 Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Lisa Guernsey. I'm the director of the Early Education Initiative here at the New America Foundation. And for those who don't know, the Early Ed Initiative is situated within the Ed Policy Program here at New America. And our Ed Policy Program aims to look at new ideas and new policies that cross the spectrum of children's and student learning from birth through college completion workforce entrance. So we really are trying to cover the Waterfront as a policy program. This particular event, however, is going to be focused on our little ones and our little ones that are in that three and four-year-old age range. So welcome. I'm really thrilled that you are all here today on what I think we're calling day 16 of the shutdown and crossing fingers maybe in the last days. But gosh, you never know around here. So I'm not going to make any predictions on that. That's for sure. So I'm just going to say a few opening remarks. And then we're going to turn over to what's going to be a really fantastic presentation of some new research that needs to get out there. When policymakers and stakeholders talk about the need for more public investment and high quality pre-kindergarten, often the studies that are mentioned are ones that refer to programs like the Perry Preschool Program, which was based in Ypsilanti, Michigan and started many decades ago, or that of the Abbasidarian program that ran in North Carolina. And the results from those programs are really amazing to look at and deserve all of our attention. They showed evidence of improving long-term outcomes for children and being wise economic investments. But they've also been criticized for being small resource intensive programs. Maybe hard to scale up. That's what often we hear out there. Now we're going to be able to actually really do this for kids at any kind of scale. And we have to recognize that those are programs that were implemented, again, many decades ago as interventions really, in some ways as trial runs, as testing what the science was telling us about what young children needed and the kinds of environments that would be good for them. And then seeing over time, and we're talking about really over time, right? Tracking children into adulthood to see what kinds of outcomes came from those. And those were incredibly important studies. But those are programs, those two particular examples, the Perry Preschool Project and the Abbasidarian Program do not exist in exactly the same way today. Those very specific programs do not exist in any way today. And so it's important for us to be looking at what's really happening today, what kind of research is out there that we can draw on that can help us understand what it means to scale up programs and why it's important to be thinking about investing and scaling programs up. And in fact, over the past several years and in fact over a decade, we do have more and more evidence from other programs out there about the impact of a high quality pre-K program on young children. And these are programs that are not small little boutique programs. These are programs that have been implemented at scale in cities and across states. And they're programs that in fact also include Head Start in many cases. And we're gonna be hearing a lot more about this today in this presentation. But one of the big things that we're hoping that you'll draw from this is that if you look at this new research and combine it then with what we've already learned from those small scale but longitudinal studies, there's just too much evidence to ignore. There's too much evidence to ignore to keep pushing off the idea of preschool for the majority of our children in this country. So what we're going to do today is we'll hear from two authors of a new report that I hope you all have with you that has been published by the Foundation for Child Development and the Society for Research in Child Development. And this piece, Investing in Our Future, the Evidence Based on Preschool Education takes you through what we know now from the science in addition to what we've seen in those smaller programs that have been cited so often in the press. There's a lot of new material in here that for many of us I think is just now kind of coming to light where at the point where we can really start digesting this and recognize what it means to really build out programs in a larger way in a way that makes a difference for children. And after we hear that presentation, then we're gonna have a panel discussion to get at what it's gonna take to bring research like this into practice, how we can change things on the ground and in state and federal policy to expand access to high quality programs for all children in the United States. So I'm going to introduce you now to our first speakers here. It's a real pleasure and honor to have them with us today. You will be hearing from two of the authors of this report, there are many authors of this report as you see on this. And I think that also is a testament to the breadth of this report as well. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Hiro Iashikawa, who is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Education and University Professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University and had been at Harvard before that. NYU I think was pretty excited to nab you Hiro. I know that for sure. And we'll also be hearing from Marty Zaslow who is the director of the SRCD Office for Policy and Communications. And that's a fairly new role for Marty in the early childhood world. She's known as a real head of star on understanding the research and understanding implementation of research as well. So it's a real thrill to have both Hiro and Marty here with us. And I'm going to turn the table over to them. So thank you both for being here. So give them a round of applause. Thank you, Lisa. It's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks to the New America Foundation for the opportunity to share our report, Investing in Our Future, the evidence based on preschool education. And to engage in a discussion with you all about it, particular thanks to Lisa, Guernsey, and to Laura Bornfront not only for hosting and organizing this event, but also for their work and keeping an ongoing focus on issues related to preschool education. Thank you all for being here. I look out into the audience and recognize so many faces. And we're really eager for your feedback and input on the report. A note about the authors, Hiro Yoshikawa and Chris Whelan. Chris, do you mind just standing for a moment? You won't be speaking, but she'll be helping us with questions. Thank you. They are the primary authors on the brief. And we just want to thank them both for their leadership on this. Deborah Phillips will be joining the panel discussion in a moment. And as I'll note, she was the prime mover for the brief. And I'll give you a little history about that. Co-authors Gene Brooks-Gun, Peg Bertchanel, Linda Espinoza, Jens Ludwig, and Catherine Magnuson have masterful knowledge of the research in this area. And I'm so grateful that they responded to the request from SRCD and FCD to co-author this brief, through which they shared the depth of their understanding of this set of issues. SRCD is also extremely grateful to the Foundation for Child Development for supporting the development of this brief. Very quickly, by way of background, SRCD is an interdisciplinary and international organization of developmental scientists that seeks to foster the exchange of ideas among scientists and other professionals of various disciplines and to encourage the application of research on children's development to improve the lives of children and families. And the Foundation for Child Development is a national private philanthropy dedicated to the principle that all families should have the social and material resources to raise their children to be healthy, educated, and productive members of their communities. We're also very grateful for the extremely helpful input of fully 19 colleagues who gave their time generously to reviewing the brief. And the brief was greatly strengthened by their feedback. So now just quickly, the origins of the brief. As I mentioned, the prime mover for the brief to whom I am very grateful is Deborah Phillips, who observed that in the aftermath of the president's proposal on preschool education, the public discussions of the evidence showed heavy reliance on the early studies and selective portrayals of the evidence. She felt, and I strongly agreed, that important recent evidence, including rigorous studies of preschool at scale, as Lisa mentioned, were not sufficiently reflected in the public discussions. And she felt there was a need for a review that included both the foundational studies and the more recent research as well. At Deborah's initiative, FCD provided SRCD with funding to develop this report. And we, in turn, turned to Hiro Yoshikawa, a member of FCD's board for leadership, something he's done for SRCD in the past. And this, over time, became a collaborative effort of FCD and SRCD staff. We're so grateful to the staff of the foundation for their work in drawing together the co-authors for meetings and their assistance in producing the brief. I want to note that the focus of the brief is on four-year-olds. And we want to be clear about this, that we did not take on all the evidence, but we recognize the importance of the evidence on birth to three, and birth to five, and beyond. But we're going to be talking specifically about four-year-olds today. There are some instances in the brief in which we do include evidence of three-year-olds because it's relevant to the topic. The context is clearly a policy initiative with the president's proposal to increase access for four-year-olds to high-quality preschool education. And this is in light of concerns about disparity in participation. And it included a very strong focus on quality with rigorous curriculum, a focus on teacher salaries, being comparable to those in K through 12, and comprehensive health and related services. And before I turn it over to hero, I just want to say that the proposal itself sparked many questions that we then return to the evidence to look at. And here's a listing of the questions we were interested in. Is preschool at scale worth the investment? And is this the case when that evidence goes beyond the small control demonstration projects? What are the specific dimensions of quality that make a difference for children's outcomes? And can such quality be implemented at scale? This is critical. And does preschool benefit children above as well as below the poverty line? What about key subgroups, such as children who are dual-language learners and children with special needs? Is a second-year beneficial? And what family support services actually make a difference in preschool? I'm going to turn it over now to hero to talk about our key conclusions. I do also want to add my thanks, especially to Marty and to Deborah for their leadership, and hours and hours and hundreds of emails that went into the production of the brief and the careful attention to all the details and really the feedback provided by a large number of really spectacular scholars. We, I think, had a 100% recruitment rate for our co-authors, which was nice. But really, everyone kind of gave their all within what, on academic terms, is a fairly short period of time. So we do aim to address these and other questions through our synthesis. And we did not exclude the older literature. We really wanted to create a synthesis across the classic studies and the more recent evidence. But of course, we felt that the most important sets of information that we're missing, perhaps, from some of the current policy discussions, were the more recent evidence. Really, the past 12 to 15 years have produced another large new wave, a new generation of evidence that we felt was actually quite relevant to these very important policy issues. We applied guidelines for including evaluation research that really met our criteria for rigor. And I think many of us, and certainly Deborah most prominently, has had a long history through organizations like the National Academy of Sciences and so somewhat similar to that kind of synthesis or consensus document, we applied a quite high standard of research evidence. And there is actually an appendix in the brief that discusses and explains what some of the comparisons might be among different methodologies. And that itself relies on a longer report, which we referenced that came out of the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. So speaking of the center, we do want to first state what is the rationale? What is the rationale for providing high-quality educational experiences in early childhood? And really, the bulk of the literature on