While most of this blog has discussed secondary education policies and their implications, I wanted to focus on a different age group this week – pre-school. While many people think that pre-school isn’t essential to or telling of future education, many believe that stronger preschool programs are important, even necessary.

For example, in November 2013, Senator Tom Harkin, a democrat from Iowa, and Representative George Miller, a democrat from California, introduced the Strong Start for America’s Children Act, which would create a federal preschool program for all four-year old children from low-to-moderate income families in the country. President Obama proposed a parallel plan for a $75 billion federal preschool program. The Strong Start for America’s Children Act would provide federal grants to help states create preschool programs for three and four year olds. States would be required to match federal funding.

States would also be required to establish “early learning and development standards that describe what children from birth to kindergarten entry should know and be able to do,” implement performance measures for obesity prevention programs, make sure that preschool teachers have comparable salaries to K-12 teachers, and increase the number of preschool teachers with bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education. The Act would require states to establish universal preschools for every four-year-old under 200 percent of the federal poverty line and then extend that eligibility to three-year-olds.

Supporters argue that preschool is an essential milestone in child cognitive and social development and should be available for all children, especially those who experience the detrimental developmental affects of living in poverty. They cite evidence claiming that research studies have consistently demonstrated that high quality programs for infants and toddlers better position those children for success in elementary and secondary education and help children develop essential physical, social, and cognitive skills.

However, there are contradictory reports on the effectiveness of investments in preschool education. For example, the Head Start program, a program out of the US Department of Health and Human Services, provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families. It is the largest government-run preschool program currently in place. A study done by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2012 concluded that the $8 billion a year program actually had little to no impact on cognitive, social-emotional, health, or parenting practices of the 5,000 participants in the study. Additionally, the program would cost tax payers extra money.

Personally, I disagree with such preschool programs and think that money in the public education system needs to be funneled more into elementary and secondary schools and school systems. Although critical development does occur at ages 3 and 4, elementary and secondary education ages are more critical and encompass more actual learning – social, emotional, and cognitive. More evidence exists for the benefits of successful investments in elementary and secondary schools than exists fro the benefits of investments in preschool systems. On a related note, however, it is important for children at ages 3 and 4 who are in lower income areas to have somewhere to go and be taken care of during the day, which is something that this program would provide for. Many children in lower-income areas do not attend preschool or daycare because of the cost, and many of these kids need to be taken care of during the weekdays.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/01/preschool-programs-how-effective-are-government-funded-proposals

http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/hs/about

http://www.saltlakeheadstart.org/about-us/what-is-head-startearly-head-start/

I had never really heard much about the DREAM Act until this semester. Somebody in our class brought it up during the online deliberation and, although it doesn’t get much attention, it definitely needs it. “DREAM” is an acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors. The DREAM act addresses both issues of public education and of illegal immigration, making it a more politically controversial topic than other educational policies. It brings up both questions about what the purpose of public education should be – to help the majority of students get quality education? And questions about our immigration policies and how we should – or if we should – integrate children of illegal immigrants/illegal child immigrants into our education system.

The DREAM Act would provide conditional permanent residency to certain immigrants who graduate from US high schools, arrived in the United States as minors under the age of 15, and lived in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment. The student would need to graduate from high school and move on to college or military service. If the student were to complete two years in the military of two years at a four-year college, they would obtain temporary six year residency, during which time they could potentially come to qualify for permanent residency.

Although the DREAM Act has not been passed yet, as of November 2013, fifteen states have passed their own versions of the DREAM Act. These versions deal with tuition prices and financial aid for state universities. States that have passed their own version of the DREAM Act are Texas, California, Illinois, Utah, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, and Oregon. At the federal level, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been accepting applications under President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provides a temporary suspension of deportations for illegal immigrants in the US who were brought here at a young age. However, these people do need to meet certain criteria. For example, they must have graduated from high school, been here for at least 5 consecutive years, and meet other criteria listed under the DREAM Act.

