NYTimes.com | Infants Form Memories, but Forget Them

Press release for results of a study by Patricia Bauer (Duke University) about infants and memory. Turns out they do remember what they see and experience -- it's just that they forget a lot, too.

NYTimes.com | Bridging Gaps Early On in Oklahoma

by David Leonhardt
7 February 2007

70% of Oklahoma 4-year-olds attend free, non-compulsory public preschools, and the state is planning to extend these Educare services to all its 3-year-olds. This article describes the apparent successes -- and limitations -- of the Oklahoma model and puts them into context of other states' programmes for expanding preschooling (among other things) as a means of diminishing social class differences in academic achievement. Includes a summary of the research relating to preschooling, economic and academic concerns.

Teach For America Setting Sights on Pre-K | Edweek.org

Education Week
9 February 2007
(article by online subscription or purchase only)

Teach for America, a programme which recruits new graduates (in any field but teaching) to teach for at least two years in under-served areas is extending its primary and secondary programmes to include pre-kindergarten. Criticisms of TFA's placement of new, low-paid graduates in some of the country's most challenging teaching situations have been loud and continue. But not even detractors can deny the urgency of the unmet need for educated (which is not to say trained) teachers in parts of the USA. Now that TFA has ventured into founding and staffing early-childhood programmes, the crash-course training methods and "perhapts not the best -- but better than nothing" mantra of TFA will be under fire again. And rightly so.