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On June 19, 2017, Education Week published an article by Marva Hinton that highlighted ConnCAN’s report “Lessons from the Field: Profiles of Quality Early Childhood Education Programs and Implications for Connecticut”:
The study found four common threads among the programs it studied, including effective strategies for recruiting and retaining a high-quality workforce, an intentional focus on learning and development, a wide variety of structures, and a reliance on data to help drive continuous improvement.
The profiles were developed by Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now, or ConnCAN. The organization studied a diverse group of successful programs, including two community-based providers, two charter schools and a traditional public school. The schools had differing student body compositions and different sources of funding. It chose to focus on out-of-state programs becuse researchers were not able to find any Connecticut programs with independent evaluations of their impact on students.
“What we wanted to do was to spotlight what five very different but all high-quality early childhood programs looked like in order to spark a conversation around what high-quality programming in Connecticut can and should look like,” said Jennifer Alexander, ConnCAN CEO. “Connecticut needs a system that embraces quality in the many forms in which it can come.”