Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Growing research evidence relates school climate to student outcomes (e.g., Allensworth, Ponisciak, & Mazzeo, 2009; Kraft, Marinell, & Yee, 2016; Pallas & Buckley, 2012; Sebastian & Allensworth, 2012). This body of research, and the development of tools to measure these constructs, is largely limited to the K-12 sector. However, early education research suggests, as in K-12 settings, that programs with supportive organizational climate are more likely to exhibit higher quality (e.g., Burchinal, Vandergrift, Pianta, & Mashburn, 2010; Dennis & O’Connor, 2013; Rohacek et al., 2010). Thus, we posit that programs with strong practices aligned to these organizational conditions will exhibit higher-quality classroom instructional practices and greater learning for children prior to kindergarten entry.

Early education programs have faced struggles with improving the instructional quality of classroom practices, and thus with reducing achievement gaps that already exist when children enter school (Aikens, Klein, Tarullo, & West, 2013; Burchinal et al., 2010; Early et al., 2007; Ross, Moiduddin, Meagher, & Carlson, 2008). To date, improvement efforts have primarily focused on what occurs within the classroom itself (including structures and interactions among teachers and students). However, schools and early learning centers are complex organizations; classroom processes do not occur in isolation from the rest of the processes of the organization.

The proposed paper presents the Five Essentials-Early Ed as a new measurement tool designed to measure these important organizational conditions in early education (Ehrlich, Pacchiano, Stein, & Luppescu, 2016). Because accurate assessment is essential to improvement, we will share findings of the measure’s internal reliability and concurrent validity, carefully testing the tool’s measurement properties in a new educational setting. The authors employed the Rasch IRT model to develop a parent survey and adapt an existing K-12 survey—the 5Essentialsteacher survey—for use in early education settings. Rasch analyses ensured internal reliability of measures and allowed for explorations of potential bias across settings (center vs. school) and language on the parent survey. Concurrent validity is being analyzed using data from 41 school- and 40 center-based pre-kindergarten sites in Chicago. Data collection occurred during the 2015-16 school year and analyses will be complete by summer 2017.

The validation analyses examine whether site-level differences in survey responses distinguish between higher- and lower-quality early education programs. Early analyses indicate between-program variation on survey responses and the three outcome measures of interest—(1) teacher-child interactions (CLASS-PreK; Pianta, LaParo, & Hamre, 2008), (2) child development growth scores (Teaching Strategies GOLD; Teaching Strategies, 2010), and (3) student attendance. Because each measure is able to detect differences across sites, a series of hierarchical-linear models will probe the relationship between each outcome and survey measures. Initial results indicate significant relationships between measures of Effective Leaders and Collaborative Teachers with CLASS Classroom Organization and Instructional Support scores. Complete analyses will be presented at the conference. The current project aims to draw on this descriptive information to provide the field with a rigorously developed and tested survey tool to assess the strengths and weaknesses of organizational conditions that best support improvement efforts.