This article highlights the practices of administrators and master teachers who are trying to balance the needs for accountability, prescribed curriculum, and learning standards with a broader view of education that gives equal importance to skills not so easily quantified by standardized tests. The author makes a case for the use of careful…

This commentary highlights the work of the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems (CBASS), a collaborative of mature, city and county-wide nonprofit OST intermediaries, to develop and adopt common youth-, program- and system-level measures that are easy and cost-effective for local systems to implement. By agreeing to adopt and publicly…

This technical report presents issues related to defining and applying accountability systems for young children, including those with disabilities. It notes that reaching shared perspectives on definitions of accountability systems and their constituents remains complicated by the number of levels to which such systems can apply (e.g., child-,…

As demand for after-school services has grown, the public has responded with support for growth in federal, state, and local funding for these services. As in other successful grassroots movements, this high level of support is evident across groups with diverse objectives. Some after-school advocates are mainly interested in increasing the supply…

A system for evaluating and monitoring child development projects, with possible computerization capabilities, was developed for the State of Pennsylvania in connection with 26 child development projects funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission. The Ecological Monitoring Information System (EMIS), provides a series of ecological measurement…

The UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities (CHCFC) has developed the School Readiness Critical Pathways (SRCPs) as an evidence-based conceptual model that links related outcomes and strategies. This helps to organize an array of broad and diffuse evidence regarding the strategies that produce school readiness outcomes for…

This report outlines the national and state environmental context for the SECCS Initiative in supporting MCH strategic planning in early childhood systems building. This strategic context has implications for roles, relationships, and activities within a planning process and ultimately an implementation process. It summarizes the opportunities and…