Common Core State Standards

Tomorrow morning, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will markup the Strengthening America’s Schools Act, the latest ESEA reauthorization proposal from Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA). Ed Money Watch and Early Ed Watch have already recapped many of the changes proposed to accountability for schools and educators, as well as Title I and early learning programs. But we have yet to weigh in on the alternative proposal offered by the Committee’s Republican members, led by Ranking Member Lamar Alexander (R-TN).

Here are the three biggest differences between the two bills:

1. No love for Common Core. Alexander’s bill – the Every Child Ready for College or Career Act – includes detailed language to explicitly prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from exercising any direction, preference, or control over state’s academic content standards (like the Common Core State Standards) or achievement standards (i.e. cut scores that determine what it means to be college- and career-ready). This also has big implications for education data and reporting – more on that below.

Clearly concerned with federal overreach, this level of specificity around the Department’s role should appeal to critics of the common standards, claiming they are step one toward a “federal curriculum” or “national school board.” But Alexander is silent on a specific timeline or transition to college- and career-ready standards and tests – another increasingly divisive issue. Harkin’s bill would allow states a one-year “pause,” requiring implementation by the 2015-16 school year, even though both Common Core consortia say they will deliver their assessments on-time in 2014-15.

2. A mini-backpack for Title I funds. Another sharp contrast with the Harkin proposal: states could allocate Title I funds to districts based only on their number of eligible children – and federal funding could then follow the child to any public school in the district. Similar to a Romney campaign proposal (but on a smaller scale, without the option to use Title I funds to attend out-of-district public schools or private schools, or to pay for tutoring), it is unclear how many states would take advantage of this provision. How would it work in districts that lack other public school options – in particular, rural districts or districts where the overwhelming majority of schools are low-performing? Funding fights are always messy – how would school and district administrators respond to the change? The Alexander bill would also eliminate maintenance of effort requirements, meaning that states and districts would not be penalized for spending less on education from year to year, another potential sore spot for local school leaders.

3. States: choose your own accountability adventure. Unlike the Democrats’ bill, Every Child Ready for College or a Career would not require performance targets for schools. As Politics K-12 predicted, this was a major partisan sticking point between Harkin and Alexander. And transparency – rather than accountability – is the key policy lever in the Republican proposal. States can choose to differentiate between schools as they see fit.

Further, the Senate Republican proposal would prohibit the Department from specifying, defining, or prescribing any measure that states include in their accountability systems. Presumably, this means states could choose how they want to define everything from adequate student growth, to a cut score for college and career readiness, to how they define graduation rates. Would this undermine data comparability between states, including efforts to report a uniform graduation rate?

Alexander’s bill also doesn’t require states to identify any set percentage of Title I schools for improvement, leaving both identification and intervention entirely up to states (with the exception that students be allowed to transfer if their schools are identified). Given states’ history with setting rigorous goals and expectations for schools (as this new Education Sector report reminds us), Alexander’s bill would effectively set federal education policy back twenty years – to the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act.

Finally, Alexander’s bill would not require states to develop teacher or principal evaluation systems, but they could use Title II funds for these purposes. And unlike Harkin’s proposal, states could partner with for-profits, as well as nonprofit organizations or higher education institutions, to implement their plans for preparing, training and improving the quality of teachers and school leaders. Because the bill also eliminates the “highly qualified teacher” provision, states would not have to report, whether teachers are distributed equitably between Title I and non-Title I schools – another blow for accountability and a big difference between the Alexander and Harkin proposals.

The bottom line? Alexander’s bill doesn’t actually require states to do anything. And that’s a problem. As Chad Aldeman also notes in his smart take on the Alexander bill, Every Child College or Career Ready relies on assurances from states that they will implement rigorous and high-quality standards, assessments, and accountability systems. As Aldeman writes: “There are no serious standards for these things and, even if there were, there would be no way to verify state assertions.” If a plan is a poor substitute for policy, then an assurance as policymaking is downright laughable.

To help keep both draft bills – along with No Child Left Behind and the Obama administration’s waiver policy – straight, download this side-by-side cheat sheet to use during the markup. You can click also click on the image below to enlarge it. And of course, the always-helpful Politics K12 team has another side-by-side comparison that features the House Republican plan. 

