State education officials are busy finishing the commonwealth’s application for the $500 million federal Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge, the Obama administration’s signature early education initiative. Massachusetts is eligible for up to $50 million over four years. The program will be jointly administered by the U.S. Departments of Education (DOE) and Health and Human Services (HHS). The application is due October 19, and grants will be awarded by December 31.

The competition is designed, according to a U.S. Department of Education announcement of the program in May, to “reward states that create comprehensive plans to transform early learning systems with better coordination, clearer learning standards, and meaningful workforce development.” Its purpose is to fund “ambitious yet achievable plans for implementing coherent, compelling, and comprehensive early learning education reform.” Its goal, according to an August announcement of the application form, “is to better prepare more children with high needs for kindergarten.”

As Early Education and Care Commissioner Sherri Killins told the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care at its September meeting: “They are really looking for states that are already out in front and ready to take it to scale. They’re looking for low-hanging fruit.”

(Read a summary of the challenge, along with relevant Massachusetts progress.)

The competition has several priorities, including an “absolute” priority of “promoting school readiness for children with high needs” that, among other things, includes “integrating and aligning resources and policies across Participating State Agencies and… designing and implementing a common, statewide Tiered Quality Rating and Improvement System” (QRIS). It has two “competitive” priorities: including all early learning programs, public and private, in QRIS and “understanding the status of children’s learning and development at kindergarten entry.” Finally, the application includes two “invitational” priorities: “sustaining program effects in the early elementary grades” and “encouraging private sector support.” It gives states some flexibility in how they address the various priorities.

So how does Massachusetts stack up? In many ways, the state seems well-positioned for the competition. For one thing, the commonwealth is ahead of most, if not all, states in terms of governance.In 2005, Massachusetts

streamlined governance by merging early education and child care bureaucracies to create the nation’s first consolidated Department of Early Education and Care (EEC). The state recognized the importance of an education continuum, from early childhood to college or career, by creating the Executive Office of Education in 2008, with EEC, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Department of Higher Education as three legs of the stool. Unlike many states, which have focused their efforts on state-funded pre-kindergarten, Massachusetts focuses on the entire mixed-delivery system and seeks to infuse all early learning settings – public, private and community based – with quality.

In addition, in January EEC launched an evidence-based QRIS that defines quality benchmarks and provides pathways for programs to improve. EEC has also restructured the delivery of professional development services to early educators. Since its creation in 2005, the state’s Early Childhood Educators Scholarship program has awarded more than 5,000 scholarships to early educators pursuing college degrees.

The portion of the challenge that perhaps has received the most attention, here and across the nation, is its call for developmentally appropriate kindergarten entry assessments. For states like Massachusetts that do not have a statewide system of kindergarten assessments, the application asks that one be implemented by the 2014-15 school year. The application also asks that states assess multiple areas of children’s development – language and literacy, cognition and general knowledge (including early math and science), approaches to learning, physical well-being and motor skills, and social-emotional development.

As the Boston Sunday Globe recently reported in a front page story, Massachusetts is developing a system of kindergarten readiness assessment.

Kindergartners – who are not expected to know how to read or write – would not be filling in bubble sheets or answering essay questions. Instead, teachers would measure students’ early knowledge of literacy and math by carefully observing and questioning them during classroom activities, meticulously documenting their performance against a set of state standards, and including samples of their work. They will also take note of students’ social, cognitive, emotional, and physical development.

Paul Reville, the state’s education secretary, emphasized that the kindergarten readiness assessments, which are in the conceptual phase, ‘shouldn’t be mistaken for an early MCAS’ and will not be used to determine who should enter kindergarten. ‘It will be a more subtle and nuanced approach to assessing students,’ Reville said. ‘The goal is to get a better sense of how students are doing, particularly in literacy.’

In the course of developing the state’s application, Commissioner Killins has held sessions around the state to gather input from the field. She consults regularly with a leadership team comprised of members of the EEC board’s Advisory Committee. She has briefed the business community. She and Amy O’Leary, director of Strategies for Children’s Early Education for All Campaign, briefed legislators and legislative staff at a well-attended Beacon Hill session sponsored by Representative Alice Peisch and Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz, co-chairs of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education.

“The Early Learning Challenge is about building a statewide system,” Commissioner Killins said at the legislative briefing. “This isn’t about a pilot. You don’t get points for just doing it in one place or just doing a pilot.”

Irene Sege is director of communications for Strategies for Children and its Early Education for All Campaign . She blogs at Eye on Early Education .