Financing Early Childhood Education

This Evaluation Brief is intended to help stakeholders in early childhood and elementary education think about how to use evaluation at different stages in the development of a PreK-3rd effort.

A report from the Urban Institute, How Do Public Investments in Children Vary with Age? A Kids’ Share Analysis of Expenditures in 2008 and 2011 by Age Group, examines 2011 federal spending and 2008 total government.

This issue brief from the New America Foundation, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level, released in concert with the expansion of the FEBP database, details the problems that stem from states’ lack of data and outlines policy recommendations.

In a report from the Urban Institute, resident experts from diverse disciplines were asked to respond to the question: “How can solutions to our national and state budget crises fit the facts about children in the United States?” For example, children are poorer than all other age groups in the U.S. yet their share of the federal budget is projected to drop from 11 percent in 2010 to 8 percent in 2020 as additional funding from the American Recovery Act ends and mandated spending, especially for Social Security and Medicare, rises.

For more than a decade New Jersey’s schools have served as a national model for providing high-quality early childhood education programs to thousands of low-income children, including an ambitious plan approved by the Legislature two years ago to reach even more 3- and 4-year-olds by September 2013.

The organization hosted a summit of business and community leaders October 5, 2010 to spark discussion and explicate on the high-dollar return on investment associated with early learning and care.

This is a collection of PreK-3rd’s key resources broken down by: The Case for PreK-3rd; Financing PreK-3rd; Implementing PreK-3rd; Leadership by Educators; Teacher Preparation/Professional Development; Educating Dual-Language Learner (DLL) Students; Federal Policy; State Policy; School District Policy; Research Basis for PreK-3rd; and, Assessment and Evaluation.

New America Foundation makes the case for PK-3. This is the first of a series of papers to define a PK-3 agenda in advance of NCLB reauthorization.