Follow along with us tomorrow, and stay tuned to Ed Money Watch for continuing coverage.

Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, released yet another attempt to reauthorize No Child Left Behind: the Strengthening America’s Schools Act of 2013 (SASA). NCLB, due for a Congressional rewrite since 2007, has few remaining fans. But all previous reauthorization bills, including a bipartisan effort from Sen. Harkin and Mike Enzi (R-WY) last Congress, have failed miserably. While every Democratic Senator on the Committee signed off on the new draft legislation, Harkin could not sway key Republicans. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the Ranking Member on the Committee, plans to offer his own reauthorization legislation later this week, with partisan bills also expected from the House Education and Workforce Committee later this month.

Given the partisan nature of the Harkin bill and Congress in general, the odds for a successful reauthorization are more dismal than ever. Insiders agree: the latest Whiteboard Advisors tracking survey found that 87 percent of edu-insiders believe reauthorization will occur after January 2015. Add 37 states and Washington, D.C. with NCLB waivers into the mix, and there is little real pressure from the administration or from state and local policymakers to rewrite the law – especially a bill that would increase the role of the federal government and take away some of the flexibility states received in their waiver plans (more on that below).

Harkin’s bill is scheduled for a Committee markup next Tuesday. In the meantime, here are some of the key provisions we’re watching within Title I – the bill’s largest program – as well as areas for excitement and concern. Education Week, New York Times, and Huffington Post also offer excellent recaps of the proposed legislation.

Timeline and Interaction with NCLB Waivers

States, regardless of waiver status, must immediately begin implementing college- and career-ready assessments and reporting disaggregated student achievement data for any subgroup larger than 16 students. Otherwise, there is a two-year transition period to establish a baseline for performance targets and to identify schools for improvement based on the accountability provisions in SASA. This is a no-brainer: any reauthorization at this point cannot dismantle states’ NCLB flexibility overnight.

What’s far more interesting, however, is that Sen. Harkin is borrowing some ideas from the Department when it comes to waivers. Under SASA, state Title I plans become the new NCLB waivers – subject to Department-approval, including peer review, every four years. Any significant changes to standards, assessments, performance targets, or accountability would fall under the review and revision process. 

What’s brilliant (and quite welcome for education policy wonks) is that this provision eliminates the possibility that the next federal education law gets trapped in reauthorization limbo like NCLB. And it gives Congress more oversight over the renewal/waiver process, since it’s authorized explicitly in the law. Another welcome provision is that the bill requires states’ plans to include how they are improving access to full-day kindergarten if they fund it and to report the distribution of effective teachers – data currently unavailable to most parents, researchers, and policymakers.

Academic Standards

Under SASA, states would have to adopt college- and career-ready academic content standards in reading, math, and science by January 2015. States would also need to adopt achievement standards in all three subjects and, unlike previous bills, demonstrate that they are aligned with credit-bearing academic coursework, without need for remediation, in the state’s public colleges and universities. Without alignment to actual postsecondary standards, states’ new K-12 standards would be college- and career-ready in name-only. While the draft bill could go further, this is a move in the right direction.

The proposed legislation also weighs in on the growing backlash to the Common Core standards. SASA reiterates that the Department of Education cannot “mandate, direct, or control a State’s college and career ready academic content.” Finally, Sen. Harkin would require any state that uses Title I funds for early childhood education to develop early learning guidelines for preschool programs and early grade standards for students in grades K-3. These standards would be required to address multiple domains of learning, including social-emotional development and approaches to learning (ability to persist at a challenging task, work with others, make decisions) and align with the state’s college- and career-ready standards. While this could help encourage states to address the specific needs of its youngest students and how they learn best, it should be a requirement for all states, though, and not just those who use their Title I dollars for preschool programs.

Assessments

Not a lot has changed as far as the NCLB testing schedule, but SASA would require states to administer college- and career-ready assessments by the 2015-16 school year – with assessments subject to a technical review by the Department. This provision has big implications for both the Common Core consortia and other competitors, like ACT. And Bellwether’s Andy Smarick recently revealed that the Department is also revising its review process, so this issue will emerge regardless of an NCLB reauthorization.

