Wednesday, January 10, 2007
From Cradle to Career...
Yesterday I shared information about the report, From Cradle to Career, Connecting American Education From Birth to Adulthood. I hope that you check out the website at http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2007/01/04/index.html.
For the past decade, Quality Counts has focused on the policy efforts states have undertaken to improve K-12 education. But that schooling is just part of a larger continuum of learning opportunities that starts in infancy and progresses into adulthood. And if Americans are to make the most of those opportunities—both as individuals and as a nation—their learning should build on itself at every step along the way. As Isabel V. Sawhill, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, puts it: “Skill begets skill, and each stage of education builds on skills acquired at an earlier stage.”
Yet in the United States, the historical separation between various levels of education, and the consequent lack of communication and coherence across sectors, means that children and older students are lost at every juncture. Just consider:
- Even before kindergarten, the average cognitive scores of children from the highest socioeconomic group are 60 percent above those of children from the lowest socioeconomic one.
- Fewer than one-third of 4th graders read at the “proficient” level or higher on national tests, and fewer than a third of 8th graders reach that benchmark in reading or mathematics.
- The gaps in reading and math performance between poor, African-American, and Hispanic students and their better-off, white, and Asian peers are roughly two grade levels—or at least 20 points on a 500-point scale.
- Fewer than eight in 10 white teenagers graduate from high school on time with a regular diploma. That figure drops to 52 percent for black students and 56 percent for Hispanic students.
- While some 33 percent of white Americans ages 25 to 64 have at least a four-year college degree, that’s true for only 18 percent of black Americans and 13 percent of Hispanic Americans.
I hope that you spend some time at this website, it contains a weath of information and statistics. i would like to share part of the report talking about the importance of quality early education...
Paying Attention Earlier On
High-quality early education can help mitigate disparities in school readiness that exist between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds.By Lynn Olson
In his 2006 book Building Blocks: Making Children Successful in the Early Years of School, the author and education observer Gene I. Maeroff argues, “Unprecedented attention to schooling from preschool through 3rd grade offers greater promise for improving outcomes than almost any other step that educators might take.”
“Doing it right in the first place,” he explains, “is the most obvious way to give students what they will need to prosper in the classroom.”
Striking disparities in what children know and can do are evident well before they enter kindergarten. While the average 4-year-old in a family receiving welfare has heard some 13 million spoken words, for example, a child from a working-class family has heard about 26 million, and a child from a professional family almost 45 million, according to a study by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, summarized in their 1995 book Meaningful Differences.
Research has found that participation in intensive, high-quality early-childhood education can improve school readiness. Children who attend such programs are less likely to drop out of school, repeat grades, or need special education than children who have not had such experiences. As adults, they are less likely to commit crimes, more likely to be employed, and likely to have higher earnings.
Studies also suggest that poor and minority children stand to benefit the most academically from attending high-quality early-childhood programs.
Read the full article...
