In this article, Mark R. Warren, Soojin Oh Park, and Mara Casey Tieken explore the training and development of community-engaged scholars in doctoral programs in education. Community-engaged scholars working in the field of education collaborate with families, teachers, and communities to support their efforts to address educational inequities, marking an important way that researchers can promote social justice in public education. Yet these collaborations require particular skills and orientations of researchers, which traditional models of doctoral education are not designed to develop. Additionally, much less attention has been paid to the process of training and equipping emerging community-engaged researchers. This article presents the findings of a self-study of a research project designed to build among doctoral students the skills, dispositions, and commitments of community-engaged scholarship. The authors argue that by fostering collaborative learning and creating a community that embraces project members' whole selves, students learn to tell their stories, build “horizontal” research relationships, question their researcher positionalities, and develop identities as community-engaged scholars. One of the few in-depth investigations of doctoral practices that support community-engaged scholarship, this study offers critical lessons for those who care about the development of a new generation of education researchers committed to working with communities to transform schools and society.

as recent education reform efforts in the United States have prioritized family engagement as central to school improvement plans, school districts must grapple with ways to develop home-school partnerships (Mapp & Kuttner, 2013). Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, school districts must reserve 1% of Title I funds to assist schools in carrying out activities that foster family engagement, which can include home-based reading programs that promote alignment between home and school activities. Yet, researchers have repeatedly found that the effectiveness of these efforts is contingent upon the extent to which they acknowledge and build upon the funds of knowledge within the homes of culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse families (Dudley-Marling, 2009; Gallimore & Goldenberg, 2001; Janes & Kermani, 2001). Thus, understanding the ways in which families support their children's reading skills, motivation, and habits is imperative to working with families as partners in a child's education. Qualitative studies of family reading practices have been instrumental to highlighting the numerous ways in which culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse families support the development of their children's reading skills,

Parental investments in the activities and materials that drive learning are central to young children's school readiness and life success. Little is known, however, about how parents adjust these investments in response to outside pressures, including their children's impending entry into kindergarten. In the present study, we employ two analytical strategies (multilevel residualized change and regression discontinuity) within national data from the Head Start Impact Study to examine whether parents of children facing an impending entry to kindergarten invest more time and materials in their children's language and literacy skill development compared with parents of otherwise similar children who are not yet facing formal school entry. Results suggest that low-income parents react to the impending kindergarten transition by increasing their provision of parent-child language and literacy activities (d = .15) but not related materials. We discuss the implications of our findings for the timing of parenting interventions.

Following the pioneering efforts of a federal Head Start program, U.S. state policymakers have rapidly expanded access to Early Care and Education (ECE) programs with strong bipartisan support. Within the past decade the enrollment of 4 year-olds has roughly doubled in state-funded preschool. Despite these public investments, the content and priorities of early childhood legislation–enacted and failed–have rarely been examined. This study integrates perspectives from public policy, political science, developmental science, and machine learning in examining state ECE bills in identifying key factors associated with legislative success. Drawing from the Early Care and Education Bill Tracking Database, we employed Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a statistical topic identification model, to examine 2,396 ECE bills across the 50 U.S. states during the 2015-2018. First, a six-topic solution demonstrated the strongest fit theoretically and empirically suggesting two meta policy priorities: ‘ECE finance’ and ‘ECE services’. ‘ECE finance’ comprised three dimensions: (1) Revenues, (2) Expenditures, and (3) Fiscal Governance. ‘ECE services’ also included three dimensions: (1) PreK, (2) Child Care, and (3) Health and Human Services (HHS). Further, we found that bills covering a higher proportion of HHS, Fiscal Governance, or Expenditures were more likely to pass into law relative to bills focusing largely on PreK, Child Care, and Revenues. Additionally, legislative effectiveness of the bill’s primary sponsor was a strong predictor of legislative success, and further moderated the relation between bill content and passage. Highly effective legislators who had previously passed five or more bills had an extremely high probability of introducing a legislation that successfully passed regardless of topic. Legislation with expenditures as policy priorities benefitted the most from having an effective legislator. We conclude with a discussion of the empirical findings within the broader context of early childhood policy literature and suggest implications for future research and policy.

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