Early Childhood Education

	Overview		Accomplishments to Date
	Board and Supporters		Contact

Overview

Given the power of early intervention to tackle the achievement gap before it widens to three or four grade levels, Teach For America launched a national early childhood education initiative in 2006 to bring increasing numbers of outstanding pre-K teachers to our country’s lowest income communities. After spending two years in the pre-K classroom, these individuals, from all academic majors and interests, will continue their work to eliminate educational inequity as leaders in early childhood education or other sectors.

The success of the pilot program in D.C. region along with the potential of high quality pre-K to influence a child’s life trajectory compelled us to expand these efforts to ten other regions since 2006:

Chicago, New York, Mid-Atlantic, Los Angeles, Houston, Bay Area, Colorado, Las Vegas Valley, South Louisiana, and Greater New Orleans

Through our continued efforts to grow this initiative, the number of total early childhood corps members will nearly quadruple in three years, from 112 in 2007 to 477 in 2010, reaching more than 8,000 students in their first experiences with school.

This expansion means that in five years nearly 500 ECE alumni will have the experience and conviction from teaching pre-K to become lifelong leaders in early childhood education. As the ECE landscape continues to evolve and attract stakeholders at the local, state, and national level, the efforts of our alumni as excellent teachers, school leaders, public policy leaders, and advocates for change in other sectors will have a catalytic effect on broader reform efforts in the early childhood education arena.

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Accomplishments to Date

Corps Member Impact:

Since its pilot year in 2006, the early childhood education initiative has already catalyzed substantial progress for our nation’s youngest and most impressionable learners:

• Impacted 2,346 pre-K students since by placing 120 highly qualified teachers in school-based settings and community based organizations across 6 regions, nearly all of whom held leadership roles on campus and who had an average GPA of 3.5
• Established a network of local and national relationships needed to expand our early childhood presence to 11 regions in total
• Developed differentiated training within our broader Teaching As Leadership framework that aims to cultivate the language, cognitive, social/emotional, and physical development of students through highly purposeful and developmentally appropriate instruction
• Alyson Cummings (D.C. Region Corps ‘06) realized the power of a highly engaging, interactive, and supportive pre-K experience by guiding and tracking her students’ progress throughout the year. She proactively worked to increase their oral vocabulary and facilitate a smooth transition to school by modeling how to use new words and full sentences in her interactions with them and affording multiple opportunities for them to express themselves and interact with their peers during center time, Read Alouds, and meals. Michael, who entered Alyson’s class knowing only Spanish, finished the year with some of the strongest reading English reading comprehension and math skills of anyone in the class.

Alumni Impact

Despite the fact that Teach For America did not formally place corps members in pre-K settings prior to 2006, several alumni are already making strides in the larger early childhood education context as teachers, school leaders, and advocates for high quality pre-K, such as Khadija Ahmjad, Claire Cohen, and Sandy Escobedo.

• Khadija Ahmjad (D.C. Region Corps ‘06) continues to teach pre-K at her original placement site where, as a corps member, she fostered significant growth with her students in foundational skills and actively involved her parents in a variety of ways including having them record books on tape for her class library. Khadija will expand her impact as her school’s elected union representative next year. She aims to develop a more empowered school community by investing teachers in the development of curriculum and other school wide initiatives.
• Claire Cohen (South Louisiana Corps ’95) leads a high performing Head Start, pre-K and kindergarten program at the Family Charter School in West Philadelphia where most of her students finish her program on or above grade level.
• Sandy Escobedo (New York Corps, ’03) brought her insights from teaching pre-K as a corps member to the California Community Foundation in 2007 when she became a Palevsky Fellow for the Los Angeles Preschool Advocacy Initiative. Sandy works to build a grassroots coalition composed of different stakeholders including members of the business community, parents, and other community advocates to provide access to high quality pre-K in Los Angeles County.
• Nine ECE school leaders in California, Texas, Washington, D.C, Arizona, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
  

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Early Childhood Education Advisory Board and Supporters

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