1. Massachusetts Early Childhood Support Organization (ECSO): Year 3 Annual Evaluation Report
- Author
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Abt Associates, Inc., Kerry G. Hofer, and Wendy Wei
- Abstract
The Massachusetts Early Childhood Support Organization (ECSO) initiative seeks to improve the quality of early education programs (EEPs) by supporting leaders to strengthen their organizational climate, provide job-embedded professional learning opportunities for educators, support the use of instructional curriculum and child assessments in their program, and engage in continuous quality improvement. This report presents findings from an ongoing implementation and impact evaluation of the ECSO initiative conducted by Abt Associates, an independent research firm. In the 2022-23 school year, 30 similar EEPs that were not receiving ECSO supports were recruited to serve as the first cohort of comparison programs for the impact evaluation, a quasi-experimental design (QED) that will ultimately involve two cohorts of ECSO-supported EEPs and two cohorts of comparison programs. The interim findings in this report focus primarily on data collected from ECSOs, participating Cohort 3 EEPs, and the comparison EEPs in the 2022-23 school year, including surveys, classroom observations, and administrative data -- data collected after the ECSO EEPs had experienced their first year of supports. Similar data from Cohort 2 after two years of supports are provided for context and to offer insight into what might be expected to happen in the QED after ECSO EEPs experience their second year of the initiative. Although the findings are interim because the full QED relies on data from an additional cohort of treatment and comparison programs onboarded in the summer of 2023 and will not be completed until both cohorts experience the full two years of initiative supports, this report sheds light on the initiative's impact so far.
- Published
- 2023