Keywords

Throughout this volume, the term “transition ” is most frequently used to refer to the shifts that children and families experience as they enter Kindergarten classrooms. “Coherence ,” “continuity ,” “consistency ,” and “alignment” are other words used to describe the necessity of bringing together prior-to-school (which includes a wide variety of early care and education settings and programs) and Kindergarten experiences in ways that benefit young children and their families. This chapter expands our understanding of these terms by focusing on system-level strategies that contribute to transition, alignment, coherence, continuity, and consistency. With this system-level lens, this chapter also expands the focus beyond the 1 year prior to Kindergarten (PreK) and Kindergarten and addresses the full continuum of learning from birth through elementary school .

Efforts to address this developmental continuum have been ascribed a variety of labels – P-3, PreK-3rd , PreK-3, PK-3, 0-8, B-3, and others. In this chapter, I favor “P-3” and focus on the array of early care and education (ECE) programs that serve children before they enter school and their connections with the primary grades of elementary school (K-3). System-level alignment requires a complex array of strategies needed to bring greater coherence between the traditionally disparate systems of birth-to-five early care and education (ECE) programs and PreK-12 education. This chapter addresses practical, theoretical, and policy aspects of P-3 alignment approaches.

Rationale for Alignment Across Systems: Two Vignettes

One challenge with alignment as a system-level strategy is that it can seem abstract and disconnected from practice and the real lives of young children. The following two vignettes illustrate the importance of system-level alignment, providing perspective on real-world implications.

Vignette #1

Joaquin Enfield is an elementary school principal in a school district with five elementary schools . Every fall, 85 children start their K-12 pathways in Enfield’s school by enrolling in Kindergarten. Some will attend half-day programs; others will attend full days, being at school for the same number of hours as first graders. Enfield hosts an annual open house for entering Kindergarteners during which children and their parents can meet the Kindergarten teachers and tour classrooms. Usually, 15–20 families attend; he gains minimal information on their children’s experiences prior to Kindergarten. For the other 65 children, Enfield meets them for the first time when they arrive at school.

Enfield knows that aggregated data from the state-mandated Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA) show that a large majority of his Kindergarteners lag far behind district and state averages and lack the necessary skills to succeed. Because of this, he senses pressure from parents, the district central office, and the state department of education to provide rigorous, academic learning to all students and to close achievement gaps on the state third grade tests. To demonstrate his commitment to academic excellence, his annual school improvement plan has a singular focus: to increase student performance on reading and math assessments. As part of this goal, Enfield increased the length of reading and math blocks in the primary grades and decreased recess time.

Devoted to standards-based learning , Principal Enfield relies on the Common Core State Standards, which set standards for what children should know and be able to do at the end of each grade level, to structure teachers’ professional development . During grade-level meetings with his Kindergarten and first and second grade teachers, he encourages them to collaborate to develop worksheets to be sent home with children so their parents can support reading and math skill repetition.

Vignette #2

Anne Burke is also an elementary school principal but in a neighboring school district. She, too, has approximately 85 entering Kindergarteners each fall. Approximately one-fourth of these children attend PreK classrooms that are colocated at Burke’s school; the colocation of PreK was something Burke advocated for when the district recently applied for additional slots from the state-funded PreK program. This, among other things, was a key strategy she gained during her enrollment in a P-3 leadership program offered by a local university; the central office provides funds for all of the district’s elementary principals to attend the 10-month program and also pays for community-based early learning providers to enroll. Five years ago, the central office expanded full-day Kindergarten for all students in all schools, even though the state did provide funds to cover the costs.

For the past several years, Anne has conducted surveys of parents and identified the handful of community-based child care centers and preschools that her Kindergarteners usually attended in the year prior to enrolling at her school. Burke established and supports a professional learning community (PLC) with the PreK teachers in those programs, and, together, they plan and host no fewer than seven transition-to-Kindergarten opportunities for children and their families, including an open house night, a week-long Jump Start program, and home visits. Having gone through the state-provided training on the Kindergarten Entry Assessment, Burke works as a close team member with her Kindergarten teachers, spending time looking at each child’s individual profile – as well as school, district, and state averages – to understand how they can better support and engage each child’s strengths and bolster their own efforts to increase the learning opportunities provided.

