Kudos to Sara Mead for this nice post on what the preschool quality debate should be about. As I have written earlier, preschool quality is a critical issue for all K-12 school reformers and Head Start may be the place to start. Proposed Head Start regulations will use a standard based observation tool, the CLASS, to determine the quality of preschool instruction. These observation measures would then be used to close the least effective centers (lowest 25 percent of centers), and result in competitive applications to replace them. Sara Mead argues that while not perfect, these observation tools will move quality far beyond the input/training based approach that has not worked for K-12. I concur.
I am also wondering whether this is the start of a more serious discussion of the charter preschool movement, and will charter management organizations (CMO’s) be ready. Sara Mead’s forward thinking piece from 4 years ago raised the issue back when she was at Ed Sector. If Head Start centers are going up for competitive application, this is an opportunity for effective CMOs to create quality pipelines into their elementary schools. To date, charters have not really been in a position to apply for these funds since the same centers received grants year after year basically fencing off from competition. But, this would be the first time that the federal government would end contracts for reasons that were not about basic fiscal or regulatory violations or under-enrollment. These issues deserve broader debate. Let’s hope that Sara’s post expands the conversation.
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5/11/2012 | U.S. News & World Report highlights ideas from "Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class." 
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Preschool definitely needs to be top priority these days!!
Thinking out loud, because this is a very important issue that I don’t know about, I could see this as a win-win effort perhaps bringing us back closer to an old-fashioned liberalism just being more effective. But as a historian, I spent years on this issue on a broader level. Its always been liberals, with labor on the team and often leading the team, that has campaigned for humane nursing homes, juvenile centers, and other public insitutions. Few of the low-quality cdenters, I bet, are union or pay union wages. Upgrading quality would be more expensive, but it would yield huge benefits. On the child care front, I’d be surprised if reform involved union busting. If early ed or charters started non-stop high-stakes testing of four year olds, there would be a backlash, but who in their right mind would do that? (A skeptic could ask who in their right mind would have expected the destructive test prep caused by “reform” in public school?)
The problem with public schools “reform” is “reform” which has denegerated into psuedo-reform and which is now preoccupied with settling scores and defeating unions. But this too will pass.
We need to unite to help kids and early ed would be a great start. We need to rebuild the New Deal/Great Society coalitions were liberals, unions, civil rights organizations, and scholars united to help young people. I imagine that there would be a few true-believers in the market and/or Rheeocrats who couldn’t stand to work with unions and social scientists, but its time to move on.
Look at the big picture. The only way that early ed and comprenesive systems like the HCZ can be scaled up is by expanding unionized professions. To improve services to the young or the old or the ill or the institutionized would be like improving the conditions in sweat shops by speading up asssembly lines. In no other field except education do you have erstwhile progressives trying to help clients by abusing and deminzing service providers. If we see a Waiting for Superwoman next year trying to destroy social workers next year, I’ll admit I was wrong and too naive. But I’d see this emerging field as an opporunity to abandon the beggar-thy-neighbor school of “reform” for a return to the growing the pie so were not battling over scraps logic that served us well from the 1930s to the 90s.
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