Kindergarten

This report is a compilation of six blog posts on the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge winners.

Links to each of the six posts can be found on our special RTT-ELC page, and the PDF of the blog series can be found under "related files" in the column to the rignt.

Children undergo tremendous changes in how they think about the world throughout their pre-kindergarten and early elementary school years, presenting a challenge for educators who work in this age span. In a new book, Growing Minds: Building Strong Cognitive Foundations in Early Childhood, an array of experts expound on the development of children's understanding and thought processes, while also providing ideas for fostering this growth in ways that match what is known about human cognitive development.

Research on English language learners often focuses on whether children learn more when they are taught only in English or more when they are taught partly in the language they speak at home. A new paper by Wen-Jui Han, a professor at the New York University Silver School of Social Work, sheds light on a different question: how the characteristics of an ELL student’s school affects his or her ability to catch up academically with native English-speaking peers.

Han’s analysis, published in the Jan./Feb. 2012 issue of Child Development, demonstrated that although most ELL students with a Spanish-speaking background score lower than their English-speaking peers on kindergarten reading and math assessments, ELL students improved their academic performance faster than their native-English speaking peers. Han also found that when she controlled for a student’s school and home environment, bilingual students caught up to white, English-speaking students by fifth grade.

“I wanted to do this study because I really believe that when you can speak two languages, it’s an important asset,” Han said.

Thanks to the generosity of New York University, the Early Education Initiative is putting on an NYC version of "Watching Teachers Work", the event that drew big crowds in Washington, DC two months ago. We'll present findings from our latest policy paper on new tools for gathering data on what teachers do in the classroom (from infant/toddler prorgrams up through the PreK-12 system) and we'll hear from a principal, two teachers and a coach about how observation data can spur more effective teachings.

More details on our event page. Space is filling up so please RSVP if you haven't already. Hope to see some of our NYC readers there tomorrow morning!

If you've ever wondered whether 5-year-olds have more capacity for learning than we give them credit for, take a look at a clip from a Dutch television show for preschoolers:

Data can be a valuable tool in helping states and school districts implement effective policies and practices and teachers shape their instruction to meet the individual needs of their students. But how those data are used is just as important as the kind of information collected.

States are making progress toward building longitudinal data systems and implementing what the Data Quality Campaign (DQC) calls the 10 Essential Elements. For example, states have collected data on students’ standardized assessment scores and graduation status (for the list of the full 10, see the table below).  

According to DQC’s latest survey of states, however, most continue to struggle using their data systems to inform and guide policy decisions.

Ensuring that children receive a good education throughout their early years, from pre-kindergarten through third grade, is not just about helping them achieve academically.  It also means providing kids with teachers who can help them grow socially and emotionally year after year.

Ensuring that children receive a good education throughout their early years, from pre-kindergarten through third grade, is not just about helping them achieve academically.  It also means providing kids with teachers who can help them grow socially and emotionally year after year.

This is the final post in a series on winners of the Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC), the Obama Administration’s competition to spur improvements in early learning for children up to age 5.  Two weeks ago, we wrote about states’ plans to develop the workforce. Prior to that, we dove into states’ plans to improve early learning standards, birth to 5. The first two posts in this series described states’ plans to use and evaluate quality rating & improvement systems. Earlier this week we explored states’ plans for kindergarten entry assessments. In this post, we’ll revisit the invitational priority for sustaining and building upon early learning outcomes throughout the early grades of elementary school.

Last December, we wrote about states that included plans for either pre-K through third grade or birth through third grade improvement in their RTT-ELC applications. Today we’ll focus on the winners’ plans under this optional invitational priority. Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington focused on sustaining gains into the early grades, while two other winners, California and Minnesota, chose not to participate.