(Photo: Getty Images)

Editor’s note: With Los Angeles poised to be able to expand preschool access once Gov. Jerry Brown signs the budget, here is a look at one city that has invested heavily in early education.

It’s a typical Wednesday morning at the Lincoln Park campus of AppleTree Early Learning, a network of pre-K charter schools dotting Washington, D.C. Inside the school, a converted row house a mile from the Capitol, three-year-olds participate in the daily Sounds, Songs, and Symbols lesson.

The kids are nearing the end of a three-week unit on paleontology and archeology, so the old Hokey Pokey gets a Jurassic spin: “you put your dino-claws in, you take your dino-claws out,” they begin to sing, concluding with an emphatic “and that’s what it’s all about!”

The class also puts in, takes out, and shakes all about their dino-teeth, tails, and gratifyingly oversized dino-feet.

The four-year-olds, a week deeper into AppleTree’s curriculum than their younger schoolmates, sit in a classroom down the hall. A teacher reads the story of best friends Chester and Wilson. There is a pause while the students discuss whether, as a character suggests, a watermelon really could grow in someone’s stomach.

Dino-dances, stomach agriculture debates, and other adorable activities resounded across the city that morning, testifying to the fact that Washington, D.C. sends nearly all of its children to pre-K. Spurred by a landmark 2008 law, the District enrolls 85 percent or more of its four-year-olds (depending on who’s counting) and an even more remarkable 60-plus percent of three-year-olds.

“The city has committed to providing a high-quality seat [to every pre-K child,]” said Travis Wright, who leads early learning programs for District of Columbia Public Schools. “That’s not something every child in the United States has.”

The National Institute of Early Education Research, which tracks enrollment nationally but uses a different methodology than the District, said 86 percent of Washington, D.C.’s four-year-olds and 64 percent of three-year-olds were enrolled in publicly-funded programs in 2015.

By contrast, Vermont, which leads all states in NIEER’s early-education enrollment analysis, had 84 percent of four-year-olds and 26 percent of three-year-olds in programs that year.

The District’s high numbers reflect a surge over over the last decade. Just 61 percent of four-year-olds, and 28 percent of three-year-olds, were enrolled in 2004, according to NIEER.

Students and a teacher work on a puzzle at Appletree Early Learning’s Lincoln Park campus in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy Appletree Early Learning)

In all, more than 12,500 children out of an estimated 16,400 were enrolled in public preschool, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. An additional 1,221 children were in full-day subsidized daycare, according to the state superintendent’s office.

Early childhood educators and advocates attribute the city’s high enrollment to its commitment to provide sufficient support — preschoolers are funded using the same formula that funds older students, teachers are paid on the same salary schedule as teachers in higher grades, and city leaders have refused to cut support even in lean budget years.

Enrollment growth has also been attributed to the quality of the city’s programs and the high expectations to which the programs hold their young students. D.C. law requires every preschool to use a comprehensive curriculum aligned to K-3 instruction, to be externally monitored and accountable for student growth, and that teachers in district and charter schools have college degrees (teachers in community programs must have an associate’s degree and be working toward a four-year diploma).

FENTY, RHEE AND A LANDMARK LAW

Long before its post-2008 expansion, Washington, D.C. was a leader in early education. Anacostia, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, was home to a Head Start pilot site in the 1960s, and city schools began offering preschool in 1972, according to a case study of preschool expansion.

In the early 2000s, prompted by growing recognition of the importance of preschool learning and newly available public and private funds, a group of advocates and city officials formed the Universal School Readiness Group. Their report, presented to then-Mayor Anthony Williams in 2004, called for improved oversight — at the time,  multiple city agencies, as well as charter schools, shared supervision. The group also urged more funding, better teacher training, and a “date certain when universal school readiness will be a reality.”

That year, an estimated 2,000 children waited for seats in public programs that the city couldn’t afford to create.

Early learning advocates seized on the high-profile 2006 elections — the mayor and city council chairman seats were both being contested — to elevate pre-K as an issue. A new administration, led by Mayor Adrian Fenty and his hard-charging schools chief Michelle Rhee, convinced the city council to give Fenty control of the city’s schools in 2007.

The following year, city lawmakers, led by council chairman and bill sponsor Vincent C. Gray — who would go on to serve a term as mayor — unanimously passed the Pre-K Enhancement and Expansion Amendment Act of 2008.

