___ Web Resources ___ The following links were selected by the editors of Education Week to provide further reading on these subjects. These links take you off the washingtonpost.com Web site. • The Children's Defense Fund argues that quality child care is a key to school success. • "Long-Term Effects of Early Childhood Programs on Cognitive and School Outcomes" -- a 1995 report by the group Future of Children. • "Child Care and Early Education Program Participation of Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers" -- a 1996 statistical brief from the National Center for Education Statistics. • Early Childhood Education On-Line contains information on childhood developmental stages, issues in early childhood, and advocacy group contacts. E-Mail This Article Printer-Friendly Version

Education Week

Research has shown that the first few years of life are critical for a child's cognitive development and learning. But early care and education in this country _ a hodgepodge of public and private programs, child-care centers, family day-care homes, and preschools _ has been called a nonsystem by experts in the field.

Affordable child care is often not the best child care. Although some programs have been able to strike a balance between holding down costs to families and offering attractive pay and benefit packages to their employees, they are far and few between. Quality child care for low-income working parents remains largely unavailable.

Head Start, created in 1994 to bring the education, health, and nutrition benefits of the federal Head Start preschool program to low-income pregnant women and children from birth to age 3, is among the federally funded programs designed to address that gap. In the spring of 1999, Westat, a Rockville, Md., research organization, found that Head Start classrooms were faring well but that there were areas where improvement was needed.

Many of the nation's young children already are faltering when they start kindergarten and achieve far below their potential during the early grades. In 1994, 42 percent of the nation's Grade 4 students were unable to reach even the basic achievement level in reading. In 1992, most Grade 4 students _ 82 percent _ were not proficient in math.

Young children, given the opportunity, could be grasping rudimentary math and science principles far more than current early-childhood curricula allow them to. Research suggests that large learning gaps already exist among children when they come to school and that those gaps often persist through high school.

In the early 1990s, a massive new federal effort to track children's learning and development from the start of school to the end of Grade 5 was launched by the National Center for Education Statistics.

The study is the first of its kind to probe children's early learning experiences on a grand scale. In all, hundreds of assessors are individually testing 21,000 kindergartners in 1,000 public and private schools and interviewing the children's parents and teachers. The first results from the study are not expected until 2000.