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Monday, July 22, 2013

The Educated Reporter: Guest Post: Measuring Early Childhood Classroom Quality

The Educated Reporter: Guest Post: Measuring Early Childhood Classroom Quality:

Guest Post: Measuring Early Childhood Classroom Quality



The American Educational Research Association (AERA) held its annual meeting in San Francisco in May, and we asked some of the journalists in attendance to cover a few of the sessions for us. Given that early childhood education is back on the front burner, it seemed like a good time to share this post from Martha Dalton of Public Broadcasting Atlanta. In case you missed it, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan fielded questions from reporters last week in an exclusive EWA webinar. You can catch the replay here. And for more on early childhood and preschool, check out EWA's Story Starters online resource. 

Early childhood education programs in the United States are like a patchwork quilt: Most states have a combination of programs, ranging from state-run prekindergarten to

independently operated centers to federal initiatives such as Head Start.

And because so many of these programs are fairly new, so are the systems used to evaluate them.

As a result, research on effective evaluations for both these educators and the