Comment on FR Doc # 2013-11821

The Early Years Institute is a catalyst for community partnerships to improve school readiness across our region of Long Island in NYS. In this role, we would like to recommend that Priority 3 and the definition of Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA) embrace and encourage the monitoring of school readiness at the population level. This allows communities to target limited resources where they are most needed and work collectively to close the school readiness gap at kindergarten entry and inform instruction in the early elementary school grades. Population-based school readiness results that are reported by neighborhood can be crucial in addressing the readiness gap because they allow communities to see how vulnerabilities in readiness domains are distributed across the community for ALL children. This allows local communities to take collective ownership of the results and engage a broad-base of cross-sector stakeholders around a common, data-driven agenda to address determinants of early childhood development at the individual, programmatic and systems levels. In addition, population-based assessments can be disaggregated at the school level to inform instruction for the incoming cohort of kindergarteners, through 3rd grade. To effectively monitor school readiness at the population level, KEAs should be: 1) Based on assessments completed by Kindergarten teachers; 2) Cover all essential domains of school readiness; 3) Administered after 3 months so teachers can get to know their students; 4) Easy to administer at a population level, including teacher training requirements of no more than 1 hour, and no more than 15-20 minutes per child to administer; 5) Inclusive of student address data for mapping along census tract;s and 6) Valid and reliable including evidence of predictive validity. The Early Development Instrument fits the bill and we know because we have used it to effectively assess needs and create numerous sustainable solutions with local agencies.