Measuring kindergarten readiness is essential to identifying children who would benefit from additional supports, either in kindergarten or in the years before kindergarten entry. Several measures of kindergarten readiness are in use now by states and researchers. Most assess individual children at the time they enter kindergarten, using teachers…

The Healthy Schools Campaign (HSC) has worked at the intersection of education and health for the last 15 years, supporting schools, districts, states and national stakeholders as they work to create healthy schools where children can learn and thrive. In the fall of 2017 the Healthy Schools Campaign engaged RESOLVE, a D.C.-based nonprofit…

The Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) program, authorized by Congress in 2011, is designed to improve the quality of early learning and development programs for children from birth through age 5. This discretionary grant program is administered jointly by the U.S. Departments of Education (ED) and Health and Human Services…

This brief reviews results of an Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsored project that challenged local data intermediaries in eight cities (all partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, NNIP) to use their data to promote strengthening of their local school readiness systems. The project showed it was possible to develop rich…

Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) researchers visited 38 public high schools around the United States in 2007 and 2008 with the goal of validating and operationalizing a definition of college readiness. Schools in the sample were selected because they were demonstrating success at enabling more students from underrepresented groups to…

Publicly funded prekindergartens are programs that most states use to promote school readiness, especially of 4-year-old children at risk for academic problems due to poverty. Despite large public expenditures, these programs have not been widely evaluated. We examined 240 randomly selected pre-kindergarten programs in six states with mature…

Research Findings: This study analyzed the school readiness beliefs of parents of 452 children from public pre-kindergarten and the relations of these beliefs to socioeconomic status and children's readiness skills. Parents conceived readiness largely in terms of the ability to name objects, letters, or numbers, but few included inferential…

This publication, developed by W.K. Kellogg Foundation in collaboration with IDEO, details a human-centered approach to evolving the system of early education for the needs and possibilities of the 21st century. It provides a set of ideas or "thought-starters" on transforming early education to ensure school readiness and success for the…

While current early education and care funding still reaches only a fraction of preschool children, some states now have considerable experience in coordinating subsidized child care, Head Start, and state prekindergarten initiatives to enhance early education and learning opportunities for young children. Drawing on the experiences of Georgia,…