At Birth to Thrive we are keeping a close eye on efforts to rewrite the defining federal education act, and it’s newsworthy when the Council of Chief State School Officers puts its name on a report about pre-kindergarten’s importance in school reform.

The new report, Redefining ESEA: The Critical Role of Pre-K and the Early Grades in School Reform Efforts, contains a lot of ideas and questions for those who will write, debate and vote on reforms to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind), including creating a new title for early learning and ensuring those in that field are part of professional development for educators.

Plus, if we want to know why students are and are not learning, we should “ensure that longitudinal data systems include children before age 5.”

This report is only the latest sign that the Council of Chief State School Officers has endorsed adding early learning to the debate.

“Chiefs across the nation are confronted with these most serious challenges—how to eradicate deeply rooted domestic and international achievement gaps,” the council wrote in A Quiet Crisis: The Urgent Need to Build Early Childhood Systems And Quality Programs for Children Birth to Age Five.  “They now recognize that the seeds of inequity are sowed early in children’s lives, and thus their leadership of education reform must expand to encompass early childhood interventions.”

We love to ask questions here, and Redefining ESEA – an effort by the school council, Pre-K Now, the Pew Center on the States and the New America Foundation – raises a whole bunch of thoughtful ones.

• “How do you provide the most stability and protection from future cuts?”
• “To what extent will greater investments for early childhood, preschool, pre-K and preK-3rd programs lead districts to feel that they have to borrow from already existent programs?”
• “How do you measure progress in a 4- or 5-year-old? What tools are developmentally appropriate?
• How do you account for children’s different levels of ‘readiness’ when they arrive at school?”

The best, toughest and arguably most important question is: “Where will the money from?”

Extra Credit: It may not focus on preschool or pre-kindergarten, but the new National Assessment of Educational Progress at Grades 4 to 8 is worth reading as one measure of how well students are prepared before they enter K-12.

Here is the bottom line: “Reading scores up since 2007 at grade 8 and unchanged at grade 4.”