Brookings: Topics - Early Child Development

Early Childhood Education in the Nordic Countries

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:00:00 -0500

Event Information

February 28, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036

In his State of the Union address, President Obama called on states “to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.” As states contemplate adopting universal preschool, the Nordic nations of Denmark, Finland, and Sweden offer interesting comparisons and perspectives based on their experiences in early childhood education. Since all three countries are built around the welfare-state model, they have already been offering universal systems for quite some time. As a result, there is an opportunity to see what these three countries have been doing right and what they are still struggling with.

On February 28, experts from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden joined Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst at Brookings, to compare their different education models with the United States. The Danish Minister for Children and Education, Christine Antorini, offered a keynote address discussing the early childhood education system in Denmark. Following her address, she was joined by Tuula Peltonen a Social Democratic Party Member of the Finnish Parliament and Göran Montan a member of the Riksdag in Sweden.

Obama’s Preschool Plan

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:57:00 -0500

When I began writing reports on preschool a month ago, first with a piece on Head Start and then another on Universal Pre-K, I had an inkling that the Obama administration was considering initiatives in this area. I had no idea that preschool policy would be a centerpiece of the president’s state of the union address. I’ve been popular since. Thank you, Mr. President, for drawing attention to my work, no matter how inadvertently.

The president’s preschool plan deserves serious consideration and analysis, and I’ll attempt that here. But the plan I’ll address is the one described in the fact sheet released by the White House, not the one the president has been talking about. In his state of the union address the president said, “I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America” [emphasis added here and in the next two quotes]. Two days later at a preschool in Decatur, Georgia, he repeated that call, “Let’s make it a national priority to give every child access to a high-quality early education.” And he added a populist appeal to middle class parents, “Michelle and I remember how tough it can be to find good childcare. I remember how expensive it can be, too.” He singled out Georgia and Oklahoma for praise because they “have worked to make a preschool slot available for nearly every parent.”

Bait-and-switch. I’m sure there are a lot of parents who can resonate to the new entitlement the president seems to be offering: taxpayer-funded preschool for all. But whereas the president has been selling his preschool plan to the middle-class parents as universal, i.e., available to them, the White House fact sheet makes it clear that the administration is proposing to work with states to fund expansion of taxpayer-funded pre-K for lower income families. Specifically, the administration’s plan is to share the costs with states that are willing to expand public preschool to reach all four-year olds from families at or below 200% of the poverty line[1] and that expand their half-day kindergarten programs to full day for the same families. So let’s be clear, the president’s plan may have the effect of expanding the middle-class in the future to the extent that early education enhances school readiness and improves the chances for upward mobility of children reared in low income families. But he is not proposing federal funding of public pre-K for the current middle class even though that is what you might think from listening to him. In fact, the Obama administration’s preschool plan is consistent with the federal role in education and human services since the Lyndon Johnson administration: targeted assistance for services to the economically disadvantaged.

Once we get beyond the president’s rhetoric to his actual plan, there are several things I applaud, particularly if I’m allowed to read between the lines.

Targeting. I’ve previously described evidence that suggests a much greater return on public investment for targeted pre-K as compared to universal pre-K, so the administration’s focus on providing financial support for expansion of pre-K access for 4-year-olds from lower income families is consistent with the evidence on both where the need exists for enhancing children’s school readiness and on how to maximize bang for the buck.
Data and assessment systems. If we have learned anything from more than a decade of rigorous research on K-12 public education it is that quality varies widely by classroom and school. For instance, variations in classroom quality in kindergarten are significantly related to college attendance rates and labor market earnings.[2] Although the research is not as causally rigorous, we also have evidence that variation in the quality of adult-child interactions in child care settings for preschoolers is associated with differences in cognitive/academic development that persist at least through adolescence.[3] If we don’t collect data and carry out assessments that yield information on the quality of the out-of-home settings in which young children are being cared for, neither states, the federal government, nor more importantly parents will be able to take the actions that are necessary to avoid low-quality services. It remains to be seen what types of data and assessment systems the Obama administration has in mind. It will be important to include observational measures of classroom interactions, assessments of child outcomes (yes, 4-year-olds can be tested without stress to them and with reliable results), and surveys of parental satisfaction.
Curriculum. There is good evidence that children’s pre-academic skills including vocabulary, letter recognition, and phonemic awareness are strongly associated with academic outcomes during elementary school and that children from low-income families are far behind their more economically advantaged peers on these skills at school entry.[4] There is also strong evidence that the curriculum used in classrooms for 4-year-olds from low-income families has a significant impact on the development of these pre-academic skills.[5] Thus, the administration’s commitment to linking federal funding to the requirement that preschool programs have a “rigorous curriculum” is important and evidence-based.
Curtains for Head Start (as we know it). A casual reader of the administration’s preschool fact sheet might think that Head Start is a winner. After all, there is a bulleted, bolded heading: “Under the President’s proposal, investment in the federal Head Start program will continue to grow”. But a closer reading suggests that the administration’s plan to support the expansion of state pre-K programs for 4-year-olds will be at the expense of Head Start, which serves the same population. The administration’s plan is to expand Head Start services for children from birth to age 3, and to do this through a “partnership program” with states and communities. Traditional Head Start is not administered in a partnership with states and communities, does not serve children from birth to three, and it does not work in terms of getting low-income children ready for school. The administration knows that Head Start isn’t getting the job done and is proposing a bold move in a new direction. Hurray if they can push this through in the face of what will likely be fierce opposition from the Head Start lobby.

Nothing is perfect – and certainly not the president’s preschool plan. Areas in which the administration has it wrong or has left out something very important include:

Teacher credentials and pay. The president proposes that all states would staff their pre-K programs have “well-trained teachers, who are paid comparably to K-12 staff”. There is no way politically to pay pre-K teachers on the same scale as K-12 teachers unless they have comparable credentials, so what the president is really proposing is that pre-K teachers be required to have a 4-year college degree and jump through the same credentialing hoops as K-12 teachers. But we know that the degree and the traditional requirements for being credentialed as a teacher have little or nothing to do with the quality of interactions in preschool classrooms.[6] Neither does teacher salaries.[7] Thus requiring states to credential and pay pre-K teachers as they credential and pay K-12 teachers assures only two things: high costs and supportive teacher unions.
Local school districts in charge. Under the administration’s plan federal dollars would flow to states based on their share of four-year olds from lower income families and “funds would be distributed to local school districts and other partner providers”. We’ll have to wait and see what “other partner providers” means, but my reading is that the intent of the president’s proposal is that money would flow to states and that states would fund school districts to expand their school-based programs downward in age to include pre-K for 4-year-olds. In far too many cases these would be the same school districts that are responsible for the terrible public schools that will fail to educate the very children the president’s preschool proposal is intended to benefit. Further, research shows no association between the quality of classroom interactions and whether a classroom is physically part of a public school, although teachers in classrooms within public schools are predictably paid more.[8] When combined with the administration’s proposals on teacher credentials and pay, this looks like a policy designed to appeal to those who benefit from the status quo in American public education. I would urge an administration that clearly understands the value of charter schools in breaking up the monopoly of failing traditional public schools to think again about a plan for preschool that would make school districts the principal or sole provider of federally subsidized pre-K services.
Choice. The administration’s plan is silent on whether and how parents will be able to exercise choice in where they send their child to pre-K. Choice is important for many reasons, including its importance to parents, who are used to exercising it for preschool. It also impacts program performance and innovation because it allows for variety in programs and competition among providers. There are also equity issues in that it is typically the poorest parents who can’t escape the destiny of their zip code when it comes to their children’s schooling. This is as true of state pre-K as it is of K-12: classrooms that serve children from the most disadvantaged homes have less experienced teachers and lower quality instruction than classrooms that serve more advantaged students.[9] The only way to prevent this is to give parents the right to vote with their feet and send their child to the preschool they prefer rather than the preschool to which they are assigned. The nation is likely to see much better outcomes over the long term if the federal government provides significant incentives for states that accept the federal pre-K subsidy to allow a variety of organizations to provide pre-K programs and permit parents to choose among them. The requirements for data, assessment, and program evaluation that are part of the administration’s plan should enable parents to shop wisely if that information is made available to them, and allow state-level program overseers to disqualify weak providers from participating in the program.
Lack of integration with other federal funding streams. The federal government funds many programs that are intended to improve the education of young children. Among the largest are Head Start, the Child Care and Development Fund, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which permits expenditures on pre-K programs), and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act programs for infants and toddlers as well as preschoolers. There is 15 to 20 billion dollars in annual expenditure on early education through these programs. This is more than the federal government spends through Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to support the education of the disadvantaged in all of K-12. At the very least, the administration should push for common data, assessment, and program evaluation approaches, and a unified system for providing information to parents on center quality across these funding streams. A bolder direction would be to combine these funds into a single state block grant to support the early education of vulnerable young children.
Do no harm. Some children need publicly supported out-of-home care to be prepared for school and life. But the supposition that all children need or benefit from these services is not supported by research. For example, the federal Child Care and Development Fund, which provides relatively low levels of financial subsidy to young mothers on welfare to purchase formal child care when they obtain employment, appears to negatively impact the academic outcomes of the children of participating mothers.[10] The provision of universal child care services in one province of Canada appears to have encouraged mothers who would otherwise have cared for their children at home to move those children into organized child care settings, again with negative impacts on child outcomes.[11] Further, a large body of research demonstrates negative relationships between hours spent in non-relative care during early childhood and undesirable social outcomes. For instance, adolescents who experience more hours of non-relative child care across their first 4½ years report significantly more risk taking and impulsivity at age 15.[12] It is important for policy makers, include those in the Obama administration, to be mindful that not every preschool-aged child needs to be in an organized preschool setting to be ready for school and that there are risks for some young children in spending considerable time away from their parents in those settings.