Opponents of the DREAM Act argue that the bill rewards illegal immigrants by providing them with a sort of amnesty, while supporters argue that it would produce a wide range of social and economic benefits. Many immigrants and their families are currently stuck in a harmful poverty cycle that they are unable to break out of because they lack access to sufficient education, and therefore supportive jobs. At the same time, there are projected positive economic benefits to the passing of the DREAM Act. The federal Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated in December 2010 that the 2010 version of the DREAM Act would reduce federal deficits by approximately $1.4 billion between 2011 and 2020 and increase federal revenues by about $2.3 billion over the next ten years. While indirect federal costs and state and loval taxes were not considered, the report also notes that the Act would increase federal deficits by more than $5 billion after 2021. However, a report from the Center for American Progress predicted that the DREAM Act could create 1.4 million jobs by 2030

http://dreamact.info

http://www.immigrationpolicy.org/issues/DREAM-Act

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/12/01/get-facts-dream-act

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/us/dream-act-gives-young-immigrants-a-political-voice.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is perhaps the most well known piece of education –related legislation passed in the past fifteen years. Passed into law by George Bush on January 8, 2002, NCLB dramatically increased the role of the federal government in elementary and secondary education across America. While NCLB has been widely criticized since it has been enacted, its goals were actually to improve public education for disadvantaged students.

NCLB wanted to achieve this goal by holding states and their public schools accountable for student productivity and progress, mainly through the implementation of standardized testing. NCLB stipulated that the states would create standardized tests that would test students for a certain level of proficiency. According to the Act, the scores had to improve annually to meet the AYP – adequate yearly progress. Schools that failed to meet the adequate yearly progress under NCLB guidelines would provide technical assistance. If the AYP requirement was not met for three years the school would be required to offer more educational alternatives, such as private tutoring. If a school did not meet the AYP for multiple years in a low, the government would make changes to the school.

Although the bill passed in the U.S. Congress with bipartisan support, many initial Congressional supporters of the bill have withdrawn their support, claiming that, while the bill has strong goals and potential, it’s implementation failed to reach the desired outcomes and actually did more harm than good. Although the stipulations listed above were intended to maximize students’ progress and teachers’ potential, they created such high stakes that, a lot of the time, teachers were forced to alter their curricula to teach for the test, rather than what would actually be best for the students.

One of the major issues with No Child Left Behind is its extreme focus on standardized testing. The NCLB standardized testing is often thought of to be harmful to teachers, students ranging across academic levels and abilities, and the overall quality of public education in the United States. For example, NCLB pressures schools to encourage students to meet minimum skill levels in reading, writing, and math, providing no incentive for student achievement beyond the bare minimum. As a result, programs that encourage higher levels of achievement are often dropped or neglected. Additionally, when teachers feel pressured to center their curricula around a standardized test, they fail to give the students the comprehensive, well-rounded education that they both deserve and need.

Although NCLB was set to expire in 2007, the plan continued because of a clause dictating that the Act would continue if Congress failed to create a replacement education policy. Although the Congressional partisan gridlock over the past several years has prevented any new legislation from being passed, there is hope for education reform. Obama has allows for states to apply for waivers to withdraw from the NCLB program as long as they agree to comply with the government’s educational priorities.

I personally do not believe that a strong focus on standardized testing is the most effective way to increase student productivity, progress, and overall achievement. While I understand the appeal of concrete quantitative data being used to carefully track progresses being made, standardized testing ultimately hinders students’ abilities to receive a well-rounded education that teaches more than just how to answer multiple choice questions.

http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/no-child-left-behind-overview

http://www.nea.org/home/NoChildLeftBehindAct.html

One downfall of the No Childhood Left Behind Act is that it has left a hodgepodge of state academic standards with no clear learning objectives or goals. One way the administration is attempting to fix this problem is through the Common Core, which has been promoted by the Obama administration and created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The Common Core replaces the jumble of state created education requirements with one single set of rigorous learning goals in language arts and math.

Although forty-five states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards since 2010, it has been facing increasing opposition from both the right and left, but mainly the right. Critics on the right argue that the Common Core initiative is nothing more than a federal move towards a national curriculum that oversteps the appropriate role of the federal government in education, which has generally been managed by the state and local levels.

Meanwhile, as the Common Core has been developed and implemented, many on the left are complaining that there was not enough input from educators when drafting the core, the standards are not based on any research, and they ignore what is known about early childhood development. One liberal state that has been particularly adamant in its opposition of the core is New York.

The statewide teachers’ union withdrew its support for the Core recently until “major course corrections” would take place. Many teachers in New York believe that the Core is too rigorous and that the rigidity makes students – especially younger students – not want to go to school. A large part of the complaints in New York stem from the fact the New York has chosen not to wait for the new Common Core exams, which are expected to come out in 2015, but has decided to begin testing students on the new standards already. Teachers felt very unprepared to make this leap this quickly and had not been trained properly on how to handle the new curricula. As the tests changed for students, less than one third of the state’s students passed.

