FDR’s Advice to Pre-K’s Big Four

May 15, 2012

When the auto industry mentions “The Big Three,” all eyes turn to Detroit. The Big Three’s dominance in automotive engineering lasted for decades before years of failing to pay attention to critical signs caught up with them. As NIEER’s The State of Preschool 2011: State Preschool Yearbook indicates, early education has its own version of dominance in “The Big Four” - California, Florida, New York, and Texas – whose stories deserve a closer look.

Four states in very different regions largely dominate pre-K enrollment numbers in the United States and each served more than 100,000 children in the 2010-2011 year. Texas, Florida, California, and New York together serve more than 642,000  3- and 4-year-olds in their state pre-K programs, nearly half (48.5 percent) of the country’s reported 1.3 million students in state-funded pre-K enrollment. The Big Four’s reach is significant but, as the Yearbook reveals, there’s more to the story than enrollment figures alone.

Florida, a pre-K “late bloomer” whose program began in 2005, led the country in enrolling the highest percentage of 4-year-olds in state pre-K programs in 2010-2011, reaching more than 75 percent. Similarly, New York and Texas served approximately half of 4-year-olds age-eligible for pre-K (though New York remains stalled in achieving universal access by the 2013-2014 deadline established by the state’s Legislature). If you are 4 years old in California, your chances of participating in a state pre-K program drop even lower to one in five. Quite a spread, indeed indicating insufficient capacity to enroll all age-eligible children.

Total Number of Children Enrolled State-Funded Pre-K in “the Big Four”

* During this time, New York provided pre-K through more than one program.

Quality among the Big Four is another story. New York fared best among the group meeting seven of 10 NIEER’s quality standard benchmarks (20 states meet eight or more). The other three states find themselves in the shallow end of the national pool with California and Florida meeting only three benchmarks and Texas slightly better at four. This means that almost half of the nation’s children attending pre-K cannot be guaranteed the kind of quality early education experience known to benefit them.

As we have learned from previous research, quality costs. Quality is not inexpensive, but it is cheaper than the long-term costs associated with poor quality. As states continue to use a variety of funding mechanisms for pre-K in difficult economic conditions, it stands to reason that failing to make adequate investments do more harm than good. Each Big Four state came up short for providing sufficient resources to meet NIEER’s 10 Quality Standards Benchmarks, as seen below and in Table 7 of our State Preschool Yearbook.

Per-Child Funding Levels Necessary to Ensure High Quality in “the Big Four”

In order to meet all 10 Quality Standards Benchmarks and pay pre-K teachers on par with kindergarten teachers, each of these four states would need to provide additional funding per child. Nationwide, programs spend a total of $4,847 per child from all funding sources. Of the Big Four, only California exceeds this average. In both Florida and Texas, per-child funding would need to be nearly doubled in order to ensure high quality.

The Big Four aren’t the only ones guilty of prioritizing expansion over quality—over the last 10 years, per-child funding has decreased nationwide by more than $700 per child, which inevitably affects the quality of a child’s preschool experience. At the same time, enrollment nationwide has roughly doubled. Quality, access, and resources demand a delicate balancing act, but states have focused their attention on increasing enrollment, to the detriment of other areas.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “We can afford all that we need; but we cannot afford all we want.” If policymakers in the Big Four and other states are to make good on their promise of cultivating an educated public and skilled, competitive workforce, they’d be wise to heed FDR’s advice. Voluntary access to high-quality early education for all children is more than a want; it is something we need, and state budgets and policies should reflect our needs.

- Jim Squires, Senior Research Fellow, NIEER

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Widening Gap in Pre-K Access: Haves and Have Nots

April 17, 2012

Mountains of evidence over years of study have shown that high-quality preschool education helps put kids on the right track for future success in school and beyond, especially those children from low-income families or facing other challenges that put them at a disadvantage.  It could not be clearer, though, from our 2011 State Preschool Yearbook that the disparities in state-funded pre-K are so great as to exacerbate lifelong inequalities among children.

As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan explained at the Yearbook 2011 release, “High-quality early learning is what we want for our own children—which means that it must be what we want for all children.” Despite the impressive enrollment growth in state-funded preschool—nearly doubling to 1.3 million children in a decade—recession-driven funding cuts have made it difficult to give this opportunity to all children.

Using data from the 2011 Yearbook, GOVERNING Magazine created a map that highlights these disparities. States are shaded based on the percent of their 3- and 4-year-old population served in state-funded pre-K. Eleven states offered no state-funded pre-K in the 2010-2011 school year, including Arizona, which became the first state to completely remove it state-funded pre-K program. Of the 39 states that do provide these programs, an additional 15 did not enroll 3-year-olds, which drives down their percentage served compared to the measure of 4-year-olds served. For example, Florida is ranked number 1 in enrollment for reaching 76 percent of its 4-year-olds, a percentage that is slashed in half to 38 percent when combined with 3-year-olds.

Map from GOVERNING magazine. Click here to use it interactively.