Feeling pressure from parents, the central office, and the state department of education to increase student achievement, Burke engaged in deep strategic planning with all of her teachers to co-create the school’s improvement plan. Together, they set three major goals: (1) to provide meaningful, rigorous, and developmentally appropriate early learning opportunities to every child, beginning in preschool and extending through second grade; (2) to make every family feel welcome and engaged as their children’s first and most important teachers; and (3) to ensure that every child, in every classroom, every day is engaged in standards-based learning. Although Common Core State Standards are the school’s “north star,” Anne recognized that they only provide end-of-year goals and that she needed to introduce the state’s birth-through-age-8 early learning guidelines to teachers in order to emphasize the importance of developmental pathways that support students’ acquisition of standards.

Comparing the Two Vignettes

Though both fictional accounts , these two vignettes highlight how system-level strategies can influence a single school’s efforts. While both Joaquin and Anne were dedicated to the success of their students, Anne was immersed in a school community, a district, and a state that provided rich, systemic supports. The state created aligned birth-through-8 learning standards and provided meaningful training and professional learning opportunities around the KEA that included not just teachers, but also principals, and ensured participants learned how to pull classroom- and child-level data reports in order to understand the nuances of achievement patterns and provide differentiated supports. Anne and her district leveraged these state resources to support their own comprehensive efforts . A local institution of higher education engaged in bolstering the professional knowledge and leadership capabilities of principals and early learning administrators, and the district central office invested in ensuring that school leaders gained from that opportunity. The district made PreK a visible priority by colocating classrooms in its schools. Anne is certainly a motivated and team-oriented leader who recognizes that she needs to not only build collegiality and teamwork among her own teachers but also to engage with PreK teachers and programs in the community.

Policy Context for System-Level P-3 Alignment

The kinds of system-level alignment efforts that provide the background for Anne Burke’s story – those that span both ECE and elementary schools  – have a long, albeit notably understated history (Reynolds, Magnuson, & Ou, 2010). This history includes the urban Chicago Child-Parent Centers launched in the late 1960s to provide comprehensive education supports to children from preschool through third grade (Reynolds, 2003), as well as the federal Project Follow Through (Kennedy, 1978) and Project Developmental Continuity (Bond, 1982) initiatives of the 1970s that connected Head Start with elementary schools. More recently, community schools have intentionally integrated early childhood programming and services into elementary schools in order to deliberately improve the quality and continuity of practice across early childhood and community school settings (Geiser, Horwitz, & Gerstein, 2013; Geiser, Rollins, Gerstein, & Blank, 2013; Jacobson, Jacobson, & Blank, 2012), and an increasing number of states, school districts, and communities engage in their own alignment efforts (e.g., see Kirp, 2013; Maeroff, 2006; Marietta, 2010; Nyhan, 2013; Reynolds et al., 2017; Ritchie & Gutmann, 2014; Sullivan-Dudzic, Gearns, & Leavell, 2010). Over the past three decades, this system-level alignment work has been fueled by federal, state, district, and municipal policymakers’ attention to school readiness and achievement gaps.

The press for school readiness has roots in the National Education Goals Panel which, in 1991, deemed the country’s Goal One to be that “by the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn” (National Education Goals Panel, 1991). With this ambitious proclamation, the Panel invigorated a national movement to build high-quality systems of early care and education for children prior to their entry to Kindergarten (Kagan & Kauerz, 2012). This school readiness narrative, coupled with mainstreamed attention to young children’s brain development, provides the backdrop for the extensive investments made by the federal and state governments, as well as school districts and municipalities, to increase children’s access to formal programs in the years just prior to entering Kindergarten (PreK for 3- and 4-year olds). By 2015, 42 states plus the District of Columbia had established state-funded PreK programs (Barnett et al., 2016). In addition, the number of Head Start slots for 3- and 4-year olds increased by 103% between 1990 and 2013 (National Kids Count, 2017). These programs have been bolstered by extensive evidence of the efficacy of high-quality PreK in producing positive child outcomes during the period that children are enrolled (Barnett, 1995; Gilliam & Zigler, 2000; Magnuson, Meyers, Ruhm, & Waldfogel, 2005; National Research Council, 2001; Phillips et al., 2017). In terms of achieving the goal of school readiness, evidence points to some, albeit limited, success. In their comparative analyses of nationally representative data from 1998 to 2010 cohorts of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten (ECLS-K), Bassok and Latham (2017) found that children entering Kindergarten in 2010 were more proficient across a variety of math and literacy skills than were their 1998 counterparts.