Research on small scale high intensity programs such as Perry and Abecedarian has shown us the great potential of early education to improve the lives of children, whereas research on contemporary large scale pre-K interventions, including Head Start and the Georgia universal pre-K program, has introduced a needed dose of realism into expectations for what publicly funded pre-K programs can achieve. There is no question that gaps in school readiness between children from advantaged vs. at-risk backgrounds are far too large and need to be reduced if the nation is to achieve the education excellence it needs to serve its citizens and to compete in the world economy. If the Obama administration is willing to offer a preschool plan that keeps parents in the driver’s seat in terms of choosing where to send their child, puts states in charge of administering the program and provides them with general guidelines rather than detailed prescriptions, and redirects existing resources rather than calling for large new expenditures there is a significant possibility of bipartisan support in Congress. This is an exciting time for preschool education.

[1] The 2013 federal poverty line for a household of three people living in the contiguous 48 states is $19,530.

[2] http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/STAR.pdf

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2938040/

[4] http://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/NELPReport09.pdf

[5] http://ies.ed.gov/ncer/pubs/20082009/pdf/20082009_rev.pdf

[6] http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2007-02875-002

[7]http://www.leg.state.vt.us/PreKEducationStudyCommittee/Documents/impact%20of%20teacher%20and%20classroom%20quality.pdf

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] http://www.chrisherbst.net/files/Download/C._Herbst_Subsidies_Child_Development.pdf

[11] http://www.nber.org/papers/w18785

[12] http://nieer.org/pdf/Effects_of_Early_Child_Care_Extend_to_Age_15.pdf

Authors

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

Assessing Universal Pre-K Programs in Oklahoma

Ted Gayer — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:39:00 -0500

As President Obama continues to roll out his proposal for universal preschool as outlined in his State of the Union address, it is worth looking at results of these types of programs in states that already run such programs.

In a paper with Wiliam Gormley (Journal of Human Resources, 2005 (pdf)) and another with Gormley, Phillips, and Dawson (Developmental Psychology, 2005(pdf)), we studied the impact of Oklahoma's universal pre-K program on children's readiness for kindergarten. In the JHR study, which relied on the results of a school-readiness assessment developed by Tulsa Public Schools, We found that attending pre-school boosted school readiness for Hispanic and black students but not for whites. We also found that pre-school had a bigger effect on school readiness among students who qualified for free lunch at school, than those who did not. In the other study, which relied on a standardized and widely-used assessment of school readiness, we found that attending pre-school improved school readiness for students across all racial and income groups.

Authors

Ted Gayer

Improving the Quality of Basic Education for the Future Youth of Yemen Post Arab Spring

Takako Yuki and Yuriko Kameyama — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:19:00 -0500

This paper looks at the issue of the quality of education in Yemen. It uses micro-data from TIMSS and from surveys conducted in underserved rural areas, as well as macro-level policy information from the System Assessment for Better Education Results (SABER) database. The analysis indicates that the availability of teachers and resources at schools, the monitoring and supervision of schools and parental involvement in schooling are important factors for better learning outcomes and avoiding trade-offs between expansion of enrollment and quality of learning. The paper suggests three types of reforms that can be carried out in the short run. First, it is necessary to systematically monitor teachers’ actual deployment and attendance in order to link the information with salary management and incentives. Second, there is a need to refine and scale up the existing implementation and monitoring mechanism for school grants to reward schools and communities that improve access for disadvantaged students and girls, and enhance the quality of learning. Third, there is a need to enhance transparency and accountability of school resources and results by disseminating a simple database that would include trends of basic indicators to monitor and compare progress at the school, district and governorate level.

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Authors

Takako Yuki
Yuriko Kameyama

Image Source: © Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi / Reuters

The Education Link: Why Learning is Central to the Post-2015 Global Development Agenda

Anda Adams — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:05:00 -0500

INTRODUCTION

With fewer than three years until the planned end-date of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), attention is rapidly turning to what will follow. The elaboration of the next global development agenda is a complex, multi-pronged process that is academic, political and practical, involving experts from a myriad of social and economic sectors and representing a cross-section of constituencies. While the formal U.N. process is still in the early stages, the ongoing discourse (predominantly occurring in the global north, but not exclusively) has introduced several potential frameworks for this agenda. This paper describes the leading frameworks proposed for the post-2015 global development agenda and discusses how education and learning fit within each of those frameworks. While many within the education community are working to develop a cohesive movement to advance an “access plus learning” agenda, it remains equally important to engage proactively with the broader development community to ensure that education fits within the agreed upon overarching organizing framework.

The frameworks described below represent a snapshot of current thinking in 2012. On the road to 2015, the education community will need to refine and sharpen its thinking with respect to how learning is incorporated into the prevailing framework. The seven frameworks that will be addressed in this paper are:

Ending Absolute Poverty
Equity and Inclusion
Economic Growth and Jobs
Getting to Zero
Global Minimum Entitlements
Sustainable Development
Well-Being and Quality of Life

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Authors

Anda Adams

Image Source: © Adriane Ohanesian / Reuters

Learning First: A Research Agenda for Improving Learning in Low-Income Countries

Daniel A. Wagner, Katie M. Murphy and Haley De Korne — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:27:00 -0500

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Parents, educators, government ministers and policymakers in all contexts and countries around the world are concerned with learning and how to improve it. There are many reasons for this, but none is more important than the fact that learning is at the heart of success at the individual, community and global levels. Learning First is the title of this report, with the strong implication that learning should be the foremost goal of education policies worldwide.

The present review seeks not only to explain why this is the case but also focuses on what we need to know—that is, what research is needed—in order to improve learning in the decades to come, particularly among those children most in need. This question is addressed in the following six sections.

Learning Goals and Research. The first section begins with a historical synopsis of international education goals put forward in 1990 at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien (Thailand), in 2000 at the Education for All conference in Dakar, and later in 2000 as a part of the UN Millennium Development Goals for 2015. In 2011, the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution published A Global Compact on Learning: Taking Action on Education in Developing Countries, which stated that there is a “global learning crisis—which affects children and youth who are out of school with limited learning opportunities and those who are in school but not learning the skills they need for their futures.” The present review of learning research in low-income countries follows from that report. The overall purpose is to explore the most pressing learning issues today that require further research attention in the years to come.
Learning Definitions and Contexts. This section reviews how the field of education has defined learning over the years. Here, learning is defined as a modification of behavior due to experience—such as in knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. Three main principles of effective learning are suggested: individual active involvement, social participation, and meaningful engagement. As a way to emphasize the importance of learning contexts, three individual stories—Illa, a four-year-old Quechua-speaking girl in Peru; Pawan, an eight-year-old primary school student in urban India; and Rachida, a young illiterate woman in rural Morocco—are provided in order to better explain the importance of learning as a culturally specific phenomenon. These stories help to illustrate a more general learning framework, encompassing the relationship between two dimensions of learning—its processes and contexts. A discussion follows concerning the need to disaggregate learners and their learning contexts—between countries and within countries—as a way to overcome frequent and simplistic generalizations about how the “average” child learns.
Global Change and the Contexts of Learning. This section considers the issue of global change on how learning and learning contexts are being transformed around the world. For example, researchers need to pay more attention to the impact of migration on children’s learning and on educational systems more broadly. In each instance of translocation, children confront the challenges of adapting to a new environment that may include different languages, dialects or cultures within the nonformal learning contexts of daily life. Similarly, in formal education contexts, student migrants have to cope with contrasts in culture, lifestyle and language of schooling, and demonstrate skills and achievement that may vary dramatically with their culture of origin. Other changes due to globalization include increased multilingualism in schools, growing overcrowding in classrooms, inability to keep up with teacher training, changes in intergenerational learning, and the growing importance of 21st-century skills. Based on these observations, it is suggested that learning contexts and needs should be understood as a shifting target.

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Authors

Daniel A. Wagner
Katie M. Murphy
Haley De Korne

Image Source: © Soe Zeya Tun / Reuters

Can Academic Standards Boost Literacy and Close the Achievement Gap?

Ron Haskins, Richard Murnane, Isabel V. Sawhill and Catherine Snow — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:00:00 -0400

Abstract: Good jobs in the nation’s twenty-first-century economy require advanced literacy skills such as categorizing, evaluating, and drawing conclusions from written texts. The adoption of the Common Core State Standards by nearly all the states, combined with tough literacy assessments that are now in the offing, will soon reveal that literacy skills of average students fall below international standards and that the gap in literacy skills between students from advantaged and disadvantaged families is huge. The authors offer a plan to help states develop and test programs that improve the quality of teaching, especially in high-poverty schools, and thereby both improve the literacy skills of average students and narrow the literacy gap.

U.S. schools are struggling to enable students, especially those from poor families, to attain the advanced literacy skills required by the twenty-first-century American economy. One approach to enhancing schools’ efficacy in this area is improved educational standards. Standards are routine in American life. Sports have them; businesses have them; professions have them. Standards are useful in clarifying the knowledge, skills, and competencies that society expects from individuals and organizations. Society also needs a way to determine whether the standards have been met, usually through testing, certification, licensing, or inspection systems. And a respected body of experts must be responsible for maintaining the integrity of the standards.

It is no surprise, then, that standards have become a key part of American primary and secondary education in recent decades. As mandated by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, every state now has standards that specify the skills and knowledge in literacy (and mathematics, which we do not address here) that children should have at specific grade levels. States also have standards that students must satisfy to graduate from high school. In the majority of states, these include passing state-specific English language arts and math exams. Now a new set of national standards has been adopted by nearly every state. These tough standards hold promise for playing an important role in an overall strategy for improving literacy skills for all students, including those from poor families who suffer from a striking literacy deficit. However, as we explain below, the new standards are only one step down a long road.

The Common Core State Standards

Thanks to an ongoing effort by the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the fifty separate sets of state standards are being supplanted by a single set. Although we strongly support the standards movement in general and the Common Core State Standards in particular, our object here is to clarify the nation’s literacy problem, to build a case that standards are an important part—but only one part—of solving the literacy problem, and to briefly review the policies that must accompany standards if they are to enable the nation’s schools to make progress in boosting literacy, especially among children from poor families. We conclude with recommendations about using federal dollars to help all children, but especially those from poor families, meet the Common Core standards.

