The authors examine black, white, and Hispanic children's differing experiences in early childhood care and education and explore links between these experiences and racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness. Children who attend center care or preschool programs enter school more ready to learn, but both the share of children enrolled in these…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Budget Impasse Continues in the House of Representatives: Moderates' Push for Additional Domestic Spending Postpones…

This manual was developed as part of the New England Center Pilot Project (NECPP), a 3-year federally funded program focusing on the inclusion of young children with deaf-blindness within regular educational programs in Massachusetts. The NECPP provides consultation during transition to inclusive programs and offers technical assistance, staff…

This report examines the prevalence of selected accomplishments and difficulties in a national sample of 4,423 children from 3 to 5 years of age who had not yet started kindergarten. The data were collected as part of the 1993 National Household Education Survey (NHES). The report focused on 2,000 children who had turned 4 by the end of 1992 and…

This 10-year study compared the achievement of 3 samples of students designated at-risk for school failure and 1 sample deemed not at risk, and followed a transitional first-grade school readiness program (SRP) population from prekindergarten through eighth grade to identify contextual factors associated with student progress. At-risk samples were…

This manual, which was developed to assist persons using the Helpful Entry Level Skills Checklist, includes typical developmental levels or ages for each skill addressed on the check list for children ages 3 through 6. The guidelines are designed to be used to target appropriate skills for intervention. Skills included in the check list include:…

This package was developed through the outreach activities of Project STEPS (Sequenced Transition to Education in the Public Schools), which developed an early childhood transition model to facilitate the development of state and community-wide systems for transition. The package covers four major component areas of transition: interagency…

This manual provides documentation and guidance for users of the public release data file for the School Readiness (SR) component of the 1993 National Household Education Survey (NHES:93). The NHES:93 was a random digit dial telephone survey of households developed by the National Center for Education Statistics and conducted by Westat Inc. For…

This document reports the proceedings of a conference on early childhood and family research sponsored by the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF). Presentations at the conference consisted of reports of research, literature reviews, descriptions of projects funded by ACYF, and commentaries on research and practice in Head Start.…

Two institutions initiated a long-term National Child Care Research Program in 1990. The program has two components: (1) examining the comprehensiveness of services offered by licensed center-based child care; and (2) documenting the development of children in licensed center-based child care. This publication reports the results of the first…

The ecological perspective suggests that distal socioeconomic status (SES) actually affects young children via the more proximate influences of parental beliefs and the quality of their home environments. A diverse sample of 189 kindergarten children, their families, and their schools provided data on SES indices, parental beliefs, the quality of…

Over the past 10 years, kindergarten classes have escalated their academic demands in order to prepare children to begin first grade. In tandem with curricular changes, many parents have elected to "hold out" their children from first grade for an additional year, and increasingly, schools are using kindergarten retention in response to…

This manual provides guidelines for early childhood programs and public school systems wishing to establish or formalize a transition process to meet the needs of preschool children moving into the public school system, based on the STEPS (Sequenced Transition to Education in the Public Schools) model developed in Kentucky. The manual begins with…

This paper presents a general rationale for investing in early childhood development (ECD) in Latin America that derives from scientific evidence about the importance of the early years in the formation of intelligence, personality, and social behavior. This rationale argues that the economic returns of ECD programs can be quite high (through…

This third annual Pennsylvania Progress Report is designed to convey to the citizens of Pennsylvania information on how well we are progressing on our road to achieving the National Education Goals. This report has three parts. The first part is a description of the major education initiatives undertaken in 1993 by Governor Casey. The second and…