Hello December! With Thanksgiving wrapped up, this is the perfect time to thank all the staff that support the ECLS study. We recognize all that principals, teachers, and other school staff do for the ECLS study, and we are very grateful! In most schools, staff have been hard at work for weeks, or even months, communicating with our school recruiter staff, and we thank them for all of their effort.
Although the ECLS-K:2024 did not conduct study activities in classrooms in the fall of 2024, we have been getting ready for our next data collection in spring 2025, when most of the study children will have advanced to first grade. Just as we are thankful for the schools, principals, and teachers around the country, we are thankful for our team of dedicated ECLS staffers who are preparing for our next set of activities. Over the past few months, we have been reaching out to schools that participated last year—as well as the schools to which our study children have transferred—and preparing them for the next round of ECLS activities. Staying in touch with schools this fall before we visit them in the spring allows for us to identify any changes that have occurred with the schools, such as administration changes or staff changes, or any scheduling constraints that we will work around to make study participation as easy as possible for them. This way, when we do get ready to talk with our participants in the spring, the schools will be well prepared for our arrival!
As mentioned in previous blogs, the data we collect from schools, such as information on their school’s characteristics, play a vital role in our understanding of the resources available to and outstanding needs of the school systems across the United States. For example, did you know that 84.6 percent of public elementary schools educating kindergartners in 2010-11 had translators available to parents? With a growing and diverse population, it’s important to know what resources are available for children and their families today, and the forthcoming ECLS-K:2024 data will provide that answer.
In all rounds of ECLS-K:2024 data collection, the study collects in-depth information from participating students’ teachers. In the base (kindergarten) year of the study, the data are nationally representative of teachers of kindergartners, data which when compared to the earlier ECLS program studies, provide us with insight into trends in the composition of America’s kindergarten teachers over the decades. In later years of ECLS-K:2024, including in the upcoming spring 2025 data collection, teachers continue to provide information on both themselves and their study students. The ECLS-K:2024 isn’t the only NCES study that collects data from teachers (and school administrators); information on teacher characteristics such as race/ethnicity, educational background, and gender is provided by school and teacher respondents in numerous NCES studies, just as they are by our ECLS-K:2024 respondents. For instance, while we learned about kindergartners’ teachers in the 2010-11 school year from the ECLS-K:2024’s sister study, the ECLS-K:2011, we learned more about teachers of all elementary and secondary grades from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) in the 2011-12 school year, one year after the ECLS-K:2011 kindergarten teacher data were collected. For example, from SASS we know that in 2011-12, of all public elementary and secondary school teachers, 4 percent had less than a Bachelor’s degree, 40 percent had a Bachelor’s degree, 48 percent had a Master’s degree, 8 percent had an Education Specialist degree, and 1 percent had a Doctoral degree. Male public school teachers made up 24 percent of teachers in 2011–12, whereas females made up 76 percent of teachers.
We’ll know even more about America’s educators with the release of the ECLS-K:2024 kindergarten data, as the study is nationally representative of kindergarten teachers during the 2023-24 school year. We haven’t had a nationally representative sample of teachers in an ECLS program study since the ECLS-K’s 1998-99 collection, so the ECLS team and all of those who rely on our data are very excited about our upcoming data release! Our teacher data will allow the public, including scholars, educators, and local and federal governments to better understand how our current American educational policies impact teachers, and the differences in the kindergarten teacher population 25 years apart.
Not to be forgotten, the ECLS-K:2024 2023-24 data are also nationally representative of schools that educated kindergartners in that school year. We can’t wait to see how schools today compare to the schools educating kindergartners in 1998–99 and 2010–11.
We receive all our valuable school and teacher data from our participating ECLS-K:2024 school administrators and teachers; a huge thank you to you all!
Want to learn more?
This wraps up our 2024 blog series on celebrating ECLS-K:2024, but we’ll be back with future blogs with information on the ECLS program and upcoming data releases in the coming years. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to the ECLS study team at ECLS@ed.gov with any questions or comments. We’d love to hear from you!
By Korrie Johnson and Jill Carlivati McCarroll, NCES