Our new report, Extracting Success in Pre-K Teaching: Approaches to Effective Professional Learning Across Five States, identifies the following components associated with effective professional learning based on the research:

• Ongoing
• Reflective Practice
• Classroom-Focused
• Job-Embedded
• Educator Buy-In
• Data-Driven
• Continuous Improvement
• In-Classroom Coaching
• Collaborative
• Scalable

Unfortunately, with varying requirements, limited capacity, and often insufficient funding, this caliber of professional learning can be difficult for pre-K teachers to come by.

Shayna Cook, Sarah Jackson, and I profile five promising in-service programs that are incorporating most, if not all, of these aspects of high-quality professional learning. We visited Passaic, New Jersey, where SciMath-DLL is strengthening pre-K teachers’ STEM instruction, with a focus on serving the community’s high dual language learner population. In Illinois, we saw how the Erikson Institute is empowering pre-K through third grade teachers in the Archdiocese of Chicago to incorporate technology into their classrooms. In Nashville, Tennessee, we met with researchers from Vanderbilt’s Peabody Research Institute and district pre-K coaches who are together using teacher and student data to tailor professional learning to individual teachers’ needs. In San Jose, California we heard from leaders and teachers about how Franklin-McKinley School District is responding to teachers’ requests for help managing challenging classroom behavior. And in Texas, we learned about a literacy program that has been scaled to reach pre-K teachers across the state working in various settings.

Each program covers different content, though all is specific to early educators. Some of the professional learning is offered in the evenings or on weekends, others during paid planning time, and some online. While all incorporate aspects of quality, such as being ongoing, encouraging reflective practice, and providing coaching, their program designs are unique to fit the needs of their community. Our profiles illustrate that high-quality professional learning is not one-size-fits-all.

Like most policies and programs, success rests in the implementation. And having teachers and leaders who are invested in the professional learning program helps ensure successful implementation. Teachers who have agency in their professional learning –whether that be in helping to design the program, choosing to participate, or being offered leadership opportunities– are often more responsive and willing to change their practice. When leaders (school principals or center directors) are invested in the program they can support teacher growth and development accordingly.

More states and local school districts should invest in professional learning that is of the intensity and quality necessary to move the needle on how pre-K teachers interact with their students. But policymakers should keep in mind that teacher practice will not change over night, and changes in student outcomes may take even longer to see. Adequate funding is needed, especially to cover staffing costs, like coaches or part-time teachers who can cover a teacher’s classroom while they participate in professional learning during the paid workday. Sufficient funding should also be set aside for evaluation tools. A rigorous evaluation component allows programs to monitor outcomes and tailor components of the program to better serve their community.

Find out more about what high-quality professional learning looks like in these five innovative programs and what lessons they can offer other states and districts in our full report.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Extracting Success in Pre-K Teaching appeared first on Washington Monthly.

These individuals are our elementary school principals. They work to ensure that our elementary schools are safe, nurturing, and enriching places for the hundreds of students they enroll and the dozens of educators they employ. October is National Principals Month and it’s an opportunity to acknowledge the hard work of these too often overlooked professionals. Principals have a huge impact on school quality; after teachers, research shows that they have the largest impact on student outcomes.

Being a principal can be extremely rewarding, but it’s also extremely demanding work and turnover in this field is high. A 2014 report by the School Leaders Network found that half of new principals don’t last longer than three years. Principal turnover is expensive and disruptive to teachers and students. And turnover is worse at high-poverty schools where steady and high-quality leadership is essential to reform efforts. The School Leaders Network estimates that it takes about five years to fully implement reforms that improve school performance. If a principal doesn’t last more than a few years, there is no one to ensure these efforts come to fruition.

While a heartfelt letter or small token of appreciation can show principals how much their work is valued, what principals really need is better support to make their jobs less stressful and to enable them to be strong leaders. State and local policymakers can take steps to ensure that principals have the supports they need to remain in the classroom. This includes better preparing principals for their roles and supporting them once they are leading a school.

One area that many elementary principals could use better support is in their role as early learning leaders. Past research shows that they often come into their jobs without a strong understanding of how young children learn. As more schools add pre-K classrooms and more research reveals how important pre-K, kindergarten, and the early grades are to children’s long-term success, it’s clear principals need to be able to support teachers in their instruction of young students.

In May, New America released a 50-state scan mapping policies related to pre-K leaders. We gathered data via survey to state departments of education and encouraged officials to collaborate with colleagues in different offices and departments to collect the data. For states that did not respond to our survey, we scanned their websites and contacted officials via email and phone. We also conducted a handful of interviews with elementary school principals to learn more about their roles.

Being a strong early education leader takes specialized knowledge and skills, but we found that states are doing little to ensure that principals know how to lead our youngest learners. As shown in the map below, only nine states reported in our survey that they explicitly require principals to have coursework in early learning and/or child development. More than 35 states and Washington, DC reported that they do not.

We also found that while 38 states and Washington, DC require elementary principals to have teaching experience, only Alaska, Nebraska, and South Carolina require that it be in the elementary grades. Prior teaching experience in the grades that a principal oversees not only improves his or her ability and confidence to guide teachers, but also gives his or her opinions credibility with the teachers they are leading.

