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[Implications for Future Research] Early Childhood Reform in Seven Communities - October 1996
In this chapter, we discuss the lessons from these seven exemplary programs for improving our early childhood system -- both from the top in terms of policy and funding decisions and at the community level in terms of management and practice strategies. To set the stage for these recommendations, we begin with a brief reminder about the strengths and limitations of data from exemplary local programs.
A familiar adage in government observes that "where you stand depends on where you sit." In the realm of qualitative policy research, this saying could be translated as "what you see depends on what you decide to look for." These accounts of local practice are selective because all the programs were chosen based on their reputation for excellence and innovativeness. This attribute provides several strengths as a basis for creating policy recommendations. Their experience prefigures issues which will dominate in early childhood policy discussions in the future. Also, as these initiatives are succeeding in providing high quality, comprehensive services which meet the needs of children and families, their experience is an important test for the present policy system.
However, our choices in framing our case studies also create challenges as we address implications for public policy. One complication in reasoning about policy implications from these examples is that many of these agencies have learned how to "work" the present policy system in spite of its structural weaknesses. For example, many of these sites are successful in garnering and combining resources from a variety of sources and in coping with a variety of separate regulatory systems. Their success could lead to an interpretation that our present policy system is reasonably workable (or that crafting comprehensive, quality services is relatively effortless in the current policy environment); ignoring the fact that the approach seen in these agencies may require unusual levels of technical skill, energy, ambition, and ability to tolerate risk and uncertainty.
There are similar complications in drawing on these programs to address implications for practitioners. Exemplary programs explore challenges and strategies which point the way for their colleagues. However, it may be an error to assume that peer agencies can easily adopt strategies illustrated in these case studies. The challenge is to understand how much and why these initiatives differ from other early childhood programs. For example, these strategies are characterized by strong and capable local leadership and success in mobilizing local community funding to complement state and federal investments. What is the general level of management talent in the early childhood field? Can similar levels of private/local investment be obtained in most communities?
Given these caveats, our presentation of policy recommendations will follow the sequence of our analysis of policy effects:
Similarly, our discussion of implications for practice will be begin with key challenges for staff who work with children, proceed to discussion of implications for serving parents and families, and then to challenges for program managers.
One contribution from this study is its portrait of how state and federal early childhood policies interact with local factors to influence the development of early childhood agencies. Themes which stand out in these case accounts include the following:
Thus this study provides the basis to examine policy strategies which would support more widespread excellence and innovation in local early childhood agencies. What policy strategies would foster more initiatives with the innovative features and high quality found in our case study sites?
Funding Strategies
1. Coordinated expansion of federal and state public investment to equalize access to quality early childhood programs.
By selecting agencies regarded as innovative and successful, this study has profiled managers with above-average success in fund-raising and program development. However, current levels of public investment in young children limit the effectiveness of local agency directors. Many of these sites have enjoyed steady expansion of services, due to ingenious and heroic fund- raising efforts, yet they continue to face daunting waiting lists of unserved families. Resources are particularly lacking for programs for infants and toddlers and for working poor families. In addition, many agencies face a dilemma of fixed funding levels which fail to allow for increasing costs over time. In this situation, managers are forced to spend an inordinate amount of energy raising money and safeguarding the continuation of existing funding sources -- which diverts their attention from working to strengthen staff effectiveness, morale and service quality.
Thus, a fundamental priority for early childhood policy is to provide a steady expansion of services to low-income and working families towards the goals of school readiness, family self- sufficiency, and strengthening communities.
2. Supporting rates of funding which are consistent with program quality and a quality workforce.
Early childhood funding should reflect the costs of providing quality programs which meet the needs of young children and families. Unless funding rates are adequate, programs will be unable to pay adequate salaries necessary to attract well-trained staff members, or staff will be required to work with large numbers of children. Furthermore, there should be greater consistency in rates across different state and federal funding streams.
3. Encouraging local and private sector investment in early childhood services.
A key ingredient in the success of these programs is their ability to attract local businesses, community institutions and community residents to contribute to their operations. However, there is no robust set of policy strategies to encourage this ingredient. It is difficult to create uniform standards regarding what proportion of costs can be drawn from non-governmental sources without penalizing communities with fewer resources.