brain architecture and what we know about rapid neuronal development, perhaps most folks think about infants and toddlers. But it turns out that the preschool era is also extremely important in terms of the environmental malleability, how exquisitely sensitive the developing organism and the developing brain is to enriched environmental input. And we know that both nature and nurture matter, but increasingly, we are finding that experience can even shape whether genes are actually turned on or off, whether they're actually expressed in phenotype. And that the primary active agent is really the serve and return interactions. And we're going to get more specific than that. That are some of the building blocks of what quality preschool actually is. So we have a powerful new set of evidence from neuroscience, from the biological sciences and the developmental sciences that these early enriched environments can actually help to mitigate the effects of disadvantage and stress on later cognitive outcomes. We know that extreme and severe adversity and stress can get under the skin and result in, if experienced chronically in early childhood, lifelong consequences for disease and for school success, for learning and productivity. So the preschool years are not a point, words too late. Absolutely, zero to three is important. And ultimately, this is all part of a gradual, we hope, incremental progress towards a zero to eight system in the United States. That is a set of developmental experiences that are enriching and, from a policy perspective, coordinated and integrated. But again, today we're going to talk about one very key piece in that puzzle, which is preschool for four-year-olds with a bit of the evidence also for three-year-olds. So starting with the issue of investment in preschool, I think this is a great case where we know that most of the evidence cited for the benefits compared to the costs of investing in early childhood education come from a very small number of early and classic studies, such as the Prairie Preschool or the Absodarian Project. And we would note that those do show high benefit cost ratios of seven to one or higher. If we think of programs like the Prairie Preschool or the Chicago Child Parent Centers, the Absodarian Program has a somewhat lower benefit cost ratio. One thing to keep in note there is that it's a zero to five program. And so it was much more expensive per child than either the Prairie Preschool or the Chicago Child Parent Centers. But what we want to also add to this literature is some more recent evidence from at scale public preschool, some analyses by Tim Bartick using the Tulsa Pre-K Evaluation, which is one of those new very important instances we think of quality preschool implemented at scale with large effects on kids. There, Tim Bartick's analysis, which applies for the geeks among you. Raj Chetty's approach, which itself was built on Alan Kruger's approach of extrapolating from kindergarten achievement test scores out to earnings based on national data on that front. He estimates benefit cost ratios for the Tulsa Pre-K kindergarten program between three and five to one. And so he's also conducted these for some other recent at scale studies. So that suggests that indeed, at scale preschool can work. And then I think an additional question is what about when other than poor families, lower middle class or middle class families enroll in preschool? In fact, the history of Head Start, as many of you may know, was that originally one of the goals was for socioeconomic integration within Head Start. Ultimately, there's been a set aside of 10% of slots for kids from families not poor. But in reality, what directors have done is to triage limited funds and have the program has really served a virtually close to 100% low income population since its inception in 1965. So we have some basic questions here of, first of all, does preschool work and then does it work when it's universal? A recent meta-analysis showed that the average effect of preschool in evaluations going back to 1960, so close to 50 years of rigorous evaluations, shows that on average, early childhood education, the one year provided to four-year-olds produces about a third of a year of additional learning in reading and math. The recent data that we thought were important to add to this finding about where the field is in the United States are two important studies. One conducted in Tulsa. And Deborah was one of the lead investigators, along with Bill Gormley. And Boston, for which Chris Weiland was the lead investigator, they produced substantially larger impacts than this. Between half a year and a full year of additional learning in reading and math, beyond comparison groups that are really up-to-date. So the comparison groups in these studies were the counterfactual, quite high proportions of the comparison children actually attended centers or other preschool programs. And so these two cities have shown in their public pre-K programs that, at scale, they can implement preschool with quite large effects. And an important additional feature of both of these cities' programs is that they were not means-tested. So they did benefit, they were provided for both middle-class and low-income families. So starting to dig into this area of quality, because we think this phrase of quality preschool is really the center of the president's proposal, and will be an important feature or issue for any of the proposals that might come out of Congress. So what features of quality are important? So the childcare literature over decades has distinguished between two areas of quality. The first is called structural quality and incorporates things like the physical environment of the classroom, group size, adult-child ratio, teacher qualifications, and then process quality has been termed the quality of the actual interactions between teachers and children, and can include emotional support, as well as classroom practices to support engagement and learning in a variety of domains. The point we want to make here is that structural quality features help to create the conditions for positive process quality, but they don't ensure that process quality will occur. And so we do think there's a particular importance to looking at the quality of interactions, which after all, the hundreds of those that accumulate across just one year of preschool have the potential to really powerfully mold both cognitive skills across reading and math, for example, but also non-cognitive skills, as economists would say, or socio-emotional skills as a developmental psychologist, like I might say, behavioral skills, children's wellbeing, and other skills. So does quality matter for children? A relatively large literature, based on multiple longitudinal data sets all over the country, over the last two or three decades show that children do make larger gains on a variety of outcomes when quality is higher. And so what are these aspects of quality? One dimension is warm and responsive teacher-child interactions that does get to some of the very early important behaviors that are also features of positive parenting, but teachers also at this stage encouraging children to speak through rich, elaborated conversations that are not just Q&A short bursts of questions followed by answers, but actual extended conversations with rich and extended vocabulary. The opportunities that teachers provide for children to engage with varied materials and to engage with them actively in a variety of whole group, small group, and individual interactions. And then high quality support for specific skill areas. So these are the kinds of instructional supports that can foster learning in particular areas, such as language, pre-literacy, a variety of math skills, and other domains as well, executive function, and socio-emotional skills. But our concern here is that the national data show, regardless of whether we're talking about Head Start or multiple state pre-K programs that the average quality is in the middle range of the most established measures like the Eckers in the class. Again, this is true for both pre-K and Head Start. A small minority of programs truly in the kind of poor range on these measures and a small minority, only a small minority of programs at the top kind of excellent range. So that's the current picture for quality. We can certainly do a whole lot better. So what are effective approaches to high quality? The most promising recent evidence comes from about 12 experiments and the two studies of city pre-K programs at scale, Boston and Tulsa, but some other studies as well, about the combination of developmentally focused instruction or curricula that are focused on particular sets of skills. Language and literacy, a math and socio-emotional is where we see some of this evidence building. And that kind of focused instruction or curricula paired with intensive onsite or video-based professional development. And in these studies, often we see a frequency of in-classroom observation of twice a month or more. We think this builds on theories of adult learning that suggests that when you have the opportunities for modeling and practice regularly in the context of a trusting relationship, that's when behavioral change occurs. As a former clinical psychologist, I'm very well aware of and I'm sure everyone in the room is aware that adult behavior can be hard to change. But so these institute within professional development, some of the principles of adult learning that we think make a lot of sense. We don't yet have the experimental test of whether it's once a month coaching versus four times a month. But we note that these successful programs happened to provide coaching or mentoring at least twice a month with a mentor or coach coming in, not as an evaluator, but as someone to facilitate the implementation of a curriculum and also flexibly address other issues that the teacher might raise that particular day, that particular week. So that even if it was a curriculum, for example, based on language that if the teacher had an issue with behavior management, the coach was skilled enough to respond flexibly to that need. So this is the kind of flavor and I think Chris might be able to give some more details of what this looks like and Deborah as well from the perspective of those two city studies. In addition, these programs are providing regular monitoring of child progress that is not high stakes, but more formative kinds of assessments to inform teachers' practice. So teachers can adjust their content and approach based on how individual children are doing across the course of the school year. So we have the references in the brief for the actual specific examples, but just to say that there are at least two or three examples of these successful curriculum or instruction paired with coaching and mentoring in the classroom for each of three domains, language and literacy for math and for socio-emotional development. So really this is evidence that's emerged over the past 10 or 12 years. We think it's very exciting. It provides actually a route, a concrete route to the issue of quality at scale. And I would note that there are even a couple emerging examples of successful combinations of curricula. This is something that a lot of folks in districts but also Head Start are concerned with. How do you implement curricula that might address multiple domains? Of course the global curricula do address all, like quite a lot of domains, but we're talking about curricula that have a somewhat more of a specific developmental focus. So there are instances of a combined language and socio-emotional curricula being supported by one set of coaches successfully with impacts on both domains for children's development. In Boston there is an incidence of a city adapting and combining a language and a math curriculum and providing again one set of coaches to help support implementation of those two curricula at scale with large effects on both language and math. And I think Tulsa is another example where instruction and reading and math was emphasized and integrated into each week's teaching. So a long standing question in the field is what is the impact of the comprehensive services on children's outcomes? Here we think the evidence is, there's some long standing evidence about the benefits of the health component, particularly from Head Start, that the fact that Head Start requires immunizations, comprehensive screening, making sure that children have a regular medical home, a doctor, a regular doctor, and dental services, which we know are some of the first things to go in a low income family that is struggling to make ends meet. That those are responsible both in the older studies for some very important health effects, but also in the more recent National Head Start Impact Study, where some of the longer standing impacts by