Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Hi everybody, I’m Annie. 
Diane and I work very closely together, but we’ve never presented together. 
I am not an expert in the field, she is. 
So I told her when I meander and get off track she’s gonna slap me and get me back on track. 
We want to reserve right, enough time, at the end for ya’ll to ask questions and be interactive, 
so we’ll try and go at a decent pace and then just know that we’ll come back to a period 
where we can talk to you a little more about some of the questions you might have. 
So this is our agenda. 
I’m going to just tell you a little bit about George Kaiser Family Foundation, 
what it is we do and our priorities, how we got involved with EduCare, the core features of EduCare, 
what the model is and what the program elements are. 
Evaluation and design of the EduCare model will be Diane’s area. 
Results today, and then we’ll have Q and A. 
You can see here what the mission is of George Kaiser Family Foundation. 
We're dedicated to breaking the cycle of poverty through investments and early childhood education, 
community health, social services, and civic enhancement. 
So you can see by the way this is written that early childhood education has been our primary focus 
and what we view as the investment that’s most likely to change a child’s trajectory. 
We really view it as poverty prevention. 
We develop projects in conjunction with direct service organizations.
We work in a manner that is a very deep partnership with select agencies. 
We don’t accept unsolicited applications. We’re pretty different in that way. 
The thrust areas again are early childhood ed., social service support, so generally clothes, 
shelter, heal, the things that are symptoms of poverty. 
We support those things in Tulsa and, to a lesser extent, sometimes in Oklahoma City, too. 
Community health, civic enhancement, beautification, those are things that make Tulsa 
more livable, and economic development and arts. 
So, I included this slide because I wanted to give you just some sense of when I started at the foundation, 
which was almost ten years ago as the first employee, 
George Kaiser had spent most of his professional life accruing wealth. 
He hadn’t really studied ways that he would invest that wealth in society, 
but he made the determination that he didn’t need to keep that money, that he wanted to give it away. 
And one of the things that he was looking at very deeply when I met him was the rate at which 
children’s neurological growth happens early in life, how important the early years were, 
but the fact that public policy had not invested in like ways. 
So you can see that there’s this vast chasm here. This is where the brain’s at the height of growth. 
This is where the public is investing. 
So we get heavy duty when kiddos are almost adults, but the area where we really need to be intervening, 
especially for children who are at risk, is much younger. 
So at George Kaiser Family Foundation, our focus really is in birth to three education. 
That’s when we feel the research is unequivocal. 
If you intervene during that time, you can change a child’s life. 
And so that’s where our investments really are most focused. 
Again, not a researcher but it’s important to note what were some of the inputs 
that we looked at to convince us that early education was a smart investment.
 One of the things that really vexed George for a long time was, as a society, 
we say that we believe in equal opportunity for all. 
But how is it that kids in poverty have so many obstacles, so much is stacked against them, 
even at the point at which they enter school. 
And what you see in this slide really is the achievement gap- that young children, 
even by 36 months, have a significantly different vocabulary than older children. 
And vocabulary obviously, this is the basis by which children communicate, access knowledge, 
interact with adults, and so it’s really important to know 
that early intervention mitigates that truly. 
And so Diane will talk a little bit more about what we’re finding in the evaluation 
that’s taking place at EduCare. So Diane, you want to jump in here? 
Diane Horm: Yeah, I was going to take over at this point, and when I was introduced to you 
hopefully noted that I’m the George Kaiser Family Foundation Endowed Chair at OU Tulsa. 
So one of the investments the George Kaiser Family Foundation made was in creating 
the position that I eventually came to occupy. 
There is a similar counterpart to me at Tulsa Community College. 
And the Kaiser Foundation had not only created those faculty positions at those two institutions 
but also has made scholarship money available for students who are interested in studying 
early childhood education at the community college, and I think you guys started that around 2000. 
And so over time Tulsa was the beneficiary of more people who have the CDA, 
the beginning certificate in child development, to work in childcare or early childhood settings, 
as well as more people with the Associate’s Degree. 
But they wanted a way for people to complete their Bachelor’s Degree 
and get their Early Childhood Teacher’s Certification in Tulsa, so they created my position, 
and we created a program, and it’s a "2+2" program with the community college. 