As an elementary school principal from Minnesota shared with us, “Until you’re a principal, you haven’t learned how to be a principal.” He credited this to principal preparation programs being “incongruent with real work.” Research shows that meaningful clinical experiences, such as internships and assistant principalships, are an important part of principal preparation. Field  experiences in elementary schools are especially important for aspiring elementary school principals who haven’t taught young children. Unfortunately, we found that only ten states require elementary school principals to have clinical experiences specifically in elementary schools.

Ensuring that principals have on-going support on-the-job is equally important to quality preparation. Lack of support and professional learning is a key reason why principals leave the field. On the early learning front, only 12 states responded to our survey stating that they offered professional learning for principals around early education. Some states, like Minnesota are leading the way on this work. Minnesota offers professional learning on PreK-3rd alignment for principal-led teams that includes collaboration with superintendents, teachers, and community partners.

Rethinking school staffing models can also help ensure that principals are not overburdened and are held to more manageable expectations. As principals are expected to devote more time to instructional leadership, “many of the other roles principals have traditionally been responsible for have not yielded to make way for these new demands,” explains my colleague, Melissa Tooley. In her recent paper, From Frenzied to Focused: How School Staffing Models Can Support Principals as Instructional Leaders, she explains how “new school leadership” (NSL) models are attempting to support principals and distribute leadership responsibility.

This Principals Month, it’ time to show principals how much their hard work is appreciated. In addition to the candy, flowers, and kind words, let’s think more strategically about how we can support them to be effective instructional leaders.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post How to Show Appreciation This Principals Month? Empower Them to Lead Our Youngest Learners appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The logic behind these systems goes like this: ECE programs earn ratings, parents can use these ratings to tell which programs are high quality (recent research shows they may not be able to tell on their own), parents will choose to send their children to better programs, and ECE programs with low ratings will take steps to improve their quality in order to keep up enrollment as they respond to market demands. And then the ultimate goal– improving child outcomes– will be achieved. At least in theory.

As Jill Cannon and her colleagues at RAND explain in a recent policy paper, there are many assumptions in that logic model that do not always hold true. Unexpected complications arise with most policy solutions, especially in the early stages of implementation, and QRISs are no exception. Quality Rating and Improvement Systems for Early Care and Education Programs: Making the Second Generation Better examines how the “first generation” of QRISs are faring and offers recommendations for reform so that future iterations can better measure and improve ECE program quality.

According to RAND, 49 states have a QRIS either implemented or in the planning or piloting stages. While these accountability systems already existed in some states prior to 2008, the Obama administration accelerated their implementation by making them a key priority in Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC). To be eligible for close to one billion dollars in competitive RTT-ELC funding, states needed to use or create a QRIS with multiple tier levels reflecting varying program quality. Federal and state officials made massive investments in QRISs, even though there was  actually limited research around the effectiveness of these systems at the time.

A lot more research on QRIS effectiveness has recently become available, however, thanks to a requirement that RTT-ELC grantees conduct a validation study to determine whether their tiers accurately reflect meaningful differences in program quality and whether different levels of quality lead to different child outcomes. QRIS validation studies have been published in 11 states so far: California, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. (I wrote about Minnesota’s validation study when it was released last year.)

Unfortunately, it’s still somewhat unclear whether benefits of these systems outweigh the costs in their current form. RAND’s review of the validation studies found some progress in developing valid rating systems, but concludes that “evidence is still quite limited and often contradictory, preventing firm conclusions about the validity of QRIS ratings as currently designed.” Validation studies found that QRIS ratings are related to “one or more independent measures of program quality” but relationships were modest and the differences in quality between tiers were usually small. Several studies also showed a positive relationship between QRIS ratings and child outcomes in at least one domain, but again, relationships tend to be weak and limited. The RAND authors do note potential limitations from some of the validation studies because some QRISs were still being implemented or had limited programs participating.

As RAND explains, when QRISs were first being designed early child experts were using the information they had available to design the best systems. But experts knew little at the time about which quality indicators actually support child development, how to weigh different indicators, and how much it would cost programs to implement certain requirements.

There’s been more research on what is needed for a high quality program in recent years. Unfortunately, what matters most is difficult to measure. For instance, research shows that having a curriculum is essential. It’s easy to check a box on whether a program has a curriculum in place, or even a developmentally-appropriate curriculum. It’s more difficult to measure whether a program is implementing that curriculum well. Fidelity of implementation is the essential component. We also know that learning for young children depends largely on the quality of interactions and relationships they have with adults. Measuring the quality of adult-child interactions is costly and time consuming.

Another aspect of the QRIS that often gets overlooked is the “I” or improvement component. There is limited research on what types of supports are most effective for helping programs improve quality. Many QRISs offer multiple types of supports and interventions, including research-supported options like coaching, as well as options with no research base, such as peer-supported activities. Individualized coaching is one of the few types of professional learning that is shown to work, but again, it is expensive and time intensive.

While there have been challenges with designing QRISs to best measure quality and support improvement, there have also been unexpected complications that defy the original logic of the intervention. For instance, many Americans live in child care deserts where there are extremely limited child care options, regardless of quality. Implementing a QRIS doesn’t mean more child care centers appear. Some providers also don’t feel incentivized to join the QRIS because they already have full enrollment, even if they are low quality. Parents also sometimes choose to stay in a program that may be considered low quality because it appeals to them for other reasons, such as proximity to home or work. Other programs may want to improve but lack the resources to do so. Many states do offer higher reimbursement rates for participating providers that accept child care subsidies, but sometimes the higher rate is not enough to justify the cost of making the quality improvements.

