Study of Early Education – Louisiana

In 2012, Louisiana passed the Early Childhood Education Act (known as Act 3), which aimed to overhaul the state’s fragmented ECE landscape into a cohesive system that provides all young children with access to high-quality early childhood education. At the heart of this effort was a unique Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). Louisiana’s QRIS is unique in that participation is required for all sites receiving public funds and that ratings for each site are based solely on detailed data collected in every classroom using a widely used observational measure of teacher-child interactions. To support quality improvement, Louisiana has also introduced a variety of policies and initiatives aimed at supporting early educators to improve high quality early learning opportunities.

Through a long-standing research practice partnership with the Early Childhood Office in the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE), our team at UVA and UCLA is working to better understand the impact of Louisiana’s QRIS and other reform efforts on creating system-wide ECE improvement. As part of the SEE-LA study and our partnership, we have fielded large-scale ECE workforce surveys, conducted validation studies examining the link between QRIS ratings and child outcomes, and explored how Louisiana families access early learning opportunities.  Our current projects focus on the ECE workforce. We are documenting the links between teachers’ well-being and children’s learning in early childhood classrooms.  In our most recent project, we are investigating new strategies for supporting child care workers in completing a newly-required credential focused on improved interactions.