featured – First 10

What We’re Learning

In last week’s post I showed how the work of Massachusetts’ Birth—3^rd partnerships is “spilling over” in unexpected and promising ways due to the creation of new social and institutional relationships. These spillovers illustrate how the new relationships that partnerships create can lead to new strategies and build capacity for ongoing improvement. These developments are important because they are early evidence of the kinds of change that communities must become adept at in order to be more successful in addressing the intractable challenges of raising the achievement of low-income children. They signal that Birth—3^rd partnerships can develop new ideas, new practices, and more effective ways of doing the work of improving early education and care.

The spillovers seen in Massachusetts Birth—3^rd partnerships thus far are positive signs of progress that are consistent with the research on social capital and cross-sector collaboration. This research highlights the importance of building local and regional capacity through partnerships and networks in order to improve and innovate—to learn in systematic ways.

As Birth—3^rd policy developments continue to gain momentum, and as Birth—3^rd community partnerships continue to expand, it makes sense to consider several practical implications regarding the dual objectives of implementing effective strategies, on the one hand, and partnership development, on the other.

Community- and Relationship-Building are Necessary but not Sufficient
The study of Chicago elementary schools I mentioned last week found that jump-starting collaboration can be challenging. Those schools that had achieved high levels of social capital had often begun their work with low-risk collaboration that led to “early wins.” Early action and early wins build initial stores of trust, which partnerships draw on in subsequent projects, which further build trusting relationships in a potentially virtuous circle. Building healthy partnerships and implementing effective strategy are interwoven and mutually-reinforcing.

Work in Massachusetts is beginning to illustrate the dynamics of this kind of virtuous circle in action. Public schools and community-based preschools in Lowell had a strong relationship through its Early Childhood Advisory Council, which spawned its Birth-3^rd Leadership Alignment Team and a neighborhood strategy, which it turn led to a community-wide school readiness agenda. In Boston, community-based preschools were not using a transition form the district had designed. The district and the community-based providers built trust and relationships through the Boston K1DS Directors Group, and then the Directors Group became an important sounding board for Boston’s emerging universal pre-kindergarten initiative.

The idea of early wins highlights the importance of getting work done—accomplishing something. Community-building without action will try people’s patience, as the parking lot conversations after meetings readily attest. Former superintendent Jerry Weast of Montgomery County makes a similar point regarding whether to try to change beliefs first or behaviors first:

I thought I would enter the change process through the culture door and then engage everyone in creating systems and structures that would support the culture. But I couldn’t get traction, so we started to build the systems anyway, and it seemed that the culture started to shift as people saw the changes worked for kids.
–Jerry Weast as quoted in Six Lessons for Pursuing Excellence and Equity at Scale

Attending to the Imbalance of Power Requires Care
A fundamental challenge in building healthy early education collaboratives revolves around the asymmetrical nature of the district—community-based preschool power dynamic. Districts are the large institutional educational players in their communities. Their teaching staffs tend to be more highly paid have higher educational credentials. Further, while the preschool districts offer is only for the length of the school day and does not include summers (in contrast to community-based providers), many if not all of the seats they offer to families are free.

In both Somerville and Springfield, leaders have been sensitive to these power dynamics and have taken care to design collaborations between community-based and district teachers, including cross-site visits and joint professional development that are positive and respectful. In both cases, these on-the-ground collaborations have created banks of good will that are supporting more ambitious collaboration in both communities.

Preschool leaders frequently acknowledge the power imbalance between them and districts. They nonetheless emphasize that they are eager to learn more about district initiatives in the early grades that will impact them, share information about rising kindergartners, participate in shared professional development, and in effect, be included in the larger system. In some cases, however, initial collaboration efforts have foundered when attention to establishing a climate of mutual respect and joint commitment has not been adequate.

Partnerships Need a “Backbone”
Massachusetts’ experience implementing cross-sector Birth—3rd partnerships thus far strongly suggests the need for an organization to assume the role of convener and organizer in order to keep activities moving forward and coordinate and link initiatives across agencies. In Massachusetts, some partnerships are led by districts, some by large community-based preschools or preschool associations, and one by the local United Way (Pittsfield). The well-known Birth—3rd Evaluation and Planning Framework by Kristie Kauerz and Julia Coffman refers to this role as “Resources for Cross-sector Work,” a category that includes governance structures, strategic plans, and blended funding resources. Another resource that is helpful for understanding the role and function of this central convening organization is found in the notion of a backbone organization. Backbone organizational support is one of five conditions that form the Collective Impact Model, a model of community-wide collaboration that is used in several Massachusetts cities and around the country (for more information, see this article and this forum).

The developers of the collective impact model articulate the rationale for backbone organizations saying:

Coordinating large groups in a collective impact initiative takes time and resources, and too often, the expectation that collaboration can occur without a supporting infrastructure is one of the most frequent reasons why it fails.
—Channeling Change: Making Collective Impact Work

They suggest that backbone organizations perform six functions: providing strategic direction, facilitating dialogue, managing data collection and analysis, handling communications, coordinating community outreach, and mobilizing funding.

Based on their experience working with many communities, and echoing the experience of Birth—3rd Partnerships in Massachusetts, the developers of the collective impact model suggest that effectively playing the role of backbone organization requires that organizations avoid leadership approaches that are either too top-down, on the one hand, or too laissez-faire (e.g., purely facilitative) on the other. Partnerships need a deliberate approach to leadership that requires balance and finesse:

Backbone organizations must maintain a delicate balance between the strong leadership needed to keep all parties together and the invisible “behind the scenes” role that lets the other stakeholders own the initiative’s success.
—Channeling Change: Making Collective Impact Work

Birth—3^rd Improvement Requires District Early Childhood Capacity
Regardless which organization (or organizations) serves as the backbone organization, it is clear that improving learning and care along the full Birth—3rd continuum, including PreK—3^rd in district classrooms, requires that school districts develop sufficient early childhood expertise and capacity. This capacity includes staff who can support district teachers in the early grades and engage with the community-based providers as well.

Jason Sachs, the director of Early Childhood for the Boston Public Schools, emphasizes the critical role that Boston’s substantial early childhood coaching staff has played in supporting the implementation of Boston’s successful prekindergarten model, both in district and community-based classrooms. Likewise, the Lowell Public Schools is known for its strong early childhood program. As in other Birth—3rd Partnerships, Lowell is using state grant funds to expand its early childhood capacity through the extensive use of an additional coach as well as strategic and technical assistance support from a consulting organization, Early Childhood Associates.

In Somerville, political momentum in support of expanded early childhood services has grown in tandem with the on-the-ground work of its Birth—3rd partnership. As the partnership piloted collaborative professional development and coaching activities, the city committed to a universal kindergarten readiness plan. As a result, the district has expanded its professional development and coaching services to community-based providers by hiring a senior Early Childhood Director and an additional coach who will support community-based preschools.