kindergarten and first grade included access to healthcare and to dental care. In the area of parenting education, which has been an added service in so many programs, not just Head Start, a recent meta-analysis tried to tease apart when parenting education was most successful on top of the average effect of early childhood education. And what this study showed is that if parenting education programs provide opportunities for practice modeling or feedback on interactions with children, that was responsible for a close to doubling of the average effect of early childhood education on cognitive outcomes, an additional quarter of a standard deviation, a positive effect. Whereas parenting classes are simply providing information about child development and parenting seem to make no added difference. Again, I think this speaks to theories of adult learning that if we are thinking about changing parenting behavior, didactic parenting classes or workshops by themselves won't necessarily work unless there are opportunities for modeling feedback and practice. A critical question for investment, of course, is an additional year of preschool beneficial. Here we did as complete a review as we could, there aren't that many studies to review, and the few studies suggest that there are added gains from a second year of preschool, meaning typically a year for three-year-olds, in addition to kind of the standard year for four-year-olds, but that the added impact of the additional year is smaller, usually smaller, than the gains from one year. Now, that may be for several reasons. First of all, it may be that the powerful kick of an initial year of preschool, that provides the big change in comparison to comparison group children, and that produces the main impact and that a second year might not have as much of an impact compared to the comparison group. Another is whether there are actually sequences of instruction going on if a child experiences two years of preschool. So, for example, if a child experiences preschool at age three and four, we would like to see the four-year-old curriculum building on the skills that are learned during the three-year-old year, and we don't see a lot of evidence on that or actually we wish we knew more about what was going on in those programs. We know that in many classrooms, three and four-year-olds are mixed together, and that may mean that there actually isn't that kind of sequence that builds from year to year. We think this is a very important issue for the field to think about. So, what is the pattern of short versus long-term effects? In follow-up evaluations, we know that test scores converge. I'm not gonna use the F word. Between children who received preschool and those who did not. And yet, and we do have some follow-up data so far, even with these more recent studies with the Tulsa program showing some sustained impacts through third grade for math among boys. But even when there is typically convergence on test scores during the primary and middle school grades, we know that there's also evidence of long-term effects on important early adult outcomes like high school graduation, reduced teen pregnancy, reduced crime, in both the demonstration programs and Head Start. So the question is what is going on here? One of the key points to make is that the convergence happens on a very, very limited set of variables or skills among kids. It's essentially standardized reading and math scores that we have during primary school and middle school in this literature. And that means that we don't know whether boosts that preschool might provide to some other aspects of children's development such as motivation, engagement, executive function skills, those kinds of things, and or aspects of reading and math that are not captured by the standardized tests in the U.S. There may be some continuity in those that help to explain why we're seeing effects on these very important outcomes that actually have major economic consequences and are responsible for the large benefit cost ratios of the programs that have been followed up in the long run. So there is research continuing on this, some suggestions that classroom quality does and might make a difference in sustaining the post-test boost as it were, the boost at the beginning of kindergarten provided by quality preschool, but we need to know more. Gonna wrap up, I think it's just a few more slides here. We were very interested in some important subgroups, especially given the increasing diversity of America's children. A very key question right now for the policy discussion is whether high quality preschool benefits middle class children. Both the Tulsa and Boston studies show that there were substantial benefits to middle class children and Tim Bartick's benefit cost analysis in Tulsa suggested a benefit cost ratio well above one for the non-poor kids as well as the poor kids. But in both of these evaluations, the positive effects were simply larger for the disadvantaged children for kids living in poverty. And that's how both of these programs reduced disparities. So you can reduce disparities in a lot of ways. You wouldn't wanna do it by harming kids from middle class families or producing no effect. And so the good news is for both of these instances of high quality preschool conducted at scale, open to both middle class and poor families, the disparities were reduced and middle class children benefited. So that's a very important message we think from the policy perspective. In terms of race ethnicity, there is essentially no clear pattern of differences which suggests that kids of all races and ethnicities in the literature appear to benefit. We would caution that a lot of the studies in the history of the early childhood field provide not so much information about particular groups like Asian families. We know somewhat more about black, Latino, and white families and the benefits to them. But for example, the study in Boston did substantially improve the development of Asian kids from Asian backgrounds. That raises the issue of dual language learners and children of immigrants, where in our review of the literature, the positive impacts hold just as strongly, if not more strongly, for kids from these backgrounds. This is also extremely important information. In both Tulsa and Boston, the effects were larger for children from dual language learner backgrounds. And we don't have that many studies that look within non-special needs preschool. You're a kind of general mainstream preschool programs at the experience of children with special needs. But both the Head Start Impact Study and the Tulsa Evaluation showed that children with special needs demonstrated significant benefits. So I'm just gonna close with a few future directions, which you might wonder why we didn't review them more extensively. These are kind of areas where the research literature is still very much in development. One is to really pair more aggressive efforts at direct poverty reduction and human capital development in particular with quality early childhood experiences. So we have a set of evaluations and programs going on right now that are testing more intensive approaches than have been implemented generally in the past to develop workforce skills and provide adult basic education opportunities to parents with their kids in preschool programs. And that new generation of two-generation programs is a quite exciting development and the Aspen Institute among other organizations is leading in that effort. We still need to know a lot more about effective models for dual language learners and a variety of combinations of how to integrate dual language instruction in preschool. We do note in the brief that providing high quality, immersive supports for two languages at once can build bilingual skills and that is now showing some very interesting and fairly consistent associations with improved executive function skills. So that's a very exciting new area of research. The intentional sequencing birth to five with the highest impact is a really important question for the future. As our country moves towards, through examples like the early learning grants, the Race to the Top initiative, but other efforts to build systems that are integrated across birth to five and then birth to eight, we will learn a lot more and we need to learn a lot more about what the sequences of these enriched environments will provide to kids across the country. Curriculum integration across domains, we have those few hints of the possibility to integrate curricula in ways that don't overwhelm teachers if they're provided with the proper supports but when and under what circumstances do cross-domain effects occur? I mean, these are things that we don't understand that well. Effective models for children with special needs, I think are also an area where we noted they're just needed to be yet more research. We don't have a lot particularly in terms of rigorous controlled evaluations for this population. And finally, the issue of transitions with preschool to early elementary as well as what goes on between a zero to three childcare system and the preschool age emerging systems for early childhood education. The relationships between community providers and large scale preschool providers like state and city pre-K or Head Start. These kinds of transitions and making the seams more seamless will be an enormous future direction for public policy and for young kids in this country. So I'm gonna stop there and we look forward to the panel discussion. Thanks very much. So yes, please. In fact, we will start our discussion and everyone else on the panel come on up and I will introduce you in a moment here and we'll shift gears. There's a lot to unpack in what we just heard. For those of us who live and breathe early childhood policy research, there's probably a lot of questions hanging out there. For those of us who might be very new to some of this research, there may be questions about certain words and terms and making sure we're all kind of on the same page and started hearing some of the impacts and understanding really what some of these studies were telling us. So I will start by, I'm gonna introduce everybody, but I first failed to mention at the beginning and wanted to make sure everyone knows that we are live streaming this event on the web. We have a huge number of people watching out there. So hello everyone out there. Those we've been hearing from everybody ever since we put out the invitation to this event that they're very interested in this and so people across the country are watching and listening, which is great. We will have an archived version, a video of this up in just a few days and we are also in the social media world right now. There are a lot of people who are tweeting about this event. So if you are on Twitter, you can follow at hashtag too much evidence, too much evidence, I'll squish them all together, hashtag too much evidence and I realize as a tweeter myself that that's a lot of characters. So suddenly I'll lose there, but it's okay. You can still do a lot of good 140 character tweets with your hashtag too much evidence. So there's a lot to talk about here. Let me introduce who we have with us and then there's also some members of the audience who I think have a lot of expertise to bring to bear on this too and so we will be opening up to questions after I'm talking with the panelists and we may bring in some of the other researchers who are working on this report as well. So you've already met and heard from here, Yashikawa, so thank you again here for staying for this. Laura Bornfront is two heroes, right? Laura is a senior policy analyst with me in the Early Education Initiative here at the New America Foundation and has been just a fantastic colleague over the past few years on examining birth through the third grade and a lot of the different policy intersections that we need to be understanding in that space. To her right, Debra Phillips, who is a professor of psychology and associated faculty in the Public Policy Institute at Georgetown University and Debra, many of you probably have seen and heard of Debra's work over many years. She's with us today to talk about a variety of things but certainly some of the deep research that she's done with Bill Gormley at Georgetown University on Tulsa and looking very closely at what's happening in Tulsa and what the data there has been showing us over the years. Also Debra was the study director for just a huge monumental landmark report that came out many years ago now called Neurons to Neighborhoods, which many of you have I'm sure heard of and are very aware of, which is just a fundamental and foundation building piece for the field in early childhood policy. So it's a thrill to have Debra with us. And then to Debra's right is Albert Watt, who is, I wanna make sure, Albert has, in