This article originally appeared on the EDC website.
In 2014, legislators in Vermont passed a landmark bill establishing universal prekindergarten (pre-K) in the state. The legislation sought to reduce gaps in kindergarten readiness and made all 3-, 4-, and non-kindergarten 5-year-olds eligible for 10 hours of publicly funded pre-K for 35 weeks each year.
Since 2017, researchers from Education Development Center (EDC) have been working with lawmakers in Vermont to examine how the state’s bold educational initiative has affected children’s access to high-quality prekindergarten. That partnership has played a key role as the state confronts some of the unintended consequences of the new law—an example of how EDC’s collaborative approach to research is helping to inform public policy.
EDC’s Clare Irwin says that the research partnership between EDC and Vermont lawmakers began just after universal pre-K legislation began implementation. Researchers at EDC’s REL Northeast & Islands had heard about Vermont’s pre-K push and approached stakeholders with an idea: what about creating a research partnership to study the new law?
“They agreed that [such] a partnership would be beneficial to them,” says Irwin. “So we sat down with folks from the Agency of Education and the Agency of Human Services, both of which oversee universal pre-K, and we asked, What do you want to know? What’s helpful? What’s valuable?”
Together, they created a research agenda. Irwin then worked with Kyle DeMeo Cook, now an assistant professor at St. John’s University, to design a study that examined enrollment trends in universal pre-K. They spent a year analyzing data on 5,622 children across 282 qualified programs, looking for any patterns or trends, and then presented these findings to the state legislature in April, 2019. (The full report is scheduled to be published this winter.) “Lawmakers were generally glad to have this information,” says Irwin.
While this research was underway, Vermont began to experience some challenges to implementation. The state uses a “mixed delivery” system, whereby eligible children can attend home child cares, private child care centers, or public pre-school programs free of charge for 10 hours per week. Those providers and school districts are then paid through the state’s education fund. Yet individual providers complained that accounting systems were complex and inefficient, leading to unnecessary complications—and delays—in getting paid.
There were also mixed reviews from parents, school districts and private providers. While parents loved the availability of free, universal pre-K, the 10-hour cap created scheduling and transportation challenges, especially for working parents. The accounting system between school districts and private providers was also criticized as being awkward and redundant.
State legislators heard these complaints. But progress was hard to come by, as legislators generally fell into two groups: those who believed that the program could be fixed, and those who believed that the entire universal pre-K program should be scrapped and replaced with something new. With the legislature at an impasse, no improvements were made to the program for 2018-19.
They decided it was time for a full evaluation of the law. Once again, EDC was tapped to do the work. “We knew the data, we knew the policy context, and we understood the players,” Irwin says. “We had a plan in place for executing what was, essentially, a two-year evaluation in an eight month timeframe.”
That evaluation was released in July 2019. It contained a trove of information for lawmakers, including a set of recommendations for how to address scheduling, licensure, and oversight challenges. These were intended to give lawmakers some ideas for how to improve the existing law, rather than having to start anew.
Irwin says as 2019 ends, the relationship between EDC researchers and Vermont lawmakers has continued to evolve. Lawmakers are examining research as they develop public policy, and researchers consult politicians and other stakeholders as they examine new facets of the universal pre-K program. She describes it as a true partnership. “I think both groups are benefitting from the other’s expertise,” she says. “That’s really all you can ask for.”
Vermont Representative Kate Webb, who chairs Vermont’s Education Committee, indicated that the research produced through this partnership has been valuable to her and her committee members. “It is my intention to use EDC’s research to help drive a more productive conversation with stakeholders in 2020,” she says. “Emerging brain research, school readiness, social-emotional learning, and the needs of working families tell us it is incumbent upon us to do so.”