Masters in Public Administration - MPA / The White Paper on Education and training defines ECD as the process by which children 0 – 9 grow and thrive in all respects. The main focus of ECD’s is to ensure that children are thriving, by providing a solid foundation for physical, emotional, cognitive and overall healthy development of children (UNICEF, 2005). Therefore a critical factor for educational achievement is access to ECD. In redressing the exclusion of the past in ECD the equity enshrined in the white paper on Education and training (1995) and the Reconstruction and development program (RDP) suggest that government act as the key agent for ‘levelling the playing field’ . This would greatly benefit the historically disadvantaged children which are the majority within South Africa (Department Basic Education, 2001). The challenge is to establish in which way the playing field are bring levelled to increase ascertain ECD programs for all children in general, and poor children in particular. Thus the implementation of quality programs becomes a matter of urgency (UNICEF, 2005). Many ECD centres have been established around the world and in South Africa, very few studies have been conducted concerning the implementation of government policy in terms of ECD centres. As stated in the Convention on the Right of the Child and the African charter on the Rights and the welfare of the child. The South African constitutions in regard to Act 108 of 1996 include the Bill of Rights, with policies and plans that are in one place to ensure that the rights of children in the Early Childhood Developmental stage are met (Child institute, 2007/2008). This research investigates the implementation of government ECD policy in the three sectors of government policy which need to be adhered to. Namely the criteria stipulated by the Educational Department, Social Development as well as the Department of Health. The study shall ascertain whether these policies are indeed being implemented. New ECD programs include the ECD integrated Plan with a focus on parent education, in addition to Expanded Public Works Program which also includes the training of parents (Biersterker & Kvalsig, 2007 :pp 1200). The research objectives are namely to examine the implementation of ECD policy which covers all three departments that of; Education, Social Development and Health. To develop a legislative and conceptual framework to underpin the study Identify challenges and opportunities from primary data and draw conclusions Make recommendations Specific research questions addresses in this study: •To determine what processes are in place to ensure effective and efficient implementation of the ECD policy. •To ascertain what specific challenges are faced by ECD centres staff during the implementation of policy. •The relevance of the policies to the intended Institutions. A qualitative study method shall be adopted. The instrument (questionnaire) will be issued to participants namely head/principal or teacher in charge of ECD centres. The questionnaire shall be followed up with a focus group, which shall include head of ECD’s as well as active parents from communities/governing bodies. The researcher undertakes the responsibility of providing and examining the level of competences. The researcher shall be responsible in conducting the research, with integrity and maintain honesty and fairness at all times. The participants are assured that the information shared during the discussions would be used solely for the study and no other publications. The researcher shall uphold the right for any participant to withdraw from the process if they no longer wish to participate. Only respondents who provide consent to being a part of this process shall participate.

In 2014, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his commitment to provide free public pre-kindergarten (pre-K) to all of New York City’s four-year-olds. With “Pre-K for All,” New York City has undertaken the most ambitious pre-K expansion in the country. The Division of Early Childhood (DECE) in the New York City Department of Education is responsible for implementing Pre-K for All. Now in its second year of expansion, the DECE has shifted its focus from infrastructure development to quality improvement and sustainability. In my Residency, I worked to develop a quality improvement mechanism called the “Foundational Support Visit” (FSV), a new process for diagnosing need across every Pre-K for All program. The DECE used findings from the FSV to inform the allocation of coaching supports to all pre-K programs. As part of the FSV initiative, I worked closely with the Division’s 125 Early Childhood Social Workers, the DECE’s largest team of school-based support staff and one of two teams responsible for conducting Foundational Support Visits at Pre-K for All programs. In my Capstone, I describe the evolution of the Foundational Support Visit, from design to implementation, and analyze how the process impacted Social Workers’ perception of their evolving role during Pre-K for All’s expansion. I explore the question of how a growing organization can support people on the ground to adapt to be effective during a period of rapid change and argue that the FSV process generated important losses for the DECE’s Social Workers. I describe my efforts, as a developing leader, to restore Social Workers’ confidence in their value through the creation of a feedback mechanism and a monthly working group meeting. In my analysis of my own leadership, I consider my initial struggle to diagnose the losses at stake for the DECE’s Social Workers, and I explore how leaders can approach organizational change in a way that acknowledges loss and helps people adapt to new environments. I conclude with a series of implications for my own leadership, for the DECE, and finally, for the education sector.

