Looking Through a Wider Lens

Quality Counts 2007 begins to track state efforts to create seamless education systems from early childhood to the world of work.

By The Editors

For the past decade, Education Week ’s annual Quality Counts report has tracked state policies for improving K-12 education. But children’s chances for success don’t just rest on what happens from kindergarten through high school. They are also shaped by experiences during the preschool years and opportunities for continued education and training beyond high school.

Smart states, like smart companies, try to make the most of their investments by ensuring that young people’s education is connected from one stage to the next—reducing the chances that students will be lost along the way or will require costly remedial programs to acquire skills or knowledge they could have learned right from the start.

Yet the historical splits between different levels of education in the United States have made such coordination difficult, with early-childhood education, elementary and secondary schooling, and postsecondary education and training often operating in separate silos, with different rules, different financial structures, different accountability systems, and...