Improve Early Grade-Level Reading

Enhance Teaching Standards and Training

The most important influence on the classroom environment is the teacher. Teachers’ skills, knowledge, behaviors, emotional responses, and pedagogical practices all directly impact the immediate learning environment. Improving the quality of teachers has been shown to narrow race- and income-based achievement gaps. A child in poverty who has a good teacher for five years in a row makes learning gains large enough, on average, to completely close the achievement gap with higher income students. [i]

What Can Policymakers Do?

· Require all K-3 teachers to hold a renewable certification/endorsement in early childhood education. New Jersey , for example, mandated in 2000 that all teachers in state-funded Abbott pre-kindergarten programs obtain a minimum of a bachelor’s degree with PK-3 certification. This requirement provided tremendous incentive to the state’s institutions of higher education to create specialized PK-3 certification programs and to provide PK-3 professional development resources at the district level. [ii]

· Establish (and provide incentives for participation in) professional development systems, including joint professional development between K-3 teachers and the full array of early learning teachers (i.e., school-based PK, center- and community-based child care, Head Start, family child care, afterschool providers and summer school providers). In Nebraska, the State Department of Education oversees a Kindergarten-Primary Professional Development Program through which local school districts are provided leadership, resources, and professional development to support kindergarten and primary grade (K-3) teachers and administrators. [iii]