Quality Early Childhood Programs « Preschool Matters… Today!

Quality Standards: Gains and Losses in Tough Times

June 22, 2011

DIGGING DEEPER: WHAT THE YEARBOOK HAS TO SAY ABOUT QUALITY STANDARDS

(PART 2 OF 3-PART SERIES)

In our annual report of state-funded preschool programs, we examine three key features of each state pre-K initiative: access, quality standards, and resources. Here we provide a big picture look at the one of these features, quality standards, in an effort to analyze the nation’s commitment to offering high-quality preschool experiences at the state level. (For an analysis of pre-K access, see part one of this series.)

One of the most important factors in predicting preschool education’s effectiveness is the educational quality of programs. Quality is linked to effects on children’s development and academic success over time as well as other outcomes that yield economic benefits to society as a whole. States should set minimum standards for each classroom in preschool programs to ensure that all children are served in educationally effective programs and should provide adequate funding to support these standards. While standards alone do not guarantee quality, it is unreasonable to expect preschool education programs to replicate the success of previous programs without having similar high standards. For this reason, The State of Preschool 2010 compares each state program’s standards against a checklist of 10 research-based quality standards benchmarks, each representing a different component of program quality. (A list of the benchmarks and a summary of the supporting research can be found beginning on page 22 here.)

While each benchmark helps define quality, they do not all carry equal weight in predicting program effectiveness nor do they encompass all possible aspects of program quality. Rather, these benchmarks are preconditions for quality that offer evidence of a state’s commitment to provide every child enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs with a high-quality and effective experience. Finally, it is important to consider that the quality benchmarks focus on the policy requirements of the preschool initiative rather than actual practice. Therefore, since these benchmarks represent minimum standards, some classrooms may exceed state-level policy requirements or conversely fail to meet state-level policy if programs do not adhere to requirements. In some states, classrooms failing to meet a benchmark may represent a very small proportion so that the practical difference statewide is minute. However, for those children who miss out on a quality education, the difference may be enormous.

During the 2009-2010 program year, 25 states met seven or more benchmarks, and most states met at least five benchmarks. Four states – Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia – each increased the number of benchmarks met by one, while two states – Nebraska and Ohio – both lost ground on benchmarks by reducing program monitoring due to budget cuts. In addition, new pilot programs in Alaska and Rhode Island each met all 10 benchmarks. For a complete summary of the benchmarks met by each state-funded preschool program during the 2009-2010 school year, see Table 5 of The State of Preschool 2010.

As seen below in Figure 2, the total number of quality standards benchmarks met by state preschool programs has risen and fallen since NIEER began tracking them in the 2001-2002 school year. Notably, in the 2009-2010 school year, the addition of two state-funded prekindergarten initiatives, which each achieved all 10 quality standards benchmarks, influenced the total number of benchmarks upwards. When not accounting for these two programs, four benchmarks decreased, two increased, and four stayed the same. (Note, in addition to the changes in benchmarks explained above, the 2009-2010 school year saw the loss of one of Ohio’s state preschool programs, which accounts for the total number of some benchmarks decreasing.)

Other key findings regarding quality standards in the 2009-2010 school year include:

• Alabama, Alaska, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and one Louisiana program (NSECD) met all 10 benchmarks.

• Twelve other states had programs that met nine out of 10 benchmarks – Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana LA4, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey Abbott, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Washington.

• Unlike the large increases seen in previous years, no program this year increased their quality standards benchmarks by more than one.

• Only eight programs continued to meet fewer than half of the 10 benchmarks: California, Texas, and Vermont (both the EEI and Act 62 programs) met four; Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania K4 & SBPK met three; and Ohio met only two benchmarks. However, more than 40 percent of all children enrolled in state-funded pre-K nationwide are in these seven states.

• Two benchmarks are met by fewer than half of all 52 programs: only 16 programs require assistant teachers to have at least a CDA or equivalent credential, and 24 programs require at least one meal per day to be offered. In addition, 27 programs – only slight more than half – require teachers to have a bachelor’s degree.

