Durham, North Carolina, Aug. 27, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- EdReports, a nonprofit organization that provides free reviews of instructional materials, is proud to announce the formation of its inaugural Pre-Kindergarten Advisory Board. This new initiative marks a significant expansion of EdReports’ efforts to support educators by providing comprehensive reviews of pre-K instructional materials, focusing on alignment with standards and key indicators of quality.
“We are excited to collaborate with such a distinguished group of experts,” said Shana Weldon, Ed.D., director of pre-K at EdReports. “The diverse perspectives of our advisors will be invaluable as we work to ensure that our pre-K reviews meet the high standards of rigor and quality that educators rely on.”
EdReports’ reviews empower teachers, principals, and district and state officials to make informed decisions when selecting instructional materials. By focusing on alignment to standards and other critical quality indicators, EdReports aims to raise the bar for instructional materials, ensuring that educators have access to the best resources available. The expansion into pre-K materials reflects EdReports’ commitment to enhancing the quality and rigor of education from the earliest stages.
Advisory boards play a crucial role at EdReports, providing expert guidance on review tools, processes, and content-specific issues. The newly established Pre-K Advisory Board held its first meeting on August 16 and will meet quarterly, offering feedback and insights that will shape the development of EdReports’ inaugural pre-K reviews. Members are encouraged to actively engage with EdReports, contributing their expertise to ensure that the reviews remain relevant and impactful.
“Teachers shape the opportunities for children to thrive in and beyond classrooms. The materials available to teachers matter if they are to leverage and build upon children’s individual strengths based on their intersectional identities,” said Stacey French-Lee, Ph.D., Clinical Assistant Professor and Executive Director of the Campus Child Development Program at Georgia State University, and new EdReports Pre-K Advisory Member. “I am eager to work with colleagues on the Advisory board to ensure equitable opportunities for children to succeed in school and life through responsive, evidence-based, high-quality preschool curriculum.”
With over $250 million spent annually on pre-K curriculum, assessment, and professional development, and approximately 1.6 million children enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs nationwide, the need for strong, high-quality instructional materials has never been more pressing. EdReports aims to provide a trusted source of free information on pre-K products, building on its successful model in the K–12 market.
Research consistently shows that high-quality early education can significantly impact children’s long-term outcomes. However, many children still lack access to these crucial experiences. A robust preschool education is essential for fostering critical development and learning, particularly in key areas like math, early literacy, and science. This is especially important for multilingual learners and children from marginalized backgrounds. EdReports’ focus on essential early learning domains is guided by research-based evidence from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). Their report, A New Vision for High-Quality Preschool Curriculum, offers a common definition of quality in early childhood education, grounded in equity and justice-oriented principles.
EdReports is currently conducting a pre-K Listening and Learning Tour to establish review criteria, select materials for review, and recruit and train early childhood educators to form review teams. The first pre-K reviews are scheduled for release in late 2025, marking a significant milestone in EdReports’ ongoing efforts to improve the quality of instructional materials across all levels of education.
Learn more about our Pre-Kindergarten Advisory Board members below. For more information about EdReports and its upcoming pre-K reviews, please visit https://edreports.org/resources.
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EdReports is at the forefront of the curriculum reform movement. By increasing the capacity of educators to identify and demand the highest quality curriculum, EdReports is both disrupting a multibillion-dollar market and transforming the way students are taught and ultimately perform. With the firm belief that what is taught matters and that all students deserve standards-aligned, research-based materials tailored to diverse needs, including multilingual learners, EdReports publishes free, online, evidence-rich reviews of instructional materials. Since its launch in 2015, EdReports has trained nearly 900 educators to conduct rigorous reviews of instructional materials and has released over 1,100 reviews of math, ELA, and science curricula. The organization's work has been instrumental in helping educators across the country make informed decisions about the materials they use in their classrooms.
Media Contact: Janna Chan, jchan@edreports.org, 206-321-0339
EdReports Pre-Kindergarten Advisory Board Members
| Karen Bierman, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology and Human Development and Family Studies, Evan Pugh University Dr. Karen Bierman’s 40+ year research career has focused on social-emotional development and children at risk, with an emphasis on the design and evaluation of school-based programs that promote social competence, school readiness, and positive peer relations, and that reduce aggression and related behavior problems. She has directed several longitudinal studies evaluating the long-term impact of multi-tiered preventive interventions designed to strengthen school and family supports for at-risk children. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Educational Sciences, The U.S. National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the W.T. Grant Foundation. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Prevention Research, and has served as an educational advisor to organizations devoted to improving early education, including Head Start and Sesame Street. | |
| TeeAra Dias Executive Director, Early Childhood, Boston Public Schools TeeAra Dias has over 20 years of experience working in community, private, and public early education. Currently, she serves as the executive director of the Boston Public Schools (BPS) Early Childhood department whose mission is to provide an equitable, high-quality early education that leverages children’s own identities, experiences, funds of knowledge, and cultures. Ms. Dias launched BPS’ Universal Pre-K program as its inaugural director in 2019 and leads the implementation of high-quality education for all four-year-olds via a mixed delivery system. The position is a unique opportunity to be at the forefront of innovation in early education in Boston and Massachusetts, and to play a vital role in building collaborations between schools, community-based programs, and city partners. Ms. Dias joined Boston Public Schools in 2015 to manage the Preschool Expansion Grant (PEG), a federal grant that expanded upon the partnership between BPS and community-based organizations. As the project manager, she worked with various district departments, partners, outside state/city agencies, and organizations to implement the Preschool Expansion Grant and create a shared governance structure. Over the years the PEG grant improved the quality of Pre-K instruction and learning environments, providing a high-quality experience for 250 four-year-old children a year. Earlier in her career, Ms. Dias served families at Bright Horizons Family Solutions as a teacher, director and regional educator. For nearly twenty years she offered support that meets the national standards of early education and care, facilitated regional training sessions, published divisional communications, and assisted programs in achieving NAEYC accreditation. | |