This map is a great tool for some quick looks at regional trends—you can quickly see the “hot spots” for enrollment, including the Wisconsin-Illinois-Iowa trio in the Midwest; the “not so hot spots,” such as the Midwest duo of Michigan and Ohio; and the cold spots, including seven Western states that do not offer programs at all. Additional details on enrollment and spending can be found by clicking on the individual state.

Enrollment, however, only tells part of the story: programs of high-quality are necessary to guarantee long-term gains, but quality varies startlingly from state to state. During the 2010-2011 year, only five states met all 10 of our quality standards benchmarks (Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, North Carolina, and Rhode Island), while at the other end of the spectrum, Ohio met only 2. California and Florida met only 3 benchmarks each, which is particularly concerning given that these programs serve each serve more than 100,000 children, including large populations of Hispanic children.

How many preschoolers a program can enroll and what program standards it can effectively meet (i.e., not just on paper) are inherently linked to the funding available. Disparities in resources across states have persisted, contributing to the “haves” and “have nots” in state-funded pre-K. In the report’s executive summary, we say, “Disparities among the states in funding per child are substantial and persistent. In 2001, the difference in spending per child from the highest spending state to the lowest was nearly $9,000. Today, the range is more than $10,000. Massachusetts and Ohio had erratic changes in spending from one year to the next over the decade, but both states ended the period with decreases in pre-K spending of more than $3,000. By contrast, Arkansas and Maryland increased per-child spending over the decade by more than $2,000 each.” Quality, enrollment, and resources do not exist in a vacuum—each factor influences the others in ways that differ by state, but it is clear that too many states are not providing enough per-child funding to ensure quality for the children enrolled in their pre-K programs.

In order to explore these trends more fully, we’ve created a Google Motion chart of interactive Yearbook data. We encourage you to use this animated tool to explore pre-loaded variables on quality, access, and resources across states; you can select a particular state of interest to track its progress relative to other states.

Using our interactive data set via Google Motion Charts, the video above demonstrates the relationship between quality standards met by a state and the state per-child spending over time. On the whole, it’s clear that states have shifted toward meeting more quality standards in 2010-2011 than they did in 2001-2002, though per-child funding has by and large stayed below what is needed to implement these standards and ensure teachers are paid a competitive wage, as presented in Table 7 of the Yearbook.

Education has always been largely funded and controlled at state and local levels, which allows for greater flexibility and a focus based on local needs. However, there is no doubt that such large disparities among states prevent the benefits of early childhood education from reaching all children who could benefit. Given the increasing mobility of American society, the failings of one state to prepare children today is to the detriment of another state’s workforce down the line. We encourage all stakeholders in early childhood education to look at the data not just for their state, but for other states, and reach across state lines to bring best practices home and to their neighbors.

- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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NIEER Marks Decade of Study by Releasing State of Preschool 2011 Yearbook

April 10, 2012

Today, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined me for the release of The State of Preschool 2011: State Preschool Yearbook at Bancroft Elementary School in Washington, D.C. The new Yearbook not only provides insights on the state of state-funded pre-K for 2010-2011 but also for the entire past decade. Where is the nation headed in preschool education?  How do states compare on access, quality standards, and funding for pre-K?  How much progress have they made over the decade?

Our key finding is that while preschool expansion over the past decade garnered great attention, something else happened that got less notice. Funding slipped as enrollment increased –undercutting efforts to ensure program quality.  Adjusted for inflation, state funding for pre-K programs plummeted by more than $700 per child over the past decade.  The nation took a giant step backward in preschool education even as it appeared to be moving forward.  How did this happen? As many states expanded enrollment, funding did not keep pace. In the past year alone two-thirds of the states cut funding per child.

A decline of this magnitude should serve as a wake-up call for parents and policy leaders about how weak our commitment has become to preparing today’s preschoolers to succeed in school and later find good jobs in a competitive global economy. What makes this particularly striking is that over the past decade the evidence that high-quality preschool education is a good public investment has grown substantially. We now understand that the important difference is between great programs and middling programs; the gain from upgrading from low to moderate quality means far less to a child’s future success.

As always the State Preschool Yearbook provides many details about access, quality, and funding.  Here are some of the most important.

  • Over 1.3 million children now attend state-funded pre-K, and enrollment at age 4 doubled over the past decade. State pre-K serves 28 percent of 4-year-olds. Combined with Head Start and other public programs, enrollment is up to 45 percent as a national average.
  • Far less progress has been made in pre-K enrollment at age 3.  It is barely higher than it was a decade ago — 4 percent in state pre-K, and no more than 20 percent across all public programs.
  • Behind the national averages are huge disparities in pre-K enrollment from one state to another. If you are lucky enough to be born into one of the top states you most likely go to pre-K at age 4. Yet, 11 other states fund no state pre-K at all.  And, the majority of states still offer no funding for pre-K at age 3.
  • The recession clearly has slowed progress toward increasing enrollment. A number of states that committed to serving all children have made little progress in the last several years and others have actually cut enrollment. Four Midwestern states—Missouri, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio—serve fewer 4-year-olds than they did a decade ago.
  • We assess state policies against 10 benchmarks for adequate program quality standards.  In 2010-2011 five states met all 10 and 15 more states met 8 or 9.   That’s the good news. However, while two states improved on quality standards, four states fell back for a net loss.
  • The decline in quality standards is no surprise. Last year, real funding per child dropped $145. Total funding for pre-K fell by $60 million, adjusting for inflation.