Across the country, state officials have invested a great deal of time and money in this policy intervention with the hope of improving child outcomes. More research is needed to determine how to effectively and efficiently measure program quality and how to support programs as they try to improve. States must be willing to use the results of validation studies and other research to refine these rating systems if they want to see meaningful results.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Even With More Research, Many Q’s Remain about QRIS appeared first on Washington Monthly.

PDG has been part of President Obama’s larger effort to expand access to high-quality early education to all children from low-and middle-income families. The Preschool Development Grants came with a host of quality requirements. For instance, to be eligible for funding, states had to agree to require participating programs to employ pre-K teachers with bachelor’s degrees in early childhood education or a related field, pay these teachers on par with K-12 teachers, offer full-day programs, and use an evidence-based curriculum. These standards are much higher than the bar currently being met in many states.

While grants were intended to last for four years based on state plans, funding has never been guaranteed. Each year, Congress has allocated the funding to continue the program.

After two years, what have states accomplished so far?

In the 2015-2016 school year, Preschool Development Grant funds helped more than 28,000 four-year-olds have access to high-quality pre-K. And in this school year, the total number of participants increased to approximately 35,000. State grantees are increasing access for some of their most vulnerable populations– about 20 percent of children served were Dual Language Learners and 8.5 percent were children with disabilities.

Pre-K is just one aspect of early learning, and so it’s promising to see some states focusing heavily on building their birth through third grade continuum of learning. In Maryland for instance, PDG funds have helped grow the number of  “Judy Centers”. These early education centers are located in elementary schools in neighborhoods that are eligible for Title 1 funding and serve all children from birth to age five. PDG funds have also been used to support joint professional development between elementary schools and community-based programs in Title I neighborhoods “that focused on increasing [educators’] knowledge of early learning development and the standards in the STEM areas of the domains of Social Foundations, Science, and Mathematics.”

The progress report also holds up three states– New Jersey, Arizona, and Vermont— for aligning their standards, curricula, and practices to create more seamless transitions from children from pre-K to kindergarten and beyond. These types of structural changes to increase alignment between the years before kindergarten and after may be more likely sustained after grant funding ends.

While some states have made good progress, others have fallen short of meeting their goals. For instance, none of the sub-grantees in Massachusetts are meeting their goals for serving students with disabilities in inclusion settings.

When does funding end? President Obama asked for $350 million to fund the program in FY 2017, which would allow states to finish out the four-year plans they originally submitted. Congress has yet to pass a spending bill this year and it’s uncertain whether they will make this program a priority.

Even if the program is funded for another year, there are still uncertainties about how it may continue. The new Every Student Succeeds Act includes Preschool Development Grants– but while Congress preserved the name of the program, they did not preserve the quality requirements. In the new iteration of PDG, the US Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, which will continue to jointly oversee the program (although it will be housed in HHS going forward), are specifically prohibited from defining program “quality.”

As such, the new Preschool Development Grants program will give states a lot more flexibility in designing their programs. Some states, like Indiana, have already expressed newfound interest in PDG now that there will be limited quality requirements. But without an emphasis on quality it is very possible states may end up using federal dollars to expand programs that are not all that strong. Pre-K in and of itself is no panacea. Several high-quality programs, however, have been shown to produce long-term benefits and impressive returns on investment. And, it makes sense that children’s learning experiences after pre-K also matter.

Based on what we know so far about Rep. Tom Price and Betsy DeVos, who have been tapped to lead the agencies overseeing PDG in the Trump administration, they will be happy with the federal government taking a back seat when it comes to regulating pre-K program quality. The future of the program, however, ultimately depends on Congress and in this new political climate, leaders may choose not to appropriate funds to PDG at all.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Preschool Development Grants: Where Do They Go From Here? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Here’s an overview of major findings and what the data show around early learners:

Student Absenteeism

For the first time, the CRDC includes information about the important issue of chronic absenteeism. Students are considered chronically absent if they miss 15 or more school days during the school year. The data reveal that 13 percent of all students, that’s more than 6.5 million students in all, are chronically absent from school. This includes 11 percent of all elementary school students. The data also show that black elementary school students are 1.4 times as likely as their white peers to be chronically absent from school. This is especially concerning considering the persistent achievement gap between the reading and math skills of black and white students.

Students in the early elementary grades are not immune from the problem of chronic absenteeism. According to a recent report by Attendance Works and Healthy Schools Campaign, at least one in ten kindergartners and first graders nationwide are chronically absent from school. This is particularly worrisome since research suggests that students who are chronically absent in pre-K, kindergarten, and first grade are much less likely to be reading at grade level by the end of third grade. And students who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade are four times less likely to graduate from high school on time than their proficient peers.

To support coordinated community action in addressing the problem of chronic absenteeism, the Obama administration recently launched the Every Student, Every Day initiative. Last week, Secretary of Education John King used the initiative’s inaugural national conference to unveil a first-of-its-kind website that offers in-depth data about the frequency of student absenteeism broken down by grade level, ethnicity, and geography. This data will help policymakers and researchers gain a better understanding of which students are chronically absent and how chronic absenteeism compares community-by-community.

School Discipline

The new CRDC data show that racial and gender disparities in discipline practices persist throughout students’ school careers, beginning in pre-K and continuing through twelfth grade. The overall number of pre-K suspensions is down from 5,000 to 2,500 students since the last time these data were released in 2014. However, black children remain 3.6 times more likely to receive one or more out-of school suspensions than their white peers. And of the 2.8 million K-12 students who received one or more out-of-school suspensions, more than half were black or Latino. Black students in K-12 were 3.8 times more likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions than their white peers.   

