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The pre-K-3 movement, which refers to the years spanning prekindergarten to 3rd grade, wants to revolutionize early education through an ambitious list of connected initiatives, including universal access to free public preschool, mandatory full-day kindergarten, and curriculum that is seamlessly connected from preschool to 3rd grade. Increasing parent involvement is also a major focus.

As states revamp their early childhood education to grab a slice of federal education dollars, some education experts are urging policymakers to look outside the classroom to improve educational opportunites for the country's youngsters. Just as Obama awarded over $500 million in state grants to improve pre-K, the Brookings Institution released a report arguing more attention paid to family background factors such as poverty and maternal education would help improve educational outcomes for our littlest learners. The report argued that gaps in children's ability to learn begin long before they enter the classroom -- and that those gaps can have lasting effects on class mobility.

"Some states currently are preparing proposals to engage in another round of Race to the Trough [otherwise known as Race to the Top]. They are seeking a share of the $700 million federal dollars allocated for early learning in the 2011 education budget. States can get this money if they design, develop, and administer pre-kindergarten assessments and kindergarten readiness tests. Common sense and research both suggest that this is really dumb!"

First, it should be noted that researchers are almost unanimous in their caution about this subject. There are inherent difficulties in the accurate assessment of very young children's learning in the fields of language, cognition, socio-emotional development, and even physical development. Young children's attention spans tend to be short and there are wide, natural variations in children's performance in any given domain and on any given day. Thus, great care is advised for both the design and implementation of such assessments (see here, here, and here for examples). The question of if and how to use these student assessments to determine program or staff effectiveness is even more difficult and controversial (for instance, here and here). Nevertheless, many states are already using various forms of assessment to oversee their preschool investments.

The Obama Administration's approval last week of 10 state applications for waivers from NCLB was another missed opportunity to learn from a decade of policy failure. Instead of changing the disastrous direction of federal education policy, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's waiver process allows states to reproduce some of the worst aspects of NCLB's "test and punish" approach while continuing to ignore real issues, like reducing concentrated poverty or providing equitable funding and high quality pre-K for all schools.

If governors like Andrew Cuomo are truly lobbyists for students they would look at our present system and help change it through offering proper resources for schools and children, making sure students get a positive start to their educational experience through highly effective pre-k programs and stopping the race toward higher scores on a test that is really not appropriate for the students taking it. In addition, they could allow schools to use some of the evaluation practices that they have presently. Many schools are using goal setting and teacher observation. Many schools are using best practices that encourage professional conversations between teachers and administrators. Many of those same schools are using teacher-centered and student-centered practices that focus on 21st century skills to prepare students for their future.

In 1972 I spent considerable time interviewing individuals and groups of young children in order to learn more about how they went about solving test questions on standardized tests. My interest was spurred by the discovery that my fluent bookworm son did badly on a 3rd grade test, and that the students who left our cozy 4-room Pre-K to 3rd grade mini-program at PS 144 were scoring poorly in 3rd grade. I knew virtually nothing about tests until that experience. I was a good test-taker and assumed such tests were good at detecting my talents. I was stunned by what I learned. I wrote a publication.

Mike Feinberg is co-founder of the KIPP Academies and superintendent of KIPP Houston, which serves more than 6,000 students in 18 schools. In 2007, KIPP Houston announced its "KIPP Turbo" plan, under which it aims to grow into a Pre-K to 12 network of 42 schools. The goal is to enroll 10 percent of the students in Houston, making KIPP Houston by far the largest network of charter schools in one city. As part of this effort, Mike recently announced that he'd be shifting roles to focus on fundraising, advocacy, and external relations, while handing the superintendency of KIPP Houston off to a successor. If you're not familiar with Mike's story, you can check out Jay Mathews' KIPP book, Work Hard, Be Nice for an immensely readable, if pretty syrupy, account. Anyway, with Mike changing roles and with KIPP Houston well into its ambitious growth plan, I thought it'd be interesting to chat with Mike about looming challenges and lessons learned.

"More than 250,000 pre-K, elementary, junior high and high school aged children - many of them disabled and of color - are restrained or put into isolation each year for behaving in ways that are considered disruptive or threatening."

Last month, amid a flurry of natural disasters, the Brookings Institution and Rockefeller Foundation dumped a dangerous proposal on the overworked, underpaid, unrespected early childhood workforce. In "Beyond Bachelor's: The Case for Charter Colleges of Early Childhood Education," Sara Mead and Kevin Carey bring the K-12 charter school movement right on down to the earliest years of education. At the heart of their concept is a simple bargain: increased flexibility in exchange for increased accountability to deliver results.

After a decade of concerns and criticisms about the lack of rigorous national standards in the No Child Left Behind Act, we now have a set of ambitious standards for use nationwide - the Common Core State Standards. Since their formulation two years ago, these standards have been adopted by 45 states, were made a precondition for funding in the Race to the Top competition, and have begun to influence the development of new curricula and assessments. But early childhood education - concerned with children from birth to the end of third grade - seems nearly an afterthought in the standards. Not only do they end (or begin) at kindergarten, ignoring more than half of the early childhood age range, they simply don't fit what we know about young children's learning and development.

Parents may have important effects on their children, but little work in economics explores how children's schooling opportunities impact parents' investment in children. We analyze data from the Head Start Impact Study, in which a lottery granted randomly-chosen preschool-aged children the opportunity to attend Head Start. We find that Head Start causes a substantial and significant increase in parents' involvement with their children-such as time spent reading to children, math activities, or days spent with children by fathers who do not live with their children-both during and after the period when their children are potentially enrolled in Head Start. We discuss a variety of mechanisms that are consistent with our findings, including a simple model we present in which Head Start impacts parent involvement in part because parents perceive their involvement to be complementary with child schooling in the production of child qualities.

Panelists talked about early childhood education programs. Among the topics they addressed were improving Head Start programs, school accountability, education funding, and monitoring the effectiveness of various programs. They also responded to questions from the audience.

"Today marks an important day for early education in North Carolina. Thanks to Governor Perdue's actions, that state's youngest children can continue to benefit from early learning programs that we know improve academic performance."

Investments in high-quality early childhood programs, particularly those targeted to children at risk, are not just a virtuous service, but can yield a large return for those paying the bill. Study after study has proved that such programs, coupled with training for parents, result not only in economic gains for the children as they grow up, but sizable savings on taxes. For example, graduates from these preschool programs are less likely to need special education, end up being arrested fewer times and spend less time in prison (which means fewer crime victims), require fewer social services, are healthier and wind up paying more in taxes.

Educational reforms enacted through federal policies are directly impacting the voice of children, teachers, and teacher educators. The recently introduced bi partisan bill "Growing Excellent Achievement Training Academies for Teachers and Principals Act" frames a plan for state accreditation for teacher training academies based on student achievement. The newly introduced Race to the Top (RTT) competition, focused on early childhood, includes motivating states to receive some of the $500 million allotted to create ratings systems to score early childhood programs, write standards and related standardized tests, and expectations of what an early childhood teachers should know. Both the proposed bill and RTT competition are positioned to regulate with market driven ideology, reinforcing and reproducing social injustice and undermining democratic ideals.