A second major policy focus was invigorated by the National Education Goals Panel in 1991: a press to use national student assessment data to measure both students’ and states’ progress toward national standards (Vinovskis, 1998). In 2001, the federal No Child Left Behind Act mandated that students complete standardized assessment tests and that states disaggregate those scores by race, ethnicity, family income, disability status, and gender. With the first assessments being administered in third grade, this legislation drew states’ attention to achievement gaps. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) , commonly known as “the nation’s report card,” reveals a sobering look at the country’s overall progress. In 2015, the average NAEP reading score for fourth-grade students eligible for the National School Lunch Program was 28 points lower than the average score for their higher-income peers; this achievement gap is the same as it was in 2003, when NAEP began monitoring scores based on students’ socioeconomic status (National Center for Education Statistics, 2015). Similarly, the 24-point score gap between the average reading scores of White and Hispanic fourth-grade students in 2015 did not differ substantially in comparison to 1992, when the assessment was first administered.

Bringing together these two major policy trends – widespread attention to school readiness and achievement gaps – creates a troublesome storyline for early childhood advocates and policymakers alike. Despite the school readiness gains described previously, research shows that the short-term gains made by some children during the Pre-Kindergarten year “fade out” when measured just 1 or 2 years later when children are in elementary school (Currie & Thomas, 2000; Lee, Brooks-Gunn, Schnur, & Liaw, 1990; Lee & Loeb, 1995; Magnuson et al., 2005; US Department of Health and Human Services & Administration for Children and Families, 2010). In addition, the achievement gaps that exist at school entry persist across elementary school (Reardon, 2011). In short, despite expanded attention to ECE, vast disparities exist throughout elementary school and beyond.

Together, the missed opportunities to sustain gains made when children attend high-quality PreK programs point to the need to rethink the current approach to children’s learning experiences. One visionary solution proffered by scholars, policy influencers, and practitioners alike is system-level P-3 alignment as a means to ensure that children receive high-quality preschool opportunities, enter elementary school with the skills and behaviors needed to succeed, and sustain and grow their skills during the primary grades , so that achievement gaps are reduced by third grade (Bogard & Takanishi, 2005; Childress, Doyle, & Thomas, 2009; Kauerz, 2006; McCormick, Hsueh, Weiland, & Bangser, 2017).

P-3 Alignment: Connecting Research and Practice

If system-level alignment is the solution, then what, specifically, are the problems addressed by P-3 alignment? And, in accordance with recent attention to ensuring that research is relevant to children’s actual experiences (Gutierrez & Penuel, 2014), what are the problems in practice that can be addressed by system-level alignment? There are at least three research-based rationales for system-level alignment and how it positively impacts children’s experiences – dosage, developmental duration, and differentiation. Each of these is discussed next.

Dosage: “How Much” Opportunity Children Are Afforded

First, there exists the problem that children, especially those who live in families with low incomes and of specific racial and ethnic backgrounds, are not provided a sufficient quantity (or quality) of learning opportunities (Duncan & Murnane, 2011). While some policy efforts, like Universal PreK for 4-year-olds, are targeted to benefit these children, often, these singular, “silver bullet” approaches to reform are insufficient to counter the vast inequalities that persist for some children (Duncan & Murnane, 2014). To address this, system-level alignment approaches attend to issues of dosage and cumulative participation (Zaslow et al., 2010), underscoring the premise that a single-year intervention is inadequate to ensure children’s ongoing success in school and life. Instead, each year of high-quality early learning experience should be followed by another year. At a simplistic level, children need a strong dose of high-quality learning opportunities that begin early and continue year after year. System-level alignment strategies bring explicit focus to the continuum of learning, as opposed to only 1 year (e.g., Universal PreK) or to one transition point (e.g., PreK to Kindergarten ).

For example, evidence from both experimental and nonexperimental studies suggests that more participation in center-based ECE is associated with stronger cognitive outcomes, especially for low-income children (National Research Council, 2001). Similarly, research indicates that 2 years of preschool are more beneficial than 1 (Arteaga, Humpage, Reynolds, & Temple, 2014; Reynolds, 1995). Dosage is most often used to argue for providing quality learning opportunities well before Kindergarten, including PreK, preschool, and home visitation. There is emerging consensus that the quantity and quality of literacy and math instruction, coupled with the quality of emotional interactions in elementary school classrooms, have long-term impact on children’s achievement (Phillips et al., 2017; Pianta, Belsky, Vandergrift, Houts, & Morrison, 2008). Consequently, from a P-3 perspective, the concept of dosage is extended to argue that interventions that begin in the preschool years should be followed by high-quality learning experiences in the primary grades (Kauerz, 2013; Reynolds, 2003). System-level alignment efforts are predicated on the belief that there should be simultaneous and equal efforts to both provide high-quality programs to children in the years before Kindergarten and improve the quality of education provided in Kindergarten and first, second, and third grades.

