Public Pre-K-12 Education

Active Projects

The Tulsa SEED Study

Funding:

  • The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), 2023-2028

  • The National Institutes of Health (NIH), 2018-2023, $2,700,000

  • The Spencer Foundation, 2017-2021, $1,000,000

  • The George Kaiser Family Foundation, the University Strategic Organization Initiative at the University of Oklahoma, the Foundation for Child Development, 2017-2020, $225,0000

  • The Heising-Simons Foundation, 2016-2020, $1.1 million

The Tulsa SEED (School Experiences and Early Development) Study is among the nation’s most comprehensive evaluations of public pre-kindergarten. Tulsa SEED has followed a sample of low-income children in publicly-funded pre-k in Tulsa, OK, beginning when children were 3-years-old (2016) and continuing through 9th grade (2028). The study aims to understand the effects of pre-k – administered in a mix of public and charter school-based pre-k classrooms and Head Start and Educare classrooms – on children’s self-regulatory, education, and health outcomes. To accomplish this goal, Tulsa SEED collects comprehensive data, including direct assessments of children’s skills in the fall and spring of each year, teacher and observer reports of child behavior, surveys of children’s parents and teachers, in-depth classroom observations of teacher-child and peer-to-peer interactions, and program and state administrative data on items such as attendance, grade retention, IEP status, test scores, and child health. More recently, the SEED Study Team has also begun to investigate questions about how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted children, families, and educators.

SEED Study News

New Research on Long-Term Effects of COVID on Children and Families

Six years after COVID-19 disrupted childhood around the world, new research following the same children from before the pandemic through today finds that the damage was far less widespread than early warnings predicted. A Special Section in the journal Child Development, synthesizing 17 long-term studies across six countries, finds that most children's health, learning, social development, and wellbeing recovered substantially. Setbacks that persisted were concentrated among children who already faced other risks before the pandemic began.

Early studies of COVID-19, based on short-term data collected during the pandemic itself, warned of widespread and lasting harm to child development. This new research, tracking children over a longer period, tells a different story: pandemic impacts were real and wide-ranging, but not as severe as initially feared, and many effects weakened over time. The children who fared worst and recovered more slowly were disproportionately those shaped by pre-existing risks — not the pandemic alone.

These findings are featured in the Society for Research in Child Development's flagship journal, Child Development, in a Special Section on COVID-19 titled "Children's Developmental Trajectories in the Long Shadow of COVID-19." The Special Section is led by co-editors Anna D. Johnson (Georgetown University), Gabriela Livas (University of Texas, Austin), and Seth Pollak (University of Wisconsin-Madison).

"Overall, the evidence in this special section challenges dominant narratives of universal 'learning loss,' suggesting instead that COVID-19 interacted with existing inequalities," said co-editor Anna Johnson from Georgetown University. "The research highlights the resilience in children and shows the importance of context in shaping their physical, cognitive, and emotional skills over time."

Selected Publications

Click an abstract to open the publication in your web browser.

Past Projects

Child Care Subsidies:
Links to ECE Quality and Child Outcomes

Funding:

  • NIH National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

  • Department of Health and Human Service (DHHS), Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE)

The federal child care subsidy program costs nearly as much and serves almost as many children as the federal Head Start and state public pre-k programs combined. In Professor Johnson’s work, she has examined how access to child care subsidies – which are only available to low-income working parents – differ across eligible recipients and non-recipients, as well as how use of a subsidy may increase the quality of care children experience and enhance children’s development in kindergarten and through 3rd grade. Along with her students, she has also examined how child care subsidies increase low-income mothers’ education outcomes and how quality features differ across subsidized versus unsubsidized and other publicly-funded settings that serve low-income children, like Head Start and pre-k.