Conor Williams

This morning, the D.C. Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) held an event to roll out data from a community study they conducted with the Urban Institute. The data surveys the current state of affairs and highlights opportunities for connecting future efforts to meet community needs. These data have huge potential to improve the lives of children […]

No matter where you sit in the education universe, it can be easy to lose sight of the broader view of the whole system. When I was a teacher, I found it easy to get cynical about the motivations and competence of the bureaucrats regulating American schools. Now that I conduct policy research for a […]

I spent my entire primary and secondary education in Michigan’s public schools. Along with my time teaching first grade in Brooklyn, those years frame most of my thinking about education reform. As pre-K’s rising political profile has recently sparked new conversations about pre-K research, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the Midwest’s approach to […]

I have a toddler and an infant. Or, to be more accurate, they have me. By the hand. Or the arm. Or the leg. Or the shoulder. Or all of these at once. Like most young parents of very young children, my wife and I are only barely keeping up with these two creatures that […]

At the end of last week, New York’s ongoing argument over how to pay for pre-K slots took a new turn. On Friday, New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that the city would try to redirect $210 million in funds supporting charter school classrooms to expand Mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-K program. […]

People who write about early education these days often mention that the United States once came within a Nixon veto of having a comprehensive, universal system of child careand pre-kindergarten (I’ve done it too). But only a few have noticed the Lanham Act, which established the United States’ sole experiment with a universal, comprehensive birth-to-12 […]

When it comes to the recent spate of education policy debate over voucher oversight, I feel a bit like an outsider looking in. For the most part, the argument has been entirely contained within the community of libertarian-leaning voucher advocates. In other words, it’s been a conversation mostly of, by, and for the crowd that […]

When it comes to momentum, 2014 proposals to expand access to high-quality pre-K are picking up right where things left off last year. For example, last week, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D) proposed expanding the state’s pre-K program with an eye to making it universally available to 4-year-olds by 2018. But perhaps the most interesting […]