The primary purpose of California's Birth Through 3 Program is to increase the number of the most vulnerable children receiving high quality comprehensive services that meet their needs for early learning, health and family support.

The Office of Head Start developed the Early Learning Mentor Coach initiative to improve practices in Head Start programs. AIR conducted a study to describe the objectives, activities, approaches, strategies and other aspects of the initiative.

Transitional kindergarten aims to provide an additional year of early education to California’s youngest students to ensure that they obtain the necessary preparation to succeed in school. This research brief provides an initial glimpse of transitional kindergarten in its first year of statewide implementation.

The First 5 LA Family Literacy Initiative is a comprehensive program to promote language and literacy development, parenting knowledge and skills, and economic self-sufficiency among low-income families in Los Angeles County. Findings from the eight-year evaluation of this Family Literacy Initiative have shown significant growth in language and literacy skills among children participating in these programs.

This report answers two basic sets of questions about children's knowledge and skill acquisition during the kindergarten year. What gains are children making from the fall of the kindergarten year to the spring of the kindergarten year in their overall reading and mathematics knowledge and skills? What gains are children making in specific knowledge and skills (e.g., recognizing letters, recognizing numbers)?

The First 5 LA Family Literacy Initiative, which began in 2002, is a comprehensive program to promote language and literacy development for children and their parents, and to promote parenting knowledge and skills, with a goal of greater economic self-sufficiency among low-income families in Los Angeles County.

Using data from the final two rounds of the ECLS-B, a longitudinal study begun in 2001, this First Look provides a snapshot of the demographic characteristics, reading and mathematics knowledge, fine motor skills, school characteristics, and before- and after-school care arrangements of the cohort at the time they first began kindergarten.

This Issue Brief reports that the amount of reading and mathematics homework that students' teachers expected them to complete on a typical evening generally increased from first grade to fifth grade. Children in schools with higher percentages of minority students had teachers who expected more homework on a typical evening compared to children in lower minority schools. In addition, in all three grades, larger percentages of Black, Asian, and Hispanic children than White children had parents who reported that their child did homework five or more times a week.

This First Look used data collected from the final round of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) when most of the cohort was in the eighth grade. This project was intended to provide a snapshot of the eighth-grade round of the ECLS-K and make the data available to encourage more in-depth analysis using more sophisticated statistical methods.

The Common Core of Data (CCD) is an annual collection of public elementary and secondary education data administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and its collection agent, the U.S. Census Bureau. Data for CCD surveys are provided by state education agencies (SEAs). This report presents findings on public education revenues and expenditures using fiscal year 2006 (FY 06) data from the National Public Education Financial Survey (NPEFS) of the CCD survey system. Programs covered in the NPEFS include regular, special, and vocational education; charter schools (if they reported data to the SEA); and state-run education programs (such as special education centers or education programs for incarcerated youth).  

This Issue Brief reports the timing of entry into special education and the number of grades in which students receive special education across the primary grades. Data come from the ECLS-K.

This report provides an overview of data from the CCD. Nonfiscal data are presented for school year 2004–05 (except high school completion data, which are for school year 2003–04), and fiscal data are presented for school year 2003–04 (fiscal year 2004).1 For all surveys, the U.S. totals presented in the tables and in the text include only the 50 states and the District of Columbia. 

This Statistics in Brief examines the association between kindergarten enrollment status (e.g., repeating kindergarten or delaying entry into kindergarten) and children’s first grade reading and mathematics achievement, using data from the ECLS-K.

This First Look uses the second wave of data from the ECLS-B, a study of children born in the year 2001. It provides descriptive information about these children when they were about 2 years old, presenting information on selected child and family characteristics.

This Issue Brief uses information from teachers to examine the changes over time from first to third grade in how often young children are exposed to arts education in the general classroom. The brief looks at differences in these characteristics by level of poverty and/or urbanicity of the school.

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–99 (ECLS-K) is following a nationally representative cohort of children from kindergarten and into the later grades. The ECLS-K focuses on children’s school experiences beginning with kindergarten.

This report presents information about public elementary and secondary education for the 2003–04 school year. The data were provided by state education agencies through the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system.

This paper explores whether kindergartners’ reading and mathematics gains over the first 4 years of school are more strongly associated with particular risk factors alone or in combination, as opposed to the cumulative number of family risk factors a child experiences. Second, the analysis makes use of the reading and mathematics data collected at 4 time points to describe achievement growth over time, rather than using scores from two time points as a measure of academic gain.

This article introduces basic definitions and concepts important in discussions of early intervention for children with, or at risk for developing, emotional or behavioral disorders.