A new report out of New York offers another economics lesson, suggesting every dollar invested in early learning within that state generates $1.86 in new spending.

With New York struggling to cut its state budget, a Leading Edge report offers a compelling argument to spend more not less on early education, saying an infusion of $3.6 billion to give all of the state’s kids access to quality early child care and education would create $6.7 billion in spending on New York businesses.

“Business leaders are sending a clear message to Albany: investing in early education is essential for economic development in New York. The early care and education sector is an often-overlooked area that will immediately boost the economy and create long-term economic security,” John Cavalier, former chief executive officer at MapInfo, said in a summary of the report.

While a number of studies offer estimates on the long-term return-on-investment of early education, this report focuses on many short-term benefits,...

Congress has begun debating how to revamp the No Child Left Behind Act and one of the nation’s newest superintendents has an idea lawmakers should keep in mind: Education reform begins with child care, preschool and prekindergarten.

“If you want to reform high school, you need to reform early childhood. You don’t reform high school in high school, you reform very early on in life,” incoming Minneapolis Public School Superintendent Gregory Thornton told Milwaukee’s Business Journal.

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While parents may think preschool is a place where their kids race around, run and play, a study found students engaged in “moderate to vigorous exercise” only 3.4 percent of their day at preschool. Granted, there are other things to do beyond run around outside, but the level found in the Children’s Activity and Movement in Preschools Study seems way too low. (more)

Read more here at Birth to Thrive

This spring one of the giants of family research will launch a campaign to connect parents and teachers with all of the research on benefits of quality early learning, and help them use it.

Next month, Family and Work Institute head Ellen Galinsky will kick off “A Mind in the Making,” an ambitious and multifaceted effort that will be the culmination of eight years of work on early childhood learning research, why kids lose interest in learning and what can be done to keep them engaged.

“Too many kids were dropping out of high school, too many are not prepared for college, and there is a disturbing lack of engagement in learning..." (more)

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With time running out in the Washington State legislative session, a cut in child care subsidies for poor families remains a $30-million part of a House plan to balance the budget, though the Senate appears to support more funding.

The House budget plan now has a smaller version of Gov. Christine Gregoire’s proposed cut to the Working Connections Child Care program – a move that would force thousands of poor families from the program that provides child care subsidies and support, according to interest groups. (more)

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The flood of research backing the academic power of play continues. A new study found recess plays a critical role helping concentration and boosting grades, The New York Times reported.

New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.   (more) 

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Vaccine fears are back in the news today. Many parents are concerned about negative reactions to vaccines and one-quarter think these shots can cause autism, a new study found.

Overall, 54 percent of surveyed parents said they were concerned about “serious adverse effects of vaccines,” according to a story on the new research published today in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.  In addition, 25 percent agreed with the statement that “some vaccines cause autism in healthy children.”

That is the bad news. The good news is that the vast majority of parents (90 percent) agreed that vaccines are a good way to protect against disease, and 88 percent said they follow their doctor’s advice on shots, researchers said.

More at Birth to Thrive.

As budget debates heat up in state legislatures around the country it is a good time to review economic arguments for investing in early learning and Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman’s ideas are a great place to start.

With videos, flyers, pamphlets and a slide show, the University of Chicago economist makes a powerful case for the Heckman Equation, which argues that investing in child care returns 10 percent per annum. (more)

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Washington is doing better than many states when it comes to the dental health of its children, a less well known but important part of school readiness and early childhood development.

A new Pew Center on the States report gave Washington a B for its children’s dental health – only 9 states received that grade, while 36 were handed a C or worse. That means our state is doing well, but still has work to do. One area of concern is the finding that 57 percent of children who qualify for its Access to Baby and Children Dentistry program do not receive care.  (more)

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Early learning teachers earn far less than they are worth – often $18,000 a year – and one of the reasons, and flaws in the economics of their industry, is that there are actually two child care markets, one expert says.

“We also have an unregulated market in early child care existing side by side with the licensed regulated market,” Marcy Whitebook, director of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, said on NAEYC Radio. “…That puts some of the damper on what they will charge for the service because they know that parents who can’t afford it will opt out of the regulated market and go into the unregulated system where they can (get) cheaper care.” (Listen to the podcast here.)

The burgeoning field of brain research is beginning to change this dynamic because more people realize how important the first few years are, Whitebook added.

But, professionals teaching children during those critical years still make...

Children who live in poverty during the years before they enter kindergarten can struggle as adults because there is a link between living in poverty in those first years and earning less as an adult, according to a research report released over the weekend.

“The study suggests that a $3,000 annual increase in income between a child’s birth and fifth birthday is associated with 19 (percent) higher earnings and a 135-hour increase in annual work hours in adulthood.” – Research summary, Society for Research in Child Development. (more)

We have another report on detecting delays in infants. Babies with flathead syndrome scored lower on cognitive and gross motor skill tests in a new study, suggesting they could have developmental delays.

While some doctors may have considered flathead syndrome largely a cosmetic issue, “our study indicates that we should look deeper,” Matthew Speltz, chief of outpatient psychiatric services at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said in a research summary released this week. (more)

We are only beginning to understand digital media’s impact on children, researchers say, and a leading neuroscientist worries all of this screen time could rob children of “the ability to gain real understanding.”

Essentially, Baroness Greenfield, a popular scientist in England, suggests information is not knowledge and while kids may be better at grabbing information, they may lose an edge in understanding everything they gather. (more)

Doctors and other experts may be able to screen babies’ motor skills development, such things as crawling and holding things – for signs they could need extra support in preschool, according to research released today.

