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Preschool through Third Grade (P-3) Alignment

CDE seeks to elevate the role of high-quality, inclusive and multilingual preschool, strong early intervention services, and P-3 alignment in ensuring the future of California’s children.

The California Department of Education (CDE) is committed to interrupting and counteracting inequities, racism, and bias and also closing opportunity gaps to ensure all children start school ready to succeed and all schools are ready to support every child’s success. To help achieve this goal, CDE seeks to elevate the role of high-quality, inclusive and multilingual preschool, strong early intervention services, and P-3 alignment in ensuring the future of California’s children.

The CDE is committed to using equity, inclusion, and quality standards that support effective learning experiences as guiding principles for data-driven decision-making about key P-3 strategies to meaningfully impact systems, programs, schools, and policies across the state. Specifically, the CDE’s P-3 Alignment effort is designed to bring together stakeholders across systems to identify, develop, and implement policy and practice solutions focused on ensuring developmentally-informed, rigorous, and joyful learning experiences are available to all children across the preschool and early elementary years. The resources on this page reflect areas of focus to achieve these goals.

Building Leaders with P-3 Expertise in Early Childhood and Transitional Kindergarten and Grades One through Twelve (TK-12)

CDE seeks to support state and local leaders, including directors, administrators, school board members, and others in bridging preschool, special education, and multilingual support systems in an effort to break down silos and create cohesion across the early years and grades that supports optimal development and learning for all children.

Preschool administrators and elementary school principals, alongside school board members and key leaders at county offices of education, in school districts, and other community organizations, can play an invaluable role in supporting P-3 alignment efforts. In order to ensure efforts to align P-3 instruction, assessment, curriculum, transitions, professional learning and other best practices succeed, leadership at all levels need to be engaged and committed to improving the opportunities provided to children through intentional partnership across the early years and early grades. Like their teacher-level counterparts, these leaders may need professional learning opportunities to instill basic knowledge about what high-quality early learning looks like, why it may look different from classroom experiences in later grades, and how to support teachers and families in both early learning and elementary schools.

Questions:   Opportunities for All Branch | P3-Alignment@cde.ca.gov
Last Reviewed: Friday, August 22, 2025
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