The positive relationship between parental education and children’s educational outcomes is one of the most well established connections in the developmental literature. However, nearly all of this research treats parent education as static across a child’s development. Estimates from the 2008-2009 Survey of Income and Program Participation suggest that nearly 2 million low-income parents were engaged in some form of continued education that year. Given this, it is critical to understand parents’ experiences in school, as well as the relationship between child development and parent education, as the latter changes over time. In this two-study dissertation, drawing broadly from ecological theories of development, I used quantitative and qualitative methods with multiple datasets to explore the relationship between mothers’ attainment of additional education and their young children’s development. In Study 1, I used data from a national sample of low-income families with young children to test whether there is a relationship between the development of children’s cognitive skills between the ages of 3 and 7 and mothers’ attainment of additional education. Based on individual growth modeling analyses, I found a positive relationship between maternal educational attainment and children’s early writing and mathematics skills. In addition, children appeared to benefit more when their mothers attained additional education after children had transitioned to elementary school. For children’s mathematics skills only, the positive relationship between children’s growth trajectories and mothers’ attainment of additional education was largest in magnitude for children whose mothers had the lowest levels of education at baseline. In Study 2, I employed grounded-theory methods and longitudinal qualitative interviews from a different sample of low-income mothers (with preschool-aged children) to understand mothers’ motivation for pursuing additional education while raising a young child. I found that women’s motivation to pursue, or not to pursue, additional education was related to their caregiving responsibilities, and their personal goals, in contradictory and complementary ways. Specifically, the need to provide and care for their children simultaneously pushed mothers towards, and pulled them away from, additional schooling. However, women were also motivated to pursue schooling by their desire for intellectual growth and personal fulfillment. The extent to which women articulated these personal motivations may be related to their success in pursuing additional education.

The U.S. is calling for expansion of preschool to help close the well-documented income-based achievement gap. Children from low-income families often enter kindergarten academically behind their higher income peers and recent findings indicate gaps in social-emotional aspects of school readiness as well, illustrating how early these gaps emerge and raising questions about cross-domain relationships. Therefore, this two-study dissertation explores the relationship between children’s social competence and their early math development. Study 1 uses longitudinal growth modeling to explore within- and cross-domain relationships between children’s a) interpersonal, social problem-solving skills and b) early math skills during a preschool year. Participants (N=76) were recruited from a MA preschool serving mostly children from low-income and minority families. Results show that children have positive, linear math learning trajectories that vary by age when not accounting for children’s social competence. Children’s development of flexibility in social problem-solving is associated with changes in the rates at which children learn math skills across a preschool year, controlling for baseline child demographics with no evidence of differential learning trajectories by age other than observed differences in math skills at preschool entry. Children’s adaptive social problem-solving strategies show positive non-linear growth trajectories. Importantly, these adaptive problem-solving strategies from the previous time period have the potential (p =.12) to positively predict children’s growth in early math skills during the preschool year. Study 2 draws a subsample (N=3485) from the Head Start Impact Study, (U.S. DHHS, 2010) a large, nationally representative study of Head Start, to investigate the potential mediating role of children’s social competence on early math skills for children randomly assigned to Head Start. Results from a confirmatory factor analysis indicated good model fit for the latent construct with positive social skills and teacher-child relationships as indicators of social competence. Moreover, children’s social competence was positively related to math achievement during the Head Start year. Taken together, results from these studies suggest that children’s social competence may play an important role in promoting children’s early math skills and may warrant more attention in preschool curricula especially as greater attention is paid to increasing implementation of challenging, developmentally-focused math curricula.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have deficits in communication and delays in language development, but there have been few studies of their vocabulary. This study compared longitudinal parent report data from the MCDI collected for 49 children with ASD over three years with data from the MCDI norms. It focused on three aspects of lexical development: (1) change in lexical composition as evident in percentage of predicates/nominals; (2) order of emergence for predicate types and (3) predictive value of lexical variables for later grammatical development. ASD Groups were matched to typically developing group norms on total MCDI scores for each comparison. Subsequent analysis indicated: (1) no differences in the percentages of predicates/nominals for the two groups at 3 time points; and, (2) virtually identical orders of emergence for different predicate types with the exception of three meaning type categories—quantitative predicates, cognitive/affective predicates and predicates involving causal acts to change experiential states. Cognitive/affective predicates were found to come in somewhat later in ASD groups while quantitative predicates and predicates involving changes in experiential states came in earlier in ASD groups. This study also found (3) that lexical variables, especially number of predicates, strongly predicted grammatical complexity one year later, a process common in typical language development. The study concludes that lexical development in ASD follows the normal course, albeit later and more slowly. It also suggests that communication deficits in this population are rooted in challenges with social acts rather than from an inability to match meanings to words. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

Abstract not available.