my mind plays a lot of different roles because he's just a wonderful colleague and mentor to us here at New America as well and we share a lot of research interests but he's the senior policy analyst in the Education Division at the National Governors Association's Center for Best Practices and Albert has been bringing out and in forums around the country and in particular with state leaders bringing out a lot of really interesting questions and new policy ideas around birth through third grade integration and practice but really understands things at the state level. So if you're kind of following along with me here a little bit we have some state level focus, we'll be able to look at the community level and Tulsa and learn from that. Laura and her work with me here at New America we're certainly looking federal level but then trying to understand the state and local piece as well and then with Hera's work on the research we've got a lot of good coverage here. So I'm gonna start though by asking and maybe just clarifying a couple of points from the report here that I wanna make sure that our audience heard and understood. When I first found that this report was underway it was a thrill to hear about it honestly because we at the New America Foundation have been trying to piece together what we know from different pieces of research and looking at what's being published in journals like Child Development and what's coming out of all sorts of state evaluations but it's been hard to kind of get our hands around everything that's been going on out there over the past decade and so here we have it. You know it's in our hands now in this very readable piece. What I don't think maybe was fully articulated so forgive me if I'm wrong but I'm gonna kind of point out in the air though is that this is not just about maybe an extra five preschool programs that we need to add to our pile when we think about impacts. This was a look at more than 84 different preschool programs and how they were implemented with the impacts were. There was as a particular study that Harold and many others had worked on last year that was a meta-analysis of 84 programs and then in addition to that meta-analysis there are just a wealth of data from additional publicly funded preschool programs in various places around the country that are part of this report. So we really are talking about going from maybe one or two boutique studies that we often hear about in the mainstream media to a real amount of evidence here from different places and that I think is just an important point to stress. I also wanted then to maybe get a clarification around one of the big findings from this. When you had up there on your slide that what you've seen kind of in full is that children, the four-year-olds who've had a year of preschool, that they're getting a third of a year of additional learning you're not meaning that that one year of preschool really meant they only learned a third of it, correct? I just wanna make clear that what you're saying instead is that in addition to that year of enriched experiences that compared to children who didn't have that year of preschool, those kids were kind of a third of a year ahead in their learning. Do you mind just elaborating on that a little bit more? Yeah, so can everyone hear me? Yeah, so this is in comparison always, we're picking out rigorous evaluations that typically do have a comparison group that either didn't get preschool or didn't get that specific preschool program. In the more recent studies, that comparison group does include a larger and larger proportion of children who attend center-based care. So we can assume that in many of those centers they are receiving enriched environments of varying degrees, of varying quality, but so this is in comparison to those groups that we're talking about that additional months of learning. We were trying to find some everyday language to translate what our kind of social science effect sizes about how large the effects are into this idea of kind of additional months of learning. Excellent, yeah, so I just wanted to, recognizing that this really is in comparison to what the majority of our youngsters in low-income households might be experiencing is that those who have the opportunity to experience a high quality program are getting that additional one third year of learning that can lead them down a path that can cascade them into a place where they're ahead and they're able to kind of build on that year after year and we'll get into what it means to build on that a little bit in our discussion here and in getting into the K3 grades in years as well. So let me ask as well here, the other thing, important point that's made in this report is that quality is not equal across these say, let's just say, 84, 90, 100 different kinds of programs that you were examining and that there really were some distinctions in terms of what was considered of what high quality programs were out there and then what kinds of outcomes those programs were able to produce and I guess just to kind of lay it on the table, there are studies that don't show necessarily the best results over time. This past year, some results came out from Tennessee, for example, on their state-funded pre-K program and depending on which newspaper you were reading or how you were coming to the evidence there, there were some reports showing that, oh, you know, there really aren't these kinds of effects to use the word that you weren't going to use and I understand why, that there was kind of fade out that F word that we have to grapple with in our field. So I was wondering if you could talk to me a little bit about, say, that Tennessee evaluation, where it stands in relationship to this work and what you were kind of using as your measure of kind of a good study that could show effects. So the appendix, I think, is a summary and please chime in, my co-authors Chris, Marty and Deborah, if I miss anything at any point. But so our appendix lays out some of the kinds of criteria that we used for evaluations and I would say our meta-analysis uses a lot of the same criteria when it comes to the controlled evaluations. So we do cite the Tennessee study because we think some of the findings are important, so it's in the report. But I think what matters less than kind of any single study is the overall pattern of findings and that's what we're highlighting in the report. Did you want to add something to that, Deborah? You just want to make anything? Okay, all right, well, I'll get to you in a minute then. So, and in fact, let me get to you right now. Let me ask you this question. So, yes, looking at the totality, I think is incredibly important. What also seems to be a big point of this kind of research is to look at larger scale programs and that was mentioned again and again, but I want to understand that a little bit more. What to you is important about doing evaluations that are not just on, say, one classroom of children or a group of maybe less than 50 kids and doing an evaluation, say, in Tulsa where an entire city's worth of children were part of the picture. So the language we use in the field is these are programs that are taken to scale in real world circumstances. So these are precisely the circumstances that are being talked about in the president's proposals and that are being deployed in states around the country. So this is evidence that you can generalize from, true of the Boston program, true of the Tulsa program, to the country as a whole, if states want to do this, it is feasible, it is practical. People are always surprised about the evidence coming out of Oklahoma because Oklahoma is not exactly thought of as a wealthy, highly progressive state, but it is a very practical state and they knew that if they were gonna do preschool education, they needed to do it well. If they wanted to get the cost benefits, they knew they had to do it well. So these are the results you can look to and say if the president's proposal or any national proposal is implemented, you can get these results. And how many children are we talking about in the Tulsa study? So in the Tulsa study, we're looking at 2000 some children. In the other interesting thing about Oklahoma, well there are many interesting things about Oklahoma, it's a universal program and it has 70% penetration both in Tulsa and across the state as a whole. What does that mean exactly? Penetration. It means 70% of the four-year-olds in Oklahoma and in Tulsa in particular, go to the school-based preschool program. And we should add too that in Tulsa, at least there was a real effort to ensure that community-based providers, such some of the community action project that ran some of the Head Start programs was also part of the evaluation and considered part of the pre-K program. It's not all community-based providers, it's just some of the Head Start programs and that's in Tulsa. So the Head Start programs in Tulsa who have a very dynamic leader, Steven Dow, participated in the school-based pre-K program and they comply with all of the school requirements in order to receive dollars from the school system to provide pre-K. This is not a typical mixed delivery system preschool program. That's a very important distinction. Okay, good, thank you. So let me draw out a couple more specifics if I can with you Deborah on Tulsa because there's a high population there of dual-language learners, particularly children from Latino backgrounds and families. Can you talk a little bit about some of those findings? We were really delighted by these findings actually. So about 20% of the children in the Tulsa pre-K program, Tulsa by the way is the largest school system in the state, that's sort of why Tulsa. 20% of the children are Hispanic and we were very interested in this population because as everyone knows, it is the fastest growing population in this country. Critical that we be able to demonstrate that we're advancing the early learning and development of this population of children. They are also less likely than other race ethnicities subgroups to actually attend pre-K nationwide. So the first encouraging piece of evidence in this universal pre-K program, largely school-based, is that we have equal participation on the part of the Hispanic children as we do for all of the other race ethnic groups. Secondly, particularly for, and Hiro did highlight this in his slides, for the dual-language learners among the Hispanic children and the children who had a parent who had come from Mexico, so the immigrant children in this population showed the strongest outcomes of the program overall. So they gained an entire year of learning in pre-reading skills, close to a year in early math skills, pre-math skills, and about half a year in the pre-writing, kind of the spelling tests and those were larger effects than for other children. The third point I wanna make about the Hispanic children is that we tested them in both a Spanish version of our cognitive skill assessment and the English version because we were very interested in why they were showing this kind of added boost compared to the other children. And what we saw is that they showed the boost on the Spanish language tests, so they were gaining the content, if you will, academic substance of pre-K, but they showed an even larger boost on the English version of the test. They were tested on both, suggesting that they were getting a double whammy because they were also learning English. So those are the main points about the Spanish. Okay, good. So I wanna maybe then open this out to what happens after a year of good pre-K, pre-school, and then a child moves into kindergarten, moves into first grade and second grade and third grade. And this is something that we focus on here at the New America Foundation, looking at what's often termed as a pre-K through third grade approach, making sure that there's absolutely, there's access to high quality programs at age three and age four, but that there's also a continuation of quality and a sequencing of instruction that goes up through kindergarten, first, second, third. And this is something that's also, in part, this emphasis on encouraging that kind of continuum is in part because of some disappointing results that had come from some pre-school studies in the past around that convergence that you described here. And I think that that is a very helpful way to think about what might be happening in these cases where you see a bump for those kids who had that pre-K experience and then they get to kindergarten and there's other peers now in kindergarten with them who didn't have that pre-school experience and they may be starting here and then as the kids progress through their school years, there's, they're learning a little bit here and there, so we hope, right? But at some point, what you see in terms of their test scores kind of