PreK-3rd Models in New Jersey: Panel at Ed Trust Conference

As researchers continue to highlight the role of early education programs in closing achievement gaps, school districts need examples of exactly how it’s done. Red Bank Borough, a small district in New Jersey, is one such place — and attendees at the National Ed Trust Conference earlier this month had a rare opportunity to hear from Laura Morana, Red Bank’s superintendent, about how an integrated curriculum between pre-K and kindergarten set the stage for success.

Morana was part of a panel, Starting Young: The PreK-3rd Strategy , which was facilitated by The Early Education Initiative. The panel showcased the findings of our policy paper, Education Reform Starts Early: Lessons from New Jersey’s PreK-3rd Reform Efforts, by former director Sara Mead. The paper describes how New Jersey built a robust, diverse provider system to deliver high-quality universal pre-K in the Abbott districts, took steps to expand pre-K services for at-risk children in the state’s other 560 districts, and has done more than perhaps any other state in the country to link these early learning investments with early literacy reforms in the K-12 system, creating a seamless, high-quality PreK-3^rd early learning experience for the state’s most disadvantaged youngsters.

The panel, in addition to featuring Mead and Morana, also included Cynthia Rice, senior policy analyst for Advocates for Children of New Jersey, who provided updates on the status of reforms under Gov. Chris Christie. Rice’s slides showed that even in a tough budget climate, the state increased funding for early childhood programs and maintained its innovative PreK-3rd department within the education department.

Slide presentations by each panelist are now available online. Worth checking out are Morana’s slides showing the decrease between 2006 and 2010 in referrals for special education services after implementation of Tools of the Mind, a curriculum for pre-k and kindergarten that uses play-based strategies to improve children’s ability to regulate their emotions and focus on tasks at hand.  Also important are Mead’s slides showing how another district using a preK-3rd approach — Union City, with a very high population of poor Latino students — is showing test scores that are as good or nearly as good as the statewide average in 4th grade reading and math.