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This booklet is in response to commonly asked questions from parents about preparing for, and entering kindergarten. Some questions parents ask are about district policy. Nebraska has over 200 individual school districts, each having their own board, superintendent, and policies. The Nebraska Department of Education provides guidance and assistance to these districts. Understanding what is state law (such as the entrance age) and what is district policy (such as the early entry assessment procedure) can be confusing. Parents are encouraged to talk with school teachers and administrators for specific guidance. Resources for parents are also presented. [This guide was also produced by the Nebraska Early Childhood Interagency Coordination Council (ECICC). Additional funding was provided by the Nebraska Head Start-State Collaboration Office. For the 2012 version of this guide, see ED602837.]

Over the past decade, researchers, policy makers, and practitioners have increasingly come to recognize the importance of quality in early care and education. Along with this recognition is compelling evidence that sound administrative practices help ensure high-quality learning opportunities for young children. Since its first publication in 2004, the "Program Administration Scale: Measuring Early Childhood Leadership and Management" (PAS) has been used across the country to reliably measure and improve center-based leadership and management practices. Data collected by the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership since 2011 are examined in this report to provide the most current picture of the administrative practices of a large, national sample of center-based programs. The PAS assessments included in this analysis were conducted by certified PAS assessors. To become certified, PAS assessors must first achieve reliability (a score of at least 86%) on a test conducted after four days of training on the tool. Next, they must conduct two PAS assessments within three months of reliability training. The completed assessments are reviewed by PAS national anchors for consistency, accuracy, and completeness. The data for this study consisted of approved PAS assessments collected during the certification process from 693 center-based early care and education programs representing 31 states and the District of Columbia.

The experiences and learning opportunities children are exposed to in pre-K give them a boost as they enter school. However, the positive effects of pre-K attendance on children's academic and cognitive skills become smaller and sometimes disappear by third grade due to non-attenders "catching-up" to their peers. To make pre-K programs more effective, it may be key to create policies and practices that strengthen instruction to support children's unconstrained skills, such as vocabulary, problem-solving and critical thinking. This brief examines patterns of children's performance on assessments of different types of skills in the fall and spring of kindergarten for children who attended pre-K and their classmates who had no prior pre-K experience. The authors explore factors that may be related to reasons why growth in pre-K attenders' skills slows during the kindergarten year, in turn helping non-attenders quickly "catch up" to their peers. This brief concludes by providing recommendations for policy and practice.

This joint position statement is acknowledge the importance of early intervention (EI) service coordination and recognize the expertise and needs of the professionals who provide this service. Because of the complex nature of service coordination and the essential role of service coordinators in the EI process (Bruder et al., 2005; Childress, Nichols, & Schnurr, 2019; West, Duggan, Gruss, & Minkovitz, 2018), it is the position of the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) of the Council for Exceptional Children and the IDEA Infant & Toddler Coordinators Association (ITCA) that service coordinators must have the knowledge, skills, administrative support, professional development, and resources they need to provide the highest quality services to children and families. Service coordinators in the United States and in international programs need administrative support and supervision from leaders who understand their role and appreciate the distinct responsibilities of the position. While decisions about hiring, compensation, and the numbers of families served per service coordinator are often made at the local program level, leaders must take into consideration the complexity of the work and the specialized knowledge and skill set necessary to support the unique population of families of infants and toddlers with delays or disabilities. With those considerations in mind, it is imperative that compensation and the workload required of service coordinators reflect the significant demands faced by these professionals. [This joint position statement was collaborated with IDEA Infant & Toddler Coordinators Association (ITCA). The Early Childhood Personnel Center (ECPC) supported this work.]

