A Systemic Approach to Aligning and Delivering Early Learning

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Aligning Early Learning Services: A Brief Retrospective

Transition and Alignment Efforts

Efforts to create links and continuity between the institutions that serve young children are not new. Understanding why they evolved and how they fared, however briefly, is an important prelude to understanding the need for and nature of the contemporary reconceptualization of early learning services, as presented in this volume. Dating back to criticisms of the inability of the Head Start Program in the United States to enable its participants to sustain the gains made into the earliest years of schooling (Rivlin and Timpane 1975), continuity and transition efforts burgeoned in the United States.4 Learning from these endeavors, attempts to create activities that ease children’s transition into formal school have taken hold, typically not part of national policies, but as programmatic efforts. Such efforts take the form of preparatory visits, parent and teacher training, and shared student reports (Ahtola et al. 2011; Mow, Jones, and People 2015; OECD 2017b).

These “transition” activities—affecting only some children, only some of the time—have been superseded by work that promotes more comprehensive and durable approaches to alignment. Rather than focus on one-time, often intermittent activities, more sustained approaches are taking hold. Pedagogical alignment calls for the alignment of curriculum, standards, assessments, teacher competencies, certification requirements, and compensation (Kagan 2010; Kagan and Kauerz 2012; Shuey et al. 2019), irrespective of where young children receive services. For example, a common pedagogical orientation in the form of a national framework characterizes children’s early learning experiences in economies as diverse as Australia; England; Finland; Hong Kong SAR, China; and Singapore (Kagan and Landsberg 2019).

Looping—in which teachers teach in a preschool setting one year and follow some or all of their children into formal school—is growing in popularity. ECEC certification requirements are being aligned with schools, and funding models for early learning are adopting the school funding formula (NIEER 2019). The development of individual learning plans that are designed in ECEC programs and move with the children into the schools are operative in England and Finland. Indeed, an entire movement aligning preschool through third grade is striving to foster more penetrating and durable alignment (Atchison and Diffey 2018b; Kauerz 2010). Moreover, multisectoral efforts that link ECEC programs to health, mental health, and behavioral support services are under way (Kagan and Landsberg 2019).

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Alignment Realities

Despite these worthwhile efforts, systemic fragmentation between the ECEC and education systems remains both an indisputable and a challenging reality, in part because of the interventions themselves. Most efforts to redress systemic schisms are highly idiosyncratic, isolated, and sporadic; they are largely unevaluated, trial efforts, working to establish proof of concept. Lacking broad-scale fiscal support, these efforts may be locally designed and engineered to honor local traditions, histories, and cultures, but therefore remain difficult to generalize both regionally and nationally. Moreover, and transcending the direct services themselves, the interventions are often constrained by the limited attention accorded to the systems’ distinct and terribly misaligned infrastructural supports. For example, few alignment efforts transcend a programmatic focus to address the systems’ inconsistencies in teacher preparation and certification, program monitoring, funding, and governance, to mention a few.

The alignment challenge is manifested in several ways. Limited coordination across sectors is a common challenge across countries; in many countries where infrastructure efforts are under way, staffing remains insufficient to overcome alignment challenges. Romania, for example, has coordinated offices of early education but has employed only limited staff (Adams et al. 2019) to enable comprehensive systemic alignment. In short, a major problem, and one more fully addressed below, is that most current alignment efforts do not reflect systemic thinking and consequently do not address the infrastructural elements that could promote durable alignment.

Positioning Early Learning Services

Caught in the vortex of the embryonic ECEC system and the established education system, where do early learning services fit? And, more important, how should their alignment with both systems be conceptualized and planned for? Three principles, each with distinct intentions, guide this chapter’s responses to this seminal question. First is a framing principle that situates early learning: early learning services are not the sole purview of either the ECEC or the education system; rather, they transcend and are highly pertinent to both systems. Second is a conceptual principle: because early learning services typically sit at the confluence of two major systems, systems thinking must be understood as a prelude to their alignment. Third is an operational principle: because early learning services not only shape but are shaped by how they are implemented, consideration must be given to the existing properties of each system, with the goal of honoring each system’s thinking and context.

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Regarding the first principle—framing or situating early learning— early learning services fit squarely in the province of both the ECEC and education systems. Portrayed graphically in figure 6.3, it is not conceptualized as a separate system; rather, as early learning services advance, they must be a part of both the ECEC and the education systems. The position in each of these two host systems may vary across locales and time. For example, in country X, early learning services may be more closely aligned with the ECEC system whereas, in country Y, they may be more associated with the education system. Moreover, given the emerging nature of ECEC systems, such associations within any given country may shift as more consolidated approaches to ECEC evolve. Although not a single system, early learning services must seek to be represented in both and to align both. It is the bridge that spans and helps link the ECEC and education systems.

The second principle, one that is more conceptual, acknowledges the essentiality of systems thinking to the advancement of early learning services. It is predicated on the reality that programmatic efforts to support transitions, as noted above, have been neither widespread nor remarkably successful. To prevent such intermittent approaches, early learning services will need to address both components of a system—its programs and its infrastructure—with a heavy emphasis on the infrastructure elements or building blocks enumerated in figure 6.3. For example, early learning services will need unique standards, measures of implementation and accomplishment, professional capacity, and family and community engagement at pivotal times. These programs will need fiscal and governance support, as well. The point is that, in designing effective early learning, its advocates must look well beyond the direct services and consider ways that the infrastructure for early learning can be either developed or infused into the existing ECEC and education systems. Although early learning services do not need to develop a separate systemic structure, they must be conceptualized systemically with consideration for how systemic functions will be advanced through attention to infrastructure elements.

Third, operationalizing early learning services cannot be understood as the simple insertion of programs or activities into one or both systems, or even picking elements from each system that best suit early learning’s intentions. It is not about the “schoolification” of the early learning curriculum or only about shaping primary pedagogy to better resemble that practiced in quality ECEC programs. Rather, systemic alignment demands that the context help shape the intervention. Doing this well means that early learning advocates must understand and assess the philosophies, internationalities, and capacity associated with both the ECEC and education systems, noting how they do, or can be contoured to, support early