AMCHP 2006 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
EARLY CHILDHOOD: BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR LIFELONG HEALTH
March 4-8, 2006
WALTER GILLIAM: I have a lavaliere on. I'm going to check to make sure that it's sounding. Good. It's a pleasure to be here today and it's a pleasure to be standing up here speaking to you, but it was also a pleasure to be down there with the pork chop. I'm hoping that it will be there in a few minutes.
I'm here to talk to you about an issue that we've been looking at the (inaudible) Center for a little while now, but it's an issue that I think has been concerning for a lot of folks out in the field for a very long while, and that's children who have behavioral problems, challenging behaviors in classrooms, preschool programs, birth‑to‑five years old, that are so severe, that it becomes difficult for them to be able to main their placement in that classroom.
Before I go on and tell you a little bit about the study that we did, let me first say a little bit about the funding. That says next. There we go. And ‑‑ good. Work was supported by the foundation for child and development who funded the pilot study for this project that I will be telling you a little bit about. And then the rest of the project was actually funded by the Pugh Family Trust by way of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.
When we found the findings that I'm going to be talking to you about today, the findings regarding children being expelled from preschool programs, terminated from preschool programs, withdrawn from preschool programs, sent home from preschool programs, whatever the terminology that one chooses to describe the phenomena, then it became clear that it was important to be able to get this information out so that we could have a public dialogue about what to do about the issue. The Foundation for Child Development, A.L. Melman Family Foundation, the (inaudible) Foundation for Public Education, agreed to fund that dissemination project.
Before I go a little bit further though, let me tell you about the types of programs that we were looking at. These are State‑funded pre-kindergarten programs. Our definition for the State‑funded pre‑k program is a program that's administered and funded, at least in part, by a state government or state agency within a state government, serving children in the three‑ to four‑year‑old range, has some kind of classroom‑based component, and has an overarching goal of school readiness. We accepted location in the State Department of Education as a de facto statement about school readiness or educational goal. But if the program was located in another agency, such as a workforce development, governor's office, and had a state goal of helping children become ready for school, then we also counted that as a program.
When we took a look at these different definitions that we had, we found 52 different State‑funded pre‑k programs operating in 40 different states. When you do the math and you add up together the number of children served in these programs, it's about 800 to 900,000 children a year. At a total aggregate cost of about $3 billion a year.
Now, that's a lot of children and that's a pretty fair amount of money. It's almost as many children as Head Start serves. It's getting very close to that rate. As you can see, the explosion of it has been very dramatic over the past few decades.
These are the states that have a State‑funded pre‑k program. In blue are the states that have a unique system specific to their state. And then you'll see also, in yellow, the states that have a significant amount of money from the State government that goes into Head Start funding. These are State‑funded Head Start models. And because blue and yellow make green, those are the states that do both. There's 52 different state systems that we were looking at, operating in these 40 different states. And white applies to the states that don't have a system at present.
So what we were interested in was this, what do these State‑funded pre‑k programs look like? In other words, what is the quality of the service that these children are receiving for $3billion a year at 800 to 900,000 children a year being served?
We started collecting data back in 1996 regarding the policies that governed these State‑funded pre‑k programs. And we collected this information and described what these programs look like, in terms of the stringency of the policies, and we published that. We collected it again in 2000. We were planning on doing it again in 2004.
And then it occurred to me that there were, at this time, several places around the country that were collecting such policy information. Yet, we really didn't know about what was truly happening at the classroom level. For the most part, we were collecting aspirational statements about what we hoped the program looks like, or what we plan the program to look like, but not necessarily having a sense of what this program actually looks like.
And so we launched the National pre-kindergarten study which was basically an effort to be able to map the legislative intent against the policies in each one of these states. And then on to actual classroom‑level implementation and a random selection of classrooms across the nation.
This is the first study, a study of the total implementation of State‑funded pre‑k programs across the nation. That was the first big surprise in the study. The first surprise that we had 52 different state administrators, every one of them agreed to participate. Isn't that wonderful? Every single one of them agreed to participate.
Only a few of them, however, were able to tell us at the beginning of the year the location of the classrooms. Now the reason why is because the money goes from the State, as you can well imagine, down to localities, maybe county coalitions, maybe some kind of a local school coalition or a school board, and then the money gets divided out and then gets divided out from that point.