• Texas and Pennsylvania’s K4 program are the only programs to set no limits on maximum class sizes and staff-child ratios. California and Maine limit staff-child ratios, but not class size. Arizona, Maine, Ohio, and Wisconsin 4K set limits for class size and/or staff-child ratio, but these limits are not stringent enough to meet the benchmarks.

Despite mostly forward progress, standards continue to vary a great deal from state to state. For example, children in Georgia and Alabama have access to programs that meet nine and 10 of the NIEER quality standards benchmarks, respectively. But in the neighboring state of Florida, children attend programs that must meet only three benchmarks. For children in states with lower quality programs, they are potentially missing out on the most meaningful early education experiences. In our experience, program standards are much less likely to change year to year than are either access or funding, perhaps due to how they are legislatively established. While this is sometimes a silver lining—most programs did not see standards relaxed in response to the recession—states have also not made big improvements in this area over the years. At a time when all stakeholders are sensitive to the fiscal constraints on programs, it is unlikely to see a significant push in this area in the next few years. For the sake of the more than one million children in state-funded pre-K, we hope we are wrong.

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

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This Week: Thank a Teacher

May 4, 2011

From elementary school students to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, people across the nation are taking time to thank a teacher throughout the week. That’s because this week is Teacher Appreciation Week, a time to not only celebrate our educators but also to learn more about teaching as a profession.

Years of research have found that teachers play an extremely important role in the preschool classroom. Teacher qualifications are often an indicator of a pre-K program’s quality. Better education and training for teachers can improve the interaction between children and teachers, which in turn benefits children’s learning. The most effective preschool educators have at least a bachelor’s degree and specialized training in early childhood. But while this is the norm in kindergarten classrooms, this is not always the case in preschool classrooms.

When we analyzed data from the latest State Preschool Yearbook, we found that 27 of 52 state-funded pre-K initiatives require that pre-K classroom teachers have a bachelor’s degree and 45 require lead teachers to have specialized training in early childhood. Only 16 state-funded programs require assistant teachers to have at least a child development credential or equivalent. While progress has been made in state policies regarding teacher qualifications since we first started analyzing data in 2002, still more can be done. The figure below provides a visual representation of the number of state programs meeting our benchmarks regarding teacher policies over the past eight years.

Since NIEER began tracking teacher qualification requirements, we’ve seen the most improvement in requiring 15 hours of professional development each year for lead teachers as well as more states requiring specialized early childhood training for lead teachers. Progress has been slower in requiring BAs for lead teachers, and fewer than half of all state-funded programs require a CDA for assistant teachers. And, when we moved away from state-funded preschool initiatives and looked at child care, the picture was bleaker. Only 16 of 50 states have any teacher education requirements, and none of those states require a bachelor’s degree.

A newly released policy brief from NIEER and the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, written by Marcy Whitebook and Sharon Ryan, says it’s not just the quantity of teachers’ formal education but also the quality and content of that education. Whitebook and Ryan find a mismatch between the qualifications for the most effective teachers and the supports that these teachers receive to improve upon their work. Indeed, the latest Yearbook shows that only 44 of 52 state-funded pre-K programs have a policy requiring teachers have at least 15 hours of professional development for lead teachers per year; only about half of programs require professional development for assistant teachers. States provide some supports for pre-K teachers to enhance their skills and credentials; notably, almost three quarters of programs provide some scholarships to teachers enrolling in training, though requirements and amounts vary considerably by state. Three programs provide no support to teachers, despite the benefit to students and teachers of keeping up with the latest in the early education field. See the figure below for percents of the 52 state-funded pre-K initiatives offering specific supports for their teachers.

Does the state provide any of the following types of supports to teachers to help them attain credentials or enhance their skills?
Scholarships	73%
Mentors	63%
Other	40%
Loan forgiveness	21%
None	6%

Whitebook and Ryan also note the disconnect between expectations for teachers and compensation policies. When asked if pre-K teachers are required to be paid on the same scale as public school teachers, only 17 of 52 state programs ensured this for all teachers; another 20 programs extended this guarantee only to teachers who classrooms were in public settings. And, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that in 2009, child care workers nationwide had an average salary of $20,940, ranging from only $16,750 in Arkansas to $24,480 in Massachusetts. In a staggering 40 states, the average child care worker salary is below the federal poverty level set by the Department of Health and Human Services for a family of four in 2009.

