States can qualify for grants up to $100 million under a new federal grant program for early learning.
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) released more details July 1 on the Early Learning Challenge, the third round of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top state education competition. The new competition was announced in May.
Requirements to win the money include tracking students to ensure they are ready for kindergarten and expanding access to more poor children.
Roberto Rodriguez, who serves as Special Assistant to President Obama for Education in the White House Domestic Policy Council, said the fund will focus on five areas:
- How the U.S. can do more to boost the quality of early learning programs in all states
- How educators can measure outcomes for kids and pay attention to those outcomes, rather than just measuring input
- How the nation can do more to ensure that its programs really are building toward success for kids
- How to build the best early childhood education workforce
- How to align early learning programs to a common set of standards and a common way of assessing progress
“Our goal is to produce the highest percentage of college-educated people in the world,” Rodriguez said. “We know learning begins at birth, but we also know there is a vast inequity in the quality of early learning programs.”
In fact, research shows that by the time children are three years old, there is already a disparity among children from the highest socioeconomic levels and those from the lowest. That gap can sometimes be as wide as 60 percentage points as children reach kindergarten.
The fund’s goal is to “make sure that children enter kindergarten ready to succeed…too many children are already behind when they enter kindergarten,” said Jacqueline Jones, who serves as ED’s Senior Advisor on Early Learning.
The competition is organized around building successful early learning state systems, promoting early learning development and outcomes, adhering to high program quality and accountability, and supporting an early learning workforce. The program also contains 17 separate elements relating to those focus areas, Jones said.
ED will welcome public input through July 11 about the program draft before developing a final application. (You can read about the program and offer your input here.)
Awards will range from $50-$100 million. ED will release the final application in August, applications will be due in October, and grants are expected to be awarded before the end of 2011.
So far, ED has handed out nearly $4 billion to states as part of the Race to the Top grant competition.
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