Two early education advocates – Amy O’Leary, director of our Early Education for All Campaign, and Mav Pardee, program manager of the Children’s Investment Fund – recently answered questions posed by the Barr Foundation about implementation of the Massachusetts QRIS: Quality Rating and Improvement System, launched in January 2011. Expanding QRIS is an integral part of the commonwealth’s successful application for a $50 million federal Early Learning Challenge grant.

The conversation with Stefan Lanfer, Barr’s knowledge officer, is posted on the foundation’s website. We are grateful for the Barr Foundation’s support of our work and commitment to early childhood education. The Children’s Investment Fund is also a Barr grantee.

“All the research shows that quality makes a big difference in terms of outcomes for kids,” O’Leary said. “QRIS is a way to define what quality actually means. It creates a way for programs to assess their current quality and to have a clear pathway to improve. It lets EEC know how best to target resources. Ultimately, it makes it easy for parents to know what quality looks like, and how different programs stack up.”

Lanfer noted Barr’s commitment to helping programs gain accreditation and asked how accreditation fits in with QRIS. “The organizations providing early education and care programs in Massachusetts are largely pretty lean,” Pardee replied. “They don’t have big middle management layers. Usually it’s one person. It takes over a year for a program to earn accreditation. Then every couple years, they need to get reaccredited. That’s why from the start it was so critical to align QRIS with accreditation – to make sure it all works together. People didn’t want to see that set aside or not incorporated.”

“In Massachusetts,” O’Leary added, “being accredited is one way for programs to demonstrate they’ve met critical quality benchmarks. But to get to the highest level (Level 4), we’ve got higher standards in some areas than to meet accreditation requirements – like educational attainment and experience for administrators and teachers, or having a working sink in every classroom.”

Pardee and O’Leary discussed both the promise of QRIS and the challenges of launching it.

“We’re still early in the process,” Pardee said. “But over time you will see more highly qualified teachers, better curriculum, better physical environments. You will also see programs incorporating QRIS into their marketing – because being a QRIS Level 3 or 4 will send parents a strong signal. The savvier families will pick this up early. But we’ll do outreach to others too.”

One major challenge, said O’Leary, was “convincing practitioners this wasn’t just one more hoop but part of a system, and then coming to consensus about what defines quality. From the beginning, Commissioner Killins was committed to making sure QRIS was owned by those in the field – not just imposed from on high. There was a community group of 50-60 people working together on the standards. Getting to consensus was challenging, but so worth it. Everyone had input.”

Said Pardee: “We are going to have to figure out how to come up with funding to help programs meet these new standards, which is a tall order in an under-resourced field.”