Research-based policies, practices and programs

Development of a comprehensive, birth-to-third grade systems approach to children’s development and academic success in North Carolina can be anchored in:

• Recent legislation calling for birth-to-eight systems alignment and a shared measurement, including consideration of the North Carolina Pathways to Grade Level Reading measures
• Continued legislative interest in increasing interagency coordination and collaboration
• North Carolina’s K-3 formative assessment
• Progress or learning from federally-supported Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems grant awards to North Carolina¹
• North Carolina’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) state plan and district plans
• Current evaluations of North Carolina early childhood programs like Smart Start and NC Pre-K

Several states have created separate early childhood agencies to better coordinate, align and fund early childhood programs, including:²

• Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning³
• Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (within the Executive Office of Education)⁴
• Washington State Department of Early Learning⁵
• Connecticut Office of Early Childhood⁶
• Pennsylvania Office of Child Development and Early Learning (jointly supervised by the Departments of Public Welfare and Education)⁷

Some of these structures represent strong alignment with early learning and education agencies (Georgia and Massachusetts), while others have stronger connections with health and human services agencies (Connecticut and Washington). In North Carolina, birth-through-age-eight education programs and services are administered by both the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Department of Public Instruction (DPI). Recent legislation established a Birth to Third Grade Interagency Council as a means to support a collaborative and aligned system.

North Carolina communities are working to build comprehensive early childhood systems. A few examples include:

Great Expectations, Forsyth County. Great Expectations is a philanthropic 10- to 15-year investment in achieving healthy development, school readiness and kindergarten success for all children living in Forsyth County. Guided by the Great Expectations Activation Plan,⁸ this effort will seek improvements in child and family health, self-regulation and executive function among children and adults, and in parent-child interactions and adult caregiving capacity. Great Expectations will support children’s oral language and vocabulary development and build parent, provider, community and systems capacity.⁹ Investments are guided by the following principles:

• System-wide accountability and alignment at the agency-level and based on improved data alignment, collection, analysis and decision-making
• Moving to scale through community investment and by leveraging other systems reform efforts
• Aligned communications
• Strengthening work on behalf of Latino families and Latino-led initiatives
• Family engagement including “elevating family voice”
• Engaging unlikely partners including the faith and health care sectors, and educators.¹⁰

The Forsyth Promise, Winston-Salem. The Forsyth Promise, created in 2011, is a member of the StriveTogether National Cradle to Career Network and aims to ensure that all children in the county are achieving kindergarten readiness from birth, experiencing academic proficiency and growth, graduating from high school and completing post-secondary education.¹¹

East Durham Children’s Initiative, Durham. This place-based effort, modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone and now in its sixth year, is a comprehensive, cradle to high school graduation effort focused on a specific area of East Durham.¹² The goal is to increase high school graduation through careful, community-based investments and service capacity improvements and connections beginning in early childhood.¹³ Programs supported through the East Durham Children’s Initiative include:

• Durham Connects (now Family Connects), a nurse home-visiting program for all families of newborns
• EDCI LEAP Academy, a half-day bilingual preschool program for children ages 3 to 5 without an earlier formal preschool experience
• Early Childhood Parent Advocates
• Childcare subsidies that are prioritized to meet family needs
• Kindergarten readiness initiatives¹⁴

Opportunity Task Force, Charlotte. The Opportunity Task Force was convened in 2016, following a 2013 report that Charlotte, North Carolina was 50th among 50 cities in upward mobility, and violence between policy and city residents in 2016 following the police shooting of an African American resident.¹⁵ The Task Force identified two cross-cutting themes that impact child and family success—racial segregation and social capital—and focused on three areas: early care and education, college and career readiness, and child and family stability.¹⁶ Strategies are articulated for each of these areas.¹⁷

Early warning systems use student data to monitor, identify, and intervene with those at risk of failure to meet certain milestones. Such systems are used by half of all school districts nationally, usually at the high school level.¹

Attendance, behavior, and course performance data are often included in early warning systems² although other data could also be analyzed.