So the model is students start at the community college, complete the first two years of their study, 
and then come over to us at OU Tulsa for the second two years. 
And we have a very generous loan forgiveness program. 
So when students go through our program at OU Tulsa, they accrue debt and, upon graduation, 
for each year they work in Oklahoma in any early childhood setting, broadly defined, birth though age eight, 
the loan is erased by 25%. 
So with the scholarship money at TCC and our loan forgiveness program at OU Tulsa, 
students can get a Bachelor's Degree from the University of Oklahoma with Oklahoma Teacher’s Certification 
with no debt after four years. So it’s truly an amazing opportunity, 
and on the center of the table I put a full-paged flyer about our program. 
It’s the full-paged one, and we designed the program to be for working adults. 
So people can have a job in childcare or early childhood and then come to us, 
and our classes are scheduled nights and weekends, and we’ve made it possible for people 
to work full time and come to school. So, we’re very proud of that. 
We also started a new Ph.D. program in early childhood. 
Just this fall we admitted our first eight students back in August. 
And my observation, coming here from out of state, is that Oklahoma has been a national leader 
in early childhood and our institutions of higher ed although there are some advanced programs 
at the Master’s level and Ph.D. level were not producing a lot of people 
with those degrees to fill leadership roles. 
So that was why we were interested in getting the Ph.D. program going at OU Tulsa. 
And we have an informal collaboration with Northeastern State University. 
They have an existing Master's in early childhood. 
So for students who want to go on and get the Ph.D. in the Tulsa area, they can come to us. 
So in Tulsa we have the whole career ladder from CDA through Ph.D. that students can live in Tulsa, 
work in Tulsa, and pursue their higher education. 
So when the Kaiser Foundation made my position at OU Tulsa, 
definitely getting the undergraduate program up and running was one of my missions. 
But a second mission was to start a research unit that specializes 
in applied research tailored for early childhood. 
So my group, we are the program evaluators for EduCare, 
and I’ll be sharing some of that work with you today. 
We also have evaluated the Oklahoma State Pilot Program for infant/toddler expansion. 
We work with SmartStart to do some needs assessments, and we have a variety of projects 
focused on applied research in early childhood. 
So I put a brochure on the table that explains more about that if you would be interested 
in contacting us about any of that work. 
So we'll kind of now move on to the main topic for the day, which is EduCare. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Great. So there is an EduCare Center in Oklahoma City. 
Many of you have probably been there and some of you have been to Tulsa to see our center. 
We now have two EduCare Centers, we’re building a third. 
And why EduCare is important to us at the Kaiser Foundation, it was the first investment 
that we initiated in early childhood education. 
We’ve made other investments that were smaller but really felt like it was important 
to find a best practice somewhere else in the country that was mirroring what the research tells us 
is so important for child development and really implementing that in its true form. 
There have been a lot of barriers in the field to implementing what the research told us was important, 
and we’ll go through some of those elements. 
And so we made that commitment, and we found a model that we thought really was 
state of the art and that is EduCare. 
So basically we’re going to take you thought a couple of slides that describe what the program is. 
State of the art early childhood centers working together in a growing network to advance quality 
in their own states and across the country. 
There are thirteen operational sites? 
Diane Horm: I think so. Thirteen. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Right now. So there's four "P"s that we usually talk about when we are 
describing the EduCare model: Partnership, Place, Program, and Platform for policy. 
Those things will come up her in just a sec. 
Our centers in Tulsa, each one is slightly different, but they serve between 150 and 200 young children, 
that's six weeks is the earliest you can enroll. 
Each center’s a little different; one focuses more on birth to three and one focuses on birth to older fours. 
So six weeks to age five. Of course income eligibility is the most important criteria for enrollment. 
As you might imagine, the demand is far greater than the availability of open slots 
and so we carry wait lists, significant wait lists, of both. 
But you have to be low income and at risk eligible for Early Head Start. 
So what is it? What do you do at EduCare? 
Well we know that we talked a little bit about the achievement gap. 
What you’re trying to do is prepare children to enter school ready to learn. 
This is Diane’s slide so I’m going to have, I hate to read it to you, but we know what 
the early childhood education research tells us is that these kiddos 
can close that gap with the right intervention. 
So she talks a little bit now on some of that research, which I’ll let her touch on. 