Another big change in the Harkin bill is that assessments must measure whether students are performing on grade level, as well as identify the specific grade level at which the student is performing. In other words, states would be allowed to administer computer-adaptive tests that adjust to students’ abilities, using items at the 4th or 5th grade level for advanced 3rd grade students and simpler items aligned to 1st or 2nd grade standards for those that are below-grade level. By allowing states to accurately measure students’ abilities, teachers would have much better information to help students improve and stay on target to postsecondary readiness. Given the importance of grade-level reading and a growing number of states that retain students based on it, this provision is sorely needed.

School Accountability

Like the administration’s NCLB waivers, Harkin’s proposal for accountability includes aggregate and disaggregated measures of student achievement and growth and establishes annual targets for school performance. But unlike the waivers, SASA defines what sufficient academic growth is: a rate of growth by which students would be performing at grade level within three years or by the end of a grade span (like high school). Given that some states’ waivers include growth models that don’t actually measure individual student growth, a better definition is overdue. However, states would also be allowed to submit alternative growth models to the Department for approval, so any sub-par models in the waivers could, theoretically, still be used.

Annual targets can also be carried over from states’ NCLB waivers or approved by the Department anew. States on the latter track would set goals, based on 2014-15 data, which aim for all schools to be performing similarly to schools at the 90^th percentile over a “reasonable” amount of time and expect greater progress for lower-performing subgroups. Alternatively, these states could submit an “equally ambitious” set of goals for Department approval. On their face, these targets sound even more rigorous than those in states’ waivers. However, it’s hard to judge how difficult these targets would be without greater clarity on what, exactly, “reasonable” and “equally ambitious” mean. Notably, states’ goals cannot recognize a GED or other equivalency as a high school diploma, and super-subgroups would be eliminated in any new goals states develop.

But the most important – and welcome – change between SASA and states' waivers is that these targets actually matter beyond school report cards. As research shows, serious interventions – or the threat of them – could be the difference between schools improving or stagnating. Harkin’s bill would require state accountability systems to identify and intervene in focus and priority schools, along with schools failing to meet the same performance goals for two consecutive years. The Harkin bill is also more explicit about what happens to focus and priority schools if they do not improve than most state waivers: focus schools become priority schools after six years, while priority schools are subject to state takeover, restart, or closure if they are re-identified as a priority school after three years.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Sen. Harkin’s bill suffers in two areas: defining school improvement strategies and school report cards. In defining what schools must do to improve and what school data must be reported to parents, every Democratic Senator’s favored approach or data point appears to be included, leaving a jumbled mess of burdens and requirements for states, districts, and schools.

School improvement strategies – in addition to the specific provisions of the transformation, turnaround, whole school reform, restart, and closure models – must include over 15 common elements, from professional development, to improving coordination and access to early learning, to data-driven instruction, to positive behavioral interventions and supports. While these are all important factors to consider (and New America has written about the need to include preschool and the early grades in school turnaround), it’s a vague and inordinately long list to tackle in three years, especially if state and district capacity for school improvement is lacking.

SASA’s treatment of school report cards is even worse. After stating that school report cards must be “concise” and “easy to understand,” the draft bill includes over twenty data points that must be reported for all schools (NCLB required less than five). But there are actually far more than twenty – it could be hundreds. That is because nearly every data point must be reported by grade and all must be disaggregated by subgroup, and then cross-tabulated between subgroups. This data should be publically available. But does it all need to be reported in one place, where it could easily overwhelm parents and families? Ironically, despite all the data that must be included, there are still missing pieces – particularly enrollment in full-day and half-day kindergarten and chronic absenteeism.

There is a lot more (believe it or not) in the legislation, so New America will continue to cover the Strengthening America’s Schools Act on and the markup on Ed Money Watch and Early Ed Watch in the days ahead. Stay tuned.

Although the deadline for all students to achieve proficiency in math and reading has been lifted in most states by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers, 2014 test anxiety is high as ever. That’s because the 2014-15 school year is the first time 45 states and Washington, D.C. will be fully implementing the Common Core State Standards – including new tests that will be used as part of high-stakes accountability systems for schools and, in many cases, teachers and students. But when the time comes, will states stay the course? Practical concerns along with escalating political arguments already threaten the emerging system of common standards and assessments.

