In this brief, authors Jess Carson and Sarah Boege describe changes in the early childhood education and care landscape of Grafton and Sullivan Counties in New Hampshire and Orange and Windsor Counties in Vermont, collectively known as the Upper Valley. The authors find that the Upper Valley lost 25 regulated child care providers serving children…

The final decades of the twentieth century were rife with education reform. "A Nation at Risk" (1983) compared American schools to their counterparts in other countries, and found America wanting while E.D. Hirsch and others decried Americans' lack of knowledge of their own institutions and heritage (Hirsch 1987). These alarms caused…

Evaluation designs for social programs are developed assuming minimal or no disruption from external shocks, such as natural disasters. This is because extremely rare shocks may not make it worthwhile to account for them in the design. Among extreme shocks is the 2010 Chile earthquake. Un Buen Comienzo (UBC), an ongoing early childhood program in…

The authors of this memo to President-elect Barack Obama state that many in Congress are now proposing that the federal government intervene to address a range of problems in education by creating new programs and federal subsidies, including public school infrastructure and construction, funding for runaway college tuition costs, and the costs of…