The model came out of a really interesting organization in Chicago that did both direct service 
and policy and research called the Ounce of Prevention Fund. 
And that was really an intervention that was trying to improve on what was a failing Head Start 
in a section of Chicago that was deeply impoverished and alongside the Robert Taylor Housing Project 
which has since been leveled, it's gone, but the core features are what makes EduCare EduCare. 
So while each center looks a little different in the communities where they are, 
they’re these immutable elements that you have to hew to in order to call yourself EduCare. 
Those elements you’ll see at any center, and they’re really very important, 
and again that goes back to what this 40... 50 years of research tells us makes a difference 
for children to be ready to learn upon school entry. That’s low child ratios. 
You want to have the right mix of adults to children, and the adults need to be highly trained. 
So at EduCare centers what you find in classrooms is really what you can’t find on the open market 
because when I started my job at the Kaiser Foundation I had a one-year-old, a toddler, 
and then I had another child since I’ve been there. 
When I looked for early learning opportunities for my children on the open market, 
they were so far inferior to EduCare it was depressing. 
The truth is that, what we know about kids in poverty is that they need a very enriched program. 
So you’ll see a Bachelor's Degree teacher in each classroom, 
two assistants for every eight infants and toddlers, 
and then you’ll see a staffing pattern that’s a little different for the older threes and fours 
which is three adults for seventeen children. 
The high staff qualifications is extremely important. 
We know for a fact that teacher training matters in early education. 
So those Bachelor's Degree teachers are one of the elements that we know 
is most important for a child’s development. 
Focus on language and literacy and emphasis on social emotional development to promote school readiness, 
and I hope we get a chance to talk a little bit about why social-emotional development matters. 
But what we know what makes adults successful in the post-secondary world is their ability to work in groups, 
to manage their own emotions and feelings, the ability to stay on task, the ability to interact collaboratively. 
That's all social-emotion development, and you all are exhibiting it so beautifully here 
because you are all quietly listening. 
(laughter) 
What we find often in high poverty neighborhoods, especially in your early learning environment, 
something I’m really proud of when you walk into an EduCare center, typically what you find is a pretty calm, 
nurturing environment where children are actively engaged in an activity. 
If you go into an early childhood center or a Walmart or wherever you see young children, 
and there’s not a lot of self control going on with the children, if they seem highly irritable, 
a lot of crying and screaming and rage, not great. 
Those are things that you don’t want to see in a really well-functioning early childhood development center. 
Now that’s not to say that you couldn’t go into an EduCare center and see some kids who aren’t happy sometimes, 
but generally speaking, what you want to see is children who can self-regulate some of those emotional impulses. 
Continuity of care is important because what you are trying to do in a high-functioning early eduction center 
is to provide stability within the staff so that there is a bonding that takes place 
between the adults and the children, so the children have a very reliable routine 
and real connectedness with the adults in their lives. 
That’s extremely important for young children in poverty. Family support is very important. 
It’s about a third of the budget, and a third of the space is dedicated to engaging families, 
making sure that they feel involved in their child’s education, 
that they feel like they’re getting their needs met. 
So the family has goals for themselves, the adults, and for their children. 
And what we like to say is we feel like the best gift we give the public school next door 
is empowered parents who are advocates for their children and engaged in their education. 
I’m going to let Diane talk about reflective supervision because I won’t do that as well, 
but it goes back to the staffing structure. 
You have a lead teacher; you have a Master's Degree teacher who oversees the pod of four classrooms. 
You’re always trying to provide continuous feedback and support for the teaching staff and the children. 
Diane Horm: And just quickly, the reflective supervision part is, not only does a classroom teacher 
have a Master teacher who serves as her professional coach, but the reflective supervision part 
is that all that stuff that pushes your buttons that kids do usually it goes back to some issues 
you’ve had maybe with your own family or other kids that you know, so helping you work through kind of 
those psychological traps that we can sometimes get into with kids. 
So, it’s social emotional support for the teacher as well as the children. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: I’m sure none of you can identify with the need 
to need social emotional support in your adult lives. 
(laughter) 
I’m going to try and go on. I think I’m taking too much time here. 
But basically, hopefully this is clear, that the goal is to ensure at risk infants, 
and toddlers, and preschoolers grow up eager to learn and ready for school. 
