The Children Of The Cost Quality And Outcomes Study Go To School

Public education begins with kindergarten for most children, but an estimated 1 million prekindergarten children are also in public schools, and the number is increasing. In December 1997, the National Institute on Early Childhood Development and Education in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement convened a group of national, state, and community early childhood and education leaders to discuss the interrelationship between preschool and public education. Meeting participants unanimously agreed on the need to move from the current state of fragmented programs to a coordinated preschool care and education system that is linked with the public school system. Based on discussions at that meeting and on recent related data and research, this publication is intended to provide schools, families, and communities with information and ideas about public school prekindergarten and other preschool care and education initiatives that are linked with public schools. The publication offers insights from meeting participants about public school involvement in early childhood, and provides examples of how states and communities are designing programs to expand and improve preschool care and education. Following an introduction and background information on the meeting, the publication explores the following questions pursued at the meeting: (1) "Why Should Schools Be Involved in Early Childhood?"; (2) "What Roles Should Schools Play in Early Childhood?"; (3) "What Facilitates School Involvement in Early Childhood?"; (4) "What Challenges Do Public Schools Face with Involvement in Early Childhood?"; (5) "What Are the Key Issues for Professional Development?"; and (6) "What Are the Key Research and Evaluation Questions?" The publication concludes with a 52-item bibliography and lists of meeting participants and state early childhood education contacts. (HTH)

"Ultimately, it's parents who matter most, what happens at home makes the difference in how children develop.

As a result of the generally low quality of child care in the United States, quality rating and improvement systems (QRISs) are proliferating in the child-care arena. This study examines the QRIS developed by Qualistar Early Learning, a nonprofit organization based in Colorado, evaluating how reliable the system's components are, whether the QRIS process helped providers to improve, and whether and how much children benefit from such improvement.

Professor Mommy is designed as a guide for women who want to combine the life of the mind with the joys of motherhood. The book provides practical suggestions from the authors' experiences together with those of other women who have successfully combined parenting with professorships. Professor Mommy addresses key questions—when to have children and how many, what kinds of academic institutions are the most family friendly, how to negotiate around the myths that many people hold about academic life, etc.—for women throughout all stages of their academic careers, from graduate school through full professor. The authors follow the demands of motherhood all the way from the infant stages through the empty nest. At each stage, the authors offer invaluable advice and tested strategies from women who have successfully juggled the demands and rewards of an academic career and motherhood. Written in clear, jargon-free prose, the book is accessible to women in all disciplines, with concise chapters for the time-constrained academic. The book's conversational tone is supplemented with a review of the most current scholarship on work/family balance and a survey of emerging family-friendly practices at U.S. colleges and universities. Professor Mommy asserts that the faculty mother has become and will remain a permanent fixture on the landscape of the American academy.The paperback edition features a new Preface that addresses the public conversation about mothers and work raised in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Ann Marie Slaughter’s Why Women Still Can’t Have it All. The new Preface also answers frequently asked questions from readers.