Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 3

Because I have not yet received a response from my international contacts, I visited UNESCO’s “Early Childhood Care and Education” webpage (http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/strengthening-education-systems/early-childhood/). 

Some of the insights I gained about issues related to international early childhood education that relate to my professional goals have to do with inequity of funding and program access, quality of curriculum, and parent education.

The inequity of funding and program access across countries reminded me of how the funding in the United States works. Federal block grants are available to states, but each state sets its own budget and criteria for early childhood services. While the federal government provides funding for Head start, it is still up to the local agencies to apply and allocate funds. This relates to my goal to become a stronger advocate for children and Early Childhood programs by working with policy-makers to ensure quality preschool programs are available and sustained. 

Another issue that relates to this goal is the push for universal preschool. When reading about the new Early Childhood Development center initiative in Gambia and the idea of universalizing school for 6 year olds, I was thinking about the current push in the US for universal preschool. Gambia decided to not universalize because of issues of sustainability. While I believe that access to preschool should be a right for all children, the question of how to sustain such an endeavor in the US has to be addressed. 

The centers in Gambia were going to be located within primary schools. There was some concern that they will be pre-primary education, focusing on preparing children for formal schooling, rather than child development. This topic too relates to my goal of becoming a stronger advocate for children. The program I teach at is also located within an elementary school and through the years there has been pressure to be more academically focused in order to prepare the children for Kindergarten. Thankfully, I have the support of our Early Childhood Specialist to back up what I am doing in the classroom.

Finally, one of my revised professional goals is to be a better parent educator. In the publications section of UNESCO’s website I found materials on parenting education workshops that I could easily ‘tweak’ and use with my parents.

Sharing Web Resources

I still have not received a newsletter from The Global Fund for Children. The website doesn’t contain many links to other websites. The few that it does have are to corporate sponsors and foundations.  

I thoroughly searched through the section of the website that describes The Global Fund for Children’s impact. In the last year alone they reached 1 million children and hope to bring their total to 10 million by 2015. This means that thousands of children are going to school instead of to work and thousands more are protecting themselves from HIV, escaping the bonds of slavery, and getting the childhood they deserve.

Since 1997, the Global Fund for Children has invested $25.6 million in more than 500 grassroots organizations in 78 countries worldwide. They specialize in maximizing our donors’ investment in the developing world. Here’s how:

• They Find What Works-Program officers use their regional expertise to scout out the most promising organizations operating in marginalized communities. An annual pool of more than 2,000 organizations is whittled down to about 150 that they visit, of those approximately 50 new grantees are selected to be funded.
• They Invest Strategically-They identify innovative groups as they emerge, and over the course of three to six years, help them to grow and thrive using flexible, strategic investments. 
• They Spread the Word-Their first job is to find community-based organizations that are changing children’s lives—then help them grow with management support, training, and leverage. 
• They Check Our Work-They track their grantees’ development. Each of their grantee partners produces measurable outcomes, whether it’s helping more migrant children stay in school, getting more girls to understand the risks of HIV/AIDS, or providing more counseling sessions to child trafficking survivors. 
• They Keep Their Costs Low-Their grantees operate on a shoestring budget—and they follow their model, maximizing every dollar and putting the money where it counts.

The website contains blogs from all the regions. Through these blogs, I found many examples of information that adds to my understanding of equity and excellence in early care and education. GFC works around the globe with displaced families in places such as Beirut, Lebanon and Dili, Timor-Leste.
In Luhansk, Ukraine GFC partners with the Association of Disabled Young People of the Eastern Donbass, or AMI-East for short which provides educational opportunities for children with disabilities.
In Washington DC, GFC supports the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project (HCPP). The number of children at DC General shelter has reached an astounding 600 up from about 200 children in 2011. HCPP works directly with many of these children, providing weekly activities, healthy snacks, and opportunities to play and learn at DC General and various emergency shelters and transitional housing sites in the District of Columbia.

The new insight I gained doesn’t have to do with the early childhood field but I was very surprised. First, I didn’t know that January was National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. The most astounding fact I found out is that child trafficking is a huge problem in the U.S. It is estimated that 90% of runaways in the U.S. end up trafficked into the commercial sex industry. Over 100,000 children are subject to child trafficking every year in the U.S. alone.

Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 2

Since I still have not heard back from my international contacts, I visited Harvard University’s “Global Children’s Initiative” website. On this website I learned about many initiatives that they are taking part in around the globe. Three areas they are focused on are Brazil, Zambia, and Chile.

In Brazil, the Center is launching Núcleo Ciência Pela Infância which works with Brazilian scholars, policymakers and civil society leaders. Translating and adapting the Center’s existing print and multimedia resources for a Brazilian audience. Some of the work they are doing is to build a scientific agenda and community of scholars around early childhood development, synthesize and translate scientific knowledge for application to social policy, strengthen leadership around early childhood development, communicate the science of child development in the Brazilian cultural context, and translate and adapt the Center’s existing print and multimedia resources for a Brazilian audience. 

In Zambia, the center is working to increase evidence available on early childhood development in sub-Saharan Africa. They are working with the Zambian Ministry of Education, the Examination Council of Zambia, UNICEF, and the University of Zambia to create the Zambian Early Childhood Development Project (ZECDP). Their goal is create a new comprehensive instrument for assessing children’s physical, socio-emotional, and cognitive development before and throughout their schooling careers. The ZECDP collaborators hope that the data collected as part of this project, as well as future work in this area, will not only improve understanding of child development in this context but also help identify key interventions towards improved outcomes in a rapidly changing developing world.
In Chile, the center is working on a collaborative program called Un Buen Comienzo (UBC). The goal is to improve early childhood education through teacher professional development with a focus on improving the quality of educational offerings for four-to-six-year-olds, particularly in the area of language development. This project is also designed to intervene in critical health areas that improve school attendance as well as socio-emotional development, and it seeks to involve the children's families in their education. 

The work that is being done in Brazil, Zambia and Chile is all being completed so that equity and excellence of early childhood programs is present. For example, in Brazil the hope is that adapting the Center’s model will create more effective programs and policies. The longitudinal study in Chile has never been carried out in any other country in Latin America and will place Chile at the forefront of demonstrating the impact of a high-quality early education. The work being done in Zambia will be a model for all developing countries.

The NCCP (National Center for Children in Poverty) February update newsletter includes current statistics on low-income children in America. There are fact sheets that breakdown statistics into the following groups: Children under 18 Years, children aged 12 through 17 Years, children aged 6 through 11 Years, children under 6 Years, and children under 3 Years. 

There is also information about the Young Leaders Open House, an event being held in NYC where people can about how Child and Family Poverty in America affects us all, and what is being done about it in the research and policy arenas.

Finally, the newsletter asks for people to give what they can to the NCCP Annual Fund.

While checking out their Facebook page, I noticed that NCCP had shared a link that was very relevant to me. It was a link to the Michigan Kids Count report: Rural areas also face child poverty, well-being issues. This is relevant to me as I teach in a rural district in Michigan that is one of the most poverty- stricken in the state.