55 One reason is that early childhood teachers themselves often lack the skills and confidence to substantially and effectively increase their attention to mathematics in the curriculum.56 Mathematics and literacy concepts and skills—and, indeed, robust content across the curriculum—can be taught to young children in ways that are engaging and developmentally appropriate.57 It can be, but too often isn’t; to achieve such improvements will require considerable strengthening of early-years curriculum and teaching. Failing to meet this challenge to improve all children’s readiness and achievement will perpetuate the inequities of achievement gaps and the low performance of the U.S. student population as a whole. Besides specific predictors in areas such as mathematics and literacy, another major thread in recent research is that children’s social and emotional competencies, as well as some capabilities that cut across social and emotional and cognitive functioning, predict their classroom functioning. Of course, children’s social, emotional, and behavioral adjustment is important in its own right, both in and out of the classroom. But it now appears that some variables in these domains also relate to and predict school success. For example, studies have linked emotional competence to both enhanced cognitive performance and academic achievement.58 A number of factors in the emotional and social domain, such as independence, responsibility, self-regulation, and cooperation, predict how well children make the transition to school and how they fare in the early grades.59 A particularly powerful variable is self-regulation, which the early childhood field has long emphasized as a prime developmental goal for the early years