It's sort of like the old 1970s Pert commercial. They told two friends, who told two friends, who told two friends. And before you know it, we had a system in each one of these states. But that wasn't helpful for us, because we needed to be able to know exactly the location of all these State‑funded pre‑k classrooms in order to be able to sample them.
So what we did is this. We asked the State directors to tell us every location that they give money to within their state. Then we contacted each one of these state localities, and asked them, where do you give the State‑funded pre‑k dollars at this point? And we followed the contractual arrangements and subcontractual arrangements until we got down to the classroom level. Cataloging the existence of about 41,000 State‑funded pre‑k classrooms across the nation, in terms of their exact location.
Once we knew the location of the classrooms, then we randomly selected a particular number of classrooms within each one of the states, totaling a total of about 3,900 classrooms across the nation. We got a response rate of 81 percent, which gives us a margin of error a little bit better than what we use to predict presidential elections. We felt good about that.
You'll see throughout this presentation a few cartoons. I'm happy to tell you about the cartoons a little bit later on. I'm not sure what this one means. I've had a few people tell me it looks like bowling balls, and they're not quite sure. This was USA Today's interpretation of the preschool expulsion.
The expulsion, however, was only a very small portion of the study. We were collecting about 400 different variables in these State‑funded pre‑k programs in order to be able to better understand what they look like, and expulsion was a very small part of it.
The question was basically this, over the past 12 months, this was asked to the lead teacher, the teacher that's most responsible for the day‑to‑day operations in the classroom. Over the past 12 months, have you ever required a child to terminate participation from your classroom because of a behavioral problem? Please do not include children who were transferred directly from your classroom to special education, to a therapeutic preschool program or some other of more appropriate setting.
So basically we were looking for, in the past 12 months, children who had behavioral problems. And as a result of them, were told to leave the program on the whole, not the classroom, but the program on the whole, without a planned transition someplace else, and we interpreted that as being expelled.
Now, we certainly have heard a lot of debates, or at least I have, about whether expulsion is the right term for that. I'm not sure what is the right term. Some states call it withdrawal. Some states call it terminations. I'm not very fond of the idea of terminating children, but I've heard it called terminations. I've heard it called exclusions in one state. And expulsion was the term that we used to describe the phenomenon that we've basically been looking at.
Here's another cartoon that I have absolutely no idea what it means. It looks like a mother hanging from a ‑‑ from a thread with a screaming child and hoping that someone will catch this child in a blanket. I think those are supposed to be child care workers, but they look about the same age as the child. So I'm not sure what that means. But nonetheless, that was one of the interpretations in caricature.
10.4 percent, about 10 percent of the State‑funded pre‑k classroom teachers reported that, yes, indeed this has happened in the past 12 months in their classroom. That's what the teachers told us. When we took a look at the number of children being expelled, because we asked follow‑up questions, how many children? We knew how many children were in the classroom. 78 percent of the teachers reported that this had happened for one child. Two reported that this had happened for 15 children ‑‑ or 15 percent had reported this had happened for two children in their classroom within the past 12 months and a few people reported even more.
When we piloted these ‑‑ now, notice that I'm not talking about State‑funded pre‑k now. When we piloted the study, we piloted it in licensed, center‑based child care programs in the State of Massachusetts, and we did have one teacher who reported expelling six children out of a class of 16 in the course of a 12‑month period. We gave job stress measures as well. The teacher did not report any elevated level of job stress. I've heard a few people suggest that maybe she expelled the job stress.
But aside from speculating about those sorts of things, I think the important thing to realize here is that ‑‑ is that it's not really about figuring out whether some teachers are more to blame than the child. The reality is that this is all of our problems. And it doesn't serve any of us any good to be able to think, is this mostly about the child or mostly about the teacher? It's basically about the child and the family in the context of the program. And it's the context, I think, that ultimately is where we'll find the solutions, if we find them.
Another finding, when we divided the number of children served in these programs by the number of children that were reported to have been expelled, terminated, withdrawn, excluded, we got a rate of 6.7 children thus excluded or withdrawn, per 1,000 children enrolled in the program.
