Principles

For children to thrive, their pre-K classrooms and programs must provide effective teaching that leads to meaningful learning. Effective teaching is not possible without a commitment to these five principles:

1. Teachers​ need to have the preparation, knowledge, skills, compensation, and resources that enable them to effectively apply the full range of professional competencies* and must be supported to participate in ongoing professional learning that helps them improve upon those competencies.
2. Teachers and families need to be supported by instructional leaders​ who are well-compensated and have the preparation, knowledge, skills, and resources to facilitate a culture of learning and are also supported to participate in ongoing professional learning.
3. Comprehensive standards, assessment, and curricula​ must be aligned and grounded in early childhood development, cover all domains of learning, and be well implemented and seamlessly connected to what comes before and after pre-K.
4. A system for continuous improvement​ is necessary to ensure effective teaching and learning driven by the use of meaningful data that guides practice and policy at all levels.
5. Public financing​ must be in place that reflects the true cost per child, ensures equitable access, and is sustained over time at an adequate level to support high-quality pre-K in a way that does not reduce the availability of quality care and education for children under age three. This requires a bold reimagining of who is eligible and how to pay for public pre-K across systems.

*For the full range of professional competencies, see pp. 328-329 of the consensus report published in 2015 by the National Academies Press, Transforming the Workforce for Children from Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation. These competencies include working with families.

Caveats

This project to achieve agreement on indispensable policies and practices for quality pre-K was not making a judgment on whether pre-K should be universally available or targeted; policies and practices that lead to high-quality teaching and learning are necessary in either case. Nor was it designed to identify policies that promote children’s health and well-being; many families need public programs that provide comprehensive services (such as Head Start, with its inclusion of nutritious meals, dental checks, etc.) and those services can promote conditions that make learning more likely. However, since a child may have all of those services and still not experience high-quality teaching and learning, those services and policies rest outside the scope of this project.

While this project focused specifically on programs for children at ages 3 and 4, it is not intended to disregard the critical importance of investing in and improving policies for children in their first years of life (birth through 3) nor does it ignore the significant need to align and improve policies and practices for children in kindergarten through third grade. As discussed in the background research and noted in Indispensable Policy 3, children will learn and develop best when there is continuity and an emphasis on continuous quality improvement across the birth-through-8 age span of early childhood.

Definitions

Below are the definitions of key terms used throughout the project.

Pre-K
A pre-kindergarten or pre-K setting is one that employs well-prepared  teachers to organize and facilitate educational experiences in a classroom or learning center for children who are a year or two away from kindergarten; thus, typically the children are 3 or 4 years old. Many states and other entities also use the label “preschool.”

This project focused on determining indispensable policies and practices for programs that receive public funding, regardless of whether those programs are administered by schools, school districts, community-based organizations, or other organizations. This includes state- and locally-funded pre-K, school-district-funded pre-K, and Head Start.

Teaching
Teaching refers to the practices of adults who are responsible for ensuring that the children in their classrooms are learning. Teaching competencies include the skills and knowledge needed to recognize individual children’s needs and interests across multiple domains (see learning, below); scaffold children’s experiences to promote learning; and work with children’s families to enhance classroom learning as well as promote learning outside of pre-K.

Learning
For the purposes of this project, learning refers primarily to children’s learning. Learning is another way of saying that a child is growing and developing within and across multiple domains, including social-emotional and cognitive domains.

Indispensable
This project uses the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of indispensable: “not subject to being set aside or neglected;” absolutely necessary.

Consensus
Lack of disagreement; a point against which no one in the room would actively argue.

Related Work

Other organizations have also led projects to help provide clarity and determine commonalities in establishing what constitutes quality pre-K. The outcomes of these projects include:

The Building Blocks of High-Quality Early Childhood Education Programs 

In April 2016, the Learning Policy Institute released this brief that identifies important elements of high-quality early childhood education programs as indicated by research and professional standards.

Puzzling It Out: The Current State of Scientific Knowledge on Pre-Kindergarten Effects: A Consensus Statement

In 2016, 10 esteemed researchers from multiple institutions culled the evidence on the value of pre-K programs for supporting long-term success. Their report synthesizes what is known about short-term and long-term outcomes of large-scale pre-K programs and concludes that continued investment in “scaled-up pre-k programs is in order as long as the implementation is accompanied by rigorous evaluation of impact.”

Core Components of a High-Quality Early Childhood Program

In February 2017, the Center for American Progress released Quality 101: Identifying the Core Components of a High-Quality Early Childhood Program, which identifies three core components of program quality and six key program structures and supports for high quality that can be aided by policy. The document does not focus on pre-K, however. Instead, CAP looks at birth-to-five programs with a tilt towards child care.

Child Trends Fact Sheet

In April 2018, Child Trends published a two-page document, “High-quality Preschool Can Support Healthy Development and Learning,” which encapsulates the state of research and policy on pre-K. It provides four considerations for policymakers, the first of which is: “Better-quality preschool is connected to better outcomes for children.”

Successfully Taking Preschool to Scale: Implications of Research for Policy and Practice (Forthcoming)

Daphna Bassok of the University of Virginia and Mimi Engel of Vanderbilt University are the editors of an upcoming special topics volume entitled Successfully Taking Preschool to Scale: Implications of Research for Policy and Practice. The issue is expected to include articles that cover the results of interventions and strategies for improving the quality of scaled-up preschool initiatives through strategies including, but not limited to, curricular reform, reduced fragmentation, accountability, programmatic alignment, and labor market reforms. The volume’s release was anticipated in 2018.

Untangling the Evidence on Preschool Effectiveness: Insights for Policymakers

In January 2019, the Learning Policy Institute released this report that reviews 21 studies on the outcomes of children enrolled in pre-K programs. It finds that quality matters and that the following are present in the programs that demonstrate the strongest and most persistent impacts on children: sufficient learning time and small class sizes with low student-teacher ratios; well-prepared teachers who provide engaging interactions and classroom environments that support learning; ongoing support for teachers, including coaching and mentoring, with program assessments that measure the quality of classroom interactions and provide actionable feedback for teachers to improve instruction; research-based, developmentally appropriate early learning standards and curricula; assessments that consider children’s academic, social-emotional, and physical progress and contribute to instructional and program planning; and meaningful family engagement.

.

Participants

Below is a list of attendees at one or both of the meetings hosted by New America in the fall of 2016 who agreed to the principles and indispensable practices and policies and would not actively argue against them.  Organization names reflect the attendees’ affiliation at the time of the meetings.

Equity Advisory Group

The following individuals took part in an equity advisory group in spring 2018 to provide guidance on dissemination and framing of the practices and policies:

• Cemeré James, National Black Child Development Institute
• Nakeshia Knight-Coyle, Oregon Department of Early Learning
• Delia Pompa, Migration Policy Institute
• Rosita Ramirez, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO)
• Syritha Robinson, the Education Trust