Education Week
Over the past decade, federal and state accountability policies have defined how we measure the overall progress of K-12 students. To date, accountability policies have focused on student test scores from 3rd grade onward as the primary measure of progress, ignoring what goes on before then.
These first years of life are actually the most important to a child’s development, and we need an accountability system that measures the quality of young children’s educations in those years—one that uses a broad set of metrics, including a wider range of outcome measures than just test scores and gauges of the quality of professional practice...