Even with the lights off, room five in Williamsburg’s Jonathan Williams Day Care Center glowed. At 1 p.m. the kindergarten children slept in their blue cots as light slid through the partially lowered blinds onto the white walls decorated with the preschoolers’ art.

But only four years earlier room five had another look. One side of the dark and dull classroom was blue and the other pistachio green. The lighting, furniture, and even the cots had been around from before anyone could remember. The building blocks had faded in color, and there were no computers. The city’s Administration of Children’s Services said they had no money for new equipment and a paint job.

Enter Quality New York, an initiative dedicated to getting preschools to meet national accreditation standards. The group is powered by Bank Street College, Child Care Inc. and the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, and funded by United Way of New York City.

As part of a push for accreditation Quality New York recommended the center for grants by a non-profit foundation to buy new furniture and revitalize several of its classrooms, a change that lifted not only the children but also the adults at the center.

“That even built up the morale of the teachers, because they had modern things,” said Mildred Hook, the 71-year-old bespectacled educational director of Jonathan Williams.

Quality New York’s work comes at a time when quality in early childhood education has steadily gained supporters. Studies have continued to tie readiness for kindergarten with the quality of the preschool program, making improvement of quality ever more urgent.

In guiding centers toward accreditation with the National Association for the Education of Young People – a well-known mark of quality for early childhood education programs – Quality New York has given the city a helping hand in raising the quality of early education for children in New York City.

“I think it’s revolutionary in New York that this is going on,” said Sheila Smith, the director for best practices for quality early childhood programs at New York University’s Child and Policy Center, noting that the city had few accredited centers before the initiative started. Smith has previously worked with Quality New York.

Established in 2002, Quality New York combined the already on-going efforts of Child Care Inc. and the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, or FPWA, to get centers accredited, one of the main ways to raise quality in childcare centers. Bank Street College holds many of the workshops and trainings offered to the teachers and directors going through the accreditation process. The initiative does not charge any fees for its services.

To be accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC, a center must go through a four-step process that includes meeting ten standards ranging from whether teachers are using developmentally appropriate teaching methods to how well the program works with children’s parents. The process demands copious documentation of what the teachers and administrators are doing.

The staff of Quality New York attends conferences, holds workshops and also sends out newsletters to all New York City preschool centers to spread the message about accreditation and its standards for quality.
“I think we have raised visibility for what quality education for young children in New York City should look like,” said Alison Pepper, Quality New York’s director of early childhood accreditation.

For Brooklyn’s Jonathan Williams Day Care Center, whose 100 preschool and kindergarten students are mainly Latino children of working families from the neighborhood, the changes brought on by accreditation – both in the look of the classrooms and in what teachers were doing – are evident.

In room five, there are new chairs, tables and blocks in bright colors. One corner held a computer booth and against one wall rose a wooden playhouse with stairs that lead up to a elevated play area equipped with a kitchen, covered with a roof, and where light filtered in through its windows. Underneath this loft rests a dramatic play area where children can play dress up, or dress up baby dolls that are black, Latino and Asian, playthings the center did not have before. Quality New York worked with Jonathan Williams to acquire grants totaling nearly $10,000 from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which teachers used to pick out the new toys and furnishings.
But changes extended beyond the physical environment. In getting accredited, the center also created staff and parent handbooks, which they never had before, and pushed the center to provide improve quality and services for the children.

“The teachers became more professional,” Hook said. “The way we speak to children, the way we work with children. We know more what’s age appropriate for them.”

Offering developmentally appropriate activities for young children has been one challenge for programs, according to Judith Ennes, the director of special projects at Child Care Inc. Preschool children should be read stories, Ennes explained, and also building with blocks, painting, reading their own books, and taking part in imaginative play, such as in a housekeeping corner. Through these activities the children can develop their language. However, many parents believe their children should be taught in a more conventional sense.
“If you have a group of two and three year olds, and you have them sit at a table tracing letters, that’s not probably developmental appropriate for children that age,” Ennes said.

