Early care and education is provided in a decentralized and fragmented system, consisting in large part of public preschool, Head Start, and child care.
This non-system poses significant challenges for governmental efforts to improve the delivery of services.
Of greatest concern, are efforts to improve the quality of instruction children receive.
Despite the abundance of policy initiatives aimed at the goal of quality enhancement, we know very little about how to improve quality in these diverse settings.
As our goals for early care shift increasingly toward improving children's academic readiness this lack of knowledge hinders our ability to design and implement quality enhancement programs.
This study explores the extent to which institutional settings shape children's early literacy experiences, and whether or not programs aimed at improving literacy instruction may be differentially effective in a mixed delivery early care system.
The following five institutional supports and constraints on quality are proposed: institutional distinctions in program philosophy or mission, acceptance of government influence on children, policy tools and their capacity to encourage adherence to government goals, staffing requirements, and operational procedures in schools and classrooms.
These factors are expected to influence the distribution of quality in language and literacy instruction across the early care system.
These expectations are tested for The Texas Early Education Model, TEEM, a rigorous language and literacy intervention being implemented across child care, Head Start, public pre-k, and integrated classrooms.
The Teacher Behavior Rating Scale was used to assess the quality of language and literacy instruction in 219 participating classrooms.
This tool looks specifically at behaviors critical to language and literacy development including phonological awareness, print and letter knowledge, written expression, oral language use, and book reading behaviors.
The initial cohort of 100 TEEM teachers observed had been randomized to treatment and business as usual conditions, and are used in this study to estimate the quality of language and literacy instruction across settings before and after the TEEM intervention. 119 teachers in subsequent cohorts are used to further examine relations between the quality of language and literacy instruction, institutional setting and TEEM dosage.
The first objective was to assess the distribution of quality across institutional settings.
As expected, quality at pretesting was best in pubic pre-k programs, followed by Head Start then child care.
Overall, the quality of language and literacy instruction across settings was found to be of low to moderately low quality.
The second objective considered whether TEEM was equally effective across institutional settings.
Positive effects are seen across child care, Head Start and public preschool, though the distribution of quality across settings changed very little from pretest to posttest.
Together, these findings document disparities in access to quality for families relying on publically supported programs, particularly child care programs.
However, they also illustrate the potential for an intervention to improve quality across the many institutional settings in which early care and education takes place.