In Multiple Instance Learning (MIL), models are trained using bags of instances, where only a single label is provided for each bag. A bag label is often only determined by a handful of key instances within a bag, making it difficult to interpret what information a classifier is using to make decisions. In this work, we establish the key requirements for interpreting MIL models. We then go on to develop several model-agnostic approaches that meet these requirements. Our methods are compared against existing inherently interpretable MIL models on several datasets, and achieve an increase in interpretability accuracy of up to 30%. We also examine the ability of the methods to identify interactions between instances and scale to larger datasets, improving their applicability to real-world problems., Comment: 25 pages (9 content, 2 acknowledgement + references, 14 appendix). 16 figures (3 main content, 13 appendix). Submitted and accepted to ICLR 22, see http://openreview.net/forum?id=KSSfF5lMIAg Revisions: v2) Added additional acknowledgements v3) Updated to ICLR camera ready version

In this paper, we study a novel behavior developed by certain tree-level scalar scattering amplitudes, including the biadjoint, NLSM, and special Galileon, when a subset of kinematic invariants vanishes without producing a singularity. This behavior exhibits properties which we call $\textit{smooth splitting}$ and $\textit{semi-locality}$. The former means that an amplitude becomes the product of exactly three amputated Berends-Giele currents, while the latter means that any two currents share one external particle. We call these smooth splittings 3-splits. In fact, there are exactly $\binom{n}{3}-n$ such 3-splits, one for each generic, interior triangle in a polygon; as they cannot be obtained from standard factorization, they are a new phenomenon in Quantum Field Theory. In fact, the resulting splitting is analogous to the one first seen in Cachazo-Early-Guevara-Mizera (CEGM) amplitudes which generalize standard cubic scalar amplitudes from their ${\rm Tr}\, G(2,n)$ formulation to ${\rm Tr}\, G(k,n)$, where ${\rm Tr}\, G(k,n)$ is the tropical Grassmannian. Along the way, we show how smooth splittings naturally lead to the discovery of mixed amplitudes in the NLSM and special Galileon theories and to novel BCFW-like recursion relations for NLSM amplitudes., Comment: 49 pages, 13 figures. V2. Corrected typos; added Section 6.7 on smooth 2-splits in k=3 CEGM generalized amplitudes

This document supports high-quality Child Outcomes Summary (COS) ratings by helping teams connect their observations of children's functional skills and behaviors with three child outcomes: (1) Positive Social-Emotional Skills; (2) Acquisition and Use of Knowledge and Skills; and (3) Use of Appropriate Behaviors to Meet Needs. Effectively aligning functional skills and outcomes will help Part C early intervention and Part B, Section 619 preschool special education program teams improve their outcome measurement. By making connections between provider and caregiver observations with the three child outcomes, it becomes increasingly natural for teams to identify a child's functional skills, align those skills to the three child outcomes, and determine an accurate and consistent Child Outcomes Summary (COS) rating.

The goal of early intervention and early childhood special education is to enable young children with disabilities to be active and successful participants during their early childhood years and in the future. Child outcomes are the benefits that children and families experience as a result of early intervention or early childhood special education services. This document helps teams think about measuring a child's use and integration of functional skills to participate in their everyday routines. This resource will help teams further their understanding of the following questions: (1) What makes a skill functional?; (2) How does context help align functional skills with each of the three outcomes?; and (3) How do teams assess functional skills?

Over the last several years, a growing number of cities have invested in early care and education for 3- and 4-year-old children, known as "preschool." This paper aims to aid cities in planning preschool programs by outlining a range of factors to consider. We largely do not make recommendations, but rather try to identify a range of options so communities can choose a course that best meets their needs. We focus on nine major components: (1) Governance and Administration -- Some cities govern their program through a new agency, and others add the program to an existing city agency. Some assign responsibility to the school district. Cities also need to determine whether to administer the program directly, contract out the services, or run a hybrid model; (2) Financing and Cost - Most localities have identified revenue on top of their state preschool funding. They have employed a range of strategies, including ballot measures, property taxes, and general funds; (3) Eligibility and Pace of Scale -- Some localities strive for universal access, while others target eligibility based on income. Local programs also differ in how rapidly they plan to scale; (4) Enrollment and Outreach -- Cities should mount serious efforts to reach out to families and maximize enrollment; a number of design dimensions and enrollment pathways are presented; (5) Structural Program Features -- When planning for preschool programs, local leaders will consider several structural design questions; (6) Workforce -- Building a high-quality workforce is critical to the success and sustainability of a preschool initiative; several factors are presented; (7) Program Standards and Supports for Program Implementation -- Local leaders will decide what program standards and supports will be a part of preschool programs; (8) Continuous Improvement and Evaluation -- Many programs have implemented systems of quality improvement. Quality rating and improvement systems (QRIS) and research partnerships are two elements; and (9) Integration with Other City Services -- Cities have created models that help families access other services more easily by integrating preschool with other local services. [This report was funded by CityHealth.]