An Important Balance: Strategy with an Eye towards Capacity-Building
We have seen in Massachusetts early evidence of better relationships, more trust, changing culture, and unplanned and even innovative strategies. These developments in Massachusetts are in line with the educational experience of Ontario, Canada, Montgomery County, MD, and high-performing countries. Partnerships characterized by high degrees of social trust and strong personal and institutional relationships are more likely to build the capacity and expertise required to continuously improve and innovate. As we’ve seen, community-building requires a focus on action—building relationships and changing hearts and minds through the work. The question then arises how we can best exploit these new institutions to take advantage of improved social capital. The challenge is thus to have two goals in mind: implementing change in the near term and building relationships and capacity over time. In addition to implementing good strategies, assessing them, and adjusting in a process of continuous improvement, are we also attending to the importance of social capital and relational trust in ways that build local expertise and capacity, generate new ideas, and lead to innovative work?

This post was completed as part of a contract between the MA Department of Early Education and Care and Cambridge Education (where David Jacobson worked at the time). Contract # CT EEC 0900 FY13SRF130109CAMBRID.

New Article in Kappan Magazine

Kappan Magazine has just published an article I wrote , The Primary Years Agenda: Strategies to Guide District Action. I draw on examples from Massachusetts and other states to make the case for three Birth-3rd strategies. These strategies are as relevant to communities as they are to districts. They are intended to help set priorities and “chunk the work for action.” Here is the abstract:

School districts on the leading edge of the Birth through Third Grade movement have demonstrated unprecedented success raising the achievement of low-income students by developing coherent strategies focused on the early years of learning and development. These communities are not merely improving preschool. Rather, they are building aligned, high-quality early education systems. Building such systems requires that school and district leaders embrace improving early education as a strategic priority and provide leadership in implementing three overarching strategies in their communities.

Relationships, Capacity, and Innovation

Innovations often evolve out of a series of what may seem to be minor developments. As a consequence, instead of waiting for disruptive products and technologies, we need to create the conditions for individuals, groups, and organizations to adapt, innovate, and improve all the time.
–Thomas Hatch, Innovation at the Core.

Principals pick up the phone to call preschool directors to discuss specific children. Communities use a new early learning partnership as a platform to win new grant funds. A district invites community-based preschool teachers to share information about rising kindergarten students, significantly influencing classroom assignment decisions.

These are all examples of activities that have emerged out of the work of Birth-3^rd partnerships, activities that were not proposed in grant proposals or explicitly planned as partnership strategies. These activities have come about as a result of new relationships—both interpersonal and institutional—developed through Birth-3^rd partnerships. Improving learning and care during the primary years from birth through third grade requires implementing strategies that lead to positive outcomes for children and build momentum for continued collaborative work. Effective implementation requires new interpersonal relationships and new institutional arrangements that build local and regional capacity to sustain ongoing improvement and innovation over time. Birth-3^rd reform is in effect asking for Early Years Collaboratives that are broader, more robust, and more ambitious in scope than typically has been the case in the past, new institutions and new “infrastructure” that can only be effective if they are undergirded by social relationships and trust.

Collaboration between school districts and community-based preschools on PreK-3^rd alignment is a significant component of what I refer to as the Primary Years Agenda. As communities around the country advance Birth-3^rd work, and as 12 communities in Massachusetts continue developing Birth-3^rd partnerships with funding from the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC), it is helpful to keep in mind the interconnected relationship between implementing good strategies and programs and developing institutional relationships and capacity. On the one hand, there is a danger of only of building relationships and never get around to implementing effective strategies. On the other hand, as the examples from Massachusetts and other communities described below suggest, it would likewise be a mistake not to be intentional about developing social and institutional relationships—relationships that build expertise and capacity that in turn lead to ongoing improvement and innovation.

Not Exactly Intended Consequences: Relationships that “Spill Over”

A number of Birth-3^rd partnerships in Massachusetts have carried out activities that are surprising—in a sense, extra—from the standpoint of their grant responsibilities and stated strategies. These kinds of extra activities, such as the examples below, are sometimes referred to as “spillover effects.”

Simple invitation, concrete impact. The Somerville Public Schools has for some years held an annual “speed dating” event in which district prekindergarten teachers went from table to table meeting with kindergarten teachers to discuss the rising kindergarten students that would be transitioning from one teacher to the next. As the Birth-3^rd Alignment Partnership was meeting one day, the principal of the Capuano Early Childhood Center came up with the idea of inviting the community-based prekindergarten teachers as well. At the now larger Teacher Talks event, the community-based teachers share information about their children, including, for instance, which ones had strong social-emotional skills and could serve as class leaders and role models. This information influenced classroom assignment decisions as potential leaders were distributed across kindergarten classrooms.

One-to-one relationships and joint decision-making. As a result of relationships formed in Springfield’s early childhood Professional Learning Community, principals and preschool directors began calling each other to discuss children they shared in morning and afternoon programs. On a more structural level, the Birth-3^rd Alignment Partnership has engaged in a collaborative decision-making process that includes district and community-based teachers in choosing a new preschool curriculum and making a joint request to the city for funding for the new curriculum.

From partnership strategy to city-wide agenda. Lowell’s alignment partnership began with a strategy focused on two communities. Its diverse Leadership Alignment Team found common ground around the issue of community school readiness. The team reached out to many other city institutions, including health, mental health, social services, and homelessness organizations in addition to city government and even the fire department. With these organizations on board, Lowell has now developed a city school readiness definition and a full-fledged city school readiness agenda that has considerable momentum.

Pooling resources to support parents. Spearheaded by the local United Way, several early childhood organizations in Pittsfield have joined together and pooled resources in order to support families in their parenting roles. Two home visiting organizations—Healthy Families and Parents as Teachers—joined with the local Head Start organization, the Community and Family Engagement coordinator, and the United Way to offer a series of evening Parent Cafes that were organized around the 5 protective factors of the Strengthening Families model. Each organization contributed different resources and undertook different responsibilities related to the workshops, events that provided more supports and were higher profile in nature than any of the organizations could have achieved individually.

From pilot group to stakeholder body. To support the implementation of the Boston Public School’s (BPS) preschool curriculum in community-based preschool classrooms, Boston’s partnership convened a monthly meeting of the directors of the participating preschools. This group has developed over time and has begun to play other roles. The directors asked to pilot a BPS transition form that had previously gone unused. Recently the partnership convened a special meeting to solicit input from this group on Boston’s emerging universal prekindergarten plan, and thus the directors are now serving as an important stakeholder body for the school district.

The Role of Relational Trust in Innovative Systems

Large scale changes come from better cross-sector collaboration rather than the isolated efforts of individual organizations. (Kania and Kramer, 2011)

These examples of informal, unplanned collaboration help illustrate the role of trust and relationships in capacity-building and organizational change. Often referred to as social capital, these types of social relationships are critical to improving educational outcomes. A large study of Chicago elementary schools found that relational trust was a key factor in schools that built professional capacity, developed a student-centered learning climate, and strengthened parent-community ties. A lead author of that study, Tony Bryk, refers to relational trust as a “lubricant for organizational change” and a “moral resource for sustaining the hard work” of local educational improvement.

