The introduction to this Special Topic Collection has two parts. To provide background and context for the articles in the collection, Part 1 tells the story of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study program at the National Center for Education Statistics. It offers an abridged history of this program and describes the designs of the two national…

This brief report focusing on children' s kindergarten readiness i s the third in a series of reports describing data from the 2009 cohort of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES 2009). Previous FACES 2009 reports described the characteristics of children and their families and programs as they entered Head Start in fall 2009…

The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), was first launched in 1997 as a periodic longitudinal study of program performance. Successive nationally representative samples of Head Start children and their families,…

Explored how children's literacy skills and resources at the start of kindergarten relate to their reading and mathematics achievement at the end of kindergarten and the start of first grade. Data are from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (National Center for Education Statistics). Findings show that children…

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…

Raising the age of eligibility to enter kindergarten has not eliminated variations in children's readiness for school, and parents and teachers have used delayed entry and retention as strategies to accommodate these variations. Information from the 1993 and 1995 National Household Education Survey is used to describe the numbers and…

The 1991 National Household Education Survey collected information on children's experiences in the home; in home-based child care; in center-based programs, including day care centers and nursery school; and in school. Data were collected by telephone from the parents and guardians of 13,892 children of 3 to 8 years between February and April of…

Some parents have chosen to delay their children's enrollment in kindergarten by a year because of individual differences in the pace and pattern of children's development. In other situations, some schools recommend delaying a child's school entry based on "readiness" testing or require that some kindergartners attend kindergarten for a…

With the launch of the U.S. Department of Education's Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, measures of knowledge, skills, health, and behavior of a large and nationally representative sample of American Kindergartners are available. Drawing on data from the study, this report provides a portrait of kindergarten…

The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), was first launched in 1997 as a periodic longitudinal study of program performance. This report is the fourth in a series that uses data from the FACES 2006 cohort to describe…