Really that says it, so while you want children to enter school, minimize that achievement gap 
and have them go forward and flourish. 
And we know that early childhood education, if done right, can do that. 
Partnerships are really important. 
I’ll try and go through this a little more quickly, but essentially you co-locate 
with a public school because you’re sending the message that learning begins at birth. 
It’s too expensive to do alone, so at any point where there are entities that can partner, 
you need those entities to partner. 
In our case, a public school system is extremely generous. 
One of the few commodities they have is land in Tulsa and so they have, in each instance, 
given land to EduCare to build a school. 
And the idea is that you are partnering in a very thorough and holistic way 
with the neighboring elementary school so you’re not just co-located 
but you're working together for the benefit of children. 
This just gives you an idea that in most instances the capital costs are covered by the private sector, 
in our case GKFF were some partners. 
In the newest EduCare 3 in Tulsa, a really interesting thing happened. 
The Tulsa public schools passed a bond initiative, and they’re allocating some public dollars 
towards the building of EduCare 3, which is fantastic. 
It allows us to spend more money on children. 
Of course the Federal Government and state government is a massive partner 
because that is where families get support for childcare dollars is though Oklahoma’s DHS. 
Feds is through Head Start and Early Head Start and then of course, even with the mix of all those players, 
there’s not quite enough money to make it work, and so the private sector 
- in our case Kaiser Foundation - does the rest. 
The place is, I can really say this I think fairly succinctly, the idea for us initially 
is we feel that our community is only as strong as our most vulnerable children. 
And if you believe that, then you really need to show that by investing in the place 
where those kids are going to be educated, and we felt like, George felt like it was extremely important 
that it be state of the art in every sense: that it be beautiful, that it be welcoming, that it be child centered, 
that there be sufficient space for teachers to be trained, the community to come in for training. 
During tax season, we prepare people's tax returns for free through a partnership with Community Action Project. 
We cede space to OU Tulsa to provide medical care for families. 
We have all the family support and mental health components, 
and so the place is important because we feel like we are sending 
a message that learning begins at birth and frankly that poor children matter. 
We’ve tried to have sort of a common thread of architecture throughout the network 
across the nation, but it’s not required. 
And this just gives you a feeling of how the center looks, and we’ll give you our contact information 
if you haven’t been to Tulsa and you want to come look at EduCare, we're happy to show it to you. 
Any of you that have had young children in early learning environments 
know that probably your experience didn’t look like this. 
This is an exterior of EduCare 2 which actually now is open. There it is. 
And your Oklahoma City EduCare which is incredibly beautiful, too. 
This is, and I’m kind of flying through this, but this gives you a sense of where there are 
other centers across the country either operational, under construction, or under development. 
And the green dot changes a lot. 
I’ve heard some interesting things of late about different partnerships that are forming. 
Diane Horm: I always like to point out at this point, I moved here from New England, 
and I must admit I had an east coast bias before moving to Oklahoma. 
I thought everything important started on the east coast and then gradually migrated 
to the center of the country. But with EduCare, if you go back to the map, Annie. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Sure. 
Diane Horm: The first one was in Chicago and then what Milwaukee, Omaha, Tulsa? 
So the EduCare movement really grew up in the middle of the country and now has expanded to the coasts. 
So this has challenged one of my lifelong assumptions, so I am now a center of the country advocate. (Laughs) 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: The platform P that I talked about a minute ago is important 
because you wouldn’t spend as much as we do on a building without trying to make that investment 
really ripple out and have other effects. 
And so for us, we use EduCare as opportunity to educate at any possible moment. 
So whether that’s just opinion leaders in the community, parent groups, people in the field, 
policy makers, George hosts business meetings there routinely. 
And the idea is, if you don’t have any opinions on how important early education is, 
let's talk to you about that and show it to you. 
If you do, let’s talk to you about what it is we do and why we think it’s important. 
And it really has been an interesting opportunity to show people what we’re talking about. 
It’s a lot harder in the abstract to understand how important early learning is to a family’s sense of well-being, 
the ability to work, the ability to be the type of parent that you really want to be without the supports you need. 
So we use EduCare as a learning opportunity as much as possible. 
So the first center opened in '06, the second center opened in February of 2010, 
and the third site is going to open fall of '12. Those are all adjacent to public schools. 
