How Can We Turn Around K–12? Take a Page Out of Preschool!

| By: Committee for Children

By Tonje Molyneux, M.Ed.

It’s a tenuous time in public education. The Elementary and Secondary School Act (ESEA) is on the verge of reauthorization, but it’s actually been perched there since 2007. Meanwhile, outdated requirements from the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the last reauthorization of ESEA, continue to thwart progress toward an equitable education for all. Districts, schools, and educators are being held accountable for students’ achievement while barely keeping their heads above water in a sea of shifting standards. Among these are the new Common Core State Standards, rigorous standards for math and English language arts that have been adopted by 45 states to date. New standardized tests tied to Common Core Standards are being implemented (for example, the PARCC Assessment), but across the country students are opting out by the thousands. In fact, public opinion toward standardized testing in general is experiencing a marked downturn. For example, in a 2014 Gallup poll, 68% of those surveyed felt that standardized tests were not useful for teachers. Developmentally inappropriate high-stakes testing of children as young as kindergarten-age is also being met with criticism and protest.

Despite these Herculean efforts, the American public education system is still failing its students. American students continue to rank poorly compared to their international peers on academic tests. And while it’s important to note that fourth- and eighth-grade students made 1- or 2-point gains on tests of reading and math as reported in The Nation’s Report Card (2013), and that high school graduation rates recently hit a record high, the reality is that students are leaving America’s public education system ill-equipped for the demands of college, career, and life. Many students (disproportionately those of color, with disabilities, or who identify as LGBT) never even make it there, instead ending up on the school-to-prison pipeline. Among those who do make it to college, only 56% will finish their bachelor’s degree in under six years. America has the lowest college completion rate in the developed world! What are we missing? Why are we failing to prepare our students for success in school, work, and life? And how can we turn it around?

Taking a Page Out of Preschool

By focusing on academic standards and high-stakes tests, American public education is missing a key contributor to students’ school, work, and life success—something that could help it turn around K–12 education and outcomes for students. This missing piece goes by many names: social-emotional learning, self-regulation skills, growth mindset, grit, character, non-cognitive skills, soft skills, habits of mind, and non-technical skills, just to name a few. Melissa Tooley and Laura Bornfreund recently coined the phrase “skills for success” to capture the myriad terms in a way that connotes their outcome. Their 2014 report Skills for Success: Supporting and Assessing Key Habits, Mindsets, and Skills in PreK–12 reviews the research-based reasons for developing skills for success (SFS) in students. The report also makes recommendations for ways policymakers, schools, and other groups can help promote students’ SFS development in schools. Their recommendations draw heavily from tried-and-true practices used in early learning settings, essentially taking a page out of preschool to help fix what ails K–12.

Standards, Assessments, and Accountability

Foremost among Tooley and Bornfreund's recommendations is to take a holistic approach to developing standards, assessments, and accountability systems that support the development of SFS in all students, preschool–grade 12. This is already in practice in the early learning community since free-standing social-emotional learning (SEL) standards for preschool exist in most states. These standards are typically tied to assessment and accountability practices that are fair and appropriate for both students and teachers. For example, in early learning environments student-level SEL needs and strengths are identified, teacher observations are used to inform and improve teaching practices that support SEL development, and classroom and school climate ratings are also used to further promote SEL. These measures are then considered in accountability systems tied to things such as preschool program accreditation and federal funding.

The picture changes quite drastically, however, for K–12. Only three states have comprehensive, free-standing SEL standards for preschool–grade 12: Illinois, Kansas, and Pennsylvania. Appropriate tools for assessing students’ SEL skill development are few and not widely used, and they are rarely tied to teaching practices or accountability systems. But by modeling and expanding on preschool practices, the picture is changing for K–12. For example, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), first developed for preschool settings, has now expanded to include developmentally appropriate versions through twelfth grade. Teachers are rated in categories such as emotional support, classroom organization, instructional support, and student engagement, which together provide a window into how well teachers are supporting students’ SEL development in the learning environment. The CLASS is currently used by some states to gauge the quality of publicly funded preschool programs and could certainly be used in K–12 educator and accountability systems, too.

Instructional Strategies

Opportunities to develop and practice SFS are integrated into all learning activities in a preschool classroom. Sometimes this is simply out of necessity. Early childhood can be a highly emotional developmental stage! The fact is young children often have very strong feelings they’ve not yet learned to recognize or rein in. So early learning educators are masterful at modeling and scaffolding for young children throughout the day to ensure that they’re given many opportunities to develop self-regulation and social-emotional skills. These skills are often also explicitly taught with specific curricula such as the Second Step program, which can help teachers and schools use consistent language and strategies to help young children develop these skills.

What’s common practice in early learning environments turns out to be what's recommended for all students. Tooley and Bornfreund call this the “hybrid approach” in that it combines both direct skill instruction and the embedding of these skills in the classroom and school climate and culture. In a recent review, Jones and Bouffard cite research that points to the importance of integrating SEL into daily school activities, but the same authors also highlight research supporting sequenced lessons that focus on developing specific skills. Using this hybrid approach borrowed from preschool, K–12 schools can maximize their students’ ability to develop SEL skills.

Turning Around K–12 for Our Kids’ Futures

The American K–12 public education system is failing to prepare students for their future. It’s missing the opportunity to help students develop key drivers of school, work, and life success, known together as skills for success. But the K–12 education system can turn it around by taking a page out of preschool. By adopting SEL standards tied to fair assessments and systems of accountability, and by using a hybrid approach to teaching students SEL skills, K–12 schools can finish the work started in preschool and help improve students' chances of success in school, work, and life.