Interview with Co-Editor of Applying Implementation Science in Early Childhood Programs and Systems

Trend Lines Q&A with Tamara Halle, Ph.D., Child Trends’ Co-director of Early Childhood Research, about the new book she co-edited along with Allison Metz and Ivelisse Martinez-Beck, Applying Implementation Science in Early Childhood Programs and Systems.

Q. Who would benefit from reading this book?

A. The book is intended for researchers interested in implementation science frameworks, program developers who design and implement programs and systems, and policymakers who want to make sure the early childhood programs and systems they fund are effectively implemented.

Q. How do you describe implementation science?

A. Implementation science is the scientific study of the process of making evidence-based practices work in real world settings. Implementation science is important because when you scale up a program to reach more children and families, you want to make sure you achieve the desired outcomes.

Q. Within the early care and education field, what is the state of deployment of implementation science?

A. Historically, the application of implementation science in early care and education has lagged behind its application in other disciplines such as child welfare and health. In recent years, the number of federally-funded early childhood initiatives such as home visitation that include an explicit focus on implementation has been growing.  The topic of implementation is also increasingly being featured at research conferences in the early childhood field, so it’s an exciting time of expansion now.

Q. How do you get the professionals working in early care and education, many of whom have been in positions for many years, to make changes in how they work?

A. It’s hard to get people to change, but effective implementation of a new practice requires it. This is why we included a chapter called Readiness to Change in the book. You have to assess where people are in their readiness to change at each stage of implementation.  As you understand people’s willingness to embrace change you can adapt the appropriate approaches to engage them and to be successful in implementing new practices.

Q. In the book, you talk about how it can often take 20 years in lag time from research to practice. How do you shorten this gap?

A. The book talks about the importance of data and feedback loops to inform decisions about program and practice during all stages of implementation – from exploration to full implementation. This means we shorten the time frames from collecting data and sharing it with the stakeholders who need to know the results of the data to make program improvements and modifications. We need to move to a model where data are continuously collected, analyzed and shared in a feedback loop for continuous quality improvement.

Q. Should universities that are preparing the future workforce for the early childhood field spend more time teaching implementation science?

A. Yes. There does need to be more attention to educating early childhood practitioners and researchers in implementation science frameworks and techniques, and more salience of implementation science in peer review journals. We have to prepare, train and retrain our early care and education workforce – as well as the researchers and funders, who will be assessing the effectiveness of early childhood practices, programs, and systems – so that we can ensure that evidence-based practices are delivered in a way that the majority of young children and their families can benefit from them.

Note: Interview conducted by Frank Walter, Vice President of Strategic Communications, Child Trends

Who’s Teaching our Toddlers: Investing in Early Care and Education Providers

A recent New York Times article highlighted research by the prominent economist James Heckman and others about the need to invest in children’s education before they arrive at school. Heckman cited studies that found ratings of children’s academic skills to be consistent from age 3 to 18 years. Julia Isaacs, a researcher at the Urban Institute, reported that less than half of children living in poverty enter kindergarten with the skills needed to succeed in school. Child Trends’ researchers have documented disparities in children’s development starting in infancy. As early as nine months of age, infants from low-income families were rated lower on their overall health, cognitive and social development, and positive behaviors than infants in higher-income families. Between infancy and toddlerhood, these disparities just about doubled.

If we are going to invest more into early education for children, where to do we start? One place to start is with our early childhood workforce. Little is known about the individuals who care for our infants, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Only 32 states maintain a child care registry, where child care providers can upload their credentials, according to the National Registry Alliance.

What we do know about child care providers serving young children is that they are an instable workforce that is not paid well and have (on average) less education than primary or secondary teachers. Child care workers make, on average, less than half that of elementary teachers.

Additionally, there is little regulation of early care and education providers serving outside of pre-kindergarten and Head Start. Only 10 states require the comprehensive background check of child care providers recommended by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies [NACCRRA], which includes federal and state criminal background checks and checks of the sex offender and child sexual abuse registries. Additionally, state education and training requirements for early care and education providers vary by program and state, with the majority of states (62 percent) requiring a high school degree or less  of lead teachers in child care centers, according to NACCRRA.

