Tag Archives: preschool

On National Special Education Day, Don’t Forget Special Education Pre-K

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Today, December 2, is National Special Education Day, marking the anniversary of President Gerald Ford’s signing of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). As we reflect on the important ways in which IDEA has changed our public education system, I want to call attention to an important and often overlooked component of the early childhood landscape: special education preschools.

Heather Snyder, 31st Medical Operation Squadron educational and developmental intervention services speech and language pathologist, hands a plastic coin to Nathan Gribble, a patient at the Educational and Developmental Intervention Services clinic. The EDIS clinic also has multiple health care providers that offer the following services: child psychology, occupational therapy, speech pathology, and physical therapy. (U.S. Air Force photo/ Staff Sgt. Taylor L. Marr)

Photo credit: U.S. Air Force, Staff Sgt. Taylor L. Marr

Under Section 619 of IDEA Part B, children ages 3-5 identified with disabilities have a right to a free, appropriate, public education. This means that school districts have an obligation to provide preschool services to children diagnosed with disabilities. Currently, approximately 462,383 children with disabilities are served in special education preschool nationally, meaning that special education serves more children than any single state preschool program, roughly half as many preschoolers as Head Start, and nearly 1/3 as many children as all state-funded pre-K programs combined.

Beyond the number of children directly served, special education preschool influences our national early childhood care and education system in a variety of ways. Preschool special education pre-dates the growth of state-funded pre-K, and until relatively recently, most licensed early childhood teachers working in public schools were special education preschool teachers.

As a result, licensing and preparation programs for birth-5 or early childhood teachers in many states are designed primarily to prepare special educators. At the state level, early childhood specialists in state departments of education have played important roles in state pre-K and early learning systems coordination over the past 25 years, but many of these roles were originally created to support and oversee preschool special education — which remains a major part of these system leaders’ portfolios.

And at the federal level, the Office of Special Education Programs funds training and technical assistance for special education preschool and has developed or supported the dissemination of resources, models, and approaches — such as the Pyramid Model — that support quality teaching and child development across a variety of early childhood settings.

In other words, special education preschool is a pretty big deal. Yet it’s largely overlooked in national conversations about early childhood care and education. Continue reading →

Exploring Pathways Into Early Education: Q&A with Kathy Glazer of the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation

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Early educators spend all day building baby brains, setting them up for lifelong learning. You would think, then, that they would be supported and paid accordingly. But, as you already know if you’re a reader of Bellwether’s early childhood work, that’s not the case. Early educators actually make less than animal caretakers and desk clerks. 

The early childhood field is exploring alternative pathways to better compensate and prepare early educators. One such pathway is an early childhood apprenticeship, like the Registered Apprenticeship initiative offered in Virginia. To understand how this apprenticeship operates, I spoke with Kathy Glazer, the President of the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation (VECF), a key partner in the Registered Apprenticeship program.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Teachers from the ACCA Child Development Center in Annandale, Virginia are celebrated for their completion of early childhood registered apprenticeships at an event in Richmond in March 2019.

Let’s start with the basics. What is the registered apprenticeship and what is VECF’s involvement with it?

The Virginia Early Childhood Foundation leverages a partnership with the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry to facilitate and promote registered apprenticeships for early childhood educators. The program allows early childhood employers — specifically, child care directors — to designate early educator employees as apprentices, or be apprentices themselves. 

Apprentices complete a sequence of coursework and on-the-job training based on an individualized professional development plan. They need to complete a certain number of coursework hours; they receive college credit for those. They’re also paired, one-on-one, with a veteran staff member who mentors them and advises their on-the-job training. It takes about two years to go through the program. 

VECF’s role is to facilitate and shape implementation of the apprenticeship program. We identify potential participants and leverage an existing state-funded initiative, Project Pathfinders, to cover the cost of the required college coursework (tuition, fees, textbooks, etc.) so that there’s no cost for apprentices or their employers.

What do apprentices get after completing the program?  Continue reading →

3 Things Head Start Programs Can Do Right Now to Improve Their Practice

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Research tells us that, overall, Head Start has positive effects on children’s health, education, and economic outcomes. But there is wide variability in quality from program to program — and, as a field, we don’t understand why. 

