Action Plan to Address Improving Quality in VPK

In comparison to the vast available literature and other states success in meeting quality early
childhood education standards, it is evident that Florida VPK isn’t meeting its voter mandate of high-
quality childhood care for all. While it is true that high quality care is costly and would take a huge
shift in legislative will and billions of state dollars, there exist actionable policy mechanism in the
action plan below that would improve the current state of Florida’s Pre-K. following years of
research, these action plan focus on creating strongly-aligned structural components of quality for as
Burchinal et al., (2008) posits, “without the presence of high-quality structural components, process
quality is nearly impossible to achieve.’’
The first towards moving to a more sophisticated and high-quality early childhood Pre-K in Florida is
abolishing the Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screener (FLKRS) and replacing with a more suitable
system of observation such as Georgi’s CLASS system. Currently, the FLKRS system does not
adequately measure Florida’s proposed standards. This explicitly goes against the state statute that
holds that an “instrument that assesses the readiness of each student for kindergarten based on the
performance standards adopted by the department” (Section 1002.69, Florida Statutes). While this
current assessment attains some of the performance standards set forth in Florida’s most recent Early
Learning and Developmental Standards, the assessment tests extreme focus on math and literacy
standards leaves out all the essential social-emotional development of young kids and other major
components of the Florida Early Learning and Developmental Standards. Although Florida’s Office
of Early learning is quite clear on the significance of appropriate assessment, the 15 minutes test that
is allegedly meant to measure early literacy, early numeracy and language skills only tests two of the
eight domains from the 2017Forida early Learning and Development Standards. Furthermore, the
assessment’s administration, issued to all the state’s kindergarteners within their first thirty days does
not permit for a measure of progress rather provides a one-tie score (Florida Office of Early Learning,
2017). While evaluating Pre-K providers isn’t inherently flawed, the Florida Kindergarten Readiness
Screener isn’t effectively measuring provider outcomes. An appropriate way to quantify whether kids
in Florida are learning all of what the Floridian Office of Early learning set forth in their various
standards is to observe class environments, as studies on the significance of in-classroom relationships
between educators and leaners suggests (Postal, 2018). This system is currently employed in Georgia
(CLASS) and a similar system may be employed in Florida to achieve future success and high quality.
Secondly, to achieve quality, Incentive providers in Florida should b required to participate in a
centralized quality rating system. As we speak, there isn’t any statewide quality rating and
improvement system (QRIS) in Florida. This is despite findings particularly by Yazejin & Iruka
(2014) indicating that program quality increases overtime with participation in QRIS. Although a
statewide QRIS is nearly impossible to implement in Florida now given the state’s current structure of
oversight, dissolving the distinct regional ELCs and housing the duty of oversight in the state Office
of Early Learning would enable the state to develop a statewide QRIS that incentive providers would
participate in.
Lasty, the State can tackle the issue of quality by producing and disseminating standard curricula that
are aligned with the Florida early learning standards. A close examination of the VPK program
reveals that there isn’t any requirement that service providers use a curriculum in the class that’s
deemed high quality or effective by the Florida Office of early Learning and acre. Rather, an educator
is only contractually obligated to offer a curriculum that; (a) are designed to prepare kids for early
literacy; (b) are developmentally appropriate; and (c) prepare kids to be ready for kindergarten.
However, with a rather less than robust system of evaluation, ELCS most of the time do not check to
ascertain that an educator’s curriculum covers the aforementioned basics. Instead, Florida may
provide a list of approved curriculum offerings to aid teachers. This will permit service providers the
autonomy of selecting which curricula works best for their leaners as well as educators at the same
time giving the state a peace of minding knowing that the curricula adheres to the set standards.