"Early Ed Essentials": Testing New Surveys to Inform Program Improvement. Early Childhood. [Snapshot]

High-quality, well-implemented early childhood education (ECE) positively affects the learning trajectories of children who start school with lower skills than their peers, according to decades of evidence. Yet studies on ECE programs across the country reveal that too few offer high-quality programming. To date, the ECE field has focused most improvement efforts on "classroom" materials and interactions. Broadening these efforts to an "organization-wide" focus can better support quality improvement. The University of Chicago Consortium on School Research (UChicago Consortium) and the Ounce of Prevention Fund (Ounce) designed teacher and parent surveys, the "Early Education Essential Organizational Supports Measurement System" ("Early Ed Essentials"), to help ECE sites diagnose organizational strengths and weaknesses. The current study tested whether the newly-adapted and designed "Early Ed Essentials" teacher and parent surveys capture reliable and valid information about the organization of ECE programs--information that is also associated with existing indicators of program quality. [For the accompanying report, "Organizing Early Education for Improvement: Testing a New Survey Tool. Technical Report," see ED589706.]