Now it's hard to know whether or not a rate like that is higher than you'd expect or lower than what you'd expect, so we needed something to compare it to. And so, it's not a perfect comparison, by any stretch. But the only comparison that I could think of that even remotely resembled this is, at what rate are children expelled from K‑12 programs in schools?
Now, the U.S. Department of Education collected, through the Office of Civil Rights, a set of surveys, fast‑track surveys, looking at children being expelled from preschool programs, suspended ‑‑ or from K‑12 programs, expelled, suspended or given in‑school suspensions. That data was collected by the U.S. Department of Education. It resided on their web site for a few years and was apparently never reported out by the U.S. Department of Education. So a couple of researchers had downloaded the database. I was one of them. And another one is a fellow named Russ (inaudible) of the University of Indiana, who was interested K‑12 expulsion issues.
We downloaded 16,000 databases. One for every school district in America, and wrote formulas to go with them to figure out what the rate of expulsion K‑12 was. And when we figured out the rate of expulsion of K‑12, that rate is 2.1 per 1,000.
Now, they don't break it down, unfortunately, in the U.S Department of Education's survey by grade level. So I can't tell you what the rate is for kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade. I can only tell you in terms of the counter aggregates. But when you compare those two, more than three times the rate in the preschool programs, as opposed to in the K‑12 systems.
As a matter of fact, across the 40 states, the rate of expulsion in preschool programs was greater than the rate of expulsion in the K‑12 programs in all but three of the states.
However, this is not the only study to look at this. I hope that can be seen in the back. You can see at the top the National Pre-kindergarten Study. But there was also a study done a while back in Detroit, Michigan, by folks who coordinate their ‑‑ the Michigan Child Care Expulsion Prevention Program.
What an interesting concept, isn't it, to have a whole statewide system called the Michigan Child Care Expulsion Prevention Program? But they've had that there for about seven or eight years now and have collected some survey information. Surveying 127 preschool directors. 28 percent response rate. Not as good as a response rate as what you would hope, but no less, found a rate of 27.5 expulsions per 1,000 children enrolled.
Now, those are licensed, center‑based child care programs, not these State‑funded programs. The State‑funded Pre-kindergarten programs that I talk about are largely in the public schools, about 75 percent of them. The rest of them are in community‑based organizations. And oftentimes, they have to comply with certain kinds of State mandates and regulations. And so it might be a better crop of the local community‑based organizations that participate in these programs.
There's a study in Chicago, Illinois, of 195 infant‑toddler child care programs. These are programs serving children birth‑to‑three years old, primarily. They found that 42 percent of the directors, when they surveyed the directors, reported expelling at least one child in the past 12 months.
Alaska has been collecting this information as part of their child care market rate survey in their state for about three or four years now, and you can see the rate that they found there per center.
We also collected, as part of a pilot study to this study that I'm talking about right now, a study in Massachusetts in licensed center‑based child care programs, and we found an expulsion rate very similar to what they found in Detroit. We found 27.4 per 1,000. They found 27.5 per 1,000. Basically, the rate seems to be about four times higher in licensed center‑based child care programs than what we found in these State‑funded pre‑k programs.
To a large degree, the information that we reported and made a little bit of a media splash about, is actually an underestimate of the amount of expulsion that happens when you take a look at these programs that are not as regulated by these states.
This map shows you the rate by state. And if you're good in geography, you can find your state pretty quickly. It made a big splash. It was 0n the front page of just about every newspaper across the nation and every major network news station as well.
I have to say there was a two‑month period of time that I had more make‑up applied to me than my seven‑year‑old daughter has ever been able to put on me in my sleep. Though she has tried. Though she has tried.
Here's another cartoon that ran. This one's a little bit clearer, I guess, in terms of the message. Although very sad in the way it portrays it.
The question here, who is it that we found were being expelled from these preschool programs? Four‑year‑olds were about 50 percent as likely or more likely to be expelled than three‑year‑olds. And I don't mean more likely, actually, I mean, expelled at a 50 percent greater rate. So among four‑year‑olds, their chance of expulsion is 50 percent greater than the chance of the expulsion for a three‑year‑old.