We talked a little bit about staffing pattern, again you have a very rich staffing pattern, and that's expensive. 
At the current moment, we think it’s really, really important. We’re always looking to tweak the model. 
One reason that our relationship and Diane’s work is so important is because we consider evaluation 
a feedback loop for us. We don’t know that we're doing this right. 
Very honestly, there are things that we’re probably doing that are an over-correction for the problem. 
Do we know we need this exact staffing pattern? Not exactly. 
So we’re always trying to look to see to evaluate are we spending money in the right ways that have 
the greatest impact for children. 
This just gives you a sense of all the different folks in the community 
who work together to make EduCare successful. 
It is really... you’re meeting extremely high standards all the time. 
So just to be licensed by the state of Oklahoma to then meet performance standards, 
there’s thousands of them from the Federal Government. 
I can’t remember how many, but many. We're a three-star center. 
All those things are arduous and difficult, but then again we have this other attachment 
to the EduCare network, and so we have to meet all those standards, too. 
This gives you another little look at the type of professional supports that are in the building. 
Family support again is incredibly important. 
Families need to know how to be successful, how to parent, 
how to incorporate literacy into the lives of their children. 
So there's all kinds of things that our family support are connecting with parents about all the time. 
I’m going to switch with Diane. Excuse me. 
Diane Horm: This is where I take over. 
So as I said my role with the project is serving as the external evaluator, and the evaluation study 
that we are doing really has two purposes. 
One, Annie already referred to, and that is I work closely with the program staff to share the child results, 
the parent feedback, all the information we collect. 
We analyze that information and then meet with the master teachers, the teachers, and the family support staff 
to help them use that information to continually improve the services to meet the needs of the children and families. 
Second reason is to really document what high-quality early childhood can do for children. 
There’s a literature base on that in the professional field of early childhood, 
and we see EduCare network as being positioned to contribute to that 
because we are growing across the country and must serve different types of children and families across the nation. 
The evaluation is a collaborative effort. 
We have a national contractor at Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina, 
and they’re probably the top researchers in our nation right now related to early childhood education. 
So they convene somebody like me from each of the sites, and here in Oklahoma City, 
faculty and school psych department at the University of Central Oklahoma serve as the local evaluators. 
So each of those EduCares across the nation have somebody like me, 
and we’re all convened by the people at Frank Porter Graham. 
And we also have a National Advisory Council who are the top experts in our field 
to help us design the study so it’s the best it can be. 
I mentioned the evaluation is collaborative. 
It’s collaborative not only in collaborating across all those different states that currently have an EduCare, 
but it's also collaborative in terms of us evaluators working with the program people. 
Often, unfortunately, what happens in social service settings is that an external evaluator will be hired. 
They kind of parachute in, collect some information, they go away, 
you don’t hear from them for a couple of months, then this report comes and you kind of look at it 
and put it up on the shelf, and the results really aren’t used. 
We try to avoid that by constant dialogue between the program people and the evaluators. 
We get them to help us pose questions that they want answers to. 
When we get results, we take them back to the program people to get their eye to interpret those results. 
So it’s really a dynamic relationship between the evaluator and the program people. 
We call ourselves embedded researchers because my research staff, who actively collect the information for the study, 
are actually officed at the EduCare site. 
And to somebody walking into the building, you couldn’t tell that my staff gets paid 
by me or from the University of Oklahoma versus the teaching staff that are there. 
They get to know the kids and families so the children feel comfortable when we do the assessments. 
Across all those sites we collect common measures, we have common training for our data collectors, 
we collect everything on a common time line. 
Frank Porter Graham checks up on us to make sure that we're doing everything right. 
And the power of that is it allows us to combine all that information from all the sites 
so that we can talk about large numbers of children when we do our evaluation. 
This is a very busy slide, but what I wanted to make the point here is that we collect 
a variety of types of information, and we get information from staff, from parents, 
we go into the classroom and do observations of classroom quality using well known tools in our field. 
We do a number of direct child assessments on a variety of areas, all of the components of developments, 
social, emotional, cognitive, language, literacy, and then we have the teachers rate the children’s social 
and emotional development because the teachers know the children the best 
so they're best able to do that with that tool. 
So what have we found today? 