Often overlooked, social capital is an important resource within organizations, but also across organizations locally and regionally. Large scale change of the type that the Birth-3^rd movement is calling for requires cross-sector collaboration across the mixed delivery system of public and private early childhood education. Such cross-sector collaboration was integral to the success that Montgomery, MD, one of Birth-3^rd’s leading edge communities, has achieved in dramatically reduced achievement gaps while raising learning outcomes for all. Montgomery County’s former superintendent, Jerry Weast, set out to unify a mixed delivery system through an inclusive approach to collaboration and a deliberate blurring of lines across institutions, leading to a culture of shared accountability and deep engagement by stakeholders—an example of social capital acting, in Bryk’s language, as a “moral resource for sustaining hard work” (Childress, 2009; Marietta, 2010).

Montgomery County’s experience is consistent with research on high-performing regions and countries that shows that a common denominator across successful educational systems is the extent to which they invest in social capital by building local and regional networks. Social capital is important in these systems, says Thomas Hatch, in that it leads to sharing resources, information, and expertise while building political and public support. Through inclusive, blurred lines systems such as Montgomery County’s they cultivate collective responsibility for children and an understanding of schooling as, in Hatch’s words, “a communal and societal endeavor.” Facilitated by relational trust and shared understanding, expertise and will and capacity grow, leading to ongoing improvement and innovation. Hatch is in effect drawing a line between informal relationships in which principals call preschool directors in Springfield and innovations in strategy like Lowell’s emergent community school readiness agenda.

In next week’s post, I suggest that the Massachusetts’ experience thus far has several practical implications for how Birth-3^rd partnerships go about building the capacity to improve through cross-sector collaboration.

Teaching a New Curriculum in East Boston (#1)

How does classroom practice change as a result of Birth-Third work? How do children, teachers, and leaders experience these changes? Having summarized the strategies of the first five Birth-Third Alignment Partnerships in Massachusetts (Boston, Lowell, Pittsfield, Somerville, and Springfield), I am now posting an occasional series of articles describing the on-the-ground experience of implementing these strategies. I began these profiles of direct service by describing teacher professional development in Lowell’s Communities of Practice for family child care and center-based preschool teachers. Future posts will cover home visits in Pittsfield and literacy coaching in Somerville. This week I begin a series of three posts that examine the experience of implementing a new preschool curriculum from the vantage point of two teachers and the program director at the East Boston YMCA.

For this series I’m trying out a new blogging platform called Medium. When you click on the link below, a new tab will open in Medium with the first post on the East Boston YMCA. Medium provides an attractive environment for article-length posts and photos. The type is clean and big, and it’s a distraction-free place to read. There are no sidebars with links inviting you to go somewhere else. Medium also has improved notes and commenting capabilities. Click on the discreet numbers to the right of paragraphs for notes from me (like footnotes) or from other readers. You do not have to sign in to read posts, but if you sign in using your Twitter or Facebook account, you can comment on paragraphs or even sentences or words. Nothing will be posted to your account unless you want it posted. Click the plus sign (+) to the right of a paragraph (or highlight text and click the plus sign) to add comments.

I welcome your comments on the posts, and let me know what you think of Medium via comment or email.

Here is the first post:

Teaching a New Curriculum in East Boston

Snapshots of Birth–3rd Strategies in Five Communities

This week I’m posting short bulleted summaries of the core strategies of the first five EEC alignment partnerships, an idea prompted by a helpful conversation with Titus DosRemedios of Strategies for Children last week at an ESE Kindergarten Networking Meeting. These updated summaries may be helpful to the seven new communities coming on board in the Round Two grants. You can also find short paragraphs on each community here. Click on the EEC Alignment Partnerships category in the blue panel on the left to see all the posts thus far on these communities.

Pittsfield and Boston represent the ends of the continuum in the graphic above. Springfield, Lowell, and Somerville are all implementing two-pronged strategies that include both community-wide and targeted components.

Pittsfield

Community Goal: The Pittsfield Promise–90% reading proficiency on the 3rd grade MCAS by 2020
Berkshire United Way as community backbone organization
Supported by a strategic plan and six committees
Focus
1. Community-wide family engagement around literacy
2. Home-visiting
3. Preschool participation, quality and alignment
4. Out-of-school time programming

Boston

Implement BPS K1 (preschool) model in 14 community-based classrooms
1. BPS K1 (preschool) model
  - Integrated OWL and Building Blocks curriculum
  - Making Learning Visible professional development
  - Skilled coaching
  - NAEYC accreditation
  - Demonstrated results; national and international recognition
2. Implement model in 14 community-based classrooms (Boston K1DS)
  - Teachers with BA degrees
  - K1 curriculum
  - Professional development
  - Compensation
3. Potential to expand to additional community-based classrooms contingent on results

Springfield

District and community-based preschool collaboration
1. Joint selection of community preschool curriculum
2. Joint identification of shared standards
  - Priority Teaching Strategies Gold domains
  - Social-emotional standards
3. Common formative assessments
4. Common professional development and outreach
5. Public/Private Professional Learning Community Meetings
  - Preschool teachers from two elementary schools and several community-based programs
  - Cross-site visits
6. Define kindergarten readiness
7. Expand teacher-to-teacher observations
8. Share kindergarten assessment data

Lowell

Pilot project in two low-income neighborhoods (expanding to three this fall)
1. One elementary school, center-based preschools, and family childcare providers in each
2. Use of CLASS observations across settings
3. Training in Teaching Strategies Gold
4. Communities of practice for center-based and family childcare programs
  - Professional development workshops
  - Use of ECERS-R and FCCERS-R tools
  - Addition of coaching beginning this fall
5. Family engagement workshops and activities
Emergent community-wide school readiness agenda

Somerville

Four strategies focused on early literacy
1. Kindergarten Readiness Group
  - Public/private preschool and kindergarten teachers
  - Half-day workshops over three semesters
  - Cross-site visits
  - “Using Play to Address Standards” theme
2. Literacy coaching
  - 8 classrooms (public, private, and Head Start)
  - Two observations and debriefs with literacy coach each month all year
  - Pre- and post- ELLCO observations
3. Teaching Strategies Gold training
4. Website for families with young children
  - Outreach to parents on use of site through agencies
Universal Kindergarten Readiness Plan

Communities of Practice in Lowell: Supporting Family Child Care and Center-based Providers

As discussed last week, there are multiple entry points for understanding Lowell’s Birth-Third work—the Leadership Alignment Team, the use of the CLASS tool, the emerging school readiness agenda—but a good place to start is with Lowell’s communities of practice. Supporting family childcare providers is a logistically more challenging and less common component of Birth-Third initiatives.[1] The communities of practice are a direct form of professional development that reaches both family childcare providers and community-based centers using the FCCERS-R and ECERS-R tools. They show that even within the boundary-spanning work that Birth-Third improvement requires there is a critical role for tailored work within sectors on improving quality.