The law established class size requirements (one adult to eight children up to age three and 1-to-10 for four-year-olds) and tasked OSSE to improve city preschools by setting standards for curriculum, teacher qualifications, and professional development. It mandated universal access by 2014. (In D.C., which functions in many ways as both a city and a state, OSSE is responsible for some functions that typically reside with state education departments, like administering tests, overseeing federal grants, and setting curriculum standards. DCPS focuses on the day-to-day issues of running schools.)

Gray said it wasn’t difficult to get his fellow council members on board. “What had to be done was to make the case as to why the expenditure of these dollars for young children would have a payoff down the road,” he said.

I spent @PeaceCorps Day of Service with bilingual pre-K students at Barbara Chambers Children’s Center in DC pic.twitter.com/e1XcZI0d4k

— Director Carrie (@PeaceCorpsDir) January 15, 2015

The law folded pre-K into the city’s larger education reform strategy, said Elizabeth Groginsky, assistant superintendent for early learning at the OSSE, which oversees pre-K expansion for DCPS, charters, and community organizations.

“That was where the growth really started,” she said. “It was really a pre-K-12 system [after] that point.”

Wright, the deputy chief for early childhood education at DCPS and a former teacher, called passage of the law a “watershed moment” for preschool expansion in the city.

PRESERVING PRE-K THROUGH THE RECESSION

The Obama administration, citing studies by economists, has argued that early learning programs can save about $8.60 for every $1 spent from increased earnings for pre-K graduates as well as reduced remedial education and incarceration costs.

Early learning programs are nonetheless often among the first to go when school districts need to make cuts. State spending on preschool fell by almost $60 million in 2010 — near the height of the recession — according to NIEER.  By contrast, District leaders retained pre-K funding even when facing a budget shortfall of close to $700 million in 2009.

“There’s no panacea to anything, of course, but this is probably as close to a panacea as we’ll get, and it will save the city,” Gray said.

The District’s funding provisions are among the strongest of any city in the country.

In addition to using the same per student formula for preschool and K-12 funding, it supports programs at community-based organizations by providing the difference between federal monies a CBO receives to support its preschool and the city’s funding level.

Most states invest in early learning programs at a much lower rate — about $4,100 per child nationally compared to about $15,400 per child in D.C., according to NIEER. State funding is also often more unstable than in the District; many programs are forced to stitch together funding from multiple federal, state, and local education and child-care sources, some number of which may not be available in the next budget season.

“You need to have that kind of investment” in early learning to provide a professional workforce, said Jack McCarthy, president and CEO of the Appletree Institute.

@ELHaynesPCS pre-k students meet compost @redwigglerfarm! pic.twitter.com/61DZNdqMy7

— DC Greens (@dc_greens) May 1, 2014

“We have professionalized the field of preschool,” said Wright, of DCPS’s early learning office. “We have 50 years of research that shows that kids do better when their teachers are better prepared.”

The city’s investment was reflected in results using the national Classroom Assessment Scoring System. D.C. preschools received high scores for environment and organization — above levels linked to positive outcomes in other programs. In a third area, instructional support, scores are nearing that standard and increased between 2014 and 2015.

As with other standardized tests, children in affluent areas performed the best while students in poorer areas had lower scores.

FLEXIBILITY GETS RESULTS

The District’s law also gives pre-K providers unusual flexibility, particularly those in the charter sector, which enrolls slightly more preschoolers than do traditional public schools.

Evaluation in early education has often been input-driven, with ratings based on items like the square footage of classrooms and number of staff meetings. D.C.’s Public Charter School Board, by contrast, uses outcomes like attendance and measures growth in literacy and math skills to determine whether schools are preparing children for kindergarten.

“D.C. does a good job of providing us fewer strings, better levels of funding, and then an accountability system that is really aimed at ensuring kids are entering kindergarten with those skills we know will lead to success,” McCarthy said. “Not being under-resourced — like having a fraction of what we get and do[ing] all kinds of pretzel twists in terms of compliance to get those dollars — is really important.”

Not to be outdone by their freewheeling charter school counterparts, traditional D.C. public schools also have a unique program: all of the city’s Title I schools (those with the highest percentage of poor children) incorporate Head Start programming. That translates to additional family support, health services, and free field trips. Federal authorities have also given the city freedom to innovate in the way it serves children in Early Head Start who are too young for preschool.

Dad shares a book in a Pre-K classroom in Southeast DC as a Roving Reader, part of our Tellin’ Stories Project. pic.twitter.com/HcuLXjLxTy

— Teaching for Change (@teachingchange) March 28, 2013

It’s too early to say for a fact, but many in the District believe the city’s long-time commitment to early education helped D.C. fourth-graders post bigger gains in reading on the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress than students in any other state. It was also one of just three states or jurisdictions to achieve gains in math in fourth grade.

