Education Next: Study Shows High Quality Teaching in Early Childhood Education Closes Achievement Gap, but Not Enough Programs Provide It.

STANFORD, Calif. -- In a targeted study of children who are, on average, behind their peers at age four and further behind by 1st grade, Robert C. Pianta, professor of education at the University of Virginia, found that learning gaps can be eliminated for children in high-quality classrooms who receive strong instructional and emotional support from teachers. The new study is described in the winter issue of Education Next, released this week.

Pianta and a team of researchers examined the effects on two groups of at-risk children: those whose mothers had less than a four-year college degree and those who had displayed significant behavioral, social, or academic problems. Children from low-education households who were placed in high-quality classrooms achieved at the same level as those whose mothers had a college degree, and children displaying previous problem behavior showed achievement and adjustment levels identical to children who had no history of problems. At-risk children who did not receive these supports did not show such gains.

These results are consistent with other studies that show a substantial increase (up to 50 percent of a standard deviation on standardized achievement tests) in achievement in high-quality classrooms, with greater effects often accruing to children with higher levels of risk and disadvantage. (The size of the well known racial gap in test-score performance is between one-half and one standard deviation.)

Few of the nation's highest-need children, however, are currently receiving the kind of quality early education experience they require, despite rising participation rates in early education programs, warns Pianta.

Pianta's analysis of two recent large-scale early education studies -- the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (NICHD SECCYD) and the National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL) Multi-State Pre-K Study -- confirms this.

The 11-state NCEDL study revealed that, even in state-sponsored pre-K programs staffed with credentialed teachers with bachelors' degrees, variations in the quality of teaching were considerable, as was also the case in Pianta and his colleagues' analysis of1st- and3rd-grade classrooms in the NICHD study.

Among pre-K classrooms in the study, only about 25 percent of those serving four-year-olds provided students with high levels of emotional and instructional support. And preschoolers lucky enough to have such support in pre-K are not highly likely to be enrolled in similarly high-quality classrooms in kindergarten or 1st grade. In those grades, too, only about one-quarter of classrooms are providing the instructional and emotional nurturing that young children require.

Because the standard measures of teacher quality -- degrees and experience -- are not reliable proxies for what teachers do in the classroom and tend not to be consistently related to gains in achievement, policies that mandate accumulating course credits are not likely to produce teachers with high-quality classroom skills or necessarily raise student achievement, unless those credits are tied to knowledge and skill about implementing instruction in actual classrooms.

"The odds are stacked against children getting the kind of early education experiences that close gaps," explains Pianta. "Most children in pre-K, K, and 1st-grade classrooms are exposed to quite low levels of instructional support, and the quality is particularly poor. We also see this in 3rd and 5th grades in our work there -- it's a problem throughout the system that we need to solve."

To combat the uneven quality of early education instruction, Pianta has called for more effective professional development focused on the specific challenges of teaching young children: standardizing descriptions of teacher-student interactions, direct assessments of teacher and classroom tied to incentive and credentialing systems, and improved alignment of early childhood education with K-12.

Read "Preschool Is School, Sometimes" in the new issue of Education Next, now online at www.EducationNext.org.

Robert C. Pianta is a professor of education at the Curry School of Education and director of the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning at the University of Virginia.

Education Next is a scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform. Other sponsoring institutions are the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.