Last week, the state advisory committee in charge of developing a Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) for California’s early learning and care programs released a report outlining what an upcoming pilot would look like and how it might be funded. You can read the executive summary here.
Preparatory steps include developing an early-learning data system in which children would be given a unique identifier based on birth certificate numbers, cost analysis, and creation of incentives and local partnerships to build a sustainable funding model. A three-year initial pilot is expected to start in the next few months.
Meanwhile, some local pilot efforts are already underway and have shown good results. The Los Angeles Universal Preschool (LAUP) program boasts California’s largest and longest-running quality improvement system currently in existence. Pilot evaluation results show LAUP children performed above the national mean in early academic and social skills. (For more on this, click here and go to Appendix C.)