In the Trial Urban District Assessment that compares large-city districts (which unlike NAEP doesn’t include charters), D.C. students were the only ones to make gains in both fourth-grade math and reading.

“People have sort of started asking about the D.C. magic. Like: What is happening in D.C. public schools, that you got these amazing math scores?,” Wright said. “We’ve been improving at every grade and in multiple ways over that time, but I think that early investment really did lay a foundation for these children.”

While many factors likely contributed to the gains, few in D.C. believe it’s a coincidence that the class of fourth graders who took the test were the first to go through schools under the universal preschool program — including Chancellor Kaya Henderson.

“At DC Public Schools, we know that an investment in early education makes sense,” Henderson told The 74 in an e-mailed statement. “We saw historic gains on the recent NAEP exam in 4th-grade reading, and that 4th-grade class was one of the first classes to benefit from access to universal pre-K.

“Improvements in education come from bringing lots of reforms together, and, for us, those reforms include starting kids in school early.”

TCCS pre-k S. sketching their favorite RB piece at DC Moore @DoingArt2gether@RomareBeardenpic.twitter.com/WUi7gMj487

— UnspokenIdeas (@VenturaRute) April 9, 2014

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.

As I’ve recently written

The usual case for early education is already well established in American public discourse. Research shows that low-income children fall behind their wealthier peers’ language development almost from birth. By age three, the children from the poorest American families have heard an average of 30 million fewer words than children from the wealthiest families. These gaps only grow in the years before elementary school.

Fortunately, early education programs can help. The dollars we spend on pre-K and quality care for infants and toddlers can save us lots of money and energy down the line. If we get kids on track by kindergarten, we spend less on later gap-closing efforts — and those kids are more likely to grow up healthy, wealthy, and wise. Research suggests that they’ll generate more tax revenue through their increased incomes, cost less in public assistance dollars, and generally be better citizens. (The Upjohn Institute’s Tim Bartik is among the best resources for the research behind these programs’ returns on public investment.)

Done right, early education programs work just about as intuitively as they sound. But building a broader system that can deliver on those promises is no simple thing: pre-K’s not like some sort of cream you apply to achievement gaps and, whoosh, they’re gone in two days!

Here’s why: those early word gaps can’t just be closed by rattling off a number of words. Quality matters. Rich, robust language use builds vocabulary and literacy. But pre-K programs’ capacity to deliver that sort of language varies considerably. This should be relatively intuitive: these programs work by exposing children with low linguistic development to the speech of highly-literate adults. So a program’s effectiveness fluctuates along with the literacy levels of its teachers.

“We know the child’s word-gap risk increases his/her lifelong academic, social and income disparities,” e-mailed Elizabeth A. Gilbert, director of the University of Massachusetts’ Learn at Work Early Childhood Educator Program. “The low-literacy early childhood educator’s word gap is one of the results of such disparity.”

No surprise, then, that staffing is the biggest challenge preventing new early education proposals from becoming high-quality early education programs. Whenever a political candidate announces a new pre-K program, your first question should be: who will teach in these classrooms?

It’s not enough to be great with kids, or have loads of charisma. Early educators need to build emotional connections with children, yes, and that can help students develop social skills and perseverance. But they also need to help students develop linguistically. This requires proficient literacy and the careful usage of scaffolded vocabulary. It requires strong conversation and meaningful interactions that are about more than just signs and gestures.

“States require that our public school teachers test and pass literacy tests prior to hire and teacher-certification,” wrote Gilbert. “States never require adult literacy screening of early educators as part of: 1) hiring protocols, 2) teacher-licensure requirements, 3) Quality Rating Information Systems standards, or 4) early education professional development.”

People in the early education world are aware of the problem. In response, many suggest that early education programs should require educators to have more formal training. But these are usually low-rigor credentials, such as: a Child Development Associates (CDA), an Associate of Arts (A.A.), or even a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.). Those additional letters carry no magic. They’re irrelevant, unless they actually impart higher literacy and language to the teachers who get them. Credentials are only proxies for the level of skill development they require. If they don’t translate into improvements in instruction that actually improve student achievement, they’re the policy equivalent of soda: just empty calories.

