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PATHWAYS TO EARLY SCHOOL SUCCESS

Effective Preschool Curricula
and Teaching Strategies
Lisa Klein



Jane Knitzer

September 2006

ISSUE BRIEF NO. 2

The National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) is the nation’s leading
public policy center dedicated to promoting the economic security, health, and
well-being of America’s low-income families and children. Founded in 1989
as a division of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University,
NCCP is a nonpartisan, public interest research organization.

PATHWAYS TO EARLY SCHOOL SUCCESS—ISSUE BRIEF NO. 2

Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies
by Lisa Klein and Jane Knitzer
This issue brief explores lessons from research and practice about the role of intentional curriculum
and professional development and supports for teachers in closing the achievement gap in early literacy
and math for low-income preschool-age children. The aim is to help policymakers and administrators
integrate this emerging knowledge more rapidly into their decisions to support teachers. It is part of
a series of reports from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) that address the question
“What will it take to ensure that young low-income children succeed in the early school years?” In other
issue briefs, NCCP has focused on the importance of strategies to promote the social and emotional
competencies of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers known to be foundational for effective learning (see
Pathways to Early School Success: Helping the Most Vulnerable Infants, Toddlers, and Their Families,
and Resources to Promote Social and Emotional Health and School Readiness in Young Children and
Families—A Community Guide, as well as other publications in the series: Promoting the Emotional
Well-Being of Children and Families at www.nccp.org).
AUTHORS
Lisa Klein is Principle of Hestia Advising and was formerly the Vice-President of Early Education at
the Kauffman Foundation.
Jane Knitzer, Ed.D., is Director at NCCP and Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health at
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She has contributed many important studies
on how public policies can promote the healthy development of low-income children and better support
families, particularly those who are most vulnerable.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank the participants at the meeting in November 2005 who generously gave their
time and shared their wisdom, experience, and insight to inform this brief. We also greatly appreciate
the comments made by Rachel Chazan-Cohen, Herb Ginsburg, Susan Landry, Martha Moorehouse,
Bob Pianta, Barbara Wasik, and Anne Wolf who reviewed initial drafts of the document. We also want
to thank Jana Martella and the Council of Chief State School Ofﬁcers and Marty Zaslow and Child
Trends for sharing their ideas during the planning of both the meeting and the brief. And as always,
we are grateful to our funders, Ruth Mayden and Lisa Kane, of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, without
whose support the meeting and the brief would not have been possible. But we also want to thank
them for their steady commitment to the achievement and success of young low-income children and
their families. Our appreciation too, to the NCCP staff, in particular to Meredith Willa for assistance
transcribing the meeting discussions, to Carole Oshinksy for her tireless editing of the brief, and Telly
Valdellon for her layout and production expertise.
Copyright © 2006 by the National Center for Children in Poverty

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
How This Issue Brief is Organized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Section I: Setting the Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Key Principles About Effective Early Learning Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Four Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Why a Special Focus on Curriculum and Teaching Strategies to Improve Early Learning Outcomes
for Low-Income Children? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Section II: Stretching the Early Education Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Strategy 1: Intentional Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Strategy 2: Professional Development and Effective Teacher Supports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Teacher Supports: What We are Learning About the Best Way to Help Teachers Deliver Intentional
Curriculum and Effective Practice in the Classroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Section III: Expanding the Knowledge Base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Evaluating Early Education Learning Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Evaluating State Preschool Programs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Section IV: The Role of Local-Level Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Section V: Take-Home Messages, Implications, and Recommendations for the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Boxes, Tables, and Figures
Box 1: Joint Position Statement on Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Box 2: Characteristics of a High-Quality Intentional Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Box 3: Structural Quality versus Process Quality Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Box 4: Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Constructs & Scales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Box 5: Evaluations of Selected Prekindergarten Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Table 1: Verbal Interactions of Children 10 Months to Age 3 Years, by Socioeconomic Status . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Figure 1: Academic Abilities of Entering Kindergarteners by Family Income . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Figure 2: U.S. Four-Year-Olds in Immigrant Families Enrolled in Pre-K/Nursery School,
by Parents’ Country of Origin, 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Appendix A: Meeting Participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 3

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

“High quality early learning is like a ‘life jacket’ for low-income kids. They need the lifepreserver; whereas middle and upper-income kids already know how to swim and are not
dependent on this to get ahead.”
Jean Layzer, ABT Associates and NCCP Meeting Participant

This issue brief, based on a meeting of a group of distinguished researchers, educators, and policymakers convened by the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) explores lessons
from research and practice about the role of an intentional curriculum and professional development and supports for teachers in closing the achievement gap for low-income preschool age
children. The aim is to take stock of emerging knowledge about how to increase low-income
children’s achievement in early literacy and early math and to explore the implications for how
administrators and policymakers can best integrate this knowledge into their decision-making.
A special focus on curriculum and teaching strategies in preschool programs is important for
two reasons. First, many low-income children in early learning settings fall behind early and
remain very much behind their peers in reading and math. Second, we are learning that closing the achievement gap depends greatly on providing teachers with the professional development and supports that can help them more effectively promote early literacy and early math
in the context of nurturing and emotionally supportive classrooms.

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• On average, the association between teacher education and child outcomes is small and
there is still no ﬁnal determination about how much education and training is needed and
what is the best way for to offer this so teachers are more effective in the classroom.
• Overall, children achieve more when they have teachers with more education and training
closely tied to knowledge about early childhood and child development.
• New and existing teachers who do not have advanced degrees or training can be effective in classrooms with high concentrations of low-income children if they have ongoing
consultation, mentoring, and feedback that is directly tied to their classroom practice.
• Some research on state pre-k programs shows positive results, other research suggests there
are signiﬁcant program quality problems and implementation challenges, and more rigorous research designs and methods would help determine how effective these programs are
for increasing achievement, particularly with low-income children.
• There are examples of school districts using an intentional curriculum and teacher supports that have achieved powerful results with ethnically diverse and low-income children.

Implications and Recommendations
The research in this brief has implications for state and local policymakers, early learning
administrators, teachers, families, community leaders, and researchers. Recommendations for
each of these key stakeholders groups follow.

For State and Local Policymakers
• Ensure that requirements for obtaining more education are linked to requirements for
training in early childhood development or a related ﬁeld.
• Allocate resources for state and local training in instruction to ensure the translation of
new knowledge about teaching, curriculum, and related practices actually reach teachers
on the ground.
• Invest in training strategies that provide direct feedback on classroom practice through ongoing consultation, mentoring, or coaching.
• Ensure that state incentives for quality early childhood programs include teacher-child
interactions, child-focused teaching, and content-driven classroom instruction.
• Invest in experimental research to determine the speciﬁc content, modules, and sequencing of curriculum that best predict increased achievement for low-income young children,
including the most at risk, across all settings.
• For the most challenged families, build in supports that address family and communitybased barriers to learning, such as child and family health and mental health.

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 5

• Provide release time, substitute teachers, and subsidies so teachers can take advantage
of professional development that helps them understand how young children learn and
develop, and to help them implement curricula used by the district.
• Align early learning curriculum and teaching strategies with kindergarten through grade 3
standards to sustain increased achievement.

For Teachers
• Participate in education and training that increases knowledge of the subject matter being
taught and understanding of how to teach young children.
• Participate in education and training that focuses on how young children grow and learn.
• Participate in training that focuses on the cultural traditions and practices and language
diversity of the growing number of immigrant and limited English proﬁcient children.

For Families and Community Leaders
• Join together to determine how effective preschools are in teaching early literacy and early
math to low-income preschoolers.
• Develop advocacy efforts to ensure that parents and community leaders have a voice in improving early learning outcomes and implementing an intentional curriculum and effective
teaching strategies across all preschool settings.

For Researchers
• Conduct experimental studies to determine the speciﬁc content, modules, and sequencing
of preschool curriculum that best predict increased achievement for low-income and the
most at-risk preschoolers.
• Conduct experimental studies across all early learning settings to test what content and
delivery methods of training best help teachers improve their classroom practice.
• Promote the development of new tools to measure classroom quality and predictors of
increased achievement.
• Translate research ﬁndings so that parents, teachers, and community leaders can understand whether the differences identiﬁed are meaningful and make a difference in children’s
achievement.

Conclusion
Closing the achievement gap is a large task requiring strategic planning and action at the
classroom, local, state, and federal levels. For children in the highest-risk families and poorest
communities, even the best early care and early learning opportunities will not be enough to
help them perform on a level consistent with their more advantaged peers. However, a strong
evidence base is showing that there are pathways to increase the early literacy and early math
achievement for low-income preschool-age children. The challenge is to use this knowledge
so that it gets into the hands of those working directly with the millions of low-income preschool-aged children across this country.

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INTRODUCTION

This issue brief explores lessons from research and practice about the role of an intentional
curriculum and professional development and supports for teachers in closing the achievement gap for low-income preschool-age children. The aim is to take stock of emerging
knowledge about how to increase low-income children’s achievement in early literacy and
early math and to explore how administrators and policymakers can use this knowledge in
decisions about improving prekindergarten.
It is based on a meeting of a group of distinguished researchers, educators, and policymakers
(see Appendix A) that NCCP convened to help explore the issues and challenges raised by
emerging research on intentional curriculum and professional development support strategies.
In this paper, an “intentional curriculum” refers to planned, organized, sequenced activities
and lessons focusing on academic readiness delivered through direct instruction that is ageappropriate and fun for young children.
Professional development refers to the education, training, and supports that teachers need to
be effective in early learning classrooms. The focus on professional development and supports
acknowledges the critical role teachers play in increasing the achievement of low-income children.
This brief is part of a series of reports from the National Center for Children in Poverty
(NCCP) that address the question “What will it take to ensure that young low-income children succeed in the early school years? This question assumes a new urgency in light of the
movement to expand preschool (pre-k) access and the complementary effort to align pre-k
instruction with kindergarten through grade 3 curriculum. In other issue briefs, NCCP has
focused on the importance of strategies to promote the social and emotional competencies of
infants, toddlers, and preschoolers known to be foundational for effective learning.

How This Issue Brief is Organized
Section I, Setting the Context, highlights key principles and challenges that impact all efforts
to ensure that all children succeed as they enter kindergarten, as well as the rationale for the
speciﬁc focus on intentional curriculum and professional development. Section II, Stretching the Early Education Paradigm, highlights two emerging, research-informed strategies
responsive to the key principles and challenges: the use of an intentional curriculum and effective teaching support strategies. Section III, Expanding the Knowledge Base, highlights
additional emerging research evaluating early learning strategies and state-funded preschool
programs. Section IV, The Role of Local-Level Leadership, provides an example of a districtwide early learning reform effort that encompasses a number of the emerging strategies and
has documented impressive results. The ﬁnal section summarizes the Take-Home Messages,
Implications, and Recommendations for policymakers and administrators, teachers, families
and community leaders, and researchers.
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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 7

SECTION I
Setting the Context

Key Principles About Effective Early Learning Strategies
To set the context for our ﬁndings, ﬁrst we highlight four key research-informed principles
about early learning that should frame all efforts to improve outcomes for young low-income
children.