As I wrote previously, Alabama became the first state to exit the Common Core test consortia, opting instead to administer ACT-based assessments. By 2014, Alabama will likely not be alone in its choice. ACT is a well-established player that has spent decades building an organization with a reputation for providing valid, reliable assessments. Conversely, the state consortia are upstarts, attempting to build next-generation assessments and a precarious, multi-state structure to support and sustain the effort simultaneously. Naturally, states are left with many unanswered questions. How much will the new tests costs, and what are the technical requirements? Will the tests accurately reflect a student’s readiness? And will the assessments even be completed on time? In his smart take on the issue, Bellwether Education Partner’s Andy Smarick writes, the ACT “is the ‘Plan B’ that many states – concerned about the reliability and cost of the consortia-developed tests – have been looking for. It enables a state to remain committed to tough standards and rigorous assessments without putting all of their eggs in the basket of a fragile multi-state entity.”

But this kind of pragmatic concern isn’t the only threat to the common standards. While the Common Core is a state-led initiative (I repeat, the Common Core is a state-led initiative), the effort has been supported by private and corporate philanthropy and by the federal government. Specifically, the requirement to adopt the common standards to compete for Race to the Top funding is at the heart of increasingly polarized and politicized arguments against the Common Core. In their words, “Obamacore” amounts to a “nationalized curriculum” and “leftist indoctrination” that has been “forced on state governments” and “imposed on the children of this nation.”

Reasonable individuals easily dismiss most of these arguments. But reasonable arguments are often overshadowed, especially when national politicians and parties start getting involved. Just last week, the Republican National Committee adopted an anti-Common Core resolution, echoing these same divisive arguments.  And President Obama frequently touts that his administration “convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, all for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year” – adding credibility to their claims.

The problem may be about to get worse. As noted in our Key Questions on the Obama Administration’s 2014 Education Budget Request, federal funding for the assessment consortia is set to expire before the tests are fully launched. To provide continued support, President Obama’s latest budget includes a $9 million competitive grant initiative that could finance some of their ongoing work. The other $380 million of the “Assessing Achievement” program would provide states with formula grants for their current assessment programs, although leftover funds could go toward Common Core implementation.

However, a significant change would occur in fiscal year 2015: Assessing Achievement formula funding would be available “only to States that have adopted college- and career-ready standards that are common to a significant number of States” (emphasis added). While Race to the Top included a similar requirement, that program was a competition, where states could opt-out. NCLB waivers also require states to adopt college- and career-ready standards, but they do not have to be common ones. The Assessing Achievement program would mark the first time federal formula funding – typically available to all states – required adoption of common standards. If enacted, this requirement will undoubtedly add fuel to the “Obamacore” fire. On the heels of the president’s budget request, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Ia) is calling for the federal government to eliminate all Department of Education funding that supports or prioritizes the Common Core – and he doesn’t even mention the Assessing Achievement program.

What can we make of these threats to the Common Core? To date, most of its political detractors have been contained outside of the mainstream and have had little success gaining traction or passing legislation to reverse Common Core adoption. Will the RNC resolution, Grassley’s letter, or potential changes in federal funding have a greater impact?

On the other hand, the pragmatic concerns about how the new standards and assessments will be implemented are just that – pragmatic. Few could fault Alabama’s decision to choose the ACT over PARCC and SmarterBalanced. All three of the developing testing systems could prove to be a great improvement over current assessments, measuring competencies better aligned to postsecondary work and providing more useful information to students, their teachers, parents, and policymakers.

The important difference between the practical and political critiques is that states deciding to use the ACT system are not necessarily backing away from their commitment to the Common Core altogether. Yes, the assessment consortia should do as much as possible to allay the concerns of wavering states. And yes, policymakers and stakeholders should closely monitor all of the emerging for-profit and non-profit ventures to ensure their assessments, curricula, textbooks, and other resources accurately reflect the new standards. But in the end, any damage done to the Common Core from these pragmatic objections to the consortia is far less severe than what would happen in the unlikely, but not out of the question, case that “Obamacore” goes mainstream. Common Core supporters would do well to distinguish between the two. 

