School Readiness and the Transition to Kindergarten in the Era of Accountability - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557668906 ISBN 13: 9781557668905

Publisher: Brookes Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

The follow-up to Pianta & Cox's groundbreaking The Transition to Kindergarten, this book updates readers on what's happened in early childhood education in the past seven years; clarifies influential changes in demographics, policies, and practices; and describes promising early education programs and policies.

More than 30 highly respected experts give readers the latest information on the most important topics surrounding early childhood education and kindergarten transition. Armed with this knowledge, administrators, program directors, and researchers will

• make the most of learning opportunities in early childhood classrooms
• build stronger connections between early childhood and elementary education programs
• work to close racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness
• understand health, emotion regulation, neurological development, and other
• factors that affect school readiness and academic success
• address the challenges faced by English language learners

A necessary resource for anyone with a role in shaping early education, this book will help readers develop programs that answer the demands of our high-pressure era of accountability—and start the youngest students on the road to school success.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert C. Pianta, Ph.D., is Dean of the Curry School of Education, Director of the Center for Advanced Study in Teaching and Learning and Novartis U.S. Foundation Professor of Education at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. A former special education teacher, Dr. Pianta is a developmental, school, and clinical child psychologist whose work focuses on assessment and improvement of teacher-student interactions and their role in fostering children's learning and development.

Dr. Pianta is a principal investigator on several major grants including the National Center for Research in Early Childhood Education and the Virginia Education Sciences Training Program, and he has worked closely with the Gates Foundation-funded Measure of Effective Teaching project.

He is the author of more than 250 journal articles, chapters, and books in the areas of early childhood education, teacher performance assessment, professional development, and teacher–child relationships, and he consults regularly with federal agencies, foundations and universities.

Martha J. Cox, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Developmental Science and Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Cox is known for her studies of families and young children and for her methodological contributions to the observational analysis of family interactions. Since the 1980s, she has studied the early years of family development and the processes of reorganization of families over the transition to parenthood and the transition to school with a special emphasis on the role of family relationships, including parent-child and marital relationships in children's successful adaptation to new challenges in the early years.

She is 1 of 10 principal investigators in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, a study of children from birth through the elementary school years. She is Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded North Carolina Child Development Research Collaborative (CDRC). A centerpiece of the CDRC activities is a longitudinal, collaborative, multidisciplinary research study focusing on multiple levels of factors associated with successful development of a diverse group of young children. Dr. Cox is also the Co-principal Investigator of the program project Rural Children Living in Poverty, funded primarily by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development but also by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The purpose of this program project is to understand the early school readiness of an understudied but important group of children: impoverished children living in low-resource, rural areas of the country.

Kyle L. Snow, Ph.D., is Program Director for research in early childhood education at Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International. He is also Principal Investigator for the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth (ECLS–B) cohort, a prospective longitudinal study of a nationally representative cohort of children studied from 9 months to kindergarten.

Dr. Snow has also held a faculty appointment at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and taught courses at Cornell University, American University, and Seton Hall University. Dr. Snow holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Castleton State College in Vermont and master’s and doctoral degrees in human development from Cornell University. Dr. Snow’s areas of specialization include infant and child development, the interface between early social and cognitive development, and children’s transition to school.

Ruby Takanishi, Ph.D., President and CEO, Foundation for Child Development, 295 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor, New York, New York 10017. Dr. Takanishi works at the Foundation for Child Development, which initiated a 10-year commitment to promoting the integration of early learning programs with K-12 education reform in 2003. Her interest in how research on children's development can inform public policy and programs is a lifelong concern.

Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Ph.D., Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and Education, Teachers College and College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, Box 39, 254 Thorndike, New York, New York 10027. Dr. Brooks-Gunn directs the National Center for Children and Families (http://www.policyforchildren.org). She is interested in factors that contribute to both positive and negative outcomes across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, with a particular focus on key social and biological transitions over the life course.

