Addressing Quandaries in Early Education through Research Practice Partnerships

This panel examines research on early education from two research practice partnerships, the Baltimore Education Research Consortium (BERC) with Baltimore City Schools and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Stanford-SFUSD Partnership with San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and Stanford University in San Francisco, California. First, it explores how BERC convened the Early Education Data Collaborative (EEDC), a collection of Baltimore agencies that provide services to children from birth through the early elementary years whose goal is to understand how different pathways to kindergarten may be associated with kindergarten readiness and later learning outcomes. Second, it explores a line of research by a Stanford University professor and her team of doctoral students working with SFUSD's early education department. The Stanford team worked with SFUSD to establish and test a new Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) early literacy assessment aligned to K-12 measures, and also established a kindergarten readiness indicator that has been used by SFUSD over the past three years. The Baltimore sample included 11,897 kindergarten students across two cohorts with matched program and birth records. The San Francisco Transitional Kindergarten study examines literacy outcomes, as measured by the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System, of Kindergarteners enrolled in SFUSD in the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 school years. The sample contains 6,174 students, 5% of which (309 students) had enrolled in the TK program. Another 17% (1,051 students) attended the district's Pre-K program. The remainder of the students had the option to attend a Pre-K program offered by San Francisco. Both studies examine the use of longitudinal data sets from large urban school districts with robust early education programs. The Baltimore study provides an analysis comparing kindergarten readiness measures for the three most common pathways to kindergarten: Baltimore City Schools Pre-K, Baltimore City Head Start, and both programs. Preliminary results from the first cohort of students from the Baltimore study show when the mother's background and the circumstances of the child's birth are accounted for (Model 2), students with prior experience in only Head Start are more likely to be ready for kindergarten than students who did not attend either program (odds ratio: 1.260; 95% CI: 1.016, 1.563). When the mother's background and the circumstances of the child's birth are accounted for (Model 2), children who attended both Head Start and BCPS Pre-K are nearly four times as likely to be identified as ready for kindergarten as children from neither program (odds ratio: 3.904; 95% CI: 3.058, 4.983). Children who attended only BCPS Pre-K were three times as likely to be ready for kindergarten than children who attended neither program (odds ratio: 3.314; 95% CI: 2.744, 4.009) when family background is taken into account. Preliminary results from the SFUSD Transitional Kindergarten (TK) study indicate that the program may have increased fall student literacy outcomes. Fall results, however, indicate that TK students are not more likely to be able to read books. Four data tables are appended.