On September 23, 2008, Latino state legislators from throughout the United States participated in a Legislative Hearing on Pre-K and the Early Grades on Capitol Hill. The nation's leading experts on Latinos and early childhood education presented new research and information on programs and policies that work. Their testimony provided an in-depth…

Research Findings: Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, this article relates neighborhood characteristics to the type of child care used in families with toddlers and preschoolers (N = 1,121; representative of children in Chicago in 1996-1998). Neighborhood structural disadvantage was assessed via U.S. Census…

To help policymakers and others measure the school readiness of New Jersey children, the Association for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) participated in the national School Readiness Indicators Initiative, funded by The Packard Foundation. Guided by research on what helps children succeed in school, ACNJ and various private and public New Jersey…

Research regarding the development of early academic skills among American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) students has been very limited to date. Using a nationally representative sample of AIAN, Hispanic, African American, and White children at school entry, the authors used latent growth models to estimate the associations among poverty, low…

Foster children are at great risk for poor school outcomes. Given that school readiness is a powerful predictor of later school success, the promotion of school readiness skills in foster children is an opportunity for preventive intervention. Results are presented from a preliminary evaluation of a program designed to improve school readiness in…

The Early Development Index (EDI) is a teacher-completed checklist, intended to be a population-level tool to measure children's readiness for school and to alert communities to potential developmental problems in children. In response to the increasing popularity of the EDI, this paper provides a critical and timely evaluation and identifies the…

Research indicates that problems faced by many youngsters and families, such as poverty, inadequate housing, and poor health care and nutrition, are interrelated in complex ways. These problems are often inadequately addressed because of flaws in the social service delivery system. These flaws include a lack of communication between public and…

This study examined the relationship between age at school entry and reading readiness in kindergarten. Subjects included 30 kindergarten students selected randomly from a population of 56 students at a parochial school in a predominantly low socioeconomic status neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. All students were African American and ranged in…

This report presents the current status of an ongoing qualitative case study of the implementation of the High Scope Curriculum in the preschool readiness program at one elementary school in Gordon County, Georgia. This program, provided for all 4-year-olds, includes home visits by a family services coordinator, parent involvement opportunities,…

The focus of this study was on the expectations that first-grade teachers have of the mathematics skills of their incoming first-grade students. At the end of one school year and at the beginning of the next school year, first-grade teachers (n=64) in rural and urban settings completed the Mathematics Skills Expectations Survey (MSES). The MSES…

Opinions vary widely as to what young children should know or be capable of doing to be ready for kindergarten. This paper looks at the beliefs held by two groups who play critical roles in the early education of children: parents of preschoolers and kindergarten teachers. Two surveys that were sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and…

When families take part in their young children's education programs, children do better in school. Many early childhood programs offer families the opportunity to participate in their children's learning through family resource centers. Family resource centers provide information on raising and educating children, along with ideas on how to work…

This document is comprised of two reports, the first detailing findings of a 1997 Oregon survey to determine the status of the state's current kindergarten children and their developmental readiness for school, and the second providing county data from the survey. Surveys were mailed to 1,141 public school kindergarten teachers and 245 private…

This document collects technical resources for assessing literacy among young children and the literacy environments of early childhood programs. Contents include: (1) a checklist for assessing the literacy environments of kindergartens; (2) an article on assessment and early literacy; (3) a discussion of basic aspects of the formal and informal…

This brief report cites data that indicate the need for increased efforts to achieve the first of six National Education Goals proposed by the President and the Governors in 1990. The first goal states that "By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn." The grade given to goal 1 is "incomplete"…