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Florida Grade Level Reading Campaign

Florida Philanthropic Network Unpacking Public Policy for Early Grade Success

www.FloridaGLR.net

www.FloridaGLR.net

The Suitcase

School Readiness: Why It Matters

 Approximately 1 in 3 children arrive at kindergarten without the basic skills needed for success  The achievement gap starts with a readiness gap:

 Children from low-income homes hear as many as 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers  61% of children from low-income backgrounds have no children’s books at home  Early language and engagement lags have been documented as early as 18 months  By age two, low-income children are already behind their peers in listening, counting and other skills essential to literacy

School Readiness: Why It Matters

 Early gaps become growing, glaring differences in preschool:  Words children understand and speak  Listening and comprehension abilities  Early counting  By age five: a typical middle-class child recognizes 22 letters, compared to 9 letters for a typical child from a low-income family  Amount and quality of early vocabulary words directly supports the development of basic reading proficiency and eventual mastery  Without a robust vocabulary, children may learn reading mechanics but not comprehend the meaning of the text  Focus on language development can improve teaching practices and responsive interactions that help build language skills

School Readiness: Why It Matters

 Executive functioning skills also developed during the early years:

 Planning and managing time  Flexible thinking  Impulse control  Self-awareness  Interactions with others  Organization

 These cognitive and social competence skills at age three are highly predictive of overall achievement at age nine  Foundation-building formative years critical to grade level reading and long-term success

Early Learning Programs: Private Business Driven

 Most young children attend an early learning program

 ~40% of infants and over 80% of preschoolers receive care from someone other than parents regularly  Most early learning programs find it difficult to maintain quality due to payment rates  Industry very labor intensive; program revenue limited by tuition families can pay/limited public funding  Efforts to improve program quality challenged by overall market  Florida has an overabundance of supply: 41% vacancy rate  Average cost of care in Florida is $8,000 annually for one child

School Readiness: Florida’s Subsidized Child Care Program Information

 Federally funded means tested program through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG)  Priority given to families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and families whose income is at a 150% or below the federal poverty level  Originally designed to be a workforce support for working families  In 1999 Florida Governor Bush recognized the importance of this program and required that programs provide educational activities to children and renamed it Florida’s School Readiness program

School Readiness: Funding Landscape

Florida’s OEL, in partnership with 30 local Early Learning Coalitions, administers annual budget of $1,047,533,314, including:  $570,827,228 in School Readiness Program:

 Federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funding and general revenue: child care subsidies, quality funds (4%), resource/referral for all families  206,380 children 0-13 served (including 144,717 children birth-age five)  In Florida only 18% of eligible children receive child care subsidies  Florida has the 6th lowest payment rates for infants and toddlers and 7th lowest payment rates for preschoolers in the nation  Coalitions can pay up to 20% higher rates to programs that are nationally accredited by a DCF- approved organization: approximately $33 million annually invested in differential payments  Parents must contribute a co-payment based on a sliding fee scale

Overview of UF Data Portal

 Developed through funding from OEL  Includes over 14,000 data points:

 Population  Poverty  Other risk factors  Children receiving different services

 Grade Level Reading Campaign data added in campaign areas as available:

 Investment data funding stream/county  Population served by funding stream/county  Florida Standards Assessment results by county

https://public.tableau.com/profile/oel.portal#!/vizh

• me/LastingerTrendswithtitleupdated/GLRIntegrat

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School Readiness: Funding Landscape

School Readiness: System Funding Issues

 The funding formula to allocate dollars to early learning coalitions is based on a historical funding formula that does not take into account Florida’s population trends by county  The reimbursement rates to providers are not equitable across coalitions due to prior legislative language  To fix inequities would cost $100’s of millions of dollars  The School Readiness program is currently funded $33 million less than it was a decade ago  Increases in funding needs to be allocated strategically in order to maximize impact

School Readiness: Provider Funding Issues

 Based on the vacancy rate and depressed market rates the child care provider community can only afford to provide basic services in accordance with child care licensing requirements  Florida ranks 40th on the strength of its licensing requirements  Child care providers who do not have at least 85% of enrolled capacity filled will have trouble sustaining a viable business model  Florida’s depressed child care market makes it difficult to incentivize providing quality early learning environments to those that need them most

School Readiness: Program Landscape

 Recognized age-appropriate standards of what children should know and be able to do for children birth to five years old which have been aligned to Florida’s kindergarten education standards  Requires developmental screening of each child within 45 days of enrollment and annually thereafter  Requires that basic health and safety requirements are met in order to receive funding  Requires providers to implement a developmentally appropriate curriculum that has been approved by the state and aligned to the Birth to 5 standards  Beginning this year each child will be given one years worth

• f eligibility to foster continuity of care

 Approximately 10,000 providers participate in the state’s School Readiness program annually

School Readiness: VPK Information

 Constitutionally approved entitlement program  Available universally to Florida’s children who turn four on

