Early childhood curricula and interventions

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality programs. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Effectiveness of public education: Average per-grade change in English Language Arts achievement between the third and eighth grades. These data are available from Stanford University’s Education Data Archive.

• School economic diversity: Share of students attending high-poverty schools by student race or ethnicity. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal.

Mathematica's Education-to-Workforce (E-W) Indicator Framework helps local leaders identify the data that matter most in helping students and young adults succeed. Local leaders can use the E-W framework to better understand education and workforce conditions in their communities and to identify strategies that can improve outcomes in these areas.

Several indicators in the E-W Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality programs. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Access to early intervention screening: Percentage of children with identified concerns who are connected to services or percentage of children needing selected special education services in kindergarten who were not identified and connected to services before kindergarten.
• Access to quality public pre-K: Percentage of public pre-K programs that meet Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) state benchmarks of quality.
• Kindergarten readiness in terms of approaches to learning, cognition, language and literacy, physical development, and social-emotional development: Percentage of children meeting benchmarks on teacher-reported kindergarten readiness assessment.
• Mental and emotional well-being: Percentage of youth with mental or emotional health needs as identified by a universal screening tool.
• Physical development and well-being: Percentage of students meeting benchmarks on self-rated surveys of physical health, such as the California Healthy Kids Survey Physical Health & Nutrition module.

• High-quality instructional materials: Early childhood curricula should be high quality and domain-specific, such as targeting math, language or social-emotional skills, with a clear scope and sequence. Intentional instruction should incorporate mediated scaffolding, primed background knowledge, conspicuous strategies, strategic integration, judicious review, and intentional opportunities for language interactions. Data systems should be in place to capture the extent to which the model is being implemented as required.

• Upfront, ongoing and job-embedded training: Early childhood curricula should be tied to a professional learning program that supports teachers as they deliver the curriculum in the classroom, with clear guidance around dosage and assessment. This training should help ensure equitable implementation and support across different settings. Policymakers and practitioners should ensure there are sufficient budgets and time scoped for professional development and ongoing coaching, avoiding one-off trainings wherever possible. One expert said this equates to at least two days of upfront training followed by monthly coaching sessions.

• Integrated assessments that provide specific guidance to teachers: It is important that practitioners are intentional about review opportunities to understand progress made by children over time. These assessments capture information on specific development goals, such as executive functioning, math skills and language and pre-reading skills. Integrated assessments can also enable the collection of data at scale, so that local leaders can understand city-wide and neighborhood-level trends around child development.

• Play-based learning and evidence-based curricula that are mutually inclusive: There is often a false dichotomy between play-based learning and evidence-based curricula. Play-based learning is most effective when it is paired with evidence-based, high-quality teacher interaction that integrates a curriculum into play.

• New approaches to early childhood curricula embedded across the whole early education ecosystem: High quality early childhood curricula need to be accessible to families where and when they need it. For policymakers that means ensuring that home-based programs and child care centers are supported to deliver new interventions alongside publicly-funded Pre-K settings. It also means that high quality curricula and interventions are available for all age-brackets, including 0-2 year olds.

• Design a culturally responsive curriculum: Good curricula incorporate the child’s cultural background into opportunities for learning. Practitioners should ensure teaching materials and activities correspond to the diversity of children in the classroom. For example, when discussing which holidays a child celebrates, teachers can incorporate children’s backgrounds into a task around language learning. Local leaders can complement this effort by ensuring that the diversity of the early childhood workforce is representative of the communities that they are serving.

• Consider bilingual instruction for dual language learners: Where possible, bilingual instruction is advantageous for dual language learners. For instance, there is evidence that bilingual children with developmental delay have been both under-identified and over-identified by monolingual practitioners. Assessing dual language learners in both languages for whatever skill is under concern, such as phonological awareness, can help identify developmental delay more accurately.

• Ensure early education provision is accessible: Children that benefit most from high-quality early learning are most often from low-income families, given early disparities in milestones like vocabulary acquisition, and should therefore be prioritized in the delivery of government-funded programs. One expert practitioner noted that 80% of their slots are allocated to low-income families, with families with children in the foster care system or families that are considered unhoused given top priority.

• Systematic data collection: Local leaders need a granular understanding of their early childhood education landscape, including what curricula and assessments are already being used at scale, to better capture inequities in provision. This requires an explicit focus on monitoring program quality, particularly in settings serving more marginalized groups, which in turn informs how to allocate professional support. Local leaders should consider moving beyond the Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) in their assessment of setting quality, which does not provide sufficiently granular insight into instruction.