Gender disparities were also evident in the CRDC school discipline data. In public pre-K programs, boys are more likely to be suspended than girls. Boys represent 54 percent of children enrolled in pre-K, and yet they are 78 percent of the children receiving one or more out-of-school suspensions. Black girls represent only 20 percent of pre-K enrollment, but receive slightly more than half of the out-of-school suspensions among pre-K students who are girls. This trend continues in K-12 with black girls representing only eight percent of enrolled students, but 14 percent of students receiving one or more out-of school suspensions. The CRDC states that girls of other races did not disproportionately receive more out-of-school suspensions.  

Over the past few years, the U.S. Department of Education has released guidance around how districts can end disparities in school discipline practices. The Department has promoted its Rethink Discipline campaign to help school leaders evaluate their current practices and policies and develop ways to promote positive behavior in school without the use of suspension and expulsion, particularly in early childhood. New America’s Early & Elementary Education policy team and over 30 other organizations agree with the Department’s stance and released a joint statement to ban suspension and expulsion in the early years and grades.

The CRDC also collects data on whether sworn law enforcement officers (SLEOs), including school resource officers, are present in schools. Twenty-four percent of elementary schools have SLEOs. The 2015-2016 CRDC will include data on the number of SLEOs in schools and will collect data from every district on the use of corporal punishment in pre-K programs.

Pre-K Enrollment

The CRDC also looks at enrollment of three- and four-year-olds in preschool or pre-K. In the 2013-2014 school year, only 54 percent of school districts provided pre-K to children other than those entitled to services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). (All districts are required to offer services for preschool-aged children with disabilities under IDEA). The data account for both school-based pre-K programs and those delivered by community-based organizations.

However, just because a district offers pre-K does not mean that it is reaching all three-and four-year-olds or even those it deems eligible for the program. According to the most recent NIEER Preschool Yearbook, only five percent of three-year-olds and 29 percent of four-year-olds in the United States attended public pre-K in 2015. This is largely due to limited funding.  

Of the districts that do offer publicly-funded pre-K, the data find that 48 percent offer full-day programs. While states and districts often disagree over what qualifies as a “full day”, CRDC defines full-day as six hours per day for five days per week. There is evidence that children benefit more from full-day pre-K programs than part-day programs. While almost half of districts offering pre-K might offer full-day programs, keep in mind that all preschool-aged children in that district do not necessarily have access to a full-day program. Many districts offer both full-day and part-day programs, making it difficult to determine how many children actually have access to a full-day program.

Of the districts that offer pre-K, 73 percent offer it to children of all income levels. However, this doesn’t mean that they necessarily serve all eligible children. The remaining 27 percent of districts target pre-K to children from low-income families and Title I schools.  While all children can benefit from high-quality pre-K, when public resources are limited access should be targeted towards those children whose families do not have other means to access high-quality pre-K. The percentage of districts providing universal pre-K has increased in recent years; it was 55 percent of districts in 2011-2012 according to the last CRDC .

One surprising finding was that 14 percent of districts charge tuition for public pre-K. While we often associate a public program with being free for eligible participants, this isn’t the case in every district. Charging parents tuition for pre-K can make it out of reach for those children who stand to benefit the most.

The CRDC is the most comprehensive data set on district-level pre-K enrollment available. Unfortunately, it does not include data on program quality. Pre-K access is just the first step; programs need to be high quality in order for children to fully benefit.

We’ll be writing more about the data over the next several months.

[This article was co-authored by Abbie Lieberman, Shanya Cook, and Aaron Loewenberg]

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

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Speaking at a Kentucky family health center on Tuesday, Clinton unveiled her plan to improve child care quality and access for low-income and middle-class Americans. There are three main components to Clinton’s plan:

First, Clinton’s plan calls for significantly increasing child care investments so that no family spends more than 10 percent of their income on child care. (This is how the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services defines affordable child care.) This is a big promise. Child care is extremely expensive in the United States and costs have been increasing. Child care currently comprises a significant portion of family income, in most states costing more than housing or college tuition. In a majority of today’s families, both parents participate in the workforce and rising child care costs make this difficult. Clinton emphasized this fact in Kentucky, saying “You’ve got to look at what families are facing today. And I think, still, too many of the programs are really designed still for an earlier time that just doesn’t exist anymore.”

According to Clinton’s plan, the reduction in child care costs would be accomplished by increasing federal investment in child care subsidies for low-income families and providing tax relief to help offset the cost of child care for middle-class families. Clinton’s campaign said the exact mix of subsidies and tax credits to pay for the new benefit will be announced later, but Clinton did say the benefit would be offered on “a sliding scale” based on family need. She also said she is “looking for good ideas” that could serve as national models.

While details of the plan have yet to be released, it will be interesting to see how it compares to proposals previously championed by President Obama. Obama has called for increasing the maximum child care and dependent tax credit up to $3,000 per child for middle-class families with a household income up to $120,000. The President has also called for expanding the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), a child care subsidy for low- and moderate-income families designed to enable more families to afford care.