Developmental Duration : Ensuring a Ladder of Learning

Second, there exists the problem of rickety, misaligned instruction across the P-3 continuum, whereby children’s experiences from teacher to teacher, classroom to classroom, and year to year do not match developmental pathways (Kauerz, 2006). For example, field-based evidence highlights that when children experience Kindergarten instruction that is the same as what they experienced in preschool, they do not exhibit learning gains (Engel, Claessens, & Finch, 2013; Engel, Claessens, Watts, & Farkas, 2016). Similarly, research shows that for children who attend two consecutive years of preschool, the actual learning experiences within those years make a difference in children’s outcomes. Findings show that if children enrolled in Head Start as both 3- and 4-year-olds receive more of the same activities in both years, rather than increasingly complex, differentiated learning experiences, children gain less from their second year in the program than if they switched to a more academic PreK program at age 4 (Jenkins, Farkas, Duncan, Burchinal, & Vandell, 2016; Reynolds, 1995). These conclusions clearly point to the importance of minimizing repetition during the years prior to Kindergarten, and those findings can be extrapolated to hold true for the primary grades, K-3. The value of connecting concepts, skills, and learning approaches introduced in one grade to what children learned in the previous grade and to what will be learned in the following grade is a core tenet of P-3 approaches (Stipek, Clements, Coburn, Franke, & Farran, 2017).

As such, a second rationale for system-level P-3 alignment – developmental duration – extends the concept of dosage by emphasizing that children should not receive the same curricular content and learning experiences 1 year after another but developmentally progressive content year after year. At its most basic level, developmental duration recognizes that the content and organization of knowledge, over time, matter (Goldman & Pellegrino, 2015; Stipek et al., 2017). In early childhood literature, this concept is encompassed within developmentally appropriate practice (DAP; Copple & Bredekamp, 2009), which fundamentally recognizes that deep knowledge and understanding of how children develop and learn are imperative to ensuring that children receive learning opportunities that meet children where they are and support them to achieve at ever-higher levels. To accomplish this, children’s learning must be viewed from a broad perspective that understands and values the developmental trajectories that exist within all domains of children’s development and learning, from birth through age 8. From a practical standpoint, this suggests the importance of organizing instruction not only within grade levels but, more importantly, across grade levels so that it moves children along typical and, in some content areas, well-documented pathways or sequences of acquiring abilities, skills, and knowledge. To organize standards, curriculum , and assessments in this manner requires system-level alignment effort.

Differentiation : Ensuring Adults Adapt Their Practice to Benefit Children

Third, and another source of misaligned instruction, is the problem of discrepant teacher beliefs and attitudes, both within and across grade levels, about student abilities and instructional strategies (Abry, Latham, Bassok, & LoCasale-Crouch, 2015; Connor et al., 2009; Engel et al., 2013; Swain, Springer, & Hofer, 2015). For example, one study reported that children taught by preschool and Kindergarten teachers whose beliefs were not aligned about the relative importance of academic and social skills received lower ratings for their social skills and approaches to learning and had lower math achievement than children taught by preschool and Kindergarten teachers whose beliefs were more in accordance with one another (Abry et al., 2015). This evidence suggests that teachers’ beliefs and attitudes can be closely linked to their ability and willingness to individualize instruction for children. Because the rate and pattern of each child’s learning is unique, a group of children of the same chronological age may have widely variable developmental abilities, even though the children are all progressing along the same mostly predictable sequences of growth and change. Further, because children’s learning trajectories are somewhat messy and vary from child to child, it is important that teachers and other caregivers be able to differentiate instruction for each child in order to ensure he or she receives content and experiences that support his or her individual and unique stage of development. In other words, a teacher with a classroom full of 4-year-olds will not only need to be familiar with learning sequences that both precede and follow the chronological age of four but also need to be comfortable, confident, and prepared to provide different contents and instructional strategies to children within the same class.

Differentiation requires that teachers and caregivers hold high expectations for and challenge each child to achieve at a level just beyond his or her current mastery (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009). To target learning experiences that are neither too simplistic nor too advanced for each child requires sophisticated skill from teachers. It also requires that teachers invest time to truly understand each child’s strengths, needs, and challenges. However, it is widely recognized that ECE and K-12 teachers and administrators have vastly different preparation pathways, in-service professional development opportunities, compensation packages, professional associations, and job security (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2015), all of which contribute to discrepant beliefs, attitudes, and dispositions between teachers in ECE and K-3. System-level alignment efforts tackle these problems.

