Created in 1965, Head Start is the longest running national school readiness program in the United States. Head Start was developed to improve children's social and academic readiness for kindergarten and to reduce the academic achievement gap between impoverished and more affluent children. However, questions about the effectiveness of Head Start have trouble the program since its inception. Head Start children often experience considerably more sociocontextual risk, specifically in the form of more economic disadvantage, maternal psychological distress, and dangerous neighborhoods. The goal of the present study was to evaluate the extent to which attending Head Start buffers children from some of the harmful effects of sociocontextual risk on their acquisition of academic and social school readiness skills. Socio-contextual risk factors were largely unrelated to the school readiness skills. Only mothers' reports of anxiety were significantly associated with slower rates of increase in children's PPVT scores, suggesting that mothers who are more anxious have children who are not developing receptive vocabulary scores as quickly as children whose mothers have fewer anxiety symptoms. Head Start did not buffer the impact of socio-contextual risk on children's attainment of school readiness skills. A secondary goal of the present study was to validate mothers' reports of neighborhood danger with interviewer impressions of neighborhood safety and objective crime reports. Interviewer impressions correlated significantly with mothers' reports of neighborhood danger and official crime statistics. Interestingly, official crime statistics were not correlated with mothers' reports of neighborhood danger, but were correlated with interviewer impressions. Interviewers may provide a valuable objective perspective of characteristics of the neighborhood. This sample was not intended to explore the effects of natural disasters on household structures, maternal psychopathology, or children's academic development. However, results clearly highlighted the need to empirically consider the specific challenges associated with lowincome families after a natural disaster. Study implications and promising directions for future research are discussed.

Research has found that many children who come from a low socioeconomic background often begin their schooling careers behind most students. Head Start programs around the nation are utilized to close the gap in achievement, by providing those students with the educational support necessary to prepare them for future schooling. However, when assessed with the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), Head Start programs have been found to be weaker in the area of Instructional Support. As a result, teachers are falling short in the way they provide feedback, incorporate higher thinking skills, and foster language development. In order to strengthen the instructional support component, research has supported the utilization of professional development to foster ways of incorporating informative praise which then encourages the desired behaviors and provides a rich language model for children This study was designed to provide professional development to Head Start teachers in order to increase informative praise and decrease commands and negative comments utilized by teachers. An increase in the number of general praise statements and informative praise statements used directly after the training was administered was found. However, as time progressed, the amount of praise decreased back to the levels before the training was given. It was also found that negative comments and commands decreased continuously throughout all observations after the training.

Satisfying a campaign pledge to the National Education Association (NEA), President Jimmy Carter pushed for a federal Department of Education in 1978 and 1979. In the ensuing legislative battle, Carter confronted opposition from states’ rights, social, and religious conservatives that were beginning to form the nucleus of the New Right in the Republican Party. Using divisive racial and religious issues, these conservatives tried, and failed, to thwart the Department of Education project. Congressional testimony, the Carter administration’s internal documents, and newspaper editorials illustrate that the Department of Education battle foreshadowed the Reagan Revolution of 1980.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-141).

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State funded preschool programs are recent phenomena in the United States and the state of Tennessee. The intent of the researcher was to explore the implementation of the preschool program in the Greene County Schools system and to develop a better understanding of the effects of this process at the classroom level. This study may provide significant information for other pre-k programs in the state of Tennessee or nationwide programs in partnership with Head Start. The preschool program in the Greene County Schools system consisted of 16 classes with nine of the classes in partnership with Head Start and one class in partnership with a community child care center. Data were collected from the transcripts of three focus groups, documents, and classroom observations. The constant comparative analysis method was used to analyze the data (Glaser, 2004; Merriam, 1998; Thorne, 2000). Triangulation of the data resulted in the identification of several supports and barriers to teaching and learning in the pre-k classrooms. Supports identified were the curriculum, the use of effective teaching strategies, specific teacher characteristics, specific rules and regulations, services provided by Head Start, and adequate program funding. Participants defined barriers to teaching and learning in the pre-k classroom as specific rules and regulations, teacher isolation by location in the school, teacher isolation from peers, the need for knowledge of early childhood education and regulations of the program, and specific components of the Head Start partnership. The recommendations of this study are to continue the partnership that allows for a powerful combination of the organizational resources between the Greene County Schools Pre-K Program and the Upper East Tennessee Human Development Agency (UETHDA) Head Start to continue. The use of an outside ECERS-R evaluator and monthly Head Start classroom evaluations should be discontinued. New practices to implement are an attendance policy for the pre-k classrooms and regularly scheduled collaboration meetings with administrators of both organizations and classroom personnel. Other districts considering similar programs should identify financial resources and use a collaborative process in the development and maintenance of the pre-k program.

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