Submitted by Anonymous on
By Jack McCarthy, President and CEO of AppleTree Institute for Education and Innovation and AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School
The District of Columbia, with its robust funding for preschool and pre-kindergarten, needs to give more thought to defining and measuring "quality."
DC is home to innovative preschool charters that have strong evidence of closing the achievement gap before children enter kindergarten. This should be the goal of preschool and prekindergarten--especially those that serve highly disadvantaged children. In a city where three of every five live births are to single mothers living in poverty, it is essential that preschool and prekindergarten programs that build young children's language, vocabulary, pre-literacy and early math skills, as well as critical social/emotional skills like taking directions from adults, attending to instruction, persisting when frustrated, and solving word problems, be brought to scale.
Unfortunately, OSSE is proposing tools that are ill-equipped to support this kind of improvement. The “Quality Rating Improvement System” (QRIS) it has proposed measures mostly child care inputs, versus early learning outcomes aligned with school success. OSSE also has proposed “Teaching Strategies Gold” as the District's Kindergarten Entry Assessment. This choice is misguided for a number of reasons. First, it is expensive to administer. Second, it is time consuming--up to 96 hours per classroom. Third, it is explicitly not designed for assessment purposes. On page 2 of the technical summary (provided at an OSSE working group meeting), Gold evaluators state "The primary purpose of Teaching Strategies Gold is to document children's learning over time, inform instruction, and facilitate communication with families and other stakeholders. It is important to remember that Teaching Strategies Gold is not intended as a screening or diagnostic measure, an achievement test, or a program evaluation tool."
With robust funding, tremendous need, and a delivery system—charter schools—that have flexibility and accountability, DC is positioned to be a leader in demonstrating the effect of preschool interventions on closing the achievement gap. To fulfill the promise, we need leadership that identifies the best tools to produce the strongest outcomes for the greatest number of children. Back to the drawing board....