converges and it's not as if they're constantly way up here. Sorry for my hand, this is my only way to kind of understand this and think this through in terms of convergence. And so I'd love to get all of your responses to this but let me first turn it to Laura and to Albert because I know that this concept, this pre-K through third approach, is something that both of you work on quite deeply and one of the things I'm wondering is, first, is convergence a better way to think about it than the term fade out that's been often out there in the mainstream media and thinking about what's happening here? And then can we really tease out then what's going on? Don't we need to do more than just have convergence? Don't we really need to get kind of all kids help to get more and more kids access to pre-K in the first place and then get them all up to higher level as they move on through? So I'd love to just hear your thoughts. Why don't you start Albert? Sure, so I do think convergence is a better term to answer that question first. I will refrain from using the word, the F word also because it's actually what happens is kids tend to catch up when these studies show that convergence. So the question is why? I also want to point out, I think that when at least I look at the research and please anybody in the room correct me if I'm wrong, but under the right conditions, when you have well-trained teachers who know how to implement quality instruction when they're given the supports in the environment to do so that you do see preschool programs that have some benefits that persist through some of the early elementary years at least. So, and I don't think that's insignificant. I think that those formative years when kids start school kindergarten, first grade, second grade, if they feel more competent and confidence in their learning ability, those are formative year where they're developing themselves as learners and they're developing sort of dispositions and behaviors that will hopefully kind of give them a boost later on. So I think we need to sort of emphasize that we have seen evidence of that and that's significant. I should point out that say in New Jersey and we did a report on this a couple of years ago which is why it's certainly on my mind, Union City, Red Bank, New Jersey were two places where there were big gains from pre-K particularly for disadvantaged groups but then there were still continuation of that. Those benefits seem to be continually appearing in the data at first grade and second grade and third grade. Right, and that's a good point. The evidence is not, again, it's not just the peer preschool and vestidairing is things like New Jersey preschool. The Chicago Child Parents Center has also pretty significant lasting benefits. There are other main analysis that I've seen and existing state pre-K evaluations are beginning to show some of these effects. And then I think the paper raises interesting theory that I think other people have, like James Heckman have sort of offered is, what if we have better ways of measuring non-academic and I won't use non-cognitive, I would use non-academic skills. I like to call them social and intellectual habits. Maybe I'll try to coin that term here. Social and intellectual habits. So basic things like social, emotional learning, approaches learning and second function skills. So what if we have better ways of measuring those things along the way? Will we see these benefits persist but just in different outcomes such as graduation rates or college attendance and that sort of thing? I think that's, you know, I think a very plausible theory especially when one of the trends I've observed in all this talk about college and career readiness is that there's a lot of people who are working on that topic at the other end of the continuum, secondary, post-secondary years that are also focusing on these social and intellectual habits. Collaboration, critical thinking, communication skills, persistence, motivation, that sort of thing. And if they think not that early childhood folks need to sort of value ourselves based on what those folks think but if there's some kind of pattern between what they're thinking of as successful students at that end of the spectrum and we're thinking at the lower end or the younger end of the spectrum, these are also important. I think that's a very possible theory and I think, you know, I'm not a researcher so I hope people like Hiro and others can kind of dig into that and put some, you know, elicit some of the findings from that. Laura, do you wanna add to that? I agree with what Albert said and what I would add is so is that the high quality pre-K is definitely essential but as Albert said, you know, we need not just teachers in the pre-K programs to foster what we know, you know, the non-academic skills and habits that children need but also up through K through third and so focusing on, you know, we need an intentional focus on that, that early ed pre-K through third grade continuum and so providing, you know, helping kindergarten teachers to communicate and interact with pre-K programs and have information about the children that are coming into their classrooms, having principles that have, you know, deeper knowledge about early education and helping and understanding of when they walk into a kindergarten or first grade classroom, what good instruction that is fostering the, you know, non-academic side, the social emotional skills, the executive function, you know, that those teachers are teaching in ways that young children learn best that they're not just having them sit and rows and lecturing to them. All those things are important and need to be continued up through the continuum to continue to grow and build on the, you know, early gains that children have after the pre-K year. Do you want to add something? Yeah. So in Tulsa, my colleagues, Carolyn Hale and Bill Gormley have looked at, we've followed one cohort of kids, actually two cohorts, up through third grade and were able to look at their school achievement testing data. And what we found is that there are lasting effects of the pre-K program on early math, on math scores in third grade. It's true for boys and it's true for the free lunch kids. And it's interesting to us because, you know, we don't know why it's showing up in math and not reading. There are probably a dozen reasons we could come up with. But one possibility is that another impact of the Tulsa pre-K program was on children's attentional abilities, ability to pay attention in the classroom and also on their engagement, active engagement in learning. These are precisely these, I like your terminology, social and intellectual habits, that we think may, you know, be underneath the surface during the elementary and middle school years that then cause these high school and young adult outcomes. So I think it's interesting that we are seeing these lasting effects, if you will, on math testing. Math is heavily dependent on children's attentional and executive functioning, these kind of intellectual habits, even more so than reading is, so. So I know that there may be some questions already bubbling up out there and we will have a lot of time for questions. So hold on to them. I'm gonna ask one more around some of these, this quality of what's happening in program issues and then I wanna get to some policy questions and then we'll open it up in a few minutes to everybody else here. So unless this is something for any of you to answer, I think that Debra, you might know it in terms of Tulsa, but here I know that this is something that you work on a lot. I wanna understand or have you helped us all understand when we're talking about quality in these programs, we are certainly talking about those structural quality, like that distinction, structural versus process quality that you made as necessary but not sufficient. So let me just clarify. That it sounds like what you're saying, that you're learning from the research is that structural quality is necessary but not sufficient if it does not also include process quality and this process quality is measured by things such as the interactions that teachers are having with children and in particular on whether there's an instructional component to that and one of the terms that's tossed around a little bit that I want to make sure that we're all understanding or that we even have a picture ahead of is what we're talking about when we say instructional quality. If you're seeing in some of the data from these pre-K programs that instructional quality is low, what does that actually mean? What is happening in the classrooms with kids that's indicating to someone observing that oh, this is a moment of low quality? Can you help just kind of paint a picture for us of what that looks like and then maybe the alternative, so then what does high quality instruction look like? And instruction is a weird word to use with three and four year olds too. We need to kind of recognize that. We're not talking about lecturing in the way I'm lecturing, yeah, so, yes. Let's do what I can start, like, yeah. So there's actually this measurement of instructional support that's getting used increasingly in a lot of research and the kinds of things it captures is, first of all, it's a well-organized, well-structured, not over-structured from a child's perspective, a predictable organized classroom. So children know what to expect. It's not stressful to them. It's each day is different from the other. Secondly, these are classrooms where children, where the teachers know that kids have brains. I think about it, right? So, hero use that serve and return terminology around conversation. So they have conversations around academic content that really engage, make the child think. It's not just yes and no answers or give me the facts or how many of this. It's really they're working with knowledge and information in the context of a teacher-student relationship. Teachers are drawing the kids out, pushing them the next step. You told me this, what if you think about it that way? This is what high-quality instruction is in college and in preschool. These are teachers who really know how to keep children engaged and interested. So if a child is sort of wandering off and aimless wandering is one of the phrases we use a lot when we look at childcare programs, they catch that, right? And they draw the kids back in. So they're excited about learning. And this is exactly what we saw in the Tulsa classrooms. This is how we saw in the kids. The kids were engaged. The kids were not wandering around the classrooms. They were excited about what they were doing. When the teachers provide feedback, it's not just giving the kid a grade or a one plus versus two pluses or a smiley face versus a sad face. It was feedback that really fostered additional learning. It's not easy to do. They could do it in Tulsa because they had those structural, they had BA level teachers with early childhood education backgrounds. They were very dedicated teachers. They were teaching preschool, I believe in part. This is my own impression from having worked there for years. They were paid on the same wage scale as the kindergarten teachers in the first grade. They were paid on the school wage scale. So they could teach four-year-olds because they wanted to do it and not earn half as much as they would have in many, many other places in this country. So they didn't have to sacrifice to teach the little kids. And they loved doing it and they were fabulous. Anyone else wanna add anything about the instructional quality piece? Sure. I think on the more specific and what the successful, particularly the sets of interventions that have combined focused and evidence-based curricula with coaching, what you'll see is the particular kinds of skills that build particular domains. So I'm just gonna give a couple examples. So in language, in the interactions that build language that there is not just conversations but new and unfamiliar words that teachers return to over the course of a week. They might not just pick up a book and read it but provide the extended conversations about particular words linking to the child's everyday life. The concept of even difficult words that might be outside of the kid's normal vocabulary that sets up the ability to absorb academic vocabulary later on. In the domain of math, this is like the building blocks curriculum that was implemented at scale in Boston that we think was responsible for the large effects on math skills there. This was not about counting. It went far beyond counting in that curriculum in a set of sequenced activities that really built on what kids are capable of learning in skills like magnitude and spatial skills and geometry and not just numeracy and arithmetic. In the area of the socio-emotional curricula, it is, for example, providing the scaffolding