, which I lay out in a new piece for The New Republic, will be fami... Read Full Post >
Writing about new Head Start "recompete" regulations on Wednesday, I said that the regs "essentially move Head Start towards a charter-like model, in which continued receipt of federal funding is contingent on demonstrated quality and performance." That's true in the sense that Head Start grants w... Read Full Post >
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