Earlier this year, Sara Mead and I tried to figure that out. We published an analysis, conducted over three years, of several of the highest performing Head Start programs across the country. We specifically looked at programs that produce significant learning gains for children. Our goal was to understand what made them so effective.

As part of this project, we provided detailed, tactical information about exemplars’ design and practices. We hope to serve as a resource and starting point for other Head Start programs interested in experimenting with something new and, potentially, more effective.

Here are three action steps that Head Start programs can take right now to improve their practice:  Continue reading →

Are You a Presidential Candidate With a Child Care Proposal? Pay Attention.

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As candidates put forward their visions for 2020, potential Democratic frontrunner Elizabeth Warren has chosen to make childcare a centerpiece of her campaign to rebuild the middle class. Warren’s announcement builds on recent arguments that child care is a vehicle to increase women’s workforce participation and, therefore, economic growth. Warren’s proposal has since stimulated a good deal of coverage and debate about both the merits of her plan and the value of early childhood education more generally.

One overlooked factor in this debate is the debt that Warren’s plan owes to Head Start, which Warren acknowledges in the unveiling of the plan. Head Start, the country’s largest pre-K program, is a federally funded child development program that supports local early childhood programs to provide early learning, family engagement, and comprehensive supports for nearly one million preschoolers in poverty and their families every year.

Warren is smart to seize on Head Start as a model. Research shows that Head Start students overall make meaningful gains in school readiness during their time in Head Start, and that the quality of Head Start programs is better than many other early childhood settings. But other research shows that the quality of Head Start programs varies widely, with some programs producing much bigger school readiness gains than others.

My Bellwether colleague Sara Mead and I have spent the last three years studying five of the highest performing Head Start programs in the country, programs that have produced significant learning gains for the children they serve. We examined every aspect of these programs in an effort to understand what practices led to their effectiveness and how, as a field, we can leverage their successes to improve the quality of all early childhood programs — Head Start and otherwise.

After closely analyzing these programs’ practices, we produced a series of publications called “Leading by Exemplar,” released today. This research is the first of its kind to do such an in-depth study of program practices. It offers lessons for other Head Start programs and for policymakers — including Warren — who want to expand access to quality learning in the early childhood world.

So what is the “secret sauce” that contributes to these programs’ successes? Three practices stand out: Continue reading →

Little Kids, Big Progress: New York Times’ Head Start Coverage

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It’s not often that early childhood stories make the front page of the New York Times. But this week, the paper featured an article by Jason DeParle about Head Start, a federal early childhood program that serves nearly 900,000 low-income children, and how the quality of the program has improved over the past several years.

DeParle’s article is a great example of journalism that moves past the common (and relatively useless) question of “does Head Start work?” and goes deeper into exploring how the program has improved  its practices, including changes related to coaching, teacher preparation and quality, use of data, and the Designation Renewal System (all of which Bellwether has studied and written about previously). This type of reporting contributes to a more productive conversation about how to create high-quality early learning opportunities for all children that can inform changes to early childhood programs beyond Head Start.

Courtesy of Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action.

As DeParle points out and the data clearly show, while there is wide variation between individual programs, overall the quality of teaching in Head Start is improving. But while this trend is undoubtedly positive, it raises some questions: What effect will these changes ultimately have on children’s academic and life outcomes? And what can Head Start programs do to their program content and design to even better serve children?

Next month, Bellwether will release a suite of publications that tries to answer those questions. We identified five Head Start programs that have evidence of better-than-average impact on student learning outcomes and thoroughly examined these programs’ practices to understand how they contributed to their strong performance. I visited each program, conducted in-depth interviews with program leadership and staff, reviewed program documents and data, hosted focus groups with teachers and coaches, and observed classroom quality using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, CLASS (the measure of teaching quality on which DeParle notes Head Start classrooms nationally have shown large quality improvements). By better understanding the factors that drive quality among grantees and identifying effective practices, we hope to help other programs replicate these exemplars’ results and advance an equity agenda.

As the New York Times front page recently declared, Head Start’s progress offers a ray of hope in a dysfunctional federal political landscape. But there is still room for progress. Looking at what high-performing programs do well can help extend the reach and impact of recent changes to produce even stronger outcomes for young children and their families.