Early warning systems can be used at the student or population level to:

• Identify students’ needs and offer them expanded educational, health and other supports
• Guide reform efforts within schools with high levels of grade retention, low student academic performance, and/or high levels of students with risk factors by determining whether certain interventions prevent students from falling behind when risk factors suggest that they are likely to. ³ 

Since chronic absenteeism begins in the early years of schooling, PreK-3rd grade early warning system could help schools mobilize family, school, district, and community supports and interventions in the earliest years. The American Institutes for Research⁴ has created an early warning rubric specifically for North Carolina that utilizes the NC Risk Report and Diploma Assessment Report available in PowerSchool. This tool enables schools and districts to identify and support students at risk of dropping out of high school. Work on an early-grades warning system could be built from this tool. A system that considered attendance data, behavior data, and academic performance measures could help schools identify and support students at risk of not being promoted to the next grade.

Research tells us that it takes a comprehensive, whole-child approach, from birth, to ensure that children are reading on grade level by third grade. A step in that direction is to align our preschool system for three- and four-year-olds with the early elementary grades. States are experimenting with this approach, with some results. 

Common elements in PK-3 alignment (also called a “three to third” approach) include:

• High quality preschool for three- and four-year-olds
• Attention to the transition between preschool and kindergarten
• Alignment of curriculum from preschool through the third grade
• Cross-training of teachers across PK-3, anchored in developmentally-informed, child-centered learning
• Instructional practices that support individual children’s academic and social-emotional learning
• Active parent and family engagement
• Collection and use of data for quality improvement and accountability¹

North Carolina’s FirstSchool was launched in 2005 to create a seamless experience from preschool through the third grade for children and families, with special attention to the needs of vulnerable children.² FirstSchool is located at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina, and is aligned with the national P-3 Center housed at the University of Washington.³

At least one evaluation of a state’s PK-3 system has shown positive results. A five-year RAND evaluation of Hawaii’s P-3 initiative, conducted over the period 2008 through 2014, revealed third grade reading improvement equal to an additional nine weeks of schooling each year with more students in the participating group achieving reading proficiency than among the comparison group. Key contributors to this success were:

• Development of cooperative, informed relationships among teachers across PK-3
• Newly implemented early learning standards
• Local decision-making on activities
• Establishment of measurable outcomes
• Better policymaker-staff relationships
• Parent support⁴

The National P-3 Center at the University of Washington notes that while PK-3 alignment is being implemented in many states, additional research to document both the implementation process and student outcomes is required.⁵ A core guidance document is available from the national P-3 center:  Framework for Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating PreK-3rd Grade Approaches.⁶

Ensure that teachers are adequately trained to incorporate math as a developmentally-appropriate, intentional component in birth-through-third-grade education.

Early math knowledge and skill begin to develop in the first three years of life, prompted and supported by adult interaction though such activities as counting, grouping and comparing.¹ However, there is not a general consensus among educators about how much and what types of learning activities are essential in early childhood classrooms.²

A decade ago, a study of young children’s math skills revealed that math skills³ were more strongly linked to academic performance in the 5th and 9th grades than were early literacy skills.⁴ States are taking notice. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported on states’ changes during the 2015 legislative session to support improved mathematics instruction, including:

• Georgia increased funds for differentiated pay for newly certified math and science teachers and for K-5 math mastery initiatives.
• Iowa funded salary increases for K-12 math and science teachers and supports for math programming.
• Michigan included math skills in its kindergarten readiness assessment.
• Texas created Math Achievement Academies for K-3 teachers to improve instruction on core numeracy skills.
• Utah created a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Center to improve academic learning among K-6 students.⁵

North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction sets guidelines for math instruction through its Standard Course of Study for Mathematics with online resources from kindergarten through the eighth grade⁶ and through its three-level Standards for Mathematical Practice.⁷ North Carolina’s math proficiency standards are challenging—they are the fourth highest in the nation at the fourth-grade level and second highest in the nation at the eight-grade level.⁸