Research tells us what credentials make for the highest quality early educators, but state policy has a way to go in fully supporting them. State budgets continue to be tight, but states must prioritize a well-educated, well-compensated early childhood workforce to receive all the benefits we know pre-K can yield. As a nation, when it comes to thanking pre-K teachers, we might consider more than a shiny red apple.

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

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Latest Yearbook Findings: A Wake-Up Call?

April 26, 2011

When NIEER’s research team analyzed the 2009–2010 data for this year’s State Preschool Yearbook, it was not without some trepidation. News coming from the states has been anything but encouraging and we knew the previous year’s data had not captured the full impact of the recession. In many respects, the 2009-2010 data does present a fuller appreciation of the economic stresses affecting the states. For the first time since we began tracking state pre-K, total spending for the country fell in real (inflation adjusted) dollars. So did per-child spending, which now sits $700 below what states, on average, spent in the 2001–2002 school year.

Beyond the national averages, however, there’s a very mixed picture — some of it good, some bad and some downright ugly. First, the good: Enrollment increased nationally with nearly 1.3 million children attending state-funded preschool education. While the enrollment increase was not large, it does stand as testimony to the value many state leaders grappling with tough economies place on preschool education. Alaska and Rhode Island started programs for the first time – the first new states to provide pre-K in many years.

But there was plenty of bad news. After adjusting for inflation, state funding per child declined in 19 of 40 states with programs. Many of these were relatively large states. Nine state (Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Carolina) cut per-child spending by more than 10 percent. While four states (Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia) improved on NIEER’s Quality Standards Checklist, two states (Ohio and Nebraska) lost ground. And, despite increased enrollment at age 4, enrollment of 3-year-olds decreased across the country with nine states (Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington) cutting enrollment at age 3 by 10 percent or more.

In talking with members of the early education community as we prepared to release the report, it sounded like more bad news is in the offing in states like North Carolina, New York, and Illinois. These are states that have made good progress in state pre-K in recent years – progress which is now being threatened by the proposed cuts and changes in governance. Barbara Bowman, a NIEER scientific advisory board member who runs Chicago’s pre-K program, describes the funding situation in Illinois as “dire” and points out that if the federal stimulus money she used this year to support public pre-K in Chicago isn’t replaced she will have to cut the number of kids they serve next year.

This state of affairs is not lost on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who joined me in Washington to present the yearbook findings. Duncan remarked that educational inequality is the civil rights issue of our time and increased access to quality pre-K and other early learning opportunities is the way to begin addressing disparities.

– Steve Barnett
Co-director, NIEER

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More Great Work from John Merrow

April 8, 2011

This week we saw on PBS Newshour an important installment in John Merrow’s continuing and exemplary pursuit of answers to what ails education in this country. Learning Matters, the nonprofit production company he founded traveled to Chicago where they visited homes with preschool-age children and visited an outstanding Educare program that serves kids from infancy to 5 years old. Along the way, Merrow interviewed Barbara Bowman who runs Chicago’s public pre-K program, once headed up the Erikson Institute, and is a NIEER Scientific Advisory Board. He also interviewed Diana Rauner, president of the Ounce of Prevention Fund, and Maria Whelan, president of Illinois Action for Children.

Bowman discusses the enormous costs of school failure and Merrow illustrates by cutting to a scene of young men entering a prison cell block. The cost of keeping them there? — $30,000 per year. Rauner says Educare spends about $19,000 per year per child, pointing out the potential return on that investment. She pointed to research showing that at-risk kids who attended the program for five years (at $95,000 per child) entered kindergarten as ready to learn as their middle-income peers.

