Prekindergarten

For nearly two decades, Christina Weiland has partnered with education leaders nationwide to pinpoint how to strengthen early learning. She teamed up with Boston Public Schools to roll out and assess their universal pre-K program. With evidence-based...

To improve early learning programs nationwide, policymakers and funders are investing in curriculum, professional development, and assessments. However, ensuring educational partners are well-prepared to deliver them remains a crucial step.

Today the Regents of the University of Michigan approved Christina Weiland’s appointment as the inaugural Karl and Martha Kohn Professor of Social Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. With a gift from Hal and Carol Kohn and the Kohn ...

Ford School professor Christina Weiland coauthored an opinion piece with Deborah Phillips for The Hechinger Report about how the preschool curriculum has been underdeveloped and overlooked. Weiland wrote that there is a long overdue movement in state...

A new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) lays out a new vision for high-quality preschool curricula that support equitable early education for all children. The report recommends that in the next five year...

Nikki Hamp (MPA ‘23) had several professional lives before arriving at the Ford School. An MD, she is a board-certified developmental behavioral pediatrician, and until recently has been the medical director of  the Arbor Autism Clinic in Ypsilanti w...

Christina Weiland, faculty co-director of the Education Policy Initiative, has studied pre-K programs around the country. The state of Michigan will spend an additional $107M in its 2023-2024 budget on pre-K, hoping to increase the number of children...

Achieving Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s aim of universal Pre-K, made in her State of the State address in January 2023, will require building upon its established programs and making some adjustments to the state’s education system.       ...

The value of Pre-K education has been widely acknowledged through decades of research. However, much of that research has come from studying older and often smaller programs than those currently being implemented across the country. To determine how ...

Chalkboard Detroit: A shift toward free preschool for all 4-year-olds — which the Legislature will debate this session — could increase access and improve teacher pay at the same time. Indeed, that’s what happened in other states with universal presc...

Children who attend a prekindergarten (Pre-K) program generally score higher on academic, social-emotional, and cognitive assessments at the start of kindergarten than children who do not. However, Pre-K nonattenders typically catch up to Pre-K atten...

The next phase of one of the largest and most comprehensive studies of early childhood education launches this summer with a $1.5 million grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), U.S. Department of Education. The grant, funded by the...

The Education Policy Initiative (EPI) recently launched a two-year study to research the impact of transitional kindergarten (TK) on children's readiness for other grades co-led by Christina Weiland and Brian Jacob. Weiland commented about the import...