According to the nationwide National Assessment of Educational Progress, North Carolina’s fourth-graders have held steady in math proficiency, at slightly above the national average.⁹

More than a decade of research has documented that a positive family-provider connection increases family engagement, and that family engagement contributes to the academic motivation, grade promotion and social-emotional development of young children. For practices to be effective at promoting children’s development, they must also be regarded by the family is useful.¹ Some family engagement practices include:

Creating a Welcoming Environment. Feeling welcome within a setting is one of the factors rated by parents as most important to their engagement.² Strategies valued by parents include being greeted at the door, creating a parent resource room, providing signed directions to various parts of the setting, and using multi-language resources.³

Mitigating Cultural and Racial Implicit Bias. Implicit biases are negative attitudes or stereotypes about people that we hold without our conscious knowledge. Cultural or racial implicit biases held and acted on by teachers and school leaders can make families feel misunderstood or unwelcome and contribute to their disengagement, without the staff even being aware that this is happening.⁴ Attention to implicit bias and its impact on racial inequity has been the recent focus of work in the criminal justice system,⁵ health and health care,⁶ education⁷ and housing.⁸ Research has found that implicit biases can be changed if people are provided with new information that helps them reinterpret what they know.⁹ Strategies that can help to mitigate implicit bias include:

• Training in understanding implicit bias
• Home, neighborhood and community visiting by program staff
• Holding family meetings in neutral settings
• Hosting family-accessible community meetings¹⁰

Engaging in Teacher Home Visits. Parents, teachers and children all benefit from early grade teacher home visits.

• Parents build greater confidence in engaging with their children’s programs
• Teachers build a better understanding of environmental influences on home settings.
• Children perform better in math and reading and adapt to their school classrooms more easily.¹¹

Many school systems also encourage opportunities to meet with teachers during the summer before the school year starts and provide orientation programs and school-wide activities to welcome new families.¹²

Engaging in Respectful, Responsive Two-Way Communication. Communicating with families in a variety of ways and through different vehicles (in-person, phone, text, email, letter) is a core practice in building family engagement.¹³  Evidence-based strategies include:

• Asking parents about their preferred forms of communication
• Translating all written material into the native language of families
• Making translators available
• Engaging in responsive listening to gather parent input¹⁴

Practicing Shared Decision-Making. While many early education programs and schools try to include parents in discussions and seek to advance parents’ leadership, parents often do not have opportunities to become real decision-makers¹⁵. Research has shown that families from minority cultures may feel reserved and alienated from school engagement activities.¹⁶ Fear of deportation may prevent undocumented parents from participating.¹⁷

Promoting Parental Learning. There are evidence-based programs and research-informed practices that, when implemented with fidelity, can improve parent-child interactions, advance more positive parenting and discipline behavior, and reduce parenting stress.

Practices include:

• Teaching or modeling parenting and discipline skills
• Modeling healthy interactions with children
• Sharing information with parents about child development
• Affirming parents’ strengths, self-efficacy and empowerment¹⁸
• Children benefit from these practices as well, through increased social-emotional competence and improved cognitive, language and literacy development.¹⁹

For more on evidence-based programs and practices that can improve parenting and parent-child interactions, see the Positive Parent-Child Interactions webpage.

Offering Family Supports. Child care and transportation are common barriers that reduce the likelihood of family engagement with the programs that serve their children. Strategies that support families’ participation include:

• Providing taxi or Uber passes
• Volunteer drivers
• Providing or paying for child care while parents attend events or meetings at the school or program²⁰

Equipping children to progress successfully from grade to grade begins at birth. The early identification of learning challenges can reduce the likelihood that children’s academic performance or developmental delays may lead to grade retention in the K-3 years. Several of the other issue webpages address this, including:

• Physical Health, which addresses developmental, social-emotional, lead and hearing and vision screening
• Social-Emotional Health, which addresses the impact of trauma and adversity on the learning process
• Early Intervention, which addresses the early identification of developmental and learning delays
• High Quality Birth through Age Eight Care and Education, which addresses issues of quality and access in early care and education settings and the early grades.