These are troubling signs.  Research tells us the only pre-K programs that really help children prepare for school are high quality.  So, it’s wonderful that more children have access to pre-K classes. But most states don’t serve nearly all those who could benefit. And, many states that make pre-K available to large numbers of children fail to ensure that these are high-quality programs. It’s time for us to step up as a nation.  The research is quite clear: failure to prepare children for school success is far more costly than providing high-quality pre-K.  Ultimately, high-quality pre-K means a better-educated, more competitive workforce, healthier communities, and less money spent on school failure, welfare, and prisons.

All we’re asking is this: as states begin to recover economically, they should expand high-quality pre-K and invest more in these effective programs. By the end of the next decade voluntary high-quality public pre-K should be a choice for every American 4-year-old and for all 3-year-olds in poverty.

I usually stick just to the numbers, but it helps to understand the situations of the real people behind these numbers. I get letters and emails from parents desperate to find a quality preschool program for their children. I even got an email from a big sister who didn’t want her younger brother to have the same troubles she did starting school unprepared. Usually, they are families who earn enough to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, but don’t qualify for Head Start or many state-funded pre-K programs because they are not below the poverty line. Yet, they can’t afford quality pre-K on their own—there just isn’t enough left over in their paychecks after the rent has been paid.  They know their children would benefit from attending a good pre-K, but they can’t get into one.

Some states are already moving forward to change this situation — Georgia, Iowa, Vermont, and West Virginia have made remarkable progress despite the recession. Alabama and Rhode Island are poised to move ahead with increased access to top-quality programs. They demonstrate that progress can be made even in difficult times. Georgia also demonstrates how precarious progress can be. After finally making its way to the top for quality standards, it increased class size and cut the length of the school year due to limited lottery funds in the current year.  Similarly,North Carolinahas become a pre-K battleground as budget cutters slash enrollment and cut funding in a state that was once a national leader in early education.  This backsliding and the low standards and funding that characterize some massive state pre-K programs (Florida, for example) are the reasons we publish the Yearbook so that parents and everyone else can see exactly what their public officials are doing, or not doing, to invest in their children.

This is the second year in a row that Secretary Duncan has joined me for the release and his remarks were characteristically supportive of preschool education. He emphasized the importance of expanding access to high-quality early learning programs as an “investment that benefits us all.” Media interest in the report has been high and we’ll be carrying some of the coverage on our new web site.  Many thanks to the NIEER web site development team and the Yearbook team, both of whom worked many, many hours to get both the Yearbook and the web site ready in time for this release that marks a decade of commitment to high-quality preschool education!

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

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“Privatizing” Pre-K Is About More than Saving Money

March 2, 2012

It was with no small measure of alarm that we learned this week of a proposal in the North Carolina legislature to completely privatize pre-K classrooms by the summer of 2013. It’s part of a draft report that calls for pre-K to be the exclusive domain of child care centers and to be removed from the public schools that currently serve about half the state’s preschoolers. It also would decrease eligibility from an annual family income of about $50,000 to $22,000— for all practical purposes, the poverty line.

If passed, this legislation will erase years of progress that made North Carolina one of the premiere states for delivering quality preschool education. In the process, it will relegate the children most at risk of school failure to programs that will more closely resemble babysitting than anything that enables children to start school ready to learn.  Although it seems that the North Carolina legislature may back away from some aspects of the proposal, the proposal’s core principles are likely far from dead.

For anyone wondering how policy leaders could consider consigning the state’s disadvantaged kids to such a poor start in life, this should serve as a wake-up call. They should realize that those who are pushing to eviscerate high-quality state pre-K are not the least bit interested in the welfare of the children. Rather, they are pursuing a different agenda, seeking instead to separate preschool from public education. Rayne Brown, the co-chairwoman of the committee that came up with this plan told the Winston-Salem Journal she thinks privatization would be a “great thing to do and that it would help shrink government.”

This is not just more of the public employee/teacher union bashing that has been popular of late.  It is part of strategy to deny rights and escape responsibilities that adhere to public education through state constitutions.  By shifting preschool to child care and out of education, prohibitions against funding religious education are eluded and children’s rights to an effective education are made irrelevant. Make no mistake, this is a carefully crafted legal strategy spreading across the states wherever legislators fear that courts might force them to offer young children a real (and more costly) education or interfere with the legislature’s desire to funnel public funds to the religious and business institutions of their choice.

To my mind, children’s advocates who now almost uniformly describe preschool programs as “early learning” rather than “education” and support moving administration of early childhood programs out of state education departments are playing right into the hands of their opponents.  As children’s advocates care deeply about the quality of education and closing the achievement gap, they will find the consequences tragic.  The legal foundations of public education make it uniquely suited to bringing all sectors—including Head Start and faith-based organizations—into comprehensive state systems with uniformly high quality standards and adequate funding.

