Anyone who’s driven north from downtown Wausau toward Bridge Street may have seen the billboard there featuring the smiling face of a young child and the word “YoungStar.”
The relatively new program of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families is designed to be a resource for parents and to create a system of incentives for child care providers. The state rates child care providers that receive state subsidies based on a number of different assessments largely focused on how they approach early childhood education. The state provides help for providers to improve their ratings, and there’s a financial incentive, too: Those who score highly receive more state tax credits; those with low scores can lose funding.
YoungStar got a big boost last week when Wisconsin won a $22.7 million grant in federal Race to the Top funding to be spent in the next four years on expanding the program and improving its data collection system.
As our understanding of brain development has become more sophisticated in recent years, the importance of early childhood education has been amplified. Young brains — from birth to four or five years old — are building connections and forming habits that have the potential to have long-term effects.
One way that’s measured is in what’s called “readiness,” a measure of the skills children bring with them when they enter kindergarten. Those who start kindergarten at a disadvantage can struggle to catch up even a decade or more into the future.
Another way to think about this is that kindergarten is not some magical threshold: Learning doesn’t begin when a child is enrolled in kindergarten. Creating the right environment for a child to learn literally begins in the womb, and proceeds at exponential pace throughout early childhood. We need an education system that recognizes that.
In Wausau, the Marathon County Early Years Coalition is a group of many different local organizations tackling this issue. Parents or anyone interested in seeing ratings of local child care providers can go to http://dcf.wisconsin.gov/youngstar/ to find YoungStar online.
There are not many more foundational goals than improving early childhood education. It’s good to see Wisconsin’s system given a boost, and we all can hope this grant will help Wisconsin’s children move forward.
Title Post: Fundamentals of Early Childhood Education
Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
Author: Anonymous
THANK YOU FOR VISITING, I HOPE YOU HAPPY
Rating: 100% based on 99998 ratings. 5 user reviews.
Author: Anonymous
THANK YOU FOR VISITING, I HOPE YOU HAPPY