| Stacey French-Lee, Ph.D. Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Early Childhood; Elementary Education and Executive Director of the Campus Child Development Program; Georgia State University For over 30 years, Dr. Stacey French-Lee has been an early childhood education advocate, practitioner, and leader in NAEYC-accredited programs, where she harnesses her expertise to develop responsive and equity-based policy, programs, and practices alongside children, families, community members, and teachers. Her leadership and experiences span international and national contexts, including in military, corporate, and university settings such as serving on urban school boards and in early childhood programs. Currently, Stacey is a clinical assistant professor at Georgia State University (GSU) in the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education, where she serves as a core faculty member in the bachelor’s program in birth through five education and the master’s program in creative and innovative education. She is also the executive director of GSU’s two campus childcare centers. Through the lenses of critical frameworks, including intersectionality, critical race theory, and community cultural wealth, Dr. French-Lee focuses her work on critiquing and dismantling any presumed neutrality or universality of the idea of “child” and “childhood” in policy, practice, and research. Dr. French-Lee earned her bachelor’s degree in communicative disorders from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky and her M.Ed, Ed.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education at Georgia State University. Her major research interest is on how the intersections of race, class, and gender influence how African American boys are perceived and educated in the United States. | |
| Gail E. Joseph, Ph.D. Bezos Family Professor of Early Learning, University of Washington College of Education Dr. Joseph received her Ph.D. in early childhood special education at the University of Washington in 2001. She teaches courses, advises students, provides services, and conducts research on topics related to early learning and equity, childcare quality, and early childhood workforce preparation. She is the founding executive director of Cultivate Learning at the University of Washington and was the director of the Head Start Center for Inclusion (Headstartinclusion.org) and co-director of the National Center for Quality Teaching and Learning funded by the Office of Head Start. At Cultivate Learning, she creates professional learning resources such as Circle Time Magazine and the Meaningful Makeover series. Additionally, she is the Founder of the EarlyEdU Alliance which focuses on increasing the quality of early learning settings nationwide by making relevant, affordable degrees accessible to the early childhood workforce. | |
| Laura Justice, Ph.D. EHE Distinguished Professor of Educational Psychology; Executive Director, Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy; Executive Director, Schoenbaum Family Center; Ohio State University Dr. Justice is an expert in early cognitive development and disabilities whose research agenda focuses on enhancing the well-being and life potential of young children. Her global research portfolio includes active collaborations in Denmark, Hong Kong, China, Australia, Mexico, and New Zealand. Dr. Justice has received such recognition for her research as the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (from President George W. Bush), two Fulbright Awards, and numerous scientific merit awards for research publications. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Canterbury, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Zagreb, and the University of Bologna. Dr. Justice has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals (e.g., Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Psychological Science) and is editor-in-chief of Early Childhood Research Quarterly, the premier global publication on applied early childhood development and education. She has been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator of more than $55,000,000 in federal research funding over the last decade, and her work is currently funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the National Institutes of Health. | |
| Lillie Moffett, Ph.D. Education Research & Evaluation Consultant, Early Education Division, California Department of Education Dr. Moffett supports the California Department of Education’s (CDE) work on preschool and transitional kindergarten learning standards, curricula, and assessment. She first joined CDE as a Society for Research in Child Development postdoctoral policy fellow. Dr. Moffett’s prior work in her doctoral program at the University of Michigan involved preschool through second grade classroom observation coding and research of Boston Public Schools’ curriculum, Focus on Early Learning. As part of her dissertation, she also created and supported teachers in implementing math and executive functioning activities in Head Start preschool programs in Los Angeles. | |
| Stacey Wallen, Ph.D., CCC-SLP Speech-Language Pathologist and Director of Field Implementation, The Rollins Center for Language & Literacy, Atlanta Speech School Dr. Wallen’s clinical areas of expertise include sociolinguistics, acoustic phonetics, fluency disorders, early intervention, speech and language disorders in school-age children, speech and language disorders in medically fragile children, speech and language differences/disorders in culturally and linguistically diverse populations, and parent/caregiver education. Dr. Wallen has over 20 years of experience across the education continuum, including early childhood through post-secondary environments. She has served as a clinician, faculty member, peer reviewer, and editorial advisor for publications in the fields of communication sciences/disorders and education. In her current role at the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy, Dr. Wallen is responsible for overseeing implementation of science of reading professional development/programming with both public and private partnerships across the learning continuum, including perinatal/prenatal, early care/learning, K–12, and university/teacher preparation spaces. | |
| Christina Weiland, Ed.D. Professor, Marsal Family School of Education; Karl and Martha Kohn Professor of Social Policy, Ford School of Public Policy; Co-Director, Education Policy Initiative; University of Michigan Dr. Weiland’s research focuses on the effects of early childhood interventions and public policies on children’s development, especially on children from families with low incomes. She is particularly interested in the active ingredients that drive children’s gains in successful, at-scale public preschool programs. She holds an Ed.D. (quantitative policy analysis in education) and an M.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College. |
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