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Thursday, May 20, 2010

Education Research Report: Governors Protecting Pre-Kindergarten Programs Amid Budget Squeeze

Education Research Report: Governors Protecting Pre-Kindergarten Programs Amid Budget Squeeze



Governors Protecting Pre-Kindergarten Programs Amid Budget Squeeze


In spite of widespread fiscal distress in states, FY11 budget proposals from the nation's governors and the mayor of the District of Columbia keep overall state funding for pre-kindergarten near the previous year's levels. Should all the governors' budgets pass, state pre-k investments would remain at $5.3 billion, increasing by less than 0.2 percent, or slightly more than $8.2 million, according to a new report by Pre-K Now, a campaign of the Pew Center on the States.

Leadership Matters: Governors' Pre-K Budget Proposals Fiscal Year 2011 finds that access to state-funded high-quality pre-k remains largely dependent on where children live, with gubernatorial proposals ranging widely from significant expansion in Alabama to elimination in Arizona.

Highlights from this year's report include:
- Nine governors would increase pre-k investments. These proposals would increase funding for early learning in these states by a total of $78.5 million.
- Three states and the District of Columbia anticipate an increase for pre-k through their school funding formulas.
- Ten governors are proposing to flat fund pre-k. These proposals maintain funding for early learning at FY10 levels and include Alaska and Rhode Island, which both started new programs in FY10.


New Orleans schools fail to provide equal education opportunity, new U of Minnesota study says

Separate but unequal tiered system of schools created post-Katrina
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the public school infrastructure in New Orleans, Louisiana embarked on a massive effort to rebuild the entire New Orleans public school system, launching the nation's most extensive charter school experiment. The goal was to provide a quality education to all New Orleans students, regardless of race, socioeconomic class, or where they live.

The University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Race and Poverty (IRP) evaluated the success of the rebuilding efforts in a new study --The State of Public Schools In Post-Katrina New Orleans: The Challenge of Creating Equal Opportunity -- which found that the rebuilt public school system fails to adequately provide equal educational opportunity to all New Orleans students.

The study finds that the state-driven reorganization has created a "separate but unequal tiered system of


More than 60 percent of teachers have voice problems

Researchers at the University of Malaga (UMA) have analysed the presence of voice disorders in male and female teachers, in order to obtain a representative statistic: 62.7% of the Early Childhood and Primary Education teaching body suffer from these complaints on a daily or weekly basis.

Professions such as teaching require a high resistance to voice fatigue to be able to deal with vocal overload. "Our aim was to analyse the vocal problems of Early Childhood and Primary Education teachers, and the psychosocial dimensions associated with said disorders in Spain", Rosa Bermúdez, main author of the study and researcher at UMA, explains to SINC.

During the 2004-05 academic year, the scientists studied 282 teachers from 51 public education centres in the Malaga capital, which represented 13% of the teaching population of this sector. To do so, they used two types