One of the reasons children's scores are stagnant, in my view, is because there is limited resources available for EC educators, specially in daycares. Our research conducted for three years, which included providing research-based professional development to daycare providers in all content areas along with a developmentally-appropriate curriculum that included materials and mentoring turned out to be highly successful. The need is at the early years...No dought about it. If we don't provide the appropriate "instruction" to EC educators and the material necessary to implement a "standards-based curriculum" (and instruct the EC teacher "how to"), the children are at a loss and will not succeed. As the demand for mothers to be in the workplace increases, the same demand should be applied to the proper education of their children. How do we accomplish that? We need to raise the salaries of these EC educators who receive nothing (minimum wage) just because they have no preparation...Preparation? They 've been taking care of kids because the majority of them want to make a difference in the children....they love children! Just as much as we, mothers do! Our government needs to consider that now a days, it's both sexes that are at the working force...and we should stop sex discrimination. Are there too many women trying to get ahead? Is educating our young children a threat to men because it entails mostly women educators? (Maybe, to men in politics). In all, it has to do with having the available resources and early training to get a generation of kids that can represent us all (both sexes/cultures/ religion) successfully and in which will be our right leaders for our nation...

Early Stimulation[Pre-school] is more than just math and science;it is the first preparation steps for life[school included]in socialization,emotional,spiritual,creative,physchomotor,cognitive, language,and other care related programes.The difficulties that the higher academic order[post pre-school] of reseason that Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell are refering to should be addressed to post pre-school curriculum development and its delivery and implementation systems.The issue of the teacher preparation for the post-pre-school grades;the issue of the other influences outside the designated learning environment ie home,parents and the community where the children come from;and the nature of curriculum support and instructional materials are some of the key areas that Shikha and Lisa should be addressing

It's amazing that the Wall Street Journal did not take into account the ever-increasing number of
non-English speaking immigrants flooding into our schools when compiling their statistics and condemniing preschool---either private or public!

Unfortunately what is often excluded from many of these tests scores is how much funding is invested into making these programs effective with properly trained teachers. How do you keep teachers that have strong backgrounds in Early Childhood Education when thay are making merely minimum wage?? If you want to see effectiveness in these programs start treating and paying those trained in ECE as professionals!!!

Has anyone ever stopped to think that the Federal requirements on scores have risen however, the funding has not. I also believe that if you take a child's ability to learn through play out of the equation, they are not as successful. If the study only took into account programs that use Teacher bases curriculum, that is the cause for the lower scores.