Low-income children too often begin school without the basic behavioral, emotional, and cognitive skills that they need to thrive academically — putting them at an immediate disadvantage and contributing to the large gap that develops in school achievement between low-income children and their more affluent peers. States and localities are responding by making major new investments in early childhood education and child care programs. In this climate, policymakers and program administrators face a fundamental challenge: to build and protect program quality at the same time that they expand the size of the preschool system.
Much public attention has focused on boosting the educational components of preschool. Until recently, however, less notice has been paid to a more basic challenge: dealing with children’s problem behaviors in the classroom. Preschool teachers in low-income neighborhoods report that between 15 and 20 percent of the young children in their classrooms exhibit clinically high levels of disruptive and challenging behaviors. In fact, a 2005 study from the Yale Child Study Center reported that rates of expulsion from preschool are even higher than in the later elementary years, with 10 percent of preschool teachers expelling at least one child in 2004. Disruptive children spend less time on classroom tasks, receive less instruction from teachers, grow to like school less, and attend school less often than their more emotionally well-adjusted peers. Children with behavior problems can also disrupt their peers’ chances for academic success by distracting teachers away from teaching to manage poor behavior in the classroom.
Many early education settings for low-income children are particularly ill-equipped to deal with these problems because they receive relatively low levels of training and technical assistance in this area. In addition, there are few rigorous studies about how to address children’s problem behaviors in the classrooms that provide the kind of definitive information needed to guide policy and practice for preschool education. The Foundations of Learning Project sought to address this challenge.