for when children are overwhelmed with emotions to recognize that state and to understand what they can do to recognize it in others themselves and to cope with that, to address this area that is called kind of social cognitions. How can kids learn to think about their social relationships with others and their own and others' emotions? So those are some examples of when instructional skills scaffold particular domains of children's development. And that's what's very exciting is these combinations are providing ways and routes to do that. Because again, these are not curricula that are just thrown at teachers with materials. This is the regular support in the classroom. And I would say also that these evidence-based curricula typically provide activities that are enjoyable for both parents, well, teachers, for both teachers and children. So incredibly engaging activities. There's a real science it feels like to me in the teaching of children at these ages and being able to draw out those responses in that way. If we could see that in supporting our kindergarten, first and second grade teachers as well as the support that we're seeing in these pre-K teachers that could do a world of good sort of my editorializing for a moment. Let me talk about policy here and get into kind of where we are today. So the president put out a proposal back in February and March and it feels like a long time ago now given just even the past two weeks and where we are. Laura, can you take us through this a little bit? The president's proposal is out there. What are some of the contours of it? And then there are people in Congress, members of Congress who are interested in moving forward in different ways whether it's on that proposal or not. Tell us where we stand on those things. Well, the president's proposal that he announced in the State of the Union was a birth through five proposal but focusing on the pre-K piece. It was really increasing access universally but beginning with increasing access for high poverty children, low income children and it's not really a new program more of building on what states are already doing and with a focus not just on access but on quality and so providing additional funding for two states that were interested but also interested in taking a new focus on quality and there was some specific features that the president's proposal covered. So increasing salaries, making salaries more equitable to K-12, requiring degrees, bachelor's degrees, also class ratio, class size, those types of focuses and some others. But where we are, zooming to where we are today, so there's been talk in both the House and the Senate about bills and then the Senate, Senator Patty Murray back in June announced work with other senators, Senator Hirono, Harkin and Senator Casey around working on a bill that would be introduced at some point but we have yet to really see that bill introduced. Also in the same is true in the House, we've heard some work that's not necessarily been coordinated with the Senate but sort of separate but both of these would be to, or the intent from my understanding is to help realize the president's proposal and what he put out there. But being where we are now with the shutdown and lots of issues around resolving a new federal budget or continuing resolution of where we are with funding right now, it's whether we're gonna see bills anytime soon I think is my sense probably unlikely. And meaning through the end of the year at least maybe as far as actually seeing them the legislative action on them is. And I'm realizing too Helen Blank is with us here today from the National Women's Law Center and knows a lot of this intimately. In a moment maybe Helen I'll see if we can get the microphone to you and you can give us an update on some of that as well. So given that, and thank you Laura for kind of just description of kind of where we are, you were mentioning a couple of times this was about building on what states are already doing or helping states kind of realize higher quality in what they were already doing, perhaps pushing those states that don't have no program at all to think about actually investing in this area. Albert you watch what's happening in the states very closely, give us an example or two right now of some states to watch, how something like that kind of policy proposal could help those states. So I think, I was thinking about this question, I kind of, I was like making a list and I realized I like to also categorize things. So I have three categories of states to watch, one and governors to watch. One is a group of what I call investors. So these are governors who have proposed very, very significant increases just this past year. So for FY 14 for the current fiscal year for the pre-K programs and have actually seen the most of what they asked for come to fruition. So governor Bentley from Alabama, Snyder from Michigan, Dayton from Minnesota who also included some significant full day kindergarten investment. And also governor Hickenlooper from Colorado. In that case his proposal is contingent upon a ballot initiative to raise income tax in the state. But those are what I would call investors. And then there's another group of states and governors who I would call reformers. So these are, and then the theme is here, that these are folks who are trying to promote more coordination within the birth to five system including pre-K and in some cases beyond and going to the early menstrual year. So we see for example in Connecticut, Governor Molloy proposed a new office, new agency for the birth to five programs that is beginning, you know, kind of getting set up right now. Governor Kit Saber who has a very interesting proposal to create these regional hubs that would be, you know, each hub would sort of help coordinate in that region. In which state? Sort of Oregon. In Oregon. Early child services in that region and they're beginning to fund them and get them up and running. Again, governor Hickenlooper also had a. Hickenlooper's Colorado for this. Proposed to move some of the early learning services and programs into one agency in the Colorado case. The Department of Human Services. And I should mention in Colorado, he's, we need to give credit to the lieutenant governor, Joe Garcia, who actually his portfolio includes early child education. And then New America, you guys did an event with Governor McKell, who has a very ambitious strategic plan that's fueled by the early learning. And Delaware. Delaware, sorry. These things, these names come up for me. You know the first name, the rest of us are like, what state again? Right. And then the third group I would call up-and-comers. So bold as to call some governors up-and-comers. But there are two in my mind. So one is governors and Sandoval in Nevada, who's already made a proposal and the legislature passed a pretty significant investment in fully kindergarten and English language learners. I was there last week and while we were there, he signed the executive order moving some of, again moving some of the early childhood services into the state education agency. So we'll see what the sort of impact of that is, but he's trying to do something different and definitely is interested in investing in this issue. And then the other governor is Governor Abercrombie from Hawaii, who created an office of early learning within his, within the governor's office of kind of elevating the issue by the mere fact of doing that. And he also proposed a pretty significant initiative to start a new state pre-K program in Hawaii. That didn't pass. He got a little bit of what he wanted, but again, I'm actually working with the staff there and they're doing a lot of work there to sort of continue the momentum. So- Okay, that was a very helpful review. Thank you. Laura, did you- Yeah, I just wanted to add one thing. I neglected to mention it. And while Albert said that there are both Republican and Democratic governors that are working and making investments in pre-K across the country and other groups that are coming to say support like the US Chamber of Commerce for more investment in pre-K at the federal and congressional level behind bringing pre-K bills forward. It's predominantly in both the House and Senate right now been a Democratic initiative. And so I think that that's an important point to make and that the House effort is led by right now the Democrats on the Education and Workforce Committee. So we have this difference where we're seeing that Republican governors are very much in the mix, but in terms of Republican congressmen and women, we're not seeing as many champions. Is that a fair way to put it right now? So I'm gonna shift then, there's this big question I have in my head right now around cost and like, how do we pay for this stuff? I'm actually gonna hold that and maybe we can kind of bring that into some of the answers and discussion here, but I wanna get to you all to our audience that I'm sure many of you have many questions and before we get to that, I do want to maybe turn the microphone over if I could, Helen. So poor Helen did not know that I would do this to her until about 30 minutes ago or half ago at this point. But I really, I think it would be very helpful for all of us to know, I know that you've been talking with many members of Congress about the president's plan and how to make it real. Can you tell us what you know of what's going on? Let me stand up. Yes, sir. I think one way to make it real is to believe it can be. It's interesting that you asked. Yes, it is on. Okay, sorry. I think you asked about cost. The president has proposed a win-win way to pay for this by proposing a tax that would raise $75 billion on cigarettes and some other tobacco products that would by the 10th year give nearly 2 million children access to high quality pre-K and keep 1.7 million children from becoming adult smokers. He's like something on the table. I think it's important when we talk about all of this and cost and it really will be important as we get into now what it looks like December. It looks like into talks about a budget resolution. You have to put revenue on the table. Maybe I'm pretty harsh. Can't be for pre-K. You can't be for more support for children birth to three unless you're for revenues because there's no way this can come out of existing revenues. So as we look forward, the budget talks have very significant because we all know nothing works the way it used to. I mean, we're seeing it today when Nancy Pelosi will deliver in the house the resolution to this almost three week standoff. We don't have bills become a law. That's, you know, we are looking forward to a bill from Senator Harkin and from Representative Miller, but it's highly unlikely that it'll go through the traditional budget, the traditional, you know, process. So really what's very significant is the budget resolutions and I can't remember the dates. One is like December 13th and one is February 7th for the CR. Who knows how things will fall out. Apparently the signals aren't terrific but two things have to happen and that we all have to fight for. One, we have to end the sequester because we can't build new programs if we wreck the infrastructure of existing ones. I mean, Head Start's an $8 billion program. If you look at Tulsa, some of it was delivered in Stephen Dow's high quality Head Start program. So we have to preserve the infrastructure of whatever exists in Head Start and childcare and if we don't lift the sequester and we don't keep more cuts coming in fiscal 14, that will be very hard to do and hard to argue to build something new. So that's the first thing. And then we have to think about what you could accomplish on a budget resolution. On the appropriation side again, you have to lift the sequester, the Senate Labor Health and Human Services Subcommittee put in money for the President's Head Start childcare partnerships the full amount, I think it's 1.4 billion and they put in 750 million for preschool development grants on the education side. So there's two components of this larger president, that larger preschool plan. And those were the parts that would happen through the normal appropriations process but the big significant change would come for a big program where you could argue much like Tulsa, much like Boston, much like Abbott, every four year old would have access to high quality pre-K and they would all go to kindergarten with that experience which I think is really significant to the success of these programs. Debra and I were in France a long time ago and we went into a ZEP, which is a high quality, it was supposed to be higher quality for low income kids and you could discuss that ad infinitum but there was one little boy who had significant issues plus a runny nose and he kept running out of the classroom. And because there were 28 children in the classroom only if, because