Richard M. Clifford, Ph.D., has training in educational administration with specializations in political science and research. He has taught and has served as a principal in public schools. For more than 25 years, he has studied public policies and advised government officials and practitioners on policies affecting children and families. His work focuses on two major areas: public financing of programs for young children and the provision of appropriate learning environments for preschool and early school-age children. Dr. Clifford is co-author of a widely used series of instruments for evaluating learning environments for children, including the Family Day Care Rating Scale (FDCRS; Teachers College Press, 1989), co-authored with Thelma Harms, and the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale (ITERS; Teachers College Press, 1990) and the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale0-Revised Edition (ECERS-R; Teachers College Press, 1998), both co-authored with Thelma Harms and Debby Cryer. In 1993-1994, Dr. Clifford helped establish and served as the first director of the Division of Child Development in the North Carolina Department of Human Resources and helped with the design and implementation of the state's Smart Start early childhood initiative. He is a past president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

Jason T. Downer, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist at the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Charlottesville. He is a clinical–community psychologist whose work focuses on the identification and understanding of contextual and relational contributors to young at-risk children's early achievement and social competence. Specifically, Dr. Downer is interested in the role of fathers in children's early learning, as well as the development of observational methods to capture valid, reliable estimates of teacher–child interactions in prekindergarten through elementary classrooms. Dr. Downer also has a keen interest in translating research-to-practice through school-based, classroom-focused interventions.

Bridget K. Hamre, Ph.D., is Research Associate Professor in the Curry School of Education and Associate Director of University of Virginia’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning (CASTL). Dr. Hamre’s areas of expertise include student–teacher relationships and classroom processes that promote positive academic and social development for young children, and she has authored numerous peer-reviewed manuscripts on these topics. This work documents the ways in which early teacher–child relationships are predictive of later academic and social development and the ways in which exposure to high-quality classroom social and instructional interactions may help close the achievement gap for students at risk of school failure.

Dr. Hamre leads efforts to use the CLASS™ tool as an assessment, accountability, and professional development tool in early childhood and other educational settings. Most recently, she was engaged in the development and testing of interventions designed to improve the quality of teachers’ interactions with students, including MyTeachingPartner and a 14-week course developed for early childhood teachers. Dr. Hamre received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her master’s degree and doctorate in clinical and school psychology from the University of Virginia.

Sharon Lynn Kagan, Ed.D., Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy and Co-director of the National Center for Children and Families, Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, Box 226, New York, New York 10027. Dr. Kagan is Professor Adjunct at Yale University's Child Study Center. Through her leadership in the field and her 15 books and 250 articles, Dr. Kagan has helped shape early childhood practice and policies in the United States and in countries throughout the world.

C. Cybele Raver, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Applied Psychology, The Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, New York University, Kimball Hall, 246 Greene Street, Room 403W, New York, New York 10003. Dr. Raver directs New York University's Institute of Human Development and Social Change. Her research focuses on self-regulation and school readiness among young children facing economic hardship, and she examines the mechanisms that support children's positive outcomes in the policy contexts of welfare reform and early educational intervention.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Excerpted from Chapter 1 of School Readiness and the Transition to Kindergarten in the Era of Accountability, edited by Robert C. Pianta, Ph.D., Martha J. Cox, Ph.D., and Kyle L. Snow, Ph.D.
©2007. Brookes Publishing. All Rights Reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

This volume is an extension of a previously published book, The Transition to Kindergarten, which I co-edited with Martha Cox (Pianta & Cox, 1999) and which was intended at the time to identify and frame issues related to the transition to school. In that volume, we assembled chapters pertaining to conceptual models of transition, evidence of the importance of focusing on transition, and discussions of an assortment of policies and practices that pertained to the transition period. In the final chapter, we speculated about four trends that would focus work in the decade that followed. These trends are a good starting point for this brief introduction to the present volume, and are presented next.

1. There is an emerging conceptual base that integrates developmental psychology and education. This conceptual base, solidly grounded in empirical work, has fueled increasing recognition by educators that 1) the development of young children relies greatly on contexts and 2) the early grades of school are a different, and somewhat critical, period for later school success. Thus, a new conceptual model for understanding the role of the school as a context for development is emerging and will likely influence how educators think about and prepare for the transition to school. . . .
   
   
2. The diversity of America’s families and school population is increasing rapidly and is likely to be the most pronounced among the younger age groups of children. Challenges of culture, language, family background, and processes and differences in the ways families view schools, all of which are formidable, will be exacerbated by these demographic shifts. These shifts raise issues of how schools will face the challenges of educating a diverse population, how communities work to support families and schools working collaboratively, and how the teacher work force will need to respond to student and family diversity.
   
   
3. Public school programs for young children (ages 3 and 4) will continue to increase. Universal prekindergarten programs for 4-year-olds will be the norm, programs for 3-year-olds will be common, and the age for entering school will be 1–2 years earlier than it is now for nearly all American children. . . . Schools will need to be more family–friendly. . . . Transformations of readiness definitions and assessment will also occur as programs are implemented for younger children.
   