As shown in a recently released issue of The Future of Children, “Literacy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” America has a literacy problem—actually, two literacy problems. The basic cause of both is that the literacy skills demanded of Americans by today’s economy far exceed those required only fifty years ago. It is no longer sufficient to define reading as merely the ability to recognize words and decode text. The American economy, responding to technological advances and international competition, has shed blue-collar and administrative support jobs that involve simple operations and minimal reasoning skills while adding jobs that require the ability to select, categorize, evaluate, and draw conclusions from written texts. Think of twenty-first-century literacy as reading plus.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the reading skills of American children are inadequate for the heightened literacy demands of the twenty-first-century economy. Nor do American students perform well on international test score comparisons. U.S. students score lower in reading than students from fourteen other countries on the Programme for International Student Assessment conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. That is literacy problem number one—the literacy skills of the average American student do not match international standards. And although the NAEP scores of recent cohorts of black and Hispanic U.S. students have improved, the gap in average reading skills between students from high- and low-income families has widened. That’s literacy problem number two—in a nation committed to equality of opportunity and economic mobility, a widening literacy gap between students from rich and poor families is a national affront.

Enter the Common Core State Standards. In 2008, at least partly in response to the confusion created by the fifty-one sets of state standards and fifty-one definitions of proficiency that resulted from the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the NGA and the CCSSO set out to work with state educators, researchers, and others to develop detailed common standards in English and mathematics for grades K through 12. The standards, released in 2010, have now been formally adopted by forty-five states and the District of Columbia. The Thomas G. Fordham Institute compared the Common Core State Standards with state standards across the nation and concluded that the Common Core reading standards are more demanding than those of thirty-seven states. States with rigorous standards and the best NAEP scores have embraced the Common Core.

Beyond the Common Core

The impressive procedure followed by the NGA and the CCSSO, combined with the Fordham study, justify the conclusion that the Common Core is an excellent set of standards. If American children were to master the Common Core, they would fare better in international comparisons, the American economy would receive a boost, and the literacy achievement gap between disadvantaged and advantaged children might narrow somewhat—and in any case, disadvantaged children would boost their literacy skills, giving them a better opportunity to compete in the twenty-first-century economy.

But not so fast. Even the best possible standards cannot raise student literacy unless they are part of a larger strategy. Excellent standards are no more than a first step. Research by Grover Whitehurst and by Tom Loveless of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, for example, finds virtually no relationship between the quality of state education standards and the achievement test scores of students in the respective states. These and other studies offer little support for the expectation that even the fine standards developed by the NGA and the CCSSO will, by themselves, improve student learning.

Several articles in the new Future of Children issue identify additional elements of a strategy to boost student achievement in literacy and close the literacy gap. At least four elements stand out. The first is adoption by states of assessments now being designed to accompany the Common Core. These assessments, which will test how well students are performing relative to the Common Core standards, including those in literacy, are now under development by two groups of states with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. The second is a common system for reporting results that will provide schools, parents, and communities with detailed knowledge about how their students are performing relative to the Common Core and to other communities. The third is a better curriculum that is aligned with the Common Core for every grade and every subject. Above and beyond these three, almost all researchers and practitioners agree, the single most important element in any strategy aiming to boost student literacy and close the literacy gap is improving the quality of teaching. It follows that institutions preparing teachers must undergo a major retooling to produce graduates who know the Common Core, who can teach challenging curricula, and who have developed skills requisite to helping students achieve the standards. Preparing teachers who can help disadvantaged children master the standards will undoubtedly require even greater efforts by schools of education. Similarly, teacher in-service education will need to become much stronger than the current mostly ineffective professional development programs.

In our view, the nation is now making significant progress on only the first of these four elements of a comprehensive strategy that would, together with the Common Core standards, boost average literacy achievement and close the gap. The two groups of states working with assessment firms to develop tests that gauge whether children are actually meeting the Common Core standards are expected to have quality measurement instruments ready by 2014. Then comes the grueling political challenge of developing common performance indicators acceptable both to states like Massachusetts, whose students do quite well on assessments, and other states like Mississippi, whose students’ scores are near the bottom.

If all the states that have adopted the Common Core also adopt the new assessments, a major flaw in NCLB will be resolved. Under pressure from NCLB to show that they could meet its standards, states developed tests and standards that made it easy for students to score as “proficient,” thereby overestimating student performance and obscuring the real comparative information about school, system, and state performance levels. With a common test and indicator system aligned with the Common Core—ideally a system adopted voluntarily by most or even nearly all states—the problem of inflated and misleading tests and indicators will be diminished (although teaching to the test in ways that narrow the curriculum will likely remain a problem).

One virtually certain outcome of the Common Core and the assessments now under development deserves special attention. If states adopt the new assessments that measure students’ mastery of the Common Core literacy standards, the results will show a much larger literacy gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students than revealed by current achievement tests. The more demanding Common Core standards in literacy, based on reading comprehension, conceptual knowledge, and vocabulary as well as accurate and fluent reading, combined with accurate assessments of these skills, will reveal how far disadvantaged children lag behind on these more advanced literacy skills. This finding will ratchet up pressure on states and local school systems to oppose accurate assessments and may reduce the number of states that agree to use the new assessments. Similarly, the light shed on education outcomes may convince states that adopt the new assessments to abandon their use once they see how their students’ poor performance inflames public opinion.

Beyond Standards: What to Do

The solution to the nation’s literacy problems is adopting policies that improve schools, not abandoning accurate assessment instruments. After all, clarity about the nature and magnitude of a problem is critical to solving it. We recommend a strategy, based on recent research, that holds promise for helping students, especially those from poor families, achieve the new level of literacy required for success in the nation’s twenty-first-century economy.

A host of studies document what most parents already know, namely, that good teachers have substantial impacts on student learning. Indeed, we now know that having good teachers for several consecutive years leads to cumulative increases in learning by students, including students from disadvantaged families. Augmenting this already persuasive research is a recent study by Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff showing that good teachers raise adult earnings, arguably the most important outcome of education in a society that for the past three decades has been characterized by large increases in inequality and by wage stagnation among workers at the bottom of the income distribution. As a result of this body of research, there is widespread agreement that good teachers can boost learning, increase test scores, and improve life outcomes. Thus, in anticipation that a very large gap in literacy between advantaged and disadvantaged students will be revealed by the new assessments, we stress the importance of improving teaching to help disadvantaged students learn these more complex literacy skills.

The task will be daunting. Numerous studies and surveys show that teachers in schools with high concentrations of students from poor families tend to be ineffective. As studies by Susanna Loeb and her colleagues find, the typical pattern in high-poverty schools is that as teachers accumulate experience and seniority, they tend to exercise their option to move to schools in low-poverty areas, thus creating a continuous inflow of new, inexperienced teachers into high-poverty schools. And a frequently replicated research finding is that the work days of beginning teachers are dominated by classroom management problems, thus causing their students to miss out on many opportunities for learning.

How can high-poverty schools attract and retain better teachers and create the collaborative work environment required for success? Several recent studies provide important clues. First, many teachers leave high-poverty schools because of poor social conditions for their work. Such schools lack the strong leadership, culture of collaboration and shared responsibility for learning, and resources needed to teach their challenging and needy students. Second, teachers, especially novices, are more effective when their grade-level colleagues are effective teachers. Third, the current system of basing teachers’ pay solely on educational credentials, years of teaching experience, and participation in professional development activities does not reward excellent teaching. Fourth, better pay does make a difference in attracting and retaining teachers in high-poverty schools, though it does not compensate for working conditions in which they feel ineffective.

An implication of these findings is that combinations of incentives and accountability can attract teams of effective teachers to high-poverty schools and create the conditions for their success. What is not clear as yet is just what the most effective combinations of incentives and accountability will be. For example, will it be less costly to attract effective teachers to high-poverty schools as individuals or as parts of teams? Is it more effective to hire a school principal and let her select teachers or to recruit a team of effective teachers and let them choose the principal? Will the availability of particular types of professional development attract teachers to high-poverty schools? These are just a few of the many questions that will arise in the process of designing initiatives to improve teaching in high-poverty schools.

We propose a plan to answer these and related questions as well as a way to pay for the plan. The core of the plan is for the federal government, redirecting a significant portion of funds from Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, to initiate a competitive grant program that encourages school systems to design and implement programs to improve teaching and learning in high-poverty schools. As outlined below, to be eligible for an award, the program must combine incentives and accountability.

The system for rating proposals should favor those in which the components, such as curriculum consistent with the Common Core standards, professional development approach, and teacher compensation strategy, have a favorable research base. To assure a balance between evidence-based components and innovative components, proposals that contain elements that show promise but do not yet meet high program evaluation standards, such as those promulgated by the Institute of Education Sciences, would also be eligible for funding. Each proposal must also show how the school system will continuously evaluate the impact of its plan on student literacy scores as measured by the new tests being developed in association with the Common Core. Thus, each school system plan will be evidence-based in two senses: its major parts will be consistent with what is known from the best research available, and its impacts on student literacy skills, especially those of students from disadvantaged families, will be continuously evaluated. The plans can include evidence-based elements that focus on basic reading skills such as those recently reviewed by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy and the Social Genome Project but must also feature elements that promise to improve the teaching of advanced literacy skills, especially in high-poverty schools.

The Obama administration is well-prepared to implement an evidence-based initiative of this sort because senior officials in the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and the executive agencies are now implementing six evidence-based initiatives in areas such as teen pregnancy, infant development and parenting, workforce training, and other aspects of education. These initiatives have provided senior administration officials with a wealth of experience in working with Congress to plan and fund evidence-based competitive grant programs.

We are confident that the coming assessment of whether state education systems are meeting the Common Core standards will reveal an expanded literacy achievement gap between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families. The cause will be the new twenty-first-century literacy standards that are specified in the Common Core and that, we assume, will be accurately measured by the assessments scheduled to be implemented in 2014. Rather than wait for the expanded literacy achievement gap to be revealed, U.S. policymakers and educators should begin now to shrink the gap. Based on solid research that supports a strategy centered on improving the quality of teaching in high-poverty schools, our plan would use funds redirected from Title I to help local school systems aggressively implement new programs based on both research-tested and innovative components that hold promise for improving the literacy, and thus improving the life chances, of students from poor families. Once implemented, these new programs could serve as models for school systems throughout the United States. Unless strong new reforms such as these are adopted, the nation will yet again discover that its schools are not meeting the needs of its disadvantaged students.