Research has shown repeatedly that the physical, social, emotional and educational development that occurs in a child’s first five years of life is a strong predictor of success in school, work and later in life. One way to support our young children is to ensure they are spending time with well-trained, and appropriately compensated, professionals to provide the highest quality of care and education.

Nicole Forry, Senior Research Scientist

What’s Next for Head Start?

While President Obama in his State of the Union address called for greater investment in early childhood education, he also said some 70,000 disadvantaged three- to five-year-old children and their families could be denied access to Head Start programs if Congress fails to reach an agreement on the deficit reduction.  As policymakers evaluate funding for Head Start, it is worth examining the evidence base for this program that has served more than 27 million children and their families since its founding in 1965.

From the start, Head Start has been the object of vigorous debate and research.  Often misunderstood as a program intended to boost students’ test scores, Head Start has always had broader goals: strengthening families (and particularly parents’ involvement in their child’s education), and promoting the health of children and parents, as well as giving young children a safe, developmentally appropriate environment to learn the social, behavioral, and cognitive skills that will give them a leg-up on kindergarten.

With federal legislation enacted in 1998, Congress mandated rigorous evaluation of the Head Start program. The results of the most recent set of findings demonstrates that access to Head Start has immediate, significant, and positive impacts on children’s preschool outcomes across developmental domains, although few impacts on children were sustained  through third grade.

The Advisory Committee on Head Start Research and Evaluation, a prestigious group of researchers and practitioners who developed the blueprint for the Head Start Impact Study, recommended that the “research findings should be used in combination with the rest of Head Start research in an effort to improve the effectiveness of Head Start programs for children and families.” With this in mind, decision makers should take into account two important findings from the body of research on Head Start:

•  In the almost 50 years since Head Start was created, states and localities have launched a wide range of early learning programs, many targeted to the same low-income population that Head Start serves.  When we compare children who attended Head Start with children who did not, it is quite likely that the latter group attended some kind of early childhood program.  School systems across the nation are working to better understand how to help sustain the impacts of all early childhood interventions – not just Head Start — from kindergarten to third grade and beyond.
•  Researchers who have studied Head Start have found “sleeper effects,” that suggest though some effects may be dormant for some time, Head Start has benefitted children when they enter high school and early adulthood.

On this last point, a few years ago, David Deming, a Harvard researcher, conducted an analysis of the long-term benefits of Head Start.[1]  Using longitudinal data (that is, following the same children over time), Deming contrasted outcomes in young adulthood for siblings who either participated or did not participate in Head Start (thereby controlling for a host of background characteristics). He found a number of beneficial effects.

Participants were more likely to graduate from high school or to have tried at least one year of college, and less likely to have a learning disability, to be idle (not engaged in either education or employment) or to have poor health.  Some effects were particularly strong for certain subgroups of children: for instance, boys who participated in Head Start were especially less likely than non-participants to repeat a grade; black children were especially more likely to have attempted college; on several of the outcome measures, the biggest gains were for those participants whose mothers scored low on cognitive ability.

The bottom line?  On a summary index of young adult outcomes, which (in addition to those mentioned above) included teen parenthood and crime, Deming found that Head Start participants gain nearly a quarter of a standard deviation.  How much is that?  Well, it closes about a third of the gap between children from families with median incomes and those with the lowest incomes.

Perhaps even more important, Head Start is not in the same league as some of the model child care programs (often funded with generous university or foundation support).  Head Start quality has improved over time, but in the 1990s (the period of Deming’s study) it was more representative of “good” (not “best”) care.  Yet even so the gains from Head Start are about 80 percent as large as those in the Perry Preschool Project—the best known of the model programs, which has been found to have a very favorable return-on-investment—at about 60 percent of the cost.

It is not always easy to know where to start when facing tough budget choices.  We recommend starting with the evidence.

David Murphey, Senior Scientist

Sarah Daily, Research Scientist

[1] Deming, D. (2009).  Early childhood intervention and life-cycle skill development: Evidence from Head Start.  American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(3), 111-134.