we were there, could the classroom go on? But the point was really not that, the point was that if you have half the children without a good experience, they will be running all around the classroom, the teacher can't focus on them and I think that's really important about the President's plan. But to get it to happen, I think it has to be attached to these big budget negotiations and is that possible? It's pretty challenging but I think on the positive side is that this has all shed a light on early learning and it's very important that we continue to be optimistic because if you look at articles, they, talking about the budget, they talk about one of the President's priorities being pre-K but you look at what's going on around the country, Albert talked about the governors, I mean the governors have led this since 1980 and of course the federal government invested a lot in Head Start but I think that this has changed the conversation and so it's important sort of to continue the conversation and push very hard in these budget negotiations for something more comprehensive and then whatever happens to sort of keep the conversation alive. Thank you, that's really helpful context. If we have more kind of specific kind of sequester on budget questions, Claire McCann is here as well, she's a policy analyst for us in the Ed Policy Program and has been writing a lot about what's been going on not just in the past two weeks but throughout the budget process and a lot of that is on our blog, Early Ed Watch but Claire also might be able to answer some specific questions to that today but let's just get to the questions then. Who would like to ask a question of our panelists about the report and if there are any clarifying questions that you have out there, anything that you didn't quite understand, please, please jump in and then also if there are members of the press here who might have questions because you're writing something, let us know as well. So let me actually, any members of the press that have a question right now? Okay, we'll go ahead to, I'm sorry, the woman in the white next to the woman in the red. Thank you. I'm Lori Connors-Tadros with the Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes. We're funded by the Department of Ed to provide technical assistance to state education agencies so my questions frame that but first I wanna thank the panelists and the report authors because I think that what this review of the literature gives us as a tool for policymakers who are crafting legislation is kind of some very clear elements of which they could craft the legislation around developmentally appropriate practice, professional development, use of formative assessment, health and parenting education. And so one of the contextual challenges we have is that legislators are not often crafting the legislation based on the best known research and that's for a variety of different reasons which I don't wanna go into but what I really like about the paper and actually the way you've presented it in such a succinct way is that that's going to be very easily understood by them and it's in a fantastic tool for us to get out. And so the question I have and perhaps the next step of this if our goal is to actually do this at scale and to sustain it, we need to articulate in addition to the structural and process elements we need to articulate the system elements. So the question that I have actually for Deborah is you made a comment about mixed delivery and I think it'd be really helpful for the audience to clarify what you meant by that because in essence we don't have the capacity to actually offer all four-year-olds a program unless we have some mixed delivery system which would include the comprehensive services you mentioned. And I think I'm just gonna make one final comment based on I work for NEAR and the National Institute for Early Education Research and our latest year's yearbook findings found significant effects of the impact of the recession on those systemic elements of quality, monitoring and evaluation. And so we are in very much of a danger of the review that you found and the findings you found not actually finding them in five years. So the question is clarified mixed delivery and if it's possible at some point to articulate the system elements that are necessary to achieve these outcomes at scale? Okay, thank you. And thank you for all of your fabulous work in this complicated territory. So mixed delivery, technically, and there are other people in the room who are far better qualified to answer this than I am. Many states take pre-K dollars and cut across various funding streams and therefore give money to support four-year-old care and education in childcare centers and Head Start programs and school-based pre-K because there's not enough capacity in school systems at this point and there is controversy about whether that's the best setting anyway, right? Is that fair? Yeah, so that's the complicated controversial part. And feel free to chime in, hero. What part of what I think has been so instructive about Tulsa, frankly, and I'm learning this more and more in all sorts of other data that I'm looking at and we need to take this to heart. The issue is not the funding stream and the issue is not what's on the front of the door of the program. The issue is the people who have the power to be leaders, to guide what children actually experience, value that it be quality early childhood education. It can happen in many different settings and what Tulsa tells us is it can happen in Head Start and it can happen in school-based pre-K programs. They didn't include their childcare, maybe they're one or two in other cities, but not in Tulsa but it's really about what are you expecting of the children and providing for the children and supporting the adults who care and educate them what supports and training do you offer them so that they can do a good job of it? I mean, that's really the bottom line here. I would just add that I think one of the things that I report highlights is that a phrase that I don't think we've heard very much in the field, we're now possible to talk about which is evidence-based professional development approaches, not just the idea of evidence-based curricula, what this means I think is for us to think about in the financing, to think about the percentage of any budget that goes to increasing access, how much of it goes to quality as I think is usual around this kind of legislation, but we're hoping that the report actually provides some guidance on how such funds could be spent. Both existing funds, because we know, for example, large-scale public school systems but also Head Start have significant budgets for professional development. We think that redirecting some of those to some of the more evidence-based approaches might produce benefits for children. At the systems level, Boston is engaging in a community pilot and I thought actually maybe Chris Weiland could talk a little bit about that and the other system supports and as innovative as Stephen Dow is in Tulsa, Jason Saxe is in the city of Boston, so yeah. Sure, so Boston is currently rolling out their model, essentially so coaching and language, literacy and math curricula in community-based programs in the highest poverty neighborhoods within the Boston program and so we're just collecting the pilot data now, but what we're finding and which we'll be talking about at the APAM conference coming up in about a month is the real need for math support in particular in these places to get those teachers up to speed but I think it's something where we don't have a lot of empirical studies yet for which is the best system but we are seeing some efforts to figure that out. But then just to underscore, the point being that the research that you were looking at was not just exclusive of something happening in a building that was an elementary school building that happened to have a preschool tacked onto it nor was it just one sort of model of mixed delivery but different ways of thinking through what a mixed delivery system could be and I think it is important to recognize that even if we got to a world in which Pre-K slash Head Start was available to all children and families who wanted it, there's still a wraparound care question and a need for childcare programs that support families that are working odd hours or are working as in the majority of us who are working even nine to five, at least it'll have a way nine to six or nine to, you know, that we have a way to make sure our children are in a safe place even after a more kind of instructional program is over at say two or three in the afternoon. So I think those are all parts of this discussion and what I have watched happen over the past five years that I think is really encouraging is that systems building and recognition across the field that everybody is needed at the table and that it's not just this only can be done by the schools and we, you know, of course there has to be a really integrated and thorough approach that crosses. Let's, yes, yes. I think both what Hero and Christina was talking about was also how important the adult is in a Pre-K program, the teacher and I think in terms of a system approach, I think we need to, or policymakers need to keep in mind that it is really about not just investing in kids but investing in adults in terms of the quality of the preparation programs, the professional development and how thoughtful it is and how evidence-based it is. Compensation, thank you. She was whispering in my ear. Right, so all those issues that relate to the quality of instruction, I don't know that we have at the state, at least at the state level, a lot of examples where leaders have really focused on those investments in a very sustained and significant way. I think that's an area where we can see that we would like to see more action. Let me get, there's a number of folks who have their hands up, a woman right here and then I know Helen had a comment again but yes, if you can go next, that would be great. Thank you very much for the report as well as the very interesting discussion. My name is Tamar Manuel Yanatinch from the Brookings Institution, working on ECD internationally. I had a question about the C, the convergence, where you show that children who have not participated in preschool programs catch up to those who have. I think, and I understand the point that that is on what is measured in the tests. It's a subset of what we want to see in terms of children's development and there may be gains in terms of the socio-intellectual habits of the children that we're unable to observe and measure. Even so, I think it's a difficult finding for policymakers who are working with financial constraints to sort of look at and say let's invest more in preschool programs if the evidence indeed shows that there is convergence for those who haven't participated in those programs. So I was just wondering whether is there a case to be made for spillover benefits in classes from children who have participated in preschool programs that are now in the same classes after kindergarten and first and second, third grade. So sort of peer effects and spillover benefits from having children that have participated in preschool programs together with those who have not, which would bolster the case, I think significantly for additional investments. I don't know if those effects exist. Yeah, we did review those studies and there's a small but growing literature. Again, Chris has conducted some of these studies and essentially there's two kinds. One is comparing higher ability peers with lower ability peers and the other is that SES can sometimes be a marker of that. So mixed SES classrooms and what are the benefits. And correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, but it's not entirely a consistent literature but there is some evidence of the benefits for example lower income kids when they are in classrooms with higher income peers. So there's some but it's still a very much an emerging literature. Two recent studies that are about the notion of school and classroom quality as being key to sustaining the boost is one is a study from the long-term follow up of a socio-emotional curriculum called the Chicago School Readiness Project, which is not the same thing as the Chicago Child Parent Center, worked by Sobel Raver and Stephanie Jones, finding that when kids went on to higher quality elementary schools, the benefits in terms of improved socio-emotional development were sustained. Worked by Catherine Magnuson on some national data sets suggesting that things like the amount of instructional time in a classroom helped to explain how long the benefits of exposure to preschool lasted. So those are just two examples but still we need more evidence. Thanks for that, throw out a theory as well that I think deserves