Effects of the Issue on Early Childhood Education Essay

This study examines the effects of Tulsa, Oklahomas early puerility education chopines on social-emotional outcomes at kindergarten entry. As much(prenominal), it extends our prior work demonstrating substantial positive impacts of the Tulsa pre-K and take work programs on cognitive development, including pre-reading skills, pre-writing skills, and pre-math skills (Gormley, Phillips, & Gayer, 2008). We focus on children who were enrolled in either the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) pre-K program or the connection Action Project (CAP) of Tulsa County Head Start program during the year prior to kindergarten.Oklahomas pre-K program has received national attention because, as one of a handful of programs with universal eligibility, it reaches a higher(prenominal) percentage of fouryear-olds (68%) than any other program in the nation (Barnett al. al. , 2007). It also offers atypically high case preschool education (Phillips, Gormley, & Lowenstein, in press), perchance in part because O klahoma requires a lead teacher with a B. A. degree who is early-childhood-certified in every classroom and pays these teachers regular school system wages. In Tulsa, the CAP Head Start program follows the same guidelines.As a result, this investigation may be seen as crack a best case scenario look at the potential contribution of high-quality school-based pre-K and Head Start programs to childrens social-emotional development. Social-emotional Development Young childrens social-emotional development captures a broad swath of specific outcomes, ranging from the ability to call and understand ones own and others feelings, establish and sustain relationships with both peers and adults, and regulate ones behavior, emotions, and thoughts (National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2005).The importance of these foundational capacities has been welldocumented. Having behavior problems in early childhood, for example, is associated with low peer acceptance, maladjustive teach er-child relationships, and anti-social disorders and delinquency in sum childhood and adolescence (Brody et al. , 2003 Ladd & Burgess, 1999 Nagin & Tremblay, 2001 Shaw, Owens, Giovannelli, & Winslow, 2001 White, Moffitt, Earls, Robins, & Silva, 1990).Early childhood behavior that is more internalizing in nature, such as fearfulness or behavioral inhibition, is also associated with the development of serious anxiety problems in middle childhood and beyond (Tincas, Benga & Fox, 2006 Fox et al. , 2005 Schwartz, Wright, Shin, Kagan, & Rauch, 2003). The emergence of emotional and behavioral problems in children is much more promising under conditions of adversity, with poverty and low social-economic status having been studied extensively in this context.Deep and prolonged poverty, perhaps especially during the early childhood years (Duncan, Yeung, Brooks-Gunn, & Smith, 1998), has been found repeatedly to predict emotional and behavioral problems in children, even after accounting for parent and family characteristics (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002 Dodge, Pettit, & Bates, 1994 Duncan, Brooks-Gunn, & Klebanov, 1994 McLoyd, 1998 Ripke & Huston, 2005).The effects of poverty appear to be more say for externalizing behavior problems (e. g. , aggression, defiance) than for internalizing behavior problems (e. g. , social withdrawal, depression) (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002 Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997).