Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

By LiAnna Davis

After receiving her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Yale, Dr. Deborah Phillips spent a year working on Capitol Hill through a fellowship from the Society for Research in Child Development. The public policy implications of her research on the developmental effects of early childcare and preschool classes are still central for Dr. Phillips, now a professor in Georgetown’s Department of Psychology.

“What I love to do is translate early childhood research into public policy,” explains Dr. Phillips, who also has an affiliation with the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. “I like blending traditional development science with putting that knowledge to work in the public arena.”

For the last 20 years, Dr. Phillips has researched the effects of early childhood care and education. Her findings suggest that the quality of the early care environment has a significant impact on cognitive, language, and social development; children who have the most supportive and stimulating one-on-one interactions with the care provider (what Dr. Phillips terms “high quality care”) demonstrate more advanced development.

But she and her colleagues have also found that children who spend a high percentage of their time in childcare—regardless of quality—can exhibit negative effects in their social development. While Dr. Phillips is quick to point out that all of the children display behavior that is within the normal range, she notes that a few show a pattern characterized by not responding well to authority, being quicker to get angry, and having problems with social interaction. The media grabbed onto such findings, she says, and denounced childcare wholesale. But Dr. Phillips wanted to know more.

“Taking this evidence as a point of departure,” she says, “the pressing questions are which children seem to be affected this way and why?”

The answer, she believes, lies with children with widely varying temperaments, and specifically those who are inhibited socially—that is, debilitatingly shy. Working with Dr. Nathan Fox at the University of Maryland, who examines temperament in young children for indications of social inhibition, Dr. Phillips studies their childcare environments. To do this research, Dr. Phillips and her team of graduate and undergraduate researchers follow the children throughout the day, watching a child’s interactions with teachers and peers. They look for such social and emotional development keys as warmth and mutual enjoyment between the child and the teacher, the positive and negative interactions with other children in the care center, and what sort of environment the teacher fosters among the children in the setting. They have collected all the data and are now starting to analyze it.

“The existing literature suggests that the range of quality you see in typical child care in this area—and we saw everything from wonderful to horrible—matters more for these highly inhibited children, especially in their interactions with their peers. We are guessing that their social development may be compromised when they are in low-quality childcare, but enhanced when they are in high-quality care,” says Dr. Phillips. “My message to parents is, pay more attention to the social-peer environments of childcare, especially with inhibited, shy kids. Mostly, parents look at the space for things like cleanliness and plenty of toys and books, as well as at the teachers’ qualifications, which are both important, but so is the peer group and how the teacher interacts with the kids.”

Dr. Phillips’ other branch of research, on preschool classrooms, is done in conjunction with her GPPI colleague Dr. William Gormley and others through Georgetown’s Center for Research on Children in the United States. Seven years ago, Oklahoma became one of the first states to offer universal public-school-based preschool programs in the country. Now, all but a handful of states are offering similar programs, making it one of the biggest public policy trends, but most restrict their programs to low-income students only, and none have the high participation rates that characterize Oklahoma—between 60 and 70 percent of all 4 year olds attend preschool.

Dr. Phillips and Dr. Gormley have been researching the students involved in the Tulsa school district and are currently in their third wave of the project. Their team of research assistants has observed every preschool class in Tulsa, cataloguing how much time is spent on academic work, the social-emotional environment of the classroom, and the quality of instruction.

Preliminary results show gains of three to seven months in early literacy and math development at the point of entry to kindergarten over students not enrolled in the preschool program. Students from all racial and economic backgrounds show gains, although Hispanic children have demonstrated the largest gains. Dr. Phillips suggests this is because they are learning both English and academic knowledge. Such results give hope to the idea that early childhood education can be accomplished at a statewide level.

Oklahoma requires that instructors have a bachelor’s degree and an early childhood education certification, the class size is limited to 20 students, there is always an assistant teacher, and the program has strong local business support. The team’s data suggests the teacher plays a large role in the success of the students. Higher quality instruction tends to occur in classrooms in which the teacher had a high undergraduate grade point average, majored in early education in college, had more years of experience in the classroom, and followed a more structured curriculum. Hispanic students do better with teachers who speak Spanish, although all interactions are conducted in English. All these facets point to the importance of the teachers.

“Early childhood educators should be earning my salary, and I should be earning theirs,” Dr. Phillips says. “Their work is so critical.”

Dr. Phillips recently testified to these effects to the House Committee on Education and Labor in an effort to demonstrate the importance of early childhood education at the federal level. She has also testified at a roundtable on juvenile delinquency prevention programs. Dr. Phillips, who served as the chair of the Department of Psychology for six years, also brings her work into her classroom, where she teaches Early Childhood Development, Children and Families, and Child Development and Social Policy.

“I bring every strand of my research into the classroom,” she says. “Students read empirical articles to get an understanding of what we know, how we know it, and how we can responsibly use that knowledge. I could do the kind of work I’m doing at a think tank, but it can’t compare to the energy you get from working with the amazing students here. I feel like I am training my replacements, and it’s thrilling to see students get excited about doing research.”

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