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After spending much of her career developing and implementing policies to get young children ready for kindergarten, Jenna Conway is now focused on ensuring that students come out of their K-12 experience ready for career, college, military service or whatever comes next. She refers to this dual mission as “bookends of readiness.”
Recently named as Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, Conway brings extensive experience improving early childhood systems, studying teacher-child interactions and leveraging data to drive performance.
Before coming to Virginia in 2018, she helmed the closely watched early education efforts in Louisiana, and played a key role in redesigning the state’s approach to measuring early childhood education quality. As the assistant superintendent of early childhood in Louisiana, Conway led implementation of The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), a rigorous national measure of classroom quality that evaluates the quality of teacher-child interactions in real time, and contributed to significant improvements in the state’s early childhood system.
When Conway became a leader in Virginia’s school system, she was determined to build a common framework for measuring the quality of early childhood programs but knew the state required its own approach. The early childhood landscape was fragmented: family childcare providers, Head Start programs, early childhood special education services and school-based pre-K programs were all operating largely in isolation. Conway helped change that.
Superintendent Conway during a recent listening tour. (Courtesy Virginia Department of Education)
Working with providers, community members and legislators, she helped pass a law in 2020 that moved oversight for all early care and education programs to the Board of Education and the Virginia Department of Education, laying the groundwork for what would become the Unified Virginia Quality Birth to Five System (VQB5).
The VQB5 system is, in Conway’s words, an “apples to apples” way of measuring early childhood experiences across every type of provider. Twice a year, about 1,200 certified individuals from the local community gather data on Virginia’s early learning environments by observing those settings in person; additional observations are conducted by contractors from Teachstone, the company that developed CLASS.
Conway also implemented the Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program, which exemplifies her data-first orientation. This statewide framework for assessing children’s preparedness as they enter kindergarten gave Virginia a clearer picture of where children stood at the threshold of formal schooling. It also exposed the gaps that early childhood investment needed to close.
The literacy and math results that Conway sees across Virginia’s 131 school divisions are not where she wants them. Her response is characteristically collaborative. As she puts it, the task is to “roll up our sleeves and work with … our school division leaders, our principals, our educators and all of the support staff and coaches to get kids the education that puts them on track for success.”
In Virginia, where the governorship regularly flips between parties, bipartisanship is essential to enacting policy change, Conway said. She consistently works across party lines, making the case that school performance, workforce participation and long-term economic competitiveness all depend on early childhood progress.
As she settles into her new role, Conway discusses school readiness, teacher-child interactions, bipartisanship and how her personal experience has shaped her views on education.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How does Virginia define school readiness?
I have been working in Virginia for nearly eight years with different governors and with stakeholders across the state to improve school readiness. And that has been the True North for the entirety of my experience here. And really, by focusing in on improving school readiness, it allowed us to think very differently about how we work with all of the places that kids are served before kindergarten to improve school readiness outcomes. If you can improve school readiness outcomes, then you then open up all sorts of opportunities for kids throughout school and beyond.
There is no single birth to 5 provider that could serve all kids. You need family childcare and [center-based] childcare and Head Start and Early Head Start and early childhood special education and the schools which offer preschool and pre-K to work together to offer opportunities to families … that put them on track for success. Although Virginia had taken some steps to measure readiness for all kids entering kindergarten, we didn’t have good information about the quality of those experiences.
Superintendent Conway visiting a Virginia childcare center. (Courtesy Virginia Department of Education)
To what extent are you applying the Louisiana playbook to Virginia?
There are two things that we learned from Louisiana. The first is that … kids who were in classrooms that had higher quality teacher-child interactions learn more over the course of that year. We don’t ever standardize test toddlers — it’s not appropriate. It would be a little bit of a fool’s errand to try to test a 2-year-old in that way, and we certainly would never want to do it with stakes. [The second] is that [CLASS] could be used regardless of a teacher’s credential or curriculum use. It provided a way to compare the thing that matters most — the kind of secret ingredient: these teacher-child interactions. But it’s less input focused than something that says, “You have to use this particular curriculum” or “You have to have this particular credential.” In fact, more than 10 years [later] it is still the system of measure in Louisiana. And if you look at some research done by the University of Virginia, you see tremendous gains in quality of interactions across the board, including in very low-income and historically underserved areas from New Orleans to the Mississippi Delta.
How does this approach play out in Virginia?
We realized Virginia had different community members, different parents, different perspectives. And so we worked with the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation to pilot an effort to think differently about how we might organize early childhood funding. We rolled VQB5 out statewide two years ago. So we have two years of results [from] over 12,000 classrooms. And in each of those classrooms we look at … the quality of teacher-child interactions. We completed 31,000 classroom observations last year, about 2.2 million minutes of insight. These are 60- to 80-minute observations, very rigorous. There’s an infant tool, there’s a toddler tool, and there’s a preschool tool. All of that data goes into determining their ratings, and all of that information is put on a website for families to be able to use.
Have priorities in Virginia shifted with the Spanberger administration, or was it more of a continuation?
It has been a very intentionally bipartisan effort across different administrations. [Democratic Gov. Ralph] Northam [who served from 2018 to 2022] and first lady Pam Northam were really intentional as they worked on a potential early childhood law. When [Republican] Gov. Glenn Youngkin [who served from 2022 until Spanberger took office on Jan. 17, 2026] came on … improving K-12 outcomes was part of his vision for Virginia as well as supporting workforce participation.
During the pandemic, Virginia had some of the lowest [employment] rates, so the biggest drops in terms of moms participating in the workforce. So there was a real bipartisan effort at the time that he came in around investments in making sure that parents can access care so that not only will the kids benefit, but that parents can come back to the workforce. And over that period, you saw some of Virginia’s very low unemployment and very historic workforce participation.
Virginia has made historic investments in early childhood. When I started [in 2018], it was less than a hundred million dollars. This year, the initial proposed budget has us at over a half billion. Virginia is not getting full credit for it, relative to other states. Most people think of childcare as being federally funded. Virginia’s program is now two-thirds state funded.
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What motivates you? You’re a mom yourself, you’re from Virginia. What’s a story you think about that helps to center you when you’re doing this work?
My ability to be a working mom is because of childcare. Growing up, my mom did work, although part-time, and many people in my family are in education. My mom is a Ph.D. and was at the University of Virginia School of Education.
As I became a mom, I realized that there’s just no greater act of trust than leaving your child in the hands of an early childhood [provider]. Across three children, I did everything from home-based childcare to pre-K in a school. And I had such tremendous respect for what was being provided to my children and that it enabled me to be successful at my career and to be able to earn money for my family.
I felt so grateful that I didn’t have to face this trade off of: I’d like to be able to work and also be able to know that my kid is well taken care of. And that is the trade-off that we often hear from folks who are working very hard, but whose salaries do not cover the cost of care.
And the thing that sort of struck me more than anything else coming out of the pandemic is that … human beings learn in the context of relationships with adults.
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