• r before September 1st of the year preceding their

enrollment into kindergarten  One of three universal voluntary programs in nation  Launched in 2005: Three models: school year (540 hours), summer (300 hours), or specialized services (hours vary based on disability/services)  Parents choose the VPK provider and program type to best meet their needs  School year VPK instructors must have a CDA credential: Summer VPK instructors must have a BA degree  All instructors must have training on the VPK Educational Standards and implement a developmentally appropriate curriculum aligned to the VPK educational standards

School Readiness: VPK Program Landscape

 VPK providers must provide a pre assessment and post assessment of literacy and math skills to children in their VPK classrooms  Each VPK provider receives a Readiness Rate based on their prior years’ students’ Kindergarten Readiness Rates at the beginning of kindergarten  The Office of Early Learning is responsible for adopting the minimum kindergarten readiness rate  Any provider who does not meet the minimum kindergarten readiness rate shall submit an improvement plan, placed on probation, and ultimately may be removed from the program  82% of children who completed VPK in 2013 were prepared for kindergarten compared to 53% of children who did not attend

School Readiness: VPK Funding Landscape

 $395,180,396 in Voluntary Prekindergarten Education (VPK) program funded through state general revenue

 Base student Allocation(BSA) for School Year: $2437 Summer: $2080  When program was launched in 2005-2006 the BSA was $2677  168,788 four-year-olds (77%); 3rd nationally in terms of percentage of children served  78.3% of VPK is provided in private centers, 20% in public schools, 1.3% in private schools, and .4% in family child care homes

School Readiness: VPK Accountability Challenges

 Challenges defining child learning gains Focus of tool Alignment with K+ assessments Balancing policy maker needs and practical needs of teachers Building consistent, reliable infrastructure: training teachers/assessors, using data to inform care and instruction, data system  Program assessments measuring adult-child interactions are highly predictive of child outcomes and are less intrusive but may not be sufficient for policy makers

K-3 Education Landscape: Program Information

 Florida first in the nation to pass comprehensive kindergarten through 3rd grade reading policies

 Including creation of the “Just Read Florida” office  Mandatory retention of 3rd graders who cannot demonstrate attainment of a level 1 on the ELA Florida Standards Assessment  Supports that include teacher training, progress monitoring, and intensive interventions  Funding of the Reading Instruction Allocation and the Supplemental Academic Instruction within Florida’s student funding calculations (FEFP)  Approximately $91 million in 21st century Funding to elementary schools and other organizations for extra supports

 2016-2017 FTE funding of $7,178.49 is the highest it has been since 2007.

Absenteeism: Why It Matters

 Chronic absence, for any reason, means children do not have the opportunity to learn and refine critical grade and other reading skills  Good attendance: helps children build good habits like persistence and curiosity and increases exposed to language rich environments  Regular absence slows down children who miss class and classroom overall: classroom instruction is slowed down and school climate is impacted as chronically absent children struggle to catch up

Absenteeism: Why It Matters

 Children with chronic absence (missing >10% of days of school) in Kindergarten score significantly lower than their peers in 5th grade, with more absences equating to progressively worse achievement, even if attendance has improved by third grade  Chronic absence can alert communities to families and neighborhoods in need of further support, since poor school attendance can be an early warning sign

• f challenging social, economic, and

health conditions

Absenteeism Landscape

 Florida has one of the most robust student data systems which enables it to collect an extraordinary amount of data on its

• students. However it has not defined a

singular definition of attendance.  For example a student may not be considered absent even if they miss half a day or more. For middle and high school a student can continually miss 2 or 3 periods

• f the same class over a semester and not

necessarily be counted absent as long as they attended one period within a school day.  Therefore students may be missing significant instructional time but the school district or DOE is unable to look at those data trends to inform decision making.

Summer Learning Loss: Why It Matters

 Research shows: academic gaps are relatively constant during the school year but widen dramatically over summer  Every summer low-income children lose one to three months of reading skills and two months of math skills while higher income peers make slight gains.  Cumulative, disproportionate impact of losses can leave lower income children two+ years behind by fifth grade  Reading skills lost during summer slows progress toward reading proficiency by the end of third grade and exacerbates the achievement gap between low- income children and their more affluent peers.

Summer Learning Loss

Summer learning programs with the following attributes produce the greatest gains for low- income children:  Regular student attendance  Individualized instruction  Smaller class sizes  Parent involvement  High quality instructors  Alignment of school year and summer curricula  Inclusion of content beyond remediation  Tracking of effectiveness  Experiences designed to address the “opportunity gap” by offering low-income students with summer opportunities similar to those experienced by higher-income students

Summer Learning Loss

 School Districts in Florida are required to provide by law a summer reading camp to students retained due to not scoring a level 2 on the statewide standardized assessment  21st Century Community Learning Center Grants: communities apply for and receive through competitive RFP ($91 million)

 The focus and manner of investment of 21st Century Learning funds varies by the grantee  Summer programs are allowable but not a required investment

 Many Children’s Services Councils also invest in summer programs

Comments and Questions

Contact Information: Florida Children’s Council Brittany Birken, Ph. D, CEO bbirken@floridacsc.org 850-212-0408 Jenn Faber, Director of Grade Level Reading jfaber@floridacsc.org 239-432-0051 www.FloridaGLR.net