Quality Enhancement Strategies
4. Setting program standards which support quality services, but with suitable flexibility about strategies for meeting local needs.
State and federal early childhood programs should be undergirded with a common commitment to quality, as embodied in consistent program standards. Research and professional judgment support regulating key factors which protect the safety of children and create the preconditions for effective nurturing and instruction; namely, group size, staff training, adult:child ratios, family support and involvement and support for the health, nutrition, and other core needs of children and families. All forms of early care and education should be expected to meet standards on these measures.
Yet while policies need to be stronger and more consistent in supporting quality, they should be more easy going in other realms, such as the form and mix of service strategies appropriate to different local communities. As these case studies illustrate, there are a variety of effective approaches to serving young children and families, including home-based and center-based programming; various approaches to engaging, serving, and involving families; and different designs for staffing programs.
5. Service strategies which support a dual focus of enhancing child development and strengthening families and which sustain services over time.
Policies should allow programs to respond to the survival needs, schedules, and personal stresses typical of today's poor and working poor families at the same time as they provide developmentally appropriate learning experiences and other services for young children. Head Start's comprehensive performance standards give equal status to early childhood education, health, social services, and parent involvement. Project FACE combines parent education and home visits to families with infants and toddlers, a family literacy initiative, and prekindergarten classrooms. Other program guidelines should be revised to acknowledge the benefits of working simultaneously with young children and their families.
6. Building an infrastructure to support program quality and innovation.
All forms of early childhood programs and agencies should be able to benefit from the tools of monitoring, technical assistance, formative evaluation, and participation in professional networks. In particular, these case studies show the potential for peer exchange across program sites and types as a strategy to accelerate innovation and improvement in early childhood programs. Another crucial policy challenge is to create a more coherent career development system for staff members who work in early childhood programs, addressing needs for ongoing training, tied to a career ladder of credentialed roles, and with more consistency across major delivery systems to enhance career mobility.
7. Creating a leadership/management development system.
Early childhood program management is complex, consequential work, involving important decisions and executive responsibilities of considerable scope. However, the career development system for local early childhood administrators is fragmented and random rather than coherent and purposive. Since managers work for a mix of institutions (Head Start grantees, public school systems, independent non-profit agencies) there is no single credentialling authority for managers in this field. Indeed, in more than twenty states there are no training requirements for child care center directors. There are few university-based programs to prepare candidates for management positions. The majority of local leaders included in this study learned about the realms of fiscal and program management through trial and error and via informal mentoring relationships.
The lack of a system to prepare and support early childhood administrators is a structural problem but also a troubling symbolic statement. It implies that managing services for young children is not significant or distinctive as a professional role. States, foundations and the federal government should collaborate in initiatives to stimulate and support local leaders -- to bolster the skills and motivation of our present cadre of talent, to develop leaders for the future, and to use existing talent to mentor and train colleagues.
Intergovernmental Strategies
8. Easing the administrative burdens involved in administering multiple public early childhood programs.
These case studies illustrate the benefits of a diversified funding strategy and the local invention of approaches to program design and quality. However, our current infrastructure of policies creates few incentives and many barriers to this approach to local program administration. State and federal early childhood programs are designed and administered as if they were isolated entities, rather than a series of complementary funding streams and programs. Successful management of multiple sources of funding requires considerable skills and knowledge. Yet, most early childhood administrators have nowhere to turn for consultation on strategies for working with a mixed range of investors. State and federal policymakers and administrators should come together to find ways to make life simpler for local program managers, and to see how different funding streams and mandates can be made to work together more easily and productively at the local level.
9. Building community planning and responsibility for early childhood services.
As much as we need to create more programs with the qualities of the seven included in this study, we also need a more coherent system to govern early childhood services at the community level. This is a two-fold problem. First, we lack a technical planning capacity to guide decisions across program and agency lines and to dovetail with general purpose government. Secondly, we need a mechanism to embody and engender the general public interest in quality early childhood services. Early childhood services should become a concern and responsibility of local communities, rather than an activity which is perceived as controlled by professionals and funded by state and federal agencies.
