Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Based on its sizeable short-term effects on children’s language/literacy and math skills (Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2013), the Boston Public Schools (BPS) preschool program has been identified as one model that has the potential to sustain preschool impacts through third grade. In addition, BPS recently rolled out a new curriculum – called Focus – to align preschool to third grade so that children’s educational experiences effectively build on one another as they move through early schooling. Yet, there is no evidence to date on the long-term impacts of the BPS program. Moreover, the district has few tools of their own to measure implementation of preschool and Focus programming, and assess student outcomes. These limitations make it difficult for BPS to monitor the efficacy of early childhood education and engage in effective program improvement.

Accordingly, BPS has entered into a research-practice partnership with early childhood researchers and experts in quantitative methodology to explore strategies to understand the long-term impacts of their programming. The current paper will first provide information on how the research team worked with district staff to create reliable and valid measures of program fidelity, that provide accurate and real-time actionable information to instructional coaches working with early childhood teachers. Findings from data on this observational tool – collected using a tablet-enabled app – will be presented to describe the range of quality observed in BPS early childhood and elementary settings. Second, we will present on a series of apps that the research team and district co-constructed and are being used to assess formative and summative assessments of children’s early skills. The apps measure early numeracy and letter knowledge, in addition to outcomes that BPS is more explicitly focused on supporting – higher-order cognitive skills that capture problem solving, vocabulary knowledge, and critical thinking, and are most predictive of later academic skills (Paris, 2005; Snow & Matthews, 2016). Finally, we will present on findings to date about how these measures inform the long-term impacts of the BPS preschool program on student outcomes through third grade.

The current paper will provide insights into how policymakers can integrate high-quality data collection into existing district practices in a feasible and sustainable way. Findings will inform burgeoning efforts across the country to form research-practice partnerships that use better data for better decision-making across educational settings.