Principle #1: High quality, continuous early care and education helps low-income
children do better in school.
Getting young children started on the right track is essential to getting them where they
need to go. Reviews of empirical research show that children are born eager to learn and that
learning occurs faster in the ﬁrst ﬁve years of life than at any other time.1 Economist James
Heckman’s research applies an economic principle to early learning and shows that “early success begets later success,”2 implying that children who do not have good early learning experiences are more likely to fail.
In fact, there is strong experimental evidence, primarily from early childhood demonstration
programs, that high-quality interventions beginning in the earliest years help children learn and
achieve.3 In addition, three large-scale descriptive studies looking at the relationship between
high-quality programs and child outcomes report positive gains for low-income children,4
But others have found that middle-class children beneﬁt from center-based, high-quality
early learning programs as well.5 However, most research shows that these programs are most
effective for low-income children.6 The most practical issue may be to consider the magnitude of the gain that is seen, with low-income and minority children generally making more
progress than their middle-income peers.7
There is a sizable amount of evidence that shows length of time in programs has a positive effect on children’s achievement. Low-income children make the most gains in prereading and
premath when they are in high-quality early learning programs for either more than 30 hours
per week, full-day programs, or programs for more than one year.8 New results from the
two-year follow-up to the Early Head Start (EHS) impact study show that the most positive
results for children were found when they went into formal preschool care after participating
in high- quality EHS programs.9

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Principle #2: Social-emotional development is the foundation for, and intertwined
with, early cognitive development.
During the past decade, an explosion of knowledge in both brain science and child development research underscores the importance of early relationships as the foundation for developing social and emotional competencies. Young children learn and perform well in school
as a result of stable and supportive social relationships that form the base for self-conﬁdence,
self-management, and the ability to get along well with peers and adults.10 Two years after
participating in EHS, parents reported that their children still had fewer behavior problems
and more positive approaches to learning when they were 5 years old.11
There is also evidence that links social-emotional development to early literacy and early
math. An age-appropriate ability to manage emotions, relate to others, and understand the
emotional cues of others can facilitate the development of early literacy and math skills. The
reverse is also true, so that helping children to succeed in early literacy and math can reduce
some behavioral and emotional problems.12
At the same time, research also tell us that young children who start preschool with antisocial or aggressive behavior are more likely to do poorly on academic tasks, be held back in
the early years, and be at greater risk for dropping out in the later school years.13 And there
is now evidence that preschoolers are being expelled from their classes for behavior problems
three times more than students in kindergarten-12 schools.14 Therefore, systematic attention
to social and emotional issues in the context of early learning is important to successful academic outcomes.

Principle #3: Formal early learning occurs in a variety of settings, including schoolbased, center-based, and home-based programs, so it is important to pay attention
to all settings when considering strategies to improve achievement and close the gap.
Currently, much of the focus in early learning is on state funded pre-k, which is largely
housed in public schools. However, preschool settings also include community-based child
care programs (public, private, faith-based, and Head Start) and home-based child care
(family, relative, kith and kin care). In fact, 62 percent of young children are in one or more
arrangement. State funded pre-k programs, Head Start, and preschool special education programs collectively served 35 percent of the nation’s 4-year-olds during the 2003-2004 school
year15 and only 17 percent were in state-funded pre-k programs.
There is limited research on the impact that different settings have on children’s achievement
in early literacy and early math. Some new evidence is however showing that increased letterword recognition and decreased aggression in children who participated in EHS were maintained regardless of whether they transitioned into community center-based child care, Head
Start, or public pre-k programs.16

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 9

Principle #4: Closing or reducing the achievement gap is not simple and requires
a comprehensive approach that goes beyond only efforts to improve what children
know and can do and must consider how families, schools, and communities can
support early learning and the transition to school.
This principle is perhaps the least explored; it reﬂects experiential knowledge that piecemeal
efforts (a new curriculum here, a new workshop there) are not likely to pay off. Instead, sustained strategic reform efforts that include comprehensive services and supports are required.
From this perspective, the challenge is not just choosing a curriculum, providing some professional development, or creating a program, but building a comprehensive early childhood
system where families and communities help support the social, emotional, and cognitive
growth children need to be successful as they enter and continue through school.

Four Challenges
At the same time, those seeking to improve early learning for low-income children also must
be responsive to four core challenges that make the task especially difﬁcult.

Challenge #1: The Achievement Gap or Readiness Gap Related to Income Status
is Real and Signiﬁcant
The achievement gap has been deﬁned as “the disparity in academic performance between
different groups of students.”17 The focus is often on kindergarten-12 students, but some
researchers are quantifying differences in knowledge in the preschool years. The study, Inequality at the Starting Gate, shows that before entering kindergarten, the average cognitive
scores of preschool-age children in the highest socioeconomic group are 60 percent above the
average scores of children in the lowest socioeconomic group.18 Another study found more
than a year’s gap between low-income and middle-class children on an array of cognitive and
academic achievement tests, with middle-class preschool children scoring signiﬁcantly higher,
on average, than the economically disadvantaged kindergarten children.19
A review of national data sets on preschool and child care shows that at age 4 years, children
who live below the poverty line are 18 months below the developmental norm for their age
group. By age 10, that gap is still present. For children living in the poorest families, the gap
is even larger, and neither time nor the ﬁrst years of elementary school have closed the gap.20
One of the most dramatic gaps has to do with the use of language, which is highly predictive of
school success. Many studies have recorded and analyzed the verbal interactions of children from
different socioeconomic levels from the time they were 10 months old until they were age 3 years
(see Table 1). A child growing up in a family on welfare could have heard 32 million fewer words
than a classmate growing up in a professional family by the time of kindergarten entry.21
Other research conﬁrms these ﬁndings. By the time children from middle-income families
with well-educated parents are in the third grade, they know about 12,000 words. At the
same time, children from low-income families with undereducated parents who don’t talk
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Table 1: Verbal Interactions of Children 10 Months to Age 3 Years, By Socioeconomic Status
Number of words heard per hour

Vocabulary words by age 3

Professional

2,153

1,100

Working Class

1,251

750

616

500

Welfare

Source: Hart, B. & Risley, T. R. (2003). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young children. Paul H. Brookes Publishing.

to them very much have vocabularies around 4,000 words, one-third as many words as their
middle-income peers.22
The achievement gap is so large that a study of over 14,000 preschool-age children concluded: “the magnitude of gains for poor children is simply insufﬁcient to catch-up.”23

Challenge #2: The Population of Young Children At Risk of Poor Early School
Achievement by Virtue of Poverty and Low-income Status is Large
Forty percent of all young children (9.6 million children) live in low-income families, 20
percent (4.6 million) of them in families with income less than the poverty level ($20,000 for
a family of four in 2006).24 Moreover, poverty and low-income status disproportionately impact children of color. Over 3 million young children of Hispanic descent (65 percent) and
2 million young African-American children (64 percent) live in low-income families, double
the percentage for white children.25
Why do these numbers matter? Because virtually all research points in the same direction: poverty and the hardships that come with poverty pose the greatest risk factors for poor academic and
other outcomes.26 In general, there is a linear relationship between academic success and income
(see Figure 1).27 In the aggregate, although there are many exceptions, children from low-income
families score well below the national average on reading tests compared to children from higherincome families, who score well-above.28
For poor children living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, the risks are even greater.
An analysis of the 2000 U.S. Census categorizes the country’s 65,000 census tracts into a childraising vulnerability index using 10 indicators reﬂecting social, educational, economic, and wealth
factors.29 Neighborhoods with the greatest number of “vulnerability” factors also have proportionately higher rates of young children. According to Charlie Bruner, an NCCP meeting participant, who carried out the analysis, “Poor neighborhoods are rich in young children.”30 This underscores the importance of also taking a community perspective and paying attention to where
young children live when considering how to change the trajectory for educational success.

Challenge #3: Young Immigrant Children and Children with Limited English Proﬁciency Face Additional Challenges Before They Begin and as They Continue in School
The infusion of children of immigrants in this country raises new challenges about how to
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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 11

Figure 1: Academic Abilities of Entering Kindergarteners by Family Income

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten
Class of 1998-99, Fall 1998. In Barnett, W. S.; Hustedt, J. T.; Robin, K. B.; & Schulman, K. L. (2004). The state of preschool:
2004 state preschool yearbook. Washington, DC: National Education Association .

promote language and literacy in young children, especially if their families are non-English
speaking. The Latino/Hispanic population is the largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority
group in the United States,31 but there are increasing numbers of immigrant children below
age 5 representing multiple countries and speaking multiple languages. It has been noted that
preschool participation for these children varies greatly.
Some believe the disparity is caused largely by ﬁnancial and linguistic barriers, while others
note differences in how families feel about formal preschool learning. Whatever the roots,
achievement levels of limited English proﬁcient children remain markedly below those of
their white, English-speaking peers, although research is showing that they can be successful
if they are supported in developing their home language while using their new language in
school.32

Challenge #4: The Quality of Child Care and Preschool Programs is Often Poor;
and Poor Children Tend to be in the Lowest Quality Settings
A large-scale study of child care found the overall quality so poor that 11 percent of all centers could actually harm children and another 64 percent had quality lower than the recommended level that the early childhood profession recognizes as necessary to promote achievement.33 Furthermore, poor and low-income children are more likely to be enrolled in settings
with lower quality than their more afﬂuent peers. A recent study found that early learning
classrooms comprised of at least 60 percent of children from low-income homes were rated
signiﬁcantly lower in quality indicators of teaching, teacher-child interaction, and provisions
for learning.34 And as they go on, typically the most disadvantaged children enter elementary
school with the fewest resources and the least-qualiﬁed teachers.35

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Figure 2: U.S. Four-Year-Olds in Immigrant Families Enrolled in Pre-K/Nursery School,
by Parents’ Country of Origin, 2000
Native-born

60%

Mexico

35%

Central America

43%

Dominican Republic

52%

Haiti
Hmong
Cambodia
Laos

60%
25%
29%
35%

Thailand

50%

Vietnam

47%

Pakistan/Bangladesh
Afghanistan
Iraq
former USSR
Africa, Blacks

47%
35%
43%
53%
61%

Source: Calculated by Donald J. Hernandez based on U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census 2000 data, 5 pct Public Use Microdata (PUMS) files.

