Quality Ratings Systems

In “The Hell of American Day Care,” a piece published by The New Republic on Monday, journalist Jonathan Cohn highlights one particularly devastating example of low-quality child care. Four children died in a house fire that took place at a day care program in a private home, while the proprietor, Jessica Tata, was allegedly shopping at a nearby Target and Starbucks, leaving her young charges alone. Tata was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Jacqueline Jones, our country’s first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Early Learning, left her post at the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month. Early Ed Watch had the opportunity to conduct an email interview with Jones. Below is the complete interview, edited for typographical errors only.

Today the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announced five winners for the second round of the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge: Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin. These states join nine others that received grants in 2011: California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington.

When Michelle Rhee was chancellor of DCPS, one of her chief accomplishments was negotiating a new contract with the teachers union that included a new teacher evaluation system. The system, called IMPACT, was designed to keep good teachers in the classroom through incentives like merit pay and weed out the bad by giving the district the power to fire teachers who were repeatedly ranked at the bottom.

IMPACT rates teachers on a variety of metrics, from their students' test scores to classroom observations. It has been both controversial and held up by education reformers as a model for how other districts could begin evaluating teachers in a holistic way. In some ways, the methods for observing teachers are similar to those of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), the Danielson Framework for Teaching and other evaluation systems that are catching on in the early childhood world in that it both evaluates teachers and gives them opportunities for feedback and mentoring. 

DC has been using this system since 2009, so two school years have passed since it began. This month, The New Teacher Project released a report that addresses important questions about how the new teacher evaluation system is playing out. In this podcast, Dan Weisberg of The New Teacher Project and Anne Hyslop of the New America Foundation discuss the new report and what it says about the future of the teaching workforce. Maggie Severns hosts.

Click here to listen to the podcast. You can also subscribe to our podcasts in iTunes, and download previous podcasts from our online archive.

As the presidential election dominates the news over the next few weeks, PolitiFact – a fact-checking website sponsored by the Tampa Bay Times – has released an analysis of then-Senator Obama’s 2008 campaign promises, as well as promises made by Republican party leadership during the 2010 congressional elections.

It’s telling that not one of the 57 GOP promises rated by PolitiFact is directly related to education or children.

But of 508 of the president’s promises rated, several dozen are early childhood- or education-related. They range from home visitation for low-income expectant mothers (Promise Kept) to requiring that all schools of education be accredited (Stalled).  And a surprising number of them are promises specific to early education.

Monday evening, for the first time, the Romney campaign offered some much-needed clarification on what Governor Romney would or wouldn’t do for early learning if he were elected president: Speaking at a mock debate hosted by the Columbia Teachers College, Phil Handy, a  co-chair of Romney's Education Policy Advisory Group, said that Romney would make Head Start more of an educational program, and criticized the current programm, saying it functions “more as a social experience.”

His statement is likely an interpretation of recent studies on what gains Head Start kids do and don’t make when in the program. Currently, while many of the  gains of Head Start have been shown to “fade out” by third grade, research suggests that thecognitive and social-emotional gains children make in high-quality pre-K settings could be replicated in Head Start.

But calling Head Start a “social experience” is both patronizing and off-target. Head Start is in need of improvement, which the Obama administration is pursuing through its recompetition program. But what does Handy mean by “educational”? Is he suggesting the program focus more on academic skills like pre-reading and math? The Obama Administration’s Head Start reforms will soon incorporate the Classroom Assessment and Scoring System, also known as CLASS, to augment the administration’s evaluations of Head Start providers. That tool, which is already employed by Head Start programs to figure out which teachers need additional training, should help boost teacher quality and make the program better at preparing kids for school. But it’s unclear whether Handy or Romney are aware of these reforms, and whether their stress on academics would translate into classroom instruction that is developmentally appropriate  for young children—not to mention the fact that the social-emotional gains children are making in Head Start are crucial.

There has been some debate throughout the presidential election of education, including early childhood education. But in spite of its implications for working families and social mobility, quality, affordable child care has rarely been noted by either of the candidates.

Last week, the Newark Star-Ledger's Linda Ocasio asked me why our presidential candidates should be talking about early learning and child care -- the lead topic in an open panel discussion hosted by the Early Education Initiative and the Workforce and Family Program in W

States around the country have big plans to improve the collection and coordination of data on young children, including data dashboards, scorecards and tools for tracking the well-being of children from the day they are born. But how -- and if --  these plans turn into reality depends on whether they can win support from federal  grants, state funds or private philanthropy, according to a report released today by the Early Childhood Data Collaborative.