In September, the Alliance for Early Success organized a national conference on the early childhood education profession. The meeting was an opportunity for 200+ state leaders, advocates, national experts, and early childhood educators to share promising strategies and lessons learned thus far, and to engage each other on the future.
The Alliance for Early Success believes that protecting or making progress in early childhood investments depends largely on state leadership. Governors have a lot of discretion over how to allocate, maximize or misuse resources. And their policies will either support or harm young children; and either help or prevent their families from becoming independent, successful and secure.
Like its predecessor, the new Preschool Development Grants seek to support early childhood education, but the similarities don’t extend much beyond this general commonality. The first Preschool Development Grants were issued by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015 and 2016 to help states expand high-quality pre-kindergarten for four-year-olds from low-income famliies.
Last month, dozens of Alliance for Early Success partners convened in Denver, Colorado, for the 2018 Partner Summit, where policy experts, thought leaders and child advocates spent three days sharing best practices and connecting with counterparts from other states over their experiences, challenges, and solutions to improve state policies for children, birth through age eight. Shannon Jones, Groundwork Ohio executive director, shares her reflections from the event.
Your state has goals for performance in English Language Arts (ELA) and Math. Do you know what they are? As an early childhood advocate you may well not, as all of the goals are based on standardized assessments given to children in third grade and up. But you should, because chances are those state goals are out of reach for your state unless it puts more focus on early learning.
The midterm elections of 2018 is ushering in a group of new state superintendents who will put their stamp on states’ education systems and reforms. Though most of them probably will not have much early education background, many of them will also lead state pre-k programs and in some cases, even child care systems and other early childhood programs.
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