How about "No Chicago Nanny Government"
nytimes.com
By SAM DILLON
Published: December 16, 2008
CHICAGO — It was the morning after the presidential election, and Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, a national organization devoted to early childhood education, could barely contain his exultation.
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"We aren't going to solve our education problem by throwing more money at it. ... Bust the big teachers unions, revamp the entire tenure system, use true merit-based pay and put kids first."
Jake Culligan, Philadelphia, PA
Read Full Comment »Post a Comment »Mr. Melmed fired off an e-mail message to his board and staff, reminding them of President-elect Barack Obama’s interest in the care and education of the very young and congratulating Mr. Obama for campaigning on a “comprehensive platform for early childhood.”
Mr. Melmed was not alone in his excitement. After years of what they call backhanded treatment by the Bush administration, whose focus has been on the testing of older children, many advocates are atremble with anticipation over Mr. Obama’s espousal of early childhood education.
In the presidential debates, he twice described it as among his highest priorities, and his choice for secretary of education, Arne Duncan, the Chicago schools superintendent, is a strong advocate for it.
And the $10 billion Mr. Obama has pledged for early childhood education would amount to the largest new federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965. Now, Head Start is a $7 billion federal program serving about 900,000 preschoolers.
“People are absolutely ecstatic,” said Cornelia Grumman, executive director of the First Five Years Fund, an advocacy group. “Some people seem to think the Great Society is upon us again.”
Despite the recession, Mr. Obama has emphasized his interest in making strategic investments in early childhood education. Asked if the financial troubles might force him to scale back, Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the transition, said, “We simply cannot afford to sideline key priorities like education.”
It is not as though Mr. Obama is running against the wind. Major philanthropists including Bill Gates; Warren Buffett’s children; and George B. Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil billionaire, are financing education efforts for the very young. And the chairman of the Federal Reserve and many governors have said that expanding early childhood education should be a national priority.
Driving the movement is research by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, James J. Heckman, and others showing that each dollar devoted to the nurturing of young children can eliminate the need for far greater government spending on remedial education, teenage pregnancy and prisons.
Now that new initiatives seem likely, experts are debating how best to improve America’s early childhood system, which they call fantastically fragmented, unconscionably underfinanced and bureaucratically bewildering. Some hesitate to use the word “system” at all.
“It’s a patchwork quilt, a tossed salad, a nonsystem,” said Libby Doggett, executive director of Pre-K Now, a group that presses for universal, publicly financed prekindergarten.
There are federal and state, public and private, for-profit and nonprofit programs. Some unfold in public school classrooms, others in storefront day care centers, churches or Y.M.C.A.’s, and still others in tiny centers run out of private homes.
“California has 22 different funding streams for child care and preschool, and that mirrors the crazy labyrinth of funding sources coming out of Washington,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is the author of “Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle Over Early Education.”
Debates cut many ways. Some advocates want the nation to start by expanding services to all 4-year-olds. Others say improving care for infants and toddlers cannot wait. Some insist that middle-class and wealthy children must have access to public preschool. Others say the priority should remain with the poor.
Mr. Obama’s platform, which Mr. Duncan helped write, emphasizes extending care to infants and toddlers as well, and it makes helping poor children a priority. It would also provide new federal financing for states rolling out programs to serve young children of all incomes.
Outright opponents are fewer, and certainly less influential than they once were. In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon vetoed a bill that would have underwritten child care for everyone, arguing that the bill “would commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”
For years after that, conservatives blocked many early childhood initiatives, but resistance has diminished in recent years.
The last major federal initiative came in 1994, when the Clinton administration worked with Congress to create Early Head Start, which serves pregnant women and children from birth to age 3. Since then, states have largely carried the ball. go to link for more--------
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NEXT SEE THE RANKINGS FOR CHICAGO CITY SCHOOLS------
To: MJ who wrote (56909) 12/16/2008 2:13:36 PM
From: longnshort 1 Recommendation of 56932
His new Secretary of Education is Arne Duncan, Chief Exec of of CHICAGO school systems!
Chicago schools ranked 778th out of 842 cities.......
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