Lowell’s communities of practice bring to life and make real the well-known challenges associated with supporting family childcare providers and small community-based preschools. We often refer to the egg crate nature of teaching in schools. School teachers are separated in classrooms and work independently and thus are isolated, or were traditionally. Now many K-12 schools are much more deliberate about creating opportunities for teachers to work together in teams or professional learning communities. In the case of family child care providers, however, the isolation is even more extreme. Rather than in a crate, each egg is packaged individually. There is simply no egg in the dimple next door. Likewise, many teachers in small center-based programs lack opportunities to collaborate with teachers and coaches outside their center.

The child care providers in Lowell’s communities of practice explicitly acknowledge the isolating nature of their work (“we don’t network enough”). They also make it palpably clear—through their responses to the meetings—how valuable it is for them to come together in a structured way to work on their practice. They describe the experience as “eye-opening,” revelatory in some cases, and according to some it has impacted every aspect of their classrooms and their teaching.

The communities of practice are led by Teresa Harrison, who is trained in the ECERS-R, FCCERS-R, and CLASS tools and does a range of work related to the Quality Rating Improvement System (QRIS) for the Lowell Public Schools. Ten family childcare providers began by meeting monthly with Harrison in the community of practice and then asked to increase the meetings to twice a month. Recruiting centers to participate in the work in the middle of last year proved more difficult, and thus the partnership took the opportunity to work intensively on a monthly basis with one center that was requesting support with the QRIS system. The teachers in this center are now better prepared to work with other centers, and the plan is to add teachers from more centers this coming year.

The ECERS-R tool includes 43 criteria organized into 7 subscales, such as “space and furnishings,” “language-reasoning,” and “program structure.” Using the ECERS-R or FCCERS-R tool as a framework, the communities of practice participants discuss a wide range of topics, including play, centers, math, science, hygiene, gross motor activities, art, drama, and dance.[2]

A good example of a community of practice conversation took place in one of the meetings with the center-based teachers. Through visits to the center and previous discussions with the participants, Harrison identified best practices in discipline and staff-child interactions as topics of interest for the participants and had begun to provide related support. At this meeting Harrison discussed staff-child interactions, drawing on the approach of the Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning (CSEFEL). Lowell Public Schools has provided extensive professional development on CSEFEL for its pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teachers and advocates its use throughout the community.[3]

Clearly the center teachers understood the importance of their relationships with their students, yet they also appreciated the opportunity to come together off-site and think through how they could do their best in this regard. Harrison shared CSEFEL materials and a video and discussed research on the importance of the teacher/child relationship. She then did an activity using the metaphor of “relationship banks.” When teachers have positive interactions with a child, they are adding to the child’s piggy banks, making a deposit. Negative interactions are withdrawals. When a child’s bank is empty, it is harder to deal with challenging situations. The teachers thought of all the things they could do to make deposits (e.g., “listening,” “following through,” “validating their feelings,” “really listening,” “getting down to their level,” “talking calmly,” and “showing you care”) and withdrawals (“taking things personally,” “showing frustration,” “using a loud voice,” “not being sensitive to their needs,” and “nagging or controlling them”). The discussion served as a forum for exchanging practical ideas and an off-site opportunity to reflect on the tenor of one’s daily interactions with children.

The participants of both communities of practice emphasize that though they learn the expectations of the ECERS-R/FCCERS-R tool relative to the QRIS system, they also learn specific ideas and practices from their colleagues and from Harrison. The ECERS/FCCERS tools serve an interesting and helpful function in these discussions. Conversations typically begin with the participants sharing what they do with regard to a specific item on the tool (e.g., helping children understand language, fine motor skills, or dramatic play). Harrison adds what evaluators in fact look for with regard to the item, highlighting expectations that she knows to be particularly challenging or frequently surprising to teachers: for example, expectations that math be integrated not only during carpet or whole group time but throughout the day during free play; that nature and science activities be included every day; and that TV be limited to no more than 15 minutes at a time and no more than 30 minutes a day (and only for children above 24 months).

Eventually the participants rate themselves on each item within a given category or “sub-scale.” In route, however, discussion of the evaluators’ expectations naturally transition into the learning activities the participants typically do, do not do, could do better, and ideas they could learn from others. In effect, the tools serve to make the conversations less awkward as both of the communities of practice were in the process of building trust and the confidence to share and reflect on their own practice—conversations that can feel personally threatening both with close colleagues and with new acquaintances.

Out of this type of conversation at one meeting crystallized a number of pointers regarding QRIS expectations at one level, but about the current understanding of best practice at another:

The importance of free play and choice (e.g., moving away from one whole group activity followed by clean-up followed by another whole group activity …),
Balancing independent exploration and the teacher role in providing structure,
Encouraging interactions among children,
Encouraging children to solve their own problems (with support),
Expanding the use of music, dance, and dramatic play and making art projects less “cookie-cutter” and more creative, and
Increasing the proportion of talking and listening that is not directed towards behavior management and control.

From the vantage point of the participants, key take-aways included the need to be more deliberate and organized in setting up centers as discrete areas for specific activities, being mindful of which centers are placed next to each other (i.e., not placing loud centers next to quiet areas), attending to sight lines and the placement of furniture, how not to use time-outs, how to use routines to make activities run more smoothly, and the importance of choice among activities.

The Lowell partnership is planning on deepening its community of practice model with the addition of an on-site coaching component that will complement the monthly meetings. Among other benefits, coaching will provide support in translating the pointers and take-aways from the meetings into practice. We also find this combination of off-site whole group professional development and on-site coaching in Somerville’s literacy coaching model and the Boston’s K1DS curriculum implementation support.

The two communities of practice are soon to come together for a joint CSEFEL training. Lowell’s plan for Round Two of the EEC Alignment Partnership includes continuing these two communities of practice, adding one for administrators of public school and community-based preschools, and developing a pilot community of practice for families led by a parenting coach.

Lowell’s communities of practice broaden the range of professional development and coaching arrangements we find across the first five EEC alignment partnerships. They demonstrate the use of the ECERS-R and FCCERS-R rubrics and a model tailored to family child care providers as well as community-based preschool centers. One family child care provider summed up her experience of the community of practice saying,

“You look at your daycare differently, which is hard to do unless you are in a class like this.”

[1] The Pittsfield Promise also works with family childcare providers and family childcare systems.

[2] A study published last month called into question the relationship between quality as measured by the ECERS-R and child academic and social outcomes. The authors suggest that since that many centers meet the baseline levels of quality the ECERS-R measures, a more nuanced tool may be needed. Nonetheless, most states, including Massachusetts, currently use the ECERS-R as part of their QRIS systems. Further, as will become clear, in the context of the Lowell community of practice, the ECERS-R is being used as a formative professional development tool to guide conversations about best practice with an experienced coach. Used in this way the ECERS-R has the potential improve practice independent of the link between ECERS-R evaluations and child outcomes. We will continue to track the research on the ECERS-R and related tools.

[3] For more on Lowell’s adoption of district social-emotional standards, use of CSEFEL training, and home visiting protocol, see page 36 of Improving Early Years of Education in Massachusetts.

Joint Professional Learning in Somerville and Springfield

Last week’s post described how both Somerville and Springfield have developed professional learning initiatives that bring together prekindergarten and kindergarten educators. The work of Somerville’s Kindergarten Readiness Group and Springfield’s Birth-Third PLC begins to suggest what the content of these workshops can be and what the participants get out of it. These examples also raise a number of helpful questions to consider when designing joint professional development experiences.

