Determining whether pre-kindergarten or Head Start or other programs are serving their children well and helping them to develop socially, emotionally, and cognitively is fraught with challenges. Obviously, testing kids by asking them to read and bubble in the answers is silly. To wrestle with this issue, the Pew Charitable Trusts (full disclosure, a financial backer of the Hechinger Institute, which I run), the Joyce Foundation (another backer), and the Foundation for Child Development formed an accountability task force and named Sharon Lynn Kagan, a professor and associate dean at Teachers College, to chair it. The task force issued recommendations this week. A press release is here.

The task force took its task seriously and issued ambitious recommendations that go far beyond just assessment to providing a blue print for a "system" of early childhood education where one currently does not exist. Among the recommendations: develop standards, assessments, data reports, and training programs that are common to state pre-k's, Head Start programs, and so on; build grades K-3 on that same foundation, so that what happens before kindergarten builds toward what happens after kindergarten; make sure the assessments are good; make sure non-English speaking ahd disabled children are assessed properly and included in programs; invest the money to do all this.

I've just sketched the recommendations. Were I still writing for a newspaper or magazine I'd compare what the task force recommended with what my state is already doing in this area. In Florida, for example, kindergartners take a test and the state grades preschools based on the result. What are other states doing or not doing?