Last week, Early Ed Watch described two surveys that shed light on what teachers are thinking about the Common Core State Standards, which will soon affect what and how teachers teach in K-12 classrooms throughout country. This week's education podcast -- available through iTunes and the In the Tank blog -- discusses those survey results with Lindsey Tepe, our program associate at the Education Policy Program and a former elementary school teacher. Tepe dug into the results and found several surprises. Listen in to learn more.

An under-examined aspect of President Obama’s new early childhood education plan is his proposal to encourage states to create more full-day kindergarten seats – though only after states are able to guarantee access to pre-K for all 4-year olds from low and moderate-income families.

It seems that the stakes in the college-ready war have been raised. Today, Education Week broke the news that Alabama was pulling out as a participant in both Common Core testing consortia, PARCC and SmarterBalanced. Previously on Ed Money Watch, I noted that Alabama was getting ahead of the curve by implementing more rigorous assessments to measure students’ postsecondary preparedness before the new Common Core tests were ready to be delivered in the 2014-15 school year. I still believe this is a practical move for states that want better indicators now that their students are college- and career-ready (even better would be to collect evidence of students’ readiness based on their post-high school outcomes, like college enrollment, credit accumulation, and remediation rates).

In Alabama’s case, the new testing system was aligned to ACT’s battery of assessments – EXPLORE, PLAN, and the ACT. But as today's news and the state’s pending waiver request shows, this system is anything but temporary. In fact, the waiver request does not include their participation in either consortia as evidence the state adopted college- and career-ready assessments. Instead, the state touts their new system based on the ACT framework and indicates this is the system that will be in place in 2014-15. The news isn’t really news at all.

It was easy to see it coming. ACT was originally slated to work with PARCC to help develop their assessments, but wiggled out of the contract with plans to develop their own linked system of college- and career-ready assessments from kindergarten through high school into postsecondary. As I warned in my earlier post, for states like Alabama and Kentucky using the ACT and other established measures of college readiness, “it could be even more challenging to transition to Common Core benchmarks now that these states have institutionalized the ACT benchmarks.”

There’s a lot to be said for using ACT as a college-ready measure. The ACT is already accepted as a measure of readiness by those who actually make that decision: higher education institutions. ACT scores are used in college admissions decisions, and the ACT COMPASS exam is commonly used to determine whether students require remediation. On the other hand, no college has guaranteed they will use the PARCC or SmarterBalanced assessments for these decisions. While many higher education leaders are supportive of the Common Core effort, they have not yet had to make the ultimate decision that their standards for college readiness are the same as those adopted by forty-six states through the Common Core effort.  

Is this a sign of things to come? I wouldn’t be surprised if other states decide to go the ACT-route rather than stick with the consortia. That said, Alabama is less of a bellwether state than Massachusetts, Florida, or California. Leaving the consortia is also different than abandoning the Common Core entirely. There are still common academic standards across forty-six states and two comparable, high-quality assessments in development. But given that states seem to be considering the ACT as a serious alternative, it will be critical for both consortia to demonstrate their comparability to ACT and highlight any advantages their assessments offer.

More important, the consortia and Common Core advocates must engage more seriously with higher education to ensure their work is not a wasted effort. If the new standards promise to truly reflect “the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers,” the only way to fulfill that promise is for mastery of the Common Core to be accepted as the definition of readiness by both secondary and postsecondary education. States’ public higher education systems control specific policies related to financial aid eligibility, admissions, credit-granting, dual enrollment, and remediation, among others, that will either promote or inhibit the Common Core. In order for authentic implementation of the Common Core to happen, the new standards and assessments must permeate not only K-12 policy, but also these policies at the postsecondary level.

What can you do with $45 million and three years? Well, if you’re the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, you can confirm, empirically, what educators have always known implicitly: great teaching matters, it can be measured, and it improves student learning.[1]

That was one of the many findings released last week in the final report from the MET Project (Measures of Effective Teaching). MET has generated buzz in education and popular media alike, so I won’t provide a full synopsis here. For a basic summary, check out the Washington Post or Huffington Post rundown; for more thoughtful commentary, turn to posts from Chad Aldeman, Andy Smarick, Rick Hess, Marty West, and National Journal Experts Blog. Instead, I want to call attention to two big takeaways from the MET Project.

