These policymakers are correct to point out the need to ensure students can in fact read before entering the fourth grade. But research is also clear that students who are retained are much less likely to graduate, among other negative outcomes. So are policymakers simply stomping out the flames or pouring gas on the fire?

Unfortunately, there is no clear answer. Similar retention policies have been used in the past, with limited success at best. Yet, such policies always seems to come into vogue every decade or so.

Looking at past attempts at similar policies doesn’t provide a clear answer on whether retaining students will boost their future achievement or not, but I’d have to agree with John Wilson, a reading specialist, who wrote in EdWeek that interventions are the way to go, not retention. Of course, Wilson advocates for interventions by reading specialists when a third grader is unable to read adequately; that is, a response when there is already a problem. The best solution is to not just provide interventions when there is already a problem, but to prevent a problem in the first place.

Research is clear that expanding access to high-quality pre-k programs is one of the most effective solutions to improving third grade reading scores and other student outcomes. Unfortunately, many of our most disadvantaged students, who would benefit most from pre-k, have the least access to such high-quality programs. And while access has been improving over the past decade or so, the current recession has put a damper on the expansion of high-quality pre-k programs.

However, school districts around the country are still pushing hard to provide high-quality pre-k programs to their students, especially their neediest students. But budgets are tight. Many school board members are struggling to determine what would be best for their students: offering pre-k and retaining their half-day kindergarten programs, or expanding their half-day kindergarten programs to full-day programs?

The findings from our Starting Out Right report point to the fact that including pre-k along with half-day kindergarten provides a better chance for disadvantaged students to be able to read by the third grade than providing full-day kindergarten alone. Of course, offering both pre-k and full-day kindergarten is best, but when budgets are tight providing pre-k along with half-day kindergarten can be an effective intervention solution to increase the chances students know how to read when they start the fourth grade. Providing pre-k is a much more effective solution than simply retaining a third grader who can’t read.—Jim Hull

As a product of a New York City Title I high school, I remember sitting in my high school classroom being told that out of a 1,000 or so seniors, only a handful of us would graduate. I couldn’t help but often ask myself, would I be one of those students?

Walking into a school faced with challenges, from the security guards to the metal detectors to the fights that broke out each day, I wondered if I would ever get out. What other kinds of thoughts could such a school environment provoke? However, I was lucky that I was raised in a household where dropping out of school wasn’t an option. With siblings whose specific circumstances prevented them from graduating high school, I was surely lucky.

Yet today I think about the idea of being lucky and laugh.  As though some of us are lucky enough to gain a college education while others aren’t lucky enough. Unfortunately, it’s a mentality that plagues high school students everywhere. Who will have their cards line up just right, so that they can walk in brightly colored gowns on graduation day? In a high school where my day-to-day presence didn’t seem valued, luck seemed like the only thing that might get me through.

Consequently, my own focus in recent years has been on how to recognize and appreciate the role of different races and cultures in education. Honestly, to me these differences often seem ignored. I say this from experience working with students within New York State’s opportunity programs, which focused on helping students from underrepresented minority groups to attend college. In working with extremely talented groups of students year after year, I saw first-hand the lack of college preparation afforded to them by their high schools. It also appeared as though not many felt like their own cultural experiences were valued, because they hadn’t yet learned to value them themselves.

I believe that this is one of the reasons why predominately white higher education institutions have lower African, Latino, Asian and Native American (ALANA) student retention rates compared to their white counterparts. Most of the time valuing your own cultural experience comes in college, and often times that’s too late for many.  How are high school students from these cultures viewing public education, which is supposedly built around their needs? Are different experiences valued and reflected in education policy on local and federal levels?

