Strong Schools/Lessons Learned

No pipelines for leadership
We searched (hard) for a founding principal of DC Prep’s elementary school. We discovered that no ready pipelines exist for early education leadership training. College programs in early childhood development focus on training teachers and researchers and generally take a philosophical stance opposed to the active “academic” education of young children. We found Dr. Doreen Land through a personal referral and an avalanche of good luck.

CityBridge’s ambition is that its two partner schools will become training grounds for future leaders of early elementary schools. Ultimately, however, training large numbers of effective leaders for early education postings will need to become a part of regular higher education training for educators.

Obstacles to assessment
Assessing the educational progress of young children is both difficult (it takes 20-30 minutes for a trained assessor to test a single child) and controversial (some fear that “testing” may put young children under undue stress). But without appropriate forms of assessment, teachers cannot know how to adjust their instruction to meet the needs of their students, and leaders and funders cannot know if schools are effective. Ultimately, we need markers of progress before the Federally-mandated Grade 3 baseline test, which currently shows that by this age half of D.C. students are “behind” already. 

Early childhood experts have devised a number of valid and reliable assessment tools to measure language, math, and social-emotional development, and they have shown repeatedly that assessment done right can be an engaging activity for young children. One problem, however, is that “norm-referenced” tools comparing a child’s scores with the larger population are often not useful for individual teachers trying to adjust instruction. Moreover, most teachers lack the training to administer these assessments. As a result, programs with young children will likely use a variety of assessment tools: tests taken from curricula, assessments created in-house, and norm-referenced tools administered by professional assessors.

Work needs to be done to develop assessment tools that are easy for teachers to administer, that guide instruction, and that provide data needed for program evaluation.