The quality of early childhood programs plays a crucial role in improving outcomes for children. Play-based practices are considered a vital component in early childhood development as they offer opportunities for children to learn and grow. Despite this, the field is still trying to understand the role of teachers in facilitating play and their beliefs and practices related to play, as well as how to best support these practices. The study was grounded in methodology developed within the Paths 2 Play (P2P) project, using definitions from the LEGO Foundation's white paper on play facilitation as a starting point. The study specifically looked at the training processes within aeioTU, a Reggio Emilia inspired early childhood program in Colombia, exploring how learning through play is understood, conceptualized, and practiced, and the degree to which materials support it. The aeioTU program is centered on child-led play, exploration, projects, and aesthetic expression. The study was conducted against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and commenced during the period when children were learning from home. Later, as learning shifted to hybrid and in-person formats, the study shifted to centers. The research focused on gaining insight into the concepts and interpretations of learning through play among train the trainer teams, teachers, and caregivers. Data was collected between June and December 2021 from 55 teachers across 7 municipalities. A small study was also conducted, consisting of video observations and interviews with teachers and parents. The small study took place at two aeioTU centers in Cartagena, Colombia, where 6 teachers were followed through their professional development process. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, all data collection was carried out remotely. [For "Measuring Teacher Facilitation of Playful Learning. Research Note," see ED628956. For "Play Related Beliefs and Practices in Colombia: Implications for Policy & Practice. Policy Brief," see ED628957.]

State-funded preschool is already offered in mixed-delivery settings in most states, meaning that along with public schools, children are also served in settings such as child care centers, Head Start agencies, and private schools. However, just 39% of 4-year-olds and 14% of 3-year-olds were enrolled in publicly-funded programs, such as state-funded pre-K, special education, or Head Start in the 2020-21 school year, demonstrating many children still lack access to these programs. Increasingly, decisionmakers and advocates are proposing that one part of the solution to ensuring more children have access to state- and other publicly-funded programs may lie in increasing enrollment slots available to children in other settings beyond school- and center-based classrooms, such as in family child care homes (FCCs). In the 2019-20 school year, just 29 of 62 state-funded pre-K programs reported that they allowed FCCs to be included in their program; and of the 24 states that allowed it, only 10 states were able to report enrollment -- with most serving less than 1% of preschool children in home-based settings. This leaves the knowledge base on what works in supporting FCCs in publicly-funded programs extremely limited. In the "Conditions for Success," we have outlined conditions or policies that states could establish that may set up FCC educators for meaningful inclusion in state-funded programs by synthesizing the literature base on high-quality pre-K and on learning in home-based settings. We outline what is known about high-quality pre-K and demonstrate that it could be possible for states, cities and localities to provide high-quality, publicly-funded pre-K in home-based settings if attention is paid to how states provide structures and supports for educators and families.

