ON ITCAPSKI(BGC/RSD)

Also: I am fully stoked for the potential for the improvement in early education.

And the $10 billion Mr. Obama has pledged for early childhood education would amount to the largest new federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965. Now, Head Start is a $7 billion federal program serving about 900,000 preschoolers.

When basically EVERY study EVER articulates the importance of a child’s earliest years (peep HCZ’s Baby College, as profiled on This American Life #366*) this is all good news. ANYBODY who has taught past 2nd or 3rd grade can see where students were lacking in early ed. For my kids, there were just really obvious gaps either in socialization or just generalized cognitive problem solving. 

Let’s see what happens, but expanded awareness has got to be a great thing. Also: it won’t simply be a matter of starting up a nationwide system…much profound reorganization is in order (yuck yuck yuck). I mean, california has 22 funding sources for childcare and preschool? Yikes.

*yes, no stats yet exist for children going through the whole HCZ program, it just seems so dope.

The entry.

Yglesias on teacher ed in finland plus discussion in the comments section. His posts re: Finnish systems are, by his own admission, more of a jumping off point from an outsider rather than an in-depth analysis. What is frustrating is, as Yglesias points out, the circular phenomena at work in both systems. US: Poor teacher pay/prep/performance -> Ailing school systems ->Fewer people wanting to become teachers -> Less competition for ed school->Fewer qualified teachers->Poor teacher pay/prep/performance . Finland: Teaching seen as competitive “good” field->Good teachers and prep/training->Good schools ->more people wanting to teach. (Gross oversimplification, of one aspect of the issues facing education but nonetheless I think puts into perspective how deep the problem is.)

After leaving the classroom, all of this is increasingly interesting to me. Thinking of how I could have been a better teacher and all that comes with hindsight and all my leisure time….well let’s just say I am fully on board with shifting the dialog to teacher performance and not NCLB styled student performance metrics (not that I was not for ditching NCLB long ago). 

Still researching Arne Duncan. Via tertiary analysis, doesn’t seem so bad, despite the ways you can splice the stats. (more yglesias)