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

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The Pre-K Debates: What the Research Says About Teacher Quality

February 10, 2012

The body of research on teacher quality is, if nothing else, a mixed bag, in terms of both quality and approach. Studies of the effects of preschool education levels have employed techniques ranging from simple correlations to complex statistical analyses that seek to account for the complexities of interrelated policies and practices that affect teaching and learning. Given just how complex policy and practice are, it may be that the simple correlations are just as informative for policy purposes, but neither approach is particularly satisfactory.  Controlled randomized trials that look at teacher quality might get us farther, but even these may not tell us what we really want to know, and they are few and far between in any case.  Little wonder, then, that some studies find that teachers with higher levels of education have stronger effects on children’s learning while others do not. A 2007 NIEER quantitative summary (meta-analysis) of the literature found a modest positive effect of teachers with a bachelor’s degree compared to those with less education. A few studies in that analysis deserve extra attention because they have obvious strengths:

1. The Cost, Quality and Outcomes Study of child care found that higher levels of teacher education and pay were associated with higher quality as measured by structured observations, and children’s cognitive test scores. A reanalysis that controlled for location and center found no differences between teachers with bachelor’s degrees and those with associate’s degrees or high school diplomas. However, the reanalysis fails to take into account that programs basically hire all their teachers under the same budget constraint, that teachers within a center are not independent performers, and that centers like to assign difficult-to-teach kids to better teachers.

2. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study of early care and education has an advantage over most studies because it includes measures of education in the home, thereby more completely modeling the processes that contribute to children’s learning and development. And, it does so over multiple years and not just a few months. Several NICHD studies have found that teacher education contributes to children’s learning and development.

3. Two studies that found no effects of teacher education on children’s learning are a University of Nebraska study of child care centers in four Midwest states and a University of North Carolina study using data from the National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) Multi-State Study of Pre-K. The latter involved more than 230 classrooms and 800 children. While both have relatively large samples, nether takes into account teacher assignment, apparently assuming that it is random and they do not measure home learning processes. In the Nebraska study, only about seven teachers out of the hundreds interviewed had salaries above $30,000.

To my mind, the most informative evidence comes from real policy changes such as when the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered high-quality preschool provided to all children in 31 low-income school districts. This “natural experiment” was implemented in a public system wherein most children were served by private providers under contract to the districts. Teachers lacking the necessary credentials received scholarships to attend more schooling so they could meet the new standard of a bachelor’s degree and early childhood certification. Salaries were raised to public school levels.  Teachers received coaching on a regular basis. It comes as no surprise to many involved in this dramatic, albeit painful, transition that the quality of teaching as measured by direct observation was transformed, changing from poor-mediocre to good-excellent.

Of course, we can’t pinpoint teacher qualifications as the sole source of success in New Jersey, and I wouldn’t.  Raising qualifications requirements without raising pay from its typically abysmal level is a recipe for disaster.  Honestly, would the field really be debating whether preschool teachers needed to be well-educated if wages were not at issue?  In addition, coaching and a continuous improvement process are certainly important, but it would be equally misguided to conclude that specialized training and professional development alone could produce quality teaching over the long-run with low wages and poorly educated teachers.

Education research rarely provides a basis for certainty and this is particularly true of studies looking at teacher effectiveness where so many variables matter. If policymakers want greater certainty than the existing evidence provides, different sorts of studies will be needed that are based on real policy changes. In the meantime, leading experts in the field provide us with well-reasoned arguments for and sometimes against requiring higher levels of education for preschool teachers than is currently the case in most classrooms across the nation. Their arguments are well represented in The Pre-K Debates, a new book edited by Ed Zigler and Walter Gilliam at Yale and me.  If nothing else, it is always interesting to see university professors argue that their students don’t learn anything useful or that minority students can’t make it in higher education. I’m always happy to put forward Rutgers University as a counterexample.

- Steve Barnett, Director, NIEER

Note: This post is part of a series discussing issues of contention from The Pre-K Debates. For my analysis of universal preschool’s role in economic mobility, see this earlier post in the series.

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Early Education on the International Scene

January 27, 2012

Continuing its focus on the importance of early childhood education, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) held its high-level roundtable “Starting Strong: Implementing Policies for High Quality Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)” in Oslo, Norway this week. The OECD, a collaborative organization with 34 member nations, provides a forum for governments to share best practices and address common problems in a variety of areas.

Recognizing the impact of high-quality early learning, the OECD has had a special initiative focusing on early childhood and early care (ECEC) since 1996. Their “Starting Strong” initiative has collected data on policies, practices, and success across countries. The roundtable meeting, along with the release of a new publication, “Starting Strong III: A Quality Toolbox for Early Childhood Education and Care,” continued this legacy of international cooperation as nations try to protect crucial early learning investments during difficult financial times.

