Worth revisiting during Women’s History Month — how women brought kindergarten to America. Also, a quick look at our partner school’s namesake, Dr. A. Sophie Rogers.

QUOTABLE & NOTABLE

FACT OF THE WEEK

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) analyzed Head Start availability across the country and found that it varied widely from state to state. Specifically, the availability of program slots in relation to possible need — as estimated by the number of young children living in poverty — is often insufficient. In Ohio, GAO estimated there are 30 or fewer Head Start slots for every 100 children living in poverty.

President Biden released his FY25 budget proposal, which includes several early childhood related investments. Here are a few good reads about what it includes: 

• “Biden proposes 'historic new program' to address child care shortages” 
• “Biden calls for an unprecedented investment in education, including free preschool” 
• “White House budget director says Biden plan would ‘give working families a shot’” 
• “New America experts react to President Biden’s fiery State of the Union speech”

In case you missed it, here is the recording and recap from our recent Crane Research Forum exploring the implications of COVID for early learning language and literacy development.

BEYOND THE BUCKEYE STATE

New America offers an overview of efforts in Washington, D.C., to not just raise the minimum educational requirements for early childhood educators but also provide needed supports — e.g., grants and scholarships, linguistically diverse programs — to help make meeting the new requirements more accessible. Importantly, the district also increased early childhood educator wages and established a health insurance program so that there was a clear payoff to educators seeking to achieve the increased credential requirements.

A new bill in Colorado would change the state’s subsidized child care program in a few key ways: child care employees would earn a state subsidy for their own child to attend care for free, regardless of family income; providers would be paid based on student enrollment instead of attendance (thus stabilizing their budgets); families would pay no more than 7% of their income in copays; and application processes for families would be streamlined, including a 90-day grace period to prevent families from being booted out of the system while their materials are under review.

WHAT WE'RE READING

Axios briefly looks at several facets related to employer-sponsored child care benefits. Elliot Haspel, writing for New America, offers a lengthier, more critical take on the limits of such well-intentioned programs.

Among the four million college students who are also parenting children, over a third attend community colleges. Yet just 100 out of 3,000 community colleges across the U.S. have Head Start on-site. NPR explores why so few community college campuses have on-site Head Start centers — and a new partnership that hopes to improve that statistic. On a related topic, the National Conference of State Legislatures published a brief describing challenges among parenting students and how policy can help address it.

A study published in Developmental Psychology examined a literacy intervention applied to first through third graders attending a randomly selected group of urban North Carolina schools, to assess whether science and social studies lessons focused on building content knowledge would impact later reading scores. Researchers discovered that children in the knowledge-rich instructional group did achieve higher reading scores at third grade — and those gains sustained into fourth grade. (Math scores were also positively impacted, which could be partially explained by the frequency of word problems on math assessments that require careful reading.) The Hechinger Report explains more about the study and how it fits into the broader body of evidence regarding the importance of building background and content knowledge for young readers.

This edition was written by Jamie O’Leary.

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