That's an interesting finding, because it actually runs a little county to another finding that we found. Most of these classrooms were mixed‑age classrooms. Many of them are mixed age. When we took a look at the mixed‑age classes, they had the three‑year‑olds and the four‑year‑olds mixed together. When the proportion of three‑year‑olds is higher, the likelihood of an expulsion is higher. However, the child who gets expelled is not one of the three‑year‑olds. It's one of the four‑year‑olds.
It's a very interesting thing. You know, so when the rate or proportion of these three‑year‑olds is higher, someone's going to be expelled. Someone gets a ticket home, but it's not ‑‑ it's not that child. So whenever we get a finding like this, and that I'm not quite sure what to make of it, I have to go back to the experts, and I talked to preschool teachers and child care directors that I know and trust.
And invariably, they tell me about the same thing. And when I distill it down, it's basically this. It's one thing to have an aggressive four‑year‑old in your classroom, it's another thing to have an aggressive four‑year‑old and an awful lot of smaller three‑year‑olds with victim written on their back. The concern for liability starts to rise in the teachers' minds, and then it becomes more likely that they'll feel that they need to remove that child from the situation.
It's another circumstance of which, I think it's really not just the child. It's the child within the context. And it's important to understand the context and the way the context interplays in order to be able to understand it.
Boys are three 1/2 times more likely than girls to be expelled. African‑American children are about twice as likely as children from other ethnicities. And if you're African‑American and a boy, your chances are extremely high. About 92 percent of all African‑American children who are expelled were boys.
Other factors, too. High teacher‑child ratios predicts expulsion rates. As a proportion of children per teacher in the classroom increases, the likelihood that one child in the classroom will be expelled also goes up. Length of school day predicts expulsion. However, it's important to realize that that doesn't necessarily mean that the length of day causes children to be expelled or causes children to have behavioral problems. It's entirely possible that certain demographics of children and certain risk factors of children are more likely to be enrolled in full‑day programs then in half‑day and part‑day programs. So we can't really exactly say that one is causing the other, but it's important to understand it.
This is the numbers part of the presentation. It be probably be a little difficult to see from the back, but I will tell you a little bit about what it was that we found. We found that children that were in public schools or Head Start, were less likely to be expelled than children who are not in public schools or Head Start, that were enrolled in community‑based organizations.
However, when we entered into some regression analyses, teacher‑child ratios in hours, the relationship upsetting vanished. Which largely tells us that it might be some of these other factors having to do with the ratio of teachers to children and the amount of the hours that's really driving this relationship.
One of the other things that we found that also predicts the likelihood of a child being expelled is the teacher's believes and the teacher's feelings. Teachers who report having a teaching style in their classroom that draws largely upon child‑centered activities, play‑based activities, dramatic play, for a large proportion of the day is spent in those sorts of activities, are less likely to report expelling a child from the classroom.
Teachers who report a larger proportion of their day spent in highly‑structured activities. We asked about a variety of different activities. Structured activities, passive activities on structured activities. Those teachers are more likely to expel a child from the classroom. Teachers who screened positive for depression on the Center for Epidemiology Studies Depression Scale, expelled children at twice the rate of teachers who screened negative for depression on the CESD.
There was a section at the end of the study called My Feelings. And My Feelings just sounded a little better in a survey than Center for Epidemiology Studies Depression Scale, but that's what it was.
I can certainly tell you this though, and this is a good piece of news. Preschool teachers no more likely to screen positive for depression than anyone else in the general public. However, we also know that, when you are depressed or you screen positive for depression, it probably will affect your work. For these teachers, their work are these children. And so, when they screen positive for depression, they were expelling at twice the rate.
However, we also had measures of job stress, and job stress was also highly related to expulsion practices. Teachers reported higher levels of job stress are more likely to expel. When we entered them both into an analysis, this where it gets interesting, when we entered them both into an analysis, we found this, when you control for job stress, teacher depression doesn't matter anymore. But when you control for depression, job stress still matters.
Now, for the people who are more statistical minded in terms of the way we think about these things, that basically suggests a mediated model. It basically suggests that depression makes you prone to elevated levels of job stress. And it's the job stress that drives the actual expulsion practices. It doesn't mean it drives all of the decision making in terms of expulsion, but it seems to drive more of it.
