Microsoft Word Packard Teaching Case revised docx
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- One legislative reform contemplated at the time, however, seemed to hold promise: transitional kindergarten.
- As this proposal began to gain momentum, Packard staff and grantees continued to lay the groundwork for local and statewide policy change.
- The Governor Signs Transitional Kindergarten Bill
- A New Stage Begins for the Preschool Strategy and for the Evaluators
- “Now we are at a different phase that is more an implementation-‐focused strategy,” she said.
- For the evaluators, this later stage of the Packard program raises questions about their role.
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Teaching Case: Evaluation of Preschool for California’s Children
29 program aims to ensure that all 3-‐ and 4-‐year olds in California have access to high-‐quality preschool. By the end of 2013, our goal is to achieve high-‐quality, publicly funded preschool for the children who need it most. Packard Trustees approved the revised target. PHASE 3: Transitional Kindergarten Bill Passed; Strategy Shifts Again When Packard staff refreshed their strategy, they contemplated four potential avenues for promoting the preschool agenda: (1) state legislative reforms, (2) new federal funding for early learning, (3) a ballot initiative on school financing that would include preschool, or (4) more local preschool expansion. Of these options, the Foundation saw legislators (along with local champions) as the most likely avenue to achieve broader preschool access. But with a $25 billion state deficit, the chances of major legislation passing anytime soon seemed unlikely.
kindergarten. California has been one of only four states in which children who are still four can enter kindergarten (the cutoff date is turning five by December 2 of the year entering kindergarten). Educators and advocates have long argued that four-‐year-‐olds often lack the maturity and social and early reading and math skills they need to succeed in kindergarten. For many years, California legislators and policymakers had attempted to change the kindergarten entry date with no success.
However, in the summer of 2008, Packard grantees again introduced the idea. They began to craft a proposal that would create “transitional” kindergarten so that the 120,000 four-‐year-‐olds eligible for kindergarten (those born between September and December) would instead receive a year of kindergarten preparation. The start date would also change so eventually all children would be five when they entered kindergarten.
The proposal would not cost any more money right away. In the beginning, existing funding for children with fall birthdays would be redirected to transitional kindergarten and would employ existing teachers and classroom facilities. The $700 million required for the cohort’s extra year in school would not come due until the thirteenth year, when the kids graduated from high school.
“One of the biggest opportunities to achieve our goal sat in K-‐12,” Salisbury said. “In our 2008 memo to the Board we said, ‘how can we achieve our modified goal?’ One way was to offer four-‐year-‐olds an extra year of kindergarten.”
broader birth through 3 rd grade focus in its preschool grant making. While a focus solely on preschool had the advantage of being a clear goal people could rally around, it also, at times, ended up leaving out the early childhood advocates who worked from birth to five, and the K-‐12 community—both key advocates for achieving broader preschool access.
There was also a growing nationwide discussion that argued for a broader approach to early childhood development, saying it made more sense to focus on the needs of children from PreK to 3 rd grade. Advocates of this approach argue that children are more likely to succeed in school when Teaching Case: Evaluation of Preschool for California’s Children
30 one grade builds upon the other, especially up until 3 rd grade—a year in which students must read proficiently or they are unlikely to catch up and graduate from high school. But first, Packard wanted the evaluators to test whether the PreK-‐3 rd ” frame was effective with two key audiences—business leaders and the K-‐12 community. Evaluators Test a New, “Rapid Response” Methodology
provide Packard staff and grantees key data even more rapidly than they had in the past.
Up until this point, evaluators had worked to provide timely information to Packard on emerging issues or needs but those projects still took about six months to complete from inception of the concept to final report. Now, Packard needed information much more quickly.
“I wanted to find a way for the evaluation to continue to inform Packard and be relevant,” Coffman said. “We came up with the idea at the beginning of 2009. I said, ‘we have enough money in our budget to help you answer two strategic questions that come up. You may not know them yet. You come up with questions and we will respond in a month or two.’ The idea is that it’s rapid response. It may not be the most thorough data collection but it’s reliable enough.”
Packard’s need to test the PreK-‐3 rd frame gave evaluators a chance to test this new rapid-‐response idea. Over a three-‐week period in early 2010, evaluators conducted 31 interviews with key informants. They produced a report to Packard on February 15, 2010, just ten days or so after completing their interviews.
“We wanted to know if this PreK-‐3 rd framing would help attract the business community and engage K-‐12 and the early childhood community,” Salisbury said. “[The evaluators’] answer was serious caution bells. Business was very wary. They liked the preschool strategy. They said K-‐3 was a mess— don’t go there. K-‐12 was more receptive to this. They weren’t as hungry for this frame as we thought they’d be. Despite those warnings, we decided to go forward with the PreK-‐3 rd grade frame.” Added Mani, “We got a sense of where [PreK-‐3 rd grade] resonated and where there were reactions. That was a really important. We didn’t get a clear response that said, ‘yeah, this is a great idea.’ We heard, ‘if you are in, be sure you are really in. Packard must make a meaningful commitment.’ That really helped us.”