Second, Clinton plans to give child care teachers a much needed boost in pay by creating the Respect And Increased Salaries for Early Childhood Educators (RAISE) initiative. Similar in design to the Care Workers Initiative Clinton has proposed for caregivers for the elderly and disabled, the RAISE initiative is designed to increase the quality of child care by ensuring that child care teachers receive a living wage. The initiative would help support states and communities working to establish career leaders and ongoing education for child care teachers in order to increase compensation levels.

Even though child care costs have been increasing for years, quality has not. According to Child Care Aware, “only 10 percent of child care meets the quality requirements that lead to positive effects on children’s outcomes.” While multiple factors impact quality, one of the most important is the quality of interactions between children and the adults who help them develop and learn. Many of the adults working with our youngest learners are underprepared for this highly skilled work. And because the child care workforce is severely underpaid, it is difficult to attract and retain high quality teachers who do have a deep understanding of child development and early childhood education content.

Most child care teachers are paid much less than K-12 teachers, and many earn poverty-level wages. In fact, nearly half of the child care workforce relies on public assistance such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or federal food stamps. It’s difficult for a teacher to provide a child with quality care when she is worried about whether or not she will be able to feed her own children that night. Clinton’s plan aims to help states and communities make child care teacher salaries more comparable to kindergarten teacher salaries.

There has been a push in recent years to increase the education requirements for child care teachers. The National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) recently explained the need for a highly skilled workforce and recommended transitioning to a minimum bachelor’s degree qualification requirement for all lead educators working with children from birth through age eight. Yet, on average, students who major in early childhood education presently earn the lowest salaries of all college-educated workers.

Increasing pay for child care teachers could bring more qualified teachers to the field, and increase both the likelihood that they stay in their jobs and that they perform better while at work. On it’s own it won’t be enough, though, there also needs to be an investment in how early childhood educators are prepared and in their ongoing professional learning.

Third, Clinton calls for doubling federal investment in home visiting services such as the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program so that it reaches twice as many children. In fiscal year 2015, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded $386 million to states, territories, and non-profit organizations to support home-visiting services through MIECHV.

MIECHV provides early intervention services to low-income pregnant women and parents of infants and toddlers during a critical period of growth and development. Home visits conducted by nurses, social workers, or early childhood educators during pregnancy and in the first years of a child’s life have been shown to substantially improve child and family outcomes, including children’s school readiness. Parents are their children’s first teacher, and home visiting programs can help improve the quality of interactions between parents and their children.

Clinton plans to help parents enrolled in college by awarding scholarships of up to $1,500 per year to as many as one million student parents. The plan, inspired by the Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund, would allow scholarship recipients to use the money to pay for costs such as child care or emergency financial aid. Clinton also advocated for dramatically increasing access to child care on college campuses by increasing funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program (CCAMPIS) from just $15 million to $250 million per year with a goal of serving an additional 250,000 children each year.

The proposals announced yesterday are only part of Clinton’s plan to improve access to quality child care and early education. She’s already proposed doubling the number of children served by Early Head Start and the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships, which reach low-income pregnant mothers, infants, and toddlers. And, she also wants to make pre-K universal for all 4-year-olds, something the Obama Administration has been working towards over the last several years. Lastly, she’s proposed guaranteeing all parents a right to 12 weeks of paid family leave.

It is promising to see proposals such as these introduced into the presidential campaign, which will hopefully lead to broader discussion and thinking about how to best pay for and improve families’ access to high-quality early childhood education programs. While these plans would be costly upfront, they would be an investment in America’s families and the future of our country. Child care and home visiting have proven to be rare areas of bipartisan support in recent years. So, if Clinton’s presidential bid is successful, she could have success in negotiating with Congress to make some of these proposals a reality.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Clinton’s Plan to Make Child Care Better and More Affordable appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Minnesota now has some answers: while the tiered ratings of state’s QRIS appear to differentiate quality of center-based programs, they do not differentiate quality of family (home-based) pre-K programs.

QRISs can help parents and policymakers make informed decisions about early education. If ratings accurately reflect quality, they can empower parents when choosing where their children attend pre-K. Policymakers can also use QRIS ratings to inform reimbursement rates of federal child care subsidies or to determine whether a program should be eligible for state funding. QRISs can help inform decisions about where to invest resources by identifying common areas across programs that need improvement.

The Obama Administration’s Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) grant program placed a large focus on creating tiered QRISs as a method to strengthen state early learning systems. RTT-ELC required that each state conduct a validation study to help determine whether the tiers accurately represent meaningful differences in program quality and whether different levels of quality lead to different child outcomes. Minnesota, a RTT-ELC grantee, released findings from its initial validation study in February. The study on the state’s QRIS called Parent Aware, conducted by Child Trends, shows that the state is headed in the right direction but has room for improvement.

Child Trends deemed that the indicators used to rate programs in Parent Aware are based in research around what constitutes quality early education. For instance, Parent Aware evaluates programs on the quality of teacher-child interactions and curriculum and assessment practices. The validation study looks at a sample of three- and four-year-olds in Parent Aware-rated programs across program types and income levels. It finds that children in Parent Aware-rated programs made gains during their pre-K year in numerous essential areas: math, language and literacy, social competence, persistence, and executive function. Some of these gains were more pronounced for children from lower-income families. But despite more significant growth, these children did not surpass their peers from higher-income families. These children were less likely to master basic concepts and were more likely to be over- or under-weight.