Together, dosage, developmental duration, and differentiation provide sturdy theoretical grounding for what children need to experience between birth and third grade and the practical problems that system-level alignment can address. Ultimately, comprehensive P-3 approaches hold the potential to improve child outcomes and, theoretically, to close or altogether prevent achievement gaps between subpopulations of children. Realizing these in practice, however, requires that teachers and other caregivers deliver them consistently and effectively. Accomplishing this across the various classrooms, programs, and schools in which children learn requires explicit and strategic attention to increasing the kinds of alignment and the strengths of alignment between organizations and systems. I turn next to discussing key dimensions of system-level alignment .

Dimensions of System-Level Alignment

P-3 approaches aim to reform the ECE and K-12 systems and bring greater alignment and coherence across teachers, classrooms, schools, organizations, and systems. Simple in concept, this is challenging in practice. For example, challenges have been documented related to conflict around sharing resources when PreK is colocated at a public school (e.g., library and playground), building mutual understanding and respect between early learning and elementary school staff, dealing with salary inequities between preschool and elementary teachers, and protecting preschool from the negative aspects of the K-12 accountability environment (Desimone, Payne, Fedoravicius, Henrich, & Finn-Stevenson, 2004; Halpern, 2013; Wilinski, 2017). Tackling these challenges requires thinking about and focusing on alignment in different ways. In this section, I address three fundamental dimensions of P-3 alignment: paradigmatic, structural, and implementation.

Paradigmatic Alignment

ECE and K-12 have vastly different histories and, as social institutions, varied theoretical grounds and competing paradigms. At a practical level, these paradigmatic differences have far-reaching influence on teacher and administrator qualification requirements, organizational priorities and investments, accountability measures, approaches to child/student assessment, data systems, and more. Often unacknowledged and unaddressed, the currents of these differences are rooted in competing notions of children’s inner nature and potential and how best to educate them (Fuller, 2007).

Some of the earliest philosophers of the early childhood field in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi , declared that the goal of early education was to preserve the natural state of the child through play and encouragement of children’s innate curiosities. Developmentalists who built on these liberal-humanist traditions, including education scholars such as Friedrich Froebel and Lev Vygotsky, established early learning approaches that emphasize whole child development, play-based learning, and child-initiated exploration. The emergence and development of modern government-sponsored early learning programs in the United States have followed the general trajectory of social services, focusing on children’s needs and providing support only when families fall short (Kagan, Cohen, & Neuman, 1996). For example, historically, the nation’s child care policies and programs were created to protect the health and safety of children while simultaneously supporting the needs of working families. Head Start was designed in the 1960s as an aspect of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty to meet the social service and educational needs of a targeted group of young children, those living at or below the federal poverty line. The burgeoning growth of state-funded PreK programs since the 1990s represents an important shift in the early learning field from being heavily anchored in social services (both child care and Head Start are housed in the federal Department of Health and Human Services) to beginning to favor “educationalization” of the preschool years (Kagan & Kauerz, 2007).

Inherent to all early learning programs is a dedication to developmentally appropriate practice (File & Gullo, 2002; Smith, 1997), child-centered learning (Brown, 2009), and a core value of including and supporting children’s families. Early learning programs emphasize the uniqueness of each child and focus on teaching the whole child, ensuring that social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development are addressed. Assessment is usually informal and accomplished via observation and recording individual children’s behaviors in natural, play-based environments.

In contrast, the development of the modern American K-12 education system evolved from the Common School movement of the early nineteenth century and educator-philosophers such as Horace Mann who viewed public schools as an instrument to unify society by providing didactic, skill-based instruction in schoolhouses as institutions through which “norms and ways of surviving in the new industrial society would be conveyed” (Kliebard, 1995, p. 1). Rooted in institutional liberalism, public education relied heavily on universal, government-provided approaches to children’s learning. The late nineteenth century witnessed the professionalization of teachers, and the twentieth century emphasized accountability and the increasing power of standardized learning (Spring, 2001). This subtext of common, standards-based sets of knowledge became especially pronounced in 1994 when Congress passed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which called for the setting of challenging standards – both content and performance – in academic subject areas and assessments. The K-12 system focuses on teaching explicit academic skills and competencies that are delineated into specific content areas of learning (e.g., literacy/reading, math, science, social studies). The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 extended this standards-based framework by requiring states to set standards for “highly qualified teachers” and to formalize methods of assessing student performance. The state-led creation and widespread adoption of Common Core State Standards that began in 2009 include College and Career Readiness standards that, in turn, were back-mapped to create ambitious standards that start in Kindergarten and emphasize English language arts and math. The K-12 system employs formal, summative assessments that measure mastery of limited forms of content knowledge and that are administered in prescribed and controlled environments and timelines (Goldman & Pellegrino, 2015). Assessments use valid and reliable measures that are norm-referenced and group-administered.

