Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona – ��

Alarming New Numbers: COVID ‘Erased’ Decade of Growth in US Preschool Enrollment

Linda Jacobson — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 04:02:00 +0000

Enrollment in state pre-K programs fell for the first time in two decades after a period of steady growth, according to a new report focusing on the 2020-21 school year.

Before the pandemic, states were serving 44% of 4-year-olds. Now they might not reach 40% over the next 10 years, the report found.

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“The pandemic erased an entire decade of progress in preschool enrollment,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, which released the report. He added that it was “minority children and children from low-income families who lost out most.”

As in past years, this year’s pre-K report provides an overview of how many children states serve, how much they spend per child and the quality features of programs that support children’s learning and development.

But this 19th edition also conveys the extent of the pandemic’s blow to states’ pre-K systems. Concerns about COVID and reluctance to participate in a virtual program topped the reasons thousands of parents decided to skip pre-K.

“It’s unacceptable to go back to where we were in March 2020,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. “Our littlest learners need more.”

Cardona and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra joined the Institute’s Monday call with reporters, signaling the Biden administration’s push for a larger federal role in public pre-K.

‘First order of business‘

Becerra highlighted passage of the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, which many states have used to offset state budget cuts, pay pre-K teachers and keep programs open in spite of enrollment loss. Without federal relief, spending cuts to pre-K would have been much worse, the report said.

But Biden began his administration with a pledge to do much more — provide universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds. When last year’s annual report was released, early education advocates were still hopeful Democrats in Congress would pass Build Back Better, a domestic spending package that included $400 billion for child care and pre-K.

Momentum stalled, and the war in Ukraine and inflation have pushed some of the president’s education priorities aside. The Senate education committee recently held to draw attention to families’ struggles to find quality, affordable programs for young children, but a divided Congress is unlikely to address the issues soon.

Republican leaders don’t agree with Biden’s plan to address those challenges. Their would expand the existing federal block grant for child care. Democrats are still pushing to pass without Republicans’ support.

State pre-K enrollment fell at least 30% last year in Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Kentucky and Nevada (National Institute for Early Education Research)

Barnett said he hopes early-childhood legislation is the Senate’s “first order of business” this week, and added in the media call that the House plan, which passed in November “could find widespread support in Congress.”

Last Thursday, Biden returned to the topic at a Democratic fundraiser in Seattle, citing research findings on high-quality pre-K and the benefits of young children attending school — “not daycare.”

Overall, state funding declined for pre-K for the first time since 2014, by 3% — almost $255 million, adjusted for inflation. Twenty-six states cut state funding by at least 2%, including those with long-running universal pre-K programs, like Florida, Georgia and Oklahoma.

Arkansas, however, was among the 14 states that increased spending by at least 2%. The state kept its Arkansas Better Chance classrooms open the whole year. Individual classrooms only closed if there was a COVID outbreak.

“We continued to push through,” said Lori Bridges, director of early childhood programs for the Arkansas Department of Education. While enrollment fell by about 2,800 children at the beginning of the year, parents gradually became more comfortable with safety procedures, Bridges said, and by the end of the year, 87% of the slots were filled.

The report includes Arkansas among the 10 states “within striking distance” of serving at least 70% of their low-income 4-year-olds. The state, which targets its program to children in poverty, served over 10,400 4-year-olds last year, and would need to enroll about 8,600 more to reach 70%.

Federal funding for universal pre-K, Bridges said, would allow the state to offer free pre-K to middle class families, but she added that with limited staffing and classroom space, her state currently couldn’t implement such an expansion even if it had the funds to do it. “There would have to be some kind of phase-in,” she said.

States Still Waiting on Ed Department Guidance to Restart School Accountability

Linda Jacobson — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 20:01:00 +0000

The 2021-22 school year is nearly half over and some state officials say they’re still waiting for guidance from the U.S. Department of Education on how to restart the process of identifying schools most in need of assistance and setting expectations for how they should improve.

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Though assessment issues came up last week in a conversation with state superintendents at a Council of Chief State School Officers policy forum, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona didn’t address a burning question for many state officials — how to meet the accountability requirements under the Every Student Succeeds Act after two years of testing disruptions.

“In some cases we simply don’t have the data to calculate accountability scores using normal business rules,” said Georgia Department of Education spokeswoman Meghan Frick. “That will necessitate some adjustments.”

State assessments were cancelled in 2020. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Education waived the requirement that states test 95 percent of students. And in both years, states were exempted from publicly sharing which schools did not meet standards and how officials planned to turn them around. Some leaders and experts seized on the pause in testing and accountability as an opportunity to rethink the role of standardized assessments in determining school quality. But education advocates and think tanks argue that the disruption in learning due to the pandemic makes it even more important to identify and get help to schools that need it most.

“There’s still no clarity from the feds about how they expect testing to proceed — or not — in spring 2022,” said Dale Chu, a senior visiting fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “It’s worrisome.”

The department did not respond to requests for a comment.

Experts said they don’t expect the department to issue any more testing-related waivers. Dan Farley, the Oregon Department of Education’s director of assessment, said he’s “awaiting guidance regarding accountability that will largely maintain prior expectations” in place before the pandemic.

Under the law, states are required to test students in reading, math and science. They must share the results on state report cards and identify the schools that score in the bottom 5 percent in the state as well as those in which a demographic group, such as Black students or English learners, consistently performs poorly. States then have to get those schools headed in the right direction, using strategies that can range from hiring consultants to replacing teachers and administrators.

But even if states resume testing 95 percent of students this year, as federal law requires, some officials still wonder how states will measure school improvement since the 2018-19 school year. In some states last year, large proportions of parents opted their children out of testing or students didn’t take tests because they were still in remote learning.

In South Carolina, test participation during the 2020-21 school year fell to 87 percent, compared to 99 percent before the pandemic, according to Ryan Brown, spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Education.

The missing data, he said, impacts the scores schools receive for showing improvement over multiple years. And if high school students didn’t take the ACT, SAT or the state’s career readiness assessment, it will be hard to calculate how well schools have prepared students for college or the workforce.

“We would be looking for guidance and flexibility from the U.S. Department of Education in this area,” he said.

But leaders in states that retained high test participation feel more confident about resuming accountability.

North Dakota had a 97 percent testing participation rate last year. The state education department even sent letters to the top-performing schools and to those scoring at the bottom to let them know where they would fall on the state’s accountability system had it been in effect, Superintendent Kirsten Baesler said in an interview after last week’s event.

Baesler said she felt it would have been irresponsible not to share that information with local leaders. She didn’t want schools to have a “false sense of accomplishment,” she said.

“I think people assumed that because we were in person most of this school year, that we were fine,” she said. “There’s still chaos in our students’ lives and in our teachers’ lives.”

She’s also among those state leaders who want to see a new approach to assessment. At the state superintendents’ gathering last week, she asked Cardona how states can “measure what we say we really value.”