As mentioned, the researchers concluded that Parent Aware is successfully differentiating quality in center-based programs: higher Parent Aware ratings (ratings are between one and four stars) are associated with higher quality programs. Child Trends used ECERS-R to measure quality and ECERS-E to measure practices related to children’s math, literacy, and individualized learning. Programs that scored higher on these measures had higher star ratings. Still there were no observed differences between CLASS scores measuring the quality of teacher-child interactions in center-based programs.

The study finds no difference in quality by star ratings for home-based pre-K programs. This could be because of the low sample size of family programs or because family programs are essentially choosing to earn lower ratings. The report explains that “Programs may set a lower goal rating than they could otherwise achieve because they want to work through each level of Parent Aware incrementally, either to provide feasible, attainable goals for their program or to access the maximum amount of quality improvement grants. The implication of this finding is that the lower rating levels of Parent Aware are likely to have greater variation in quality than the higher levels.” Researchers conclude that more research is needed to improve the rating process for family pre-K programs and that the incentives may need to be changed so that programs are encouraged to work toward the highest possible rating.

While all school-based pre-K programs and all Head Start programs in Minnesota now have a star rating, most center-based and home-based pre-K programs have yet to join. There are two ways that programs in Minnesota can earn a Parent Aware rating– through the full rating pathway or through the Accelerated Pathway to Rating (APR) process. Accredited programs, Head Start programs, and school-based programs can all use the APR process, which only takes about six to eight weeks. These programs must show that their curricula and assessment tools align with Minnesota standards and provide evidence that staff are prepared to implement curricula and assessments appropriately. All other programs, including the overwhelming majority of family pre-K programs, must go through the full rating pathway. This can be time intensive since they may have much to do to show they meet Parent Aware’s standards.

The  chart below shows that programs eligible for the APR process have been much more likely to earn a Parent Aware rating. The state has been working diligently to encourage non-accredited programs to join Parent Aware and assisting them through the process.

Programs rated through the APR process and programs that earn three or four-star ratings through the full-rating pathway both “engage in quality practices” that support children’s school readiness, according to the report.

Perhaps most importantly, the study finds that higher ratings are indeed linked to greater gains for children in certain (although limited) areas. Higher ratings didn’t predict better outcomes across the board, but they were associated with greater gains in select measures, including language development, social competence, and attention/persistence. Additionally, low-income children in highly rated programs saw particularly large gains on print knowledge (a measure of literacy) and social competence. Children in school-based programs and Head Start programs had significantly higher scores than those in other programs in literacy and math.

These findings are especially important because Parent Aware plays an essential role in Minnesota’s growing Early Learning Scholarship program. (Check out New America’s recent paper that looked at early learning in Minnesota). Early Learning Scholarships are essentially vouchers that help lower-income families send their children to school-based, center-based, or home-based pre-K. The scholarships can go directly to parents or directly to select programs. Parent choice is a fundamental aspect of the program.

But parents can’t just send their children anywhere. To regulate quality, the scholarships can only be used at Parent Aware-rated locations. All rated programs are eligible to receive scholarships, but only four-star programs can receive the full amount of $7,500.

The effectiveness of the scholarship program largely depends on the validity of Parent Aware, since the ratings determine where children can attend pre-K. The findings suggest that children from low-income families are experiencing significant gains in Parent Aware programs, but they are still entering kindergarten behind their peers. It’s also evident that quality varies among rated programs. Scholarship recipients need to have access to three and four star programs if they are to have a real chance of catching up with their peers. Programs serving children from low-income families might need to provide them with more supports.

Child Trends suggests that even the highest rated programs can benefit from quality improvement efforts. Specifically, many highly rated programs  scored low on the CLASS Instructional Support measure, specific math and literacy practices, and planning for individualized needs. Coaching might help teachers improve in these areas. The study found that teachers who received coaching in CLASS showed improved Instructional Support scores. Currently, CLASS coaching in Minnesota is limited to center-based programs working towards a three- or four-star rating in the full-rating pathway. Expanding coaching to other programs or using it for quality improvement purposes could support child development across programs.

Minnesota began rolling out Parent Aware in 2012 in select counties, and the tool was only made available statewide a little over a year ago. It’s still new in many parts of the state and it’s natural for there to be growing pains. The report suggests that the patterns might change as the tool becomes more cemented into the state’s early learning system. The state should utilize these results to reform Parent Aware so that it evaluates all types of programs effectively and supports child development and school readiness to the greatest extent possible. It’s unclear what steps policymakers will take to improve Parent Aware and whether the state will choose to devote more resources to the tool, especially as RTT-ELC funds come to an end.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Minnesota’s QRIS is Effectively Measuring Pre-K Quality- Sometimes appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This study sparked a lot of discussion and concern among researchers and policymakers about the value of publicly funded pre-K programs. There have been a host of new initiatives taking hold at the federal, state, and local levels in recent years because of evidence that high-quality programs can help close the achievement gap and have a strong return on investment. Pre-K proponents tried to figure out why children in Tennessee’s program, which on paper met a host of basic quality indicators, weren’t seeing long-term benefits. Some skeptics used this study to argue that pre-K is not the worthwhile investment it’s claimed to be. But in a couple of posts my colleagues and I reminded that it’s unreasonable to expect pre-K gains to persist through third grade if pre-K is followed by poor teaching in the early grades. And, another Tennessee study released at the end of December provided some evidence to support this. Many advocates feared that these disappointing results would mean the end of the Volunteer State’s public pre-K program.