The contrast between the underlying paradigms of ECE and K-12 is stark. One way to characterize the dichotomy is the difference between prioritizing the teaching of children and the teaching of content (Kagan & Kauerz, 2006). In one, the child holds primacy; in the other, professionals and institutions do. Indeed, as some argue, P-3 alignment is like colliding worlds and “the merger thrusts the tensions between public and private, system and nonsystem, caregiving and education, and home versus institutional care into the forefront like no other current policy issue of our time” (McCabe & Sipple, 2011, p. e2). The different perspectives reflect distinctly competing assumptions about the purposes of their services, whom they serve, and who is responsible for providing, funding, and governing them. To effectively work across ECE and K-12, these differences must be acknowledged and negotiated. Research suggests that creating and maintaining collective decision-making structures and processes is important to creating coherence and attaining joint goals (Honig & Hatch, 2004; Thomson & Perry, 2006). As such, system alignment strategies could include collaborative leadership teams, shared professional learning opportunities, and public awareness efforts.

Structural Alignment

The different paradigms of the ECE and K-12 systems are reflected in the policy realm, where organizations and governance are siloed. At best, both ECE and K-12 are loosely coupled systems (Weick, 1976) in and of themselves, meaning that their component parts are related and somewhat responsive to one another, yet also preserve their own identity and logical separateness. For example, because of the multiplicity of programs within it (e.g., child care, Head Start, state-funded PreK, informal care), the ECE system has been termed a “nonsystem ” (Kagan & Kauerz, 2009). Similarly, the K-12 system is a behemoth system of nearly 14,000 independently governed local school districts across the country. While the federal, state, and local governments all play varying roles in both ECE and K-12, the governing of these independent “systems” is complex and disjointed. The challenges faced by stakeholders who strive to establish comprehensive P-3 approaches, by aligning the two systems, are amplified exponentially by the different governing structures.

The various sectors within ECE and the K-12 system are situated differently in government and, therefore, are linked to different governing bodies and procedures, financing mechanisms, standards (for children, teachers, administrators, facilities), rules, regulations, and accountability structures. Some programs are largely governed at the federal level (e.g., Head Start), while others are largely governed at the local level (e.g., K-12 school districts). State governments play variable roles, too, providing primary leadership in some programs (e.g., state-funded PreK, child care) and marginal, if any, leadership in others (e.g., Head Start). The siloed structures influence more than organization-level variables; they also affect teachers and children at the level of practice. Of particular note are wage and benefits discrepancies between teachers employed by school districts and child care providers (McCabe & Sipple, 2011; Whitebook, 2014).

Structural and regulatory contradictions can also negatively affect access when, for example, different standards for facilities prohibit school districts from being able to provide space for preschool programs. For example, state regulations for PreK may require a specific amount of square footage per child or a particular distance to access toilet facilities. If an elementary school has available space and the desire to house a PreK classroom, yet cannot adhere to the PreK licensing requirements, they may not be able to do so. Even within the ECE system, when comparing formal and informal arrangements, there are stark differences in regulations and funding streams, and, as a result, there are large differences in quality (Bassok, Greenberg, Fitzpatrick, & Loeb, 2016).

In sum, aligning structural elements of ECE and K-12 is a complex policy problem that involves multiple levels of government and a complex web of stakeholders. System-level alignment efforts can tackle these structural barriers by creating common standards and regulations – for both programs and professionals. System-level efforts also focus on shared governance, data systems, and flexibility in funding streams and mechanisms (Kagan & Gomez, 2015; Kagan & Kauerz, 2012).

Implementation Alignment

The promise of system-level alignment resides in the day-to-day experiences of young children in hundreds of thousands of classrooms and programs. School districts and communities all across the country are engaged in this work, striving to improve the quality and coherence of children’s learning opportunities and bringing together ECE and K-12. While implementation varies from site to site, based on local context, comprehensive P-3 approaches share common strategies for increasing alignment and coherence across ECE and K-12. These strategies fall into eight categories (Kauerz & Coffman, 2013): (a) cross-sector work, (b) administrator effectiveness, (c) teacher effectiveness, (d) instructional tools, (e) learning environments, (f) data-driven improvement, (g) engaged families, and (h) continuity and pathways. Here, I highlight just a few of these categories, discussing how they might be addressed in practice, at the level of implementation.