Chapter V highlighted strategies of staff members and directors working with young children and families. Across the country, in Head Start, child care and school-based initiatives, we found the following:
Rather than reiterating the innovative strategies reported in Chapter 5, we will focus here on challenges and dilemmas faced by classroom staff, family service staff, and program managers.
For Promoting Child Development and Learning
1. Refining and promoting teaching excellence within the paradigm of developmentally appropriate practice.
Consistent implementation of the principles of developmentally appropriate practice is a major asset for these programs and for the overall early childhood profession. Practitioners feel that they belong to a national community of professionals which stands behind a concrete, comprehensive image of effective practice. They also enjoy the benefits of a vocabulary to explain and defend their work with children, particularly in discourse with parents and public school representatives. The "DAP" construct includes clear markers which allow quick assessment of the qualities of physical space, materials, forms of activities, schedule, and instructional strategies.
However, success in implementing these outer markings of age-appropriate instruction gives rise to a new challenge: creating a second generation set of shared images of excellent teaching to guide further improvement in classroom practice. A risk is that once teachers have put in place the external features of a developmentally appropriate environment, they will assume a passive or routinized approach to their practice. Teachers may mistakenly overemphasize child-initiated learning and fail to work actively in observing, questioning, and suggesting ways to extend children's activities and ideas.
It is difficult to define and describe this next stage of sophistication and excellence in teaching. When children are free to move physically, choose their partners, and frequently invent their own activity as they engage with materials, there are correspondingly more complex choices available to teachers. Often the most effective strategy depends of sizing up the context of a particular group of children to guide plans and responses.
One strong emphasis within these programs is to assist teachers in taking a clinical approach to observing and tracking individual children -- getting to know them well as individuals, understanding how their minds work, and figuring out how to respond to their learning and developmental profile with different strategies and activities. Taking on this role, particularly through observations, and brainstorming with colleagues, provides rich opportunities for analysis and reflection. Another perspective stresses enhancing teachers' skills in talking with children and adapting activities and routines to the needs and responses of a particular group of children. A Training Coordinator from one program expressed the following views on this issue:
2. Working to continue to motivate and foster the professional development of staff members.
These flagship programs have been successful in recruiting and retaining a corps of teachers and supporting many individuals in career development from entry level positions to attainment of an initial credential in early childhood education. However, staff must contend with barriers including studying part-time while working, financing college courses, and often balancing work and home responsibilities:
One approach towards fostering continued professional growth in staff is the use of experienced teachers as mentors for new staff members. Sheltering Arms uses a staffing strategy which includes a role of Instructional Lead Teacher in addition to an administrative Center Director in each site. They also encourage staff members to share their expertise with peers:
Agencies encourage staff members to attend state, regional, and national conferences to validate their work and keep them motivated to learn new pedagogical methods. Teachers in FACE programs attend meetings and training events several times a year where they have opportunities to present strategies and learn from colleagues in other communities. FACE is also creating a network of peer trainers, to support teachers and home visitors from their more established program sites to work with peers in communities beginning to implement FACE.
3. Working to promote continuity with schools and successful transitions for children and families.
While many of the programs we visited have made progress in connecting with local schools, prospects for more universal and substantial progress in this domain are daunting. One set of barriers to easy, positive relationships between early childhood programs and public schools are simple conflicts in jurisdictional boundaries. For example, Child Development, Inc. serves children who will enroll in forty local school districts, and collaborates with a dozen intermediate agencies involved in serving students with disabilities. In other cases, many school districts enroll children from dozens of different types of child care, preschool, Head Start, nursery school and family day care home settings. Thus even accomplishing the simplest level of communication about mutual features of programs and expectations of parents and children can be an awesome assignment for early childhood and school administrators.