COMMON THEMES

“Demystifying What We Each Do For a Living.” In both Somerville and Springfield the PreK/Kindergarten collaborations began with discussions and cross-site visits in which the participants recognized many similarities in practice across settings. Public school teachers remarked that circle time and transitions felt familiar and expressed surprise in seeing the age range in the preschool programs; the community-based teachers found public kindergartens to be warmer and “more loving” than they are typically reputed to be and were impressed by the extent of literacy and writing activities they observed. Lisa Bakowski, the principal of the Boland Elementary School in Springfield, refers to this stage as “demystifying what we each do for a living.” In both communities, participants refer to their first meetings as leading to a cultural shift, an “opening up,” and laying a foundation of trust and relationships.

Sharing Teaching Practices. From the participants’ perspectives, the appeal of these meetings lies in the opportunities they create to share practices, to see different environments and classroom settings, and to learn more about the learning expectations and assessments found in each sector. At a recent Birth-Third conference in Springfield, a panel shared their experiences in the 2010-11 public/private PLC, and the teachers emphasized that they learned about many new ideas and lesson strategies that they brought back to their classrooms. Likewise, teachers at the Somerville Kindergarten Readiness Group readily share lesson ideas, ranging from using a storytelling bracelet in which each bead stands for a part of a story to a discussion of the use of turn and talks as children become developmentally ready to engage in this practice.

Motivation. The participants on the Springfield panel also emphasized the motivational impact of seeing a wider variety of classroom practice through the cross-site instructional learning walks. One veteran community-based preschool teacher shared the moving story of losing her entire classroom of materials, which had taken years to accumulate, when a large tornado hit Springfield last year. The teacher started over in a new classroom in a new building but felt demoralized professionally. She described the experience of seeing a prekindergarten teacher in an elementary school teach as a “refresher course” in all the strategies she had learned over the years but that in some cases had fallen by the wayside and needed to be brought back into the forefront of her practice. The visit provided her with new ideas and inspired her to begin re-incorporating a broader range of effective strategies into her teaching and helped her re-engage professionally. Conversely, teachers also found motivation in being visited by colleagues. As principal Bakowski explained, “We don’t know all the great things we are doing until we see it through others’ eyes.”

The kinds of topics under discussion by the members of Springfield's Birth-Third Professional Learning Community (some of these were changed due to snow days). — The kinds of topics under discussion by the members of Springfield’s Birth-Third Professional Learning Community (some of these were changed due to snow days).

Learning Standards. In addition to sharing lesson ideas, the teachers in Somerville and Springfield were eager to explore their respective standards and assessments. For the meeting in Somerville referred to earlier, the meeting organizers had excerpted and matched sections from the EEC and ESE standards documents so that small groups could identify similarities and differences across the two sets of preschool standards and then compare the preschool standards to kindergarten standards. The participants found these activities highly useful, in particular as many community-based preschool teachers were unfamiliar with the new Common Core-aligned Massachusetts frameworks. Community-based preschool teachers in both cities expressed much interest in learning more about kindergarten expectations. As one Springfield preschool teacher said,

“I feel like it would make me a better teacher to really know what is expected of my students. What do you really need to know for kindergarten? I think they are ready. I think I am getting them ready. But I’m not 100% sure, and I want to be. Learning about kindergarten makes me look at myself as a teacher.”

Snowball Effects. Project directors in both Somerville and Springfield emphasize that the public/private early childhood collaborations in their communities are having snowball effects. Once a platform for collaboration is established, it is leading to additional collaboration. Now that principals and preschool directors have established relationships, when a principal realizes that a struggling prekindergarten child is also spending half of his or her day in a community-based preschool program, the principal is more likely to pick up the phone and call the preschool director. During Springfield’s first iteration of public-private PLC in 2010-11, community-based preschool directors expressed an interest in learning more about autism, which led to a workshop by an autism expert from the Springfield Public Schools that benefited both public and community-based preschool teachers. Likewise, the collaboration around the Birth-Third Alignment Partnership in Somerville has led to the incorporation of community-based prekindergarten teachers into the public schools’ annual Teacher Talks event, in which prekindergarten teachers go from table to table, meeting with kindergarten teachers to discuss the children moving into kindergarten. This additional intelligence about rising kindergarteners has had a large impact on how kindergarten class lists are formed.

LEARNING FROM EARLY EFFORTS

The joint professional learning projects in Somerville and Springfield raise for the field the kinds of structural design decisions that leaders of public/private early childhood education collaborations face. These design decisions stem from the overall purpose of the collaboration (e.g., standards alignment, assessment literacy, lesson design and teaching strategies, improving developmentally appropriate practice, and so on).

What should the balance of teachers and leaders be?
How often should the groups meet?
What activities should they carry out? How can partnerships structure activities to make the most of valuable professional development time?
Will a community-wide group best serve a community’s needs or is a pilot in a few neighborhoods preferable?
Is it more important to expand the number of participants/schools/centers or to extend the work of a few groups more deeply into the analysis of assessment results and lesson study?
And importantly, how do representatives from schools and centers share their experiences with their colleagues who do not attend?

Future posts will pursue how partnerships in Massachusetts and other states address these as well as the critical underlying question: What is the sought-after impact and how will we monitor progress in achieving it?

Top Image: An activity planning web from Somerville’s Kindergarten Readiness Group. Mixed groups from different programs/schools outlined units based on four different books.

A Community Commitment: Berkshire Priorities and the Pittsfield Promise

The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today. American society is dividing into skilled and unskilled, and the roots of this division lie in early childhood experiences. Kids born into disadvantaged environments are at much greater risk of being unskilled, having low lifetime earnings, and facing a range of personal and social troubles, including poor health, teen pregnancy, and crime. While we celebrate equality of opportunity, we live in a society in which birth is becoming fate. (J. Heckman, Giving Kids a Fair Chance, 2013)

On January 23^rd John Bissell opened a meeting of community leaders in Pittsfield, MA with this quotation from the Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman. Bissell is a banker, and he and a number of community leaders in Berkshire County had recently been reading Heckman’s book, Giving Kids a Fair Chance. This group of community leaders is on the leading edge of a movement to mount concerted community-wide campaigns focused on Birth through Third Grade (Birth-Third) efforts, and third grade reading proficiency in particular. In Pittsfield this work is directed towards a singular community goal, referred to as the Pittsfield Promise: 90% reading proficiency on the third-grade MCAS by 2020. In 2012, Pittsfield won the National Civic League’s All-America Grade-Level Reading Award, and it was recently named one of 37 communities to be named a 2013 Pacesetter community by the Grade-Level Reading Campaign. (Springfield too has achieved both distinctions.)

