Program Quality, Intensity, and Duration in Preschool Education

Abstract

Up to this point, we have described the growing national momentum toward universal preschool, as well as the developmental and economic rationales for early education and its role in the lives of children across the income spectrum. In the next several chapters, we turn our attention to issues regarding the content of effective preschool services. In this chapter we discuss issues of program intensity and duration. We also focus on the various components of quality associated with lasting benefits and strategies for how programmatic quality can be facilitated and maintained during large-scale implementation. The effectiveness of any preschool program is related directly to the quality of that program and the amount of the program that is actually received. Beneficial impacts are most appreciable when services are delivered at reasonably high levels of quality and received in sufficient quantity by those who need the services (Brooks-Gunn, 2003; Ramey & Ramey, 1998). Aspects of program delivery can be described as program duration, intensity, and quality. An analogous description is used in medicine: when describing medication effects physicians often refer to how long the patient receives the medication, how often the patient receives it, and the amount of active ingredient it contains. Although everyone in the medical community would agree that these components are of paramount importance to good medical care, decision makers and administrators responsible for implementing social and educational programs often seem to skimp on these features and end up with a ghost of the originally planned intervention.