Second, there are many structural differences between early childhood agencies and public schools. These differences complicate communications and make it difficult to transfer practices and strategies from one setting to another in order to smooth out "bumps" in the transition process. Parent involvement and communication is more natural in most early childhood centers, where parents tend to bring their children into the classroom each day. By contrast, public school buildings are larger, more formidable edifices, often with confusing entrances, stern warning signs about visitation, and long hallways to navigate. Early childhood agencies and staff members often have a strong tradition of values and practices supporting substantial parental involvement in classroom life and in program governance, while public schools have a different history.
Third, incentives for school/early childhood partnerships are weak and uneven. In the near future, all Head Start programs will be required to create transition agreements with local schools, but there are no similar provisions attached to other forms of federal early childhood funding or public school programs. This policy context leaves it up to local managers to take the initiative and choose to pay the costs of genuine collaboration around core practices and policies.
Finally, when early childhood programs go beyond their boundaries to influence the wider school, they run up against deeply embedded "cultural constructions" of schooling that are difficult to change. The historical experience of school reform movements suggests that it is very difficult to change standardized patterns (Tyack and Tobin, 1994). All this suggests that continuity of early childhood practice upward to the primary grades must be systemic, involving outreach and communication with administrators and teachers as well as the wider community. Furthermore, such advocacy will have to be continuous, and will require resources, for it is unlikely that change will come quickly or easily.
For Family Support and Involvement
1. Programs face a set of challenges trying to gain participation of adult family members.
Families are generally eager to give their children the benefit of participating in an early childhood programs, and to gain even a partial subsidy of child care costs. However, it can be more difficult for staff to secure parent participation, particularly in forms of involvement which demand time, commitment, and effort. Most parent respond positively to outreach efforts of agencies to provide social support, recreation, tangible assistance for economic and family needs, although even these interchanges take time and require parents to divulge information about problems which they might choose to keep confidential. However, other aspects of family involvement are more demanding. Classroom volunteering and parent education programs require parents to contribute time; adult literacy requires study and confronting previous failures or negative encounters with schooling; involvement in advisory and policy committees requires development of new skills and taking risks in public. While many parents welcome opportunities to grow and to contribute to a program, others find it difficult to enter into more demanding aspects of family support strategies. Some parents are overwhelmed with personal problems such as substance abuse, domestic violence, or mental health difficulties. In other families, the survival demands of obtaining food, clothing and shelter command all of parents' time and energy. Working parents have more than enough tasks on their hands and parent involvement activities become another claim on their time. Program staffs struggle to connect with all of these types of parents and to adapt activities to their needs and capacities. One home visitor expressed the dilemma this way:
2. Program staffs are negotiating the boundaries of their work with family members and the special situations they face.
Staff members have to negotiate a balanced approach to the range of demands on their work. There are no formula solutions to the issues they confront and tradeoffs have to be made. For example, when programs are family-oriented, teachers are called upon to spend time getting to know the families and sharing information about a child's problems and progress. They also have the added task of working with family advocates, home visitors, and other specialists who concentrate on family service and advocacy functions.
Home visitors, through the intimate contacts they have with families, confront a different set of challenges, often without adequate training and experience. They deal with a number of complex issues -- child abuse and neglect, marital problems, substance abuse, and severe mental health problems -- that they are not able to handle by themselves. They are sometimes caught between having to report families for abuse and neglect, and then feeling they have betrayed the trust of families. They may have to deal with families who need food, housing, and clothing assistance even before they can be receptive to parenting information. They must decide whether or not to continue trying to recruit or maintain distressed families when there are other families who need their services. They have to use their judgment on continuing home visits when husbands or companions threaten them for making mothers more assertive and independent. Each of these situations demands a great deal of support from management and in-service training.
Family service staff, too, are challenged to work with families in a way that avoids dependence and promotes independence. While advocates are willing to provide parents with the information and contacts they need to get help from community services, they expect parents to speak for themselves rather than have the advocate do all the negotiations. The advocates also juggle the roles of professional and trusted friend. They have to balance their time and availability to parents as advisers and counsellors, with the requests parents place on them after work hours or for services that go beyond the call of duty.