The roundtable featured invited guests from government, research, and advocacy throughout its member countries to focus on its three goals:

  • Focus attention on the economic and social importance of investing in high-quality early childhood education and care,
  • Highlight key policies and practices that can enhance investment in high-quality early childhood education and care in countries, and
  • Share perspectives and foster dialogue with, and among, stakeholders to promote understanding of the implementation challenges and how to address them.

Steve Barnett, director of NIEER, was a keynote speaker at the roundtable meeting and participated in a panel with other crucial ECEC stakeholders in the international community. Video footage can be found online, with Dr. Barnett’s address beginning at the 25:30 mark, and continuing into the panel at the 57-minute mark. The slides from his Oslo Benefits and Costs of ECEC presentation are available both from NIEER and on the OECD website alongside the video footage.

Norwegian Minister of Education Kristin Halvorsen gave a particularly striking speech (beginning at the 10-minute mark) in which she walked participants through the process of achieving high-quality early childhood education and care programs in Norway. Her argument was rooted in her experience as former Minister of Finance; that is, early childhood education is beneficial not only for the individual child but also for families that are better able to work and the economy that benefits from this. Her presentation slides are also available alongside the video footage of the event.

The complete Starting Strong III report is a 300-plus page tome addressing five policy levers utilized cross-nationally to improve quality in ECEC programs and ensure this crucial investment pays off. An interactive site guides stakeholders through these five levers, and well as the five “action areas” laid out below—this site is an incomparable tool for policymakers both stateside and in the international community.

Policy Levers
Setting out quality goals and regulations
Designing and implementing curriculum and standards
Improving workforce conditions, qualifications and training
Engaging families and communities
Setting out quality goals and regulations

Action Areas
Using research to inform policy and the public
Broadening perspectives through international comparison
Selecting a strategy option
Managing risks: Learning from other countries’ policy experiences
Reflecting on the current state of play

Steve Barnett and Ellen Frede (former co-director of NIEER) contributed to this report and its online materials, and NIEER’s research can be seen in a number of areas through the publication. Research briefs around each policy lever topic address the current body of knowledge on the topic, what is still unknown, and what the policy implications are in the field. NIEER’s contributions can particularly be seen in this brief on data monitoring and accountability.

The OECD hosts a plethora of material on ECEC in member nations. Much of NIEER’s research centers on early education funded by states, which reflect great diversity in resources, access, and quality. These differences are only magnified at the international level, offering a number of ideas that nations may wish to incorporate into their own programs. There is no one “right” model for early care and education; programs must be of high-quality, fit the needs of their community while being culturally responsive, and contribute to lasting gains. Cooperative efforts such as those launched by the OECD provide a crucial opportunity to share knowledge and ensure that all children are provided with quality early learning opportunities, contributing to an improved global economy.

-  Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

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Head Start: Mend It, Don’t End It

August 19, 2011

One of the most neglected questions in the ECE policy arena is “How should we respond to the failure to find lasting effects for Head Start and Early Head Start after investing years and many millions in nationwide randomized trials of those important programs?” I say neglected because there is far less awareness of what the research says than one might expect given the importance of the high-quality research effort that represents our best shot at unbiased estimates of program impacts. For instance, I find that few people even know that Early Head Start’s long-term effects have been evaluated through fifth grade.  I addressed this long-simmering question  in an article published today in the journal Science.  At the outset, I wish to make clear that the evidence does not lead me to the conclusion that we should end these programs, but that they need major reform.  Let’s start by quickly reviewing the evidence.

One randomized trial evaluated the impacts of a year of Head Start by following 4,667 children and their families from entry in Head Start through kindergarten and first grade. After one year of Head Start cognitive effects were positive, but fairly small, and the broader the domain the smaller the effects. In follow-up the effects were even smaller.  No cognitive or school progress effects were found in kindergarten or first grade, though one might argue that there is a persistent effect on IQ of about 1/10th of a standard deviation.  This would close about 10 percent of the gap between Head Start children and the average child on IQ.  No effects were found on any teacher-reported measure of social-emotional development or behavior.

Upward adjustments can be made to the findings because not every child followed the random assignment (some assigned to Head Start did not attend, some assigned to the control group found their way into Head Start).  Yet even after such adjustments, follow-up results remain weak.  Additional adjustments could be made for participation in other programs, but these would make little difference, particularly at age 3 when high-quality alternatives are scarce.

A randomized trial of Early Head Start with more than 3,000 infants and toddlers produced results similar to those for Head Start even though most children and families participated two or more years. Effects at ages 2 and 3 were quite small for cognition and social-emotional measures including aggression. By age 5 no effects were found for cognition and only one small socio-emotional effect was found. In the grade 5 follow-up no effects were found on any of 49 measures and the estimated effects were near zero for both cognitive and social-emotional development.

For some in the early childhood field the reaction to these long-term findings has been denial. One claim is that bad public schools offset Head Start’s positive effects.  The national Head Start study finds, to the contrary, that gains in literacy and math accelerate for both Head Start and control groups after they enter kindergarten.  Any wash-out in Head Start effects from the public schools occurs because control children quickly make up the small advantage from attending Head Start.  Others claim that non-experimental studies consistently find long-term effects despite a lack of short-term gains in achievement.  However, the non-experimental studies are not really consistent among one another in either their short- or long-term patterns of effects.  Their positive long-term results likely result from chance variation and methodological failings rather than real effects.  If effects are not evident at fifth grade, they won’t be later.