In the context of the range of Birth-Third Alignment Partnerships underway in Massachusetts, Berkshire County’s campaign represents a good example of a robust community-wide approach that includes community outreach, direct supports to families, and work to improve preschool access and quality. The following list gives a sense of some of the main Pittsfield Promise activities:

Literacy events (e.g., Story Walks—staged walks across towns and parks from one large poster of a page from a book to another, accompanied by library readings of the featured books)
Book giveaways and storytelling sessions (e.g., literacy bags for newborns, books for mothers through the WIC program, pediatrician and nurse promotion of reading through Reach Out and Read)
Quality improvement efforts for early childhood providers (e.g., training in assessments, coordination with Berkshire Readiness Center trainings)
Home visiting programs
A media campaign (e.g., cable TV shows and newspaper articles)
Access to quality preschool (e.g., community funding tied to quality indicators)
PreK-12 alignment (e.g., a PreK/K professional learning community)
Resource mapping and community engagement (e.g., “asset-based community development” in collaboration with Berkshire Community College and neighborhood initiatives)
Data analysis/communications (e.g., A State of the Young Child Report in collaboration with the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission)

Three Berkshire United Way Birth-Third Leaders (from left): Nancy Stoll (Director of Community Engagement and Evaluation), Karen Vogel (Early Childhood Coordinator), and Kris Hazzard (President and CEO).

Berkshire County has established a governance structure, a strategic plan, and a network of working groups to drive and coordinate these Birth-Third activities. The Berkshire United Way serves as the “backbone organization” of the partnership, leading, coordinating, and staffing the work. The MA EEC Alignment Partnership grant supports Berkshire United Way in organizing these activities, in particular through the person of its Coordinator of Early Childhood, Karen Vogel. Over the past year, Berkshire United Way has participated in a five-city network led by Strategies for Children and Harvard professor Nonie Lesaux. Influenced by this experience, Berkshire United Way’s Birth-Third leaders are increasingly focused on marshaling the community’s resources in a strategic fashion that will yield the most impact.

Pittsfield Promise’s early literacy campaign raises a number of interesting and important questions regarding:

How a community mobilizes and coordinates commitment and action tied to a single goal
How communities balance diverse strategies including community awareness, direct support to families, improving preschool access and quality, and collaborating with the school system
The role of a community funder in spearheading change and the associated benefits and challenges
How to assess impact and results across a broad array of initiatives

This initial post on Pittsfield Promise’s efforts first describes the basic structure and scope of the Birth-Third work underway in Pittsfield, including the partnership’s recent evolution and reassessment of priorities. A subsequent post will trace the development of Pittsfield Promise’s institutional commitment to early learning and third-grade reading, to be followed by deeper investigations into on-the-ground implementation and practice.

Strategy and Structure (Phase 1)

A recent meeting of the Early Childhood Think Tank serves as a good introduction to the work of the Pittsfield Promise. The Think Tank is a group of early childhood providers and partner organizations that has played an integral role in the Pittsfield Promise. The meeting began with a discussion of a marketing campaign in the city that would emphasize the importance of early childhood education and the critical role of families. The Think Tank has worked with the Pittsfield Promise communications committee to frame the appropriate messages, and Berkshire County Readiness Center Director Doug McNally was there to note how he could support the campaign through his monthly cable TV show. The Think Tank then discussed the goals of a State of the Young Child report that will present data regarding poverty and other risk factors in the county. 37.1% of Pittsfield children under five live in poverty, a percentage that is growing. The purpose of the report is to inform policymakers as well as provide a common framework of indicators that early childhood providers can draw on in order to send consistent messages to the broader community, including funders.

Karen working group — Early Childhood Coordinator Karen Vogel (pen in hand) and other members of the Early Childhood Literacy Impact Council.

The Think Tank then reviewed a PreK to K inventory list that Karen Vogel, the Coordinator of Early Childhood, had developed. This inventory integrates Massachusetts’ two kindergarten readiness tools, Work Sampling and Teaching Strategies Gold, and is intended to become a transition form used by all preschools in the county (see draft here). The meeting also included a proposal to re-constitute the Early Childhood Think Tank as an umbrella governance organization in the county, overseeing not only the Pittsfield Promise but also similar efforts currently being seeded throughout the county. Doug McNally of the Berkshire Readiness Center concluded the meeting by announcing high participation rates by preschool teachers in recent early childhood development classes and sharing dates for future professional development opportunities.

In order for a community-wide commitment to move from vision to implementation to impact, communities need to establish a governance structure, a plan targeting high-leverage priorities, and mechanisms to implement and monitor the plan (see this Birth-Third Framework for more on infrastructure). Overseeing the Pittsfield Promise is a group of approximately 60 community leaders who in 2011 committed to the 90% reading proficiency goal by 2020. Pittsfield Promise meets quarterly, while a smaller group of leaders, the Berkshire Priorities, meets monthly, in effect serving as the steering committee for the larger Pittsfield Promise group. The work is guided by a strategic plan that began in July 2012 and is currently in Year 2 of implementation. The strategic plan outlines five core strategies:

Strengthen the infrastructure of Berkshire Priorities to drive achievement of the Pittsfield Promise.
Create strong community awareness of the importance of literacy as pursued by Pittsfield Promise.
Create collaborative partnerships to align, integrate and leverage community resources to achieve the common goal of the Pittsfield Promise – by 2020, 90% of Pittsfield students will achieve reading proficiency as demonstrated by third grade standardized tests.
Leverage direct and indirect community resources to advance early childhood literacy.
Engage and connect parents, families, and other caregivers to opportunities to infuse literacy and inclusion in their everyday life.

The Pittsfield Promise has designed structures and mechanisms to implement these strategies in a coordinated fashion. The community has established six committees, staffed and coordinated by the Berkshire United Way (currently with support from the EEC grant). These committees play a critical role knitting together numerous agencies, community leaders and volunteers, including the Berkshire Readiness Center, the Berkshire Health systems, early childhood providers, libraries, museums, the mayor’s office, and so on. Sue Doucette, the early childhood coordinator for the Pittsfield Public Schools, sits on several of the preschool committees and working groups and supports alignment between the community-based providers and the public schools. Pittsfield Promise has begun working with two of the elementary schools in Pittsfield, but alignment efforts with the public schools have been hampered by leadership instability in the district (four superintendents in four years) and labor-management tensions.[1]

Importantly, Berkshire United Way’s Karen Vogel attends all of the Pittsfield Promise committee meetings and thus is able to update each on the progress of the others and make connections across their various spheres of work. The exact structure of these committees is evolving as the community tries to streamline and mesh their work. The following list is likely to change but nonetheless serves to indicate how Berkshire County/Pittsfield Promise has initially structured its work: Family Engagement, Communications, Staff Enrichment, Data and Inventory, PK – 12 Alignment (which includes a focus on PreK and K assessments and transitions), and Out of School Time.

The Pittsfield Promise represents a deliberate decision made in 2011 to begin with a focus on Pittsfield and then expand outward to include the whole county. The anticipated move toward an all-county scope has begun in recent months, and the January proposal to reconfigure the Think Tank as a county organization mentioned above has been accepted. The county-wide umbrella governance group is now called the Early Childhood Literacy Impact Council.