   
4. A movement for accountability has emerged in American education in response to pressures, political and substantive, from all sides. From one perspective, such a movement holds potential for enhancing the quality of education offered to American children and ensuring their performance at higher levels. Clear communication of expectations, for example, can actually enhance transition processes when these expectations form the basis for constructive communication about a child between home and school and between programs. . . . However, dangers also lurk in the accountability movement. For the most part, this movement has ushered in a rash of new testing and assessment for children of all ages. . . . [that are] not consistent with the emerging conceptual model that underlies most educational practice for young children. Thus, the accountability movement is likely to produce serious tensions for educators interested in this period of transition. (Pianta & Cox, 1999, pp. 363–364).
   

Our speculations involved the focusing of developmental and education science on the effects of various contextual resources and processes on the development of children’s skills. We noted the emerging demographic shifts taking place and judged that early education programs would come to look increasingly diverse in terms of the ethnic backgrounds of and languages spoken by the children in attendance. It was clear at the time that investments in early education programming would increase to the extent that kindergarten would not be the first occasion in which most children would come into contact with a setting in which an adult was trying to teach them new skills that would be valued later. And we noted that the public would want to see a return on this investment. That we were reasonably accurate forecasters is not surprising; these trends were evident to most anyone familiar with the early childhood education policy landscape (Barnett, Robin, Hustedt, & Schulman, 2003; Committee for Economic Development, 2002; U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). What might be surprising to some is the rapidity with which these predictions appeared to become reality.

The expansion of publicly funded prekindergarten programs and the further inclusion of developmental and educational research in early childhood education has given rise to widespread popular support for universal prekindergarten in many states and the emergence of a model of elementary school that extends from preschool to third grade (see Chapter 5). Demographic shifts that pressure early schooling in relation to cultural, linguistic, and economic diversity have occurred far more rapidly than expected, and accountability is firmly entrenched in early childhood policy and practice (see Chapters 2 and 3), whereas 10 years ago, no had one predicted that all Head Start children would be tested or that there would be standards for preschool. These realities provide the context and impetus for this volume’s efforts to organize conceptual, policy, and practice initiatives that span early childhood and elementary education.

This volume situates the trends described in The Transition to Kindergarten in the realities of early education in contemporary America, less than a decade later. The first section outlines theoretical, policy, and programmatic issues that early childhood education and elementary education have in common. In some sense, these first chapters provide a conceptual and policy bridge between these two sectors of the educational service system. The second section addresses an area of work that was not a focus of the original Pianta & Cox (1999) volume: recent work on domains of child functioning related to performance in school. By including a section on child functioning, we purposefully focused on areas of recent conceptual progress and empirical findings—health, executive functioning, English language learners—in an effort to continue a forward-looking perspective. The third section of the book is devoted to family and community contexts as they relate to a range of issues pertinent to the connection between early childhood and elementary education. Our challenge to the chapter authors was to look forward and, as we did in 1999, to try to forecast the key challenges the field will face and to present solutions if at all possible.

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES AND EARLY EDUCATION

This volume will be published at a time of unprecedented interest in identifying, deepening, and exploiting the connections between early childhood and elementary education. There is no longer any question that providing early learning and educational experiences that are intended to contribute to children’s development of academic, social, and task-oriented skills (or their precursors) is an overarching goal of social and educational policy in the United States today (Barnett et al., 2003; Committee for Economic Development, 2002). The educational and developmental opportunities to which young children are exposed in child care, state-funded prekindergarten programs, Head Start programs, and their homes are leverage points for addressing concerns about K achievement, particularly those related to income and ethnicity or race. Federal, state, and local politicians view providing early learning and educational experiences as a political as well as an economic and social good: universal prekindergarten was on the ballot in California at the time this book went to press, and although the initiative did not pass, advocates contend it is only a matter of time before it does; Virginia may consider a universal prekindergarten program in near-term budget cycles; states and cities are considering new governance and administrative structures out of which to regulate and operate programs for families and young children that integrate social, health, educational, and child care services and funding streams; and an ever-growing number of states and school districts are adopting new and innovative staff development, training, and quality–assurance programs to improve the value of experiences offered to children in early education settings.