To prepare the center for accreditation review, Quality New York first observed and assessed the state of classrooms and also the administration, and then held workshops explaining the accreditation experience as well as offering training. A Quality New York staff member supported the director and teachers by answering their questions and providing encouragement and reminders.
NAEYC accredited Jonathan Williams Day Care Center in 2005 after a two-year process.

Vanessa Scott, 34, a teacher in room five, credits Quality New York for getting the center through a difficult and unfamiliar process that also required copious documentation of the what and why of the center’s curriculum and activities.
“If we went out and just did it on our own, it would have never happened,” Scott said.

Of the 175 programs that Quality New York has worked with, 83 achieved accreditation, with 72 programs currently working to get accredited. Though the initiative partners with any interested and qualifying program that applies, the majority of the child care centers on its former and current roster either provide Head Start, the national preschool program for low income children, or the Administration of Children’s Services subsidized child care.

One such center is Louis A. Fickling Child Development Center in the Bronx, which was accredited at the end of September 2005. The center serves mostly Latino and black children. Beatrice Moncrease, Louis Fickling’s educational director since 1975, credits Quality New York with giving her confidence to pursue accreditation, which she originally did not attempt because of time and money concerns.

Looking back, the 60-year-old Moncrease can see how her center has been affected. While not pinning the change on any one thing, she said that her teachers learned to shed their traditional roles as authority figures and engage children more at their own level as the center worked toward accreditation.
“You don’t have to be the adult all the time. You can be someone children can tumble on the floor with,” Moncrease said.

And even though many new parents to the center do not know or care about accreditation, Moncrease said the process has made her staff feel more like professionals, rather than just babysitters, which is how many parents still view preschool staff. New York does not require preschool teachers to have a college degree.

But the best part of accreditation was bringing this national stamp of approval to a children’s center in a poor neighborhood. “Most of all I enjoy the fact that we are in the South Bronx, in the middle of the projects, to have a program in the midst of poverty, a quality program, is something I wanted to do,” Moncrease said. “It’s something the community needed.”

The importance of quality services in preschools has been widely studied.
“Now there’s a large body of research literature this is kind of vague that says quality matters a great deal for the effect that a preschool program has on a kids’ development,” Smith said.

Quality in preschool classes is defined in terms of class size, the number of teachers to students, and also how the teacher and students interact, such as whether the teacher uses new words and complex syntax with children.

A 1999 study by researchers from the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, UCLA and Yale University found that children in high quality child care classrooms showed better language and math skills going into elementary school. Better preschool care also affected children with less highly educated mothers more prominently: they were better at math and didn’t have as many social problems.

So even though some preschools seek accreditation for marketing purposes, Ennes stressed the significance of the process on young lives.
“In a country where the divide between the people who have a lot of money and the people who don’t have a lot of money is getting wider and wider, children must have a good beginning. You could ruin a kid by the time you’re five,” Ennes said.

Accreditations’ effectiveness has also been examined. A 2005 Minnesota Department of Health study on how ready preschoolers are for kindergarten revealed that accredited child care programs have two times as many children who were prepared than found in a statewide readiness survey. Children from low-income families also matched the performance of children from wealthier backgrounds.

Yet the number of accredited centers in New York City sits at 144, according to NAEYC Web site. New York City has 2061 licensed preschool centers, according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

The cost in time and money likely holds many schools back, and not every program can sustain the lengthy process to be accredited. In its five-year history, Quality New York has seen 20 partner programs drop out.
But Pepper remains optimistic, saying that Quality New York been receiving more applications. She also sees how the word on accreditation has been spreading.

“One of our major objectives has been to excite the New York City community about accreditation. And I think we’ve done that, because we consistently have programs that apply and say ‘I’ve heard about this, I’ve known about it for a couple of years, and now I’m ready.”
Hook remembers Jonathan Williams’ first step toward accreditation: she saw a flier from FPWA. Shortly thereafter Hook, who has been at the center for nearly 40 years, began attending meetings to learn more and, she says, one thing led to another. Even now Hook can still clearly recall why she picked up that flier in the first place.

“It seemed like instead of things going higher, seemed like things were staying the same or getting worse,” Hook said of the center. “And I figured we needed to move in a different direction.”