Early Elementary Education Years Are Important for Public Policy

The early elementary years – from kindergarten through third grade – are particularly important ones in children’s schooling. Parents and teachers know that children acquire new skills and knowledge rapidly during these years. Research shows that average annual learning gains for children in grades K-2 are dramatically greater than those for subsequent years of school. Moreover, the outcomes of early elementary education, particularly whether or not a child can read proficiently by third grade, are a powerful predictor of later school and life outcomes.

Yet you’d never know that from our current public policies, which largely ignore the early elementary years. Instead, these years occupy a sort of no-man’s land between early childhood efforts and K-12 school reform efforts, which tend to focus on children in later, tested grades.

Under the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, reauthorized last year as the Every Student Succeeds Act, states are required to test students annually in grades three to eight and to use student test scores to inform ratings of school performance. Testing requirements begin in third grade because the kind of standardized tests used in later grades don’t work with young children, and existing assessments that are appropriate for younger kids aren’t reliable enough to be used to judge school performance.

But this means that, by the time states look at how well schools are serving children, it’s much too late. By third grade, low-performing schools have left many children so far behind they never catch up. Moreover, the focus on tested grades creates incentives for schools and districts to focus attention and resources (including the best teachers) on later grades, even though focusing on the early grades might lead to better long-term results.

This lack of attention to the early grades is particularly at odds with the growing public and policymaker recognition of the importance of early childhood education. However, most early childhood efforts focus on improving children’s learning before they get to school, ignoring the early grades. To be sure, improving children’s school readiness can lead to better early elementary results. But maximizing the benefit of preschool gains requires changes in how early elementary teachers teach, to build on what children learned in preschool rather than making up for what they missed, and to bring elementary teaching approaches more in line with how young children learn best. Neither current early childhood initiatives nor K-12 accountability systems create incentives for school leaders to focus on improving early grades teaching.

The No Child Left Behind Act, the current education law’s predecessor, did balance the emphasis on tested grades in K-12 accountability systems by creating a $1 billion program focused on improving the quality of K-3 literacy instruction. Although the program, Reading First, was far from perfect, it encouraged states, districts and schools to pay more attention to the early grades, and evidence suggests that Reading First improved the quality of early reading instruction. But the program was defunded late in the 2000s, due to a combination of political factors (Democrats didn’t like the signature Bush administration program) and a deeply flawed evaluation that produced disappointing results. The Every Student Succeeds Act includes no similar focus on K-3 students.

Yet even as the Every Student Succeeds Act codifies federal inattention to the early elementary years, it creates new opportunities for states to pay more attention to them. Under the law, states have much more flexibility in how they design school accountability systems, including additional measures of “school quality or student success” along with test scores, to measure school performance. Earlier this year, the Ounce of Prevention’s Elliott Regenstein authored a paper arguing that new state accountability systems should pay much more attention to how schools serve children in grades preschool-3. He proposed including a measure of instructional quality as the “non-academic” indicator in state accountability systems, selecting instructional quality measures that can be used in both grades K-2 and later grades, and disaggregating instructional quality measures across grades. This approach would ensure that information about grades K-2 is included in state accountability systems. Giving K-2 instructional quality independent weight in these systems would also push school, district and state leaders to focus specifically on the quality of children’s learning experiences in the early elementary grades. In a recent Bellwether Education Partners paper, my colleague Chad Aldeman argues for including grades K-2 through holistic, on-site school quality reviews that could be incorporated into state accountability systems.

To be clear, neither Aldeman nor Regenstein is proposing that states extend the kind of test-based accountability used in later grades into the early elementary years. That’s both a bad idea given the inherent difficulties in testing young children (and weaknesses of existing assessment tools), and a political non-starter in the current anti-testing climate. Instead, Aldeman argues that, while tests should continue to remain a central indicator in school accountability systems, they should no longer be the only, or even the primary, measure. Rather, rigorous assessments of the quality of a school’s instructional program, as measured by trained, objective reviewers, should be the final arbiter of school performance. That’s a big shift from current accountability systems, but it has a lot of potential benefits: It would be fairer than current systems that judge schools primarily based on student test scores, and it would provide useful feedback to help schools improve.

The problem, of course, is that while the Every Student Succeeds Act creates the flexibility for states to design systems in this way, it doesn’t create any incentive for them to do so. And creating accountability systems that take early grade quality into account will require both more intentional design and likely more resources – a hard sell for state policymakers dealing with reform fatigue and limited budgets. But, just as helping kids succeed in the early grades can reduce costs for future remediation later, putting in the time and effort to get K-2 accountability right now will put states on a better path toward improving long-term student outcomes.