Preschool News -- April 2006

The Universal Preschool Campaign Heats Up

This is a very important time for all Californians. We have put aside issues of race, color, political affiliation, wealth, and poverty, and come together in support of Universal Preschool. Universal Preschool will ensure that all children, from all income levels and backgrounds, will have equal access to high quality, publicly funded preschool. This is what our children deserve and they need your support.

Quality Counts

According to Ms. Alice Huffman, California State Conference NAACP President, universal preschool will provide minority members and all California families with free high-quality preschool education for their children. "Our kids will be taught by trained and credentialed teachers," said Huffman. "Teachers know first hand that kids with a quality preschool education start school ready to learn, and that such readiness is the key to improving our state's education system."

LAUP Identified Areas of Greatest Need

We welcome you to participate in a conversation with California policy makers and education leaders to discuss how California's education system is doing and, more importantly, what needs to be done in the future to ensure results.

Education Testing Service (ETS) and Education Week are co-hosting the conversation, which will be based on Education Week's Quality Counts report. Quality Counts takes a comprehensive look at the progress of standards-based education across the nation and in each state. The event will include a presentation on the Quality Counts report, with specific emphasis on California findings.

A discussion of the implications to California policy and education will follow the report presentation. The discussion will include a panel of California policy makers and education leaders, including Jack O'Connell, State Superintendent of Public Instruction; Marshall Smith, Director of Education of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Margaret Gaston, Executive Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning; and others.

Following the panel discussion, all invitees will have the opportunity to participate in the discussion with the panelists, journalists, and researchers.

Event details follow:
When: Tuesday, April 4, 2006 Where: California Chamber of Commerce, 1215 K Street, Suite 1400, Sacramento, CA 95814 Time: 9:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.

Why Universal Preschool?

WATSONVILLE — COPE Centro Familiar, a state funded preschool, shuts doors after three decades as a community institution.

The sudden shut down of the financially troubled school left the parents of more than 200 children confused and uncertain as to what they would do for child care.

"Our world's fallen apart," said Annette Melendez, who learned of the closing from staff when she picked up her 4-year-old grandson a Friday afternoon. "Changes should have been made - not just cut us off. We are not rich families. We can't take our children to centers that cost $30 or $40 a day."

COPE serves low-income families at sites on Lawrence Avenue and at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds.

What next? Californians need Universal Preschool. Universal Preschool will ensure that all eligible children, from all income levels, have equal access to quality preschool education that meets age and developmentally appropriate statewide preschool standards.

Rand Corporation Research on Universal Preschool

Rand Corporation Research was based on the following questions:

• What are the core implementation issues and policy choices facing states that are moving toward universal pre-K? How has the current fiscal climate affected these choices?
• How have states negotiated the consequences of their policy choices?
• What lessons might be learned from these negotiations?
• What are the effects of particular universal pre-K policy choices on other child populations, families, and communities?

According to the research, significant new practices are emerging across state pre-K programs in such areas as the development of standards, creative funding, professional development, technical assistance, and partnership with diverse providers. States are working to develop the quality of their programs and their ability to provide services to all children in the targeted age ranges. This study highlights the choices and challenges faced in moving quality to scale within presently fragmented and multilayered systems of governance and programming. The study argues for more rigorous examination of current efforts in order to identify promising practices, as well as careful coordination of policymaking to ensure that large-scale public pre-K programs more fully echo the small-scale, high-quality interventions that inspired them. Activities that may support the quality of current and future efforts include the following:

• Raise public awareness that the benefits of high-quality early childhood experiences are not entirely or even primarily academic and that full readiness for school — and realization of long-term benefit — may require comprehensive, developmentally appropriate programs.
• Base new efforts to develop state infrastructure for taking pre-K to scale on evidence from successful practices, where it exists, and examine ongoing efforts more closely to determine where and why they are and are not successful.
• Integrate efforts across state bureaucracies — if necessary, reorganizing to reduce turf wars and silo effects.
• Expand state efforts to engage linguistic and cultural minorities in pre-K as both consumers and providers, and examine present efforts to do so that appears to be meeting the needs of these generally marginalized groups.
• Work toward standards that are developmentally appropriate, support program quality, and balance performance expectations across all developmental domains.
• Develop measures of pre-K teacher and administrator quality other than simple certification, and encourage their adoption as a support for quality and staff stability.
• Increase the extent to which professional development and technical assistance efforts focus on upgrading teacher and administrator quality in non-school settings, and develop a base of evidence on successful practice in these arenas.
• Examine more rigorously the effects of school district dominance on access to, demand for, and utilization of programs, and consider restructuring programs so that populations most in need can be provided with services.
• Focus outcomes research on the effects of particular program components over time, once programs are taken to scale, as a support for the adoption of quality practices in other states.

Los Angels Universal Preschool

Los Angeles Universal Preschool (LAUP) has funds available to qualified providers who will increase preschool capacity for 4-year-olds in one of 34 selected cities in Southern California. In each of these cities, there are at least 500 more 4-year-olds than there are licensed child care spaces.

This funding may be used to:

1. Increase capacity for 4-year-old children in existing centers by providing operational funding for: (a) new preschool sessions in licensed but currently empty classrooms; or (b) additional preschool sessions in currently operating classrooms;
2. Create new preschool facilities that will serve 4-year-old children through renovation of existing facilities or the installation of portable classrooms; or
3. Fund 4-year-old children in Family Child Care homes that are not already part of the LAUP network.

In order to qualify for possible funding, interested applicants must attend an orientation session organized by LAUP.

NAACP State Education Committee

During the March 14, 2005 education committee meeting, California State Conference of NAACP education chairperson, Mrs. Ida Johnson stated "we are strong supporters of universal preschool." In addition, Dr. Pat Washington will seek funds to support preschool activities in Southern California.

The Children Advocate: Rob Reiner

Rob Reiner has stood firm that a publicly funded television campaign promoting preschool, which was sponsored by the state commission he chairs, was developed without his input and was not intended to build support for the Universal Preschool initiative that he backs.

Reiner is facing allegations that he mixed public money with his political interests, but he denied the allegations by stating that he had never seen the commercial,which aired at the same time he was leading an effort to gather signatures for a ballot measure that voters will decide on in the June primary.

People across the state have openly come out in support of Universal Preschool despite the allegations. UC Davis professor Ross Thompson, who focuses on child development and public policy, states that "Young children enter school carrying the burden of their early experiences, and it is simply more efficient to prevent later difficulty than to try to remedy problems that occur."