What It Takes to Hit 10/10: The Coaching Secret Behind Georgia’s Quality Rating
When a state achieves a national first in early childhood quality, it’s worth asking: what actually got them there?
The Recognition
Georgia just became the first state in the country to meet all 10 of 10 quality standards benchmarks in the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) 2025 State Preschool Yearbook. It’s a milestone that reflects years of deliberate, sustained investment — in classrooms, in educators, and in the systems designed to support them.
It’s a big deal. And it didn’t happen by accident.
What the Benchmarks Actually Measure
The NIEER benchmarks are a rigorous, nationally recognized framework for evaluating the quality of state Pre-K programs — from teacher qualifications and class sizes to learning standards and professional development systems. Meeting all 10 means Georgia didn’t just check boxes. It built a comprehensive ecosystem designed to support children and educators at every level.
Two of those benchmarks are worth pausing on, because they speak directly to the kind of infrastructure that makes everything else work:
Staff professional development — including individual PD plans and ongoing coaching for both teachers and assistant teachers.
Continuous quality improvement — through structured classroom observations and data used actively for program improvement.
These aren’t just policy requirements. They’re the conditions that make sustained, meaningful educator growth possible. And for the team at Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL), they represent a deliberate shift in how they show up for the providers they serve.
From Consultation to True Coaching
For years, DECAL’s technical assistance teams provided support at the program level — often working across entire centers, sometimes managing 18 or more classrooms at once. The work was meaningful, but something was missing.
As Regina Little, a CCR&R leader at DECAL, described it:
We knew that coaching and PLC was where we’d get the biggest bang for our buck. We just needed the opportunity to truly invest our time and efforts into it.
Regina Little, CCR&R Leader
That opportunity came when DECAL began using TORSH to support their coaching and continuous quality improvement work.
When DECAL introduced TORSH, it was like a fire lit underneath us. Finally, we had the tools and the structure to become true coaches for our providers.
Regina Little, CCR&R Leader
TORSH didn’t tell DECAL’s team how to coach — they already knew what good coaching looked like. They’d believed in it for years. What TORSH provided was the infrastructure to finally make it happen at scale: video-based coaching workflows, customizable observation tools, learning paths, and a platform that worked across DECAL’s seven regional CCR&R groups without requiring everyone to be in the same room.
Visibility That Changes Everything
On the operational side, the impact looked different — but was equally significant.
Abby Mozo, an Operational Analyst at DECAL, described what changed once her team was working within TORSH:
That kind of visibility — across departments, across regions, across roles — is what allows a system to actually function like a system. When coaches can see and share their work, when leaders can understand what’s happening across sites without being in every room, and when professional growth becomes part of the everyday rhythm rather than an annual event, outcomes improve. Not immediately, not magically, but steadily — because the infrastructure is finally in place.
Abby also reflected on what surprised her most about the platform itself:
Once we got in there and realized we could do the library, the learning paths, the video — all of that in one place — that was surprising. And how you could customize it for each R&R region, so it looks different but really works for us.
Abby Mozo, Professional Learning Operations Analyst
The Spark That Keeps Growing
What struck us most in talking with Regina and Abby wasn’t just how much they’d accomplished. It was how much it had changed what they believed was possible.
DECAL went on to invest in additional coaching skills training for their staff, building internal capacity in a way that could be replicated and sustained. The platform became the foundation for something larger: a culture shift where coaching wasn’t something that happened occasionally, but something the entire team was fully invested in.
That’s what meeting 10/10 NIEER benchmarks looks like from the inside — not a policy change that lands in a report, but a team that decided coaching mattered, found the infrastructure to support it, and built something that could last.
What Gets You There
Georgia DECAL’s 10/10 recognition is a celebration — and it should be. But more than that, it’s a proof point: when organizations invest in real coaching infrastructure, in professional development systems that go beyond the one-day workshop, and in the conditions that help educators grow continuously, the outcomes follow.
If you’re building toward that kind of standard — for your program, your district, or your state — we’d love to be part of the conversation.
Learn how TORSH supports coaching and continuous quality improvement →
Read Georgia’s full NIEER 2025 State Profile →
This post was written in partnership with Georgia DECAL. The reflections shared here come directly from our conversation with Abby Mozo, Professional Learning Operations Analyst, and Regina Little, Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) Leader, who generously shared how this work is supporting their mission. We helped shape those reflections into written form, but the words — and the work — are theirs.