There are 90,000 children in Chicago who need high-quality early education but the Educare Program Merrow visited serves only 149. Bowman describes to Merrow the dire budgetary straits in which Chicago’s much larger pre-K program finds itself. It serves 24,000 kids two and a half hours per day. When you add in all the kids in Chicago who attend Head Start and other public pre-K programs, the total comes to 37,000 kids served. In other words, says Merrow, Chicago spends about $5,000 per child on preschool for 40 percent of its neediest kids and nothing on the rest.

This picture could grow worse next year, says Bowman. Chicago used federal stimulus funds for pre-K and if that money isn’t replaced she’ll have to cut the number of children served by public pre-K even more. Merrow asks Whelan about making difficult choices in this economic environment, about spreading less funding over more kids or ignoring the needs of the many in order to serve the few. You will find her answer, and the analogy she uses, interesting. You can view the segment here: http://learningmatters.tv/blog/on-pbs-newshour/closing-the-vocabulary-gap-in-chicago-preschoools/5782/. American’s should not allow themselves to be forced into a “Sophie’s choice” because of all the other things that are given priority–corporate welfare, foreign wars, and tax cuts for the wealthy among them.

Where would Merrow find the money for pre-K? He presents a bold answer in his blog Taking Note. He proposes to eliminate 12^th grade, and then suggests the even more unthinkable—eliminate subsidies for corn production. I take it his point is that people will have to come up with new ideas and fight tough political battles to wrest money for early childhood investments from powerful entrenched interests. Stay tuned for NIEER’s 2010 Preschool Yearbook to be released later this month where we will reveal which states have chosen to support new investments in children despite tough times and which have chosen to disinvest in young children.

Steve Barnett

Co-director, NIEER

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Head Start’s Improved Eligibility Process is a Positive Change, but Doesn’t Address the Root Problem—For Many American Families Quality Early Education is Out of Reach

April 1, 2011

It comes as welcome news that the Office of Head Start proposes more stringent rules for enrollment eligibility and data keeping in the program. (See the Federal Register at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-03-18/pdf/2011-6326.pdf.) Although the extent of the problem is unknown, in some locales parents have been able to enroll their children in Head Start despite the fact that they are not income eligible. This may deny access to children who do meet the guidelines and creates enmity among parents who are not willing to break the rules. Yet, tougher enforcement of eligibility rules does not get to the root of the real problem.

Many American families with incomes too high to qualify for Head Start or state-funded pre-K simply can’t afford a good preschool education for their children. Unless they live in Oklahoma or one a of a handful of other places that offer pre-K to everyone regardless of income or has a relatively high income cutoff for eligibility, families will continue to be frustrated by their inability to provide their children with a quality early education no matter how hard they work. And no matter how tough the screening, parents will continue to feel pressure to misrepresent their finances and manipulate their circumstances at enrollment to gain access to a good early education.

NIEER encountered one such example last August when a young single mom from the Southwestern United States shared her story of frustration. Her son, whom we’ll call Cam, was looking forward to attending preschool. His mom had tentatively enrolled him in the local Head Start program and together they purchased a new back pack for him. But preschool wasn’t in the cards for Cam. By the time Head Start informed Cam’s mom that her income was too high, other pre-K programs in the area were already full. Cam, now 4, remains at home while mom works. She is frustrated not only at the lack of pre-K programs for Cam, but also because, in her view, the rewards of public pre-K go first to those who game the system.

Q: Why was Cam denied enrollment in the program?

A: Because they said I make too much money and I didn’t get enough points in their enrollment system. I make $37,000 a year and I got 50 points — 25 for being a single parent and 25 for having a child at home with no caregiver. The other possible points were for homelessness, foster care, learning disability, inability to speak English, and death of a parent.

Q: That seems straightforward enough. Why are you frustrated?

A: Because I am pretty sure other people lie about their income to get their kids in school. In fact I know that they do. Besides that why should income define what children deserve in education?

Q: What makes you think that?

A: I have spoken with other women in the community whose kids were being turned away because of income and they were told to lie about their income. And while we were registering Cam, my father overheard a young lady being told to lie about her income. I also know of a couple that owns their own business and got their children in.

Q: Did you point this out?