some study. But I've also been wondering about spillover in the other direction, meaning if you have a kindergarten classroom where say half the children have had a high quality preschool experience and the other half have really had very little, then you have a teacher who is going to be having to work with children who have had very little preschool experience and spend a lot of time kind of getting them up to speed, not so much even on academic stuff but on can you sit next to Jose and not keep poking his leg please and no, it's not time to all get a run to go grab our lunchboxes out of the cubby, we need to wait a few minutes. Those kinds of moments in the classroom that then take away from the instructional time that those preschool, those children who've had preschool could get a chance for them to kind of yet build further on their knowledge, both their academic knowledge and their social emotional growth. And it's made me wonder if some of convergence is based on kind of holding back what happens happening in kindergarten and first grade is that those kids kind of, whatever gains they may have had, we can't really build on them very well because there's this triaging that's having to happen in classrooms. So, well, I shouldn't ask if there's any data on that because I don't want to take away from our audience's questions here but I just want to put that on the table and maybe it can come back into discussion. So either there's a woman, oh and Marty, did you want to point out something? Our group discussed this. And this is Marty again, one of the. Sure, just that our group discussed this and said we really need studies looking at kindergarten classrooms and the wider range of previous experiences that children are entering with. Your question can be studied directly and really needs to be. And we need to ask what help can we give to kindergarten teachers facing a wide range of entering skills? Excellent, thank you. So I think behind you, someone had a question. And we've got about 10 more minutes so try to, yeah, I'll keep them short here so that we can make sure we can. I'll be short. My name is Stephanie Miller. I'm the executive director of the Trust for Learning which is a collaborative foundation of foundations. Taking a hard look at early childhood, specifically in the area of helping to scale up high quality early childhood models. We think there's a lot of focus on policy, thank God. We are not focusing on policy but rather set up to support and prepare and build the capacity of models, existing programs, we know Stephen Dow, we know others that are ready when hopefully that bill passes sometime down the road to actually get to work. What do you think, two things. One of the models that we're looking at quite carefully is Montessori which is now ventured into the public sector quite broadly. And really addresses a lot of the executive functions, social-emotional, self-reliance from zero through often grade eight. So the convergence issue becomes a non-issue because the classrooms teach to the child when they're ready in mixed-age classrooms developmentally with a developmental focus. And I raise all this because as we take a look at various models and a lot of private sector foundations come together to join us to do this, what do you think the private sector's role is in helping support using the research that you've just released, the scaling up that it supports so well. Great question. So we know there have been some innovations like the acceleration and innovation of, so there's some real big new initiatives that have a focus on access and could build in a more explicit notion of quality I think. So I think there's a tremendous need for innovation, entrepreneurship, the kinds of things that have kind of driven some change in the K-12 sector. And so I think some of the new initiatives in early childhood are quite exciting on that front. And to the degree that they kind of also integrate some of this evidence, this new wave of evidence, I think that would be tremendous. No one can do it alone. And I think the future actually globally is public-private partnerships around ECD investment. So. I'm in the back there. Hi, I'm Tom Corwin from the Penn Hill Group. I'm a little unclear on the universe of programs that were the focus of the study, the 84 and some odd programs. Dr. Yoshikawa in your presentation said, you said most publicly funded programs, state-funded and head-starter, kind of in the middle range on your quality measures. Small number on the left side of the curve that are low quality, and then another small number on the other end that are you called excellent. I kind of surmised, but I wasn't sure that this study basically synthesized from those excellent programs. And couldn't make the statements you did about impacts about head-start in general or state-funded or preschool in general. I think some of this lack of clarity is in the report itself. I noticed some of the sentences say preschool education does this and does that and other sentences say the impacts are about quality preschool education. And since the book doesn't say anything about how the programs are selected, I couldn't tell from that either. So I'm requesting clarification, thank you. Sure, sorry for the confusion. The 84 comes from our recent meta-analysis, which was literally all of the rigorous evaluations of early childhood evaluations conducted between 1960 and 2007. And so that did not restrict on any kind of indicator of quality. On the other hand, there were no descriptive information provided in the bulk of the research literature on the levels of quality. We do have to look to the more recent literature for what the levels of quality are. But it's important to note that some of the long-term effects of head-start were conducted on national samples of the program as it was implemented in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Studies by Jens Ludwig and David Deming that you'll find in there. But essentially our kind of entry criteria were for a level of rigor in terms of whether the conclusions and supported and the analyses really supported what was said in terms of methods. But thanks for the clarification in that the reviews were, the statements were not restricted to those 84 studies that were in the meta-analysis, but there were a few findings from that meta-analysis in there and in fact other prior meta-analyses by Steve Barnett, Greg Camilli and colleagues out of near other reviews, rigorous reviews. So it's essentially a comprehensive review of the literature on preschool dating back to 1960 that we could do at the present time. Just to kind of follow up and maybe pin point one part of your question, sir, that the report does include head-start and state-funded pre-K programs and there were some state-funded pre-K programs that were at low quality, but also some that were at high quality because there's such variations state by state, is that right? And I think that maybe for those of us who live this every day, that's kind of a known, but it may not be as known to those who aren't looking at every single detail about the Oklahoma program versus the Florida program, et cetera. And maybe we should just take a minute if you could to talk about, Oklahoma is a state, a full state-run program. And when we talk about these effects, we're talking about Tulsa obviously because that was the sample that you looked at, but it's the same quality indicators are part of the full state program in Oklahoma, correct? Okay, so maybe that just answers it and happy to take more questions as people kind of come up. We are going to ask, maybe we'll take one or two last, let's put two questions together if we could. The woman, is that Yesmina in the back there? And there was someone right in front of you who had a question as well, or no? Maybe not. Just yeah, go for Yesmina and then we'll close up. I thank you, really a good way to get the evidence together. I'm sorry, with the National Head Start Association, I should have said. National Head Start Association. So one of the things that we heard from all of you, the important person is the teacher and it's the quality of the interaction to the quality. What I keep hearing repeatedly, and Head Start has now met about two thirds of the teachers have bachelor's degrees. The apparently, most of our programs are articulating the fact that the teachers who are coming with new bachelor's degrees are not really well prepared to teach. They're not, you know, none of the great things we heard about the elements of teaching, what has to happen in the classroom and so on. It's not there. So it's anybody, so our constituents keep saying, you know, start the national conversation and I keep saying we're not the ones to do that. But I'm just wondering if any of your research can inform or if there is anybody who is actually starting the conversation about the quality. I heard the thing about the Boston Public Schools and the coaching and so on, but just the preparation, teacher prep. I mean, I think the conversation about teacher prep is hot and heavy in K-12. And I think that there could be lessons learned from that conversation in terms of, you know, they're looking at a lot at, you know, not only are our teaching candidates taking the right tests and the courses, but also can they actually demonstrate proficiency in front of a real classroom. So those kinds of reforms I think are worth looking at and thinking about how to apply it to really chat. I think the mentoring and coaching strategies that he will talk about and has talked about in this report, same similar conversation in K-12 is not just about providing these sort of, you know, isolated workshops and professional development opportunities, but really it's about following up those opportunities with coaching and feedback and collaboration among teachers. So I mean, those are all heavy lifts, especially in K-12 and especially even more so in the early childhood sector. But I think it's a conversation that people are having and, you know, I think hopefully it'll lead to, you know, more of a, you know, kind of what we want to see in terms of, you know, teachers getting more education and coming out with, you know, better skills and competencies in the classroom. Yeah, a couple points. If we think of mentors and coaches as being part of a career ladder where teachers who have the skills and I would say not just the instructional skills but the relational skills to mentor other teachers, then I think, you know, that's been a, I think perhaps an often stated goal, but this, I think this new evidence provides specific examples for how that could be done. And then the concept of why not someone who's in a teacher preparation program getting access to some of that coaching or having that kind of similar experience in their teacher preparation program might be a quite an exciting new approach. And I know Marty and our group has spoken a lot about that and has, I think, highlighted some of that in also an excellent review she did a few years ago for the Department of Education on Early Childhood Professional Development Systems. And Laura, I know that you've done a lot of looking at preparation issues for teachers. I'll give you the last word here. Okay, okay, well first, I think, you know, we need a two prong approach. So teacher preparation, you know, at the pre-service is a poor in, you know, as Albert was saying, you know, K-12 and the same is true for early childhood. Of course, depends on the school, but largely speaking, teachers aren't prepared to meet the needs of kids in the classroom. And so two prong, we need to make some improvements on the front end. And I talk about some of what needs to be done in a paper I wrote a couple years ago and Getting in Sink and looking at both, you know, how elementary teachers are prepared and how early childhood teachers are prepared and looking at some licensure and certification issues. But it's equally important to focus on the in-service and, you know, as hero and, you know, this paper talks about that the coaching, that the making professional development for teachers once, you know, they become teachers, more meaningful is just as important. So we need to focus on both sides. And I think there's a lot of things happening in early childhood that can inform K-12 when it comes to professional development. So I think there's lessons to be learned and definitely more work that's needed. Yes, and hopefully policy will eventually catch up and label all of this to happen at scale, whether it's access for kids to high quality programs and access for our teachers and our soon-to-be teachers to the programs that will help them improve. So we need so much and there's too much evidence to ignore. So we need to keep moving on this. Please join me in thanking our amazing panel and report authors. And have a good afternoon, everybody.