Cross-Sector Work

As already described at length, comprehensive P-3 approaches require, at minimum, that the traditionally disparate sectors of ECE (no matter how narrowly or broadly defined) and K-12 work together; cross-sector collaboration is a fundamental necessity. At the implementation level, this means that elementary schools and community-based ECE programs work together, creating formal linkages. These linkages might include school-community P-3 leadership teams or committees that have formalized decision-making processes, jointly developed strategic plans, and modest amounts of money to support collaboration. For example, a local P-3 cross-sector leadership team might involve one or more elementary school principals, the directors or lead teachers from community-based child care centers within geographic proximity to those elementary schools (feeder programs), the director of the nearby Head Start program, and other stakeholders with early learning expertise . When this collaborative team meets, they discuss shared priorities, plan joint professional development for teachers, consider the diversity of families who live in their community, and strategize how to meaningfully engage them. Most importantly, this leadership team takes action together, not as separate entities.

Administrator Effectiveness

The literature on K-12 leadership shows that of all in-school factors influencing student achievement, principals have the most influence second only to teachers in impacting student outcomes (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004); a similar finding exists for administrators in the ECE system (Rohacek, Adams, & Kisker, 2010). Increasingly, researchers and practitioners alike recognize that elementary school principals and ECE administrators must possess knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are unique to the P-3 continuum (Abel, Talan, Pollitt, & Bornfreund, 2016; National Association of Elementary School Principals, 2014; Pacchiano, Klein, & Hawley, 2016). For example, rather than generic approaches to organizational management, P-3 administrators must be well equipped to navigate and engage in the kinds of cross-sector collaborations just described. Similarly, rather than generic approaches to instructional leadership, P-3 administrators must be highly versed in child development and the specific teaching and learning strategies that are most appropriate for young learners.

At the level of implementation, school principals, directors of early learning programs, and other administrators play important roles in building visible support for alignment efforts, providing adequate resources, and helping to direct the work. This could manifest as explicitly discussing their P-3 efforts during staff meetings, in family newsletters, and on web sites. These administrators will also seek ways to expand and improve their knowledge base and skill set. The second vignette that opened this chapter highlighted multiple (albeit hypothetical) ways that Anne Burke actively developed her leadership skills around improving learning opportunities for young children .

Teacher Effectiveness

Teachers are the adults who, ultimately, deliver the dosage, developmental duration, and differentiation explored earlier in this chapter. While preservice preparation, degree attainment, and compensation and benefits are crucial to transforming the birth-through-age-8 teaching workforce (Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, 2015), these are largely beyond the direct influence of local schools and communities. In order to ensure that teachers across P-3 are actively dedicated to providing high-quality instruction and effective learning experiences for all children, they need ongoing professional development that is grounded in child development and focused on effective instructional practices. They also need ample opportunity to make their own practice visible to other teachers, observing each other’s classrooms in order to identify and share effective teaching strategies.

Further, teachers need to be provided opportunities and support to work as teams – both horizontally (within the same age/grade level) and vertically (across age/grade levels). Teamwork provides time and space to engage with peers to assess, reflect on, and improve their own teaching practices. In and of themselves, these actions are not unique to either ECE or K-12. However, in reality, most training, professional development, professional learning communities and other team-based endeavors, and professional affiliations are provided in siloes – ECE has their efforts and K-12 has theirs (Whitebook, 2014). Bridging these siloes is a challenge in practice, with some studies highlighting uncertainties about how much preschool and elementary teachers should be in each other’s daily affairs, including things such as faculty meetings and curriculum planning (Desimone et al., 2004). Thus, comprehensive P-3 approaches bring explicit and sustained attention to aligning teachers’ paradigms in order to increase their buy-in to collaborating with other teachers not in their usual sphere, as well as to aligning their day-to-day structures and practices.

Instructional Tools

When considering the range of ECE and K-3 classrooms in which children play and learn, there exists a wide range of standards, curricula, and assessments that teachers use to structure children’s experiences. ECE teachers may adhere to their state’s early learning guidelines (if they know about them at all), while K-3 teachers likely adhere to Common Core State Standards. The literacy curriculum used in PreK may be entirely different from that used in Kindergarten. In accordance with the research-based rationales alignment presented earlier in this chapter – dosage, developmental duration, and differentiation – P-3 approaches should strive to use standards that address all domains of children’s development (i.e., physical, cognitive, social-emotional, approaches to learning) and to identify and implement curricula that reflect children’s holistic development. Common curricula that have been designed to be developmentally progressive should be shared across ECE and K-3 . Because curricula are often selected locally, school-by-school, and program-by-program, if not classroom-by-classroom, practitioners have great opportunity to influence P-3 alignment.

