Executive Summary

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 created the Early Reading First (ERF) program to enhance teacher practices, instructional content, and classroom environments in preschools and to help ensure that young children start school with the skills needed for academic success. This discretionary grant program provides funding to preschools that particularly serve children from low-income families so that the preschools can support age-appropriate development of children's language and literacy skills. The program, which was authorized under Title I, Part B, Subpart 2 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as reauthorized by NCLB, reflects the research of the last several years about the kinds of skills that young children must have to become successful readers. These skills include oral language (expressive and receptive language and vocabulary development), phonological awareness (rhyming, blending, segmenting), awareness of the print conventions, and alphabet knowledge (letter recognition) (Whitehurst and Lonigan 2001; Pullen and Justice 2003).

The NCLB Act also mandated an independent national evaluation of the ERF program and required a final report to Congress. This final report presents the impacts of the program on the language and literacy skills of children and on the instructional content and practices in preschool classrooms.

The main findings of the national evaluation of ERF are that the program had positive, statistically significant impacts on several classroom and teacher outcomes and on one of four child outcomes measured. Specifically, ERF had positive impacts on

• the number of hours of professional development that teachers received and on the use of mentoring as a mode of training
• aspects of classroom environments and teacher practices that were major focuses of the ERF program, including
• language environment of the classroom
• book-reading practices
• the variety of phonological-awareness activities and children's engagement in them
• materials and teaching practices to support print and letter knowledge and writing
• the extensiveness and recency of child-assessment practices
• other, more general aspects of classroom quality, including the quality of teacherchild interactions, the organization of the classroom, and the planning of activities for children.

With regard to child outcomes, ERF had a positive impact on children's print and letter knowledge but not on phonological awareness or oral language. ERF neither enhanced nor diminished children's social-emotional development during the preschool year. Patterns of results that were observed for the overall sample were also observed for most subgroups examined.