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. This major information gap is now being addressed. Maine has joined sixteen other states in a special project funded by the Packard Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Through this initiative, the participating states are creating expanded sets of measures related to school readiness. These will be used to identify and fill gaps in current knowledge, to track children’s school readiness over time, and to report to citizens and decision-makers regularly on what the measures say. Indicators will focus on young children from birth to the beginning of fourth grade.

Maine’s project is building on relevant data in Maine Marks by adding measures in several areas: family environment (for example, family support for learning, home environment stability, family health, family-community relationships, and learning environments), community conditions (including availability and quality of early childhood education programs, and family supports), availability of effective services (for example, health, child development intervention, child welfare, and income support services), and child development (including physical well-being, how children approach learning, and children’s motor, social, emotional, cognitive, and language skills). Initial results from this project should be available later in 2003.