The Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale-Revised, an assessment of quality that is commonly used by states to judge preschool programs, has little connection to the academic, language, and social functioning of children evaluated at age 5, says a study in the spring 2014 edition of the journal Education Finance and Quality.
The study also found that children who were considered to be more at risk than others didn’t appear to derive any academic or behavioral benefit from attending centers with higher ratings.
Researchers drew on federal data from the Early-Childhood Longitudinal Study. About 800 children were part of the study, and trained observers evaluated the quality of their preschool programs using the ECERS-R tool. The study concluded that children failed to benefit more from preschool programs rated to be at medium or high levels of quality on the scale than they did in those rated low quality.