• Early childhood education providers: School-based pre-K, family child care (home-based programs), child care centers and HeadStart grantees are at the heart of delivering effective early childhood education. It is important to engage educators across the range of education age-bands and setting types in new curriculum initiatives.

• Parents/Caregivers: Parents and caregivers are their child’s most important teacher. Engaging parents/caregivers in the content of new early childhood curricula interventions will help increase the impact of the home learning environment on child development. One expert suggested that parents participate in working groups that are choosing between various evidence-based curricula.

• Senior politicians: Given the costs associated with high quality early education programs, high-profile political/administrative support (for instance from a mayor or city manager) is key. One expert practitioner was able to gain support for their program through passing a ballot measure, which demonstrated strong community support.

• School system: Although only one part of the early education ecosystem, school leaders - including district curriculum directors, superintendents, principals - are important actors in the adoption of early childhood curricula. Principals, much like center-based child care directors, are responsible for the delivery of ongoing training opportunities for pre-school teachers and so need to be engaged with regards to budgets and dedicating practitioner time to professional development.

• Business community: Given the role that effective child care systems play in increasing labor force participation and improving worker wellbeing, members of the business community can often be powerful champions of a high-quality, well funded early childhood education system. One expert practitioner reflected that educating business leaders on the benefits of quality child care played a significant role in increasing public support for their program.

• External evaluators: External evaluation partners should be sought from the start of implementation in order to demonstrate the efficacy of the intervention or address any challenges around implementation.

• Align curriculum selection with local conditions: Evidence-based early education curricula and interventions vary significantly in terms of scope, skills, and pedagogical approaches. Evaluate a range of curricula and interventions before selecting one or more for implementation. Criteria for selection should include alignment with state and local benchmarks (especially the local school district) for age-appropriate skills development; a high degree of cultural responsiveness; and frequent opportunities for measurement and evaluation.

• Staged implementation: Rolling out the new curricula in a phased approach allows leaders to make adjustments based on implementation. For instance, the Boston Pre-K program, funded and administered by Boston Public Schools, was rolled out over a four-year period. This ensures policymakers and practitioners can understand any unintended consequences for marginalized communities, such as issues around take-up. Understanding barriers and facilitators to accessing new curricula will help ensure the benefits of the intervention are felt most by vulnerable children.

• Collaborate with families: Families can play a major role in reinforcing and supplementing classroom learning. From its earliest phase, the implementation process should include a formal family engagement component. This can include soliciting input and/or feedback on intervention selection, which can also help build trust; setting student goals in consultation with family; and offering workshops to train caregivers on how to deliver components of the curriculum at home.

• Enrollment: The first indicator to monitor implementation is the enrollment of children in early education settings, as this captures the extent to which pupils are exposed to new curricula. Enrollment reflects the extent to which new early childhood interventions and curricula appeal to families. This can also be measured through family satisfaction surveys.

• Curriculum and assessment usage: Leaders need to understand the percentage of early education settings that are using evidence-based curricula effectively. Fidelity to curricula can be tracked through a range of tools, from self-reporting to coaching to ongoing monitoring of classroom quality. Local leaders should also monitor the percentage of programs that have a well regarded integrated assessment, which includes executive functioning, math skills and language. Assessments should have reliable and valuable indicators that allow local leaders to capture child development over time.

• Hours of instruction: For any new early childhood curricula, policymakers and practitioners should look to identify benchmarks for the number of hours of training and coaching that are recommended for delivery of the model. The hours of training received by practitioners should be measured as part of rollout of early childhood curricula to ensure fidelity to the model.

• Child outcomes: In the longer term, leaders should expect to see the use of high-quality, evidence-based curricula translate into improved child development outcomes, including oral language development, physical development and socio-emotional development. This can be measured through summative data that draws on shared assessment tools. Weight should also be given to progress measures, such as the proportion of children who move from below national averages on child development to above average. Child outcomes are particularly powerful when tracked longitudinally into elementary school and beyond - local leaders should consider partnering with external evaluators to understand impact of early childhood curriculum initiatives over time.

• Parent/caregiver outcomes: There are a range of wider outcomes relating to parents and caregivers that can indicate the impact of new early childhood curricula and interventions. A more effective, higher quality curriculum can lead to greater parental/caregiver satisfaction, as measured through surveys. Better engagement of parents/caregivers can lead to a more effective home learning environment, including the home literacy environment. Higher enrolment will also lead to positive economic outcomes around labor force participation.