Strategy 3: Improve Accountability for Early Childhood and Development Programs. 3.1 Develop a comprehensive and unified data collection system for early childhood education and development programs. As the first point of entry into the K-12 educational system, early
Potential Policy Actors:
childhood and development programs should also contribute to
educational progress of each student. Promising efforts by groups
Federal legislators and/or policymakers
such as the Early Childhood Data Collaborative recognize the
State legislators
importance of connecting early childhood data systems to
State education agencies
longitudinal data systems already being developed and used by states to track individual students over the course of their
and boards of education Local education agencies
learning careers. While implementation should be led by the states, the federal government can offer funding to support implementation and maintenance of the system. Localities should be responsible for ensuring data entry and interpretation training for users.
CASE STUDY The Oregon Department of Education is a model for an early education data system. After having received two previous State Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grants, Oregon received an additional award in 2009 for develop Project ALDER, a program that expands and enhances the state’s already existing educational data collection system to enable stakeholders to examine data on student progress from early childhood education to career. Some of the expected outcomes of the project will be to “ Design and implement K-12 teacher-student linkage components that allow subsequent reporting to support instructional decision making and potential analysis of teacher-level variables that may impact student achievement at the elementary and secondary levels; to develop policies, procedures and partnerships needed to expand collection and integration of early childhood, postsecondary success and workforce data; and to design and implement an active multi-state and multi-sector data exchange with the states of Washington, Hawaii and Idaho through the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE).”
3.2 Create evaluations assessing the quality of early childhood education and development programs. Although children are not assessed on academic achievement measures, early childhood education and development
Potential Policy Actors: Federal legislators and/or policymakers
programs themselves should be subject to performance
State legislators
measures that determine and help to maintain their quality. By
State education agencies
developing standard measures of the content and performance of these programs, we can establish nationwide comparability and quality control among programs in and between states.
2020 Vision Roadmap: A Pre-K Through Postsecondary Blueprint for Educational Success
systems that collect and maintain data on the developmental and
45