Despite these conditions, new evidence shows low-income children in higher-quality settings
can begin to catch up to their peers. A study of high-quality Georgia pre-k found the lowest
income children made the most gains.36 In Oklahoma, while all children in high-quality preschool beneﬁted, low-income black and Hispanic children made the most gains.37

Why a Special Focus on Curriculum and Teaching Strategies to Improve Early Learning
Outcomes for Low-Income Children?
A special focus on curriculum and teaching strategies in preschool programs is important for
two reasons. First, although all young children are born ready to learn, many low-income
children fall behind early and remain very much behind their peers in reading and math.
Success in narrowing this achievement gap depends on providing young children with speciﬁc knowledge in preschool curricula before they start kindergarten.
Second, over the past decade there has been an exponential increase in our understanding
of how young children learn and how early experiences promote achievement. As a result of
this new research, there has been a fundamental shift in the way curriculum and professional
development are understood during the preschool years. We are learning that closing the
achievement gap depends greatly on providing teachers with the professional development
and supports that can help them more effectively promote early literacy and early math in
the context of nurturing and emotionally supportive classrooms. Designing and allocating
resources for these infrastructure supports poses new challenges and opportunities for policymakers and administrators that need to be part of the public dialogue about improving access
to and the quality of preschool learning.

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 13

SECTION II
Stretching the Early Education Paradigm

“What’s happening in the ﬁeld is the emergence of more speciﬁcity, which is to say it’s not
enough to say you need more hours of training, or more years of education. You have to
talk about the content and how to best deliver professional development and then relate it
to speciﬁc child outcomes.”
Marty Zaslow, Child Trends and NCCP Meeting Participant

This section explores the research and leading expert opinion on two key strategies: the use
of an intentional curriculum and improving teachers’ capacity to be effective through professional development and supports.

Strategy 1: Intentional Curriculum
The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), a leading national
organization dedicated to improving the quality of education and care provided to children
birth through age 8, developed a position statement on curriculum in conjunction with the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education (NAECS/
SDE). The goal, according to this position paper, is not to identify the single best curriculum, but to identify what features of a curriculum are most effective for what outcomes and
under what conditions.38
Recognizing the importance of curriculum to increase the achievement of low-income children, below we highlight the NAEYC and NAECS/SDE joint position statement for a highquality intentional preschool curriculum. (See Box 1.)

Box 1: Joint Position Statement on Curriculum
Policymakers, the early childhood profession, and other stakeholders in young children’s lives have
a shared responsibility to implement a curriculum that is:
• Thoughtfully planned
• Challenging
• Engaging
• Developmentally appropriate
• Culturally and linguistically responsive
• Comprehensive across all developmental domains
• Likely to promote positive outcomes for all young children
Source: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and National Association of Early Childhood Specialists
in State Departments of Education (NAECS/SDE) (2003). Early childhood curriculum, assessment, and program evaluation: Building
an effective, accountable system in programs for children birth through age 8. Washington, DC: NAEYC
< www.naeyc.org/about/positions/pdf/CAPEexpand.pdf>.

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Box 2: Characteristics of a High-Quality Intentional Curriculum
• Is research-based
• Emphasizes teachers actively engaging with children
• Includes attention to social and regulatory skills
• Is responsive to cultural diversity and English language learners
• Is not teacher-proof
• Requires new ways to measure classroom quality, teacher effectiveness, and student progress

NCCP meeting participants discussed what they believe is essential for an intentional
early learning curriculum. (See Box 2.) What emerged is consistent with the NAEYC and
NAECS/SDE position but emphasizes a few other points.

An Intentional Curriculum is Research-Based
A longitudinal study to identify important preschool predictors of elementary school reading success found that speciﬁc prereading skills such as knowledge of print (for example, letter
names), phonological awareness (for example, being able to rhyme), and writing (for example,
being able to print one’s name) were strong predictors of reading success well into elementary
school).39 Half of the differences in reading ability in children at the end of kindergarten could
be predicted from these same abilities measured at the end of their pre-k year when they were
4-year-olds in Head Start. The authors concluded that children who had begun to learn content
that included print, sounds, and writing during the preschool period were more likely to be
ready to read at the end of kindergarten, and more likely to be reading successfully in elementary school. An intentional curriculum incorporates explicit strategies that build these skills.
An intentional curriculum can be effective in mathematics as well as in literacy. In fact, there
is evidence that the two content areas overlap. Herb Ginsburg, an NCCP meeting participant, has described early childhood mathematics education (ECME) as the broad and deep
study of mathematics, which includes a connection to language and literacy.40 His research
shows that many preschool-age children have an “everyday mathematics”—informal ideas
about mathematics and methods for solving problems. However, they are often unable to express the ideas clearly or are unable to describe the methods in words.41 The language difﬁculty
may be one important reason why low-income children generally perform lower on tests of
mathematical abilities than middle-class children. The need to focus on mathematical language is articulated by both NAEYC and the National Conference of Teachers of Mathematics, whose joint position statement proposes that mathematics education emphasize both
language (vocabulary) and communication.42

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 15

An Intentional Curriculum Emphasizes Teachers Actively Engaging with
Young Children
Successful early learning occurs when both teachers and children are actively engaged. The challenge for teachers is to help children to think, explore, talk about concepts, and practice new skills.
This pedagogical approach requires far more than simply transmitting facts to the children and
emphasizes opportunities that foster higher-order skills. Optimally, early literacy teaching strategies allow teachers to explicitly and systematically help children develop a conceptual knowledge
base that underlies the meaning of words rather than only focusing on letters and sounds.43
One example of an intentional early literacy curriculum is Partners for Literacy (PfL). PfL is
a comprehensive, sequenced, and structured curriculum that emphasizes language development and literacy skills. The curriculum includes LiteracyGames, Interactive Book Reading
strategies, and scaffolding to promote early literacy skills and social/emotional competence.
The curriculum is appropriate for children from all income groups and for those with limited
English proﬁciency. PfL combines explicit intentional instruction and high levels of engagement of children with both teachers and their peers.44
The PfL curriculum uses scaffolding (see deﬁnition in box below) to promote oral language,
phonological awareness, print awareness, and alphabet knowledge in both formal (lessons
using opportunities to intentionally build on and expand language skills) and informal
(adult-child conversations) ways throughout the entire day in large groups, small groups, and
individual instruction.45
PfL is one of two curriculum currently being tested in 44 locations as part of a randomized
study of Even Start sites in the Classroom Literacy Interventions and Outcomes (CLIO)
study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and conducted by Westat Research
Corporation. The project is in its second year of implementation and results on achievement
for low-income children are expected in 2007.

Curriculum Concepts and Guidelines for Partners for Literacy
• Positive adult-child relationships are the foundation for learning language and literacy.
• Games rely on sequenced, integrated curriculum.
• All domains of child development are addressed.
• Adults provide Scaffolding* to promote early language and literacy.
• All staff must use culturally responsive practices and the curricula must be appropriate for
English language learners.
• Parents and teachers engage in instructional conversation with children when reading to them.
• Parents and teachers use everyday care-giving routines as opportunities to foster language and
literacy as well as social development.
• Teachers help children problem-solve and learn social skills.
• Teachers practice the 3 N’s: notice, nudge, and narrate in order to help children learn to attend
and follow directions.
__________
* Scaffolding is a teaching strategy that provides supports for children to build on existing knowledge so as to promote the development of
new skills and concepts.

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An Intentional Curriculum Includes Attention to Social and Regulatory Skills
Research on early brain development and the impact of a child’s earliest relationships and experiences makes it clear that children who have strong social, emotional, and behavioral skills
are more successful in the classroom. An intentional curriculum addresses both social and regulatory skills in addition to academic skills. It also focuses on promoting a warm and nurturing classroom climate and and encouraging interactions between teachers and children (as well
as among peers). Helping children interact positively with teachers and classmates, be excited
about learning, be willing to engage in new challenges, manage their impulses, and take turns
are key components of school success46 and important components of intentional curriculum.
One example of an intentional curriculum that pays special attention to social and emotional
skill development in the context of early literacy is Tools of the Mind.47

An Intentional Curriculum is Responsive to Cultural Diversity and
English Language Learners
There is a growing presence of young English language learners, children whose families
speak little or no English, in preschool settings. An intentional curriculum should be responsive to cultural diversity and children with limited English proﬁciency.48 Although it is clear
how important this is, our research did not surface any speciﬁc curriculum that exemplify
these principles.

An Intentional Curriculum is Not Teacher-Proof
While the dichotomy between child-centered and direct instruction has been a part of
the discussion about early learning in the past, the future conversation is more likely to be
around the kind and quality of instructional interactions that teachers should have with
children. According to new evidence, focused, direct, intentional interactions that are characterized by feedback loops about student performance have the greatest value for increasing
student achievement.49 This is not to be confused with what have been called “drill and kill”
approaches that have not been found to be effective for engaging children actively in the
learning process.
At the same time, it is also important to recognize that a curriculum itself, however rich in
activities and conceptual understanding of how young children learn, is simply a tool in the
hands of a teacher. Even the best curriculum can be implemented poorly, while a talented
teacher can make up for a poor curriculum.

An Intentional Curriculum Requires New Ways to Deﬁne and Measure Classroom
Quality, Teacher Effectiveness, and Student Progress
One of the consequences of the recognition of the importance of an intentional curriculum is
a parallel recognition of the importance of measuring how well teachers teach an intentional
curriculum. In turn, this is stretching the deﬁnition of quality that has long guided the early
childhood ﬁeld. To date, much of the emphasis on quality in research has been on structural
issues, such as the ratio of adults to children, or the overall group size, and on creating rich
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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 17

environments.50 Structural variables are usually deﬁned and monitored in part by state licensing regulations and national accreditation systems and are typically used as proxies for quality.
Much of the early research on child care quality looked at structural variables. In summary,
two factors are consistently related to better child outcomes for low-income children: lower
adult-child ratios and more time spent in programs.51
Now, the focus on measurements of quality early learning has expanded to include what
are called “process variables” of teaching. These include things like the actual experiences of
teachers and children in classrooms, teacher and child interactions in social, emotional, and
instructional areas, and how well teachers are teaching the content-linked aspects of the curriculum. The importance of process quality has been recognized for some time but hasn’t
been measured very well until recently. (See Box 3.)
New research is looking more at process quality and assessing how this impacts children’s
achievement. Measures of process quality are now being used to examine the actual interactions of teachers and children in classrooms and focus on the teaching of curriculum content.
When both measures of quality are included, additional ﬁndings emerge. The National Center
for Early Learning and Development (NCEDL), in its 2004 large-scale study of state-funded
pre-k, used the revised edition of the Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale (ECERSR), a widely used measure of mostly structural quality, as well as a new measure, the Classroom
Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), which looks at process quality, including the emotional
climate, classroom management, and instructional supports for learning. (See Box 4.)

