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Developed in the 1990s, Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) aim to increase the availability of high-quality early education programs, to facilitate professional development and to strengthen parents鈥� understanding of their options. Child care providers earn stars, as if they were restaurants or hotels.

While nobody opposes quality per se, the pandemic and the reckoning over racial equity have raised urgent new questions about QRIS. Are the criteria fair and equitable? Do the systems succeed in expanding transparency and accountability? Can the flaws be remedied? Or is it time to admit defeat?

According to Kelly Etter, vice president of early childhood equity initiatives with the , evidence is mounting that this supposedly evidence-based approach to the early education classroom experience is, at best, ineffective鈥攁nd in many cases it may be racist and destructive. In Etter presents a series of ingenious videos using Duplo blocks. The lesson: 鈥淎s any 3-year-old in the block area will tell you (or gleefully show you), sometimes you have to knock it all down to rebuild.鈥�

The first video casts doubt on the evidence that higher-quality ratings predict better child developmental outcomes. (See also this , which gathers much of the damning evidence together and points to shifting circumstances in states like Maine.)

The second video provides four reasons why QRIS don鈥檛 work:

1. They put too much emphasis on diplomas as other 鈥減ieces of paper鈥� that don鈥檛 necessarily lead to quality.
2. They assume there鈥檚 just one 鈥渞ight way鈥� to quality, whereas, in the real world, educators navigate varied paths. Some get there because they’ve been in the field for 25 years. Some go to school at night and earn a bachelor鈥檚 degree. Others have a fantastic mentor on staff. (In addition, parents don鈥檛 always see quality the same way the rating systems do. : 鈥淭hey want their children to be safe. They care nothing about these rubrics that [the state wants] to invest so much money into. Quality is subjective, and for many Black and often poor families, quality is quantified in the personal character of those caring for their children.鈥�
3. They combine too much complex information into a single data point. 鈥淲hen you’re measuring everything,鈥� says Etter, 鈥淵ou’re measuring nothing.鈥�
4. They ignore variation across classrooms within the same setting. If you have one one-star classroom and one five-star classroom, the average is three stars, but that doesn鈥檛 describe the education that any children in that center are receiving.

The third video offers fixes for QRIS:

• Centering teacher-child interactions
• Providing educators with tailored supports to hone their craft
• Replacing the incentives that widen inequities with investment in workforce compensation and upfront funding for providers
• Retiring the star ratings in favor of 鈥渂adges鈥� for specializations. According to Etter, there’s some fantastic work going on in the K-12 space around .聽鈥淔rom the parent standpoint,鈥� she says, 鈥淚nstead of this crummy choice that parents have between a one-star and a five-star, what about giving them to tools to identify what makes the most sense for their family?鈥�

Early learning is 鈥渋n the blood鈥� for Etter, since her mom directed a child development center in Colorado for about 40 years. Today, as a researcher as well as a mom of a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old, Etter is seeing for herself the error in building one-size-fits-all systems.

Maybe the pursuit of quality as currently defined has come at the expense of equity. 鈥淲hen you break down the historic data in Mississippi, for example,鈥� Etter says, 鈥測ou find BIPOC-owned providers tend to be lower-rated than their white-owned counterparts. BIPOC children are disproportionately attending lower-rated programs. As a result, the programs that are already more well-resourced get more, and the programs that are less well-resourced for a variety of systemic reasons get less.鈥�

QRIS isn鈥檛 a single system. At least 45 states have a QRIS, up from 5 in 2001, and the priorities and criteria vary considerably. The growth stems from , a federal grant program that arose in 2011 to establish successful state systems. Even the states that haven鈥檛 been awarded federal money have used the process as a strategic planning opportunity to bring in state funding.

To understand how this flawed system came into being, it鈥檚 important to keep broader historic trends in mind, namely, an obsession with quality that started in the manufacturing sector and then overtook business and government in the 1990s, with important-sounding concepts like Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement permeating health care, education and other fields. Consultants came along to develop metrics for quality and to cite the oft-repeated maxim What gets measured gets done.

Etter opines that 鈥渢he quality-industrial complex,鈥� which comprises assessment publishers, departments within state agencies to manage QRIS, the raters and the coaches, perpetuates inequities. 鈥淭he further an individual is from the classroom, the more likely they are to look like me鈥攚hite, middle class, highly educated鈥攁nd the more money they make.鈥�

Etter believes the early childhood field erred when it began to regard parents as consumers. 鈥淕osh!鈥� she exclaims, channeling the logic behind QRIS, 鈥溾�楾he consumers will all just want five-star programs, and the ones that aren’t making the cut will go out of business and, so, the market will essentially correct for quality.鈥� But that has not panned out.鈥�

According to Etter, there are three states to watch for indicators of the dismantling and reformation of QRIS:

• In 2015, an advisory coalition submitted a memo to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, unpacking some of the racist structures within Mississippi’s QRIS. (Read more: ) Since that time, they have drastically scaled back their QRIS.
• Where a lot of states make the mistake of adopting a kitchen sink approach, Louisiana monitors just a single criterion鈥攁dult-child interactions. 鈥淭hey’re focusing on what we know has a ton of studies showing the linkage to child outcomes,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t’s the secret sauce.鈥� (A study聽 contended that QRIS led to 鈥渟ubstantial quality improvement鈥� in Louisiana.)
• Etter credits Keisha Nzewi of the for speaking out on QRIS at . This moment led to a widely circulated , stating, 鈥淨RIS, though good in its intentions, has caused much harm since its inception, should be dismantled as a racist system and rebuilt as an anti-racist support for all child care providers, no matter the setting.鈥�

Etter is presenting her QRIS research at the 聽in July and hopes that more state agencies and practitioners will take a new look at QRIS and the inequities the systems are causing. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have to start from scratch,鈥� she says, 鈥渂ut if we鈥檙e fearless鈥攁s fearless as toddlers鈥攚e can reimagine something much better.鈥�

This story originally published on Early Learning Nation and is now archived on 社区黑料. Learn more here.