PreK-3rd

More than 20 states now require measures of student achievement to carry significant weight in teachers’ effectiveness ratings – even in the earliest grades, in which children do not participate in state standardized testing. As a result, states and school districts are struggling to find sound methods to measure young students’ learning.

As a sneak peek to her policy paper to be released this week, we talked late last week with senior policy analyst Laura Bornfreund about how schools are experimenting with rating teachers' effectiveness in the PreK-3rd grades.

In a blog post from earlier this week I examined the issues of funding streams and dosage. We currently have no way to track a state-funded pre-K center’s level of funding or the different ways it is funded. We also have no reliable way of measuring how some pre-K programs supervise children for much longer than others because we rely on a vague binary measurement of “half-day” versus “full-day”. In this post I will explain how we can fix these problems.

What is the best way to use data to measure teacher impact on student learning? States and school districts are attempting to navigate these uncharted waters. As of 2012, 20 states and DC require evidence of student learning to play a role in evaluating teacher performance. As a result, better information on student learning is in high demand, and no grade level is immune. Historically, most states have required standardized testing only in grades three through eight.

In today’s blog post, I will examine some basic problems with current data collection processes in pre-K, kindergarten and across the PreK-12 landscape. Look for Part 2 later this week, when I’ll propose hourly tracking -- an outside-the-box approach to solving some of these issues. 

This week, the National Journal’s expert blog asked writers to respond to a series of questions about assessment. I zoomed in on several lessons from early childhood assessments, PreK-3rd grade, that educators can and should integrate into 3rd – 12th grade standardized assessment practices.

State pre-K funding shrunk by over half a billion dollars from the 2010-11 to the 2011-12 school year. That was the largest one-year decrease in the last 10 years, leading the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) to declare it the "worst year in a decade” for high-quality pre-K access across the United States.

Last week, the National Journal Education Experts blog asked if funding pre-K with cigarette taxes was a good idea.

I argue that seeking out new and creative funding streams has merit and that the tobacco tax is worth talking about. But I also caution that such a tax should not and cannot realistically be the long-term solution:

Updated 4/10/2013 5:00 PM to reflect newly published information about the state matching portion of the Preschool for All plan.

President Obama released his fiscal year 2014 budget request earlier today, which would include $75.0 billion* over 10 years for his “Preschool for All” proposal. On top of this, the president proposes other boosts for early learning, including funding increases for Head Start, Child Care and Development Block Grants, IDEA special education programs, and the home visiting program. He also proposes budget increases to several other programs under the Department of Education that could support early learning.

Last week, the National Institute for Early Education Research released new data on the impact of preschool from a study of New Jersey’s state-funded pre-K program. By following children’s progress for more than six years, researchers determined that even in fifth grade, kids who had attended pre-K were still doing significantly better than their peers on a variety of academic measures. Those academic results alone make a strong case for better investments in pre-K, but let’s consider one finding that deserves special attention in debates about the cost of pre-K: The children who attended the publicly funded pre-K program were also less likely to repeat a grade.

The study showed that even by fifth grade, the chance of retention (the jargonny word for being held back or repeating a grade) was reduced by 40 percent if children had attended the state’s Abbott pre-K program.