Strategy and Impact (Moving to Phase 2)

Berkshire United Way's Kris Hazzard talking with board member and Early Childhood Impact Council co-chair, Michael Barberi. — Berkshire United Way’s Kris Hazzard talking with board member and Early Childhood Impact Council co-chair, Michael Barberi.

A common theme emerging across the five Birth-Third Alignment Partnerships in Massachusetts revolves around the need to set priorities, a challenging task given the breadth of potential Birth-Third improvement activities. Partnerships need to develop focused strategies that can be feasibly implemented, that will lead to demonstrable impacts, and ideally that build momentum for continued commitment and investment. As relatively new or newly-convened partnerships, Somerville and Springfield spent the first months of their EEC grant determining promising strategies that could be implemented given the scope of the two-year grant and with the available resources. While Berkshire County’s partnership, given its history, already had a plan and a set of initial activities in place, its leaders felt the need to (re)assess priorities in year two to ensure the Birth-Third work is having the greatest possible impact.

According to Berkshire United Way president Kris Hazzard, Berkshire Priorities’ re-assessment, as mentioned above, has been influenced through its participation in a five-city network convened by early childhood advocacy organization Strategies for Children. This network was formed in the aftermath of the National Civic League’s All-America Grade-Level Reading award in 2012. Five Massachusetts cities applied for and attended the awards event: Boston, Holyoke, Pittsfield, Springfield, and Worcester. While at the event in Denver the communities decided to form a network, which the advocacy group Strategies for Children has convened and supported.

Over the past year this network has worked with Harvard professor Nonie Lesaux, author of the influential report, Turning the Page: Refocusing Massachusetts for Reading Success. As a result of this collaboration, the Pittsfield Promise is moving towards placing relatively more emphasis on activities that are delivered at sufficient dosage to improve child outcomes in significant ways. The idea is to devote relatively more time and attention to expanding home visiting programs and increasing participation in quality preschool programs (while continuing efforts to deepen the involvement of the public schools in the Birth-Third work).

Geographic Breadth and Strategic Focus

Beginning with a focus on the city of Pittsfield, Berkshire Priorities has set an ambitious goal and mobilized its community around this goal through an interlocking network of community groups, committees, and working groups. Berkshire United Way’s current strategy is to expand beyond Pittsfield, continue engaging community members around early literacy, and push for increased access to high-impact (and relatively expensive) home-visiting and preschool services. The next post on Berkshire Priorities and Pittsfield Promise will explore how the county has built its commitment to third-grade literacy and how Berkshire United Way is supporting this work through two approaches to community change: asset-based community development and results-based accountability.

[1] Incoming superintendent Jason McCandless has expressed interest in making early childhood education a strategic priority.

The Boston K1DS Project: Implementing a New Curriculum in Community-based Preschools

On a recent visit to the Paige Academy preschool in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, a group of students sit clustered on the rug in front of teacher Sister Paige.[1] Sister Paige leads the students in counting up to 10, with the whole class yelling the even numbers and whispering the odd ones. After a follow-up activity with puzzle shapes, she transitions the group to centers. In one small group children play with letters, picking out the ones in their names. In another, four kids “read” picture books. Sister Paige spends part of the time on a stool observing the children and taking notes on index cards.

Around the corner in another room, Sister Vishali flashes paper plates with different numbers of dots on them as the children in her class “click photos” in their minds, trying to instantaneously identify the number of dots (see photo above). The students are doing an activity of the Building Blocks math curriculum in which students practice “subitizing,” instantly judging the number of items in a set. Subitizing is an important skill that supports composing and decomposing numbers in later years. Following a routine with which they are clearly familiar, small groups of students bound up to get in line for the restroom when they hear the letter that begins their name. Near Sister Vishali is a large posted sheet of chart paper outlining the schedule of small group centers for the day for both her class and Sister Paige’s.

Sister Paige’s and Sister Vishali’s classrooms are two of 14 community-based preschool classrooms participating in Boston K1DS, a project to implement the school district’s prekindergarten model in community-based programs. Boston’s prekindergarten model has recently been found to lead to the biggest gains in vocabulary and math of any large-scale program in the United States to date and smaller but significant gains in executive function skills as well. As a result it has been profiled in Time Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, and Education Week. These findings feature prominently in a recent summary of the U.S. evidence base on preschool outcomes as an example of a highly effective combination of a “developmentally focused” curriculum and intensive coaching. The Boston K1DS project is thus a novel collaboration in which a school district works hand-in-hand with community-based providers to implement a proven, developmentally-appropriate curricular approach to improving child learning.

EEC Commissioner Tom Weber touring the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester with Vice President of Programming, Mary Kinsella.

Boston K1DS is a collaboration between the Boston Public Schools (BPS), Thrive in 5 (Boston’s early childhood collaborative), the MA EEC, and private funders (see here for the complete list). This collaboration is a more expensive initiative than the other Birth-Third Alignment Partnerships in the state, drawing on Boston’s larger pool of resources. Boston and Thrive in 5 each received $200,000 grants from EEC (over two years). The Barr Foundation is the primary funder of the project, Boston Public Schools is contributing funding as well, and Thrive in 5 is raising additional funds. The project includes a formal evaluation by a Harvard research team. Importantly, BPS and the other partners have committed to expanding the project to include additional community-based preschools if the project yields results comparable to the outcomes in BPS classrooms. Further, most of the lead teachers are receiving an increase in salary to compensate them for their participation in the project and to promote teacher retention. After first describing the BPS prekindergarten model and the context of the project, I describe the components of the K1DS project in more detail.

Boston’s Prekindergarten Model

The Boston preschool model has its roots in a 2006 decision by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to expand prekindergarten in Boston elementary schools and to develop an early childhood department to support the improvement of prekindergarten and kindergarten teaching and learning. Prekindergarten for four-year-olds in Boston is referred to as K1 and kindergarten as K2. Early in his tenure as early childhood director, Jason Sachs undertook an assessment of prekindergarten teaching and learning using the ECCERs, CLASS, and ELLCO tools, all of which are observation-based measures of classroom quality. This assessment identified the need to improve quality. As a result of this finding, Sachs and his expanded team began development of a K1 curricular model.

The model they developed is anchored by an integrated curriculum composed of the Opening the World of Learning (OWL) curriculum for literacy and the Building Blocks curriculum for math. K1 teachers were supported in implementing this curriculum with professional development, an integrated scope and sequence, a binder of detailed materials, extensive coaching, and professional development on Making Learning Visible, an approach to observing and documenting student learning. Meanwhile, numerous elementary schools underwent NAEYC accreditation during the years in which the K1 model was being implemented. Of 79 elementary schools, 22 are currently accredited and 41 either are receiving or have received accreditation support. The early childhood department continued to assess quality in K1 classrooms using classroom observation tools, conducting regular audits by outside experts to inform the provision of coaching and professional development support.

The above-mentioned Harvard evaluation found that the K1 model was implemented with a high degree of fidelity (over 70%) and that it led to the groundbreaking gains in student learning mentioned above. Sachs attributes the success of the K1 model to (1) its “laser-focus” on a developmentally appropriate, effective curriculum supported by intensive coaching and professional development, (2) a well-compensated teaching staff all of whom have bachelor’s degrees, and (3) the impact of the NAEYC accreditation process.