Box 3: Structural Quality versus Process Quality Research
Structural Quality

Process Quality

Education Level of the Teacher

What Teachers Do (Practices) in classrooms

Teacher-Child Ratio
Class Size

What Children Do (Activities) in classrooms

Teacher Compensation

Box 4: Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Constructs & Scales
Socioemotional Climate and Quality
of Teacher-Child Interactions

Instructional Support

• Positive climate

• Instructional learning formats

• Negative climate
• Sensitivity
Classroom Management
• Lack of over-control
• Effective behavior management
• Productivity

18 Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies

• Concept development
• Quality of feedback
Academic Content
• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Social Studies

National Center for Children in Poverty

The pre-k programs in the study met the criteria for high structural quality set by NAEYC,
however, measures of teaching quality were lower than expected. Assessors rated the majority of
classrooms in the lowest range for instructional climate, found instructional quality was poor,
and noted that learning interactions between children and teachers occurred infrequently.52
Other researchers have studied structural quality in prekindergarten programs and, unlike
studies of child care, found no relationship between program quality and things like staffchild ratio or length of program day. This ﬁnding suggests that structural standards alone are
insufﬁcient for ensuring program quality or improved child outcomes.53
In England, a longitudinal study of new preschool curriculum that emphasizes literacy, numeracy, and scientiﬁc skills is looking at the effects of both structural and process quality,
with an emphasis on the latter. The ECERS-E, created by the research team as an extension
of the ECERS-R, adds subscales to reﬂect the more academic components of the curriculum.
Results on quality from over 3,000 children in 141 preschool centers showed that the new
measure was a better assessment of children’s cognitive progress, while the traditional version
was more sensitive to children’s social and behavioral development.54
Findings from these studies demonstrate the importance of deﬁning and assessing quality
early learning along multiple dimensions in order to determine what ultimately leads to improved achievement for preschool-age children.

Strategy 2: Professional Development and Effective Teacher Supports
“Teacher education is one of the active ingredients of preschool quality.”
Ron Haskins, Brookings Institution and NCCP Meeting Participant

Early lessons from research on the effects of an intentional curriculum point repeatedly to
the importance of teachers and effective teaching strategies. Teachers are the critical mediators through which learning, including content-linked learning, occurs in preschool settings,
whether they are in a school setting or a child care setting. Meeting participants all agreed
that curriculum does not stand apart from teachers, whose knowledge, theories, and belief
systems inﬂuence their instructional plans, decisions, and actions.
Meeting participants also acknowledged some fundamental challenges with the early childhood workforce. Despite the important role that teachers play, research has documented that
early childhood teachers are undervalued and underpaid. A study by the Economic Policy
Institute aptly entitled Losing Ground in Early Childhood Education found that wages and
beneﬁts have remained constant for the last 15 years, contributing to an industry with fewer
new entrants, lower qualiﬁcations overall, and high turnover rates.55
Although not the focus of this issue brief, clearly this reality contributes greatly to the challenge of improving the early childhood workforce. That said, it is still important to consider
what research tells us about other kinds of supports that can help teachers of young children

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be more effective even in the context of low wages and beneﬁts. Therefore, this section explores two core questions to which research provides some, albeit not deﬁnitive, insight:
• How important is teacher education and training for impacting classroom quality and
child outcomes?
• What is the best way to support teachers in the classroom so they can effectively teach
children when there is no strong curriculum in place?

Professional Development: What We are Learning About Formal Degrees
and Training
“While our study does not provide comprehensive evidence supporting a bachelor’s degree as
a teacher requirement, it and previous studies suggest children beneﬁt from effective teachers. We found that children made academic gains in classrooms where the teacher engaged
them in interactions that encouraged communication and reasoning, was sensitive and
responsive in her/his interactions with children, and constructed an atmosphere of respect,
encouragement, and enthusiasm for learning”
Carollee Howes, Donna Bryant, Margaret Burchinal, Dick Clifford, Diane Early,
Bob Pianta, Oscar Barbarin, and Sharon Ritchie. NCEDL Issued Statement. 2006.

One of the current policy strategies in early learning requires all lead teachers to have at least a
bachelor’s degree (B.A.). New studies raise questions about what best predicts children’s achievement: the advanced degree (B.A.), an increased understanding of child growth and development, or a combination of the two? There are also questions about how teachers can best acquire this new knowledge, through education-based course work or through training outside an
academic classroom. In early childhood professional development there is a distinction between
education and training. Education refers to activities that occur in the formal academic system
and lead to a degree, while training refers to activities outside the formal education system.56
Reviews of early childhood research have looked at the relationship between teacher education and quality child care that shows that the presence of a B.A.-level teacher with specialized training in early childhood education leads to better outcomes for young children.57 For
example, ﬁndings from the Cost, Quality, and Outcomes study suggest that teachers with a
B.A. or A.A. (associate’s) degree in early childhood education or a related ﬁeld have higher
structural quality classrooms.58
Marcy Whitebook conducted a review of the literature on center-based preschool for 3- and
4-year-olds. Eight studies of child care and Head Start speciﬁcally explored the contributions
of a bachelor’s degree and specialized training in early childhood to teacher behavior and
program quality. Results strongly suggest that the best results are found when teachers have a
bachelor’s degree and specialized early childhood training at the college level.59
In addition to studies of child care, several new, large-scale studies involving about 2,500
preschool and early elementary classrooms are looking at how indicators like teacher education
and training relate to changes in achievement. Findings show that on average, there is only
a small association between child outcomes and teacher training/experience and teacher’s
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education.60 The NCEDL pre-k study showed teacher education effects in particular are
small and are attributable to training closely tied to knowledge about child development.61
Another study found similar results: teacher education paired with specialized training in
early childhood is the key to increasing quality and achievement. Teachers with a four-year
college degree and a teaching certiﬁcate in early childhood were rated as creating a more
positive emotional climate and providing more learning activities than teachers with no formal
training in early childhood.62
A follow-up to the six-state NCEDL prekindergarten study looked at teacher education in
three ways: years of education, highest degree, and bachelor’s versus no bachelor’s degree.
Researchers also examined the data for the effects of state teaching certiﬁcation and the Child
Development Associate (CDA) credential. Data were analyzed to determine the predictors of
classroom quality and academic achievement, as well as to minimize the chance that results
could be due to classroom characteristics rather than teacher education. Findings show that
teacher education, training, and state certiﬁcation are not consistently related to improved
classroom quality or academic gains in children. Children in classrooms with teachers who
had bachelor’s degrees compared to teachers with associate’s degrees or less did better in math
achievement. The only other predictor of achievement was the CDA credential, which is related to increases in basic skills, such as naming letters, numbers, and colors but not with increases in higher order skills, such as receptive or expressive language or math. The researchers conclude that having a bachelor’s degree may be necessary for attaining high-quality early
learning but not sufﬁcient for increasing children’s academic achievement.63
Other studies of pre-k have examined the relationship between teacher education and child
outcomes. In a study of Georgia’s state-funded pre-k program, there was no difference in
child outcomes based on whether they had teachers with B.A’s, A.A.’s, or other technical
degrees.64 A recent study used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) to estimate the degree to which teachers’ reports of their
qualiﬁcations are related to student achievement and found no evidence of a direct relationship between the two. Although the degree did not appear to make a difference, teachers who
reported emphasizing reading, math, and didactic instruction had positive associations with
student gains in reading and teachers who reported using more computation, numbers, and
operations were associated with more student gains in math.65 These ﬁndings suggest that the
degree is less important than the way the teachers practice in the classroom.
Findings from all these studies suggest that even if the entire early learning workforce had a
four-year degree, it would still not be enough to insure classroom quality and positive child
outcomes unless they also have some specialized training in early childhood development and
how young children learn.
In the early childhood ﬁeld, the CDA certiﬁcate provides on-site training and mentoring to
teachers to meet the national credential requirements. The requirements for this certiﬁcation
are not as intensive as an A.A. degree, but it does represent demonstrated competency in interacting with young children. In the debate about what type of education and training lead to
the best results for children, the idea of reconsidering the CDA and how it can be part of an
effective professional development system has been raised.66
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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 21

Overall, there is still inconclusive evidence and more research needed about what type and
amount of education or training lead to better achievement for young children, but the importance of having teachers knowledgeable about early childhood development does seem clear.

Teacher Supports: What We are Learning About the Best Way to Help Teachers Deliver
Intentional Curriculum and Effective Practice in the Classroom
The reality is that most teachers who are working with low-income children do not have the
combination of a high educational level and knowledge of child development that is necessary to bring high-quality practice into the early childhood classroom. What do these teachers need in order to be effective in the classroom?
A new book, Critical Issues in Early Childhood Professional Development, identiﬁes problems
and gaps in what we know about early childhood professional development and outlines new
approaches and strategies for both research and practice.67 These include teaming researchers
and teachers, making training courses credit-bearing, and using technology in the form of
PDA’s (personal digital assistants like the Palm Pilot) and web-based feedback and instructional supports. Some of these new approaches are being evaluated to determine how effective they are for teachers and ultimately, for young children.
Teacher Support Strategies Related to Early Reading Literacy. For example, Robert Pianta
and colleagues have developed a new set of resources, My Teaching Partner (MTP), an interactive web-based tool combined with consultation. MTP links individual teachers’ practices
and standards for classroom quality to improved learning, especially in early literacy.68
In a statewide study currently being conducted in Virginia, Pianta has preliminary ﬁndings
showing positive outcomes for teachers who get consultation, while there are some negative
ﬁndings in terms of lower positive classroom environments for teachers who only have web
access to training. Future results will show if these results are robust and which of the combinations of support are most effective.

