ESSA Implementation Across the States: How do NC’s Early Education Plans Stack Up?

There is evidence from across the nation and from North Carolina that elementary school principals, pressured by the high stakes testing in grades 3 through 5, move their higher-performing teachers into the tested grades, and lower-performing teachers into grades K-2. Studies have looked at data across time and found that this practice increased with the introduction of high stakes testing in No Child Left Behind. Principals are making what might seem at first glance like a logical decision—put your best teachers in the grades where you will be held responsible for the students’ outcomes.

Child development research and brain science, however, tell us that the foundation for learning is laid in the early years, from birth through age eight. It is the cognitive and social-emotional skills built in those first eight years that result in the test scores principals are hoping to see in third, fourth and fifth grades. So how do we motivate our education leaders to see the forest instead of the trees, and invest resources in the birth through eight system?

New Federal Education Policy Recognizes the Importance of the Early Grades

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the most recent iteration of No Child Left Behind, reflects the science. ESSA recognizes the need to incentivize principals, superintendents and state education agencies to put more resources into the early grades, in order to ensure that students arrive in third grade ready to succeed.

ESSA does this by explicitly calling out early childhood education as an allowable use of federal education funding. This approach signals the importance federal education leaders place on early childhood education and allows states flexibility to use ESSA funds to build on their current early care and education investments.

Very few of the early education provisions in ESSA are mandatory. So it is a nationwide endorsement of early learning that so many states have voluntarily incorporated early learning programs and accountability measures into their consolidated state plans.

The First Five Years Fund has released a toolkit of ESSA resources for states. The most recent addition to the toolkit is a first look at states’ consolidated plans, all of which have now been submitted to the federal government. These plans are high-level—the details will come later as state and local education agencies start to operationalize their plans—and states were not required to discuss how they would handle the early learning provisions. But even in these high-level snapshots, we can see that states are prioritizing investing in early education.

The chart below summarizes the early learning-related provisions in each title of ESSA, notes how many states addressed that provision in their consolidated plan, and highlights whether the NC plan addressed that provision. Since states were not required to discuss how they would handle most of the early learning provisions, more states than those listed below—including NC—may ultimately take action in these areas.

North Carolina’s plan addresses a few of the possible areas, including:

• How the state Title I plan will incorporate early learning into the state accountability system, describe early learning programs using Title I resources, coordinate Title I with Head Start and other early childhood programs, and address education for migrant children.
• Professional development for early learning teachers.
• How public preschool programs will work to ensure children experiencing homelessness have reliable access to preschool.

There are a few other areas that most other states address that NC does not, including:

• How districts using Title I funding for early learning will meet Head Start Program Performance Standards.
• Using Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants (SSAEG) for early learning.
• The role of Head Start in serving homeless students.

The NC Early Childhood Foundation will continue to work with the NC Department of Public Instruction and local school districts (here and here) on finalizing and implementing ESSA plans.