Photo: Alyssa Haywoode for Strategies for Children

Education Week magazine has released its Quality Counts 2015 report. It is a sweeping collection of articles and data that provide a thorough look at the educational opportunities and challenges that the country faces.

The subtitle of this year’s report is “Preparing to Launch: Early Childhood’s Academic Countdown,” highlighting the report’s focus on early education research and practice at the national, state, and local levels.

Noting in a press release that “support for early-childhood education has become a rare point of consensus along the ideological and political spectrum,” EdWeek points out that this consensus is only a starting point. There are still “disagreements over funding strategies and policy approaches threaten to unravel tenuous alliances that have bridged the partisan divide.”

Specifically, the report looks at how “new academic demands and accountability pressures are reshaping the learning environment for young children and the teachers and administrators serving them.” Education Week journalists explored:

– the policy debates surrounding publicly funded programs
– cutting-edge research on the early years, and,
– the academic and technological challenges that await the nation’s youngest learners 

Early Education Index

To complement the report, the Education Week Research Center “conducted an original analysis of participation in early-education programs, poverty-based gaps in enrollment, and trends over time.” Based on this work, the center developed an Early Education Index that “grades the states based on federal data across eight critical indicators.”

Unfortunately, the nation earned a grade of a D+; half of the states earned grades in “the C- to C+ range.” And the top achiever with a grade of B+ is the District of Columbia.

“Massachusetts earns a C- and ranks 27^th.”

“No state really aces the exam on early-childhood education,” Christopher Swanson, vice president of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit that publishes Education Week, said in the press release. “In fact, we find very inconsistent performance across early-childhood indicators, with the majority of states ranking in the top 10 for some areas but in the bottom 10 for others.”

He adds: “This speaks to the complexity of early education’s patchwork of laws, institutions, and programs spanning the public and private sectors.”

State of the States

There is some better news. EdWeek has also issued its “State of the States” grades based on states’ overall performance in three areas:

1. chance for success, which “captures the role of education in a person’s life, from cradle to career”
2. school financing data, “which examines educational expenditure patterns and the distribution of those funds within states using data from 2012, the most recent available,” and,
3. K-12 achievement, an assessment of “the performance of a state’s public schools against a broad set of 18 indicators capturing: current achievement levels, improvements over time, and poverty-based disparities or gaps”

“The nation receives an overall grade of C on its 2015 report card, with a score of 74.3 out of a possible 100 points,” the press release explains.

However: “Massachusetts finishes first this year with a grade of B and a score of 86.2. A perennial high-performer, the state has consistently finished among the nation’s top five,” the press release explains. The breakdown for the commonwealth:

Chance for Success: A-         National ranking 1^st

School Finance: B                 National ranking 10^th

K-12 achievement: B            National ranking 1^st

Reports for individual states can be found here along with Quality Counts reports from previous years.

Discussing the Issues 

Among the articles in the report is “Schools Seek to Strike a Balance on Rigor in Early Years,” which says that while “Fields such as psychology and neuroscience are showing that young children can understand and benefit from deep learning at the beginning of their lives,” it’s also true that “early-childhood researchers caution that the same studies showing what pupils are capable of also suggest that efforts to push down elementary-style instruction to preschool could undermine the exact cognitive development educators hope to build up.”

Another article, “Finding the Right Fit for Ed-Tech in Early Years,” explains “Preschools and early-childhood centers are likely to have technologies such as digital cameras, computers, and televisions, according to a 2012 survey by the NAEYC and other organizations.” The challenge is finding the most appropriate ways to use these devices.

To find out more, read the full report. It strives to cover the full scope of the country’s educational needs, progress, and potential.

As the report says, “while prekindergarten draws much of the attention and public money, early-childhood education includes far more than traditional preschool, day care, and other programs that support developmental and academic skills from birth to age 5.

“Increasingly, educators and policymakers view early education as a continuum that extends well into the first years of formal schooling—kindergarten through 3rd grade in particular. The stakes are higher than ever, raised by the advent of the Common Core State Standards and rising demands for academic rigor in the schooling of younger children.”