June 3, 2022 | Cal Matters

During the pandemic, public education became a highly contentious arena for vitriol around masking, vaccines and reopening schools. But those tensions did not culminate in a heated election for California’s top schools chief. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond...

The Importance of Formative Evaluation in California’s Universal Pre–K Rollout

Commentary authors
Anna J. Markowitz
Jade V. Marcus Jenkins
Summary

California’s plan to expand Transitional Kindergarten (TK) into a universal pre-K program for all four-year-olds is a significant investment in children and families. To ensure its success, the state should learn from research on other state pre-K programs and invest in a research infrastructure for formative evaluation. Evidence from various states, including California's TK program, highlights the benefits of quality pre-K, but challenges in implementation exist. A crucial study on Tennessee’s Statewide Voluntary Pre-K (TN-VPK) showed mixed outcomes, revealing the complexities of scaling such programs. The TN-VPK study faced limitations in data collection, making it challenging to link classroom features to children’s outcomes. California must fund a research system for ongoing data collection at the child, classroom, and school level to evaluate the implementation of its universal pre-K program. This infrastructure should focus on structural classroom features, classroom interactions, children’s experiences, and details about where children spend their non-school hours. Such an approach allows for continuous improvement and learning from both successes and challenges encountered during implementation. This investment will be crucial for California's universal pre-K program to create a high-quality educational system for its children.

May 19, 2022 | Daily Breeze

To the delight of the California School Boards Association, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s latest budget proposal has adopted what the CSBA calls “COVID attendance relief.” Newsom’s proposal would allow local educational agencies to be funded based either on their current-year average...

May 9, 2022 | The 74

A recent review of school guidance and communications from the Centers on Disease Control and Prevention argues that the federal agency failed often in its goal of providing timely, actionable information to states and districts around COVID-19 safety protocols. As...

May 4, 2022 | EdSource

The community college baccalaureate program is on the precipice of expanding in California. Program proponents say the more advanced bachelor’s degree offerings by colleges that typically offer associate degrees are key to training California’s workforce and expanding degrees among the...

April 9, 2022 | CNN

Last week, I wrote about the ongoing debate over whether the SAT and ACT exacerbate the larger inequality in colleges. After the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reinstated its SAT/ACT requirement, I looked at the argument that standardized test haters might...

April 6, 2022 | Attendance Works

For more than 100 years, California has funded schools based on the average number of students who attend each day. But as attendance has plummeted during the pandemic, some policymakers and education leaders have proposed to change that. Instead, they...

April 4, 2022 | The Learning Counsel

In a Community School Policy Brief by Hayin Kimner, Policy Analysis for California Education, Kimner says, “An effective community school recognizes that student success does not rely solely on the expertise of instructional professionals but is also the result of...