And yet, lots of policy thinking has been going that way for some time. The 2007 reforms to Head Start required that at least half of its teachers obtain a B.A. by 2013. In response, the number of Head Start teachers with that credential has been steadily rising. A 2015 National Academy of Sciences committee report on the early education workforce recommended moving all early educators towards a B.A. requirement, even though it acknowledged that “empirical evidence about the effects of a bachelor’s degree is inconclusive”

Think, for a moment, what this sort of policy is supposed to achieve. It’s aimed at improving student achievement by raising instructional quality by means of increasing the literacy levels and technical competence of the Head Start workforce. But again, the value of “having a B.A.” isn’t constant for pre-K classrooms. Given that the average hourly wage of Head Start instructors with an A.A. was $12.20 in 2012 (those with just a high school diploma made an average of just $10.40 per hour), it’s likely that many of these B.A.s come from the weaker end of the higher education landscape (see also).

Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences report cites research suggesting that “more than half of the faculty in early childhood programs across 2- and 4-year institutions of higher education were employed part time…In addition, faculty with prior experience working directly with children in early childhood settings are found less often in 4-year than in 2-year institutions.”

Programs like this are unlikely to provide comprehensive support and training to move early educators very far along in their skills and knowledge. Money isn’t everything in higher education, of course, but it tells part of the story, and we should be wary of seeing low-cost B.A. degrees as an important piece in improving the early education workforce’s abilities.

There are other big obstacles sure to be glossed over in the presidential early education rhetoric: how will new early education programs be funded? Will they be linked to — or operated in — schools? High-quality early education can start closing gaps, but weak elementary school instruction can undo that work — how will candidates ensure that the public school system builds on the gains? How will programs serve the growing number of dual language learners in U.S. schools?

But the workforce question is definitely the biggest, and candidates (as would-be policymakers) have options for addressing it. Here, in rough order of efficiency, are several: 1) raising early educators’ salaries to attract candidates with stronger literacy skills to the profession, 2) raising the standards for entry into early educator preparation programs (be they B.A., A.A., or other), and/or 3) improving the quality of early educator preparation programs. Really effective proposals will need to do all three.

Big American elections are always, at base, about the future. They’re an opportunity for candidates and voters to engage in (sometimes) civil debates over what sort of a country we’d like to become. New early education proposals fit nicely into that basic framework — they promise that investing early in children will help us avoid later uncomfortable problems with controversial solutions. Who could oppose giving better opportunities to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers?

Not me. Not most Americans. But if candidates want to convert early education’s promise into something more than political positioning, their pre-K proposals need to start with a plan for professionalizing the early education workforce.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org. 

Conor P. Williams is a senior researcher in New America’s Education Policy Program and founder of its Dual Language Learners National Work Group. Williams is a former first-grade teacher who holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a Master of Science for Teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College. He has two young children and an extremely patient wife.

A new report from the American Institutes of Research shows that young children have up to five months of learning advantage compared with children who don’t get an extra year of kindergarten.

But the report — Impact of California’s Transitional Kindergarten Program, 2013-14 — also points out that there’s a long way to go in funding the pre-school program evenly throughout the state, finding enough children to enroll and creating enough of a diverse curriculum for the young students.

TK is the first year of a two-year kindergarten program, giving children an additional year of early education. Transitional Kindergarten Expansion (TE or TKE) is a new grade level that is replacing some preschool programs at 117 school sites in LAUSD.

“Children in transitional kindergarten are getting a significant boost in kindergarten readiness,” said Deborah Kong, president of Early Edge California, an early education advocacy group. “Now with new clarity in law about funding for expanded TK, districts are encouraged to offer an additional option to young learners and their families to build a strong foundation for success in school.”

All LAUSD elementary schools now offer TK programs, but as the report points out, many of those classes are mixed with kindergartners because there aren’t enough pre-school-aged children to fill an entire class. The district currently has 117 schools providing TKE classes for 4-year-olds, thanks to $14.3 million approved by the school board, with another 173 to follow in the 2016-2017 school year.

The report found that TK improved literacy skills and children who attended TK were significantly better able to identify letters and words in kindergarten than their peers who did not attend. TK also improved math knowledge and problem-solving skills
, such as counting objects, understanding measurement and completing word problems,

Further, being involved in TK helped children regulate their own behavior, remember rules and think flexibly, the report said. The state budget allowed school districts and charter schools to use state money to provide TK to children as soon as they turn 5.

The report also found that more than half of TK teachers said they received no professional development training specifically related to TK, and of the 42 hours of professional development, about 11 hours on average was spent on TK.

