Suchergebnisse

This issue brief reflects NCCP's continuing commitment to ensuring that every low-income child enters school with the skills to succeed, and that policymakers have access to the very best research to create policies that use public resources in the most effective, smartest way. It is based on a meeting convened through NCCP's Project THRIVE to identify and promote solutions to emerging issues that impact young children's healthy development and school readiness. The brief is being jointly published by Project THRIVE, through which NCCP serves as a resource to the Maternal and Child Health Bureau-funded State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (ECCS) systems program and Pathways to Early School Success, NCCP's on-going project to help policymakers, program administrators and practitioners address barriers that get in the way of reducing the achievement gap for young low-income children.

Virtually all State Early Childhood Comprehensive System Initiatives have adopted or identified indicators for monitoring program performance and child outcomes related to early childhood systems. These are primarily based on nationally recommended indicators or on state initiatives. However, although a functional set of indicators is needed to monitor progress of ECCS initiatives across the states, there is no one overarching set of indicators consistently being used. The challenge for states' ECCS leadership is to select an indicator set that is both comprehensive enough to monitor system developments and specific and limited enough to be useful and manageable. This Short Take reviews the characteristics of good indicators and proposes 36 indicators, based on a review of the literature, an analysis of key national indicator sets, and a comparative review of indicators set out in State ECCS reports and plans.