Additional Reading

Jon Baron and Kerry Searle Grannis, “Improving Reading Achievement for Disadvantaged Children” (Washington: Social Genome Project, Brookings Institution, 2012).

Sheila B. Carmichael and others, The State of State Standards—and the Common Core—in 2010 (Washington: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2010).

Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoff, “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood,” Working Paper 17699 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2011).

Charles Clotfelter and others, “Would Higher Salaries Keep Teachers in High-Poverty Schools? Evidence from a Policy Intervention in North Carolina,” Journal of Public Economics 92, nos. 5–6 (2008): 1352–70.

Common Core State Standards Initiative, www.corestandards.org.

Arne Duncan, “Beyond the Bubble Tests: The Next Generation of Assessments,” Prepared remarks at Achieve’s American Diploma Project Leadership Team Meeting, Alexandria, Va., September 2, 2010.

Eric A. Hanushek, “The Failure of Input-Based Schooling Policies,” Economic Journal 113 (2003): F64–F98.

Ron Haskins and Susanna Loeb, “A Plan to Improve the Quality of Teaching in American Schools,” Policy Brief for Excellence in the Classroom (Princeton, N.J.: Future of Children 17, no. 1, Spring 2007). www.futureofchildren.org/futureofchildren/publications/journals/journal_details/index.xml?journalid=34.

C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann, “Teaching Students and Teaching Each Other: The Importance of Peer Learning for Teachers,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1, no. 4 (2009): 85–108.

Susan M. Johnson, Matthew A. Kraft, and John P. Papay, “How Context Matters in High-Need Schools: The Effects of Teachers’ Working Conditions on their Professional Satisfaction and their Students’ Achievement,” Teachers College Record 114, no. 10 (2012).

Susanna Loeb, Cecilia Rouse, and Anthony Shorris, editors, “Excellence in the Classroom,” Future of Children 17, no. 1 (Spring 2007).

Tom Loveless, “How Well Are American Students Learning?” The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education 3, no. 1 (February 2012).

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, PISA 2009 Results: What Students Know and Can Do: Student Performance in Reading, Mathematics and Science: Volume 1 (2010).

Sean F. Reardon, “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations,” in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality and Uncertain Life Chances of Low-Income Children, edited by Greg J. Duncan and Richard Murnane (New York: Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2011).

Jennifer L. Steele, Richard J. Murnane, and John B. Willett, “Do Financial Incentives Help Low-Performing Schools Attract and Keep Academically Talented Teachers? Evidence from California,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 29, no. 3 (2010): 451–78.

What Works Clearinghouse, “Procedures and Standards Handbook” (Version 2.1) (Washington: Institute of Education Sciences, 2010).

Grover Whitehurst, “Don’t Forget Curriculum,” Brown Center Letters on Education (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2009).

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Authors

Ron Haskins
Richard Murnane
Isabel V. Sawhill
Catherine Snow

Publication: The Future of Children

Image Source: © Rick Wilking / Reuters

Putting Education First in Timor-Leste

Justin W. van Fleet — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 12:15:00 -0400

Last week, the UN Secretary-General, accompanied by his Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown and the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, visited Timor-Leste on an education tour. The trip came in advance of a major announcement in September of the Secretary-General’s new global education initiative, Education First, which aims to raise the political profile of education and accelerate progress towards the 2015 education goals and beyond.

The scenario in Timor-Leste was all too familiar for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who grew up during war in South Korea knowing firsthand the power of the international community’s support for education. “All I had for a classroom was the tree we gathered around. We had no chalkboards or textbooks. I know education deprivation first-hand. I also know the power of education to transform,” Ban said in his speech to school children during his trip.

At first glance, Timor-Leste’s 85 percent primary school enrollment rate would make it appear to be post-conflict education success. However, a closer look reveals the deeper challenges in the education system that will hold back social and economic progress if unaddressed, making the case for international support for education in post-conflict settings such as Timor-Leste.

Challenges Facing Timor-Leste’s Education System

With one out of every two adults unable to read and nearly two-thirds of children suffering from stunting, the early and most crucial years of a child’s development in Timor-Leste are not suited towards preparing a child to learn and thrive in society. Only one out of 10 children have the chance to go to preschool; the first time most children step into a classroom is at the age of six or seven. Upon entering school, chances are the language of instruction is different from the language they speak at home, further complicating the learning process.

For those who stay in school, the outcomes are not promising. Teachers are not adequately trained and face challenging circumstances ranging from poor facilities and materials to overcrowded classes. More than 70 percent of children cannot read a single word in Portuguese or Tetum at the end of first grade; 40 percent cannot read a single word after two full years of school. Repetition rates are high in the first three grades of school, comprising more than half of the children enrolled. And only 37 percent of children will continue on to secondary school.

New elections, new leaders, renewed commitment to education

There is hope for Timor-Leste. The country has made great strides since years of conflict when nearly 85-90 percent of the education infrastructure was destroyed. As a country that has just celebrated its tenth year of independence, the new leadership agrees that investing in human potential is essential to building a sustainable and prosperous future. The country has recently completed an education strategy through 2030. The newly elected president, prime minister, minister of education and others all pledged to strengthen their efforts to mobilize internal resources to support education and look at what policies can be put into place to reach the most marginalized, achieve universal access, expand preschool coverage, and improve teacher training and overall learning outcomes across the education system.

In the Secretary-General’s public announcement of Education First at the University of Timor-Leste, Director-General Bokova challenged youth to be part of the domestic development plan of the country. Special Envoy Brown encouraged the university students to consider going into the teaching profession to help build the human capacity of the country.

The Role of the International Community

Amidst the internal commitments of the people of Timor-Leste, there are questions about the role of the international community in supporting the post-conflict nation. Many international organizations have pledged and implemented support: UNICEF and UNESCO have active projects on the ground in fostering child-friendly classrooms and adult training and literacy, among other initiatives. Portugal and Australia are the two largest bilateral donors to the country, contributing $14 million and $9 million respectively, to education through official development assistance. Timor-Leste requested $5 million from the Global Partnership for Education and received a grant of $2.8 million over three years in December 2011.

But much more needs to be done in terms of international support and collaboration with the government in order to help Timor-Leste achieve its ambitious education strategy. Given the government’s agenda, commitment and readiness to increase domestic support for education, the international community should do the same to help accelerate progress. While the typical incentives for business engagement in emerging economies may not exist in Timor-Leste, the support of the business community could help catalyze progress in several areas of the country’s education agenda. Likewise, foundations and nontraditional donors could play a role in supporting Timor-Leste.

When announcing Education First, the Secretary-General referred to creating a “bold big push” for education. And a bold push is what is needed. Actors from across sectors and disciplines must come together to support countries like Timor-Leste who have developed strong national plans and demonstrate the political commitment. It is now up to the international community to step to the plate with the additional financial, coordination and capacity support necessary to help countries like Timor-Leste reach their ambitions.

Authors

Justin W. van Fleet

Image Source: BEAWIHARTA

Is Retaining Students in the Early Grades Self-Defeating?

Martin R. West — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 09:30:00 -0400

Whether a child is a proficient reader by the third grade is an important indicator of their future academic success. Indeed, substantial evidence indicates that unless students establish basic reading skills by that time, the rest of their education will be an uphill struggle. This evidence has spurred efforts to ensure that all students receive high-quality reading instruction in and even before the early grades. It has also raised the uncomfortable question of how to respond when those efforts fail to occur or prove unsuccessful: Should students who have not acquired a basic level of reading proficiency by grade three be promoted along with their peers? Or should they be retained and provided with intensive interventions before moving on to the next grade?

Several states and school districts have recently enacted policies requiring that students who do not demonstrate basic reading proficiency at the end of third grade be retained and provided with remedial services. Similar policies are under debate in state legislatures around the nation. Although these policies aim to provide incentives for educators and parents to ensure that students meet performance expectations, they can also be expected to increase the incidence of retention in the early grades. Their enactment has therefore renewed a longstanding debate about retention’s consequences for low-achieving students.

Critics point to a massive literature indicating that retained students achieve at lower levels, are more likely to drop out of high school, and have worse social-emotional outcomes than superficially similar students who are promoted. Yet the decision to retain a student is typically made based on subtle considerations involving ability, maturity, and parental involvement that researchers are unable to incorporate into their analyses. As a result, the disappointing outcomes of retained students may well reflect the reasons they were held back in the first place rather than the consequences of being retained.

Recent studies that isolate the causal impact of retaining low-achieving students cast further doubt on the conventional view that retention leads to negative outcomes. Much of this work has focused on Florida, which since 2003 has required that many third graders scoring at the lowest performance level on the state reading test be retained and provided with intensive remediation. Students retained under Florida’s test-based promotion policy perform at higher levels than their promoted peers in both reading and math for several years after repeating third grade; they are also less likely to be retained in a subsequent grade. Although it is too soon to analyze the policy’s effects on students’ ultimate educational attainment and labor-market success, this new evidence suggests that policies encouraging the retention and remediation of struggling readers can be a useful complement to broader efforts to reduce the number of students reading below grade level.

Background on Grade Retention

Even in the absence of test-based promotion policies, the extent to which America’s school systems have retained low-performing students in the same grade has varied considerably over time. Proponents of retention have long argued that low-performing students stand to benefit from an improved match of their ability to that of their peers and from the opportunity for additional instruction before confronting more challenging material. They also contend that the threat of being held back and the creation of grade cohorts that are more homogenous in ability could yield benefits even for higher-performing students. In the 1960s, however, concerns that retention hinders the social, emotional, and cognitive development of at-risk students led many educators to call for students to be advanced to the next grade with their peers regardless of their academic performance. Although systematic data are scarce, this push for so-called “social promotion” appears to have reduced the incidence of retention nationwide. Conversely, retention rates increased with the advent of standards-based reform in the 1980s and again in some school systems in the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

The most comprehensive information on the incidence of retention at present comes from just-released data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). In 2009-10, OCR for the first time included the number of students retained at each grade level as an element of the data it collects at regular intervals from a large share of the nation’s school districts. Although not a complete census, the nearly 7,000 school districts that participated in the OCR data collection serve more than 85 percent of students in American public schools.

