Using the Teaching and Guidance Policy Essentials Checklistto Build and Support Effective Early Childhood Systems

The prevalence of preschool expulsion, coupledwith racial disparities in expulsion rates and the potential longterm negative effects of challenging behaviors in the early years,has created an urgent need to build early childhood systems toaddress these issues. The teaching and guidance policy essen?tials checklist (TAG-PEC) has been developed to assess nineessential features of high quality early childhood disciplinepolicies and can be used by early childhood programs in avariety of settings to evaluate, refine, and revise existing policiesor guide in the development of new policies. Using data from282 guidance policies assessed using the TAG-PEC, the authorsuse a framework for systems building developed by Coffman(A framework for evaluating systems initiatives, 2007) to po?sition the TAG-PEC as a powerful tool that can be used to helpbuild and support an effective and cohesive early childhoodsystem. Findings indicate that, overall, discipline policies werenot high quality and there was a great deal of variability in theTAG-PEC scores. By bringing evidence based practices to thefield via a simple to use checklist, the authors hope to helpcontribute to the development of a comprehensive early child?hood system and that supports programs in the provision of highquality services to children and families