MTP Comprehensive Professional Development Resources
• Curriculum and classroom practices
– Language and literacy curriculum
– Banking time for relationship supports
• Professional development support for high-quality teaching and implementation
– One-to-one consultation via the internet
– Quality teaching web site
– CLASS observational assessment system

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Teacher Support Strategies Related to Early Math. In early math, to promote effective
implementation of the Big Math Little Kids curriculum, Herb Ginsburg and his colleagues
are conducting and evaluating a series of in-service workshops for preschool and kindergarten
teachers. Part of the evaluation includes in-depth observations of classroom teachers who
had attended the workshops. Although the evaluation is currently underway, ﬁndings have
been described as “unsettling.” Some teachers overestimated the ability of young children to
learn the math concepts in the curriculum and spent little time or effort in implementing the
program. Other teachers underestimated children’s ability to learn the material and failed to
challenge them. Some teachers had difﬁculty understanding the mathematical content themselves, while still others had trouble developing a pedagogy effective for teaching mathematics
to young children. At the same time, there is good news. The analysis suggests that carefully
sequenced and on-going workshops can be an effective tool in helping the teachers develop
conﬁdence and skills to teach early math and overcome their own fear and lack of deep understanding about the subject matter. Some child care providers and poorly trained preschool
educators can become effective teachers of mathematics.69
There are also research-based efforts to improve the quality of training or preservice education. For example, Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL) is a web-based
course that addresses the need for new methods to train prospective teachers more effectively
in early childhood mathematics education. Developed by the Columbia University, Center
for New Media Teaching and Learning, and Herb Ginsburg from Teachers College at Columbia University, VITAL is drawn from cognitive research on adult learning and principles
of instructional technology. VITAL uses interactive media to help college students achieve a
deep understanding of children’s mathematical development and of the pedagogies to foster
it. The course provides students with the opportunity and means to analyze an extensive collection of videotapes of real children and teachers engaged in mathematics learning activities.
College students are instructed to apply the knowledge being constructed through the course
to actual early childhood educational settings.
Early indications show that VITAL improves comprehension, retention, and transfer skills.70
In 2006 and beyond, a series of evaluations will be conducted to learn even more about
VITAL’s potential to enhance preservice education.

The VITAL Application
• Digital Library of video clip examples of children performing different mathematical tasks that
are linked to speciﬁc topics in the course syllabus
• Workspace that contains only video clips that students have selected and annotated and space
to create a multi-media essay
• Video Lessons to help students develop observation and interviewing skills

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SECTION III
Expanding the Knowledge Base

This is an exciting time in early childhood research on how to improve early learning outcomes, especially for low-income children. Below we highlight several types of research. First,
there are studies evaluating programmatic efforts in early literacy and early math in both
school- and community-based settings. Second, there are three new federally funded studies
that focus on promoting school readiness through a variety of curriculum and professional
development supports. Finally, there are studies of state-funded pre-k programs. Each of
these research efforts, although meeting different levels of scientiﬁc rigor, has important messages for those seeking to improve the quality of early learning in actual classrooms and the
achievement of young, and especially, low-income children. A future NCCP brief will provide an update on some of this research that is currently in progress, with results and implications as ﬁndings are available.

Evaluating Early Education Learning Strategies:
Examples of Research in Early Literacy
The three studies described below illustrate efforts to increase the early literacy of low-income
preschoolers.
• Training Child Care Providers to Implement Early Literacy Curriculum. In Miami,
Dade County, Florida, Abt Associates, Inc., is studying the effects of three curriculum:
B.E.L.L. Program, Breakthrough to Literacy, and Ready, Set, Leap, on classroom environment, teacher behavior and interactions with children, and teacher understanding of
children’s development, as well as the effects of the curriculum on children’s language and
emergent literacy skills, school readiness, and on subsequent school performance. Additional information is available at: .
• Comparing Materials and Coaching to Support Early Literacy. In Pennsylvania, Linda
Katz of the Children’s Literacy Initiative (CLI) is testing the impact of an early literacy
curriculum, Blueprint for Early Literacy. The curriculum has a classroom and workshop
coaching component to provide teachers with the supports they need to effectively use
books to increase children’s language and literacy levels. Additional information is available at: .
• Assessing the Impact of a Statewide Multipronged Teacher Support Strategy to Improve
Early Literacy. In Texas, a major effort is underway in response to a call by the Texas legislature to improve the school readiness of 3- and 4-year-olds statewide, particularly those from
low-income families. The overall project calls for integrating three key instructional components developed by The Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning
and Reading (CIRCLE): (1) a state-approved research-based curriculum, (2) interactive
training in small groups with coaching, PDA’s to conduct child assessments and to inform

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instruction and mentoring in a multi-unit web-based professional development course,
and (3) progress monitoring to evaluate the impact. Additional information is available at:
.

Examples of Research in Early Math
The two studies described below are examples of research on efforts to improve early mathematics skills of low-income preschoolers.
• Using a Personal Digital Assistant to Guide Early Math Teaching. The National Institute of Health has funded a project to develop an Early Mathematics Assessment System
(EMAS), which uses a PDA to guide teachers as they administer the EMAS and gain
insight into student proﬁciency. The EMAS has three major functions: to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum, to provide immediate and speciﬁc cognitive process information for guiding instruction, and to be a screening tool for identifying children at risk
for mathematical difﬁculties and those that require comprehensive assessment and intervention. Additional information is available at: .
• Evaluating Multiple Aspects of an Early Math Curriculum. The Longitudinal Study
of the Effects of a Prekindergarten Mathematics Curriculum on Low-Income Children’s
Mathematical Knowledge is evaluating the short-term and long-term effects of the Building Blocks curriculum on the mathematical knowledge of 320 low-income children in
Head Start and state-funded preschool programs in 40 classrooms in California and New
York. Both the national evaluation study and a local, complementary research study use
random assignment to an intervention or control group. The national study will follow
children into kindergarten and ﬁrst grade. The local study will highlight the differences
between one and two years of teacher training. Additional information is available at:
.

Examples of Federally Sponsored Research in Progress
In addition to these efforts, there is a signiﬁcant research agenda in early childhood at the federal
level, much of which grew out of Good Start/Grow Smart (GS/GS), the early childhood companion to President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Following are three examples meant to improve
early learning programs, prepare children to succeed in school, and close the achievement gap.
• The Quality Intervention for Early Care and Education Project (QUINCE). The federal
Child Care Bureau, together with support from the Ofﬁce of the Assistant Secretary for
Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
is examining the effectiveness of alternative approaches to training child care providers with
limited experience and education. This project is a multisite, random assignment evaluation
of two consultation models: Partnerships for Inclusion (PFI) and Immersion Training for Excellence. The studies began in September 2004 and are due to continue through September
2007. Additional information about QUINCE is available at: .
• Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Grants Program (PCER). The Institute for
Education Science (IES) awarded grants to seven researchers to test the impact of several
widely used preschool curriculum. In 2003, IES funded an additional ﬁve researchers,

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with Mathematica Policy Research (MPR), Inc. serving as their national evaluation
coordinator. Grantees are implementing one or more preschool curriculum and conducting complementary research activities that supplement the cross-site evaluation. The ﬁnal
sample includes Head Start, Title 1, state pre-k, and private preschool programs serving
over 2,000 children in 20 geographic locations implementing 13 different experimental
preschool curricula. The overall program goal is to improve the quality of the nation’s
preschool programs in part, by providing evidence so early learning educators and parents
can make more informed choices of classroom curriculum. The initial preschool and kindergarten outcome report is due to be released by the end of 2006. For more information
about the PCER grantees see: 2002 grantees: and 2003 grantees: .
• Early Learning and School Readiness Program. A collaboration between the National
Institute of Child Health and Development, the Ofﬁce of the Assistant Secretary for
Planning and Evaluation, and the Administration for Children, Youth, and Families in the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Ofﬁce of Special Education and
Rehabilitative Services and the Institute for Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of
Education has led to the creation of the Interagency School Readiness Consortium. Eight
effectiveness studies are looking at a range of interventions implemented in real-world,
public settings, including Head Start, child care, and prekindergarten programs. For example, one study focuses on the role of emotions, another on early learning in Los Angeles
County. These are ﬁve-year grants, with the ﬁrst cohort data collection in spring 2003 and
cohort two in fall 2004. When completed, this project will result in the development and
dissemination of new, scientiﬁcally-based curriculum with established professional development components. Unlike the PCERS project, there will not be a formal cross-site research or evaluation study. Instead, the eight federal grant partners meet during the year to
talk about what they are ﬁnding and what, if any, similarities there are among the projects.
Initial outcome data is due in summer 2006 for those projects that collected data in the
ﬁrst year. Other results will be released as the program continues. Additional information
is available at: .

Evaluating State Preschool Programs
“States have multiple systems that serve early childhood and are increasingly responsible
for the continuum of pre-k through elementary school so it is in our best interest not to
encourage more preschool as a separate silo, but to better connect preschool to elementary
school (grade 3) standards and practices.”
Harriet Dichter, Deputy Secretary, Ofﬁce of Early Childhood, Pennsylvania State
Department of Education and NCCP Meeting Participant

Public policy interest in closing the gap for low-income young children has resulted in the
expansion of preschool for 4- and sometimes 3-year-olds. Currently, 38 states have some type
of state-funded preschool program. Over 800,000 children were enrolled in state-funded pre-k
programs during the 2004-2005 school year and investments are growing, with $2.8 billion
spent on state pre-k during that same year. With this growth, more evaluations of state-funded

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National Center for Children in Poverty

Box 5: Evaluations of Selected Prekindergarten Programs
Program

States conducted in

NCEDL Multi-State Study of Prekindergarten and
Study of State-Wide Early Education Programs

CA, GA, IL, KY, MASS, NJ, NY,
OH, TX, WA, WI

Universal Preschool in Oklahoma

Tulsa Public Schools

Universal Preschool in Georgia

NIEER Five-State Study

MI, NJ, OK, SC, W.VA

pre-k programs (see Box 5) are being conducted.71 Overall, the research also calls attention
to the signiﬁcant implementation challenges that states face in ensuring that the quality of
preschool programs is sufﬁciently robust to turn around early learning trajectories for low-income children. The ﬁndings also underscore the importance of systematically implementing
the kinds of strategies highlighted in this issue brief.
Some early results are promising. A study of the Georgia pre-k program found that by the
end of kindergarten children who had attended the pre-k program had equaled or surpassed
norms for their age group on all but one (expressive language) of nine standardized measures.72 The ﬁrst evaluation of Oklahoma’s state-funded pre-k program found the largest
effects in language skills and other measures of cognitive development, although some gains
were also made in social-emotional development.73 A follow-up to the Oklahoma study of
the effects on kindergarten children who had just completed pre-k showed that the results
lasted over time. Children made signiﬁcant and meaningful progress in prereading, reading,
prewriting, spelling, math reasoning, and problem-solving skills, with gains falling somewhere between other state-funded pre-k programs and the small demonstration early intervention programs like Abecedarian and Perry Preschool.74
In a new study looking at 20 evaluations of pre-k in the states listed above plus Maryland and
Texas, the majority (13 of 18) showed children made gains in “overall developmental competence” at the end of pre-k, on measures of language, literacy, numeracy, social skills, self-help,
and motor development.75 Only one study found effects lasting beyond ﬁrst grade. The authors are, however, cautious about the extent to which state-funded preschool programs are
effective. Two problems are identiﬁed: most of the research designs are too weak (none use
random assignment to a control group) to determine if outcomes are the result of the program, and the research question (Does pre-k work?) is too simplistic and general to provide
information about what speciﬁcally leads to improvement in the achievement of low-income
children.
Findings from a literature review and interviews in eight states by the Rand Corporation
show how widely curriculum and professional development practices vary. In four of the
states, curriculum in local sites were put in place without regard to standards and assessments
mandated by the state. Professional development strategies were inconsistent with the lessons from research highlighted earlier. States had to rely on passive activities for professional
development like toolkits and information packets as opposed to more active, intense, and