So what I’m going to present, some selected findings from 2009-10 in terms of the quality of the classrooms. 
Annie mentioned that EduCare model strives to implement what research says is the highest quality programs. 
So as evaluators, we think the first question we have to answer is, "Is the program high quality?" 
So what this slide shows, there are these two tools that are used commonly in our field 
called the ITERS and the ECERS. The ITERS and the ECERS. 
The ITERS stands for the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale, 
and the ECERS is the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale. These are seven-point scales. 
If you look across the bottom you’ll see that that runs from one to seven. 
With seven being excellent, five good, three mediocre, and one poor. 
The authors of this instrument say you want to get a five. We want a "good" or better. 
So what the dark blue bars show are the ECERS results for our preschool classrooms across the network, 
and you can see that over 80% of the classrooms are rated as good to excellent, 
and when we look at the light blue bars, those are the infant/toddler classrooms. 
And again over 80% of those classrooms were rated as good or excellent. 
Now as Annie said, we’re not perfect. 
We have classrooms that are here in kind of the mediocre area, 
but we provide, my team provides feedback to the classrooms about what they didn’t do so well on 
and then the master teachers work with the teaching staff to improve that. 
Okay? So there’s that continuous feedback loop. 
So what I conclude from this slide, and this is again across the network based on 47 infant classrooms 
and 59 preschool classrooms across the network, EduCare is offering very high-quality services 
for the children. So that was a good finding. We were happy with that. 
Okay, so to give you a little bit of comparison about what those findings mean, 
I found the results from the ECERS, the preschool measure, from other studies. 
This study was of Head Start classrooms in 2000. 
This study is from pre-K classrooms in 11 states, basically 700 classrooms across 11 states 
for public pre-K programs. 
This is for childcare in about three states, about 300 classrooms, and then here are the results from 2010. 
So you can see, compared to a lot of other classrooms, that are well-funded and work on being quality programs, 
we feel quite happy with that EduCare result. 
So what I’m going to move into now are the child results. 
So we’ve demonstrated we have high quality classrooms and programs. 
So what do our kids looking like? Okay, this is another busy slide that people like me really like. 
(Laughter) 
I get excited about this slide because what this shows across the top, these are all the EduCare sites 
that contributed data for the results that I’m going to be presenting to you. 
So just quickly Chicago, Denver, Miami, Milwaukee, Oklahoma City, Omaha 1, Omaha 2, Seattle, and Tulsa. 
And what those numbers show are really the demographics of the children. 
And you’ll see we have great variety in our network. 
So for instance, Chicago, 100% of their kids speak English. 
That’s very different than us in Tulsa. (laughs) 
So by having this kind of a network of evaluators where we pool all of our data, 
this allows us to decompose our data to just look at Spanish-speaking kids versus English-speaking kids. 
To look at different types of family compositions. 
To look at a variety of variables that typically, as a researcher, we don’t have enough kids 
to make up our groups to do that type of analysis. 
So for a researcher, we get very excited about participating in a study like this 
because there’s great potential to learn a lot about children. 
Okay, actually this is quite peculiar, so click it a couple more times. 
Okay, stop there. Oops. That’s alright. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Sorry. 
Diane Horm: That’s alright. (Laughs) 
Okay, what I’m going to show you now are two slides of EduCare graduates. 
So these are EduCare children, who have been in the program and are ready to leave us 
to go on to the public school for the next year. 
And what we’ve done, we’ve given them a test called the PPVT 
which stands for the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. 
And it’s just what that name suggests. It’s a vocabulary test. 
And Annie showed you a slide of how we know income has a huge impact on preschooler’s vocabulary achievement. 
So one of the measures we want to give is a vocabulary test to see how our kids are doing on vocabulary. 
So again, these are kids the spring before they graduated EduCare and leave us to go to public school. 
This is a standardized assessment which means we are looking for a score of 100 as the national average, 
and a standard deviation of 15. 
We know from years of research that kids who grow up in poverty, 
when they take this type of a standardized assessment, generally score 85. 
That means one standard deviation below the average or middle-class performance average or mean. 
They are like already behind when they start kindergarten. 
That was the point Annie made with the achievement gap. 
So we would expect these kids who are growing up in poverty 
without any educational intervention to score 85. 
We found that the English-speaking kids are scoring 95. 