“We found that delay in gross and fine motor development in a child’s first year – which affects about one in ten children – was significantly associated with delayed cognitive development at age 5,” say researchers at the Institute of Education, University of London. (more)

Quality early learning is a powerful poverty-fighting tool that helps narrow achievement gaps among children. Researchers spend a lot of time focusing on those gaps in preschool, but there is not much work on these divides in babies and toddlers, a new report says.

A Child Trends report begins to change this with a study of data on 11,000 children that shows the achievement gap - differences in cognitive skills, behavior and health – actually shows up as early as nine months.

Researchers discovered many of these gaps widened by the time children were two years old.

Read more

The new draft of the manual for diagnosing mental disorders arrived this week and its changes to the definition of autism and other disorders could affect the early learning world.

While doctors, experts and advocates are still digesting all of the changes, there already are thoughts about what will happen now. Darrel Regier, vice-chair of the DSM-5 (the manual) task force, suggested it could lower the number of people who are diagnosed with autism, according to USA Today. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 1 in 91 children are diagnosed with the disorder.

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Today First Lady Michelle Obama took the lead in the effort to reduce childhood obesity by launching a national campaign that strives to strike a balance among exercise, nutrition and better access to healthy food.

One of the “Let’s Move” campaign’s most dramatic ideas is tax breaks for grocery stores that operate in underserved areas, the Associated Press reports, via MSNBC.com. 

More than 23 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, live in urban and rural neighborhoods without adequate access to a supermarket. – Let’s Move website.

 Read Paul Nyhan's full blog item here at Birth to Thrive Online 

Researchers found a few basic steps were associated with battling one of the nation’s health concerns, childhood obesity. Preschoolers who got enough sleep, watched limited amounts of television and regularly ate dinner with their families had a lower prevalence of obesity.

In fact, preschoolers who had all three habits were found to have “a roughly 40 percent lower prevalence of obesity than those exposed to none of these routines,” according to an article published today in Pediatrics, the research journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. (more)

I write a lot about funding battles, both federal and state, and hopefully that money eventually goes somewhere and helps someone, though too often we don’t follow the money.  It turns out last year’s economic stimulus package will allow 108 more kids to attend quality early learning this year in Washington State.

Thanks to the law, the federal government is sending $933,171 to this state to allow these kids to enroll in Children’s Home Society of Washington’s Early Head Start programs in King and Walla Walla counties this month. Plus, the money will create 14 new jobs...

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FURTHER READING

 Where'd the stimulus $ go? Here's where it's going in King County and Washington

Massive presidential budget proposals are worth a second, third and fourth look and a closer examination of President Obama’s plan reveals more good news for early learning, including a fresh focus on early literacy and a boost for child nutrition.

For example, President Obama tucked a proposed increase of $1 billion for child nutrition in his budget, the National Association for the Education of Young Children reports. Obama also wants to wrap together a group of literacy programs into “a comprehensive birth through high school literacy grant program. $250 million total, of which 15% for birth to kindergarten…” (more)

The Obama administration released its new budget today and despite the large federal budget deficit it contains new money for Early Head Start, child care subsidies and other incentives for early learning, interest groups reported.

Two of the nation’s biggest early learning programs, Head Start and Early Start, would receive a total increase of $989 million in fiscal 2011 over last year’s level, according to Zero to Three. It should be interesting to watch the Congressional reaction to that request, since Head Start was criticized last month in a federal report.

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We’ve seen a lot of different arguments for quality early learning - economic, artistic and wonky - and now rocker Chris Belew will make the case to Washington State lawmakers with a dance party next Friday.

Belew is the force behind the children’s rock group Caspar Babypants, which will rock out for families in the state capitol Feb. 5 with an all-ages concert sponsored by the grassroots advocacy group MomsRising.

You may remember Belew from when he fronted the popular and more parent-oriented The Presidents of the United States of America. Now, he also makes “kindie” rock and wants to make quality child care a top legislative priority.

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There are a few interesting developments today, including a new list of great math books for preschoolers.

The list compliments fresh research on how preschoolers can grasp more advanced mathematical ideas than many thought – measuring, basic geometry and relationships. Now, the Erikson Institute is developing a list of books “that are great for early math lessons.”

So far, it includes:

• “Tikki Tikki Tembo” by Arleen Mosel
• “The Doorbell Rang” by Pat Hutchins (read more here)

Sometimes a video is worth a thousand research studies.

In less than nine minutes, the film “A New Beginning for American Education” makes a powerful and inspiring case for integrating pre-kindergarten and early elementary grades by featuring Seattle’s South Shore school. For the last seven years, the school’s teachers and administrators have created a more comprehensive education that stretches from pre-k through third grade.

Instead of relying on dry studies, this slick movie relies on parents, teachers, indie rock, a principal, Department of Early Learning’s Bette Hyde, and, of course, experts. (more)

The federal Head Start review continues to generate interesting analysis, including the idea it may show a catch-up dynamic not a fade-out effect.

Once kids hit kindergarten, teachers work hard to help lagging students catch up with the rest of the class, National Institute of Early Education Research co-director Steve Barnett wrote: “This is catch-up, not fade out or wash out.” (Read more here.)

That's in contrast to a recent post on the same Head Start review, which pondered: Do Head Start benefits fade by first grade?