Early Education at Risk?

Last week’s Nation at Risk anniversary spawned a boatload of commentary on the seminal report’s impacts, as well as the continued shortcomings in American public education 25 years later. Thinking about Nation‘s impacts on early childhood and elementary education can be perplexing. As E.D. Hirsch notes in Education Week, the original report gave barely a mention to early education, focusing primarily on the need to dramatically improve academic rigor and core course-taking at the high school level. Yet it’s undeniable that the standards-based education movement that emerged out of Nation has led to significant reforms in early education–and that early education reforms have actually be more aggressive, and have produced greater results, than have reforms at the high school level Nation’s authors originally sought to affect.

Pre-kindergarten: Publicly funded pre-kindergarten was hardly unheard of before Nation at Risk–the federal Head Start program began in 1965. But the universal pre-k movement at the state level emerged in the 1990s in conjunction with state K-12 education reform efforts–particularly in Southern states that have led the charge in both pre-k and standards based reform–and in response to first National Education Goal: “by 2000 all children will start school ready to learn.” The state universal pre-k movement further gained steam in early 2000s, and today state-funded pre-k programs enroll more than 1 million 3- and 4-year-olds nationally.

Full-day Kindergarten: As states invested resources in education reform, standards, and accountability, many prioritized full-day kindergarten investments. For example, more than half of funds from Pennsylvania’s Accountability Block Grant support full-day-kindergarten. Since 1994, the percentage of children enrolled in full-day, as opposed to half-day, kindergarten has risen from under half to roughly two-thirds.

Reading Instruction: Since the mid-1990s, we have invested significant resources in improving reading instruction at the early elementary level. The National Reading Panel, which was established in 1997 and released its final report in 2000, established a new national consensus around how to effectively teach young children to read. The Reading Excellence Act, passed in 1998, and No Child Left Behind’s Reading First program, which replaced REA in 2002, affirmed that consensus and have provided billions of dollars in federal funds to help states and school districts implement sound reading instruction in the early grades.

Smaller Class Sizes: Since the mid-1990s, states, school districts, and even the federal government have invested significant resources to reduce class size in the early elementary grades, in response to research linking smaller class sizes to improved student outcomes. Although some of these initiatives have been revised, and further research has refined our understanding of the connection between class size and student achievement, we are still spending more today to educate young children in smaller classes than we did a decade or more ago. Between 1993 and 2003, the average elementary school class size in the United States fell from 24 to 20.

These are significant reforms, and they all grow out of the standards-based reform movement sparked by Nation at Risk. Moreover, these and other reforms at the early childhood and early elementary education levels appear to be producing results: Since the mid-1990s 4th grade scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in reading and math have been on a steady upward trajectory. On the most recent long-term trend NAEP assessment, administered in 2004, 9-year-olds performed better in both reading and math than at any time since the assessment was first administered in 1971! That’s a striking contrast to the middle and high school levels, where student achievement has stagnated and even declined.

Yet, even if the past 20+ years of education reform efforts have had their greatest success at the early education level (and we would argue that they have), that doesn’t mean they’ve been anywhere near successful enough. Consider: Despite dramatic improvements, only 33 percent of fourth-graders were proficient in reading on the 2007 NAEP assessment, and only 39 percent were proficient in math. Moreover, the failure of elementary achievement gains to translate into better middle- and high-school achievement shows how far we continue to fall short in equipping our young students for the next level of their education. In other words: There’s a lot more left to do in reforming early education.

For all their beneficial impacts, most of the early education reforms of the past two decades have been around the margins–adding a year of schooling prior to elementary school, lengthening the school day. All of these reforms are improvements, but they’re about doing more of the same and getting marginal returns–not fundamentally improving the core of the early learning experience. (Improvements in reading instruction do get closer to this core, but, as research from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation demonstrates, too many schools are still not really implementing read curricula informed by the evidence).

To get the results we want, we need to dramatically improve the core of the learning experience–the curriculum and concepts to which children are exposed, the quality of instructional interactions between teachers and children in the classroom, and the alignment between curriculum, instructional strategies, evaluation and teacher training.

Right now we’re a long way from where we need to be on all these factors. State content standards in the early elementary grades are woefully inadequate, and 9 states either have no literacy and numeracy standards at all in grades K-2, or had chosen to “cluster” their K-2 standards in one, largely useless, set of standards for the entire K-2 grade range. The early elementary curriculum remains woefully devoid of content. In-depth observational studies of early elementary classrooms find that the typical American elementary school classroom offers low levels of instructional support for students’ learning. And the “egg carton” structure of many public schools leads to little alignment even among same-grade class rooms–let alone across grade levels.

Changing these conditions will be incredibly difficult. But it’s essential to dramatically improving early education outcomes and getting the results we want at the elementary, middle and high school levels. And the body of research that can help us address these challenges–as well as new tools based on that research–is growing rapidly. The success of the next 25 years of early education reform will depend on the extent to which we can employ that research to move beyond the margins and radically improve the core of children’s early education experiences.