These categories of implementation-level P-3 alignment strategies, and the others not addressed here, do not stand in isolation from one another. Indeed, there is substantial overlap and entwinement among them. For example, in practice, it is impossible to separate instructional tools from teacher effectiveness or to separate the important role of administrators from cross-sector work. This framework of eight strategies (Kauerz & Coffman, 2013), though, provides a foundation of content, process, and norms for professional collaboration within and across age and grade levels, from birth through elementary school. When enacted with depth and fidelity, these strategies can establish visions of high-quality, developmentally based learning for young children that are shared among ECE and elementary school settings.

But Does It Work? Outcomes of System-Level Alignment

While there is limited empirical research that addresses the longitudinal child-level benefits of P-3 approaches, some compelling evidence exists. First, detailed in the book, Leading for Equity, the story of how Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) tackled achievement gaps is remarkable (Childress et al., 2009). The district created an Early Success Performance Plan for the PreK-third grades that included aligned reading, writing, and math curriculum , ongoing district-designed diagnostic and formative assessments at each age/grade level, extensive professional development for teachers, a prioritized focus on full-day Kindergarten and smaller class size for the district’s most at-risk students, and both summer advancement and after-school programs for struggling elementary students. With a sustained focus on these efforts over the course of more than a decade, MCPS ’s black-white achievement gap narrowed by 29 percentage points between 2003 and 2009.

Second, in the Chicago Child-Parent Centers – a Chicago Public Schools’ effort that provided comprehensive aligned services to children beginning in preschool (age 3) and extending through third grade – children who enrolled at age 3 and remained in the intentionally aligned elementary schools through second or third grade outperformed their peers who had less extensive participation (e.g., were enrolled for only 1–3 years). Not only did the children who had an intentionally aligned PreK-third grade experience outperform their peers on achievement tests in third grade and seventh grade, but they also had fewer grade retentions by age 15 and fewer special education placements by age 18 (Reynolds et al., 2010, 2017; Reynolds, Magnuson, & Ou, 2006). These Centers adhered to many of the system-level alignment strategies detailed in this chapter; for example, they built collaborative leadership teams, shared professional development across grade levels, and aligned curriculum and instructional strategies.

Although the current evidence is limited, there has been a recent federal effort to invest in longitudinal studies of P-3 alignment (e.g., see McCormick et al., 2017) that will provide important heft to the research base. In addition to studies like these that follow children over time, it will be important for researchers to also expand the use of human cognition theories and methodologies to increase the field’s understanding of the influence of system-level alignment on practitioners’ and policymakers’ paradigmatic shifts. Further, there should be increased attention to political and organizational theories and methodologies to increase understanding of how system-level alignment efforts influence the structures and boundaries of the traditionally disparate ECE and K-12 systems.

Future Directions

New research directions, as just described, are only one promising avenue to expand and enrich system-level alignment efforts across ECE and K-12. One primary takeaway from this chapter is that system-level alignment relies on linkages and collaboration. This work cannot be isolated to just the realm of research. It also cannot be isolated to just one teacher, one classroom, one grade level, one curriculum , or one school. Revisiting the vignettes that opened this chapter, the field is replete with principals who resemble the experiences and expertise of Joaquin Enfield and the experiences and expertise of Anne Burke. Similarly, the ECE field is filled with administrators who bring a mixture of knowledge, skills, and dispositions that affect their daily routines and relationships. Further, teachers in hundreds of thousands of classrooms – some inside school buildings, others in community-based centers, church basements, and family child care homes – devote their energies to young children’s well-being and development. Practitioners like them must be engaged in efforts alongside researchers to learn from and with one another. System work requires working at the intersection of practice, research, and policy.

Finally, although this chapter has focused primarily on alignment between preschool programs and the K-12 system, more alignment is also needed down the developmental continuum, between infant/toddler programs and preschool efforts (Markowitz, Bassok, & Hamre, 2017). Similarly, children do not stop developing or learning at third grade; more alignment efforts up the continuum, between elementary and middle school years, are also warranted. What makes P-3 system-alignment unique, however, is the necessity of bridging the ECE and K-12 worlds in both theory and practice. The vision for this work is to improve not just children’s transition to Kindergarten but to improve their long-term outcomes in school and in life.