The central challenges and concerns of the field are now not only how to provide safe, organized preschool programs to selected groups of children and how to better connect families and schools but also how to offer all preschool children appropriate and effective early educational experiences that are aligned and included with state K–standards and reform efforts and that, for some children, provide opportunities for accelerated progress. How to construct delivery systems for the equitable distribution of such experiences, how to ensure the training and expertise necessary to support the value of such experiences, and how to evaluate the extent to which this delivery system is actually responsible for growth in children’s skills are the contemporary challenges to scientists and policy makers in early education.

These trends and concerns do not reflect a set of incremental, unrelated shifts in the field. Rather, as anticipated by Bogard & Takanishi (2005) and others (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2002; Gilliam & Zigler, 2001), a complete reconceptualization and redefinition of the loosely regulated, poorly aligned, and chaotically funded collection of opportunities for learning that are offered to children from ages 3 to 8 is taking place. Center-based and family child care, care at home in the family, Head Start, publicly funded prekindergarten programs, kindergarten, and the primary grades of elementary school are slowly being merged and included within a new system of early education and care that increasingly will be publicly funded and more highly regulated (Gilliam & Zigler, 2001). There is no reason to believe this process will not continue.

Although the informal system of early learning and care—composed of Head Start, child care, family day care, and public preschool—has functioned like a school for many years for children in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001), the pressures of accountability will no doubt force increasing inclusion and formalization. Since the early 1990s, the informal, unintentional nature of learning that takes place in the early learning and care “school†has been challenged by expectations from families, governments, and communities that children meet a set of performance standards, at least by third grade if not sooner. In every way that K–education is pressured by accountability, early learning and care opportunities are now under the same set of expectations (Blank, Schulman, & Ewen, 1999; Brown & Scott-Little, 2003) to intentionally contribute to children’s skill growth in ways that are measurable. I have argued elsewhere that these trends are merely phenotypic expressions of the underlying reality that elementary school starts at age 3 (Pianta, 2005).

A community-based preschool in a YMCA can hardly be described as school if the referent point is the local elementary school building. But in every important way, that conclusion is wrong. Consider that parents think child care (even family-based child care) is school. In the 2000 Current Population Survey, 52% of parents reported that their 3- and 4-year-old children (about 4 million not yet 5-year-olds) were “in school†(Clifford et al., 2005). A quick glance at the advertisements in many local newspapers each spring reveals that child care is being marketed in terms of its value for improving a child’s school readiness, and Amazon.com, specialty stores, web sites for parents, and big box retailers sell billions of dollars worth of educational materials to parents who in turn expose their children as early as the first months of life.

The K–12 establishment views preschool as school and is in fact banking on the dividends expected from early childhood programs to help improve lagging achievement in the era of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (Committee for Economic Development, 2002; see Chapter 2). Early education and care programs are under pressure from the K–12 establishment and from politicians and regulators to deliver children to kindergarten who are more ready and are, as a consequence, applying standards, accountability assessments, regulation of teacher training, and an assortment of incentives in an effort to ramp up the productivity of this sector of educational services. Like it or not, child care, preschool, home learning environments, and programs for 4-year-olds are being asked to do the same things K–12 does. These settings may not be physically housed in school buildings, but they are school. The debate is no longer whether children should be exposed to early education opportunities but rather how best to leverage these resources in ways that contribute positively both to children’s development and to society.

Closing Gaps

Results from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS–K), the best national estimate of children’s competencies as they enter school, shows that as of 1999, 31% of entering kindergartners were not proficient in recognizing (i.e., naming) letters, and 42% did not demonstrate positive behavior habits associated with successful adjustment in the classroom (West, Denton, & Germino-Hausken, 2000). However, a substantial proportion of that sample of children could read books when they arrived in school. It is also very likely that performance gaps are being underestimated; for example, the ECLS–K evaluates children’s readiness skills in terms of very thin estimates of performance in early reading and includes virtually no assessments of math, science, or cognition. In terms of social adjustment of entering kindergartners, kindergarten teachers describe areas of concern that suggest much larger gaps in real-life performance in school than what is reflected in estimates based on national surveys of parents. Teachers describe challenges in social skills, adjustment, and attention that are simply not well estimated in contemporary assays of readiness (Rimm-Kaufman, Pianta, & Cox, 2000). Early childhood education is being asked to close these gaps or at least narrow them. In fact, early education is being asked to accelerate the development of the nation’s lowest performing children and to contribute positively to the continuing gains of those likely to succeed anyway. And because children from affluent backgrounds often go to better preschools and receive ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1557668906
• ISBN 13: 9781557668905
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 392
• Editor: Pianta Ph.D. Robert, Cox Ph.D. Martha, Snow Ph.D. Kyle