Podcast: A Tool for Mapping School Readiness, Neighborhood by Neighborhood

School readiness has been a hot button issue for years, as early childhood advocates have recognized that it is difficult to convince policymakers to pay for preschool programs without good data on how much children need them. Over the past week, the Obama Administration elevated the issue by promoting the use of assessments to determine whether kindergartners arrive with the cognitive and social-emotional skills that so often predict whether they will struggle or thrive in elementary school and beyond.

In today’s podcast, we will explore one tool described as a “school readiness” assessment — the Early Development Instrument, or EDI for short. The United Way World Wide has been using the EDI in conjunction with the UCLA Center for Healthier Children Families and Communities in a growing number of cities and counties around the country. Its purpose is to enable schools and communities to collect information on which children in their neighborhoods are arriving in school with vulnerabilities. Are some of them lagging in social-emotional development? Are they able  to communicate using words and sentences instead of crying or shutting down? Of the children who are most vulnerable, are their neighborhoods offering sufficient resources to their families, such as high-quality child care programs or preschools?

Our guest is Elizabeth Groginsky, early childhood director for the United Way Worldwide, who describes how EDI provides information at the neighborhood level so that maps can be created, school by school, and neighborhood by neighborhood, to show which geographic areas may need special attention. Officials in Battle Creek, MI, for example, are now using EDI in 13 school districts across Calhoun County. 

In the Obama Administration’s proposed guidelines for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, officials have put a high priority on the use of kindergarten-entry assessments to help inform teachers while helping state and local leaders get a handle on how many children need help. But the EDI is not technically a kindergarten-entry assessment because it is designed to be administered by kindergarten teachers in the second half of the kindergarten year — not in the first few days or months of school. That distinction is important, Groginsky said, to ensure that the data is most useful and reliable. Doing the assessment later rather than earlier helps “to eliminate the more transitory disparities and identify the more persistent disparities that are most predictive of later school success,” she says.

Another important distinction is that the EDI is not designed to be screening tool used to determine whether children need special education or other services, though those kinds of assessments are still necessary and should be administered to all children to ensure that no one slips through the cracks, Groginsky said in an interview after this podcast.

The Administration’s proposal for RTT-ELC also  focuses on the collection of data to be included in statewide longitudinal data systems. Groginsky said EDI data can be coded to be included in such data systems to help communities gain a sense of how subgroups of children are faring over time.

The United Way Worldwide has submitted a recommendation to Obama officials calling for the flexibility to use programs like EDI in the grant competition.

Podcast: A Tool for Mapping School Readiness, Neighborhood by Neighborhood

With our guest: Elizabeth Groginsky, director of early childhood education, United Way Worldwide

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