Sharing Web Resources Week 4

One specific section from my International Step by Step Association (ISSA) newsletter that I found to be important to my professional development is the New European Commission Recommendation: “Investing in children: breaking the cycle of disadvantage” A new European Commission Recommendation provides helpful guidance to Member States on how to tackle child poverty and promote children’s well-being. It calls for a children’s rights approach and integrated strategies based on three pillars:

• access to adequate resources;
• access to affordable quality services; and
• children’s right to participate. 

Importantly it links to the implementation of Europe 2020 and the EU financial mechanisms to ensure progress and monitoring. Member States are encouraged to adopt national targets for reducing child poverty and social exclusion.

  New Policy Briefs from EENEE on the Economics of Education helped me to understand how economist in other countries have some of the same issues we do in this country. www.education-economics.org is a forum to promote and disseminate research on the Economics of Education in Europe, provided by the European Expert Network on Economics of Education (EENEE). 

I gained new insights into the World Bank, in Washinton D. C., and what role they play in Early Childhood Education.The World Bank’s new Education Strategy lays out a ten-year agenda focused on the crucial goal of “learning for all”. The bottom line: Invest early, invest smartly, and invest for all. The strategy draws on consultations with governments, development partners, students, teachers, researchers, civil society, and business representatives from more than 100 countries.

The bottom line of the Bank Group’s education strategy is: Invest early. Invest smartly. Invest for all. First, foundational skills acquired early in childhood make possible a lifetime of learning; hence the traditional view of education as starting in primary school takes up the challenge too late. Second, getting value for the education dollar requires smart investments—that is, investments that have proven to contribute to learning. Quality needs to be the focus of education investments, with learning gains as a key metric of quality. Third, learning for all means ensuring that all students, not just the most privileged or gifted, acquire the knowledge and skills that they need. This goal will require lowering the barriers that keep girls, people with disabilities, and ethnolinguistic minorities from attaining as much education as other population groups.

I gained a worldwide view of other countries trying to protect their future by protecting their children, just like we are trying to do in our own country. Here is a web site with a video that has a message for me and my colleagues in the early childhood community.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWv72ZQRnY4&feature=player_embedded

If research says that the United States of America is behind in Early Childhood Development compared to other countries, then we need to colloborate more with our foriegn neighbors, because it seems like we all have the same issues and trends.