President Obama sent his fiscal year 2014 budget request to Congress on April 10, 2013. The New America Foundation's Education Policy Program released this subsequent issue brief, "Key Questions on the Obama Administration's 2014 Budget Request." Obama's budget request totals $71.2 billion in appropriations funding for the U.S. Department of…

Head Start, the federal government's pre-K program, is at a crossroads. The program has been used as an anti-poverty measure by the government for over 45 years. It has grown significantly since its inception and provided many children with a valuable, high-quality early education, and in FY2012 served more than 960,000 children under 5 on a $7.9…

Researchers and policy analysts have documented the challenges in collecting pre-K and other early childhood data, and reports on disparities in full-day kindergarten from the Education Commission of the States and the Children's Defense Fund place the disorganized state of kindergarten data on full display. But in both cases, organizations have…

This author contends that, as a nation, we are doing a very good job of squandering human potential and making life harder for all Americans as a result, and that this has to stop. If our government, at the local, state, and federal level, does not start investing in education systems that reach children before kindergarten, and if it does not get…

This report on the state's early education system offers a dark assessment, but not a fatalistic one, especially if leaders can seize and build on reform efforts that have already started in patches throughout the state. There's much more that policymakers, advocates and the state can--and should--be doing to work toward a day when all…

This report seeks to describe how New Jersey became a national leader in early education and PreK-3rd, identify its successes and challenges, draw lessons from its experience for policymakers in other states and nationally, and provide recommendations for New Jersey policymakers to translate progress to date into sustained, large scale learning…