In reflecting on my own experience and understanding the experience of others, I can begin to untangle my role in sharing a counter narrative. I hope to gain a better understanding of education in general by widening my lens and looking at other aspects of education. I’m exploring my role more and more, understanding that at this point, I would like to keep focusing on the idea that there are people’s lives on the line rather than just percentages, statistics and figures. – Joyti Jiandani

Measuring the impact principals have on student achievement is relatively new in research. It is actually a topic I’ve been quite interested in since I was in graduate school. Having done some qualitative research on the topic back then I was quite certain that principals made an impact but didn’t know exactly know how much of an impact or what caused the impact. There was little research on the topic at the time, but over the decade since, there have been numerous studies focused on principals. I’ve been taking a close look at that research and putting together a report on what they have been finding about the impact of principals on student outcomes. It’s been fascinating research and I look forward to sharing the report with you later this spring. But for now, I can tell you that principals are incredibly important, especially for students in our most challenging schools. My hope when the report comes out is that policymakers pay more attention to how we recruit, train, and retain principals. By doing so, they could have a greater impact than any other reform model. You decide for yourself this spring. – Jim Hull

The most current enrollment data shows that about 70 percent of children are in full-day (FDK) programs.  To be sure, some of the children who don’t participate don’t because of parental choice, but many families who want FDK lack access.  Some early ed advocates fear that the absence of strong state policy makes existing FDK programs vulnerable to the budget ax, meaning even fewer seats for children who stand to benefit most from full-day programs.   

In response, CDF is going full throttle to advocate for making FDK an expectation for kids as much as 1^st grade already is.  Last week, they released a resource center to make this case. It includes, among other things, an interactive map where you can access FDK fact sheets for every state.

There are good reasons to give FDK a close look:

• FDK produces results. As Jim Hull showed in his CPE study, children who have both pre-k and FDK had stronger 3^rd grade reading skills than their peers who did not. The results were particularly dramatic for children from low-income families.  Other research also shows that children with FDK outperform children who have only half-day K.
• New demands and the common core state standards. To date, 45 states and DC have adopted the CCSS. Some experts believe that meeting the kindergarten benchmarks in the CCSS may demand a full-day program.
• Working parents like it. FDK is especially helpful for low- and middle-class families who are struggling to find good afterschool services that they can afford. 

As with pre-k, merely expanding access to full-day kindergarten won’t produce results in itself. We have to pay attention to quality. It took over a decade of nagging and cajoling from the early childhood experts to finally get us elementary-secondary folks to simply understand the meaning of “developmentally appropriate.”  Now that we get the importance of paying attention to children’s social and emotional development as well as academic, we have to be sure that a full-day program serves the unique needs of little ones and resist the pressure to turn kindergarten into junior 1^st grade.   

Which all argues for the role of local school leadership in designing a more comprehensive P-3 strategy that includes a well-thought-out, appropriate role for kindergarten.  We have some tools to help you get started on the Center’s pre-k Web page. Also, check out the Pre-K Coalition’s P-3 Alignment Brief. – Patte Barth

I’m going to write a blog post without information to support it.

While you might think this goes against everything the Center stands for — and in many ways it does — I have to. You see, there just isn’t information out there.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the explosion of virtual learning options and the lack of information on any of them. For instance, there are the virtual charter schools, of which some are being sued for allegedly making false statements about students’ poor performance. And there are also online credit recovery programs, run by districts in the hopes of getting more students to graduate. The term “virtual learning” also covers everything from online higher-level courses that increase access to a diverse curriculum, graduation requirements for students to take at least one online course, curricula offered to the homeschooling market, and for-profit online colleges.

Yet for all of these subjects we have very little data. Our recent report on credit recovery, compiled by our policy intern Julie McCabe, shows how very little we know about the approaches taken and the results of those approaches.

Frankly, it makes me uneasy. In these tight budget times, there’s more political push behind virtual learning options simply because they’re less expensive — like the push from corporations to move to electronic banking. But if we know nothing about all these options, why are we pushing them? They could be valuable tools or wastes of money. We just don’t know.

Why, when all of the data from online courses is presumably also stored online — student data, grades, and outcomes — do we not have more answers about how all of these options perform? And why, since all of these options are vastly different, do they all get lumped together as “virtual learning”? I, too, have more questions than I have answers.

What would be the first question you would ask on this subject?

–Rebecca St. Andrie