Elsevier

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Volume 55, 2nd Quarter 2021, Pages 214-229
Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Exploring Head Start teacher and leader perceptions of the Pre-K Classroom Assessment Scoring System as a part of the Head Start Designation Renewal System

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2020.09.013Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Publicly funded early childhood programs in the United States are currently experiences rising accountability expectations that link program quality and child outcomes.

  • Publicly funded early childhood programs in the United States are currently experiences rising accountability expectations that link program quality and child outcomes.

  • Policies aimed at improving child outcomes often focus on improving teacher quality.

  • High stakes accountability mechanisms can have unintended consequences for how teachers and program leaders implement policy expectations.

  • Understanding the perspectives of teachers and leaders within these high stakes contexts can better inform policy design and implementation.

Abstract

For Head Start programs, the 2010 enactment of the Head Start Designation Renewal System (HS-DRS) reflects a national trend in rising accountability related to classroom quality for early childhood programs. Under HS-DRS, all Head Start programs are required to meet seven key criteria to qualify for or maintain program funding. One of the seven criteria is to meet identified minimum cut scores on a single, observational measure of classroom quality. Programs that fail to meet the minimum scores for this measure can be required to re-compete for their grants. The result is a high-stakes context where a single-day of observation, by a single observer, in a limited number of classrooms, can determine a program’s funding. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this study explores how seven teachers and two program leaders in a mid-sized, urban Head Start program made sense of this requirement and connected it to their beliefs about children’s needs, learning and development, the complex nature of quality, preschool teaching, and rising accountability in Head Start.

Introduction

Publicly-funded early childhood programs in the United States are increasingly subject to high-stakes accountability policies that link key criteria (i.e., quality metrics; child outcome data; evidence of program improvement; etc.) to continued program funding (Brown, 2010; Bullough, Hall-Kenyon, MacKay, & Marshall, 2014; Haslip & Gullo, 2018). The 2010 enactment of the Head Start Designation Renewal System (HS-DRS) reflects this trend. Under HS-DRS, Head Start programs are required to meet seven key criteria to qualify for/maintain grant funding (OHS, 2010). One of the criteria, and the only one relating to program quality, is to meet minimum scores on a single, observational measure of classroom quality: the Pre-K Classroom Assessment Scoring System (Pre-K CLASS) (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008). Grants that fail to meet minimum scores for the Pre-K CLASS are required to re-compete for their funds (OHS, 2010), an activity that may result in grant loss.

Within this high-stakes context, when their practice is driven by accountability to a single measure of classroom quality, some Head Start teachers and leaders find themselves struggling to meet the diverse needs of children and families (Author, 2018). This paper explores how a group of seven teachers and two leaders in one Head Start program made sense of these high-stakes while working to improve their classroom practices. The following research questions guide this work:

How do a group of Head Start leaders/teachers perceive the role of the Pre-K CLASS in their daily practice and efforts to improve classroom quality within the high-stakes context of HS-DRS?

What insights do these teachers and leaders offer that speak to the unintended consequences of using the CLASS for high-stakes accountability?

To begin, we provide some background on accountability policies in U.S. early childhood settings and explore what the current literature indicates about how ECE teachers and leaders respond to rising accountability requirements.

Section snippets

Accountability in U.S. Early Childhood Education

In U.S. early childhood settings, particularly those supported by public monies, accountability and evaluation mechanisms that link measures of quality to child outcomes are on the rise (Brown, 2013, Brown, 2010, Halpern, 2013; Pianta, Cox, & Snow, 2007). These efforts have largely focused on improving teachers’ uses of key, evidence-based high quality practices that have been identified as positively impacting children’s readiness for kindergarten, particularly for children facing serious

Theoretical Frameworks

We utilize two frameworks to analyze the data in this paper: Weaver-Hightower’s policy ecology framework and Coburn’s teacher-sensemaking framework. Per Weaver-Hightower (2008), “a particular policy or related group of policies, both as texts and as discourses, [is] situated within an environment of their creation and implementation…Every contextual factor and person contributing to or influenced by a policy…is part of a complex ecology” (p. 155). This complex ecology can be understood from an

Methods

Data analyzed for this paper are from a professional development (PD) project designed to address a specific problem of practice (Erickson, 2014). In this project we worked with seven teachers1 and two program leaders in one Head Start grant held by a mid-sized, urban school district in Ohio (Table 3). This PD was designed to help support and improve teachers’ Instructional Support practices and their low scores on this

Results

Through the analyses of these data we identified six main findings: changing perceptions about the utility of the CLASS; identifying CLASS mismatches; CLASS administration challenges; the reliability of the observations; performing the CLASS; and real world consequences.

Discussion

The purpose of this article is to explore how a group of Head Start teachers and leaders perceive and make sense of the use of the Pre-K CLASS for high-stakes accountability under HS-DRS. The findings in this study reflect and build upon other qualitative research that has examined how early childhood teachers respond to and make sense of high-stakes accountability policies (Brown and Weber, 2016, Brown, 2015; Goldstein, 2007). Specifically, findings from this study indicate that while the

Limitations

This study is not without limitations. As a small, qualitative study in one Head Start program, findings from this study cannot and should not be generalized to all Head Start program leader and teacher experiences. Another limitation of this study was the convenience sample, which emerged from an attempt to support practice-based problem and revealed specific concerns regarding rising accountability focused on classroom quality in one Head Start grantee. However, this might also be considered

Conclusion

These findings taken together indicate that the high-stakes nature of the Pre-K CLASS has had important, and unintended, consequences in this Head Start program. More research is needed to understand more broadly how teachers and program leaders are experiencing the use of the CLASS as a part of HS-DRS, and whether this study reflects the experiences of other teachers and leaders in Head Start. For example, one issue that arose in this study was the particular ways in which teachers felt that

Credit Author Statement

Katherine K. Delaney: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing. Karen Krepps: Data curation

Initial Interview with Program Leaders

  • 1

    Thanks for meeting with me today. I wanted to ask you some questions about your goals for improving instructional practices in Head Start classrooms. What are your concerns with current instructional practices?

  • 2

    How have you been using CLASS up to this point in your Head Start grant?

  • 3

    What about this approach has been working? What has not been working?

  • 4

    Are there aspects of your program that are important for us to know more about as we begin to work with teachers?

  • 5

    What are some strengths and

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

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