California “Early Learning Foundations”

This spring you will have several opportunities to influence California’s expectations for preschoolers’ development.
The Child Development Division of the California Department of Education is doing a great job at inviting—and listening to!—input from the Early Care and Education community as they develop their “Early Learning Foundations” in four areas:
* Social/emotional development
* English language learning (for kids whose first language is not English)
* Language and literacy
* Mathematics
(next year they will add other areas).
These are not supposed to be tests or requirements, but descriptions of typical development in three- and four-year-olds.
The fact that they start with social/emotional development and English learning is already a sign that the CDD has listened to the field. (Their first standards were just for literacy and math, but they heard from a lot of people that social/emotional development and English learning were essential).
The first draft of the “foundations” was developed by researchers looking at a lot of studies and experience from the field.
The department then invited “stakeholders” to four all-day sessions to give feedback. I attended two of those sessions and I have to say I was really impressed with the level of discussion. On the whole, people were very pleased with the drafts, but they weren’t shy about making dozens and dozens of criticisms and suggestions for change, which the researchers and CDD people received very graciously--they seemed eager to make changes based on the input. So that was very cool.
Their goal is to incorporate the suggestions and get the next draft on the web site by April 9.
The next step is public regional input meetings, to be hosted by the California Preschool Instructional Network (CPIN) around the state in the next few months. There will also be an opportunity to give input on the foundations on the web site.
After that, hearings on the foundations will be held in mid-May.
Dates/times/places for the regional meetings are not yet available, but you can see a general outline of the process at http://www.sonoma.edu/cihs/cpin/standards.htm. When more info is available, I’ll let you know.