Focus on Results Trickling Down To Younger and Younger Children

By Linda Jacobson

Research Triangle Park, N.C.

With the issue of accountability continuing to top the nation's education agenda, demands for greater information on student performance are starting to filter down to children who haven't even started school.

Especially in states with publicly financed preschool, policymakers are increasingly seeking data on how well such programs have prepared young children for kindergarten. That interest, in turn, is leading more states to view school-readiness testing as an accountability tool whose time has come.

"There is a movement toward testing that is unprecedented," said Sharon L. Kagan, a senior associate at Yale University's Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy and the current president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. "Every state in the union is...