The "State of Preschool 2022" annual report covers the 2021-2022 school year and is NIEER's 20th report tracking preschool enrollment, funding, and policies state-by-state. This report focuses on the recovery since the 2020-2021 school year, where we are compared to before the pandemic, where we've come over the last two decades, and what needs to come next. Across the 44 states, DC, and Guam that funded a preschool program in 2021-2022, 32% of 4-year-olds and 6% of 3-year-olds were enrolled, an increase if 13% from the prior year, but still 8% below the pre-pandemic high. This pattern was seen in nearly every state. States spent $9.51 billion on preschool and also used $393 million in COVID-19 relief funding, without which inflation-adjusted spending would have declined. A big concern is the preschool workforce where we found unprecedented teacher shortages as well as waivers to education and specialized training requirements resulting in fewer qualified teachers in preschool classrooms. Yet few states provided incentives for teacher retention or recruitment. Over the last 20 years, preschool enrollment has more than doubled and so has inflation-adjusted spending. Spending per child in 2021-2022 was $6,571, essentially the same as it was 20 years ago after adjusting for inflation. Most children continue to lack access to high quality preschool. Though seven states currently working towards universal preschool offer a glimmer of hope - California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and New Mexico. Success in these states could dramatically alter the early childhood education (ECE) landscape nationally. In the report, NIEER calls on states to take stock of their state's ECE system and calls on the federal government to provide more support to states. [For "The State of Preschool 2021: State Preschool Yearbook," see ED620548.]

Personal experience, common sense, and science all confirm that temperatures are rising across the United States and around the world. Record-setting heat waves are occurring with greater frequency and lasting longer than ever before. This working paper is the first in a series focusing on the ways that environmental conditions shape young children's development. Heat is just one component of a set of interrelated conditions that affect how children's bodies and brains develop. This working paper offers a summary of current knowledge about how heat impacts developing biological systems.

Philadelphia's Preschool Program (PHLpreK) has recently concluded its seventh year, following its initiation after a 2015 referendum approving the creation of a universal pre-K program for children ages 3 and 4. NIEER has been evaluating the program since its inception, focusing on program quality, components, and children's learning and development. This year's report highlights the consistently high to moderate quality in emotional support and classroom organization, despite the program's expansion. However, instructional support scores remain low. For the first time since 2018-19, the evaluation assessed children's developmental gains, showing improvements in executive functions and literacy, but lower gains in receptive vocabulary and mathematics compared to pre-pandemic cohorts. The report underscores the importance of continuous improvement and data-driven strategies to enhance preschool quality and effectiveness. [This report was funded by the Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC) of Philadelphia.]

The process and results of defining neighborhoods may look different depending on the purpose. In this brief, the authors focused on how neighborhoods in Chicago are defined. The initial goal of this work was to answer questions about how access to and enrollment in school-based pre-kindergarten (pre-k) may have varied by neighborhood characteristics. In conducting this work, the authors used a data-driven method for characterizing neighborhoods that leveraged publicly available census data and allowed for consideration of many neighborhood characteristics simultaneously. This method resulted in a parsimonious set of five neighborhood groupings in Chicago that simplified how the relationship of neighborhood characteristics to a host of educational and other outcomes was understood. This brief shares the approach to defining neighborhood groupings and their characteristics and the findings about them. First, the authors review prior neighborhood research and ways of characterizing Chicago community areas and neighborhoods, outlining how the current work builds on these previous efforts. Next the data-driven method for grouping neighborhoods is presented and the neighborhood groupings are described. Finally, the potential uses and implications of the work is discussed. The hope is that others in Chicago (or elsewhere) find this approach to defining neighborhood groupings useful -- both for conducting research studies and providing services or resources.

As pre-kindergarten (pre-k) expands across the country, school districts are making choices about where to place pre-k classrooms and developing policies for how families can apply and who is enrolled. In doing so, districts are pulling policy levers that influence students' access to pre-k. Research shows that some families have less access to pre-k than others, which contributes to inequitable enrollment within districts. This study explores whether and how Chicago's school-based pre-k system was more equitable after the district implemented a set of policies focused on changing access to and "enrollment" in school-based pre-k. The outcomes from Chicago's efforts offer key insights for other school districts implementing similar efforts nationwide. [For the research report, see ED612485.]