Once we accept these disappointing findings, why not just end the programs as Joe Klein recently argued in Time magazine?  I offer two reasons.  First, America cannot afford to let so many children fail academically and socially because they are poorly prepared.  Second, some other preschool programs have succeeded to a much greater extent, and Head Start can be reshaped to be similarly effective.

Table 1 compares the initial impacts of Head Start and some other large-scale programs.  Pre-K programs with above average standards and funding are found to produce larger effects than Head Start in rigorous studies including a recent randomized trial.  The Chicago Child Parent Centers, which are similar in key respects to the state pre-K programs in Table 1, have been found to produce effects on achievement and social development into adulthood as well.  Reshaping Head Start to more closely resemble these programs would enhance its effectiveness. A quantitative summary of research on early educational intervention over the past 50 years adds weight to this argument as the Head Start and Early Head Start comprehensive services approach is associated with weaker effects, possibly because it reduces the educational focus.

Table 1. Achievement Gains from Pre-K

My prescription for improving Head Start includes increasing the percentage of funds spent inside the classroom, building a stronger connection to public education, and eliminating much federal oversight and related paper work.  Early Head Start needs the same freedom from regulation, but should adopt home-based models that have a strong evidence base (Olds’ Nurse Family Partnership) as well as strengthen center-based options. Give programs a set amount of money, audit the books, and assess teaching and learning.  Teaching should be highly intentional and include direct instruction one-on-one and in small groups.  A new continuous improvement process should be put in place for learning and teaching.  The Obama administration’s plans for re-competition of low-performing Head Start agencies should be implemented as soon as possible based on both measures of teaching and broad measures of child progress.  Early Head Start should be regarded as an experimental program and subject to large-scale research for at least the next five years.

No doubt, these recommendations will be as controversial as is my longstanding recommendation to increase the amount and quality of education required of Head Start teachers and to increase their compensation accordingly.  Head Start teachers should be given the opportunity to return to school with tuition and fees paid by government loans that would be forgiven if they remain in Head Start five years later.  The quality and content of the programs they attend should be subject to an approval process to be eligible for these forgivable loans.

Even if they were not controversial, it would be foolhardy to reform Head Start based entirely on my recommendations given the limitations of current knowledge.  The evidence is just not that strong given what is at stake.  Fortunately, we have a better alternative.  Allow Head Start and Early Head Start agencies to innovate, experiment, and find their own way to strong results.  A systematic program of research should be launched in which Head Start and Early Head Start agencies propose new approaches to be tested in randomized trials. Experimental programs should be given a blanket waiver from Head Start and Early Head Start performance standards and most nonfinancial reporting requirements as long as they adhere to their own proposed plans (which will be monitored as part of the randomized trial).  This systematic program of research would provide much better guidance for early educational intervention than is now available.  In relatively short order Head Start and Early Head Start could fulfill their promise.

– Steve Barnett, Director, National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)

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Early Childhood Education Featured in Principal Magazine

August 10, 2011

NIEER co-directors Ellen Frede and Steve Barnett discuss the critical role pre-K plays in closing the achievement gap in the May/June issue of NAESP’s Principal magazine. Drs. Frede and Barnett note that the availability of preschool is a strong predictor of differences in scores in the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a comparison of educational achievement across 65 countries.  They also point to research findings that show national achievement test scores rise with the level of public spending on and quality of preschool education.  Frede and Barnett maintain that a commitment to an effective, quality preschool program could reduce the achievement gap in the United States by 20 percent.  The article from NIEER co-directors also offers principals and other school leaders 10 research-based, practice-tested steps they can take to increase the availability of quality pre-K whether or not they currently offer pre-K in their school.

Also included in the May/June 2011 issue of Principal magazine:  Jacqueline Jones, senior adviser for early learning at the U.S. Department of Education, writes about assessment in early childhood education.  First Five Years Fund director Harriet Dichter writes about pre-K to grade 3 education in Pennsylvania.  University of North Carolina assistant professors Rebecca Shore and Pamela Shue and former principal Marion Bish report on a professional development program in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, designed to prepare elementary principals for preschool.

6 Comments | Achievement gap, Early Childhood, Early Education, Outcomes, Preschool, Quality Early Childhood Programs, Research | Permalink
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Pre-K Disparities: What You Get Depends on Where You Live

July 20, 2011

When we analyzed the data for The State of Preschool 2010, a disturbing trend that we noticed the previous year continued to appear: during these difficult economic times, disparities among states in providing high-quality preschool education are growing larger. Consequently, children’s access to and quality of experiences in preschool vary drastically depending on where they reside. For instance, a relatively small percentage of children (6 percent) in Alabama have access to a high-quality program (meeting all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks) while their peers to the south in neighboring Florida have a better chance of having access (68 percent) to a lower quality program (meeting only three of 10 benchmarks). Alabama’s neighbors to the west in Mississippi have no state-funded preschool program at all to attend. This problem is not limited to the deep South – patterns like this repeat across the country. And tight state budgets are only exacerbating the problem.

