Indicator: 24 - Children Showing Appropriate Progress
Why This Is Important
A large and growing body of research highlights the critical relationship
between early childhood experiences and successful life-long outcomes.
The responsibility for providing support systems and resources that
result in positive outcomes for young children is a shared one.
Families, early childhood teachers and caregivers, community members,
health care professionals and policymakers all contribute to the
well-being of young children.
Maine has not had an agreed upon common set of measures to track
children's readiness to enter school. Some useful information is
available (for example, from screenings done when children first
enter school), but such data is not available consistently state-wide.
This major information gap is now being addressed. Maine is one
of sixteen states chosen to participate in a special project, "School
Readiness Indicators: Making Progress for Young Children."
Supported by the Packard Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation and
the Ford Foundation, this major initiative has the following objectives:
- To create a set of measurable indicators defining school readiness
that can be tracked over time at state and local levels
- To have states and governments adopt this indicators-based definition
of school readiness, fill in the gaps in data availability, track
data over time and report findings to their citizens, and
- To stimulate policy, program and other actions to improve the
ability of all children to read on grade level by the end of third
grade.
Data from this special project should begin to be available in
the next year or so.
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