Throughout the preschool grantmaking program Packard had made grants to county offices of education to help develop champions among county superintendents of education and to seed quality preschool programs. But over the course of its work, and as part of its refreshed strategy, Packard saw that to achieve its goal of securing preschool for more children, it needed to focus more efforts on gaining the support of the K-‐12 community.
“We saw that working with school districts might give us greater credibility in the K-‐12 community, which was crucial,” Jiron said. “But we had not worked with school districts before. We asked HFRP to look at foundations that had worked with school districts and synthesize the pros and cons.” Teaching Case: Evaluation of Preschool for California’s Children
31
The evaluators produced a report one month later with a “sobering” assessment, Jiron remembers. “There have been a lot of good foundation initiatives that went to school districts and withered on the vine,” Jiron said. “School districts are very difficult to change, school boards and superintendents don’t stay long, and there is technocratic leadership that doesn’t want to change. There were a lot of hard lessons here that helped us think carefully about how we wanted to work with a district and what districts we wanted to work with.”
rd grade strategy, the Packard team took into consideration the report’s findings, which provided cautions on working with school districts, and ultimately decided to make grants to select districts anyway. Mani said, “The evaluators said ‘be very, very careful about working with school districts. Think 20 times before doing it.’ Lois [Salisbury] said, “We considered their advice and their cautions. We decided to go ahead and work at the district level, but we are doing so with our eyes wide open. The [rapid response report] helped us in building a road map.”
Mani said, “The rapid response tools are one of the most exciting things about the evaluation. The ongoing evaluation does not lend itself to strategy refreshment because we don’t get it in a timely way. We are making decisions based on what we know from grantees. What the rapid response really did for us was help zero in on key questions that emerged that would have had importance for us for how we might invest.”
well as committed legislators, Governor Schwarzenegger signed the Kindergarten Readiness Act, which ensured that 120,000 more children each year would receive a year of “transitional kindergarten.” It was a huge win for advocates and a big step in meeting Packard’s goal of providing access to quality preschool for four-‐year-‐olds most in need.
“It’s really a way to offer high quality preschool for the four year olds,” Mani said. “And because it’s funded with the K-‐12 system, it’s a guaranteed and sustained funding stream. It moves us closer to our goal. Of the 120,000 children [served under this law], at least 60,000 of those children are from low-‐income households and are most in need of preschool.”
Added Salisbury: “It was so counterintuitive that something so significant happened in California in an environment that is so daunting.” She said that the enactment of the transitional kindergarten bill illustrates a key point about the Packard preschool strategy.
“Nothing happened in a year,” she said. “Transitional kindergarten didn’t happen in a year. It had been submitted for ten years. Our underlying strategy was about building and trying to have these pieces stronger and stronger and being more agile and ready as windows opened and closed.” Teaching Case: Evaluation of Preschool for California’s Children
32 A New Stage Begins for the Preschool Strategy and for the Evaluators
While Packard’s goal of achieving high-‐quality preschool for four-‐year-‐olds who are most in need has not been completely met, the transitional kindergarten bill pushed them much closer.
That win signals another shift in Packard strategy, Mani said. “Now we are at a different phase that is more an implementation-‐focused strategy,” she said. We’ve had some policy wins. To build on those wins we have to make sure policies are well implemented. We need to make sure that this investment doesn’t get wasted.” This new phase of Packard’s preschool program brings up new questions for the role of the evaluation.
“We need to refresh what we are tracking,” Mani said. “In a ten year strategy, it molds, remolds and changes. We need to look at whether the evaluation’s focus still works for us given that our emphasis is on implementation.”
are eight years in, with two years to go. Quite honestly, one of the things that I’ve struggled with is how to continue to be helpful for a strategy that is getting close to its end date,” Coffman said. It raises the question of ‘is the strategic learning approach more important at the beginning rather than at the end?”
Mani, however, has a different perspective. “The role of the evaluator next is to make sure that the evaluation keeps pace with where we are going with implementation and the glide path to 2013,” she said. “Do we have data to make sure we are on the right path? What are the recommendations for going forward?”
In 2004, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation took a chance on a bold goal and on a new approach to evaluation. Working in a constantly shifting political and economic environment, Packard staff, grantees and evaluators had to adjust their approaches and experiment with new methodologies. At times, the evaluation added clear value to the preschool strategy. At other times, it didn’t. Throughout the work, participants had to draw on or develop new skills to meet the challenges of this demanding approach to evaluation.
Berkowitz said that the Packard Foundation is still experimenting with, and learning from, their experiences with strategic learning. Now that other subprograms and their evaluators are doing real-‐ time evaluations, the Foundation has learned that there are many ways to approach it, and much to be learned about what to do and what not to do.
“HFRP did it one way, but that is certainly not the only way to do this work,” Berkowitz said. “Packard also knows that this approach is not right for every subprogram, and it is only one of many approaches that need to be in a foundation’s evaluation toolbox. Just like the HFRP evaluators, the Foundation is grappling with the question of what conditions are necessary for this approach to make sense and add value.” Teaching Case: Evaluation of Preschool for California’s Children
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