While some states continued to move forward during the recession, others fell further behind, and some have dropped precipitously. Oklahoma remains the only state where almost every child has the opportunity to attend a quality preschool education program at age 4, but other states are at least approaching the goal of offering some state-funded education program to all children. In 10 states, the majority of children attend a public preschool program of some kind (see Table 1). At the other end of the spectrum, 10 states have no regular state preschool education program, although children may receive early learning experiences through Head Start and special education (see Table 2). In six states, fewer than 15 percent of 4-year-old children are enrolled in any public preschool program including Head Start.

Table 1: Top 10 States Serving 4-Year-Olds in State Pre-K

State Percent of 4-year-olds served

State Pre-K

 State Pre-K and Special Education State Pre-K, Special Education, and Head Start
Oklahoma*

71

71

86
Florida

68

70

78
West Virginia

55

57

78
Georgia

55

57

63
Vermont

52

61

69
Wisconsin

52

55

63
Texas

47

48

57
New York

45

51

59
Arkansas

41

50

60
Iowa

38

43

51

* All 4-year-old special education children in Oklahoma are in the state pre-K program.

Table 2: No-Program States

State Percent of 4-year-olds served
Special Education Special Education and Head Start
Hawaii

5

15
Idaho

6

15
Indiana

7

15
Mississippi

7

37
Montana

5

22
New Hampshire

7

11
North Dakota

7

24
South Dakota

8

25
Utah

6

13
Wyoming

17

26

Other important disparities across the states include:
• State spending ranged from less than $1 million in Arizona to more than $790 million in both California and Texas. Ten states spent nothing on state pre-K.
• For states with initiatives, state funding per child exceeded $5,000 per child in 13 states, while in six others it fell below $2,500.
• Most states failed to meet NIEER benchmarks for teacher and assistant teacher qualifications. Seven states had programs that met fewer than half of our benchmarks for quality standards. The states failing to meet most benchmarks include three of the four states with the largest number of children — California, Florida, and Texas.
• There are no maximum class sizes or limits on staff-child ratios in Texas, the only state that fails to set either. California and Maine have limits on staff-child ratios but no class size limit. Most other states limit classes to 20 or fewer children with a teacher and an assistant.

3-Year-Olds Losing Ground?

Disparities aren’t limited only to geography but also extend to age – by and large, state preschool programs are for 4-year-olds. Even in states that enroll high percentages of their 4-year-old population, 3-year-olds have little or no access to state-funded preschool education.

Already low, enrollment of 3-year-olds decreased during the 2009-2010 school year, reversing an upward trend since the 2003-2004 school year. State pre-K programs served 170,885 3-year-olds, a decrease of almost 5,000 children from the previous year. Only 4.1 percent of the nation’s 3-year-olds are served in state-funded pre-K, meaning that even small declines in service provision can be dramatic. Thirteen states decreased their enrollment of 3-year-olds while11 states increased.

Illinois, New Jersey, and Vermont are clear leaders in enrollment of 3-year-olds (see Table 3), although no state serves even a quarter of their children in state pre-K at age 3. However, while Illinois is still the leader in serving 3-year-olds, the state actually declined in the percentage of 3-year-olds served from the 2008-2009 school year to the 2009-2010 school year.

Even when accounting for state pre-K, special education, and Head Start enrollment, only Vermont, Illinois, and New Jersey serve more than a quarter of their 3-year-old population. Arkansas is close behind with 24.5 percent of their 3-year-olds served through the state pre-K, special education, and Head Start programs. Interestingly, although it does not have a state-funded pre-K program, Mississippi serves more than a quarter of their 3-year-olds in Head Start and special education, surpassing most states that do have state-funded pre-K with access for 3-year-olds.

Table 3: Top 5 States Serving 3-Year-Olds in State Pre-K

State

Percent of 3-Year-Olds Served

State Pre-K

 State Pre-K and Special Education State Pre-K, Special Education, and Head Start
Illinois

19

21

29
New Jersey

18

22

28
Vermont

17

25

29
Nebraska

11

13

18
Kentucky*

10

10

20

* All 3-year-old children in Kentucky’s preschool program are special education students who have either a developmental delay or an identified disability.

While we are encouraged by success stories such as Oklahoma’s near universal status with a high-quality program and West Virginia’s move toward a high-quality universal program, we are troubled by the fact that many children are growing up in states with little or no access to preschool education or access to programs of low quality. As the expression goes, states are the laboratories of democracy, but wide disparities in educational opportunities for children bring to mind mad scientists rather than the Curies. We remain concerned as pre-K programs face difficult budget choices that can exacerbate today’s disparities and hope all stakeholders can work together to preserve the future for the youngest learners.

