Preschool Teacher Perceptions of School Organizational Conditions in High-Poverty School Districts

• In Event: Nurturing Early Childhood Teacher Well-being and Teaching Quality Through Essential Organizational Conditions and Leadership

Abstract

The Early Childhood Education (ECE) field has focused on the classroom as a lever for improving ECE quality and children’s learning and development (Ehrlich et al, 2018). Given that this approach has been met with mixed success (e.g., Burchinal et al., 2016), researchers have recently begun to focus on how the broader school context may or may not influence ECE quality and support children’s development (Ehrlich et al, 2016). K-12 research has found that school climate and organizational conditions are associated with student achievement and engagement (Hoy & Hannum, 1997; Lowenstein et al., 2015; Solomon et al., 2000) as well as teacher effectiveness (Kraft & Papay, 2014) and turnover (Allensworth et al., 2009; Kraft et al., 2016), and classroom practices (Bryk, 2010; Bryk et al., 2010). Positive school climate is also believed to be a critical determinant of collective capacity in schools to reform and continuously improve (Payne, 2008). School climate is a key ingredient in effective educational systems globally (e.g., National Center on Education and the Economy, 2016) yet has been largely neglected in ECE.
The current paper aims to fill this critical gap in the literature by exploring preschool teachers’ perceptions of school organizational conditions in 15 school districts in one state that has a high-quality, state-funded preschool program. ECE school organizational conditions are measured using the Early Education Essentials (Ehrlich et al., 2016, 2018, 2019), a new measure that was adapted from the 5 Essentials (Bryk et al., 2010) to be used in ECE.

Research Questions: This paper will address the following research questions: 1) How do preschool teachers’ perceptions of school organizational conditions vary by teacher, school, and district characteristics?; 2) To what extent are preschool teachers’ perceptions of school organizational conditions associated with their own well-being?; and 3)To what extent are preschool teachers’ perceptions of school organizational conditions associated with classroom quality?

Sample: Data come from a larger study in15 high-poverty, racially/ethnically diverse school districts in which a substantial proportion of children are dual language learners. Preschool is provided through a mixed-delivery system, so data come from public schools, child care centers, and Head Start centers, all of which receive state-funding for preschool. A total of 270 preschool teachers in 85 schools/centers participated in the study. See Table 1 for descriptive information on the sample.

Analysis: Data will be analyzed using two-level models to account for nesting of teachers in schools. All analyses will control for a set of observed teacher, classroom, and/or school covariates. Analyses are exploratory and correlational, and cannot be used for causal inference.

Results: Figure 1 shows school organizational conditions across four dimensions: Effective leaders, Collaborative Teachers, Supportive Environments, and Involved Families. Analyses to address the three research questions will be included in the presentation.

Implications: The results of the current paper can be used to drive ECE quality improvement at the school level, rather than only the classroom level. Moving the policy lever from the classroom to the school level offers a new, promising approach to ECE quality improvement.

Group Authors

Allison Friedman-Krauss, PhD; Milagros Nores, PhD; and W. Steven Barnett, National Institute of Early Education Research.

Authors

• Allison Hope Friedman-Krauss, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
  Presenting Author

• Milagros Nores, National Institute for Early Education Research
  Non-Presenting Author

• William S Barnett, Rutgers University - New Brunswick
  Non-Presenting Author