Getting Bigger and Better: Lessons Learned Implementing New York City's Pre-K for All

• In Event: 66.045 - The Road to High-Quality Early Care and Education: Lessons Learned in Going to Scale

Abstract

Informed by significant involvement in the planning and implementation of the New York’s Pre-K for All program, this panelist will provide a practitioner’s perspective and explore the opportunities and challenges that have emerged in the program’s first two years. The presentation will emphasize the role of data and research in supporting the program’s rapid implementation at scale.

Begun in 2013, the Pre-K for All initiative provides universal pre-k for 4-year olds in New York City. The program has been brought to scale quickly, expanding enrollment in full-day pre-kindergarten by almost 50,000 children in two years (Morris, n.d.), and it employs quality standards that are comparable to those of exemplary state preschool programs (Kirp, 2016). The Department of Education has administered two widely-used quality assessment tools in a subset of Pre-K for All classrooms: the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale- Revised (ECERS-R) and the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). Data from these tools indicate that the quality of assessed classrooms is comparable to that of New Jersey’s widely-lauded Abbott preschool program in its early years (Morris, n.d.); over three-quarters of all classrooms received a 3.4 or higher out of 6 on ECERS-R, which has been correlated with improved student outcomes (Le, 2015).

New York City has also undertaken a broad array of formative assessment and continuous quality improvement activities. Working with New York University researchers, the Department of Education has adopted a system of rapid response data collection, analysis, and interpretation that provides timely and relevant information for use in improving the program. For example, working closely with researchers, the program devised a strategy to use CLASS and ECERS data, structured end-of-year visits, data on economic need, and survey information to make decisions about how to allocate and differentiate support to programs, and then adjust based on field information during the school year. These formative assessment strategies have enabled the program to continuously reflect and improve as it expands.

New York City’s rapid rollout of a large-scale early childhood education program has generated both rich insights and continued questions about strategies for successfully implementing universal pre-k at scale. The city has encountered— and in many cases, addressed—several pressing implementation challenges; chief among these, the Department of Education and researchers from New York University have designed effective strategies for the collection, analysis, and reporting of child assessment and quality classroom data, producing generalizable insights for other contexts.

Author

• Josh Wallack, New York City Department of Education