Acknowledgements

We wish to recognize the 20,000 parents and children who participated during the first 4 years of the study. We would like to thank the teachers and administrators of the more than 3,800 schools we visited across the United States for allowing us to work with their children and parents, and for providing us with information about their students and schools. We are especially appreciative of the assistance we received from the Chief State School Officers, district superintendents and staff, and private school officials.

We also thank Elvira Germino Hausken and Karen Manship of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES); Jonaki Bose, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, U.S. Department of Transportation (formerly with NCES); Kristin Denton Flanagan, Jill Walston, Emily Rosenthal, Nikkita Willis, DeeAnn Brimhall, Sandra Eyster, Frank Avenilla, and Margaret Noonan of the Education Statistics Services Institute (ESSI); and Lizabeth Reaney, Teachers College, Columbia University (formerly with ESSI) for their hard work and dedication in supporting all aspects of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998?99 (ECLS-K) program. We appreciate the technical review comments provided by Bill Hussar, Robert Lerner, Val Plisko, and Marilyn Seastrom of NCES and Leslie Scott, David Miller, Jason Sellers, and Ruth Atchison of ESSI. We would also like to recognize the input we received from CatherineFreeman and Peggy Quinn at NCES, Ok-Choon Park at the Institute of Education Sciences, from outside reviewer Richard J. Coley at Educational Testing Service, and two anonymous reviewers.

Westat, Incorporated?in affiliation with the Institute for Social Research and the School of Education at the University of Michigan, and the Educational Testing Service, under the direction of NCES?conducted the base-year, first-grade, and third-grade studies. We would like to express our appreciation for the efforts of the staff from each of these organizations, and especially to the more than 400 field staff who conducted the child assessments and parent interviews in fall 1998, spring 1999, spring 2000, and spring 2002.

We wish to acknowledge the support that we have received from the Head Start Bureau of the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development; and the U.S. Department of Education?s Office of Special Education Programs, Office of English Language Acquisition, and Policy and Program Studies Service.

A special thank you to Kendra Chandler Webb, age 9 (1994), for designing the ECLS logo, and to Mariel Escudero at ESSI for the design of the report.