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The annual report, The State of Preschool 2014, was prepared by the National Institute for Early Education Research and focuses on 10 quality preschool standards in state-funded programs in 40 states and the District of Columbia (10 states do no fund pre-K programs).

California met four of the 10 standards, making it one of only five states to have met less than 50 percent of the standards. Among the problems cited was not having class sizes limited to 20 or under, not screening children for vision and hearing problems and not requiring teachers to have a bachelor’s degree. Five states met all 10 standards, and 17 met eight or more.

Overall, the report found a wide disparity among states and among districts within states in the level of quality preschool programs.

“It matters even more what zip code you live in,” said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, according to the San Mateo Daily Journal.

The report did find some overall good news, with funding for preschool and enrollment on the rise in the country.

“State funding for pre-K increased by nearly $120 million in 2013-2014, adjusted for inflation. This is the second year in a row that state pre-K has seen a real funding increase, though programs have yet to fully recover from the impacts of half a billion dollars in cuts in 2011-2012,” the report stated. “Enrollment growth also resumed in 2013-2014, albeit modestly.”

The report comes as early education is being hotly debated around the state and at LA Unified. Just as the California legislature is debating a bill that would guarantee preschool to every low-income child, LAUSD is considering cutting its School Readiness Language Development Program, which provides preschool to 10,000 low-income students.

The Kindergarten Readiness Act of 2014, introduced by Darrel Steinberg (D-Sacramento) and co-sponsored by Torlakson and Early Edge California, will expand access to transitional kindergarten programs to all four year old children, no matter when their birthday. Currently, children with birthdays early in the year are excluded.

“It’s impossible to overstate how important these early years are to a child’s future success in school,” Torlakson said in a press release. “Transitional kindergarten—particularly a full-year, full-day program—can make all the difference, especially for families who may be struggling to give their young children these valuable learning opportunities.”

According to the proposal, 46,000 four-year-olds would be added each year for the first five years of the program, which will cost a total of $990 million by 2019-20.

The move to expand early education comes as Governor Jerry Brown announced new spending increases on public education, the result of the state’s first real surplus in years. Details of Brown’s budget for the next fiscal year emerged yesterday.

Previous Posts: High-Quality Pre-K Top Priority for Americans, New Poll Shows; California Awaits Obama’s Pre-K Funding Specifics

Twenty-Fourth Street School

By the first of the new year, 24th Street Elementary School in West Adams will open a new pre-kindergarten program, a victory for parents concerned with how children were performing in grades beyond.

The change came about through California’s new Parent Empowerment Act, the so-called Parent Trigger Law, which lets parents implement changes that include replacing staff, adding programs, shutting down the school altogether and handing control over to a charter.

The law has been used in a small number of schools this year, drawing controversy in each case for its impact on union teachers and the parents of students who did not sign petitions seeking change.

Efforts for change at 24th Street began several years ago. Parent Maria Eloisa Alcala said the school was functioning poorly on a number of levels, with bathrooms that weren’t working properly, rats found in vents and, worse, low student achievement.

“Children at 24th were performing way below grade level,” said Alcala, who has two kids at the school. Children were testing badly, she adds, in both reading and math.

For that reason, she said, parents decided a pre-K program could make a difference. The school’s previous pre-K program was one of more than a dozen that the district had closed because of budget cuts.

“Studies have shown across the U.S. that early education efforts dramatically improve outcomes for children,” said Derrick Everett, a spokesman for Parent Revolution, an organization that works to support parents who want to use the trigger law. “It gives kids a head start on life, and that’s all that the parents wanted.”

Alcala, who was heavily involved in the effort to add a pre-K, said that despite ample research showing the benefits of early education for kids, there were no other pre-K programs in the area. “We really made clear that we wanted pre-kindergarten,” she said.

With the help of Parent Revolution, about 50 parents collected signatures on a petition to return pre-K to 24th Street. Last January, they gave the petition to LA Unified officials, and after a lengthy discussions with with a number of suitors, they handed the reins of the pre-K over to a local program called LA Up.

Now, as officials prepare to open to the program, over 90 kids – mostly around age three – are on a waiting list. Parents aren’t yet sure how many will be admitted, but are pleased with the amount of interest in the program.

“This makes things better for the kids,” says Everett. “For far too long, kids at 24th Street were not getting what they needed and deserved.”

Previous Posts: UTLA voted to find a state lawmaker to change the parent trigger law; CA Has a Plan for Using Test Scores — Even With No Tests (Updated); Haddon Parents Abandon Trigger, Still Get Changes