Developing comprehensive 0-8 systems: aligning ECD and primary school education and care

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday II)

Group Submission Type: Refereed Round-Table Session

Proposal

The first eight years of children’s lives have a long-term impact on their future health, educational attainment, and well-being. Global research has changed the discourse around early childhood development such that it now considered essential for life-long growth and success. Over the past decade governments around the world have increasingly expressed the intention to expand and improve ECD service provision. Yet systems for expanding and institutionalizing ECD remain weak and fragmented in many contexts, and the sustainability of efforts is uncertain.

This panel focuses on a set of innovations taking place in the United States that have implications for developing ECD systems in low- and middle-income countries that struggle with fragmentation of services for children and families. A number of communities across the United States are independently converging on a model to improve the quality and continuity of children’s experiences across the first eight years of their lives.

These prenatal through grade 3 (P–3) initiatives are responses to several fundamental needs around which there is a clear consensus in the research community, both in the United States and elsewhere. Although the U.S. is a higher-income country over all, 43% of U.S. children below the age of six live in families with low or below-poverty incomes. As in most low- and middle-income countries, there are large opportunity and achievement gaps between low-income children and their more affluent peers. ECD can play a major role in closing these gaps, but its impact is limited due to uneven quality in prekindergarten classrooms, early elementary school teaching practices that do not build on prekindergarten gains, and high levels of fragmentation across the education, health, and social service programs that serve young children and their families.

In response to these challenges, state governments and local communities across the U.S. are supporting initiatives to improve children’s early learning and care experiences throughout the P–3 continuum. The most advanced P–3 initiatives are comprehensive in nature and aim to improve quality, coordination, and continuity by:
• Improving teaching and learning practices in accordance with child development
• Strengthening family engagement and partnership
• Coordinating comprehensive child and family health and social service supports

In some cases comprehensive P–3 initiatives center around a primary school that functions as a hub for both families and early childhood providers. In others, communities form community-wide partnerships to improve—in systematic ways—the programs and services that serve young children and their families, including home-visiting programs, community-based preschools, early childhood mental health consultation, the transition to kindergarten, and the quality of teaching and learning in elementary schools. In both models communities are creating an infrastructure to improve quality on both sides of the early childhood—primary school divide, align practices across the two settings, and provide coordinated support services to children and their families.

This panel will include a presentation on a national study of U.S. leading edge comprehensive P–3 initiatives and early evidence of their impact; presentations from two communities described in the study—one a school as hub model and one a community-wide partnership; and an analysis of the prospects and anticipated challenges involved in adapting P–3 initiatives for use in resource-lean, low and middle income countries.

The goal of comprehensive P–3 initiatives is that all children learn and thrive. P–3 partnerships achieve this goal by creating more effective primary schools and early childhood programs and strengthening families and communities. Countries that are developing ECD can adapt principles and practices found in P–3 initiatives for use in their contexts, institutionalize these practices early in the development of their systems, and thereby promote inclusive sustainable social and economic development.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Individual Presentations

• Learning from Leading Edge Comprehensive P–3 Initiatives - David L Jacobson, Education Development Center (EDC)

• Multnomah County’s School as P–3 Hub Model - Brooke Chilton-Timmons, Multnomah County SUN Service System

• Building a Citywide P–3 System in Cambridge, MA - Lei-Anne Ellis, Cambridge Public Schools; David L Jacobson, Education Development Center (EDC)

• Learning from the P-3 Experience: Possibilities in Resource-Lean Countries - Carrie Louise Lewis, Education Development Center (EDC)