Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Pre-k education is now seen as the first step on a trajectory of academic success for all children and as wise economic policy for the nation. Nevertheless, persistent school achievement disparities for subgroups of especially vulnerable children – those who are low-income, DLLs, and children with disabilities – and mixed findings regarding pre-k’s enduring impacts (Lipsey et al., 2015; Reardon, 2011; Yoshikawa et al., 2013) suggest critical gaps in our knowledge: we have yet to adequately understand the essential, malleable classroom processes and practices needed to ensure that young children at risk of adverse school outcomes acquire foundational school readiness skills and receive the elementary education supports needed to flourish in school and beyond. This fragile knowledge base is especially problematic as states and school districts across the country continue to expand their pre-k programs.

To date, efforts to define malleable classroom processes and practices associated with early learning have focused on instructional practices. While assessments of teacher-child relationships, the emotional climate, and classroom management strategies are not uncommon in research on preschool settings (Early et al., 2007; Phillips et al., 2009; Weiland et al., 2013), variation in these non-instructional inputs has not demonstrated the same degree of influence as have instruction-focused inputs (e.g., Johnson et al., 2016). This evidence calls into question the adequacy with which the field has captured key non-instructional classroom processes and practices, as well as their role in fostering school readiness and sustained learning.

In collaboration with practitioners in Tulsa, OK – home to a renowned public pre-k program with documented short- and longer-term effects on children’s academic outcomes (Gormley, Phillips, et al., 2008; Hill et al., 2015; Phillips et al., 2016) – our research team is in the first year of a proposed 6-year longitudinal study (3-year olds through 3^rd grade) that seeks to address these knowledge gaps. Building on a 15-year partnership with leaders in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) district and coordinating Community Action Program (CAP) Head Start centers, and informed by their pressing questions, our researcher-practitioner network is examining a comprehensive set of classroom self-regulatory supports, that, in conjunction with strong instructional supports, we hypothesize will boost school readiness and contribute to sustaining the impacts of pre-k education into the primary grades, particularly for the diverse young learners who now populate pre-k classrooms.

The proposed paper will share findings from the first stage of our study, including (1) reflections on how the researcher-practitioner partnership has guided the development of pertinent research questions, particularly with respect to measurement; (2) data on the self-regulatory and instructional quality experienced by 3-year olds in public pre-k classrooms, including those that blend Head Start and other center-based programs as part of mixed delivery systems; and (3) key information on varying enrollment patterns in 4-year old pre-k options, with implications for understanding subsequent short- and longer-term pre-k impacts. Findings will provide needed information to researchers, policymakers, and practitioners on how to use rigorous measurement, data collection, and research design to promote more effective implementation of preschool programming.