We as evaluators did, like we gave each other hand high-fives and did back flips. 
We were very excited about this result. 
Now the blue bar, the darker blue bar, those are dual-language learners. 
In Tulsa and Oklahoma City, those are mostly Spanish-speaking children, but across the network 
we have a variety of languages represented. 
So this is an English test. The test is given in English. 
So of course those kids aren’t going to do as well. 
So we were very excited about this and gratified, but we got more excited with the rest of the bars, 
and Annie just go ahead and put them all up. 
Okay now, what’s very important here is across the bottom, this is the age these kids entered EduCare. 
So these kids entered when they were one, two, three, and four. What are you seeing? Earlier is better. 
We were thrilled with this slide when it came out of the computer because it shows 
the earlier children start in EduCare, the closer they’re performing to that national mean of 100. Okay? 
So this was on a vocabulary test. Annie put the next slide up, please. Okay. 
We’re going to look at the same kind of results from another test that we give the children 
which is called the Bracken School Readiness Assessment. 
And this is a school readiness assessment that looks not only at language, but number, and vocabulary words. 
It has a number of dimensions that we look at. So again we did the same kind of analysis. 
These are kids who have been in kindergarten, excuse me, who have been in EduCare 
and are leaving us that spring to go on to kindergarten. 
So again, same type of logic with the understanding of the results, national mean of 100. 
Our English speaking kids are scoring 92, pretty good. 
If we put up the rest of the bars, what do you see? 
Exactly the same pattern that earlier is better. 
Okay, so we were pretty excited about this analysis, and so then we moved on, 
and we did something a little bit more complicated. 
Go ahead and put the first line up for this if you would. Okay. 
I’m going to show you the performance of four different groups of kids, and what distinguishes this slide 
from the ones I showed, the two that I just got done talking about. 
This is longitudinal data. So this means the same kids measured repeatedly. Okay? 
The other analyses were cross-sectional. 
It was a batch of kids as they got ready to go off to kindergarten. 
This is repeated measurements on the same kid. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Wait. I don’t even get that. 
Diane Horm: Okay. So this is like Annie enters as age three, I test you. You get that score. 
I test you again at age four. I test you again at age five. So it’s your results over time. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: The last slide was dosage, so they weren’t the same? 
Diane Horm: They weren’t the same kids. So like a group of kids, like all these people 
at this table came in at age one, a different group of people came in at age two. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Okay, sorry. 
Diane Horm: A different group of people came in at age three. 
So from a developmental point of view, these longitudinal analyses, usually, are more powerful 
because it’s tracking the same kid over time to see the impact on the program on them. 
So we get very excited about this. So, okay, so this is a green line. 
It’s a little bit hard to see, but these are our late entry English kids. 
So these are English-speaking kids who entered what we considered late at age three, 
and look at that, they’re scoring on average 86. 
Remember what I said from years of research in early childhood, 
we know that kids score one standard deviation below the mean. 
We would expect that to be 85, so that kind of proves that expectation. 
So this group of English-speaking kids, okay the same kids measured over time: 86, 88, 92. 
That’s a six point gain compared to their peers. 
That’s pretty significant, and we were happy with that. Put the next line up, Annie. 
Okay, this line is considered late entry, dual-language. 
Okay, so these are kids who speak a language other that English as their native language, 
and they’re entering us with a very low score because again, this assessment is given in English, 
and they improve. That’s a 14-point improvement, which is a knock-your-socks-off improvement. 
Okay, we’re happy with that, but... Annie put up the next two lines. 
If you look over here at age five, when kids are getting ready to leave us 
to go off to kindergarten, what do you see here?
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Wow. 
Diane Horm: There’s still a gap. There’s still that achievement gap. 
So, what about these top two lines. So look at this. We start measuring. 
These are kids who started early, the top two lines, and what we mean by "early" is "before 12 months of age." 
And kids who started early, and we were able to repeatedly measure over time, 
they gain over time both the English speakers and the dual-language learners, 
and what we say this slide shows is we can prevent the achievement gap from ever forming, 
if we start early, and we can bring kids who grow up in poverty who are a little bit lower 
than the mean closer to that mean of 100. 
So this, I think, is a very powerful slide. 
