Rethinking high-stakes use of observational measures of preschool quality

Early childhood education has seen increased high-stakes use of observational measures of child care and preschool quality in recent years. Scoring above or below a particular cut-score on these measures now has substantial financial and reputational consequences for child-care centers and preschools. This policy brief summarizes a study of the effectiveness of these observational assessments that reveals problems that have important implications for the high-stakes use of the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, Revised (ECERS-R). A companion journal article on this subject by the author and her collaborators can be found in AERA Open, a journal of the American Educational Research Association, published by Sage Journals. That article is titled "Examining the category functioning of the ECERS-R across eight data sets."