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Scaling Culturally-Relevant, Early Childhood, Family-Centered Prevention:

Sat, March 23, 4:15 to 5:45pm, Hilton Baltimore, Floor: Level 2, Key 9

Integrative Statement

Introduction: ParentCorps is a family-centered, school-based intervention that aims to help parents and early childhood teachers to create safe, nurturing and predictable environments to ensure that all children develop foundational social, emotional, and behavior regulation skills. ParentCorps is delivered as an enhancement to Pre-Kindergarten (Pre-K) programs serving children from low-income families. Intervention includes professional learning for teachers and leaders and a multi-component program for all families, implemented by mental health professionals and teachers. Two cluster randomized trials of ParentCorps found impact on early childhood health and development. In the second trial with more than 1,000 children and families followed longitudinally, ParentCorps was found to impact family engagement, achievement test scores and teacher ratings of academic performance and mental health problems through second grade. This paper describes two hybrid implementation-effectiveness trials carried out in partnership with the largest urban school district in the country to evaluate ParentCorps when implemented at scale in schools and early education centers serving primarily children of color from low-income families.

Research Design and Study Population: Two randomized controlled trials were launched in 2017 in more than 100 Pre-K programs serving primarily low-income children of color (55% Latino; 25% Black; 10% Asian and 10% White): ParentCorps Effectiveness in District Schools (PEDS; N=81 schools) and ParentCorps Effectiveness in Early Education Centers (PEEEC; N=23 centers). PEDS has three conditions: 1) Department of Education (DOE) Professional Learning for teachers and leaders; 2) Thrive (ParentCorps) Professional Learning; and 3) Thrive Professional Learning plus ParentCorps. PEEEC has two conditions: 1) Thrive Professional Learning; and 2) Thrive Professional Learning plus ParentCorps. These studies examine the relative value of ParentCorps vs Thrive Professional Learning only vs DOE Professional Learning (business as usual) and take advantage of administrative data on family engagement and classroom environment already collected at scale by the NYC DOE as part of standard practice and quality monitoring. Both studies include data collection from parents and pre-k students followed longitudinally through kindergarten.
Results: This paper presents baseline characteristics on the 100+ high-poverty schools and centers including observations of classroom quality (CLASS) conducted by the DOE (see Figure 1), and family perceptions of school environment captured through the annual DOE parent survey (see Figure 2). In addition, in PEEEC, we characterize implementation fidelity during the first year of ParentCorps implementation (2017-2018) in the 12 Pre-K programs randomized to ParentCorps and present baseline characteristics of the children and families enrolled in these 23 centers in the 2018-2019 school year.
Conclusions: Culturally-relevant, family-centered intervention in Pre-K holds great promise for reducing socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in learning, behavior and health. Embedding evidence-based interventions in schools and early childhood centers makes population-level reach possible. This process requires a major investment of resources and low family engagement and implementation quality may undermine the public’s will to sustain such an investment. Careful study of implementation quality and processes as well as impact on children and families is essential to ensure successful replication and population health impact.

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