What teacher evaluations measure is just as important as how they measure it.

Much has been made of the finding that classroom observations are the worst predictor of student learning, compared to state test scores and student surveys. Some have questioned whether observations are worth the significant time and personnel costs involved to do them well. Tim Daly of TNTP even claimed that MET shows “the way that most teachers have been evaluated forever is completely unreliable.”

It’s easy to jump to that conclusion: MET used proven, high-quality observation tools, and observers were trained and certified on their knowledge of them. This isn’t the case with many of the classroom observations used across the country.  Still, observations are a critical component of teacher evaluations, particularly for those in the early grades and in untested subjects. And using observations typically receives greater support from educators compared to test scores. Finally, MET’s research found that although classroom observations didn’t improve the predictive power of the evaluation measure, they did improve its reliability – or stability – from year to year. 

Test scores also don’t have the same diagnostic power as classroom observations: as Amanda Ripley put it, “test scores can reveal when kids are not learning; they can’t reveal why.” Observations can provide teachers with valuable, timely, and clear feedback on their practice. Given their complexity and the timing of state testing, value-added measures are far less teacher-friendly – not to mention, limited in scope. Surely, great teaching involves much more than improving student scores on multiple-choice tests in two subjects.

To this end, it’s laudable that MET’s researchers also used higher-order tests (the SAT 9 Open-Ended Reading Assessment and the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics) to measure student learning. In some states, these assessments are more similar to the Common Core assessments they will offer in 2014-15. Presumably, states should want teacher evaluations that not only function well with today’s tests, but also those of the future.

Still, the tests MET used only consider English Language Arts and math skills. If the ultimate goal of evaluations is to measure whether teachers create learning environments where students achieve a broader set of outcomes (say, the knowledge, skills, and attributes it takes to be college- and career-ready), then there is still a long way to go in developing these systems. In 2014, many states will be simultaneously implementing new teacher evaluations and the Common Core assessments. But the best evaluation systems today do a far better job identifying teachers that improve student learning via state test scores than teachers that improve college and career readiness. MET’s findings suggest that states should carefully consider whether their evaluation systems are measuring the teacher attributes needed to meet the Common Core’s objectives.

How teacher evaluations are used is just as important as what they measure.

Part of the demand for research like the MET Project comes from the push to use teacher evaluation systems to make human resources decisions. Hiring, retention, placement, compensation, and tenure can all be affected. Some of the push can be attributed directly to the Obama administration: developing and using teacher evaluation systems like the ones in the MET study for HR decisions was a major component of both Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind waivers.

But there is still uncertainty surrounding teacher evaluation systems; the MET Project doesn’t provide a definitive roadmap or specific policies for states and districts looking to measure effective teaching. Many of its findings are ambiguous (with the exception that value-added measures must account for students’ prior test scores). The MET report is inconclusive when it comes to:

• whether student demographics should be included as a control in value-added models;
• precisely how to weight each component within a composite effectiveness measure: value-added data, student-perception surveys, and classroom observations;[2]
• whether measures like the Content Knowledge for Teaching (CKT) tests or subject-based classroom observation tools could be useful additions to composite measures of teacher quality; and
• who should observe teachers, how long these observations should last, and how many observations should occur each year.[3]

The teacher quality measures MET suggests are “better on virtually every dimension than the measures in use now.” But does that mean similar teacher evaluation systems should be used as the deciding factor for whether a teacher is fired? Or promoted? Or receives a pay increase?

Thorny questions, indeed. Yes, the new measures of effective teaching are promising, compared to most old-school teacher evaluation systems where nearly every teacher rated ‘satisfactory.’ But given MET’s lingering questions and inevitable measurement error in these measures of effectiveness, wouldn’t it make more sense to continue developing and refining teacher evaluation systems without rushing to use them for high-stakes decisions? Especially since most schools lack the capacity and resources to implement evaluations of the rigor and quality that the MET study used? States and districts should consider using the results from teacher evaluations in a more diagnostic manner: why not make these measures of effective teaching the first step in the process of providing professional development, determining who receives pay increases or tenure, and making decisions about hiring or firing – rather than the final step?

We’ve written before about kindergartners’ widely divergent school experiences, with some attending full-day kindergarten and ot