In terms of kind of the analysis of this, we have held, statistically constant, 
other factors that might explain these results other than the EduCare intervention, such as, 
is the child on an IEP, the age of the mother? 
A lot of variables that effect children’s school achievement, we were able to statistically hold constant. 
So we have great confidence in these findings, and we think this is quite exciting. 
So that's kind of my grande finale. Let’s see what the next slide is. 
You were supposed to all like cheer and like wave and... uh huh, go ahead. 
Audience member: The notion of knowing multiple languages indicates that’s a positive factor, 
am I getting that right that 95.3 is a dual-language learner exceeding the English Language? 
Diane Horm: Yeah. Yeah. The dual-language learners, by the time they were five 
were exceeding the English speakers, yes. Isn’t that incredible. (laughs) 
Audience member: So what is your speculation on that? 
Diane Horm: You know, there is more and more research coming out that shows 
that being a dual-language learner is an advantage cognitively, and in fact, 
for those of us who are kind of getting to the other end of the lifespan, 
that if we know two or three languages, we tend to get dementia less often. 
So, it’s kind of the more you work your brain, the more powerful it gets, 
but that’s something we want to investigate more. 
Okay, so these results suggest that EduCare can prevent the achievement gap if we start early enough, 
and this is a very powerful finding because there is years of educational research that shows 
where you start at kindergarten is very predictive of where you end up, even if you end up graduating. 
If you enter in the lowest tenth percentile, you tend to stay in the lowest tenth percentile. 
If you enter at the top tenth percentile, you tend to stay there. 
So, where we position kids on school entry really makes a difference, we think, 
to the long-term, but we’ll have to do more research to follow these kids. 
And in Tulsa, we are following our EduCare graduates into kindergarten, and we’ve collected that data last year. 
We have not had time to analyze it yet, but we are doing it, and other sites are doing that as well. 
Okay, so we think this shows strong evidence for earlier is better. 
We think the high-quality classrooms and the core features definitely play a role in that. 
We are in the midst of doing a randomized study where we have randomly assigned babies to either EduCare or not, 
and we're following those kids over time. 
And about five of the EduCare sites across the country are participating in that study. 
And, if you want to know more about the study, there is the website where there is a lot more information, 
some summaries written up and some preliminary reports. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: I just want to point out that it feels cruel to not provide service to someone. 
So, the thought of randomly assigning babies, you think, "ugh." 
But I think I said earlier, the demand is so vast, and our opportunity is really so limited. 
We have wait lists a mile long, and so the truth is there are just a lot of kids not getting services. 
So, we need to study it so that we can convince policy makers and everybody, 
folks like you, that this investment matters. 
Diane Horm: So, Annie's right. 
One of the things I wrestle with as a researcher is randomly assigning those babies, 
because these results really suggest that you’re keeping them out of something that would be very good for them. 
But because we have more babies than can be served, we explain to the parents that at least with random assignment, 
you have a 50/50 chance of getting in. 
If you don’t go that path, you probably have less of a chance of getting in. 
And the families who don’t get in are very disappointed, but they have been cooperating with us in the research, 
and they are enrolling their kids in community centers and other educational programs just like all of you do, so... 
Okay, so the goal of the EduCare network, and they’re practically there, was to create 12-15 centers 
spread across the country to serve as these models of high-quality early childhood 
and then, with the evaluation results, documenting what that could do. 
So Annie, you may want to comment, because you kind of hang out with a different level 
of the EduCare people than I do in terms of what their thinking is. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Well I think that demand has sprung up in more states than they ever anticipated. 
There is, you probably noticed, a new interest afoot in education. 
I think private sector folks are getting savvier about how they invest philanthropically, 
and there's an elevated conversation about how you make donations that really have an impact. 
And so EduCare has really caught on, and there are conversations happening 
all over the country that weren’t anticipated eight years ago, that's for sure. 
Diane Horm: One I am very excited about is in Washington D.C. within walking distance of the capital. 
I really hope that people take advantage to go see that center. 
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: And that center will be open soon. 
Diane Horm: Soon, they’re hiring staff, for any of you who want to relocate. 
(laughter)
Annie Koppel Van Hanken: Yeah, right. This is our final slide, and this is my baby. 
(laughter) 
But, I love this quote. It just says, 
“We must remember the first five years of life are not a rehearsal. This is the real show."