State to receive education grant

Staff report

Washington, D.C.

Ohio is one of nine states to receive grants through Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge fund.

The award recipients were announced Friday by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council. The competitive grants total $500 million and Ohio, with nearly $70 million, received the highest amount.

The other states are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Rhode Island and Washington.

“Education must be our national mission,” President Barack Obama said in a news release. “All of us must work to give all our children the best education possible.”

The money is to serve high-needs children from birth to 5 years.

“This is a huge win for the children of Ohio, and it is a major step toward achieving the goal of having all students enter school ready to learn,” Stan Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction, said.

The successful grant is the product of a cross-agency partnership led by Gov. John Kasich’s office. The ODE is the lead agency and is working with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services and the Ohio Business Roundtable.

Nearly 75 percent of disadvantaged children entering school in Ohio need additional instruction to be ready for kindergarten.

Those problems persist into the early grades and beyond. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, just 27 percent of economically disadvantaged Ohio fourth-graders were proficient in mathematics, and only 16 percent were proficient in reading. The majority of these children will continue to struggle throughout their academic careers, and many will not graduate.

The early-learning grant is aimed at closing the kindergarten readiness gap between high-needs children and their more advantaged peers by:

Expanding the use of a comprehensive rating system to evaluate state-funded early-learning programs;

Teaming up with Maryland to share the costs of developing a new tool to measure the readiness of children for kindergarten. It will include academic measures and measures of social and emotional development and physical health;

Providing more robust training for early childhood educators;

Coordinating fragmented state early childhood databases that contain information such as program licensing and quality.