Pathways to Grade Level Reading Initiative - Prioritizing Strategies

The NC Pathways to Grade Level Reading initiative's vision is bold: All North Carolina children, regardless of race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status, are reading on grade-level by the end of third grade, and all children with disabilities achieve expressive and receptive communication skills commensurate with their developmental ages, so that they have the greatest opportunity for life success.

To get there, we need state and local policies and practices aligned around and actively advancing a common vision, shared measures of success and coordinated strategies that support children’s optimal development beginning at birth.

The NC Pathways to Grade-Level Reading initiative is creating partnerships among the state’s early learning and education, public agency, policy, philanthropic and business leaders to define a common vision, shared measures of success and coordinated strategies that support children’s optimal development beginning at birth.

In the first two phases of the work, a Data Action Team recommended data measures that research shows move the needle on third grade reading proficiency, and Learning Teams determined where North Carolina should focus first. They recommended, and the larger Pathways stakeholders group approved, three areas of focus:

Social-emotional health,
High quality birth-through-age-eight education, and
Regular school attendance.

Now, in the third phase of the work, Pathways to Grade Level Reading Design Teams are tasked with deciding which strategies to prioritize to make progress in these critical areas. The strategy options in the following lists were proposed by local community providers, North Carolina parents of young children, Design Team members, and national research. These strategies reflect Pathways' intentional equity lens that is focused explicitly, but not exclusively, on race.

Your feedback on this survey will help the Design Teams prioritize which strategies Pathways should focus on. To guide that decision, Design Teams have agreed on a set of Pathways Criteria that are based on principles that have guided the work since the beginning. Please prioritize strategies that:

Address racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and ability inequities
Are data- and research-driven and informed by developmental science
Address the whole child and family
Are actionable and accountable
Address critical gaps in our system

Why are we asking you for your name and organization?
Survey responses will ONLY be shared in the aggregate. As we strive to be mutually transparent in our collective work, we want to understand who is sharing in the process.

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* 1. What is your first name?

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* 2. What is your last name?

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* 3. What is the name of your organization?

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* 4. What is your title within your organization?

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* 5. What is your area of expertise? (Select all that apply.)

Health and Development

Family and Community Support

Early Childhood Learning (birth through age five)

Early Childhood Learning (K-3)

Other (please specify)

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* 6. Given the Pathways Criteria and your knowledge of the North Carolina context, which eight overarching strategies would you recommend Pathways move to action on first to address High Quality Birth-through-age-Eight Early Care and Education and Regular School Attendance?

Ensure transitions (to kindergarten and between grades) are smooth and supported.

Create a tiered system of response to address individual students' attendance.

Raise teachers’ and leaders’ capacity to effectively teach children of color, English-language learners, children with disabilities, and children from low-income families.

Ensure that measurement tools for young children and the classrooms in which they learn are culturally, linguistically and developmentally valid and reliable, and build culturally relevant accountability systems that measure student outcomes and classroom quality to ensure high quality education for children of color and those from low-income families.

Build a strong screening, assessment, and treatment pipeline for identifying and addressing children's health and learning issues.

Ensure equitable and adequate funding for K-3 education, including investing in supports which are more likely to contribute to student academic success and decrease disparities, and monitor funding distribution.

Offer health services in early education and K-3 school settings.

Engage in classroom practices that are proven to improve early literacy.

Provide wraparound supports through schools, such as home visits, summer learning opportunities, housing supports and health and nutrition services, to help meet families' basic needs and support regular attendance and early literacy.

Ensure curricula, materials and instructional time are culturally responsive.

Reduce barriers to getting to school.

Conduct outreach to raise parent, policymaker, and broader stakeholder awareness about the causes and impacts of chronic absenteeism and the benefits of regular attendance.

Use socioeconomic integration models to diversify schools and prevent re-segregation.

Ensure students of color, English-language learners, students with disabilities and other vulnerable students have the academic supports they need to succeed, including high quality early education, gifted education, remedial supports, tailored interventions, and access to technology.

Support specific efforts to recruit, professionally prepare, compensate and retain a well-qualified workforce across multiple birth through eight settings, including family and center-based child care as well as public and charter schools.

Improve data collection and analysis and use data to ensure school quality and improve attendance, including equitable distribution of quality teachers, focus placed on school climate and non-academic measures of school success, and personalized education plans for individual students.

