Watch a 4-year-old for an afternoon and you’ll probably see a child who believes in the tooth fairy, needs help tying their shoes, and asks “Why?” more than any adult can reasonably answer. What’s harder to see is just how much that child is learning and where they might benefit from more support.
Early education teachers constantly amaze me with their creativity and dedication, and with how much they notice. They see who’s starting to recognize patterns while playing with blocks, who’s still figuring out how to join a game already in progress, and countless other small signals of how each child is learning and developing.
Ideally, documenting these observations is a fundamental part of supporting each child. It makes learning visible, revealing not just what a child can do today, but where they may need additional support and what experiences might help them continue to grow. Without that information, important developmental gains can go unnoticed and opportunities to respond early can be missed.
The science is clear: purposeful play is serious work, and high-quality early education can produce lasting gains. But delivering that quality consistently and at scale requires us to understand how children are developing, not just at the level of an individual classroom, but across programs and communities.
What child assessment looks like today
Ask most pre-K teachers whether they believe in assessment, and they’ll say yes. Knowing how a child is developing helps them teach better. Ask them how they feel about actually administering assessments, though, and the answer is usually quite different.
Across classrooms, teachers tell us they spend considerable time administering assessments, completing checklists, and entering data, often at the expense of interacting with children. Yet they don’t always have the time or support to turn those data into better instruction. One pre-K educator interviewed by a partner described assessment as “one of the least fun parts of the job,” requiring roughly 30 minutes per skill category at a computer and away from her students. A RAND survey similarly found that 33% of public pre-K teachers don’t have enough time to review assessment data and use it to inform instruction. Too often, assessment becomes a compliance exercise rather than a useful instructional tool.
And the problem extends beyond the classroom. State leaders I’ve met have told me they have no reliable way to know whether their mixed-delivery pre-K systems are serving every child well. They can tell you how many children are enrolled, but they have a much harder time answering more important questions: How are the children progressing? Where are some children or classrooms struggling? Where might additional support make a difference?
Helping teachers and systems measure what’s working
This is the problem MDRC set out to solve through its Measures for Early Success Initiative, which the Gates Foundation has supported since 2022. MDRC started by asking the people closest to young children what they actually need: families, pre-K educators, coaches, and system leaders across more than 20 states and localities, alongside academic researchers and assessment developers.
That work resulted in a set of User-Informed Principles for what a high-quality child assessment should do:
- Comprehensively measure children’s skills across developmental domains, not just the handful of skills that happen to be easiest to test;
- Be joyful, play-based, and embedded in everyday classroom activities, while being easy for educators to administer to more than one child at a time;
- Produce valid, reliable information that holds up across different communities, languages, and settings;
- Provide clear results educators can use to shape what happens in the classroom the next day and keep families informed; and
- Be realistic to administer within the time, staffing, and budget constraints of public pre-K programs.
These principles are now moving from paper to practice. Approximately 200 educators across almost 100 centers have piloted assessment tools designed around them, including Khan Academy Kids, which is now part of pilots underway in districts and states across the country. More than 40 additional classrooms will join the Khan Academy Kids pilot in the upcoming school year, with the assessment available at no cost to participating programs. These pilots will help us understand how well the tool fits into everyday classroom practice, including how it works alongside curricula and other assessments already in use.
A systems view of what it takes
Assessment, of course, is only part of the equation. Better curriculum without better assessment leaves us guessing about whether children are benefiting. Better assessment without strong curriculum can tell us how children are progressing, but gives educators too little support for deciding what to do next. Real change requires both, working together, with ongoing professional learning and coherent leadership.
That is the larger goal of the work we’re supporting: to ensure early educators have both high-quality instructional materials and practical ways to understand children’s growth. Done well, assessment should not pull teachers away from the work that matters most. It should help them see more clearly what children are learning, respond to what they need, and give early learning systems a better understanding of what’s working, for whom, and where more support is needed.