As pre-kindergarten (pre-k) expands across the country, school districts are making choices about where to place pre-k classrooms and developing policies for how families can apply and which children are enrolled. In doing so, districts are pulling policy levers that influence students' access to pre-k. Research shows that some families have less access to pre-k than others, which contributes to inequitable enrollment within districts. This descriptive study explores whether and how Chicago's school-based pre-k system was more equitable after the district implemented a set of policies focused on changing access to and enrollment in school-based pre-k. Specifically, we compare patterns of enrollment and geographic access (i.e., distance from home to a school with pre-k and number of pre-k classrooms nearby), and use multilevel logistic regression analyses to examine how access was related to enrollment for different student groups before and after the policy changes. Results show that both access to, and enrollment in, full-day pre-k expanded substantially among Black students, lowest-income students, and students living in mostly-Black neighborhoods, even as overall school-based pre-k enrollment remained relatively constant. There was a modest association between access to and enrollment in full-day pre-k (but not any pre-k), and this relationship became stronger following the policy changes, especially for high-priority student groups. Findings demonstrate that the geographic distribution of school-based pre-k (particularly full-day) may be an important policy lever for addressing inequities in student access and enrollment in Chicago, and have implications for other school districts implementing similar efforts nationwide. [For the research snapshot, see ED612486.]

Unfortunately, today's typical pre-pandemic preschool/kindergarten curriculum often consisted of memorizing meaningless bits of information and then regurgitating that information on a test. The dilemma for educators is that the current teach-to-the-test curriculum is based on reaching short-term goals in order to improve test scores rather than on developing long-term intellectual goals. The report discusses how the Covid-19 pandemic is providing an unexpected pause in education. This pause affords educators the perfect opportunity to create a new meaningful curriculum, a new paradigm, for preschoolers and kindergarteners. This new curriculum should be based on what is known about child development and what is known about how children construct knowledge.

At state and local levels, home visiting programs may use one of several mechanisms to collect and store data from families and clients who participate in home visiting services. States that are interested in integrating home visiting data with other early childhood data must often navigate the different ways in which home visiting data are stored and accessed and understand whether or how those systems are able to interact with other early childhood data systems. The purpose of this resource is to (1) discuss common ways home visiting data are stored at the state and local levels; and (2) provide recommendations for how data integration leaders can navigate these data storage systems when integrating home visiting data with other early childhood data.

While home visiting services are an important component of the early childhood (EC) landscape, few states include home visiting data in their early childhood integrated data systems (ECIDS). An ECIDS links together data from different early care and education programs to generate data used to support program and policy decisions. One reason for the lack of home visiting data in many ECIDS is that home visiting programs are often housed in departments of health, while ECIDS and other EC programs, such as preschool and child care assistance programs, are typically overseen by departments of education, human services, and social services. Effectively integrating home visiting data into states ECIDS requires strong data governance. Governance bodies have authority to oversee the maintenance, integration, appropriate use, and confidentiality of data. This resource discusses the importance of developing data governance bodies that include home visiting programs in order to facilitate comprehensive integration and use of data to inform early childhood policies. It includes examples of state data governance structures and recommendations for how home visiting leaders can be engaged in data governance.

Home visiting programs typically collect sensitive information about family characteristics, risk factors, and services received. States may choose to integrate these data with other early childhood data to learn more about the reach and effectiveness of the services and supports that families receive. As more states begin to integrate data across early childhood programs, data integration leaders should consider how the privacy and security of home visiting data are maintained when shared across organizations or integrated with other early childhood data. This resource describes the various types of entities, laws, and regulations that ensure the data privacy and security of home visiting data when they are used or integrated. To get data integration leaders the information they need to ensure privacy and security, we also include a series of questions for leaders to ask, research, and seek to answer prior to integrating home visiting data with other early childhood data. Data privacy means that data providers (e.g., families, home visitors, or home visiting programs) are aware of how their data will be used, shared, or reported. One component of data privacy is ensuring the security of home visiting data or safeguarding these data from being accessed by individuals or organizations that do not have permission to use or share these data.