The OCR data indicate that 2.3 percent of all students in these districts were retained in the same grade at the close of the 2009-10 school year. However, much of this overall rate reflects retention in high school, when many students fail to accumulate enough credits to advance their academic standing but often repeat only specific courses as a result. Roughly one percent of students were retained in grades K-8, with the largest numbers repeating kindergarten or the first grade. The OCR data also confirm that retention rates are highest among traditionally disadvantaged minorities, who are most likely to suffer from low academic performance. The respective rates for black and Hispanic students were 4.2 percent and 2.8 percent, as compared with just 1.5 percent for whites.

Retaining a student in the same grade is a costly educational intervention, if students (as intended) spend an additional year in full-time public education as a result. Given average per pupil spending of roughly $10,700 (the most recent national estimate), the direct cost to society of retaining 2.3 percent of the 50 million students enrolled in American schools exceeds $12 billion annually. This estimate excludes the cost of any remedial services provided specifically to students repeating a grade, as well as any earnings foregone by retained students due to their delayed entry into the labor market.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that consensus is lacking as to whether retention yields any benefits at all for students that could offset these costs. Critics of retention contend that students are actually harmed by the trauma of being held back, the challenge of adjusting to a new peer group, and reduced expectations for their academic performance on the part of teachers and parents. They also argue that, once in high school, being over-age for their grade makes students more likely to drop out. As noted above, a large majority of existing studies confirm that students who have previously been retained are at elevated risk for low academic achievement and early dropout. Ernest House of the University of Colorado-Boulder concluded in 1989 that “It would be difficult to find another educational practice on which the evidence is so unequivocally negative.”

To the extent that much of the evidence available on a topic suffers from a common flaw, however, a consistency of findings should not increase confidence in their validity. In the case of grade retention, the central challenge facing researchers is to distinguish the effect of being retained from the effects of those factors that triggered the retention decision in the first place. With few exceptions, the available studies of retention have attempted to meet this challenge by comparing the outcomes of retained students to those of equally low-performing, demographically similar students who were promoted. Yet the very fact that a different decision was ultimately taken on whether to retain the student in the same grade casts doubt on the usefulness of these comparisons. For example, educators may be more apt to hold back a student who performs poorly on a standardized test if they believe that the test is an accurate indicator of their true ability than if they believe the student simply had a bad day. Given the stigma associated with repeating a grade, more involved parents may also be less likely to acquiesce in a school’s recommendation that their child be held back. Although speculative, these and many other possible sources of bias make studies relying on standard observational methods an unreliable guide for policy.

Fortunately, recently enacted policies tying retention decisions explicitly to performance on state tests provide an opportunity to generate more rigorous evidence on retention’s consequences for low-performing students. Under these policies, students with test scores just below the standard for promotion face a far greater likelihood of being retained than students who met the standard exactly. And because there is considerable measurement error in individual student test scores, these differences in retention probabilities are nearly as good as would be achieved by randomly assigning low-performing students to be either retained or promoted. By comparing the outcomes of students with test scores in a narrow region around the promotion standard, researchers are therefore able to discern the causal impact of being retained for those students. First used in evaluations of a test-based promotion policy adopted by Chicago Public Schools in the mid-1990s, this quasi-experimental approach to the study of retention has recently been applied in a series of studies of test-based promotion in Florida. Because the Florida policy has served as a model for other states, evidence on its implementation and impact on retained students is of considerable interest.

Test-based Promotion in Florida

In 2002, the Florida legislature mandated that third grade students scoring below level two (of five performance levels) on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in reading be retained and provided with intensive remediation unless they qualify for one of six “good cause exemptions.” The policy’s exclusive focus on third grade reading distinguishes it from many earlier programs with retention gates based on reading and math achievement at multiple grade levels. This focus reflects the accumulation of evidence that acquiring basic reading proficiency in the early grades is critical for later performance across disciplines. Many educators characterize third grade in particular as a key transition point from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” In reality, this transition is a gradual one and the decision to focus on third grade is in large part a reflection of the fact that it is the lowest grade included in the state testing program.

Florida schools may exempt low-performing students from the retention requirement if they fall into any of the following categories: students with disabilities whose Individualized Education Plan indicates that the state test is an inappropriate measure of their performance; students with disabilities who were previously retained in third grade; Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students with less than two years of instruction in English; students who were retained twice previously; students scoring above the 51st percentile nationally on another standardized reading test; and students demonstrating proficiency through a portfolio of work. In light of these exemptions, calling the Florida policy “test-based promotion” may be a misnomer. It would be more precise to say that, for students not in special education, a low test-score shifts the burden of proof such that educators need to make an affirmative case that the student should be promoted. Across the first six cohorts of third graders impacted by the policy, a slight majority (52.2 percent) of students failing to meet the promotion standard received an exemption.

Even so, the policy sharply increased the number of students held back in third grade. The number of Florida third graders retained jumped to 21,799 (13.5 percent) as the policy was implemented in 2003, up from 4,819 (2.8 percent) the previous year. Consistent with national patterns, the students retained under Florida’s test-based promotion policy are disproportionately black and Hispanic. Black students represented just 22 percent of Florida third graders between 2003 and 2008 but fully 40 percent of those who were retained. Hispanics accounted for 24 percent of all third graders but 29 percent of those retained. The over-representation of blacks and Hispanics among retained third graders reflects the fact that students in these groups are more likely to have reading test scores below the promotion standard. In fact, controlling for reading performance, black and Hispanic students are two percentage points less likely than white students to be retained.

As noted above, the Florida policy also includes provisions intended to ensure that retained students acquire the reading skills needed to be promoted the following year. First, retained students must be given the opportunity to participate in their district’s summer reading program. Schools must also develop an academic improvement plan for each retained student and assign them to a “high-performing teacher” in the retention year. Finally, retained students must receive intensive reading interventions, including ninety uninterrupted minutes daily of research-based reading instruction (a requirement that has since been extended to all students in grades K-5). The degree to which schools comply with these requirements varies considerably across the state. Nonetheless, it is important to note that existing evaluations of the Florida policy capture the combined effect of retention and these additional measures.

The latest research on the Florida policy examines its impact on students retained in 2003 for six subsequent years, by which time students retained only once as third graders had reached eighth grade; students retained in later years are followed for shorter periods of time. The best evidence of retention’s short-term impact on student achievement comes from comparing the performance of retained students in grade four (two years after the retention decision) with that of their promoted peers in grade five, which is possible due to Florida’s use of vertically aligned tests that place the achievement of students in different grades on a common scale. Comparing retained students to promoted students at the same grade level would conflate the effects of retention with any benefits of being a year older. Moreover, in the retention year itself, the test scores of third graders could be inflated due to their prior exposure to the same content and the additional stakes attached to the test.

After two years, students retained under Florida’s test-based promotion policy outperform comparable students who were promoted by substantial amounts in both reading and math. The positive impact of retention on reading achievement is as large as 0.4 standard deviations, an amount which exceeds a typical year’s worth of achievement growth for elementary school students. The impact of retention on math achievement is roughly half as big, perhaps because the remedial services provided to students before and during the retention year focus primarily on reading.

These short-term improvements in achievement, although dramatic, diminish over time and become statistically insignificant by the time retained students reach the seventh grade. The fade out of test score impacts is a common pattern in research on educational interventions, including interventions such as early childhood education and higher-quality kindergarten classrooms which have been shown to generate lasting impacts on such long-run outcomes as college enrollment and earnings. Whether students retained in Florida will also experience long-run benefits remains uncertain. However, it is worth noting that the retained students continue to perform markedly better than their promoted peers when tested at the same grade level and, assuming they are as likely to graduate high school, stand to benefit from an additional year of instruction. These factors may increase the likelihood of enduring benefits.

Third-grade retention in Florida has no impact on student absences or special education classifications, but it sharply reduces the probability that the student will be retained in a subsequent grade. Specifically, retained students are 11 percentage points less likely to be retained one year after they were initially held back and roughly 4 percentage points less likely to be retained in each of the following three years. As a result, students retained in third grade after five years are only 0.7 grade levels behind their peers who were immediately promoted to grade four. This implies that one important consequence of the introduction of the test-based promotion policy was to expedite the retention of many students who would have eventually been retained in a later grade. It also suggests that the costs associated with policies that increase retention rates in the early grades are less than is typically assumed because many of them would have received an additional year of schooling anyway as a result of being retained later in their educational careers.

The results for low-performing readers in Florida compare favorably to those observed under a similar policy in Chicago that has been studied using similar methods. Introduced in 1995, Chicago’s program combined test-based promotion gates in both math and reading at grades three, six, and eight with mandatory summer school for students failing to meet the promotion standards. These requirements generated small short-term improvements in the achievement of students in grade three but not for those in grade six. Retention in grade eight also increased students’ probability of dropping out, while retention in grade six again had no impact. These mixed results imply that retention requirements do not necessarily translate into gains for retained students. They also suggest that early grade retention may be more beneficial for students than retention in later grades. To the extent that this is true, Florida students retained in the third grade who otherwise would have been retained later may have particularly benefited from the state’s test-based promotion policy.

Policy Implications

Reducing the number of students who do not acquire basic reading skills in the early grades remains an urgent priority for American public education. According to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, one third of all fourth grade students, and fully half of black and Hispanic fourth graders, fail to demonstrate even a basic level of reading proficiency. Improving on this record will require that states provide students at risk of reading difficulty with access to high-quality early childhood education programs, help districts develop early identification systems so that struggling readers can be targeted for intervention, and take steps to improve the quality of instruction in grades K-2. Although often overlooked, this latter issue is critical given evidence that schools often assign less experienced and less effective teachers to those grades, which are typically excluded from state accountability systems.

