Putting the “Quality” into Quality Pre-K

If you read this blog regularly, you probably know that quality is critical in early education programs. While high-quality pre-k programs have been shown to produce significant learning gains and long-term benefits for participating children, poor quality programs do not produce such results. Regular readers of this blog will also be familiar with structural factors that are linked to pre-k quality, such as qualified teachers with at least a bachelor’s degree and training in how young children learn, or small class sizes and child:adult ratios.

But while these factors are important in creating the conditions in which quality early education can occur, we shouldn’t mistake them for quality. True quality in early education programs is something much more complex and nuanced. It’s a matter of the interactions that occur between children and adults in early childhood classrooms–the emotional support that teachers provide to children; the richness of language used; the ways in which children are exposed to new ideas, words, and concepts; and ultimately the learning outcomes for children in these programs. Building systems that ensure children benefit from high-quality interactions in pre-k, and supporting pre-k teachers in delivering quality instruction in pre-k settings, is much more complicated than requiring lead pre-k teachers to hold bachelor’s degrees (although achieving that goal is challenging enough in its own right).

New America’s early education initiative is committed to helping policymakers and practitioners enter into a more nuanced discussion of what it really takes, from a policy perspective, to ensure that all children have access to quality pre-k programs. Last week we hosted a forum on “Putting the ‘Quality’ into Quality Pre-K.” Nationally recognized early childhood researcher Craig Ramey spoke about the features that early education interventions must have in order to produce significant and lasting learning gains for young children, and presented a model for teacher support and professional development to help pre-k teachers deliver high-quality early learning opportunities for young children. Educators working with the D.C. Partnership for Early Literacy, a federally funded initiative that supports evidence-based, high-quality early literacy instruction in 20 preschool classrooms at 3 public charter schools educating primarily low-income 3- and 4-year-olds in Washington, D.C. spoke about their experiences using data to improve the quality of their pre-k programs, as well as how they use a Response to Intervention (RTI) model to prevent children’s early learning difficulties from developing into larger problems.

You can see the full video and discussion in the video below.