This pamphlet describes the National Household Education Surveys (NHES) program, a system of telephone surveys of the noninstitutionalized civilian population of the United States. This data collection system provides information on a wide range of education-related issues. The surveys provide descriptive data on the educational activities of the…

This final report describes the activities and accomplishments of a federally funded project designed to develop a community-wide interagency service delivery model for facilitating the successful transition of handicapped children from preschool programs to the least restrictive environment in the public schools. The model addresses four major…

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), a nationwide nonprofit organization of public officials who head state departments of elementary and secondary education, provides leadership on major education initiatives. In 1999, CCSSO embarked on the initiative "Students Continually Learning," which focused on three issues: early…

Based on the view that the single most important goal of Head Start reauthorization legislation should be to improve Head Start and other preschool programs to better ensure that participating children are prepared to succeed in school, this paper describes the limited educational progress for children in Head Start and problems resulting from a…

Noting that states are expanding their spending on preschool initiatives to improve at-risk childrens chances to achieve school success, this policy brief explores three key factors that policymakers need to consider in designing school readiness initiatives. The first is the research and the need to link recent cross-disciplinary discoveries…

Summarizes research on the contribution of young children's emotional competence to their school readiness. Describes ways early childhood teachers can support young children's emotional competence by creating a secure emotional environment, helping children understand emotions, modeling genuine appropriate emotions, supporting children's emotion…

Noting that the transition from preschool to kindergarten presents many challenges to children, families, and teachers, presents a preschool-to-kindergarten planning transition model. The goal of the model is to provide a strategy that assists children, teachers, and families to establish and implement a collaborative transition process. Five…

Recently, there has been increasing interest among state governments in establishing statewide testing of high school students. This interest has been driven by various goals, such as reforming high schools, improving the alignment between P-12 requirements and postsecondary expectations, and fulfilling the mandates of the federal No Child Left…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics, which has as its mission the collection and publication of data on the condition of education in the United States. The NHES is specifically designed to provide information on educational issues that are best addressed by…

This report has two aims: (1) to stimulate discussion on issues, strategies, and possible activities at the international level relevant to the links between early childhood development and education and primary education; and (2) to gather additional ideas and information on relevant experiences and structures, to be included in a more…

This report explores social environmental supports and hazards to emotional, social, and linguistic development in infancy and early childhood. After a discussion of the prevalence and consequences of early language and emotional difficulties, selected studies that examined the effects of social experience on emotional and linguistic growth,…

Support for primary-age, at-risk children is examined in the context of renewed national interest in intervention programs for this population. This report describes alternative approaches to identifying characteristics of at-risk students and then presents a summary of states' definitions of "handicapped" or "disadvantaged."…

Three early educational intervention programs designed to prevent mental retardation and to improve school readiness are profiled. The Abecedarian Project was begun as an experiment to test whether mental retardation, allegedly caused by inadequate environments, could be prevented by providing intensive preschool programs to children from birth to…

The corporate structures that inform and sustain high schools and colleges are different from each other. The high school structure is required by law to provide students with surrogate parents who ensure that legal requirements are enforced. Colleges, however, assume students are adults and provide a much more open and volatile academic…

Concern at an elementary school that the level of successful first grade readiness for high risk kindergarten children was 62 percent, while the level of success for non-risk kindergartners was 100 percent, prompted a program for improving the readiness skills of high-risk kindergarten students described in this report. Chapter one describes Stout…