Jacqueline Jones -- Former New Jersey Early Childhood Head -- to Advise Duncan on Early Learning

Earlier this week Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his appointment of several key Department of Education officials, including the selection of Jacqueline Jones as senior adviser to the secretary for early learning. Jones previously served in the New Jersey Department of Education as assistant commissioner for the Division of Early Care and Education.

The Department of Education has never had an assistant secretary or office of early childhood education — the early childhood programs it runs are scattered throughout different offices of the Department. Given the Obama administration’s expressed interest in beefing up the Department’s early childhood role and strengthening coordination amongst existing programs, many early education stakeholders have been curious to see how Duncan would staff the Department on early education, as well as who he would select for key roles. Since late last year, Barbara Bowman, who served as chief early education officer in the Chicago Public Schools under Duncan, has been serving as an adviser to the secretary on early childhood issues, but most observers did not expect her to remain in that role permanently. With legislation now moving in Congress to create a major new early childhood program within the Department of Education, Duncan’s selection of Jones comes just in time.

We think Jones is a strong choice for this role. New Jersey’s Abbott pre-k program is one of the highest quality state pre-k programs in the country, and as we’ve noted previously has contributed to helping improve educational outcomes and narrow achievement gaps for children in several high-poverty New Jersey school districts. More important, New Jersey built a very strong state-level infrastructure of assessment, monitoring, professionally development and support to help districts ensure high quality implementation of Abbott across a range of diverse providers. As the administration’s early childhood agenda focuses on helping states build the infrastructure and systems to support and improve quality across a range of early childhood providers, Jones’ experience in New Jersey should be especially valuable.

Most exciting to us, New Jersey has done more than any state in the country to advance PreK-3^rd reforms that include not just high-quality pre-k but also fundamental changes in the early elementary grades and efforts to strengthen alignment between pre-k programs and elementary schools, so that they can build on and sustain the gains children make in high-quality pre-k programs. The Division of Early Care and Education that Jones oversaw in New Jersey is the only one in the country that explicitly has responsibility for PreK-3^rd programs, not just preschool. And both during and following Jones’ tenure the Division has taken a number of steps to strengthen PreK-3^rd alignment and improve quality in the early grades, especially kindergarten. We hope that Jones will bring that PreK-3^rd focus with her to her new position and will work to thoroughly integrate birth to five efforts, such as the Early Learning Challenge Fund, as a key component of the Obama administration’s broader vision for P-20 education reform and improvement.