Giving Compass' Take:

• Susanna Loeb discusses how regulation and Quality Rating and Improvement Systems can work together to improve early education. 

• How can philanthropists help spread the use of voluntary evaluation programs? 

• Read about creating pipelines for early learning teacher workforce. 

Early childhood education in the United States is tangle of options—varying in quality, price, structure, and a range of other dimensions. In part as a result, children start kindergarten having had very different experiences in care and very different opportunities to develop the skills and dispositions that will serve them well during school.

Systematic differences across groups by income, race, ethnicity, home language, and geographic location are particularly troubling because inequalities that appear early are often sustained through school and affect prospects throughout life.

Convincing research has demonstrated that high-quality early childhood programs can reduce these differences across groups.

However, a range of research also shows that many early childhood programs do not have positive long-term effects.

Regulations—a form of direct control—are one option that have been used widely in both early childhood and K-12 education. With regulations, governments set minimum class sizes, establish education requirements for teachers and safety requirements for classrooms. Regulations, because they are by nature rigid, tend to set floors on quality instead of pushing towards improvement and making use of opportunities.

Outcomes-based accountability has come to preschools in the form of Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS). QRIS give ratings to early childhood education and care settings based on a variety of measures.

Overall, we still do not know the effects of QRIS on children’s long-run trajectories and on the substantial differences in early childhood learning opportunities across groups. Nonetheless this new research demonstrates that a well-designed QRIS system can both encourage programs to improve and provide parents with information that they value in making choices for their children’s care.

Combined with regulations that set an acceptable floor for quality, these programs can help to create a higher quality early education system that allows for some diversity of offerings as well as the local control and parental choice, that have been hallmarks—whether for better or for worse—of the US education system and, particularly, the US early education system.

Read the full article about early education accountability by Susanna Loeb at Brookings.