What does the President's budget mean for early learning?
11 comments   
 

The President released his FY2013 budget proposal today, and, while we’re not overwhelmed by Valentine’s hearts and flowers for early learning, the news could have been worse:

An $85 million increase for Head Start and Early Head Start, to $8.054 billion overall—enough, as the White House fact sheet says, to maintain the slots that were funded as part of the 2009 Recovery Act
A $300 million increase for child care quality improvement, which would essentially double the resources available for quality activities in CCDBG
In addition, the budget proposes nearly $525 million in funds to expand access to child care. However, $500 million of that increase is on the “mandatory” (as opposed to “discretionary”) side of the budget, meaning it would need to be approved by the Ways and Means and Finance Committees, who declined to consider similar proposals made last year.  
Continuation of the Race to the Top initiative, with proposed funding of $850 million—and, while there are no details on how much would be allotted to early learning, it is spelled out that the budget “supports deepening the Administration’s investment in Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge.”

But, as those of you who are familiar with the budget dance know, this is only the beginning of a long process—one that seems to get longer each year and that for FY13 will unfold with the added pressures of election year politics and the fallout from last year’s debt ceiling compromises. Still, this is a solid first step. As the country begins to turn the corner on tough economic times, we applaud the Obama administration for maintaining momentum by continuing its commitment to early childhood. The President’s budget reflects what we all know: investments in early learning lead to higher employment, higher incomes, greater workforce productivity, and a more competitive economy. It acknowledges that the path to middle-class security starts with quality early learning and continues with effective education in school, college, and career training.

We hope that Congress agrees, and that they enact funding bills with similarly strong support for early learning. 
 
 
posted by Cornelia | TAGGED: Budget, Early Learning Challenge, Head Start, Race to the Top
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Comments
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April 06, 2012 06:20 am : Jeanne
I can answer a couple of your questions. Distance learning (and I think this includes courses through the mail, as well) are courses you can do from your home, where the teacher is a fair distance from where the student is. There are some situations, where, for instance, a whole class might meet in one location, and the teacher is in another, sometimes with another group, and there are video and computer links. People take these classes to fulfill all sorts of requirements and interests, especially when they can’t GET to another location every week or two or three times a week to take a class. For instance, I once took a whole degree where I had to drive, daily, three hours each way to classes, spend all day, then come home, because I didn’t want to relocate altogether. I would MUCH rather have done the whole degree long-distance, but that wasn’t an option at the time. I live in a rural area, and getting advanced courses is often difficult, and all we have here is a community college, so, if I want an advanced class, I have to do something else, and that can be done through distance and online courses. I can’t help you out with any specifics. There are some good online Universities, but I’d be willing to bet there are some scams out there as well. Do your research and make sure you actually can TALK to someone who has taken courses through whatever group you want to send money to…good luck! auto insurance quotes car insurance quotes
April 06, 2012 06:20 am : Jeanne
I can answer a couple of your questions. Distance learning (and I think this includes courses through the mail, as well) are courses you can do from your home, where the teacher is a fair distance from where the student is. There are some situations, where, for instance, a whole class might meet in one location, and the teacher is in another, sometimes with another group, and there are video and computer links. People take these classes to fulfill all sorts of requirements and interests, especially when they can’t GET to another location every week or two or three times a week to take a class. For instance, I once took a whole degree where I had to drive, daily, three hours each way to classes, spend all day, then come home, because I didn’t want to relocate altogether. I would MUCH rather have done the whole degree long-distance, but that wasn’t an option at the time. I live in a rural area, and getting advanced courses is often difficult, and all we have here is a community college, so, if I want an advanced class, I have to do something else, and that can be done through distance and online courses. I can’t help you out with any specifics. There are some good online Universities, but I’d be willing to bet there are some scams out there as well. Do your research and make sure you actually can TALK to someone who has taken courses through whatever group you want to send money to…good luck! auto insurance quotes car insurance quotes
February 16, 2012 07:51 am : Marcy Axness
I'm hoping that the latest research has reached President Obama's office: the timeline on "early learning" has been radically misunderstood and mis-served! As I write in my new book "Parenting for Peace," "We can no longer afford to consider pregnancy a nine-month grace period before parenting begins. On the contrary, pregnancy is like Nature’s Secret Head Start Program! When a woman is pregnant, her baby’s organs and tissues develop in direct response to grow-or-protect lessons they receive about the world—lessons that come from Mom’s diet, her behavior and her state of mind. Mounting evidence tells us that circumstances in the womb program us in critical, life-altering ways." The prenatal environment is equally as important as genes, perhaps even more important, in determining lifelong physical and mental health. U.C. Berkeley professor of integrative biology Marian Diamond cautions, “If we’re putting millions of dollars into Head Start, which begins at three, four, or five years of age, and haven’t developed the appropriate brain to receive that education, it will be a waste of money. It is important to be sure that the brain has developed well in utero. So when you start with formal education, you have the nerve cells and the dendrites that can respond.” New research suggests that attention to health factors during prenatal development may prevent childhood aggression, teenage delinquency, and violence in adulthood. And the American Academy of Pediatrics has just issued a policy statement about the powerful role that "toxic stress" (ie, when a child does not feel secure, in a chronic, persisting way) can play in disrupting the architecture of the developing brain, thereby influencing behavioral, educational, economic, and health outcomes decades and generations later. For years I've harbored the radical notion that the successes of Head Start are largely an epiphenomenon to their stated goal of teaching underprivileged children to read: that the close, nurturing relationships with consistent, predictable, available adults in their classroom provided the kind of brain nourishment that "teaching" cannot begin to approach. They thrive, and we (the big "we," the machine of state) thinks it's about words. Nicholas Kristol's New York Times editorial about the AAP policy statement was entitled "A Policy Solution That Starts With A Hug." And just yesterday, news of Luby et al.'s groundbreaking study out of Washington Univ. School of Medicine--the kind that proves what so many already know in their marrow: nurturance matters. Nurturing in infancy, childhood (heck, forever!) contributes to the most robustly healthy brains. Brains whose circuitry is wired with the capacities we will need in our next generations if we've got much hope of thriving as a global family: empathy, imagination, self-regulation, trust, intelligence. Marcy Axness, PhD author, Parenting for Peace: Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers http://parentingforpeace.com