The Common Core lays out a sequence of skills for students to master. It encourages students to show evidence for their solutions and to clearly articulate how they think. These processes are meant to foster critical thinking at earlier ages. While this sounds like a great way to increase the quality of education received by students, many of the standards may be too developmentally advanced for younger students. According to cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, children between the ages of seven and eleven are in the “Concrete Operational” stage of cognitive development. At this stage, students are able to see things from a different point of view and to imagine events that occur outside their own lives, and although some logical thought processes are evident at this age, thinking tends to be tied to concrete reality. Much of the common core, particularly in math, requires students to reach far beyond this level and think abstractly, which many students this age may not yet have the cognitive ability to do.

While No Child Left Behind left many people worried that children weren’t receiving enough rigor and were concerned about the lack of cohesion between states, the way the common core has been implemented to counteract these issues may not be the most effective way to raise educational standards in a way that is beneficial for students. The Common Core raises several questions – should there be one set of academic standards nationwide? And, if so, what should be the criteria for these standards and just how challenging should they be?

http://www.corestandards.org

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/eight-problems-with-common-core-standards/2012/08/21/821b300a-e4e7-11e1-8f62-58260e3940a0_blog.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/common-core-standards

Public education has become an increasingly big player on the political stage. In today’s risky economy, our government has been looking for the most cost effective ways to improve our faltering public education system. It has never been more important for our youngest generations to receive a strong education – in the long term, they are going to be faced with solving unprecedented wide scale issues and helping America continue to thrive on a global scale. In the short term, they are going to need to have the knowledge and skills that will help them compete in an uncertain and increasingly competitive job market.

One way that people have tried to increase the quality of education is by creating charter schools, which receive public funding but operate as public entities. These schools receive their funding and autonomy in exchange for meeting accountability standards articulated in their charters. The first law establishing charter schools was passed in Minnesota in 1991, and since then, the number of students enrolled in public charter schools has increased from 0.3 million students to over 2 million students, and there are over 5,600 charter schools in existence today.

While charter schools provide unique educational opportunities that enrich students’ experiences, they create inequality by weeding out students with the most potential and are deemed unfair by some because they are funded by the public, yet operate as private bodies.

Because they aren’t limited by certain governmental regulations, charter schools have the freedom to innovate in ways that improve student achievement. They are free to meet their own hours of operation, and charter school teachers have the strongest say in the curriculum that they teach and are able to change the materials and tools they use throughout the year to meet students’ individual needs. This freedom allows teachers to customize their materials and change them throughout the year to meet the needs of individual students.

The three major issues around charter schools are that:

(1) They provide an unfair advantage to specific students. While charter schools were initially created to help schools in poorer areas reach greater levels of achievement, they often have the ability to pick and choose which students they wish to attend their school. This creates a skewed student body that often includes more privileged students who already have an advantage due to socioeconomic status.

(2) The benefits of charter schools are only available to a small portion of the population, and many argue that it is unfair for a small portion of the population to receive these benefits when the majority of the population is paying for it in tax dollars. The money that funds charter schools is diverted from funding for public schools, many of which are struggling financially.

(3) People are skeptical of the actual effectiveness of charter schools. A 2009 study done by Stanford, for example, shows that, on average, test scores for charter schools are either the same or worse than their public school counterparts.

The institutionalization of charter schools is rapidly expanding – just recently, North Carolina approved for the creation of twenty-six of them surrounding Raleigh.  Charter schools are very popular in the area, but some are still skeptical and aren’t thrilled about their existence and expansion.

The existence of charter schools brings up both ethical questions (is it right for taxpayer dollars to fund schools that only a small portion of the population actually attend?) and questions about the quality of education we are providing our students ((1) do charter schools actually work, and are they actually effective? And (2) are the innovativeness and unique opportunities offered worth it?). The actual issue of charter schools also brings up questions about our school system as a whole and what we should be emphasizing. Should there be more funding for public schools that already exist? Or should that money be poured into new projects?

http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/01/09/3518692/nc-approves-26-new-charter-schools.html

http://www.publiccharters.org/About-Charter-Schools/What-are-Charter-Schools003F.aspx

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/new-claims-surface-in-options-charter-school-case/2014/01/03/c02d1f5e-74a4-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html