Policies encouraging the retention of students who have not acquired basic reading skills by third grade are no substitute for the development of a comprehensive strategy to reduce the number of struggling readers. Yet the best available evidence indicates that policies that include appropriate interventions for retained students may well be a useful component of a comprehensive strategy. There is nothing in the research literature proving that such a practice would be harmful to the students who are directly affected, and some evidence to suggest that those students may benefit. Test-based promotion policies may also create new incentives for educators and parents to improve student reading skills prior to third grade. Interestingly, after the initial spike to 21,799 (13.5 percent) retentions, the number of Florida students retained in third grade fell steadily in the six years following the introduction of its test-based promotion policy, reaching 9,562 (5.6 percent) in 2008. This decline was due primarily to a reduction in the number of students failing to meet the promotion standard.

Test-based promotion policies are most likely to be successful if they are accompanied by specific requirements that retained students be provided with additional, research-based instruction in reading and adequate funding to implement those requirements. The apparently positive effects of the Florida reform reflect the combined effect of retention and the remedial services made available to retained students, and common sense suggests that retention should not imply an exact repetition of what came before. Policymakers must also take care to provide local educators with sufficient discretion to make decisions they believe are in the best interest of the child without compromising the goal of increased accountability and access to focused support. Finally, continued research is needed to document the effects of test-based promotion policies on the long-run outcomes of retained students and on the quality of instruction available to all students in the critical early grades. Evidence on these issues is essential in order to determine how the benefits of test-based promotion policies compare to their costs.

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Is Retaining Students in the Early Grades Self-Defeating?

Authors

Martin R. West

Publication: Center on Children and Families

Image Source: © Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

Early Childhood Development: A Chinese National Priority and Global Concern for 2015

Lauren Greubel and Jacques van der Gaag — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:54:00 -0400

The Chinese government has recently made early childhood development a national priority, recognizing the social and economic dividends that quality early learning opportunities reap for its human capital in the long term. As the country with the largest population in the world, 100 million children under the age of six in China stand to benefit from increased access to high quality early childhood education.

The quality of education in a country is indicative of its overall development prospects. Over the past two decades – building on the momentum generated by the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals – there have been significant increases in the number of children enrolled in school. Now, with discussions heating up around what the next set of development goals will look like in 2015, it is critical that learning across the education spectrum – from early childhood through adolescence and beyond – is included as a global priority. Starting early helps children enter primary school prepared to learn. High-quality early childhood development opportunities can have long-term impacts on a child’s later success in school.

Last month, the Chinese Ministry of Education, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund, launched its first national early childhood advocacy month to promote early learning for all children. The campaign, which includes national television public service announcements on the benefits of investing early in education, builds on a commitment made by the government in 2010 to increase funding for early childhood education over the next decade. The Chinese government pledged to build new preschool facilities, enhance and scale up teacher training, provide subsidies for rural families for access to early learning opportunities, and increase support for private early childhood education centers.

A new policy guide by the Center for Universal Education outlines recommendations that education stakeholders, including national governments, can take to ensure that all children are in school and learning. These steps include establishing equity-based learning targets for all children, systematically collecting data for tracking progress against these targets, and allocating sufficient resources to education beginning in early childhood. The policy guide, based on a report calling for a Global Compact on Learning, is available in Mandarin, as well as Spanish, Portuguese, French and, soon, Arabic.

The success of China’s productivity and growth over the last few decades is attributable in part to its commitment to building a robust education system. As international attention mounts around the post-2015 education and development agendas, the priorities of national governments must be a central organizing principle. When national governments take bold steps to prioritize early childhood development, the global community should take its cue and integrate early childhood development into the broader push toward access plus learning. There is an opportunity for the global education community to push toward reaching the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals while ensuring that the post-2015 agendas include a focus on the quality of education, learning and skills development, beginning with the youngest citizens.

Authors

Lauren Greubel
Jacques van der Gaag

Image Source: Jason Lee / Reuters

A Global Compact on Learning: Policy Guide

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:47:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

Education plays a significant role in development and the dividends that result from investments in education are immeasurable. Quality education generates greater economic growth, creates a lasting impact on public health, and leads to safer more stable societies. Over the past two decades, major progress has been made in providing education to millions worldwide. Numerous global initiatives, significant increases in donor funding, and collaboration between developed and developing nations have allowed children everywhere to enter school for the first time and stay in school throughout their childhood and adolescence.

However, more needs to be done. Progress has been uneven and millions of children and youth still do not have access to good quality education. In addition, economic and gender-based disparities still prevent children from attending school and many who are in school are not actually learning the crucial skills they need for work and life. Getting into school is just a first step. It is time to refocus the global education agenda on learning through increasing access to good quality education for all.

Accordingly, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings is proposing a new agenda to reinvigorate international efforts on education and to build on the previous success of getting more children in school. This agenda, referred to as the Global Compact on Learning, is a common set of concrete steps that, if taken, will help developing countries achieve a vision of learning for all.

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Investing in Children : Work, Education, and Social Policy in Two Rich Countries

Jenny Chesters , Ron Haskins and Ariel Kalil, eds. — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2012 246pp.

Investing in Children: Work, Education, and Social Policy in Two Rich Countries presents new research by leading scholars in Australia and the United States on economic factors that influence children's development and the respective social policies that the two nations have designed to boost human capital development.

The volume is organized around three major issues: parental employment, early childhood education and child care, and post-secondary education. All three issues are intimately linked with human capital development. Since both Australia and the United States have created extensive policies to address these three issues, there is potential for each to learn from the other's experiences and policies. This volume helps fulfill that potential.

The authors demonstrate that in both nations, the effects of low family income and income inequality emerge early in life and persist. However, policies that increase parental employment, augment family income, and promote quality preschool and postsecondary education can boost children's development and at least partially offset the negative developmental effects of family economic disadvantage.

Contributors represent top-flight research institutions from both nations. They include Rebekah Levine Coley, Caitlin McPherran, Patrick Wightman, Sheldon Danziger, Lyndall Strazdins, Megan Shipley, Liana Leach, Peter Butterworth, Frank Oberklaid, Sharon Goldfeld, Tim Moore, Matthew Gray, Jennifer Baxter, Mary E. Campbell, Robert Haveman, Barbara Wolfe, Anna Johnson, Rebecca Ryan, Kathleen Mullan Harris, and Hedwig Lee.

Praise for the book:

"Investing in Children provides us with a unique look at three policy domains related to children’s academic achievement and a sobering picture of the tradeoffs and difficulties countries face in trying to level the playing field for children from disadvantaged backgrounds."—Sara McLanahan, Princeton University

"These papers provide important new evidence on issues that lie at the heart of efforts to improve children’s well-being, opportunities, and prospects—required reading for scholars and a wealth of ideas for policymakers."—Peter Saunders, University of New South Wales

"A timely and invaluable assessment of critical social policies aimed at addressing
inequality. High-quality data, careful nuanced analyses, and a comparative framework will ensure the value of this book to social researchers and policymakers."—Janeen Baxter, University of Queensland

"Countries should be judged by the way they treat their children. And here is the story of two big, open, and unequal nations where disadvantaged children’s issues lie at the heart of their future social and economic development. The superbly done chapters bring out the contrast and similarities in policy and note where each nation could learn from the other. Even those who normally do not read comparative policy ought to buy this book for themselves, their students, and colleagues."—Timothy Smeeding, University of Wisconsin

"This volume breaks new ground by providing evidence on some of today’s most pressing policy questions from the United States and Australia—two countries that are similar on a host of dimensions but are all too rarely studied together. The results will push scholars and policymakers in both countries to think differently about the work-family challenges facing us today as we strive to help parents balance their roles as workers and carers."—Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Jenny Chesters

Jenny Chesters is a postdoctoral fellow with the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra.

Ron Haskins

Ariel Kalil

Ariel Kalil is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where she also directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy.

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Starting School at a Disadvantage: The School Readiness of Poor Children

Julia B. Isaacs — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:27:00 -0400

Executive Summary

Poor children in the United States start school at a disadvantage in terms of their early skills, behaviors, and health. Fewer than half (48 percent) of poor children are ready for school at age five, compared to 75 percent of children from families with moderate and high income, a 27 percentage point gap. This paper examines the reasons why poor children are less ready for school and evaluates three interventions for improving their school readiness.

Poverty is one of several risk factors facing poor children. Mothers living in poverty are often unmarried and poorly educated, they have higher rates of depression and poor health than more affluent mothers, and they demonstrate lower parenting skills in certain dimensions. In fact, the gap in school readiness shrinks from 27 percentage points to 7 percentage points after adjusting for demographic, health, and behavioral differences between poor and moderate- and higher-income families. Even so, poverty remains an important influence on school readiness, partly through its influence on many of the observed differences between poor and more affluent families. Higher levels of depression and a more punitive parenting style, for example, may result from economic stress and so models controlling for these factors may understate the full effects of poverty on school readiness.

In addition to poverty, key influences on school readiness include preschool attendance, parenting behaviors, parents’ education, maternal depression, prenatal exposure to tobacco, and low birth weight. For example, the likelihood of being school ready is 9 percentage points higher for children attending preschool, controlling for other family characteristics, and is 10 percentage points lower for children whose mothers smoke during pregnancy and also 10 percentage points lower for children whose mothers score low in supportiveness during parent-child interactions. These findings suggest a diverse set of policy interventions that might improve children’s school readiness, ranging from smoking cessation programs for pregnant women to parenting programs, treatments for maternal depression, income support programs and expansion of preschool programs.

Preschool programs offer the most promise for increasing children’s school readiness, according to a simple simulation that models the effects of three different interventions. Expanding preschool programs for four-year olds has more direct effects on school readiness at age five than either smoking cessation programs during pregnancy or nurse home visiting programs to pregnant women and infants, the two other alternatives considered.

