A Center for Community Solutions report found a positive correlation between enrollment in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and children’s kindergarten readiness scores. We recently released a research brief on the evidence supporting the Imagination Library effort in Ohio.
Quotable & Notable
“It’s long been clear that children who grow up in poverty struggle later in their lives, experiencing everything from increased difficulty at school to lower earnings to poorer health. But it’s been hard to separate correlation from causation. Is it the lack of family resources that harms their development? Or are there other compounding factors that are responsible for the differences between poor children and those from better off families? Now a group of academics finally have an answer: giving parents more money, they’ve found, causes children’s brains to develop in more healthy ways.”
In the first months of the pandemic in 2020, the number of news stories about child care increased by 90% compared to the same time the previous year, according to data from the First Five Years Fund. This op-ed argues that every news outlet should have a dedicated child care reporter.
Policy Radar
State
Coming soon to every Ohio school district: Dyslexia screening
Legislation passed in 2021 will require all districts to screen children for dyslexia in grades K-3, starting this fall. A guidebook is to be released soon by the state to help guide these efforts.
Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) offers a strong case for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a federal bill that would require employers of 15 employees or more to provide basic accommodations to pregnant workers. The bill awaits further action by the U.S. Senate, but as BPC highlights, the proposal has been introduced and re-introduced since 2011 and this marks the farthest point it has reached thus far.
Events & Happenings
The Hunt Institute is hosting a webinar on February 1st at 2 pm to discuss New Mexico’s cost modeling technique which estimates the true cost of quality child care and how to subsequently shift the state’s subsidy payment scale. Register here.
Join Too Small to Fail, the National Black Child Development Institute (NBCDI), and Raising A Reader on February 3rd at 1:30 pm for a webinar on the importance of diversity in children’s literature. Register here.
FYI
The Wallace Foundation awarded Columbus City Schools a $8.2 million, multi-year grant, with OSU’s College of Education and Human Ecology as a partner. The grant will support the creation of an equity-focused pipeline for current and future school leaders and the college will work with the district to define equity practices. Read more about the grant and its principal investigators.
Beyond the Buckeye State
A task force in Washington D.C. is recommending that early childhood teachers receive a pay boost this year of $10-14k, funded by a tax on wealthy district residents that will have brought $54 million into district coffers by September 2022.
A law change in Colorado that encouraged school districts to select state-approved reading curriculum has led to an increasing number using better curricular materials - which in theory could influence reading practices and instruction and ultimately student reading outcomes.
Oklahoma is employing a unique approach to keep students in-person learning while dealing with staff shortages: allow state employees to substitute teach while keeping their jobs. The state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction wants to keep schools open but called the gesture “a cup of water on a raging fire” and called for more action from the governor.
What We're Reading
Two articles, in Business Insider and Newsweek respectively, discuss how many mothers aren’t able to work right now because of the unpredictability and exorbitant cost of child care.
This brief covers how school district equity plans, many of which were implemented in the wake of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, need to take further action to ensure accountability.
This opinion piece written by a Stanford professor explains what the author identifies as the two factors needed for successful researcher-practitioner partnerships. One of the factors includes incentivizing academics to engage in practitioner partnerships. For those of us in higher ed, we are aware of the rigorous focus on research and publication that the author references, which is often at odds with the time and energy investments needed for successful practitioner partnerships.
Research Round Up
New research being heralded as groundbreaking has shown a causal link between poverty and a child’s brain development. The study (published here in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.) used a first-of-its-kind randomized trial to test whether cash transfers to low-income families had an impact on babies’ brain development. The amount given during the trial was $333 a month, or about $4,000 a year – not far off the $300 monthly amount that eligible families were receiving under the (just-expired) Child Tax Credit. These two articles further elucidate the groundbreaking nature of the study, which was able to show causation and not merely correlation. And while we don't wish to diminish the enormity of this new evidence, which is well-timed during national discussions about whether to restore the Child Tax Credit, sentiments like these also ring very true.
This edition written by: Jamie O'Leary, Associate Director of Policy and Caitlin Lennon, Communications & Policy Specialist
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