But last week, lawmakers in Tennessee passed a bill signifying just the opposite– instead of scrapping the program, they decided to try to make it better. The new bill, which the Governor is expected to sign soon, takes a few important steps to improve VPK so that children experience additional benefits. The bill aims to have all VPK programs meet the Department of Education’s definition for “highly qualified pre-K program.” (I could not find a current definition.) Evidence suggests that even though VPK was designed to meet many baseline indicators of quality (like small adult-child ratios and teachers with bachelor’s degrees) at the state level, individual sites did not always implement as intended. The Vanderbilt research team found that quality varied significantly from classroom to classroom.

While many factors can determine a program’s quality, effective educators are an essential component because of the profound impact they have on student achievement. Pre-K teachers should be knowledgeable about child development, early math and literacy concepts, and children’s social-emotional development. The new bill requires districts to create plans for “delivering relevant and meaningful professional development to voluntary pre-kindergarten teachers, specific to ensuring a high quality pre-kindergarten experience.” While the bill language doesn’t lay out what “meaningful” means, effective professional learning is one way to improve teachers’ abilities to work with young children.  

Pre-K programs will also be required to use the state-approved teacher evaluation system that is based on multiple measures, including student growth indicators. This will help school leaders determine whether teachers are effective. This also raises concerns, however, about the kinds of student growth indicators that might be used. Assessments typically used in pre-K classrooms are not appropriate to use for teacher accountability.

The new bill also requires districts wishing to receive state funding for pre-K to show how they will align pre-K with instruction in kindergarten and the early grades of elementary school. Back in October my colleague Laura Bornfreund and I wrote about why the years after pre-K might be the culprit here. So, we’re happy to see this new emphasis. While programs can sometimes produce lasting benefits on their own, it’s lofty to think that one year, or even two years, of high-quality pre-K will not only negate any disadvantages children may have experienced prior to pre-K, but also shield them from the negative impacts of a low-quality K-12 public education system. High-quality pre-K needs to be followed by high-quality kindergarten, 1st grade, and so on. After all, children who attended Tennessee’s pre-K program did show positive benefits at the end of pre-K, signifying that the program did its job in preparing children for kindergarten. Alignment and quality in kindergarten through 3rd grade can help to sustain and build on those gains.

Lastly, the bill requires districts to create a plan for family engagement. Parents are their children’s first and most important teachers and research shows that family engagement in the early years can improve student achievement. Requiring districts to create plans is an important first step, but it’s unclear to me what guidance they will receive from the state in developing them. Many districts might not have the expertise or resources to do it on their own.

An important area that the bill doesn’t address is funding. It was amended so that the final version includes no additional funding to help districts make these changes. Tennessee has a history of low per-pupil spending. In fact, a handful of states spend twice as much per student as Tennessee in K-12 education. In pre-K, the state spends $5,895 per year on each child enrolled according to NIEER, which is on the low end for a full-day program. While more spending doesn’t guarantee higher quality in education, funding does matter. School districts already facing tight budgets will find it difficult to make substantial improvements without additional financial support.

While the bill might not cover everything, it is good to see Tennessee policymakers taking important steps to improve the program that the state has been building for over a decade. Let’s hope state leaders also decide to increase their investment to support the changes required.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

The post Tennessee Isn’t Giving Up on Pre-K appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the primary federal program that provides child care subsidies to low-income families through states, has been a rare area of bipartisan agreement in a Congress notorious for agreeing on and accomplishing little. The law was reauthorized in 2014 and Congress has been slowly but steadily increasing funding for the program over the years. However, this law leaves a lot of room for state flexibility, and some states have been better than others in helping families access care.

Unfortunately, there are multiple factors that can impede low-income families from actually receiving their child care subsidies. A couple of the more obvious obstacles might be income eligibility guidelines or long waiting lists for subsidies. But some of the largest impediments are state-level policies that discourage child care providers from opening their doors to families paying with subsidies. If states fail to adequately reimburse child care providers (i.e. pay them around the same amount as private-paying families) for children receiving subsidies, providers may choose not to serve those children or the quality of care that they are able to provide might suffer. Another option is for child care providers to ask families to cover the difference. Either way, families paying with subsidies lose out.

In our recent report, From Crawling to Walking: Ranking States on Birth-3rd Grade Policies that Support Strong Readers, we rank states on policy indicators that promote strong literacy skills by the end of third grade. We included two indicators around how states reimburse child care providers:

1. Is the state’s reimbursement rate equal to or above the 75th percentile of current market rate in 2014?
2. Does state provide reimbursement of child absence days?

For child care providers to offer high quality services to families eligible for subsidies, they must be reimbursed sufficiently. The federal government recommends that states reimburse providers at the 75th percentile of the market rate to safeguard against providers turning away children who qualify for subsidies and to ensure that they receive enough money to provide quality services. Right now, as depicted on the map below (taken from our interactive Atlas tool), only two states met that threshold in 2014. According to the National Women’s Law Center, this is a “significant decrease from the twenty-two states with rates at the recommended level in 2001.” A handful of states did increase their rates this in the past year but they are still below the federally recommended level.

Another way that states might discourage providers from offering services to families paying with subsidies is if they fail to reimburse for child absences. When private-paying families miss a scheduled day of child care they usually still pay for the day of care. Afterall, the provider still has to cover expenses of running the program– such as rent, facility management, teacher salaries, and administrative costs– even if the child is absent. However, many states set restrictions around reimbursing providers for days that the child is absent, even though the provider has incurred sunk costs.