The Machiavellian villain has long been the subject of discussion among critics of the Elizabethan drama. This essay attempts to analyse with some precision evidence from history and the drama of the relationship of the literary to the real political figure. It attempts to indicate the answer to the questions: In what way does the sinister stage personality symbolize the real experience of the Elizabethans ? What is the relationship of this character to that of the prince delineated by Machiavelli ? Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name has been attached to the typical sixteenth century unscrupulous and diabolically cunning cloak and dagger murderer and politician was in fact the founder of modern political science. He was a responsible and esteemed servant of the foremost city state of his time in Italy, and his theses on princely rule and on the principles underlying republican government have established themselves as texts in the courses of universities. It would appear, then, that the Machiavellian of the Elizabethan stage requires some explaining. An examination of the history of English government during the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries reveals that the practice of the kings and chief ministers of England was governed by the precepts on power that Machiavelli so brilliantly set forth in his writings; and investigation of the popular reaction to the practices he exposed makes clear that it took a sharp turn toward the close of the sixteenth century, when the bogey of Machiavellian villainy asserted Itself in England, appearing in its most spectacular form in the plays of the last two decades of that century and the first decade of the seventeenth. It becomes apparent from a consideration of the facts of history and of the record of public opinion that the Machiavellian villain epitomized the fear of the ambitious Individual experienced by a despotism faced on two sides by a threat to its claim to absolute power; and that the menace that threatened the Tudors from the reactionary nobility on the one hand and from the upstart merchant aristocracy on the other found dramatic expression in the extravagant, ruthless, self-seeking villain who inevitably was characterized by the name of the theoretician of that absolute princely rule by which alone the confusions of the end of the medieval era could be resolved into a new and more advanced order of society. Such paradoxes are not unknown in history. The great dramas of Elizabethan England present not only the Machiavellian Barabas, the prototype for all subsequent villains in the cloak and dagger tradition, they present al so such figures as Richard, Duke of York, Henry IV, Henry V and the brilliant dialogue of Volumnia In Coriolanus, proofs, every one of them, that the sound political science of Machiavelli upon which the Tudor monarchs built their institutions and formulated their laws also reached the people through the stage, although these latter characterizations were not associated with the name of Machiavelli. The conclusion arrived at from a careful examination of a selected number of plays by Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare is that the true Machiavellian prince was most effectively represented in drama by the great princes in the historical plays of Shakespeare, and particularly in the figure of Henry V in the play of that name; and that the essence of the Machiavellian thesis on The Prince was poetically most succinctly and explicitly phrased in the dialogue of Volumnla in Coriolanus. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This essay deals with the London citizen in Elizabethan drama from 1590-1620. In it I have tried to give a picture of the citizen's possession, habits and beliefs as they appear in the plays of the period. In the introduction I defined the terms I used, defended the limits of the essay,and discussed the sources. I set forth, also, the method that I followed in arranging the material. I divided the essay into two sections. In the first I gave the background for the plays by describing,in-chapter one, the development of the citizen class; In chapter two, the appearance of London; In chapter three, the ideals of the sixteenth century citizen. In the second section I discussed various portions of the citizen's life and supported my conclusions by many references to the drama. The second section was based almost directly on the plays. The fourth chapter was the one exception. In it I discussed the playwrights' contribution to the middle class drama and their attitudes towards the citizens. The fifth chapter illustrated the third one and, on the whole, followed the same plan. I included in it, however, references to the vices into which the citizen was led by two, eager a pursuit of his ideals. Chapter six dealt with Elizabethan business management and chapter seven with the position of the citizen's womenfolk. Under business management, I considered the merchant adventurer, the loan merchant or usurer, the craftsman and the apprentice. In the following chapter I examined the citizen's attitude towards women and its reflection in the drama. The houses and gardens, food and drink, jewels and clothing of the London citizen were the subjects of chapter eight. Religion and superstition was the heading for chapter nine and Morals and Mores for chapter ten. In the former I gave illustrations of the Londoner 's attitude towards Puritans and Roman Catholics and examples of blue citizen's amazing belief in all forms of magic. The tenth chapter contained