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 27

sustained activities, primarily because of budget constraints. States also reported it difﬁcult to
balance and blend federal and state funding streams so there was not enough money to effectively implement programs on a large scale.76
The researchers connected with NCEDL who have conducted the most studies on pre-k to
date have issued a statement saying: “We call on researchers, advocates, and policymakers to
examine the data on preschool programs objectively and carefully. Preschool is not a cure-all
for widespread systemic shortcomings in our educational system, but as our research and
that of others shows, it appears to provide substantial beneﬁts for a broad range of children,
both poor and not poor. But these beneﬁts are realized only if careful attention is given to
establishing a sound set of standards for programs and ensuring that the programs are in fact
implemented with teaching practices that have been shown to result in improvements in
child well-being.”77

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SECTION IV
The Role of Local-Level Leadership

“Building a successful model requires consistency, persistence, and a systematic approach.”
Jerry Weast, Superintendent, Montgomery County,
Maryland School District and NCCP Meeting Participant

In addition to research, there is much to be learned from practice. Below, we brieﬂy describe
the experience of how one school district, under the leadership of Jerry Weast, Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, is narrowing the achievement gap between
low-income and more afﬂuent children across race and ethnicity, drawing on some of the
strategies highlighted in this issue brief.

Background Description
Montgomery County, Maryland, has over a million residents and is the 17th largest school
district in the United States. It has some of the highest performing schools in the wealthiest neighborhoods, along with a growing immigrant population and high concentrations of
poverty. The district is ethnically diverse; 123 different languages are spoken in the public
schools, 27 percent of the children are Hispanic, 22 percent are African American. Mobility rates are high in some schools. The district operates 100 Head Start classrooms, 100
preschool classrooms, and 125 elementary schools. Before reforms were put in place, the
achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children had been widening.

Plan of Action
Planning began in 1999 to implement systemwide reforms to counter what Weast called a
“sense of desperation in the highest poverty schools.” To guide the effort, Weast asked teachers a series of four questions: What do you want children to know and do? How will you
know if they know it? What do you do if they don’t? What do you do if they do? One year
later the Early Success Performance Plan was launched with the goal of establishing conditions to ensure that children would be ready for college after graduating high school.

Financing the Plan
Montgomery County is in the fortunate position of having a stable and supportive government and community when it comes to advocating for the schools and young children.
Teachers, principals, and support staff and their unions all supported the plan. Weast’s longevity and trust in the community—he has been superintendent for seven years in a job with

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 29

an average length of stay of 2.5 years—allowed him to braid together funding from multiple
sources to support the plan. In addition to state education dollars, and federal Title I and
Head Start funds, Montgomery County raised $60 million in tax revenue for the schools.
The program, costing approximately $12,000 per child, beneﬁted from the additional funds
and the local control over part of the budget.

Targeting the Most At-Risk Students and Schools
To decrease the achievement gap, the bold decision was made to focus on the schools with
the greatest number of students living in poverty. Different interventions were tailored for
56 targeted schools, including increasing the number of full-day kindergarten classes and
decreasing class size to 15:1 in full-day kindergarten. According to Weast, “we spent 60-70
percent more on classrooms with higher concentrations of poverty than we did on classrooms
with higher percentages of upper-income children and got full support when we told everyone what we were doing and why we were doing it.”

Professional Development
Weast took into account both the time and funding limits the schools were facing. Most of
the professional development activities were embedded into the schools and involved peer-topeer learning and support and curriculum content consultations. Between $3-4 million has
been spent on permanent substitutes assigned to each school for teacher release time to do
classroom observations, plan together, and reﬂect on what they are learning.
Professional development activities are aimed at both teachers and principals. In the ﬁrst
two years, about 500 teachers went through over 100 hours of training on the revised reading, math, and language arts curriculum. In the next year, more teachers were added, and
they also received four days of training over the summer and 45 additional hours of training
during the school year. Teacher coaches, which are new permanent positions, are assigned to
each school to be available for additional on site assistance.

Curriculum
Before the reforms, schools were doing their best but looking for a magic bullet to help solve
the problems. In one year there were seven different changes and additions to the reading
curriculum being used, and principals and teachers in a school and across school buildings
implemented the curriculum in different ways.
As part of the new program, kindergarten teachers were given a curriculum blueprint and instructional guidelines with explicit instructions for reading and math. Curriculum and standards are now aligned from prekindergarten through grade 5 and seen as key to the reform
program.

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National Center for Children in Poverty

Additional Services for Families
Parents were an integral part of The Early Success Performance Plan. They had identiﬁed
early childhood as a priority for the district and were involved in adopting the guiding principles for the kindergarten program. Frequent meetings in parents’ home languages help keep
them updated about what is happening in the schools and solicit their feedback about the
program. In addition, families have access to school-based health clinics and home visitation.
Extended-day and year-round programs complete with breakfast, lunch, and transportation,
are now offered to families at no cost so children have access to before- and after-school
activities, as well as four hours a day of school over four weeks in the summer.

What Has Changed
The efforts have paid off. In 2001, fewer than 30 percent of children could read at the
benchmark level set for kindergarten and now 81 percent are reading at that level. Two
groups of children who had gone through kindergarten during the reform have taken the
grade 2 national test of basic skills. In 2004, the children who made up the most ethnically
diverse group in the district’s history “set new records” in scoring above national norms on
standardized tests of reading, language, and math. Low-income students scored above the
national average in two content areas and surpassed the 70th percentile in math computation. African-American students scored above the national average in every subject for the
ﬁrst time.78

Lessons Learned
According to Weast, and based on evaluation of the program to date, three key lessons have
come out of the reform effort so far.
1) Teachers were both the key to success and one of the biggest challenges. In preschool
settings, teachers were strict about their ideas of what is developmentally appropriate.
With the right set of supports, they have changed the way they think about what children
should be learning in pre-k.
2) Working with community-based child care centers is challenging for schools. Despite
offering free training, it was difﬁcult to get the teachers to participate, so some children
didn’t attend the programs even when they were available.
3) The success in the Montgomery County Public Schools would not have been achieved
if the effort wasn’t comprehensive and multifaceted.
Further research will help determine what parts of the model will make the most sense for
other districts to implement given their own circumstances.

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 31

SECTION V
Take-Home Messages, Implications, and Recommendations for the Field

This issue brief has highlighted the roles that an intentional curriculum and professional
development supports for teachers play in improving the achievement of low-income preschoolers. Based on lessons from the existing and emerging research, as well as ideas from
leading experts in early learning, we have identiﬁed implications and made recommendations
about how to integrate this knowledge into practice and policy.

Take-Home Messages
The research in this issue brief shows that low-income children make gains in early literacy
and early math when high-quality preschool programs include an intentional curriculum and
provide effective teacher professional development and supports. The most important takehome messages from the issue brief include the following:
• The gap in achievement between low-income children and their middle-class peers is real
and signiﬁcant.
• An intentional curriculum is research-based, emphasizes teachers actively engaged with
children, includes attention to social and regulatory skills, is responsive to cultural diversity and English language learners, is not teacher-proof, and requires new ways to measure
classroom quality, teacher effectiveness, and student progress.
• Using an intentional curriculum is an important strategy to reduce the achievement gap,
and since no curriculum is teacher-proof, strategies to help teachers effectively use the curriculum are equally important.
• Deﬁning and assessing quality early learning has shifted to a focus on teacher-child interactions, child-focused teaching style, and content-driven classroom instruction in addition
to issues such as child-staff ratios and group size.
• On average, the association between teacher education and child outcomes is small and
there is still no ﬁnal determination about how much education and training is needed and
what is the best way for to offer this so teachers are more effective in the classroom.
• Overall, children achieve more when they have teachers with more education and training
closely tied to knowledge about early childhood and child development.
• New and existing teachers who do not have advanced degrees or training can be effective in classrooms with high concentrations of low-income children if they have ongoing
consultation, mentoring, and feedback that is directly tied to their classroom practice.
• Some research on state pre-k programs shows positive results, other research suggests there
are signiﬁcant program quality problems and implementation challenges, and more rigorous research designs and methods would help determine how effective these programs are
for increasing achievement, particularly with low-income children.
• There are examples of school districts using an intentional curriculum and teacher supports that have achieved powerful results with ethnically diverse and low-income children.
32 Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies

National Center for Children in Poverty

For State and Local Policymakers
• Ensure that requirements for obtaining more education are linked to requirements for
training in early childhood development or a related ﬁeld.
• Allocate resources for state and local training in instruction to ensure the translation of new
knowledge about teaching, curriculum, and related practices actually reach teachers on the
ground.
• Invest in training strategies that provide direct feedback on classroom practice through
on-going consultation, mentoring, or coaching.
• Ensure that state incentives for quality early childhood programs include teacher-child
interactions, child-focused teaching and content-driven classroom instruction.
• Invest in experimental research to determine the speciﬁc content, modules, and sequencing of curriculum that best predict increased achievement for low-income young children,
including the most at risk, across all settings.
• For the most challenged families, build in supports that address family and communitybased barriers to learning, such as child and family health and mental health.

For Early Learning Administrators
• Implement and sustain over time a whole school/center model of professional development
involving principals, directors, supervisors, teachers, child care providers, and families.
• Provide release time, substitute teachers, and subsidies so teachers can take advantage
of professional development that helps them understand how young children learn and
develop, and to help them implement curricula used by the district.
• Align early learning curriculum and teaching strategies with kindergarten through grade 3
standards to sustain increased achievement.

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 33

For Families and Community Leaders
• Join together to determine how effective preschools are in teaching early literacy and early
math to low-income preschoolers.
• Develop advocacy efforts to ensure that parents and community leaders have a voice in
improving early learning outcomes and implementing an intentional curriculum and effective teaching strategies across all preschool settings.

