Evaluating the Quality of Early Childhood Education Programs

In this paper we review efforts to find measures that can evaluate the quality of early childhood education, an effort that has been complicated by the very different histories and missions of programs in this field. We split the types of early childhood education programs in the United States into two types: ones with a caring mission (child care) and those with a compensatory education mission (prekindergarten and Head Start). The original measures of quality developed to assess child care environments helped to bring attention to the needs of young children and made states aware of their responsibilities to do more than just make sure these locations were healthy and safe. These quality measures have not, however, transferred effectively to programs with a compensatory education mission. For those programs, the clear implication of their mission is that children’s academic outcomes must be improved. The academic outcomes found to be most important for later school success are math, reading (language/literacy) and attention. As we show here, none of the quality measures currently in the field have demonstrated much capacity for identifying classrooms that are more effective in helping children learn those skills. We argue that the first step in developing an effective measure of classroom quality has got to be empirical investigations of the behaviors of teachers and children demonstrated to be linked to gains in those three skill areas. EVALUATING QUALITY IN ECE 3 EVALUATING THE QUALITY OF EARLY CHILDHOOD PROGRAMS Introduction In 2008, 67% of the four year old children in the United States were enrolled in some form of early childhood education center-based program (Planty, Hussar, Snyder, et al., 2008), and the number continues to rise. Today’s preschoolers will soon begin their formal schooling years. In another 15 years, most of those children will be entering the country’s work force. The recent extension of public education into the prekindergarten years make early childhood settings the first introduction for many children to the world of more formal learning and to doing so in a group setting. These early experiences are critical for establishing learning and dispositional patterns that may affect children’s interactions with classrooms for years to come. Over the years, however, no clear or coherent focus has emerged for the purpose of early childhood education nor whether there should be different purposes in caring for or educating young children. Historically, the purpose of caring for young children was to allow impoverished mothers to work: “Day care was founded, therefore, as a necessary social service to alleviate the child care problems of parents who had to work and to prevent young children from wandering the street” (Scarr & Weinberg, 1986, pg. 1141). By the 1970s, it was no longer just immigrant or seamen’s families who needed care; mothers were entering the labor force to preserve their families’ middle level incomes, and they also needed care for their children. Concurrently with this surge of mothers entering the labor force was a growing concern for the quality of the alternative care the children received. Scarr and Weinberg described this history in detail through the mid 1980s. They report that in 1980 a group of professionals from different agencies and universities developed and proposed a national set of standards for child care that would EVALUATING QUALITY IN ECE 4 cover educational aspects as well as the health and safety issues states were ordinarily concerned with. These standards were never adopted, and since then there has not been a uniform, agreed upon set of standards for the care of children before formal schooling. While all states have regulations concerning health and safety and these sometimes also include educational requirements for teachers and regulations about teacher-child ratios and group size, about half the states have developed their own more comprehensive quality standards. In July 2010, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) reported that 24 states had statewide quality rating and improvement systems (NAEYC, 2010). Another role for programs for young children prior to formal school entry has been as compensatory education, beginning with Head Start in 1965 (Farran, 2007; Scarr & Weinberg, 1986) and continuing with the 1987 amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that allowed Title I funds to be used for whole school program improvement, ushering in the creation of Title I funded prekindergarten classes in many school districts (Ewing & Matthews, 2005). Neither Head Start nor Title I was intended to be full day care; the usual hours of care for each have been public school hours or less that do not cover before or after school care needed by working families. Although some programs provide these services as an option, many do not. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of children served in states that either provide state funds for early intervention prekindergarten programs or that coordinate sources of funding for these programs at the state level. In 2009, 38 states funded preschools and enrolled over one million four year olds (Barnett, Epstein, Friedman, Sansanelli, & Hustedt, 2009); this is not much more than the number of states who provided such funds in 1998 (Mitchell, Ripple, & Chanana, 1998), but those states with programs enrolled more children each year (until this past EVALUATING QUALITY IN ECE 5 one). These state-funded programs are primarily intended as compensatory for children from poor families; 32 of the states have income requirements for enrollment. Given the different missions of community child care and compensatory preschools, it has been difficult to find a common quality measure that was suitable for both types of program. The importance of aligning quality measures with the purposes a program is to achieve is explored in the next section. Definitions of Quality by Programmatic Purpose Caring Purpose The purpose of community child care programs is to care for children whose parent work. The concerns related to this purpose revolve around ensuring safe and appropriate environments for children who are young and vulnerable and therefore dependent on adults to create their environments. Moreover, when other adults, outside of “kith and kin,” are responsible for children they may be unknown to the parents, at least initially. Thus, regulatory agencies become involved. Child care centers are supposed to be licensed to meet health and safety regulations and are inspected by those agencies. In addition increasingly over the past 15 years, childcare programs across the country have been evaluated for their quality, using standardized rating forms administered in various ways, but most often during a visit from the Day Care division of Departments of Human Services. Scores presented as indications of the quality of a program are often made publicly available to parents in order to aid them in the selection of their child’s preschool placement. Indiana’s Paths to Quality is a good example of a Quality Rating System; run by the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, its web site 1 Unregulated child care programs exist in all states, as a type of underground economy, and may avoid even the basic licensing requirements. EVALUATING QUALITY IN ECE 6 (http://www.in.gov/fssa/2554.htm) allows parents to find ratings of child care centers they are considering. These quality scores are also used by the policy world in decisions about program funding and childcare reform. Currently many states assess child care quality to determine the amount of money that is awarded to preschool programs in state support for the care of children from low income families. This process effectively ties a program’s score to, among other things, the salary of the program’s staff. This type of real consequence in the use of a quality measure lends urgency to a determination of the validity of such measures. Education Purpose Starting from quite a different point and perspective, programs whose primary purpose is compensatory education may be very separate from programs for whom caring is primary. Head Start programs do not typically provide full-day or year round care and are therefore not good sources of care for working parents, but most Head Start programs are licensed and reviewed in ways similar to child care in their respective states. Prekindergarten programs funded by Title I or by state funds, on the other hand, are often located in public school buildings or connected to Local Education Agencies (LEAs); this connection, for example, is required for programs receiving state funding in Tennessee. Historically these programs have been resistant to coming 2 While some Head Start programs arrange full day options for working parents, they are not required to by law. The most recent Head Start Program Standards to be found online (http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2007/octqtr/45cfr1306.32.htm) list the following as the hours of care: “(b) Center-based program option requirements. (1) Classes must operate for four or five days per week or some combination of four and five days per week. (2) Classes must operate for a minimum of three and one-half to a maximum of six hours per day with four hours being optimal. ” Moreover, programs do not operate year round: “Programs that operate for four days per week must provide at least 128 days per year of planned class operations. Programs that operate for five days per week must provide at least 160 days per year of planned class operations” EVALUATING QUALITY IN ECE 7 under the supervision of the Departments of Health and Human Services and day care regulations. In order to create a standard for evaluating these types of state-funded programs, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) developed a set of 10 Benchmarks on which states ar