Over the last decade, state efforts to build stronger data infrastructure and integrate data about early childhood services have continued to grow. A stronger data infrastructure supports states in more easily linking data across programs, which in turn makes it easier to analyze and use that data to answer important policy questions. An Early Childhood Integrated Data System (ECIDS) is a type of data infrastructure being developed in some states. An ECIDS integrates early childhood data, such as data at the child, family, program, and workforce level, collected from a variety of early learning services across different state agencies. However, home visiting data are often excluded from a state's ECIDS. As states work to develop ECIDS, leaders need to identify funding to adequately support data systems that are inclusive of home visiting so that these data can be used for future planning and policy development. The purpose of this resource is to share strategies and state examples that state leaders may use to plan for costs associated with integrating home visiting and other early childhood data. This resource also identifies potential funding sources for different stages of data systems planning and development, staffing and administration, and analysis and use. This brief presents the following four strategies for funding data integration activities, based on information collected from states through surveys and interviews: (1) Allocate funds for data system planning; (2) Leverage large data infrastructures; (3) Ensure sufficient staffing to support data integration work; and (4) Identify on-going funding for analysis and use of collected data. For each strategy, the authors first describe common costs of an ECIDS that may require additional funding that states leaders should consider. State examples are provided for each strategy to highlight how states are making use of funding opportunities to plan, develop, administer, and use their data systems. Possible funding opportunities are summarized at the end of the brief.

Since 2011, the Alaska Performance Scholarship (APS) has rewarded Alaska students who excel in high school with over $88 million in scholarships to help cover the cost of in-state postsecondary education. This report covers the high school, postsecondary, Alaska residency, and workforce outcomes of the APS program between 2011-Fall 2020. [For "Alaska Performance Scholarship Outcomes Report 2020. 2011-Fall 2019," see ED606225. This report was prepared by the McDowell Group.]

In spite of what is known about the impact of effective leadership on program quality, leadership development systems are fragmented and there is a lack of sustained, systematic oversight to guide the early childhood education (ECE) program leadership profession (New Venture Fund, 2018). Goffin (2013) notes that a clear consensus about the role, definition, and development of leaders is lacking, and advancing cohesiveness in early childhood leadership capacity as a profession is critical. The McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership, with the support of the Foundation for Child Development, recently conducted a study to determine whether there was consensus among ECE leadership stakeholders about the need for a unified professional framework for onsite administrators of early learning programs. Whether leaders are in schools, centers, or licensed family child care homes, is there consensus on the core competencies needed to sustain learning environments in which children, families, and staff thrive?

Early educational interventions, such as Head Start, have been widely recognized as an effective way to mitigate the negative effects of poverty on early learning and development (Camilli, Vargas, Ryan, & Barnett, 2010). In the past decade, there has been a strong expansion of early childhood programming, including Head Start and state-funded prekindergarten programs. However, the cost of the programs calls into question the extent to which this expansion can be maintained. A tension exists between serving as many children as possible and providing the most impact with limited economic resources (e.g., Barnett & Hustedt, 2011; Steuerle, Reynolds, & Carasso, 2007), making the study of program design such as length and intensity of programming critical to efforts to serve low-income or at-risk children in the most efficient fashion. This paper reviews two frequently cited studies that looked at Head Start programs, the nation's largest early educational intervention, and examined the impact of one program factor, intervention dosage, on children's school readiness outcomes. In the two studies, program dosage was defined as the amount of services children received, and was measured as the duration of program enrollment (i.e., one year versus two years) and the intensity of the program (i.e., half day versus full day).