Another challenge for staff is working out respectful relationships with families from diverse cultural backgrounds. This is a dynamic process which may involve redefining parents' attitudes toward the school, their own families, and their peers. For many parents, sharp boundaries between home and school have been ingrained by historical and cultural traditions. Staff members try to impress upon parents the primacy of their educational role and their right to participate in their children's schooling. They persist even if they realize that change will neither be immediate nor their message necessarily reinforced when children transfer from preschool to school. Staff members also deal with mothers with domestic problems who are reluctant to speak about their experiences -- much less find help -- when that is contrary to cultural norms. The staff considers its task to make parents become "more comfortable in seeking help." Because family support involves not just a staff-participant relationship but also parents helping each other as peers, the staff members look for creative ways to break ethnic isolation and connect parents of various ethnic backgrounds with each other.
3. Programs face the challenge of defining and implementing high quality front line practices.
Although family support programs have proliferated over the last decade, little attention has been given to defining quality (Kagan, 1994). There is no position statement on appropriate parent-focused practices as has been developed for early childhood classroom practice (Powell, 1989). In addition, whereas a research-based consensus existed regarding quality standards for group size, ratios, and training of early childhood teachers, such standards have yet to be articulated for the family support field as a whole. This situation leaves it to local programs to create their own definitions and strategies to govern staffing patterns, strategies for working with families, the content of parenting programs, and the organization of service delivery. Programs face several challenges in these design and implementation decisions.
A great deal of variation characterizes the content of family support services. Programs may adopt packaged models of parenting curriculums, combine elements from the models with homegrown activities, or modify and adapt the models for local situations. Programs also offer a menu of activities, from social gatherings to family literacy, but have little or no information about their differential as well as combined impact on parenting skills, involvement in a child's education, and other program goals.
Programs need to develop standards and a strategy regarding the numbers and qualification of staff, staff to family ratios, schedules, space, transportation, drop-in child care, and access to comprehensive services. While packaged home visiting models such as Parents as Teachers and HIPPY have their respective standards in terms of frequency of home visits, curriculum, staff training, ratio of home visitors to families, the programs adapt and fine-tune these models to their local context and available resources. In some cases, the programs go beyond the minimum requirements of these models, indicative of their commitment to excellent service.
Programs face the challenge of putting many different components together and managing them. These components function as a system and require coordination among staff members within a program, as well as with the community of service providers. Developing these operational supports also takes a substantial investment of resources, including money, staff time, and space. While the programs strive to build their capacity in these areas, there are tradeoffs to be made when resources are limited.
For Improving Program Management
These case studies illustrate an impressive range of local management strategies, innovations and accomplishments. Agency administrators are key figures in creating a supportive environment for the challenging and delicate work of teachers and family support staff and they steer a course for their agencies through a complex and dynamic set of mandates and funding opportunities. We now step back to reflect on the most important challenges for local managers:
1. Managers balancing attention to external sources of funding and initiatives to promote local program services and professional development.
As we have described, managers in early childhood agencies face a continuing stream of judgments about how to allocate their time and energy. One realm of possibilities and demands comes from state, federal, and private funding sources, the pressures to sustain current funding sources and the potential to expand revenue sources. A second realm of opportunities involves leading efforts on quality, innovation, and professional development within one's own agency. One attribute observed in each of these agencies is a sense of initiative and originality in creating a shared identity and distinctive approach to early childhood practice. There are an endless array of opportunities to support the individual growth of staff members, to lead internal planning and evaluation efforts, to observe and give feedback on direct services, to brainstorm on new possibilities in strategies and conceptions of excellence. There are no models or convenient rules of thumb to govern how managers spend their time or judge productivity and effectiveness.
We conclude with the conviction that improving early childhood services is an important endeavor, with considerable payoff in improving the daily lives of children and families, making the job of public education more manageable, and contributing to stronger families and communities. We believe this study contributes to a more complete, balanced, and grounded image of how early childhood programs work in the present policy structure. And we believe that more accurate understanding of the interplay of public funding and policies; local management, staff capacity and motivation; and responses of families and communities will lead to more constructive and successful public policy. We trust that wider appreciation of the diversity of the early childhood community, the subtleties of practice, and the dynamic effects of policy and management will lead to renewed efforts to help all young children develop to their fullest potential.
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