D.C. has long been ahead of the game, with a history of prioritizing early childhood education. Fight For Children’s Sadie Ellner, a former early childhood teacher, shares with us why early childhood classrooms are uniquely important and just as rigorous as any other grade level. She also lets us know what Fight For Children, a nonprofit organization that provides funding and programming for the education of low-income D.C. children, is doing to support and develop early childhood teachers and school leaders.
When we hear about education in the news, it is often about attention-grabbing issues such as dropout rates, test scores, and teacher evaluations — leaving little room for discussion of preventive measures, like prekindergarten. Thankfully, attention for early childhood education has been picking up, with mentions in the past two State of the Union speeches and proposed legislation in states such as Michigan and Missouri.
D.C. has long been ahead of the game, with a history of prioritizing early childhood education. Fight For Children’s Sadie Ellner, a former early childhood teacher, shares with us why early childhood classrooms are uniquely important and just as rigorous as any other grade level. She also lets us know what Fight For Children, a nonprofit organization that provides funding and programming for the education of low-income D.C. children, is doing to support and develop early childhood teachers and school leaders.
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I have to admit a heresy: I cringe whenever I hear someone profess their sense of urgency about the need to reform education. It’s not that I don’t want to see our education system fixed as quickly as possible; it’s that I fear the detrimental effects of urgency, which can be a poison to education policy thinking. Urgency pulls its rhetorical power from a picture of an education system in crisis. This is a picture of (at least parts of) our system that I find persuasive, but that leads to suboptimal policy choices. Put another way, urgency comes from a good place, but leads to a bad one. There are a few ways that urgency corrupts our thinking in education. First, if you see a crisis, your first impulse is to address the most obvious and pressing issues. However, the most obvious and pressing issues aren’t necessarily the most fundamental ones. So we choose fast solutions over enduring ones -- like rushing out new teacher evaluation systems so their effect is felt right away, instead of rolling them out a bit more slowly to ensure effectiveness and engender buy-in from teachers. This bias away from root causes can, ironically, end up making progress take even longer, but the more harmful result is that it blinds us to the paradigm shifts in our understanding of education that could be most helpful in producing meaningful change. “How would you communicate the importance of good foot hygiene to an 8-year-old in an entertaining way?” This was the interview question of my nightmares. Except I wasn’t asleep. This was my first encounter with iSchool Zambia, an inspiring business initiative improving teaching and learning through solar-powered tablets and e-learning for teachers in Zambia. (Proper foot hygiene was a public health issue. Some walked around barefoot, and for many, healthcare was too expensive and out of reach.) My year as a curriculum designer for this innovative start-up pushed me creatively, as I developed solutions to challenges such as “How can 90 students build a collage with neither paper nor glue?” I was involved with iSchool before the program was rolled out in schools. Now three years into implementation, I caught up with Education Director Clare Stead to find out how the program has been received. |
aboutYEP-DC is a nonpartisan group of education professionals who work in research, policy, and practice – and even outside of education. The views expressed here are only those of the attributed author, not YEP-DC. This blog aims to provide a forum for our group’s varied opinions. It also serves as an opportunity for many more professionals in DC and beyond to participate in the ongoing education conversation. We hope you chime in, but we ask that you do so in a considerate, respectful manner. We reserve the right to modify or delete any content or comments. For any more information or for an opportunity to blog, contact us via one of the methods below. BloggersMONICA GRAY is co-founder & president of DreamWakers, an edtech nonprofit. She writes on education innovation and poverty. Archives
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