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National Center for Children in Poverty

CONCLUSION

Closing the achievement gap is a large task requiring strategic planning and action at the
classroom, local, state, and federal levels. For children in the highest-risk families and poorest
communities, even the best early care and early learning opportunities will not be enough to
help them perform on a level consistent with their more advantaged peers. However, a strong
evidence base is showing that there are pathways to increase the early literacy and early math
achievement for low-income preschool-age children. The challenge is to use this knowledge
so that it gets into the hands of those working directly with the millions of low-income preschool-aged children across this country.

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Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 35

ENDNOTES
1. Bowman, B.; Donovan, M. S.; & Burns, S. (Eds.); National
Research Council, Committee on Early Childhood Pedagogy.
(2001). Eager to learn: Educating our preschoolers. Washington, DC:
National Academy Press.
Shonkoff, J. P. & Phillips, D. A. (Eds.); Institute of Medicine
(2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood
development. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
2. Heckman, J. L. (2006). Investing in disadvantaged young children
is an economically efﬁcient policy. Paper presented at the Forum on
Building the Economic Case for Investments in Preschool, sponsored
by the Committee for Economic Development, Pew Charitable
Trusts, and PNC Financial Services Group, New York, NY.
3. Schweinhart, L. J.; Martie, J.; Xiang, Z.; Barnett, W. S.;,
Belﬁeld, C. R.; & Nores, M. (2004). Lifetime effects: The High/
Scope Perry Preschool study through age 40. Ypsilanti, MI: High
Scope Press.
Campbell, F. A.; Ramey, C.; Pungello, E. P.; Sparling, J.; & MillerJohnson, S. (2002). Early childhood education: Young adult
outcomes from the Abecedarian Project. Applied Developmental
Science. 6(1), pp. 42-57.
Reynolds, A. & Temple, J. (2005). Priorities for a new century of
early childhood programs. Infants and Young Children, 18(2), pp.
104-118.
4. NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2002). Early
child care and children’s development prior to school entry: Results
from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. American Education
Research Journal, 39(1), pp. 133-164.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2005). Early care
and children’s development in the primary grades: Follow-up
results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. American
Educational Research Journal, 42(3), pp. 537-570.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2005). Pathways
to reading: The role of oral language in the transition to reading.
Developmental Psychology, 41(2), pp. 228-242.
Rathbun, A. & West, J. (2004). (2004). From kindergarten through
third grade: Children’s beginning school experiences (NCES 2004007). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute
of Educational Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics
.
Guarino, C. M.; Hamilton, L. S.; Lockwood, J. R.; & Rathbun, A.
H. (2006). Teacher qualiﬁcations, instructional practices, and reading and mathematics gains in kindergarten: Research and development
report (NCES 2006-031). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Education, Institute of Educational Sciences, National Center for
Education Statistics .
5. Magnuson, K. A.; Ruhm, C. J.; & Waldfogel, J. (2004). Does
pre-kindergarten improve school preparation and performance? (NBER
Working Paper 10452). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of
Economic Research and Magnuson, K. A.; Meyers, M.; Ruhm, C.
J.; & Waldfogel, J. (2004). Inequality in preschool education and
school readiness. American Educational Research Journal, 41(1), pp.
115-157.
6. Loeb, S.; Fuller, B.; Kagan, S. L.; & Carrol, B. (2004). Child
care in poor communities: Early learning effects of type, quality,
and stability. Child Development, 75(1), pp. 47-65. See also Hill,
J. L.; Brooks-Gunn, J.; & Waldfogel, J. (2003). Sustained effects

36 Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies

of high participation in an early intervention for low-birth-weight
premature infants. Developmental Psychology, 29(4), pp. 730-744.
7. Burchinal, M. R.; Campbell, F. A.; Bryant, D. B.; Wasik, B. H.;
& Ramey, C. T. (1997). Early intervention and mediating processes in cognitive performance of children of low-income AfricanAmerican families. Child Development, 68(5), pp. 935-954. See
also Magnuson, Ruhm, & Waldfogel in Endnote 5.
8. Reynolds, A. J. & Temple, J. A. (1998). Extended early childhood intervention and school achievement: Age 13 ﬁndings from
the Chicago Longitudinal Study. Child Development, 69(1), pp.
231-246.
See also NICHD Early Child Care Research Network publications
in Endnote 4. See also Rathburn & West in Endnote 4.
9. Love, J. M.; Kisker, E. E.; Raikes, H.; Chazan-Cohen, R.;
Constantine, J.; Vogel, C.; Faldowski, R.; Robinson, J.; & Emde, R.
(2005). How early Head Start participation contributes to school
readiness. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for
Research in Child Development, April 7-10, Atlanta, GA.
10. See Shonkoff & Phillips in Endnote 1. See also: Knitzer, J. &
Lefkowitz, J. (2005). Pathways to early school success: Helping the most
vulnerable infants, toddlers, and their families. New York, NY: National
Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University Mailman
School of Public Health .
11. See Love, Kisker, Raikes, et al., in Endnote 9.
12. Raver, C. C., & Knitzer, J. (2002). Ready to enter: What research
tells policymakers about strategies to promote social and emotional school
readiness among three- and four-year old children (Promoting the
Emotional Well-Being of Children and Families 3). New York, NY:
National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health .
13. Ibid.
14. Gilliam, W. S. (2005). Prekindergartens left behind: Expulsion
rates in state prekindergarten programs (FCD Policy Brief 3). New
York, NY: Foundation for Child Development .
15. Barnett, W. S.; Hustedt, J. T.; Robin, K. B.; & Schulman, K. L.
(2005). The state of preschool, 2005: State preschool yearbook. New
Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research.
16. See Love, Kisker, Raikes, et al., in Endnote 9.
17. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
(ASCD), Scherer, M. (Ed.). (2004). Closing achievement gaps.
[Special Issue] Educational Leadership, 62(3). .
18. Lee, V. E. & Burkam, D. T. (2002). Inequality at the starting
gate: Social background differences in achievement as children begin
school. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.
19. Stipek, D. (2005). Early childhood education at a crossroads:
Access to preschool has come a long way, but critical choices lie
ahead. Harvard Early Education Letter, July/August .
20. Layzer, J. (in press). Project Upgrade in Miami-Dade County,
Florida. Cambridge, MA: Abt Associates.
21. Hart, B. & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the
everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD:
Paul H. Brookes Publishing.

National Center for Children in Poverty

22. Snow, C. (2005). From literacy to learn: An interview with
Catherine Snow. Harvard Education Letter, July/August
.

38. Hyson, M. (2003). Where we stand on standards for programs
to prepare early childhood professionals. Washington, DC: National
Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

23. Loeb, S.; Bridges, M.; Fuller, B.; Rumberger, R.; & Bassok, D.
(2005). How much is too much? The inﬂuence of preschool centers on
children’s social and cognitive development (NBER Working Paper No.
11812). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.

39. Whitehurst, G. J. (2004). Do preschoolers need academic content? Education Next. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford
University .

24. More information on federal poverty levels is available at
.
25. National Center for Children in Poverty. (2006). Basic facts
about low-income children: Birth to age 6. New York, NY: National
Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia University Mailman
School of Public Health .
26. Pianta, R. C.; Howes, C.; Burchinal, M.; Bryant, D.; Clifford,
D.; Early, D.; & Barbarin, O. (2005). Features of pre-kindergarten
programs, classrooms, and teachers: Do they predict observed classroom quality and child-teacher interactions? Applied Developmental
Science, 9(3), pp. 144-159.
Bruner, C. (2005). Poor and vulnerable neighborhoods and
school readiness: Pathways to success. Draft Discussion Paper.
Des Moines: IA: Child and Family Policy Center.
See Loeb, Bridges, Bassok, et al., in Endnote 23.
27. Barnett, W. S.; Hustedt, J. T.; Robin, K. B.; & Schulman, K.
L. (2004). The state of preschool: 2004 state preschool yearbook. New
Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research.
28. Gershoff, E. (2003). Low-income and the development of
America’s kindergartners (Living on the Edge Research Brief 4).
New York, NY: National Center for Children in Poverty, Columbia
University Mailman School of Public Health .
29. Bruner, C. & Tirmizi, S. N. (2004). Census tracts and childraising: Place-based implications for child and family policy investments and reforms (CFPC Working Paper). Des Moines, IA:
Child and Family Policy Center .
30. Ibid.
31. U.S. Census Bureau. (2004). Income stable, poverty up, numbers of Americans with and without health insurance rise, Census
Bureau reports (U.S. Census Bureau News). Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Commerce .
32. Espinosa, L. 2005. Curriculum and assessment considerations
for young children from culturally and linguistically and economically diverse backgrounds. Psychology in the Schools, (42)8, pp. 1-16.

40. Ginsburg, H. P.; Cannon, J.; Eisenband, J. G.; & Pappas, S.
(2006). Mathematical thinking and learning. In K. McCartney &
D. Phillips (Eds.), Handbook of Early Child Development (pp. 208229). Oxford, England: Blackwell.
41. Pappas, S.; Ginsburg, H. P.; & Jiang, M. (2003). SES differences in young children’s metacongnition in the context of
mathematical problem solving. Cognitive Development, 18(3), pp.
431-450.
42. National Association for the Education of Young Children
(NAEYC) & National Conference of Teachers of Mathematics
(NCTM). (2002). Early childhood math: Promoting good beginnings.
A joint position statement. Washington, DC: National Association
for the Education of Young Children.
43. Neuman, S. B. & Roskos, K. (2005). Whatever happened
to developmentally appropriate practice in early literacy? Young
Children, 61(3), pp. 22-26 .
44. Wasik, B. H. & Sparling, J. (2006). Partners for Literacy Curriculum. Unpublished paper. Chapel Hill, NC: Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill .
45. Leong, D.; Bedrova, E.; Henson, R.; & Henninger, M. 1999.
Scaffolding early literacy through play: How to strengthen play,
increase oral language, encourage more symbolic thinking, and
support the development of concepts of print and writing. Paper
presented at the NAEYC Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA:
Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL).
46. See Raver & Knitzer in Endnote 12.
47. Bodrova, E. & Leong, D.J. The Tools of the Mind Project: A
case study of implementing the Vygotskian approach in American early
childhood and primary classrooms. Geneva, Switzerland: International Bureau of Education, UNESCO.
48. See Espinosa in Endnote 32.
49. Hamre, B. K. & Pianta, R.C. 2005. Can instructional and
emotional support in the ﬁrst-grade classroom make a difference
for children at risk of school failure? Child Development, 76(5),
pp. 949-967.