In addition, screening, assessments and intervention in both reading and math are needed to ensure grade promotion and early learning success.

Reading Screening and Intervention. Since reading problems in the third grade often result in grade retention, screening for challenges in early literacy skills should be incorporated into preschool and early elementary school practice.¹ There is a large body of research on early literacy and reading interventions that address five core elements of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary.² A screening and intervention protocol could include:

• Screening. All students are screened for potential reading problems twice a year, once when school begins and again mid-year.
• Differentiated Instruction. Time for differentiated reading instruction is provided for all students based on current reading level assessments.
• Small Group Intensive Instruction. For students who perform below a benchmark score on universal screening, a focus on foundational reading skills is provided through small-group intensive intervention.
• Monitor Progress. The progress of students in small group instruction is monitored monthly.
• Daily Instruction. For students who make only minimal progress in small group instruction, daily intensive instruction is provided.³

Math Screening and Intervention. Elementary school math interventions are essential to avoid later problems with math.⁴ Evidence-informed math screening and intervention practices include:  

• Universal screening, with interventions provided to those identified as at risk of math difficulty
• Establish math goals to focus learning
• Cover a few topics deeply, rather than many topics on a surface level
• Use explicit and systematic instruction, which means showing students how to solve problems, talking aloud about the thought processes used in solving problems, ask questions to advance students’ reasoning, guiding students’ practice, offering corrections and feedback, and reviewing frequently
• Teach the underlying structures of word problems and build students’ skills in using math procedures flexibly as they solve problems
• Use visual representations of mathematical ideas, such as number lines, graphs, and simple drawings of concrete objects such as blocks or cups
• Focus daily on quick memory retrieval of basic arithmetic facts
• Monitor progress of those receiving supplemental instructions and others at risk, including using evidence of students’ thinking to assess their progress and adjust instruction
• Include motivational strategies that promote student effort, persistence, and achievement, helping them struggle productively. This is particularly important in Tier II and Tier III interventions.⁵

More than 3,000 school districts across the nation employ a whole school, formal Integrated Student Supports framework. Together, these school districts serve more than 1.5 million, K-12, largely African American and Hispanic students living in circumstances that make them at risk of academic challenges.¹ The largest provider of the Integrated Student Support framework is Communities In Schools, operating in just over 2,300 schools including in North Carolina.²

In the Communities In Schools model, supports are available at three tiers:

• Tier I offers school-wide access to these supports for all students, provided over a short duration and at low intensity levels
• Tier II supports are provided to groups of students with identified common needs
• Tier III provides supports to specific students with high levels of need

Supports are provided across ten domains, based on students’ needs:

• Academic assistance
• Basic needs and resources
• Behavior
• College and career preparation
• Community services
• Motivation and enrichment
• Family engagement
• Life and social skills
• Physical health
• Mental health³

Core practices across sites are:

• Specific Integrated Student Support staff conduct needs assessments and locate or develop community supports, and coordinate with providers so students receive a customized set of mutually reinforcing supports that meet their needs.
• Wraparound supports are both academic and non-academic and may include supports for students’ families.
• School leadership and staff working in close partnership with Integrated Student Support staff who are generally sited within a school.
• Student needs and progress are tracked over time.

The Communities In Schools model results in:

• Students’ receiving more support services
• Improved attendance among elementary school students
• Improved graduation rates among high school students
• Improvements in nonacademic outcomes⁴
• Reduction in grade retention and student dropouts
• Improvements in math and reading achievement, and overall academic performance as measured by students’ grades⁵

Preliminary research shows a positive return on investment of between $10.30 and $11.60 for every dollar invested over time.⁶

Students living in low-income family circumstances can lose two to three months of academic learning over the summer. By the fifth grade, the cumulative effect of these losses can leave these students two to three years behind their more affluent peers.¹ Increasing summer learning opportunities for low-income children can help slow or eliminate the summer slide.