States have a varying and often confusing policies when it comes to reimbursing for absences. As depicted in the map below, only seven states reimburse for an unlimited number of absences and three do not reimburse for any. Other states differ significantly on their generosity. For instance, Washington state “ reimburses for all absent days for licensed child care centers and licensed family child care providers, if the child is scheduled to attend and payment is authorized for care for those days and if the child attends care as scheduled at least one day during the month,” whereas North Dakota only “reimburses for up to 16 hours per calendar month if a child is absent due to an illness or medical appointment.” Colorado and Texas, on the other hand, allow localities to make such determinations.

Many of these state policies could lead to children with subsidies losing their spot in child care or low-income families covering the cost of missed days. These policies are especially detrimental when you consider that children from low-income families may be prone to absences for several reasons. For one, disadvantaged children are more likely to be sick, which may lead to unscheduled absences. Children in low-income families could also be prone to absences because of their parent’s unpredictable work scheduling or transportation challenges.

On the bright side, the newly reauthorized CCDBG law does leave some room for addressing this problem. In the proposed regulations for the new law, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) says, “While Lead Agencies have flexibility to determine payment processes for subsidies, we believe that it is appropriate to set some Federal benchmarks for what constitutes timely payments, delinking of payments and absent days, and generally accepted payment practices.” If these benchmarks make it into the final rule, it would help ensure families with subsidies can access quality care.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

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Instead, what policymakers should take from the Impact Studies is that there is room for improvement in Head Start. The program has the potential to better the lives of our nation’s most vulnerable children, and it often does. Other research has shown that Head Start children are not only better prepared for kindergarten, but also continue to benefit into adulthood. The question policymakers should be asking is this: how can we make Head Start more effective so that all attendees see long-lasting benefits?

Last week Sara Mead and Ashley LiBetti Mitchel of Bellwether Education Partners, along with Results for America, The Volker Alliance, and the National Head Start Association, released a new paper attempting to answer this question. Moneyball for Head Start: Using Data, Evidence, and Evaluation to Improve Outcomes for Children and Families offers a host of recommendations for how to improve the program based on the “Moneyball” principles that involve using data and evaluation to ensure that taxpayer money is invested in the most effective and efficient manner.

Head Start is a large program– it was allocated $9.168 billion in the FY 2016 budget– and it’s in both the federal government’s and families’ best interest for it to work effectively. While many Head Start advocates argue that increased funding would improve program quality, this paper offers ideas for how the program can change to better utilize the funding it already has.

The federal government released proposed updates to the Head Start Performance standards last summer, which are heavily backed by research and make strides in using data to inform continuous improvement in Head Start programs. (New America’s take on them, here). Moneyball for Head Start applauds the steps taken in the proposed standards, but argues that greater reform is needed to truly foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Mead and LiBetti Mitchel organize recommendations into three distinct categories: those for the local grantees, those for federal oversight, and those related to research and evaluation.

At the local level, grantees need the tools and capacity to collect and analyze data so that they can make informed decisions. Data on everything from family demographics to child assessment to family engagement to staff qualifications can help inform teachers and program directors so that they best meet children and families’ needs. The authors explain that, “Head Start grantees collect and report data on a variety of outcomes, but effectively using this information to improve quality and outcomes requires a high level of intentionality, planning, and expertise in analyzing, interpreting, and acting on data.” While some high-performing Head Start programs already collect and utilize data to inform continuous improvement, many don’t have the right data or don’t know how to effectively use the data they do have.

The authors suggest that Head Start programs build capacity by working with other Head Start grantees and researchers to form Networked Learning Communities. These groups would work together to analyze and share data and identify trends. This is already happening both formally and informally in some places such as Minnesota, but the federal government could encourage their formation by allocating technical assistance dollars this way.

There’s more room for reform in the area of federal oversight than simply reallocating technical assistance dollars. Currently, accountability in Head Start revolves mostly around grantees’ compliance with the Head Start Performance Standards and other basic measures, such as financial solvency and state licensing standards. The report calls for the federal government to measure grantee performance using more meaningful, results-based measures that can differentiate grantees based on quality. They suggest that such performance measures include child outcomes, family outcomes, and program quality data in addition to the types of data already collected. Ideally, the Office of Head Start would use these data to analyze trends, identify high performers, and help programs improve.

But one of the primary challenges of implementing such a proposal is that policymakers don’t always have a clear sense of what to measure or how to measure it. Take child outcomes for instance– many questions need to be answered. Which specific outcomes are most important? What tools are valid and reliable? Do grantees have the capacity to use these tools? What training would they need? How should the data impact program performance ratings?

More and better research and evaluation is needed to answer these and other tough questions, such as what are the key elements that make Head Start most effective. The report recommends spending one percent of annual Head Start funding on research and evaluation, up from the less than 0.25 percent currently used, to learn more about what constitutes quality in Head Start and to develop tools to measure it.

While many of the recommendations offered in this paper sound fairly straightforward, they would involve commitment from multiple groups of stakeholders and a shift in the existing Head Start culture. And everyone knows that culture is difficult to change. It will take time to identify the right measures, create valid tools, and build centers’ capacity to use data to drive continuous improvement. This process could be strengthened by partnering with  the philanthropic community, the private sector, and coordinating with other government agencies and programs, such as state pre-K and child care, that are also thinking about and making headway in these areas.

[Cross-posted at Ed Central]

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