Two new initiatives are evaluating preschool curricula, making the case that programs designed to teach the youngest learners deserve the careful scrutiny that materials aimed at older students regularly undergo.

EdReports, the most well-known and prolific provider of curriculum reviews, released its first-ever set of pre-K evaluations on Tuesday. And last month, the nonprofit Student Achievement Partners published a set of preschool instructional materials guidelines, designed to give educators a framework for identifying high-quality resources.

These projects come as state-sponsored preschool program enrollment continues to climb, hitting a record high of almost 1.8 million students in 2025, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research’s annual report on the state of the field.

“This is a really meaningful moment for the field,” said Courtney Allison, the chief academic officer at EdReports. “We know that there are curriculum decisions already being made in pre-K, but independent evaluations have lagged behind.”

The EdReports reviews evaluate pre-K curricula in three main domains, or “gateways”: meeting the needs of a diverse student body; providing high-quality, developmentally appropriate content; and supporting effective teaching practices and implementation.

Reviews of three pre-K curricula—The Creative Curriculum, Frog Street Pre-K, and Every Child Ready—present mixed results, said Allison.

Pre-K curricula take a different shape than materials aimed at K-12 students. Three- and 4-year-olds aren’t using textbooks like their grade school peers. Most of the content of these programs for younger children comprises teacher materials, like read-alouds, and direction for educators—explaining how to facilitate conversations and set up activities.

“We were really pleased to see a lot of meaningful strengths, but the quality was uneven,” Allison said.

For the most part, these programs scored high in attention to language and literacy development, fostering social-emotional skills, and incorporation of play-based learning. But they were often scant on details about how to best support diverse learners, and lesson activities didn’t always align to stated learning goals.

Why districts are paying attention to preschool curricula

“Historically, there have been a wide variety of curriculum options for preschool and early education programs, and they weren’t all created equal,” said Alissa Mwenelupembe, the chief early-learning quality and research officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC. “There’s a need for people who are purchasing curricula to have a better sense of what they’re getting with their dollars.”

For the past decade, curriculum reviews have played a growing role in materials selection in K-12, with state departments of education considering third-party evaluations when developing lists of approved resources and districts consulting them as part of adoption processes. More than 1,800 school systems have used EdReports reviews, according to the organization.

But preschool materials haven’t received the same level of scrutiny, said Mwenelupembe.

“There’s not been one centralized place where you could go and learn what the research says, what you can expect to get from a curriculum,” she said.

As states launch and expand preschool programs, increasingly incorporating them into their K-12 systems, education leaders have started to ask for more guidance, said Carey Swanson, the literacy chief program officer at Student Achievement Partners, who led the work on the organization’s pre-K curriculum guidelines.

“Coherence is increasingly emerging as an important element of what needs to be in a strong educational system,” Swanson said.

Programs are strong in literacy, weaker in math, EdReports finds

Both EdReports and Student Achievement Partners say their tools draw on research in early-childhood development and learning, citing among other resources “A New Vision for High-Quality Preschool Curriculum,” a 2024 report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine that analyzed more than 50 years of early-childhood education research.

EdReports’ pre-K reviews were conducted by a group of current and former pre-K teachers, curriculum specialists, instructional coaches, principals, and higher education faculty, said Shana Weldon, EdReports’ pre-K director.

The first of the reviews’ three gateways focuses on meeting the needs of all students. It evaluates whether programs are responsive to children from diverse backgrounds and include adaptations for students with disabilities and multilingual learners.

The second gateway covers content, including social and emotional development, language and literacy, math, science, and engineering, social studies, fine arts, physical and motor development, and cognitive development.

The third and final gateway examines implementation, evaluating whether the curriculum supports effective teaching practices, a child-friendly learning environment, and purposeful assessment.

Scoring works differently for EdReports’ preschool reviews from what it does for the rest of their evaluations. In K-12 reviews, programs are required to pass the first gateway in order to be scored on the rest. But for the preschool reviews, each program is scored on each gateway. That decision came in part from feedback from the field, said Weldon.

“I overwhelmingly heard, ‘We need all of this information to help us make better-informed decisions,’” she said.

The Student Achievement Partners guidelines outline similar criteria, though with more general recommendations rather than specific indicators. Major topics include developmentally appropriate learning environments, social-emotional development, math and literacy instruction, support for diverse learners, and engaging families as partners.

In the EdReports reviews, math emerged as an area for growth, said Weldon. While all three programs met expectations in language and literacy, two of the three only partially met expectations for math—the Creative Curriculum and Frog Street Pre-K.

While those programs incorporated math skills and activities, they didn’t always do so in a systematic progression that would build children’s math knowledge over time.

The Creative Curriculum, for example, includes lots of counting activities: Children bounce a ball and count how many times it bounces, count objects in front of them during different tasks, and model numbers out of clay. But those lessons don’t follow an intentional sequence that progressively builds counting ability, the review states.

Nicol Russell, the chief academic officer at Teaching Strategies, which publishes the Creative Curriculum, wrote in a statement to Education Week that the program is intentionally designed to give teachers flexibility to “meet each child where they are and move them forward.”

“One challenge in evaluating pre-K curriculum is the wide developmental range among 3- to 5-year-olds—children in the same classroom can be at very different points in their learning,” Russell wrote. “When curricula rely on a fixed, linear sequence built around ‘typical’ expectations, some children end up bored while others are frustrated. … A uniform sequence may be consistent, but it’s often not as effective for young learners.”

Jessica Hammond, the senior director of learning and development for Frog Street, echoed the point.

“It’s really important to note that in early childhood, learning is not linear,” she said, in an interview. “Children are all learning at various ages and stages. Teachers cannot always follow a progression that is explicit in preschool. In preparing children for kindergarten or school readiness, they have this distinct responsibility to ensure that they are giving every child what they need.”

Play vs. academics: a false dichotomy?

This back and forth raises a core question: How explicit, and how structured, should preschool instruction be? And how should that dovetail with preschool research that highlights the importance of play?

As state preschool programs have expanded, some advocates have worried that districts would push down kindergarten expectations into early-childhood classrooms, eschewing developmentally appropriate practices for a focus on academic preparation.

“It’s really important that the choice not be play-based learning or content learning,” said Swanson of Student Achievement Partners. A 3- or 4-year-old classroom shouldn’t look like a 2nd grade classroom, but curricula should still plan “purposeful” learning, she said.

“We know that careful attention to foundational [reading] skills matters in the early-childhood space,” Swanson said, as an example. But that would look like short activities designed to practice differentiating the sounds in words, or learning letters, she said—not extended lessons on decoding, which is a kindergarten skill.

Preschool should also intentionally target other abilities that lay the foundation for academics later on, like fine motor skills, said the NAEYC’s Mwenelupembe. Three- and 4-year-olds might not be sitting at desks writing, the same way a 7-year-old would—nor should they be, she said.

But they would play with clay, for example, or string beads in intentionally designed and structured activities, building the strength they will need to eventually hold a pencil, she said.

The EdReports criteria adopt a similar both/and framework, stating that materials should “intentionally leverage a mixture of direct instruction, open-ended, experiential, and play-based learning.”