references to theft, murder,and adultery as well as to smoking, swearing, drinking and playgolng. The succeeding two chapters were concerned,firstly, with the Londoner's opinion of social welfare and, secondly, with his concept of the state. Under these headings I discussed laws against vagrants; imprisonment for debt, insanity or immorality, and references to the citizen's ideal state. In the thirteenth chapter I listed the amusements of the middle class and examined the citizen's response to the theatre, plays, books, games, puppet shows, dances,and songs. In the second last chapter I attempted to define the conventional Elizabethan opinion of various trades and professions. In my conclusion I recapitulated the points that I had made throughout the essay. I drew attention to the constant appearance of two attitudes towards the citizen, mentioned again the reasons that I gave for them, and stated,once more, my opinion of their respective truths. I repeated that I thought a middle course had to be taken between the two attitudes. Then, I discussed briefly the artistic value of the middle class drama and concluded that it it possessed little, if any, literary merit and contained, few memorable figures. I spoke, finally, of the plays'value as social documents. I said that they contained much information on details of food and drink, but added that only in the early part of the period could they be said to reflect the citizen's ethos completely. From 1610 on the drama seemed to me to be too one-sided to be very reliable or of much value in helping one form a balanced picture of the London citizen's attitude of mind. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study was designed to explore the elements that influence the identification of young children that might be considered at-risk for early school failure. To this end, guided by complexity theory, the study sought to examine (a) system requirements and expectations at the provincial and school board levels, (b) current practice in schools and classrooms, and (c) the beliefs and knowledge of individuals surrounding the assessment and identification of at-risk students in Kindergarten. Using a qualitative, case-study approach 23 individuals from two different school boards in Ontario were interviewed to explore both practice and beliefs. Review of relevant provincial and school board documents as well as artifacts that were gathered during school visits provided further information. While there were some differences in details, the findings were similar in the two boards. In describing which characteristics were of concern when considering an at-risk designation, most participants cited social, emotional, and behavioural difficulties. While both school boards required tracking and assessment of literacy skills, teachers and ECEs concentrated more on ongoing observations and anecdotal notes to determine student progress. Interventions for students at-risk were more often provided for students with academic difficulties. However, there was also some support for behaviour difficulties in terms of consultation from special education personnel in one board and an early intervention team in the other. It was clear from the findings that many elements influence the identification of a student as at-risk including the characteristics of the student, the student’s family, and the particular classroom, school, and board the student attends. The study findings contribute to our understanding of practice and beliefs around young student at-risk and how the interactions of the various elements involved impact the identification of individual students.

What relationship exists between working conditions and teacher turnover in child-care (early care and education) programs? Research has shown high staff turnover is a major factor affecting the quality of care. Using a new survey and data set I designed of union and randomly selected non-union programs in Massachusetts, I examine factors other than compensation that might be related to lower teacher turnover. Focusing on different institutional settings, including unionization and regional unemployment, I use economist Albert Hirschman's theory of exit, voice and loyalty to see if "voice" alternatives to quitting are an effective method of reducing exits. "Voice" alternatives studied include working relationships and practices between management and labor; identified paths for promotion and compensation; and processes for making decisions and addressing grievances. I discuss three research questions: What working conditions or practices affect teacher turnover in child-care programs in the private market? Results indicate the presence and type of worker voice affects teacher turnover. Programs with collective bargaining agreements have lower rates of turnover than those without. Unionized programs also employ more staff per child, pay higher wages, and serve a higher percentage of state-subsidized children. How does "voice" differ in nature and quantity across different types of workplaces? I find there is more voice in unionized programs. Also different voice practices are used in programs operating in a high-unemployment compared to a low-unemployment environment. What, if any, is the statistical relationship (correlation) between teacher turnover and voice, and how does this relationship vary across workplaces? My results show a consistently negative relationship between teacher turnover and voice in these workplaces even when controlling for wages. Programs with more voice aspects have less teacher turnover.