When EdReports published our inaugural pre-K curriculum reviews this spring, we reached an important milestone; not only for our organization, but for the early childhood field. 

For more than a decade, EdReports has partnered with educators to provide independent, transparent reviews of K-12 instructional materials that help states, districts, and schools make informed curriculum decisions. Expanding that work into pre-K was a natural next step, but it also required something new. Early childhood has its own research base, developmental priorities, and instructional context. Building review tools that reflected those realities required us to draw on our experience while working closely with early childhood educators, researchers, and leaders to develop an approach designed specifically for pre-K.

From the beginning, the pre-K review work was grounded in collaboration. Through a national listening and learning tour, educator working groups, our pre-K advisory group, and extensive user testing, we worked alongside the early childhood field to develop review criteria and reports that reflected both research and classroom practice. Our engagements and deep dives with pre-K stakeholders shaped everything from the review tools themselves to how evidence would ultimately be presented in the published reports. 

This careful and informed development process gave us confidence in the reports we launched. At the same time, we knew from more than a decade of expanding our reviews into new content areas that launching new reports also means listening closely to how the field receives, uses, and interprets them in practice.

Since our report launch, we've heard from educators, curriculum leaders, researchers, publishers, and state partners across the country. Much of the feedback has affirmed the need for this work. As the first independent, educator-informed reviews of pre-K instructional materials, the reports have filled an important gap in the field, sparked meaningful conversations about curriculum quality, and already prompted publishers to strengthen their materials. Those conversations have also surfaced important opportunities to improve how we communicate quality through our reports.

While we invested significant time testing and refining the reports before publication, there are some things that can only be learned once educators and leaders begin using them in authentic decision-making contexts. Real-world experience provides an opportunity to better understand how review evidence is interpreted and used to inform curriculum decisions. What’s more, we believe listening to practitioner experience is an essential part of building trustworthy, useful resources for the field.

What We've Heard and Learned

As educators and leaders began working with the inaugural pre-K reports, several consistent themes emerged. For example:

• Many users wanted a clearer connection between the quality of instructional content and the design of the curriculum itself, including how learning is intentionally organized and sequenced over time. While our review process deliberately examined content and curriculum design as distinct aspects of quality, feedback suggested that when decision makers looked at the information, the purpose of this distinction was not clear.
• We also heard that some readers understandably focused first on the highest-level information—the gateway ratings—before exploring the detailed evidence throughout each report. In some cases, this made it more difficult for users to fully engage with the rich criterion- and indicator-level evidence that explains a program's strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Importantly, this feedback wasn't about the quality of the reviews or the evidence itself. The educator-developed evidence underpinning every report remains strong. Rather, the feedback pointed to an opportunity to strengthen how that evidence is organized, aggregated, and understood by users. 

Our experience has shown us that reviews are most valuable when they help educators not only see our conclusions, but also understand the evidence behind them. That principle is guiding the next phase of work now underway.

Putting What We've Learned into Practice

Learning from the field is an essential part of building reviews that are not only rigorous, but also useful. In response to what we've learned, EdReports will be making targeted, disciplined updates to strengthen the clarity and usefulness of our pre-K reports this summer. These refinements are designed to clarify how quality is represented across content and curriculum design, and to help users focus on the detailed evidence that supports each review. The upcoming changes will ensure that our reports communicate quality as clearly and accurately as the evidence behind them. 

Just as important is what isn't changing. The educator-led review process, the underlying evidence collected during reviews, and the research foundation behind our pre-K review tools all remain strong and reliable. These updates are not about changing the evidence or revisiting the conclusions of our reviews. They are about strengthening how that evidence is communicated so educators can use it with greater clarity and confidence.

After implementing these targeted refinements this summer, we will begin a more  in-depth revision of our pre-K review criteria and evidence guide in the fall. We will also sequence the publication of new pre-K reviews to balance timely information for the field with the importance of ensuring future reports benefit from what we are learning about how to make our review tools and reporting approach clearer and more useful. This helps ensure a clear and consistent experience for educators while allowing us to continue expanding our pre-K review portfolio thoughtfully and responsibly.

Learning Is Part of Leadership

One of the strengths of independent reviews is that they don't simply evaluate instructional materials, they also help improve them—and we've already seen that impact in the pre-K market. Every publisher in our inaugural review cycle, as well as several publishers currently preparing for review, has committed to revising materials in response to evidence surfaced through the EdReports review process. Those revisions will be eligible for evaluation using our updated pre-K review tools in 2027.

As our pre-K work expands, we’ll continue applying what we've learned while maintaining the rigor, independence, and educator expertise that has guided our work from the beginning. Our goal remains the same today as when we began: to provide the education field with the clearest, most trustworthy information possible to support informed curriculum decisions that prepare all students for their future.