STATE OF PRE-K SERIES: BRIEF MAY 2021
Public School and Collaborative Pre-K Programs and Kindergarten Readiness in 2017-2018 Research Brief by Rachel Canter and Andrew Van Horn
BACKGROUND A primary purpose of pre-K is to prepare children for kindergarten in the short term and increase their chances of success in school and life in the long term. Policymakers that want pre-K programs to succeed in fulfilling this purpose have to build systems to measure pre-K program quality. Over time, two primary measurements of pre-K program quality have emerged: adherence to program standards (such as the National Institute of Early Education Research (NIEER) benchmarks) and success on child outcome measures (such as passing scores on literacy, numeracy, or socioemotional development assessments). Program standards, which measure characteristics such as teacher qualifications, curriculum, or class size, are best understood as a means to an end, representing the educational conditions necessary for children to succeed. For example, researchers created (and updated in 2017) the NIEER benchmarks to capture the elements of programs that led to positive child outcomes in high-quality research studies.i The NIEER benchmarks focus on program requirements, but other researchers have also developed standardized measures of individual classroom conditions, which may measure, for example, the strength of adult-child interactions in a specific classroom, a program characteristic for which there is a strong research base.ii
Rigorous program standards have long been a focus for improving program quality, but they ultimately need to be paired with direct child outcome measures to determine if the standards are having the intended effect—helping children learn and grow. As we have written previously, measuring program quality via program standards, let alone child outcome measures, across provider types in Mississippi has proven to be very difficult. While Mississippi licensed childcare providers, for example, must meet a long list of health and safety regulations, they face no minimum requirements measuring program quality across any of the recognized domains of early childhood learning. The Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS) previously sponsored a monthly survey of childcare centers that collected data on some relevant program characteristics; but unless centers participated in the briefly lived Quality Stars program, a voluntary quality rating system for childcare centers, extensive information relevant to the NIEER benchmarks has never been available. Following the demise of both Quality Stars and the monthly survey, MDHS no longer collects any type of program quality information for every single center in the state on a regular basis. Instead, MDHS partially transitioned to a voluntary system of self-reporting on program characteristics, an initiative that itself will be phased out.iii Currently, only licensed childcare providers with national accreditation or who participate in the collaborative program adhere to well-defined program quality measures.
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