The synthetic phonics/whole language debate continues in the USA, where some states and localities are rejecting the former and the federal subsidies that come with it.NYTimes article by Diana Jean Schemo Published: March 9, 2007
The (US) National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) gives high marks to preschools which emphasise healthy eating and nutritional snacks. There are some laboratory preschools, such as the Nutritional Sciences Preschool at Rutgers University, whose work focuses on healthy eating. There is a long waiting list for its spaces... but isn't there always, when it comes to laboratory preschools? NYTimes article by Winnie Hu
Published: March 10, 2007
[Article by Gaby Hinsliff, political editor, Sunday March 4, 2007 The Observer] Although single mothers are offered benefits until their youngest child reaches age 16, in recent years some 3/4 of them have sought paid employment nonetheless. New government plans will reduce the benefit to include only those single mothers whose youngest child is age 11, an act which will force unemployed single mothers of 11 to 15-year-olds into employment.Perhaps even more radically, the government will soon propose a privatisation scheme in which the welfare-to-work programme will be driven by private companies to whom the government will award bounties according to the number of benefit recipients they shift into the workforce, regardless of why the recipients received benefits in the first case (i.e. lone motherhood, demonstrated incapacity to work, etc.)
OFSTED points to nurseries as a source of the gender achievement gap. Among other things, boys are said to be 'stifled' by female nursery teachers who fail to acknowledge that their masculine ways of learning. Click here for PDF of the OFSTED report.March 6, 2007
Published February 2007, the Government's Equality Review offers yet more evidence that structural and ideological conflicts within the British economy and society hinder the successful combination of paid employment and child-rearing. This severely disadvantages mothers of young children in particular, especially in terms of employment, career advancement, and quality of life in general. The disadvantages experienced by mothers in England, Scotland, and Wales are found to cut across social and ethnic groups but, as might be expected, they are not equally distributed. They depend upon the type of family in which a mother and her child(ren) live and the characteristics of their immediate social networks. The Report finds that interventions thought to reduce disadvantage from early childhood onward, such as access to high quality pre-schooling and rich Home Learning Environments, are often inaccessible to particular subgroups, including disabled children of all backgrounds. Thus it points to a need for expanded and improved early childhood care and education for all as a way to help systematically reduce inequality. Click here for PDF of the Report.
