Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, Jenna Conway, discusses connecting kindergarten readiness to college, career and beyond in an article in the The 74.
Before coming to Virginia in 2018, she headed the closely watched early education efforts in Louisiana and helped redesign the state’s approach to measuring early childhood education quality. As the assistant superintendent of early childhood in Louisiana, Conway led implementation of The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). This is a rigorous national measure of classroom quality that evaluates the quality of teacher-child interactions in real time, and it has contributed to significant improvements in the state’s early childhood system.
Conway offers these insights:
How does Virginia define school readiness?
Focusing on improving school readiness allowed us to think very differently about how we work with all of the places that kids are served before kindergarten to improve school readiness outcomes. If you can improve school readiness outcomes, then you then open up all sorts of opportunities for kids throughout school and beyond.
To serve all kids you need family childcare and [center-based] childcare and Head Start and Early Head Start and early childhood special education and the schools which offer preschool and pre-K to work together to offer opportunities to families … that put them on track for success.
To what extent are you applying the Louisiana playbook to Virginia?
There are two things that we learned from Louisiana. The first is that … kids who were in classrooms that had higher quality teacher-child interactions learn more over the course of that year. We don’t ever standardize testing toddlers — it’s not appropriate. [The second] is that [CLASS] could be used regardless of a teacher’s credential or curriculum use. It provided a way to compare the thing that matters most — the kind of secret ingredient: these teacher-child interactions. But it’s less input focused than something that says, “You have to use this particular curriculum” or “You have to have this particular credential.” In fact, more than 10 years [later] it is still the system of measure in Louisiana. And if you look at some research done by the University of Virginia, you see tremendous gains in quality of interactions across the board, including in very low-income and historically underserved areas from New Orleans to the Mississippi Delta.
How does this approach play out in Virginia?
We realized Virginia had different community members, different parents, different perspectives. And so we worked with the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation to pilot an effort to think differently about how we might organize early childhood funding. We rolled out VQB5 statewide two years ago. So we have two years of results [from] over 12,000 classrooms. And in each of those classrooms we look at … the quality of teacher-child interactions. We completed 31,000 classroom observations last year, about 2.2 million minutes of insight. These are 60- to 80-minute observations, very rigorous. There’s an infant tool, there’s a toddler tool, and there’s a preschool tool. All of that data goes into determining their ratings, and all of that information is put on a website for families to be able to use.
What motivates you? You’re a mom yourself, you’re from Virginia. What’s a story you think about that helps to center you when you’re doing this work?
My ability to be a working mom is because of childcare. As I became a mom, I realized that there’s just no greater act of trust than leaving your child in the hands of an early childhood [provider]. With three children, I did everything from home-based childcare to pre-K in a school. I had such tremendous respect for what was being provided to my children and that enabled me to be successful at my career.
I felt so grateful that I didn’t have to face this trade off of: I’d like to be able to work and also be able to know that my kid is well taken care of. And that is the trade-off that we often hear from folks who are working very hard, but whose salaries do not cover the cost of care.
And the thing that sort of struck me more than anything else coming out of the pandemic is that … human beings learn in the context of relationships with adults.
The 74
