AppleTree Projects

AppleTree is closing the achievement gap before children enter kindergarten through the following projects:

Every Child Ready

Every Child Ready is AppleTree’s groundbreaking, data-driven Response-to-Intervention instructional approach to early childhood education. It was awarded one of only 49 federal Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) awards in 2010, and made AppleTree the only DC-based organization with a program in the nation’s capital to win an i3 award.

Developed over three years through AppleTree’s DC Partnership for Early Literacy, Every Child Ready has shown extraordinarily strong results in providing those most at risk of educational failure with the language, literacy, math, and social-emotional skills they will need to succeed in school and life.

AppleTree’s leadership and Advisory Board are engaged in ensuring that our Every Child Ready i3 project will effectively organize and document the tools and practices of this innovative program in order for it to be shared and scaled locally and nationally. Click here to read more.

Quality Indicators

AppleTree Institute’s Quality Indicators is a classroom observation tool that provides specific, actionable feedback to classroom teachers. The Quality Indicators focus on the quality of children’s language, literacy and social interactions with the teacher, the classroom environment, and each other.

The Quality Indicators align with research-based factors measured by widely-used classroom evaluation tools including the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation (ELLCO), and the Sheltered Immersion Observation Protocol (SIOP). In contrast, the Quality Indicators were originally conceived for professional development. The tool uses streamlined prompts easily translated into suggestions for concrete changes to teacher practice.

As a progress monitoring tool, the goals of the Quality Indicators are to:

  • improve the overall quality of classrooms and instruction provided to young children in order to maximize their language, cognitive, and social development
  • align closely with formal observational tools used in program and teacher evaluations (i.e., CLASS, ELLCO, and SIOP)
  • create a single observation system that can be used across multiple instructional components.

Click here to view the Quality Indicators User’s Guide.

READ

Real Estate Asset Development (“READ”) creates new preschool classrooms for AppleTree Early Learning Public Charter School.

Through READ, AppleTree Institute partners with community development corporations, public schools, churches, and developers of affordable housing to create and finance new preschool classrooms for AppleTree Early Learning PCS using project finance strategies that blend public grants, private funding, private debt, credit enhancement and lease revenue.

The result? New preschool classrooms in target neighborhoods home to at-risk children who stand to benefit the most from the charter schools early language and literacy program at a predictable cost.

READ finance partners include: the Office of the State Superintendent of Education’s Office of Charter School Financing and Support, Building Hope, America’s Charters, Boston Private Bank, United Bank, PNC Bank, Non-Profit Community Development Corporation, William C. Smith & Company, Riverside Baptist Church, the DC Public Schools Realty Office, The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, and the Martin Family Foundation.

DCPEL

The DC Partnership for Early Literacy (DCPEL) is a project funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Reading First program to transform existing early childhood programs serving at-risk young children into preschool centers of educational excellence that support the development of children’s language, print awareness, phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge.

DCPEL is designed to increase the scale of the Response-to-Intervention model of instruction that ATI piloted. The chart below demonstrates mean growth in receptive and expressive vocabulary over two years by children who participated in that pilot.

Growth Chart

Three-year-old children entered the program at significant risk for language and literacy deficits. Two years later, those children exited the program scoring above the national norm.

This project features successively more intensive levels of research-based interventions to ensure that all children make progress; universal screening and progress monitoring of student’s progress, and classroom-based professional development. We will be posting more information about DCPEL and our results in the near future.