Licensed family child care (FCC) programs serve millions of children and families annually and tend to serve more vulnerable families than center-based programs. Low-income families, families needing infant and toddler care, and families that are Hispanic or African American are more likely to place their children in FCC programs than in center-based care (National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance, 2019; Porter, Paulsell, Del Gross, Avellar, Hass & Vuong, 2010). Additionally, because FCC programs tend to offer more flexibility in scheduling, families who require child care during extended or irregular hours are more likely to enroll their children in family child care (Henly & Adams, 2018). Despite the critical need for FCC, the United States has seen a 48% decline in licensed small FCC homes between 2005 and 2017 and a 21% decrease in licensed large FCC homes between 2005 and 2017 (National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance, 2019). Data also revealed a 51% decrease in licensed FCC programs receiving subsidy payments between 2005 and 2017 (National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance, 2019). Taken together the data show an alarming trend in the loss of FCC programs and, with their closure, the loss of financial child care assistance for some of the most vulnerable children and families. In 2015 the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership at National Louis University launched a new initiative, Taking the Lead--A Family Child Care Leadership Academy. Taking the Lead (TTL) has enrolled over 100 FCC providers in six cohorts since its inception. TTL has served as a vehicle for professional achievement, advancing the knowledge base and skill set of FCC providers in the Chicagoland area. TTL is delivered as a hybrid model that includes face-to-face classes and online coursework, as well as mentoring calls, emails, and group texts. Through reflective practice, supervised field experiences, and job-embedded activities participants explore how maintaining successful home-based business practices foster and maintain respectful, positive relationships with children and families. For this study, data were aggregated from the last three completed cohorts to explore four important questions: (1) Does participation in TTL improve participants' knowledge and skills on topics related to business and professional practices, including the state's professional development and quality improvement systems? (2) Does participation in TTL improve the quality of business and professional practices as measured by formal Business Administration Scale for Family Child Care (BAS) assessments? (3) Does participation in TTL lead to changes in quality recognition and improvement system (QRIS), accreditation, or credentialing status? and (4) Does participation in TTL help stem the decline in FCC programs?

Defending the Early Years released a survey to better understand the impact COVID-19 has had on young children, their families, and their teachers. Schools, centers, and childcare providers were forced to close their doors as the world implemented social distancing measures to slow the spread of the new deadly virus. This survey was written to capture the experiences of parents and teachers of young children, a population often overlooked when discussing education. The survey contained 39 questions in three sections: demographics, parents, and teachers. Utilizing a mix of open-ended, multiple-choice, and Likert scale questions, respondents were asked about their experience with online learning/remote schooling, including participation, expectations, ease of adjustment, benefits, challenges, and concerns. This report documents the findings based on an analysis of the responses collected. The authors begin by sharing the demographic data. Then they provide an overview of the online learning/remote schooling participation, expectations, and reports of adjustment. Next, they share the benefits, challenges, and concerns of both parents and teachers. Finally, the authors offer some suggestions for parents and teachers based on their understanding of the data. The hope is that by amplifying the voice of parents and teachers of young children, we can continue to protect and invest in childhood.

In this report, Defending the Early Years (DEY) offers offers some thoughts and suggestions for supporting young children through COVID-19. Topics discussed include: (1) falling behind; (2) communicating with grandparents, family, and friends; (3) routines; (4) play; (5) time to teach skills; (6) screen time; (7) talking with children; and (8) tips for parents from a veteran preschool teacher. These are stressful times but perhaps most challenging for parents of young children who are trying to do the impossible -- to care for young children and work from home, while worrying about finances, everyone's health and safety, and many other concerns. It is hoped that these ideas and resources will help the reader to navigate these uncertain days, reduce stress, and to help keep families safe and well.

Even though many of Alaska's students are getting a good education, historically Alaska has some of the largest achievement gaps in the country. Compared to other states in America, Alaska ranks at or near the bottom in reading and math scores. This document is a call to action. Thousands of Alaskans have stepped up to answer this call and have demonstrated through Alaska's Education Challenge that they are unwilling to accept their state's current results. Parents, students, educators, policymakers, tribal leaders, partner organizations, and local school boards have worked together to create a shared plan for improving Alaska's system of public education. This document outlines the three primary components of that plan: (1) Public Commitments--An invitation to all Alaskans to support a thriving and successful public education system; (2) Positive Trajectories--Measurable targets that will hold Alaskans accountable to their students; and (3) Prioritized Strategies--A menu of options for districts, schools, and families to drive improvement.