Head Start monitoring assesses recipients' compliance with requirements governing Head Start programs, including those specified in the Head Start Act (original authorizing legislation in 1965 and its subsequent amendments, most recently in 2007); HSPPS; and other applicable federal, state, and local regulations. HSPPS include provisions…

Quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) is important for young children's holistic healthy development. As ECCE scales, contextually relevant and feasible measurement is needed to inform policy and programs on strengths and areas for improvement. However, few measures have been designed for use across diverse contexts. Drawing on…

ECEC settings are children's first contact with early education, and ECEC teachers are expected to encourage and support children's early literacy development. This study aims to pilot test the self-assessment tool Social Language Environment -- Domain, (SLE-D), in order to gain more knowledge about teachers' strategies when teaching literacy.…

Leaders, policymakers, and systems developers seek to improve early childhood programs through data driven decision-making. Data can be useful for informing continuous quality improvement efforts at the classroom and program level and for creating support for workforce development at the system level. Early childhood program leaders use…

As states consider non-academic measures of school quality for their accountability plans under the Every Student Succeeds Act, few are choosing to focus on the school climate in which students learn. That's not a surprise, given concerns about the validity and usefulness of existing climate surveys. However, the authors argue, a recent study…

High-quality pre-K sets children on a path for success in kindergarten and beyond. Yet most children in the United States do not attend high-quality programs, with particularly pronounced gaps in quality for children from families with low incomes, dual language learners, Black children, and Latino children. Ensuring equitable access to…

The standard scoring of the CLASS PreK produces three domain scores that are widely used in research, practice and policy. Despite these domains being based on developmental theory and research, limited empirical evidence exists for the three-domain structure as operationalized in the CLASS PreK. Using the 2009 and 2014 Head Start Family and Child…

The purpose of this paper is to: (1) examine the research base on three types of assessments currently collected in some states and by some institutions of higher education (IHE); and (2) consider the degree to which these assessments can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of programs preparing teachers to work with students with disabilities.…