Ah, January is upon us: The wind is howling, the thermometer is plummeting, and we are greeted by the nineteenth consecutive edition of Quality Counts, Education Week’s compilation of mostly useful data, analysis, rankings, and commentaries. The best thing about QC is its focus on states, which both enables state leaders to view external gauges of their own performance and compare it with other states and also—especially valuable today—reminds everyone that states remain the central players in matters of K–12 education quality. The analysts and authors of QC keep fussing with the variables, metrics, and weightings by which they grade state performance. This year, the variables that made the cut are sorted into three buckets, two of them focused on processes, practices, and inputs. Only the achievement bucket focuses on outcomes. Along the way, some issues of key interest to education reformers—most conspicuously school accountability, teacher quality, and choice—have vanished from the QC calculus. The most troubling element of the new QC, however, is the editors’ handling of this year’s focus topic, namely preschool. They’ve climbed onto the “preschool for everybody” bandwagon, which is not a good place to be. This climb-aboard is most obvious in QC’s rankings and ratings of states, where all the metrics deal with participation rates by the state’s children in preschool, Head Start, and kindergarten. To the analysts’ credit, they avoid the input-centric gauges of preschool “quality” dearly beloved by many in the early-childhood field. To their discredit, however, they’ve made no visible effort to deal with the educational effectiveness of any state’s preschool program, nor tell whether the state has academic expectations for its preschools and whether it uses any sort of kindergarten-readiness measures to determine which preschool “graduates” are prepared to grapple successfully with the stiffening cognitive demands of today’s kindergartens. The overarching problem with QC 2015’s whole approach is its loud signal that, if everybody went to preschool, all would be right with the world. That’s just wrong. Millions of middle-class families have already found satisfactory, affordable preschooling for their little ones. The proper focus for state policy is to get exceptionally needy youngsters into intensive preschool programs that impart the knowledge and skills they will need to thrive in primary school. Such programs are deep, long-term, and costly. If states are instead encouraged to spread their resources across everybody, as QC’s authors clearly yearn for, they’ll never do right by the kids in greatest need of serious early-childhood education. Quality does count. But this year’s QC, at least in the preschool realm, insists instead that quantity counts.
SOURCE: “Quality Counts 2015,” Education Week (January 2015).