- Jen Fitzgerald, Public Information Officer, NIEER
- Megan Carolan, Policy Research Coordinator, NIEER

4 Comments | Access, Head Start programs, Preschool, Quality Early Childhood Programs, Special Education, State-funded programs | Permalink
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NIEER’s Comments on Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge

July 11, 2011

As NIEER noted last week, officials from the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services released draft guidelines for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) program and will be accepting comments on those guidelines until 5pm EDT today. The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) applauds this early learning initiative and offers the following comments.

- The program calls for a focus on children from birth to age 5. This is an ambitious approach. It should be recognized that current federal and state policies are not adequate for 3- to 5-year-olds; states cannot simply assume this work is done and move on to children under age 3. Neither federal nor state programs for 4-year-olds are sufficiently effective, and 3-year-olds are basically ignored by most states’ early education policies. Yet, simultaneously improving all services for children from birth to age 5 would be a tremendous undertaking and states are hard hit now by the recession. States should be permitted to take on major investments in one sector or program at a time in the context of a broader plan for the entire system. They should not be pressed to produce unrealistic plans for creating seamless high-quality, birth to age 5 systems in a short time with inadequate resources.

- Far too much publicly subsidized and provided early care and education is of such low quality that it fails to significantly enhance child development. Some publicly funded services may even have modest negative impacts on children. The questionable quality of services provided by some public programs for young children makes quality enhancement a more pressing goal than expanding access. Increased enrollment should become a goal only after a program is good enough to substantially enhance learning and development. Infant-toddler care should have a particularly high priority for quality improvement.

- Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) are not a proven approach to improving student learning. A QRIS can incentivize some programs to improve their quality for higher reimbursement rates, but those programs are likely to be the ones with the most resources from the start. Too often, programs that are struggling financially will be unable to raise their quality enough to earn the higher rate without more assistance than most QRIS provide. For various reasons QRIS may provide little more than window dressing with respect to improvements in quality or financial incentives for improvement. Ratings systems can become ineffectual. Increased investment in research is needed to learn from different state experiences as they develop and implement QRIS.

- Assessment is a useful tool in continuous program improvement, but must be used with caution. Assessments alone should not be used to make high-stakes decisions about individual programs or children. The regulations call for increasing understanding among educators as to the uses and limitations of various assessment types—this is paramount to ensuring data is collected and used responsibly to improve programs. Assessments aligned with standards can give useful information on what is and is not working in a program, and should be used to guide trainings, professional development, and technical assistance. Yet, many professionals do not sufficiently understand the strengths or limitations of various assessments and the appropriate purposes for which they may be used. For example, it is common to see screening tests used completely inappropriately. Beyond the particulars of assessment, it is important that early childhood professionals be educated about the difficulties in making causal inferences about programs from assessment data and the kinds of evaluation designs required for valid inferences.

- The development of the required kindergarten entry assessment for all students is an ambitious feat, and applicants may need significant guidance in implementing a strategy that works. Current regulations call for educators to implement assessments, though policymakers must be warned of the potential bias of not using third-party evaluators. A kindergarten entry assessment can also only supply so much information regarding readiness and progress without some prior assessment to use as a “baseline.”

- Developing valid and reliable assessments that can be used for every child entering public kindergarten by the 2014-2015 year is a large task with considerable expense. The federal government provided Race to the Top assessment grants for consortia of states to develop valid assessments for students in the upper grades. A similar grant program for early learning would enable states to work together on an early childhood assessment system that is valid, reliable, and manageable. Such an endeavor is likely to be unaffordable state by state; additionally, the field could benefit from collaborations among states so that information collected is comparable across state lines.

- Workforce development is an important goal in providing high-quality early learning experiences. We support the regulations’ focus on improving educators’ knowledge and competencies, and further professionalizing early childhood education to recruit and retain the best teachers. Collaborating with institutions of higher education is essential to ensuring credential requirements truly reflect the skills and knowledge needed to teach young children. Professional preparation and development efforts should formally integrate with higher education to permit seamless career development. Every child deserves a well-educated lead classroom teacher, and one route to this is a bachelor’s degree with an appropriate specialization. Teachers should be properly trained in curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy. Similarly, professionals benefit from supervision by properly trained administrators (e.g., principals, directors, coordinators). Furthermore, NIEER recommends that states address policies for scheduling and staffing patterns requiring adequate time away from children to plan curricula based on assessment and to engage in professional development.

- Judging states based on commitment and investment since 2007 may disadvantage those states whose attempts to develop early learning systems have been slowed by budgetary constraints, especially given the fiscal conditions of these last four years. These states could significantly benefit from additional funding and technical assistance offered through RTT-ELC. Peer reviews should use caution when measuring states against the criteria of prior commitment, as these funds may be exactly the “jump start” some states need to catalyze early learning investment.

NIEER looks forward to the release of the final regulations and to the chance for states to bolster their programs for the youngest learners.

- W. Steven Barnett
Co-Director, NIEER

5 Comments | Assessment, Early Learning Challenge Fund, Federal policy, Quality Early Childhood Programs, Race to the Top | Permalink
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