Early Educational Data Comments to U.S. Department of Ed

The Common Education Data Standards (CEDS) project is an initiative headed by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics to create comparable, consistent data definitions. It’s an entirely voluntary initiative, and its glossary includes preschool through workforce data elements. CEDS is in the process of refining its version 4 dictionary – open for comments through Friday, September 20. Last week, New America’s Early Education Initiative weighed in on some of the early learning definitions.

As we’ve discussed before on this blog and elsewhere, early education data are in a state of chaos. Elementary school principals frequently have no idea how many children within their school districts’ boundaries attend pre-K, how much schooling they’ve had (a half-day or a full-day? How long was the school year? And did they attend pre-K as 3-year-olds, or only as 4-year-olds?), or whether those children are well-prepared for kindergarten.

That’s because even public pre-K programs aren’t required to report funding, enrollment, and other data in the same ways as grades 1 through 12. In fact, public pre-K programs aren’t even confined to the same borders as those schools. School districts aren’t required to report funding, enrollment, and other data about kindergarten either. In fact, there’s currently no standard for how long a full-day pre-K or kindergarten program should be. For instance, in one school district, full-day kindergarten could last six hours a day, but in another district it could be four hours each day. There is virtually no way to systematically track children’s educational opportunities before elementary school, or even in kindergarten.

We learned this first-hand in collecting pre-K data at the school district level for inclusion in our Federal Education Budget Project database, and we’ve been working since then to develop a new model for tracking pre-K access and funding. Under the new model, public pre-K centers would be required to report the total number of hours children spend in the classroom (known as “dosage”) per week and per year, as well as the total funding per funding source (including, for example, state pre-K funding and tuition from parents) per child, per hour. The same could be required of kindergarten classrooms, allowing for a richness of data that doesn’t yet exist.

We’ve since refined our idea to track dosage by minutes, rather than hours. Tracking by minutes will start to align the early learning system with the K-12 system, where School Improvement Grant-recipients are required to measure the amount of extended learning time they provide in minutes. We’ve also added a suggestion that early childhood education providers report to states the geographically closest public first-grade classroom, along with the dosage information. That will allow principals, policymakers, and the public to get rough estimates at the school district level, further aligning the pre-K and K-12 systems.

For the purposes of CEDS, the dosage issue is most relevant – and most critical. That’s why we provided the National Center on Education Statistics with our comments on two of their data elements: Kindergarten Program Participation Type and Pre-Kindergarten Daily Length.

Kindergarten Program Participation Type measures the length of time a child spends in kindergarten each day – full-day (the same length of the first-grade school day), half-day (less than the length of a first-grade school day), and extended-day (a part-day program that is extended to the length of the first-grade school day, say with parents’ tuition dollars or another funding source). Pre-Kindergarten Daily Length is a program-level measure of the school day, defined as full-day, part-day, or not provided.

Neither data element offers a clear look at the amount of time children are spending in educational programs, though – or the source of funds for those programs. For these data elements, we recommended that NCES consider revising the definition to reflect:

• The number of minutes of classroom time per week and per year, both for the kindergarten and pre-K elements; and
• The number of students receiving free public kindergarten versus the number receiving wholly tuition-funded and the number receiving partially tuition-funded kindergarten. (CEDS includes a separate data element for pre-K programs’ federal funding sources, so we did not include a funding definition for the purposes of these comments.)

Counting pre-K and kindergarten programs in this way could dramatically expand the amount and reliability of data on early learning programs. While a full-day kindergarten program as it’s currently defined, for example, could mean a child in one state was in school for six hours per day and a child in another for eight, revising the CEDS definitions would uncover differences across schools, districts, and states in the amount of learning time children receive.

To be sure, CEDS is far from the perfect solution to early learning data collection. Even with these changes, there are significant challenges to collecting early learning data, and participation in CEDS is entirely voluntary, ensuring a long way before comparable data are universally available. But we felt it was important to comment on these elements because the definitions put in place now will likely be a starting point for future reporting efforts. If we start now ensuring important early educational data are available, we could see more valuable, workable information down the line.”