Create policies across sectors that collectively lower the burden of stress on families due to the often interrelated threats of poverty, crime, mental illness, substance abuse, discrimination, and community violence, and support parents and other caregivers in their roles as nurturers and providers.

Recruit and retain more teachers and school leaders of color, and ensure that students of color have access to teachers and school leaders of color.

Raise standards and compensation for early care and education teachers to professionalize the early childhood workforce.

Adopt a standard, statewide definition of chronic absence for North Carolina and create cross-agency policies and infrastructure to support regular attendance.

Authentically engage with parents and provide parent education and support around child development, wellness, early literacy, parenting and school attendance.

Ensure safe and supportive learning environments and positive school climates, including focusing on social-emotional health and learning.

Build leadership capacity for effective teaching and learning in high-need schools and districts.

Ensure children of color and children in Title I schools have high quality teachers and leaders.

Develop a comprehensive birth-through-third-grade system for young children's academic success.

Make high-quality early care and education more affordable for families.

Build the capacity of leaders and staff to make educational equity a priority and clearly communicate about race and equity with staff, students and parents.

Focus school-based health resources on a subset of health issues that are highly prevalent and disproportionately affect urban minority youth, including asthma, aggression, bullying and violence, need for physical activity, hunger, and inattention and hyperactivity.

Increase supply of high-quality early care and education services, including wrap-around services.

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* 7. Given the Pathways Criteria and your knowledge of the North Carolina context, which eight overarching strategies would you recommend Pathways move to action on first to address Social-Emotional Health?

Use a collaborative care model across child-serving systems to ensure attention to early childhood mental health is infused throughout. Build increased cooperation between mental health providers and the health, education, family supports, and child welfare systems at the community, county and state levels to implement a comprehensive, shared framework for advancing young children’s mental health and social-emotional development.

Support the inclusion of ACEs screening and trauma-informed care across governmental agencies at the state and county levels.

Use data to track community needs, available services, and racial disparities in service provision and outcomes, and use the data to adjust provision of services appropriately.

In the absence of sufficient mental health system funding, blend funding sources by centralizing program delivery and creating processes and relationships that establish early childhood systems that can leverage the various funding opportunities.

Ensure that health care institutions are welcoming and respectful to people of different races and ethnicities by providing culturally and linguistically competent staff, curriculum, and policies.

Assess the likely health equity impacts of public policies, including legislative, regulatory and administrative policies, and provide recommendations to reduce identified impacts.

Integrate mental health, physical health and primary care.

Eliminate lead hazards and other toxic substances in housing, child care locations, schools, and water

Build capacity and competence in infant and early childhood mental health practice among providers that serve young children and families by expanding professional development.

Promote public awareness of the impact of early experiences on success in school and life. Emphasize the importance of social-emotional development for children to succeed in school, be healthy, and enjoy financial stability in adulthood.

Encourage family-friendly employment policies that improve the stability of working hours, give parents more control over their work times, promote bonding and attachment, improve conditions for young low-income parents, and help new parents get their babies off to a good start in life, including paid family leave for the birth of a child, paid sick leave, and predictable scheduling,

Address stigma around mental health and build trust in services, particularly in communities of color.

Ensure access to high quality parenting programs, adult education and workforce training supports

Improve access to health insurance for children and parents and ensure that children's insurance and Medicaid payment policies provide coverage for developmental screening, including screening for social– emotional health, payment for preventive services, and payment for appropriate treatments.

Ensure equitable access for linguistically and culturally diverse children and families to a system that includes health care, home visiting, early intervention and high quality early care and education, and a comprehensive array of services from prevention to treatment.

Improve access for parents and expectant parents to screening, services and supports for substance abuse and addiction, family violence, depression, and other adult mental health disorders, including by using two-generation strategies.

Address social-emotional health and social-emotional learning in schools, including building social-emotional skills and capacities of children, parents, teachers, service providers and school leaders

Expand screening and early identification activities, using diagnostic and screening instruments that are valid for minority populations, to detect social–emotional problems in infants and toddlers, such as relationship disorders, depression, and self-regulation problems. Include screening for family risk factors that might affect children’s social–emotional development—for example, poverty, pre- and postnatal parental depression, family isolation, parental mental illness, or parental substance abuse.

Recruit, train and retain mental health providers of color.