Is kindergarten the new 1st grade?

A notebook of short but worthy items: Kindergarten teachers in 2010 had much higher expectations of their students than in 1998, and their classrooms have become more similar to first grade classes from the 1990s, according to a study published in AERA Open in January; researchers Matthew Steinberg and Rachel Garrett found prior academic achievement of students is a significant predictor of teacher success in the high-stakes evaluation system; too much teamwork exhausts employees and saps productivity, write the authors of an article in Harvard Business Review.