The Role of Research-Practice Partnerships in Supporting System-Wide Reform in Early Childhood Education: Lessons From Louisiana

• In Event: Research-Practice Partnerships for Quality Improvement in Early Education: Best Practices and Creative Solutions

Abstract

Over the past five years, Louisiana has embarked on an ambitious effort to overhaul the state’s fragmented early care and education landscape, provide all children with high-quality early childhood learning opportunities, and help parents identify high-quality care options.  In 2012, Louisiana passed a law (Act 3, 2012) charging the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to unify state preschool, Head Start and child care programs into a cohesive statewide system. Unlike most states, where separate agencies manage each ECE sector, the Louisiana Department of Education (LDoE) now directly manages and operates licensed child care as well as public and non-public preschool, and they also set licensing and performance expectations for Head Start. The centrality of a single department in administering or regulating all publicly-funded ECE programs in a state has been instrumental in aggressively moving towards a more cohesive, early childhood system.

The centerpiece of Louisiana’s efforts is a unified QRIS, which is mandated for all publicly-funded ECE providers and focuses nearly-exclusively on the importance of high-quality teacher-child interactions.  Louisiana chose to focus on these interactions based on strong evidence that emotionally supportive and cognitively stimulating interactions are foundational to children’s emotional, social, language and early academic development during the early childhood years. They now conduct two observations per year, in every publicly-funded classroom in the state using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) a widely-used observational tool. Through a set of new policies, the state is aiming to focus the entire ECE system on effective teacher-child interactions. For instance, child care tax credits are now tied to CLASS scores and pre- and in-service teacher training is being redesigned to better support teachers’ knowledge of engaging teacher-child interactions. 

A unique feature of Louisiana’s reform efforts is their leaderships’ commitment to iterative refinement of policy through empirical research. Since 2013, researchers at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education (UVA) have built a successful  research-practice partnership with LDoE focused on conducting research that both informs Louisiana’s reform efforts and addresses timely, policy-relevant questions about the role of accountability in systems-level reforms in ECE. Over this time, UVA has conducted analyses with administrative data provided by the state as well as through a large-scale data collection  tracking directors,  teachers, parents and children  in 90 preschools across 5 diverse Louisiana parishes.

Findings from these studies have led to refinements in the states’ quality rating approach and to the development of teacher and program surveys now widely disseminated in the state.
In this panel, Bassok, who leads the UVA research team, and Conway, who heads up Louisiana’s early childhood reform efforts will discuss the benefits of research-practice partnerships for both groups.  We will outline the characteristics of our partnership that have been most instrumental to creating a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship, and will address how we navigated some of the inherent tensions that arise given the differing needs and timelines of each group.

Authors

• Daphna Bassok, University of Virginia

• Jenna Conway, Louisiana Department of Education