Education Week - April 17, 2013 - 8

EDUCATION WEEK

APRIL 17, 2013

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INDUSTRY & INNOVATION > Tracking business trends and emerging models in K-12
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Preschool Network Putting ‘Innovation’ Grant to Test
$5 million in ‘i3’ aid
used in pre-K effort
By Christina A. Samuels
At the start of the school day at
AppleTree Public Charter School’s
campus in the Columbia Heights
neighborhood of Washington, the 20
otherwise-wiggly students in Monique Twyman’s preschool class are
as attentive as a group of 3-yearolds can be.
Ms. Twyman leads the children
through a brisk review of letter
sounds and tells them the plans
for the day: Some will choose to
dig through a sand table to discover dinosaur “fossils,” while others may play with classroom toys,
like blocks. Still others can choose
to work with clay, or stamp paper
with the letter E with the help of
the classroom’s second teacher.
The day also will include monitoring the progress of students at
the school, one in a network that
has received a $5 million Investing
in Innovation grant from the U.S.
Department of Education. Children will be pulled out of the classroom individually for quick assessments designed to gauge their
mastery of the building blocks of
literacy and math.

‘Not Rote Learning’
The $650 million “i3” competitive-grant program awarded up
to $50 million to 49 recipients in
2010. AppleTree’s program, the
top-ranked proposal with an exclusive focus on early-childhood
education, received one of the
smaller “development” grants, for
promising but relatively untested
ideas, and is putting its money
toward meeting the needs of its
students, primarily minority and
from low-income homes.
The organization, with seven campuses in the District of Columbia,
pledged to use its $5 million grant
to take the program it calls Every
Child Ready—a blend of earlylearning academic content, professional development for teachers, and
student-progress monitoring—and
create a curriculum that can be
used by other preschools around the
country. The grant will also pay for a
research evaluation of the program.
With the federal government’s
interest in expanding high-quality
preschool programs by supporting
state efforts—the Obama administration made pre-K expansion
a prominent part of the budget it
unveiled April 10—programs such
as AppleTree’s are expected to
receive renewed attention. Policymakers will be working to define
what programs are worth scaling
up and supporting.
In the District of Columbia,
which provides free preschool for
3- and 4-year-olds, AppleTree’s preschool campuses are already over-

Stephen Voss for Education Week

Washington

Teacher Lindsay Cunningham
tests Amai Lindo, 4, as part of
the Appletree Early Learning
Charter School’s progress
monitoring at the school in the
District of Columbia.

subscribed. The school must hold a
lottery each year to fill its 640 slots.
The Every Child Ready program
is also used in 20 classrooms run
by other charter providers in the
District of Columbia, so the program educates about 1,000 young
children, said Jack McCarthy, AppleTree’s founder and managing
director.
“We’re really focused on the
children who are starting the furthest behind. They’re the ones who
make the most gains through our
program,” Mr. McCarthy said.
“It’s not rote learning, and it’s
not reciting the letters of the alphabet,” he added. He called the
curriculum evidence-based, childcentered, and tied to the Common
Core State Standards.

Home-Grown Incubator
The AppleTree Institute was
formed in 1995 as a charter school
incubator in the nation’s capital
and supported the creation of
two charter high schools and the
conversion of a traditional middle
school into a charter program.
But members of the organization
believed that AppleTree’s impact
could be greater if it supported
efforts to give children a good
academic start, well before they
arrived in middle and high school.
The first AppleTree Early

Learning Public Charter School
opened in 2005, and the preschool
years are the program’s sole focus.
The administrators started purchasing preschool learning programs, but found that each left
gaps that they filled by adding
another curriculum. AppleTree
was using five separate programs
before administrators there decided it might be better to create
their own.
“As we were using these five different curricula, our data were
getting better, but we were having
to have teachers and coaches do
so much extra work to get those
outcomes. It didn’t make sense if
you could create something that,
at the foundation, would be really
strong,” said Lydia Carlis, the director of education at the charter
school group.

Comprehensive Approach
That was the start of Every
Child Ready. A typical day in the
program starts with a 15-minute
“morning meeting,” then moves to
“centers,” where one teacher works
with a small group of children on
language and literacy skills while
the other children move through
guided free play that relates to
one of 10 thematic units explored
throughout the year.
Every day, the pupils have story
time, outdoor play, and “journaling”
under the guidance of an adult, and
whole-class instruction in science
concepts or development of social
and emotional skills. There’s also
nap time and time for snacks.
At least four times a year, the
children’s preacademic skills are

measured through brief assessments that give teachers a chance
to reinforce skills with some students or offer more advanced work
to children who are ready for it. The
assessments include a combination
of self-developed and prepackaged
tests, including Get Ready to Read,
a free test of phonological awareness and print concepts.
Every Child Ready has an explicit academic focus, but within
the structure of play, said Mary
Anne Lesiak, the chief of staff at
AppleTree and the architect of the
program. There’s no reason why
programs can’t do both, she said.
“You can do it all with children
in an intentional, fun, engaging
way,” she said.
And the intentional focus on
preacademic skills is particularly
important for children whose
backgrounds may not have prepared them for the academic and
social requirements of elementary
school, she added.
“It takes something beyond
good care in order to increase the
number of words that kids know,”
Ms. Lesiak said. Preschool programs such as AppleTree have
only two years to introduce all
those concepts; some preschools,
which start at age 4, have even
less time.
The explicit instruction extends
to social and emotional learning.
Ms. Lesiak said AppleTree is trying to give children an emotional
toolbox they can use to deal with
challenges in a school environment; for example, learning to
take three breaths to calm down
instead of lashing out.
W. Steven Barnett, the director

of the National Institute for Early
Education Research at Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, N.J.,
said that good preschool programs
generally include language and literacy skills, social and emotional
learning, and an introduction to
science and math skills, all areas
that Every Child Ready says it
supports. Many curricula support
those activities, but they have to be
implemented well, he stressed.
For many programs, “the bulk of
the day is spent in having lunch
in the cafeteria, play where the
teacher is not engaged, transitions
[from activity to activity], and
naps,” Mr. Barnett said.
“If 50 percent of your time is
spent in those activities, I guarantee you, kids don’t learn much,” he
said.

Sense of Urgency
AppleTree does feel a sense of
urgency with its children, who
often start behind their peers in
preacademic skills.
“The role of what early childhood
is supposed to do has changed in
the past 10 or 15 years,” Ms. Lesiak said. “Our goal is to get them
to be ahead of the curve.”
Though the academic program
is the most tangible part of Every
Child Ready. AppleTree is in the
process of creating Web-based
professional-development modules. The program also requires
individual coaching for classroom
teachers.
“We want to show teachers what
to teach, how to teach, and how
they can go about improving their
effectiveness,” Mr. McCarthy said.

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Education Week - April 17, 2013

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