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Policy Framework
Low-income children too often begin school without the basic behavioral, emotional, and cognitive skills that they need to thrive academically — putting them at an immediate disadvantage and contributing to the large gap that develops in school achievement between low-income children and their more affluent peers. Hastened by the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, states and localities are responding by making major new investments in early childhood education and child care programs. In this climate, policymakers and program administrators face a fundamental challenge: to build and protect program quality at the same time that they expand the size of the preschool system.
Much public attention has focused on boosting the educational components of preschool. Until recently, however, less notice has been paid to a more basic challenge: dealing with children’s problem behaviors in the classroom. Preschool teachers in low-income neighborhoods report that between 15 and 20 percent of the young children in their classrooms exhibit clinically high levels of disruptive and challenging behaviors. In fact, a recent study from the Yale Child Study Center reported that rates of expulsion from preschool are even higher than in the later elementary years, with 10 percent of preschool teachers expelling at least one child in 2004. Disruptive children spend less time on classroom tasks, receive less instruction from teachers, grow to like school less, and attend school less often than their more emotionally well-adjusted peers. Children with behavior problems can also disrupt their peers’ chances for academic success by distracting teachers away from teaching to manage poor behavior in the classroom. Already, very little classroom time is being devoted to developing children’s school-readiness skills — fewer than 31 minutes in a four-hour day for the bottom quartile of classrooms by some estimates; this is not likely to change until teachers can effectively address children’s behavioral problems.
Many early education settings for low-income children are particularly ill-equipped to deal with these problems because they receive relatively low levels of funding, technical assistance, and oversight. In addition, when it comes to addressing children's problem behaviors in the classroom, there are few rigorous studies about how to address children’s problem behaviors in the classrooms that provide the kind of definitive information needed to guide policy and practice for preschool education.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
MDRC is developing a new demonstration project to identify promising preschool approaches to improve low-income children’s emotional, behavioral, and academic readiness upon school entry. The model to be tested will deliver a targeted intervention for high-risk children embedded within a universal prevention program for all children. More specifically, teachers will receive training on teacher-child interactions and children’s social information processing skills, and mental health workers will serve as consultants. As consultants, these clinicians will coach the teachers to reinforce the training, as well as provide targeted services to the highest-risk children. Mental health consultation is becoming increasingly widespread in preschool settings; in fact, it is mandated, although significantly underutilized, in Head Start programs.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The project is in the predemonstration phase, which includes these steps:
- Focus groups. Conduct focus groups with preschool teachers to better understand the nature of their concerns about children’s behavior in the classroom, as well as to gauge teachers’ experiences with various intervention strategies.
- Policy and research forums. Convene two forums: one with key public officials and individuals who are active in the early education policy field to ensure that the demonstration project will speak to the fundamental decisions faced by policymakers, and a second with researchers to identify best practices as the basis for developing the intervention.
- Finalizing the study design. Armed with the knowledge gained from the focus groups and policy and research forums, MDRC will design a study that addresses the questions most central to the policy debate. The current plan calls for a study of 90 preschool classrooms, randomly assigned to three research groups: a control group, a group receiving the teacher training only, and a group receiving the teacher training plus the mental health consultation. This three-group design will allow MDRC to compare the effects of the standard training alone to that with the added mental health consultation.
What's Next
The demonstration phase of this project will focus on launching a study in one or two program sites. This second phase will begin in mid-2006, with random assignment of preschool or prekindergarten programs to experimental and control groups.
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