The U.S. Department of Education's (ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) administers the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), which is a mandatory survey of all public schools and school districts in the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. To support school districts' timely submission of accurate data, OCR takes steps…

Early childhood researchers from across the U.S. came together to form the Early Learning Network (ELN) in 2016 with the mission to identify policies and practices that narrow opportunity gaps and help children maintain early learning success. Early Learning Network teams are excited to share what they have learned--and what it means for early…

Preschool is a critical period for children. They need to develop a variety of skills (e.g., social and emotional skills, cognitive skills, motor skills) that are important for their development between the ages of 3 and 5. Dramatic play provides children with safe environments that allow them to learn and practice those important skills as it…

This guidance is intended to clarify that the Head Start Program Performance Standards (HSPPS) in 45 C.F.R. Part 1302 Subpart C--Education and Child Development Program Services are required for preschool programs supported with funds under Title I, Part A (Title I) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA); and provide…

Drawing on a synthesis of foundational and extant Funds of Knowledge (fk) scholarship that traces the framework's theoretical origins and development, this manuscript proposes a unified corpus of six core tenets for fk, as an extension to current theoretical understandings of the framework. These six core tenets are commonly cited individually…

This report summarizes student enrollment during the 2020-2021 school year for the cohort of students in the 2019-2020 prekindergarten partnership between Austin Independent School District, United Way for Greater Austin, and participating child development centers. Demographic information and academic performance for beginning-of-year are also…

Montessori education was developed over 100 years ago, and persists as a marginal 'niche reform' of the standard model. Here I discuss two unresolved dichotomies in early childhood education -- the tension between work and play, and between structure and freedom. I explain how Montessori collapses and thereby resolves the dichotomies, and does so…

Quality, teaching and assessment in early childhood are often steeped in developmental logic and narrow understandings of teaching and learning. Pedagogy situated in agency and complexity disrupts these taken-for-granted narratives and offers multiple ways of teaching, learning and doing. In this article, the authors offer an example of these…

Learning trajectories (LTs) can inform teaching by contributing a variety of pedagogical and content-related insights and strategies. They support sequencing topic introduction and development. Because ideas evolve gradually and often rely on a careful introduction of new representations, operations, cases of numbers, structures, and definitions,…

From birth to preschool years, before the young children become conventional readers and writers, children are involved in a developmental process known as "emergent literacy," a concept that was coined by Marie Clay (a New Zealand scholar) in 1966. During this stage, children engage naturally in unconventional literacy behaviors such as…

Current conceptualizations of process quality in early childhood education highlight a variety of global classroom indicators that directly link to improved child outcomes. This conceptualization may need to be extended, however, to facilitate more meaningful change in children's development and readiness for kindergarten. To enhance our current…

Writing gives children a way to share their voices and ideas with the world. Even in early childhood, the purpose of writing is to communicate. All young children have messages to share, and writing is one tool they can use to communicate those messages. For young children, it is quite challenging to form and remember messages while also figuring…

"The Power to Learn: The Benefits and the Promise of Personalized Instruction" advances the notion that personalized instruction is the direction that schools must take if all students are expected to succeed with difficult learning challenges. Based on the premise that all students are capable, this book offers practical information so…

As an Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa NZ) realm nation, Tokelau people are part of the diverse Pasifika fabric that represents Pacific immigrants in this settler-colonial nation. Despite Tokelau's contentious geo-political history and climate vulnerability in Te Moananui-a-Kiwa, this paper briefly provides some of my inspirations and motivations as…

Sustained shared thinking dialogues which focus on teacher talk with preschool learners have long been considered an important route to learning progression. Toddlers, however, seldom engage in dialogues through talk alone, and their encounters are often fleeting. As a consequence, they are often positioned on the periphery of learning dialogues…