A: I did and I asked them if they expect me to quit my job to get Cam into school. I also confronted the school on the screening process of parents. They said they do not verify check stubs so anyone can make a few changes to get their kids in. I then proceeded to ask them, “Well if I come back next week with an altered check stub my son will get in?” I wanted to point out the flaws in the program criteria.

Q: Did anyone recommend other programs?

A: Yes. There is a program 20 miles away. I work a lot and that would never work out for us. There was another program that would cost $347 a month and I can’t afford it. The program was also started for school teachers so that their kids get in first and then the other children. So even if I got a second job to pay for schooling for my son, he is not guaranteed to be accepted.

Q: How is Cam doing?

A: He got really upset when we got the denial and he still gets excited when he sees a school bus drive by. My dad stays home and watches him every day while I work. We bought books on preschool learning at Sam’s Club and my dad is teaching him from them. He turned 4 in November and is really ready to go to school.

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The State of the Union and Early Education

January 28, 2011

Like many others I was disappointed that President Obama didn’t mention early childhood education in his State of the Union Speech. Yet when he talked about education, government, and the American people the president said many of the right things for our early learning programs. He noted a sense of urgency when he said the future is ours to win but to get there, we can’t just stand still. He called for more competent and efficient government and for every classroom to be “a place of high expectations and high performance.” His call to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” had that uniquely American “can do” ring to it that early education policymakers and practitioners should heed.

The president made his case for quick action when he pointed out that over the next 10 years nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school education. And, he pointed out that as many as a quarter of our students aren’t even finishing high school. He asked whether all of us — as citizens and as parents — are willing to do what’s necessary to give every child a chance to succeed and he pointed out that when a child walks into a classroom, it should be a place of high expectations and high performance.

He spoke proudly of Race to the Top, pointing out that instead of just pouring money into the status quo his administration launched a competition for innovation and reform across the education spectrum. The Obama administration has moved similarly to bring competition to Head Start. Properly implemented, this has the potential—to paraphrase the president—to be the most meaningful reform our early childhood system has seen in a generation. The administration should have the support of everyone in the early childhood field to get this reform right, and in my opinion that means including measures of children’s learning in decisions about who gets funded. This principle ought to be extended to subsidized child care, as well.

Of course there is much more to be done in way of directing funds specifically to innovation in the early education sector so that we too can reinvent ourselves. We need a great deal more research and evaluation aimed at identifying the effects and costs of policy and practice alternatives in early care and education. The federal government could greatly facilitate reinvention by sponsoring a program of research to help guide policymakers at the state and local level as well as program administrators in Head Start, child care, and the public schools. By incentivizing local innovation by educators willing to engage in experiments (freeing them from regulations that get in the way of innovating on a trial basis) and systematically collecting good data on the costs and effects of these innovations, government can build on the hard work, creativity, and imagination of our people the president recognized. Nothing could help us more to do big things for little children.

Steve Barnett

Co-director, NIEER

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Early Childhood Education and the U.S. Labor Market Crisis

January 21, 2011

Guest post by Tim Bartik, Senior Economist, Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

As Steve Barnett’s recent post indicated, the U.S. faces a prolonged labor market recovery. As of today, the U.S. would need more than 10 million additional jobs to return to the employment to population ratio at the beginning of this recession (December 2007). Based on typical job growth rates, the U.S. will take five to 10 years before returning to “normal” employment conditions.

Given our labor market crisis, every area of public policy must consider how it might improve the labor market. This includes early childhood education. Advocates of early childhood programs need to answer how early childhood programs might deal with the U.S.’s labor market problems.

First, the labor market crisis means that early childhood programs are more needed than ever to make up for negative effects of parents’ labor market problems on young children. Research by Greg Duncan and others shows that parental income when a child is ages zero to five has large effects on the child’s later earnings as an adult. Once we control for parental income when a child is five or less, parental income at later ages does not much affect the child’s later earnings as an adult. This fits in with the assumption of early childhood education that children are more malleable to various influences (parental income, quality of preschool, etc.) when they are young.

Therefore, more children are at risk than before the economic crisis. The economic returns to early childhood education occur for all children, but are greater for at-risk children. The labor market crisis implies that investments now in early childhood education will have particularly high rates of return.