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Authors

Julia B. Isaacs

An Integrated Scientific Framework for Child Survival and Early Childhood Development

Zulfiqar A. Bhutta, Linda Richter, Jack P. Shonkoff and Jacques van der Gaag — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:53:00 -0500

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in Pediatrics, a subscription-only journal. To obtain a subscription or log in to access the full article, click here.

ABSTRACT

Building a strong foundation for healthy development in the early years of life is a prerequisite for individual well-being, economic productivity, and harmonious societies around the world. Growing scientific evidence also demonstrates that social and physical environments that threaten human development (because of scarcity, stress, or instability) can lead to short-term physiologic and psychological adjustments that are necessary for immediate survival and adaptation, but which may come at a significant cost to long-term outcomes in learning, behavior, health, and longevity. Generally speaking, ministries of health prioritize child survival and physical well-being, ministries of education focus on schooling, ministries of finance promote economic development, and ministries of welfare address breakdowns across multiple domains of function. Advances in the biological and social sciences offer a unifying framework for generating significant societal benefits by catalyzing greater synergy across these policy sectors. This synergy could inform more effective and efficient investments both to increase the survival of children born under adverse circumstances and to improve life outcomes for those who live beyond the early childhood period yet face high risks for diminished life prospects.

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Authors

Zulfiqar A. Bhutta
Linda Richter
Jack P. Shonkoff
Jacques van der Gaag

Publication: Pediatrics

A New Face of Education: Bringing Technology into the Classroom in the Developing World

Marshal S. Smith and Rebecca Winthrop — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:22:00 -0500

INTRODUCTION

In the small village of Hafizibad in Pakistan’s Punjab province, a young girl is using her mobile phone to send an SMS message in Urdu to her teacher. After sending, she receives messages from her teacher in response, which she diligently copies by hand in her notebook to practice her writing skills. She does this from the safety of her home, and with her parents’ permission, during the school break, which is significant due to the insecurity of the rural region in which she lives. The girl is part of a Mobilink-UNESCO program to increase literacy skills among girls in Pakistan. Initial outcomes look positive; after four months, the percentage of girls who achieved an A level on literacy examinations increased from 27 percent to 54 percent. Likewise, the percentage of girls who achieved a C level on examinations decreased from 52 percent to 15 percent. The power of mobile phone technology, which is fairly widespread in Pakistan, appears in this case to help hurdle several education barriers by finding new ways to support learning for rural girls in insecure areas—girls who usually have limited opportunities to attend school and who frequently do not receive individual attention when they do. Often they live in households with very few books or other materials to help them retain over summer vacation what they learned during the school year.

On the other side of the world, in South America, the deployment of technology for education has not been so promising. In Peru, a number of colorful laptops sit in a corner of a classroom covered with dust. Given to the school through a One Laptop Per Child program arranged by the Ministry of Education, the laptops were intended to improve students’ information communication technology (ICT) skills, as well as their content-related skills. Without the proper support for teacher training in how the laptops are used, with no follow-up or repair and maintenance contingencies, and with outdated and bug-infested software, the laptops are seen as unusable and serve little purpose. In this case, technology has not helped improve the educational experience of learners.

Technology enthusiasts have long heralded the power of technology—from the printing press, to blackboards, to the laptop—to transform education. With the rapid expansion of information communication technologies around the globe, there is a high level of interest in harnessing modern technology to help advance the education status of some of the world’s poorest people. However, from Pakistan to Peru and beyond, experience shows that while there are numerous examples of how technology is used to the great benefit of teachers and learners alike, there are also many cases in which it does little to impact educational processes and outcomes. A better understanding of why and under what conditions these divergent outcomes emerge is the central aim of this study.

The potential of technology to help improve education has significance beyond teaching children reading and math. Quality education plays an important role in promoting economic development, improving health and nutrition and reducing maternal and infant mortality rates. Economic growth, for example, can be directly impacted by the quality of the education systems in developing countries. Studies by Hanushek and Woessman show a positive correlation over time between cognitive development, measured by student performance on international assessments, and individual earnings, income distribution and overall economic growth. A study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that Asia’s increased economic performance over Africa and Latin America could be directly attributed to its higher investment in physical and human capital, such as education. Quality education has also been a factor in reducing maternal and infant mortality rates. Over half of the reduction in child mortality worldwide since 1970 is linked to “increased educational attainment in women of reproductive age.” Educated women are also more likely to seek out healthcare for themselves and their families. Studies on maternal health show that 90 percent of women with a secondary education in South and West Asia seek neonatal care, compared with only 50 percent of women with no education.

Our purpose is to provide guidance to non-specialists interested in pursuing technology for educational improvement in the developing world. Outside of a very small group of experts, educators working in and with developing countries rarely have an expertise or even a basic grounding in the wide range of technological innovations and their potential uses for education. Even the most seasoned education expert is likely to stare blankly if terms such as ‘cloud computing’, ‘m-learning’, or ‘total cost of ownership’ are introduced into the conversation. Questions about what technology is available to support education, what its possible benefits are, and how it can be used effectively, can be heard equally in the halls of the ministries of education in developing countries and in those of the headquarters and offices of international funders of education.

Our goal is to answer these questions by providing a broad overview of some of the common education challenges facing the developing world and the range of different technologies that are available to help address them. We look closely at the different enabling conditions that frequently shape the success or failure of technology interventions in education and derive a set of seven basic principles for effective technology use. These principles can provide guidance to decision-makers designing, implementing or investing in education initiatives. In doing so, we look both at the primary and secondary, as well as at the higher levels, of education systems. Using the World Bank classification of low-income and lower middle-income countries we focus our attention on the world’s poorest countries from Sub-Saharan Africa to South and West Asia to the Caribbean.

We focus particularly on the possibilities of recent forms of technology, often known as Information Communication Technology (ICT). ICT refers to technologies that provide access to information through telecommunications. It is generally used to describe most technology uses and can cover anything from radios, to mobile phones, to laptops. Of course, education has used technology for centuries, from blackboards to textbooks, yet in recent history very little has changed in how education is delivered. Teachers in most schools stand at the front of a room, while students sit and listen, sometimes attentively. However, while for many years policymakers have been unconvinced about the usefulness of technology in education—citing multiple examples in which it adds little value—today there is a new focus on its possibilities.

We conclude ultimately that, if smartly and strategically deployed, modern information and communications technology holds great promise in helping bring quality learning to some of the world’s poorest and hardest to reach communities. The strategy for doing so need not emulate the trajectory of educational technology use in wealthier developed nations. Indeed, in some of the most remote regions of the globe, mobile phones and other forms of technology are being used in ways barely envisioned in the United States or Europe. Necessity is truly the mother of invention in these contexts and often leads to creative and promising ends for teachers and learners.

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Authors

Marshal S. Smith
Rebecca Winthrop

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The Economics of Human Development

Jacques van der Gaag — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Editor’s note: In a presentation to the 2011 International Conference on Early Childhood Development in Beijing, China, Jacques van der Gaag makes the economic case for investing in young children. He references the seminal works by several Nobel laureates in economics to demonstrate how development hinges on investments in early childhood, including health, nutrition, and education.

Thank you for inviting me to the 2011 International Conference on Early Childhood Development. I am very grateful to the organizers from the China Development Research Foundation for giving me a chance to make the economic case for investing in young children. While I have been giving these types of presentations for more than two decades in over a dozen countries worldwide, I prefer to have some back-up from a number of serious economists who, over time, have made major contributions to a key finding in development economics: countries prosper if they invest in their people, and the well-being of all people improves in a prosperous country that values equality.

To begin with, I would like to introduce my fellow countryman Jan Tinbergen, who received the first Nobel Prize in Economics, in 1969, for his work on economic development. Being a physicist by training, he pioneered the use of mathematical models to mimic the working of a country’s economy. The equations he used to formulate these models will probably look very foreign to you, but the important point I want to make is that these early models already included people, in the form of labor. People were seen as an input in the production process. Since there was an abundance of people in the developing world, and a shortage of capital, the development process, it was argued, could be sped up by providing more capital to low income countries to invest in infrastructure, factories, and other forms of physical capital. And to invest in human capital -- people. The economy needs all forms of human capital, from unskilled labor to highly skilled labor, and therefore investment in people, through education, was considered an integrated part of the development process.

Another well-known economist (Theodore W. Schulz, Nobel prize 1979) emphasized an important difference between physical capital and human capital: people respond to incentives. Thus, when food prices are being kept artificially low (to allow wages in the cities to stay low), farmers may decide that it is no longer worth their while to produce food, and they may migrate to the cities to work in the new factories. In other words, it is important to invest in human capital to stimulate the economy, but the broad preferences of the (working) population should not be overlooked.

Robert W. Fogel (Nobel laureate in 1993) underscored the role of workers in the production process by emphasizing the importance of health and nutrition to enhance productivity. Indeed, he calculated that about half of the speedy growth of the British economy during the Industrial Revolution was the result of better health and nutrition conditions of the working population. In turn, of course, the economic growth made the improvements in sanitation and the increased availability of (better) food possible.

A major breakthrough in the thinking about development (note that I am no longer saying “economic development”) came with the work of Amartya Sen (Nobel prize winner in 1998). His work has led to a re-definition of the development process from one that focuses solely on economic growth to one in which the fruits of economic growth benefits the population in terms of higher literacy rates and education levels, better health and nutrition, higher levels of social cohesion and social skills, and more equality. These four broad dimensions of well-being, together with economic growth, are now the building blocks of the Human Development Index. Indeed, human development, as currently understood, has been further specified in the Millennium Development Goals that drive today’s development discussion and policies in every corner of the world.

Before I finish my very brief (and very selective) history of development economics, allow me to mention the work of one more Nobel laureate in economics: Jim Heckman (2000). Heckman understands, of course, the importance of investing in people to increase a country’s human capital. But he also understands both the economics of early childhood development (ECD) and its scientific underpinnings. In recent work, he has extensively referred to the scientific basis that shows the causal link between deprivations early in life and education, social and health outcomes later in life. His economic work on ECD confirms what others have been saying for decades: The highest economic returns to investments in people come from the investments that occur in the early years of life.

