National Governors Association
January 2005
The National Governors Association has issued two reports arising from the work of its Task Force on School Readiness, which commenced in 2002-3 when Kentucky's Paul Patton was NGA chairman. (Today, under Virginia's Mark Warner, the focus is high school reform. One of NGA's challenges is steering a steady course.)
The Task Force's 40-page Final Report goes from unimpeachable, even banal, principles to scads and SCADS of recommendations for state policy and action, nearly all of these also sensible if not obvious. I spotted no high-controversy items (such as a call for universal publicly-funded pre-school) but plenty of common-sense suggestions across a host of domains, many of them process-heavy, some of them substantive. To my eye, the most important proposals here are a call for states to develop "early learning standards . . . that set clear expectations for what young children should know and be able to do before, during, and after school entry," then to use those standards "to guide early education curriculum and assessments to ensure that what is being taught and measured matches expectations." You can find the report here.
The companion publication, a 35-page "Governor's Guide to School Readiness," mostly gives examples of extant state programs and practices that illustrate and implement the Task Force's recommendations. With respect to pre-school standards and curricula, for instance, it points to Rhode Island, Kentucky, and Maryland, and shows you where to find more information. (As an example, here are Rhode Island's promising "expectations" for "literacy" in young children. You can find Maryland's version here by scrolling down to page 15.) You can download this NGA report here.