However, if you're depressed and your depression is not related to job stress. You're depressed but your job is not particularly stressful to you. Maybe it is the most sane and rewarding thing that you have in your life. Those teachers not likely to expel children from the classroom.
It's an important thing to think about from a mental health consultation standpoint and we can talk about this in a little bit. But from a mental health consultation standpoint, we typically think of those kinds of services being provided for children. And in some cases, maybe two children and two families and four families, but not usually for teachers and staff.
However, I think we probably should rethink the way we think about mental health consultation in preschool classrooms. It might be very difficult for a mental health consultant to be able to affect depression levels, but it might be quite possible for a mental health consultant to work with teachers regarding their job stress and the way in which they perceive the problems that they see on a day‑to‑day basis in their classrooms. Here's a cartoon about job stress. Today we're going to explore and paint how we feel when we're picked up late for preschool.
I've never been a preschool teacher, but I've been in a lot of preschool teachers' classrooms. I used to be a public school teacher for a couple of years. It was a very difficult job, K‑12. I'm certain that it is only a more difficult job when you're talking about three and four‑year‑olds, paralleled only to teachers who work with birth‑to‑three. Very difficult job. Again, I have not been a preschool teacher. However, I'm sure that I have stressed a few in my days.
This was a positive finding here that we found. When teachers reported access to a behavioral consultant in their classroom that can work with them regarding children's behavior problems and classroom management, the likelihood of that child being expelled was cut nearly in half. Now, that's a very positive finding. And in some news articles, it actually got highlighted. Not all of them. Not all of them, unfortunately, but in a few.
As you can see, teachers who reported no access to a behavioral consultant, expelling at much higher rates. Having an on‑site consultant who actually resides in your building, or is available on a regular schedule of visits, at least monthly, was associated with the lowest rates of expulsion. However, just having one on‑call was a big benefit.
Now again, we don't know whether or not this actually caused teachers to be expelling children less. It might be that programs that invest in mental health consultants also invest in a whole host of other things that might be useful for programs. And it will be useful for us to be able to think about maybe some other rigorous studies in the consultation programs.
We are doing so in Connecticut in a randomized trial of a program that we're nearing the end of, and we'll hope to be able to have some information to be able to report by summertime. I'll talk a little bit about it right now, but I can talk about it more a little bit. It's a randomized trial where we are randomly assigning some teachers to receive the intervention, some not. It is an extremely short‑term intervention. It's only eight weeks long.
It is not the kind of intervention that I would have actually designed. I would have probably thought of a much longer term model, with a much more relational base to it. However, this is a model that Connecticut was implementing, and we certainly were interested in evaluating whether or not we were able to get some of the effects with it.
We're examining the effects in terms of rates of expulsion, but also teachers' perceptions of children behavior problems, classroom practices and the amount of job stress, in order to be able to better understand the relationship of these.
I'll leave with you this one last cartoon here. This parent, who is very upset says, "This is your fifth expulsion. If you don't stop your constant name‑calling, do you know where you might end up?" Now, do we have any guesses? Oh, there's the answer. There's the answer. That ran in the newspaper the same week that the filibuster debates were happening.
And there was two cartoons. There was one of this and there was another one, and I actually thought that other one was the preschool cartoon. It was senators jumping on tables and throwing things at each other, and they can't kind of ran back to back.
I don't know if this child will end up in congress, but I certainly do hope that these findings can be useful at decision‑making levels in state government and federal government as we think about, not only how best to be able to implement and deliver Pre-kindergarten programs and child care programs, but also how best to support them. So that we give children a fighting chance in terms of their being able to succeed in the classrooms, and also do the same as our teaching staff. I'm absolutely positive that there is no teacher who wants to expel a child from the classroom. And I'm certain, absolutely beyond doubt, that it is a very painful, difficult decision for teachers to make.
It is not fair for us to not provide the levels of support necessary for children to succeed, nor is it fair for us not to be able to provide the same level of support necessary for our teachers to feel like they are succeeding as well.
And with that, I'm going to hand the podium over to a long‑time hero of mine, Dr. Jane Knitzer, who's really inspired me to go into a lot of the field that I'm in right now. Thank you.