Boston K1DS: The Context

Thrive in 5’s Executive Director, Jane Tewksbury, explained the rationale behind Boston K1Ds in a letter to the Boston Globe during Boston’s recent mayoral election campaign,

“Boston K1DS is one way to carry out both candidates’ early education agenda that doesn’t rely on the system building its way out of the not-enough-K1-classrooms problem. Supported by a partnership between Boston Public Schools, Thrive in 5, the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care, United Way, and the Barr Foundation, Boston K1DS provides the same curriculum, assessments, and teacher professional development as a traditional K1, but in community-based preschool classrooms. It meets the needs of working families who need full-day, year-round care; improves the quality of community-based early education programs; and increases compensation for early educators, who earn on average just $33,000 a year, far less than the $70,000 average salary of a BPS teacher.”

Getting ready to paint at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester.

Interest in supporting community-based preschool to implement the BPS K1 model predates the EEC Alignment Partnership grant. One early education program, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester, had already begun implementing the model in one of its preschool classrooms. The demand for K1 seats by families in Boston is high, and BPS has been running out of room to expand K1 classrooms in its elementary schools. Further, the creation of BPS’s K1 program created competition for community-based preschools. Parents have incentives to move their 4-year olds into a K1 if they get into a school of choice in order to secure a place, leaving fewer 4-year olds in community-based preschools. Community-based preschools provide full-day, full-year care for families. In the neighborhoods targeted by Boston K1DS, most families rely on vouchers from the state to cover the cost of preschool, and full-day, full-year care is a resource many families need. Community-based providers argue that the loss of 4-year olds makes it harder for them to maintain their enrollments and cover the cost of serving younger children. This tension is part of the context in which the collaboration between BPS and community-based providers is taking place, a tension that plays out in other EEC Alignment Partnerships as well.

The EEC Birth to Grade Three Alignment Partnership grant created an opportunity for BPS to collaborate with Thrive in 5, a partnership encouraged by the EEC, the Barr Foundation, and other funders. From Thrive in 5’s perspective, Boston K1DS supports its long-term vision of creating a pipeline of programs that are prepared to become community-based K1s. This project supports Thrive in 5’s goal of aligning child experiences, teacher professional development, and assessment tools across community-based and BPS programs. Thrive in 5 aims to develop a replicable model, a clearly defined product, married to the QRIS system that can be widely adopted to improve community-based preschool quality while garnering the financial support of funders.

Boston K1DS: The Model

This graphic, created by Sachs and the Boston K1DS evaluators, summarizes the Boston K1DS theory of change. The stated goals of Boston K1DS are as follows: “(1) retain highly qualified staff, (2) implement an evidence-based literacy- and math-rich curriculum, and (3) maintain full-day/full-year services that working parents depend on.” BPS began the K1DS project by soliciting interest from community-based preschool programs. An important stipulation was that the lead teachers in each classroom have a BA, as seen in the following eligibility criteria:

Licensed by the MA Dept. of Early Education and Care;
Must be located in the “Circle of Promise” or East Boston (relatively low-income neighborhoods);
Be NAEYC-accredited or willing to pursue accreditation;
Education, lead teacher: minimum BA degree, with 4-6 courses in early childhood education and three years of EC teaching experience. Assistant teacher: minimum AA in early childhood or CDA, and one year of teaching experience.
1:10 teacher-student ratio;
Programs must operate on a full-day, year-round basis;
At least 80% of enrolled children must be Boston residents.

The Early Childhood Department conducted site visits and identified programs that would participate in the project, yielding 9 K1DS classrooms in addition to the already-implementing Boys and Girls Clubs of Dorchester classroom. Thrive in 5 identified an additional four classrooms for a total of 14. At this juncture the lead teachers in the BPS 10 classrooms are receiving a compensation increase for their participation; due to the initial funding constraints of the grant, the Thrive in 5 classrooms are not. BPS and Thrive in 5 are currently attempting to raise money for the teachers supported by Thrive in 5 as well. See here for a list of participating programs.

Beginning last spring, participating teachers were provided with instructional materials, and BPS held whole group professional development in the integrated BPS K1 OWL and Building Blocks curricula. In addition to the whole group workshops, BPS coaches provide customized on-site support to all the teachers, a crucial component of the project’s support structure. Concurrently, BPS and Thrive in 5 are holding monthly meetings for the directors of the participating early education and care programs. These meetings also play a critical role in the project. They serve as a forum for administrative decision-making, coordination, and problem-solving, and in addition BPS has used them to showcase BPS and non-profit resources that are available to the community-based programs. The directors have expressly requested using meeting time to focus on curriculum fidelity, which is seen by K1DS leaders as an indication of the directors’ commitment to the project. As is the case in Somerville and Springfield, the directors meetings have led to the development of trust and stronger relationships and “spillover” collaboration beyond the scope of the K1DS project.

BPS has developed an effective, developmentally-appropriate prekindergarten curriculum. The district has also developed the internal capacity—a coaching staff—that supports well-compensated, educated teachers in implementing this curriculum. Boston K1DS is a pilot to determine if the model, in conjunction with a compensation boost, can be implemented in community-based classrooms with similar results. Future posts will explore the implementation of the K1 curriculum, the perspectives of participating teachers and directors, coaching practices, and other aspects of the K1DS project.

[1] All the adults at Paige Academy are referred to as Sister and Brother and their first name.

“Improbable Scholars” author David Kirp in Somerville

Somerville is graciously sharing a video of David Kirp’s talk about the Union City, NJ success story: https://vimeo.com/89543325.

Also see the links below for Kirp’s NYT op-ed and Somerville Mayor Curtatone’s article on the Universal Kindergarten Readiness plan. Here is a link to Somerville’s plan.

For additional resources on Union City see PreK-3rd’s Lasting Architecture: Successfully Serving Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Students in Union City, New Jersey (Marietta and Marietta) and Education Reform Starts Early: Lessons from New Jersey’s PreK-3rd Reform Effort s (Mead).

In his book about how one of New Jersey’s lowest-achieving school systems became a “poster child for educational reform,” David L. Kirp, a Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkley, describes a “universal approach that builds on existing strengths and a belief in public schools as the place for students to succeed.”

This discussion coincides with an innovative approach recently recommended by the City of Somerville and the Somerville Public Schools to develop a Universal Kindergarten Readiness strategy. Professor Kirp will discuss successful strategies that Somerville can adapt for its own student population.

David L. Kirp discusses Union City, NJ in the New York Times: http://nyti.ms/1mFugxY

Mayor Curtatone discusses Somerville’s new public/private kindergarten readiness strategy: http://www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/46890#more-46890

For another helpful reference on Birth-Third in New Jersey, and specifically on three Abbott communities, see Sara Mead’s paper, Education Reform Starts Early: Lessons from New Jersey’s PreK-3^rd Reform Efforts.

David Kirp
“Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools”
Wednesday, March 12, 2014 from 7:00-8:30pm
East Somerville Community School
50 Cross Street, Somerville, MA 02145