33. Burchinal, M.; Yazejian, N.; Clifford, R.; Culkin, M.; Howes, C.;
Byler, P.; Kagan, S.; Rustici, J.; Bryant, D.; Mocan, H.; Morris, J.;
Peisner-Feingold, E.; Phillipsen, L.; & Zelazo, J. (1995). Cost, quality,
and child outcomes in child care centers. Public report, 2nd ed. Denver,
CO: University of Colorado at Denver, Department of Economics.

50. See Burchinal, Yazejian, Clifford, et al., in Endnote 33.

34. See Pianta, Howes, Burchinal, et al., in Endnote 26.

52. Early, D.; Barbarin, O.; Bryant, D.; Burchinal, M.; Chang, F.;
Clifford, D.; Crawford, G.; Weaver, W.; Howes, C.; Ritchie, S.;
Kraft-Sayre, M.; Pianta, R.; & Barnett, W. S. (2005). Pre-kindergarten in eleven states: NCEDL’s multi-state study of pre-kindergarten
& study of state-wide early educations programs (SWEEP) (NCEDL
Working Paper). Chapel Hill, NY: University of North CarolinaChapel Hill.

35. See Lee & Burkam in Endnote 18.
36. Henry, G. T. & Rickman, D. K. (2005). The Georgia Early
Childhood Study 2001-2004. Final report. Atlanta, GA: Georgia
State University, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.
37. Gormley, W. T. & Gayer, T. (2003). Promoting school readiness
in Oklahoma: An evaluation of Tulsa’s pre-k program. Washington,
DC: Public Policy Institute, Georgetown University
.

National Center for Children in Poverty

See also NICHD Early Child Care Research Network in Endnote 4.
51. Galinsky, E. (2006). The economic beneﬁts of high-quality early
childhood programs: What makes the difference? Washington, DC:
Committee for Economic Development .

53. See Pianta, Howes, & Burchinal, et al., in endnote 26.

Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 37

54. Sylva, K.; Siraj-Blatchford, I.; Taggart, B.; Sammons, P.; Melhuish, E.; Elliot, K.; & Totsika, V. (2006). Capturing quality in
early childhood through environmental rating scales. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21(1), pp. 76-92.
55. Herzenberg, S.; Price, M.; & Bradley, D. (2005). Losing ground
in early childhood education. Washington, DC: Economic Policy
Institute.
56. Maxwell, K. L.; Field, C. C.; & Clifford, R. M. (2005).Deﬁning and measuring professional development in early childhood
research. In M. Zaslow & I. Martinez-Beck (Eds.), Critical Issues
in Early Childhood Professional Development, pp. 21-44. Baltimore,
MD: Brookes Publishing..
57. Barnett, W. S. (2004). Better teachers, better preschools: Student
achievement linked to teacher qualiﬁcations (NIEER Policy Brief
Issue 2 rev.). New Brunswick, NJ: National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).
See Bowman, Donovan, & Burns in Endnote 1.
Howes, C. & Brown, J. (2000). Improving child care quality: A
guide for Proposition 10 commissions. In N. Halfon, E. Shulman,
M. Shannon, & M. Hochstein (Eds.), Building community systems
for young children. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Center for Healthier
Children, Families, and Communities, University of California at
Los Angeles.
58. Peisner-Feingold, E. S.; Burchinal, M. R.; Clifford, R. M.;
Culkin, M. L.; Howes, C.; Kagan, S. L.; Yazejian, N.; Byler, P.;
Rustici, J.; & Zelazo, J. (1999). The children of the cost, quality, and
outcomes study go to school: Executive summary. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Frank Porter Graham
Child Development Center.
59. Whitebook, M. (2003). Early education quality: Higher teacher
qualiﬁcations for better learning environments—A review of the literature. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of
California, Berkeley.
60. Bryant, D.; Clifford, R.; Early, D.; Pianta, R.; Howes, C.;
Barbarin, O.; & Burchinal, M. (2002). Findings from the NCEDL
Multi-State Pre-Kindergarten Study. Paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the National Association for the Education of Young
Children (NAEYC) in New York, NY.
Pianta, R. C.; La Para, K.; M.; Payne, C.; Cox, M. J., & Bradley,
R., (2002). The relation of kindergarten classroom environment
to teacher, family, and school characteristics and child outcomes.
The Elementary School Journal, 102(3), pp. 225-238.
61. See Early, Barbarin, & Bryant, et al., in Endnote 52.
62. Pianta, R. C. (unpublished). Early childhood education:
The evolution of a new form of “school.” Paper submitted to
Education Next.
63. Early, D. M.; Bryant, D. M.; Pianta, R. C.; Clifford, R. M.;
Burchinal, M. R.; Ritchie, S.; Howes, C.; & Barbarin, O. (2006).
Are teachers’ education, major, and credentials related to classroom
quality and children’s academic gains in pre-kindergarten? Early
Childhood Research Quarterly, 21(2), pp. 174-195.

65. Guarino, C. M.; Hamilton, L. S.; Lockwood, J. R.; & Rathbun,
A. H. (2006). Teacher qualiﬁcations, instructional practices, and
reading and mathematics gains in kindergarten (NCES-2006-031).
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, National Center
for Education Statistics.
66. Brandon, R. N. & Scarpa, J. P. (2006). Supply, demand, and accountability: Effective strategies to enhance the quality of early learning
experiences through workforce improvement (White Paper). Seattle,
WA: Human Services Policy Center .
67. Zaslow, M. & Martinez-Beck, I. (Eds.) (2006). Critical issues
in early childhood professional development. Baltimore, MD: Paul H.
Brookes Publishing.
68. Pianta, R. C. (2003). Standardized classroom observations
from pre-k to 3rd grade: A mechanism for improving access to
consistently high quality classroom experiences and practices during the P-3 years (A Foundation for Child Development Working
Paper). Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, Curry School of
Education .
69. Ginsburg, H. P.; Greenes, C.; & Balfanz, R. (2003). Big math
for little kids. Parsippany, NJ: Dale Seymour Publications.
70. Preston, M. D.; Ginsburg, H. P.; Jang, S.; Eisenband, J. G.;
Moretti, F.; & Sommer, P. (2005). Video Interactions for Teaching
and Learning (VITAL): A learning environment for courses in early
childhood mathematics education. Paper delivered at the American
Educational Research Association Meeting, April 11-15, Montreal,
Canada.
71. See Barnett, Hustedt, Robin, & Schulman in Endnote 15.
72. See Henry, Gordon, Henderson, & Ponder in Endnote 64.
73. See Gormley & Gayer in Endnote 37.
74. Gormley, W. T.; Gayer, T.; Phillips, D.; & Dawson, D. (2005).
The effects of universal pre-k on cognitive development. Developmental Psychology, 41(6), pp. 872-844.
75. Gilliam, W. S. & Zigler, E. F. (2004). State efforts to evaluate
the effects of prekindergarten, 1977-2003. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Child Study Center. .
76. Christina, R. & Nicholson-Goodman, J. (2005). Going to scale
with high-quality early education. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.
77. Howes, C.; Bryant, D.; Burchinal, M.; Clifford, R.; Early, D.;
Pianta, R. D.; Barbarin, O.; & Ritchie, S. (2006). Preschool: Its
beneﬁts, and who should teach [Issued statement]. Chapel Hill, NC:
National Center for Early Development and Learning (NCEDL)
.
78. Weast, J. D. (2004). Early success: Closing the gap for our youngest learners. Rockville, MD: Montgomery County Public Schools.

64. Henry, G. T.; Gordon, C. S.; Henderson. L. W.; & Ponder, D.
B. (2003). Georgia’s Pre-K Longitudinal Study: Final report 19962001. Atlanta, GA: Georgia State University, Andrew Young
School of Policy Studies. .

38 Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies

National Center for Children in Poverty

APPENDIX A: Meeting Participants
Oscar Barbarin, Ph.D.
L. Richardson and Emily Preyer Bicentennial
Distinguished Professor for Strengthening Families
University of North Carolina School of Social Work
Fellow, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Charlie Bruner, Ph.D.
Child and Family Policy Center
Des Moines, Iowa
Jennifer Burrell
School Readiness Program Manager
Children and Families of Orange County, California
Donna Bryant Ph.D.
Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute
National Center for Early Development and Learning
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Harriet Dichter
Director of Early Childhood
Department of Education
Ofﬁce of Policy
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Linda Espinosa Ph.D.
Professor of Early Childhood Education
College of Education
University of Missouri-Columbia
Columbia, Missouri
Herb Ginsburg Ph.D.
Jacob H. Schiff Foundation Professor of Psychology and Education
Department of Human Development
Teachers College Columbia University
New York, New York
Ron Haskins, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow
The Brookings Institution
Washington, D.C.
Marilou Hyson, Ph.D.
Senior Advisor for Research and Professional Practice
National Association for the Education of Young Children
Washington, D.C.
Lisa Kane
Program Associate
Annie E. Casey Foundation
Baltimore, Maryland

Jana Martella
Director of Early Childhood and Family Education
Council of Chief State School Ofﬁcers
Washington, D.C.
Ivelisse Martinez-Beck, Ph.D.
Research Coordinator
Child Care Bureau, Ofﬁce of Family Assistance
Administration for Children and Families
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Washington, D.C.
Martha Moorehouse, Ph.D.
Director, Division of Child and Youth Policy
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Washington, D.C.
Bob Pianta, Ph.D.
Novartis Professor of Education
Curry School of Education
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
Barbara Reisman
Executive Director
The Schumann Fund for New Jersey
Montclair, New Jersey
Ann Segal
Wellspring Advisors
Washington, D.C.
Joe Sparling, Ph.D.
Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Barbara Wasik, Ph.D.
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Jerry Weast, Ph.D.
Superintendent
Montgomery County Public Schools
Rockville, Maryland
Marty Zaslow, Ph.D.
Senior Scholar
Child Trends
Washington, D.C.
HOSTS:

Jean Layzer Ph.D.
Vice-President and Principal Associate
Abt Associates, Inc.
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Jane Knitzer, Ph.D.
Director
National Center for Children in Poverty
New York, New York

Joan Lombardi
Director
The Children’s Project
Washington, D.C.

Lisa Klein, Ph.D.
Principal
Hestia Advising
Leawood, Kansas

National Center for Children in Poverty

Effective Preschool Curricula and Teaching Strategies 39

215 West 125th Street, New York, NY 10027
TEL

646-284-9600

 FAX

646-284-9623

www.nccp.org

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