Recent shifts in policy and practice have brought an increasingly more academic focus to the early grades, evidenced in rising standards and the now widely accepted notion that kindergarten is the new first grade. These views however are mostly supported by teacher and parent self-reports and not by an analysis of literacy achievement data. We created an up-to-date literacy profile for beginning readers using a multiple cohort database that contained achievement data for students at entry to first grade (n = 364,738) in the same schools (n = 2,358) over a 12-year period starting in 2002. Our finding that overall beginning of first-grade reading achievement for both low achieving and more typically achieving students improved measurably between 2002 and 2013 provides empirical support for the growing academic focus in the early grades. However, our findings about the differential nature of that progress for low achieving students compared to those more typically achieving raise new questions and concerns about a growing literacy achievement gap in the early grades.