Giving Compass' Take:

• Anna D. Johnson, Deborah A. Phillips, and Owen Schochet provide a roadmap for creating effective pre-K evaluations. 

• How can funders support, evaluate, and help to improve existing pre-K efforts? 

• Learn about the quality of pre-K in the U.S.

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that one of the best ways to build a productive and prosperous society is to start early – that is, before children enter kindergarten – in building children’s foundation for learning, health, and positive behavior. From the U.S. Chambers of Commerce to the National Academy of Sciences, those planning our country’s workforce insist we will need more people, with more diverse skills, to meet the challenges of the future.

A wealth of evidence supports continued efforts to improve and scale up pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs.

As you prepare to evaluate a pre-K program, we invite you to draw upon this practice- and research-informed expertise to design early education settings that better support early learning and development.

This roadmap offers direction to states and school districts at varying stages of designing, developing, implementing, and overseeing pre-K programs. It is organized around seven key questions, briefly summarized in this introduction and discussed in more detail in the full re-port. These questions are best addressed as an integrated series of considerations when designing and launching an evaluation so that it produces the most useful information for you and your colleagues across the country. We summarize these key questions, below.

  • What do you want to learn from an evaluation?
  • What kind of program are you evaluating?
  • Is the evaluation design strong enough to produce reliable evidence?
  • Which children, and how many, should you include in your evaluation?
  • What are the most important data to collect?
  • How will you get the data?
  • What else should you consider before you start?

Read the full article about pre-K evaluation by Anna D. Johnson, Deborah A. Phillips, and Owen Schochet at Brookings.