In 2015, the White House and the National Summer Learning Association launched the Summer Opportunity Project with the goal that by 2020 “every city, town and county in America will provide summer learning and jobs opportunities and summer meals to every young person who qualifies for free and reduced-price meals.”² Core practices advanced through this initiative include:

• Get Lost in a Book. Build broader library involvement, including through the distribution of books, access to e-books, and support for parents to promote summer reading.
• Fuel Minds and Bodies. Expand access to summer meals and settings that promote physical activity.
• Hard Work Pays. Provide access to work experiences in conjunction with the business sector, college counseling and literacy activities for middle and high school students.
• The Power of Teams. Expand a cadre of adult and peer mentors (including for STEM), promote summer service learning opportunities, and provide leadership development opportunities for students of color.
• Anytime, Anywhere. Create transportation passports, community technology hubs, and a digital batch program to recognize summer participation.³

In the summer of 2016, Charlotte participated in the Summer Opportunity Project by placing 360 young people in paid internships.⁴

The BELL initiative (Building Educated Leaders for Life) has developed a summer program for at risk students. In 2015, it was expected to serve 4,500 North Carolina elementary and middle school students through a camp-like program designed to “boost” reading and math skills. These programs were offered in Charlotte, Durham, Winston-Salem and Wilmington.⁵ Students enrolled in the BELL initiative made significant progress in both reading and math skills in 2014. Students scoring well below the academic benchmarks in reading and math gained about two months of skills over the summer through either reading or math instruction. Among students who received instruction in both reading and math, students made three months gain in mathematics.⁶

Students with family and life conditions that place them at risk of lower levels of educational success (including race/ethnicity, poverty and chronic adversity) are disproportionately retained in grade, compared with their white, middle-class peers.¹ Focusing on educational equity is critical when seeking to promote educational success for all students.

The Council for Chief State School Officers has identified 10 research- and evidence-informed practices that can guide state educational leaders to focus efforts on educational equity, including:

• Prioritize Equity:  Set and communicate an equity vision and measurable targets
• Start from Within:  Focus on the state education agency
• Measure What Matters:  Create accountability for equity
• Go Local:  Engage Local Education Agencies (LEAs) and provide tailored and differentiated support
• Follow the Money:  Allocate resources to achieve fiscal equity
• Start Early:  Invest in the youngest learners
• Engage More Deeply:  Monitor equitable implementation of standards and assessments
• Value People:  Focus on teachers and leaders
• Improve Conditions for Learning:  Focus on school culture, climate, and social-emotional development
• Empower Student Options:  Ensure families have access to high-quality educational options that align to community needs²

A series of community roundtables conducted by the Urban Institute revealed that housing counselors available to families experiencing residential instability or homelessness and school counselors seeking to address student absenteeism, behavioral or learning problems of individual students often did not know about each other’s programs.¹ These roundtables identified a series of practices that could assist families facing housing challenges and, therefore, conditions of student mobility and instability, which can lead to school failure and grade retention. Practices included:

Practices that Build on Federal Supports:

• Compliance with McKinney-Vento requirements assuring that homeless students and those engaged with the child welfare foster care system be allowed to remain in their original schools, even if additional transportation is required
• Provision of tenants’ rights education through federally-funded housing counseling organizations
• Creation of formal Continuums of Care to receive federal Housing and Urban Development support from the Supportive Housing Program, Shelter Plus Care Program, and Single-Room Occupancy program

Practices that Build on School District Programs:

• Cross-district collaborations to identify families with high inter-district mobility histories
• Inclusion of housing issues as a standard element in absentee and truancy data collection and action
• More effective school, social service and housing linkages to assure appropriate data exchange, warm handoffs, and family and student success plan development

Practices that Support School-Housing Partnerships

• Cross-training on the effects of student mobility and family housing instability on student attendance, behavior and academic performance
• Regularly scheduled interagency working groups
• Improved data sharing agreements and processes for interagency referrals and warm handoffs
• Expanded informal partnerships based on serving specific students and families²