In sum, with an increased understanding of the basic development process, in which people are both the driving force for development and its main beneficiaries, the importance of investing in very young children is now seen as a key factor in the broad human development process of a country.
Taking care of very young children has long been on the development agenda. Immunization programs have been pushed to improve the health status of young children, nutrition programs have been implemented to prevent malnutrition and hunger, schooling has been emphasized as important for prosperity later in life, and as a possible “equalizer” of society. What the recent literature on brain development, on the interaction of genes and the environment, on the importance of cognitive and non-cognitive skill development (“social skills”), and on the link between early deprivations and a variety of problems later in life (from health problems to increased delinquency) has added to these efforts, is a better understanding of the long-term economic implications of these interventions.

Simply stated, economists look at investments in human capital as a means to increase lifelong “productivity”. The easiest way to measure differences in productivity is by comparing differences in wage rates (in well functioning labor markets) among workers with different levels of education (skills). Higher levels of education (more and better skills) lead to higher productivity, and this advantage can be maintained during one’s entire (working) life. Of course, not everyone works for wages, but similar results (more educated workers are more productive) have been found in agriculture and other forms of self-employment. Indeed, even the productivity of people who do not work in the labor market can be improved by education. Case in point: women who finished secondary education are much better equipped to address the health and nutrition needs of their children than illiterate mothers (and they have fewer children and make sure that these children go to school).

When economist do the numbers, solely based on increased productivity in the labor market, the economic returns to ECD are impressive (see slides 21 and 22). Integrated ECD programs reduce infant and child mortality, increase children’s nutritional and health status, increase on-time school enrollment, decrease drop-out and repetition rates, and increase progression to higher levels of education. All this leads to a more productive labor force. The economic returns from these ECD benefits alone are estimated to be in the 7 percent to 12 percent range, with some estimates being much higher. When ECD interventions are properly seen as investments in the human development of a country, the benefits are very large indeed.

Chances are that you were a little surprised to get a lecture on the “the history of development economics” at a conference about early childhood development. But the organizers asked me to make the economic case for investing in young children. I decided that I could do this as forcefully as possible by invoking the help of no fewer than five Nobel laureates in economics. Development is now understood as a process by people for people. All the evidence shows that investment in the health, in nutrition, and in cognitive and non-cognitive skill development is crucial for a prosperous and equal society. Of all the investments in people one can make, investments in the very young have the highest economic returns.

I congratulate our organizers from the China Development Research Foundation for their work on ECD to benefit the children of poor minorities in western China, providing them with a chance to benefit from China’s impressive growth record. And I thank you again for the opportunity to address this distinguished audience on such an important topic.

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Jacques van der Gaag

Publication: 2011 International Conference on Early Childhood Development

Beyond Bachelor's: The Case for Charter Colleges of Early Childhood Education

Kevin Carey and Sara Mead — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

To enhance the quality of early childhood education, and provide better economic opportunities to early childhood educators themselves, states should create Charter Colleges of Early Childhood Education. These research-driven, flexible, and accountable institutions would help increase the supply of high-quality early childhood educators, provide those workers and their families with stable, well-paying jobs, and create a new model of higher education and credentialing that can be applied to other fields.

The Challenge

A growing body of research demonstrates that high-quality early childhood education has tremendous potential to improve children’s and families’ lives. Spurred by this research, as well as growing demand for childcare to enable parents to work, policymakers have seized on early childhood education as a strategy to improve student achievement and break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Yet despite increasing public investment, only one-third of American preschoolers have access to publicly funded pre-K or the federal Head Start program, and preschool quality is often low.

One contributing factor is that the average preschool teacher in the United States earns only $23,870 annually, compared to $51,009 for public elementary and secondary school teachers. To address this disparity and improve early childhood education quality, many advocates have called for extending the umbrella of traditional K-12 teacher policy over early childhood workers, by requiring preschool teachers to earn bachelor’s degrees and state certification. But that system is ill-designed for helping early childhood workers get the skills and salaries they need:

Research offers little evidence that bachelor’s degrees improve early childhood educator effectiveness
Early childhood bachelor’s degree programs are not well designed to prepare educators for the classroom
Bachelor’s degree requirements for early childhood educators would drain public and private coffers
Students similar to those working in early childhood education who pursue bachelor’s degrees usually fail to complete them

A New Approach

Building on the early success of promising models in the field, policy makers should create new Charter Colleges of Early Childhood Education, built from the ground up specifically to give early childhood workers the education they need. Like their K-12 counterparts, charter providers would receive increased flexibility in exchange for increased accountability to deliver results. To create and empower these institutions, policy makers should:

Set clear expectations for what early childhood educators need to know and be able to do, based on state early learning standards and current research
Define credentials linked to skills and workforce needs, reflecting the variety of settings in which early childhood educators work and the differentiated roles they take on in those settings
Identify metrics of teacher knowledge and skills, allowing charter colleges to confer credentials when students successfully demonstrate their effectiveness in improving children’s learning
Create and empower authorizers to grant charters, enable charter colleges to grant credentials and access public funding, and hold the colleges accountable for their performance and use of taxpayer funds
Enforce constructive accountability by organizing independent evaluations and tracking supporting data to assess early childhood educator preparation programs

The charter concept can be most fully realized in states that have in place other elements of a high-quality early childhood system. The Obama Administration’s new Early Learning Challenge Race to the Top Program provides a unique opportunity for states to consider creating charter colleges of early childhood education as part of their strategies to create great early childhood workforces. In doing so, states can address the twin challenges of providing disadvantaged children with better life chances, and giving their parents access to marketable skills and better jobs.

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Kevin Carey
Sara Mead

Reforming Early Education

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

August 22, 2011
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

Full video archive of this event is available via CSPAN here.

On August 22, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings convened a group of experts and practitioners to discuss reforms of early education programs in the United States. A discussion with Dr. Steven Barnett of Rutgers on how preschool programs, including Head Start, should be reformed based on his article “Effectiveness of Early Educational Intervention” that appeared in the August 19 issue of the journal Science. Dr. Barnett’s presentation was followed by an overview of the Obama Administration’s Head Start reform agenda by Yvette Sanchez Fuentes of the Administration for Children and Families. The presentations were followed by brief reactions from Dr. Jerlean Daniel of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Dr. Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago and Yasmina Vinci of the National Head Start Association. A panel discussion moderated by Ron Haskins, co-director of the Center on Children & Families, followed.

After the discussion, participants took audience questions.

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Audio

Reforming Early Education

Transcript

Event Materials

Participants

Panelists

W. Steven Barnett

Professor and Co-Director, National Institute for Early Education (NIEER)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Yvette Sanchez Fuentes

Director, Office of Head Start
Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Jerlean Daniel

Executive Director
National Association for the Education of Young Children

Jens Ludwig

Professor of Social Service Administration, Law, and Public Policy, University of Chicago
Nonresident Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Yasmina Vinci

Executive Director
National Head Start Association

Don’t Just Stick a Band-Aid on the Global Talent Gap

Justin W. van Fleet — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:59:00 -0400

According to a story on CBS Evening News this week, there are “plenty of jobs if you’ve got the right skills,” pointing out that companies in the U.S. have thousands of technology-based job openings without enough skilled people to fill them. But if companies are serious about tackling the global talent gap, especially in developing countries, they need to move from purely focusing on job training to also include investment in good quality education more broadly. Here’s why:

Our latest research suggests that U.S. companies by-and-large make short-term, uncoordinated social investments most heavily devoted to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, entrepreneurship education and skills training developing countries. These contributions aim to close the talent gap and in many instances include remedial literacy and math training for youth and adults. However, these companies are not really investing in early childhood development or early learning, which are vital points of intervention if we want to solve – not patch – the talent gap.

If corporations continue to invest only in education at the secondary and job training levels, they are just sticking a band-aid on the talent gap instead of focusing on the root cause— the lack of early learning success. Investment in early childhood development and quality primary school prepares the next generation to continue on with further education and acquire new skills without needing remedial education and training programs. And, if corporations coordinate their investments in adolescent education with other donors and national governments, education systems can better cultivate individuals with the necessary life and critical thinking skills to be productive members of society and the economy. Young people who can read, do math and think critically are not just useful to the technology sector, but have the transferable skills needed for a variety of economic and civic activities.

The Global Compact on Learning outlines the priorities and strategies needed to address the global learning crisis and charts the course for a new generation of young people with employable and social participation skills. It also outlines specific roles corporations can play to advance learning for all in a way that is not only a good thing for society, but is smart for the company’s business interests. Instead of investing millions in workforce preparation in the short-term, companies should really invest more broadly in education early on if they are serious about closing the talent gap in developing countries. This long-term investment will lead to a generation of young people with the transferable skills needed for the jobs of today or tomorrow.

Authors

Justin W. van Fleet

A Global Education Challenge: Harnessing Corporate Philanthropy to Educate the World's Poor

Justin W. van Fleet — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:27:00 -0400

Despite the undeniable benefits of education to society, the educational needs, particularly in the world’s poorest countries, remain strikingly great. There are more than 67 million children not enrolled in primary school around the world, millions of children who are enrolled in school but not really learning, and too few young people are advancing to secondary school (van der Gaag and Adams 2010). Consider, for instance, the number of children unable to read a single word of connected text at the end of grade two: more than 90 percent in Mali, more than 50 percent in Uganda, and nearly 33 percent in Honduras (USAID n.d.).

With more young people of age 12 to 24 years today than ever before who are passing through the global education system and looking for opportunities for economic and civic participation, the education community is at a crossroads. Of the 1.5 billion young people in this age group, 1.3 billion live in developing countries (World Bank 2007). The global community set the goal of achieving universal primary education by 2015 and has failed to mobilize the resources necessary, as UNESCO estimates that $16.2 billion in external resources will be need to reach this goal.

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Results from this report were presented at an April 6 Center on Universal Education event at the Brookings Institution.

Learn more about the launch event »

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Justin W. van Fleet