Second, early childhood programs provide economic stimulus by spending more money. Preschool teachers spend their salaries, which stimulates the economy. There is a net stimulus even once we adjust for the taxes needed to finance early childhood education. In my new book, Investing in Kids, I estimate that the spending associated with preschool (with some effects from the child care provided) will immediately boost earnings by about 22 percent of the preschool spending.

Third, we should explore packaging early childhood programs with programs that can help parents find jobs, such as well-designed adult job training programs. There could be some positive synergies between early childhood programs and job training programs for parents. The early childhood program provides time for parents to engage in job training programs. Parents may be more forward-looking with respect to their over lives if they believe that their child’s needs are being addressed. Read the rest of this entry »

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First Do No Harm: It’s Time to Address Our Quality Problem

January 6, 2011

In the next several years, those of us who believe government policies can and should help children and families are going to be in a tough fight. We need to be clear that this is not so much a fight for money as it is a fight for learning and development — a fight to ensure that every child has a chance to get in the game and compete on a level playing field in economic, social, and political life. The problem is, we can’t fully meet this challenge as long as we abide, and even seem to endorse, early childhood programs that don’t support learning and development.

In the last several years, a number of studies have found that child care subsidies negatively impact child development. This finding is particularly disturbing because we know that good early care and education enhances child development. So why all the bad news? A quick look at the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort study, commonly called ECLS-B, provides some insights. At age 2, 12 percent of children in poverty were in center-based care. More than twice as many, 27 percent, were in home-based (nonparental) care. Unfortunately, two-thirds of that home-based care was poor quality and virtually none of it was good. Center-based care was much better, relatively speaking. Only 15 percent was poor quality and 20 percent good or better. With those numbers it should come as no surprise that children from low-income families are not benefiting from, and may even be harmed by, home-based care as it is currently provided.

Child care subsidy policy in the United States is designed to get the unemployed, mostly women, into the labor force as cheaply as possible and encourages the use of low-cost home-based care over centers. In other words, federal and state child care policies increase the numbers of children from low-income families in poor quality early learning environments. At the same time, they have little effect on labor force participation. This is the policy equivalent of shooting ourselves in the head, given the importance of early learning and development for later school success and achievement. It also reinforces inequality and the cycle of poverty. We need to turn these policies around now.

The State Early Learning Advisory Councils that have recently been formed provide an opportunity to do just that beginning with three actions.

First, the Councils can collect data on the quality of early learning for infants and toddlers that will reveal just how bad the problem is state by state. This information can help bring the problem to the attention of the general public and elected officials.
Second, the Councils can recommend policy changes that will increase quality and tie public subsidies to quality. Ideally, public subsidies should only go to care providers of good or better quality. This will take some time, but every state should be able to eliminate subsidies for poor quality care entirely within five years. No government should encourage the use of poor quality care.
Third, the Councils should produce estimates of the costs of ensuring that (a) no subsidized care is of poor quality and (b) all subsidized care is good or better.

Given the tough budget decisions facing states and the federal government, the question is, are these recommendations realistic? I believe they are. Frankly, if we accept the view that we can only afford poor quality care, we might as well give up subsidies altogether. We should face the fact that we may do more harm than good by subsidizing poor quality care, and we should stop it. Moreover, we are in a weak position to oppose cutbacks when quality is not “job one.” Some members of Congress already have proposed rolling back spending for child care subsidies and Early Head Start to 2008 levels. Without a floor on care quality, it is much easier to hide the consequences of funding cuts because the amount per child can be cut without reducing the number of children served. In anticipation, each State Advisory Council should have in hand figures for the number of subsidized children who can be supported in adequate care with the current funding and the number who can be supported in adequate care if funding is rolled back to 2008 levels.

If we are willing to condone spending public dollars on poor quality care, we can’t convincingly make our case for additional funding. It is just about the money at that point, and even if we win, our children lose. Let’s take the option of poor quality care off the child care subsidy table.

Steve Barnett,

Co-director, NIEER

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