Political rallies and stump speeches in the greater metropolitan area of Pittsburgh fed William Gormley's passion for politics and policy at an early age. He saw Richard Nixon at the age of 10, Barry Goldwater at 14 and Gene McCarthy at 18 and recalls lively discussions of these politicians and related issues with his father.

"My dad liked to talk politics, and we would get into arguments – not bitter arguments, but pretty vigorous arguments about merits of the candidates," the university professor and Georgetown Public Policy Institute (GPPI) interim dean explains. "I was very interested in attending campaign rallies and speeches by presidential candidates. And so my dad, to his credit, took me to those rallies and speeches even if he preferred the other candidate."

Gormley, who teaches in the government department as well as GPPI, says his family also contributed to his growing curiosity about child care. Most of his research is devoted to early childhood education.

"I come from a large family and all at once it seemed my brothers and sisters were having children, and they were struggling to reconcile the competing demands of working and raising a family," says Gormley, who is the oldest of five with two brothers and two sisters. "They were, with some difficulty, putting together a patchwork of makeshift arrangements that included child care, parental care, preschool and ‘what the heck are we going to do tomorrow?'"

Gormley says at that point he realized that a lot of parents were facing child care challenges. "And if middle-class parents like my brothers and sisters were facing these challenges, what must the situation be for disadvantaged parents?" he asked himself.

The Challenge of Child Care
After obtaining his bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Pittsburgh and his Ph.D. in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the proud Pittsburgh native began his career in a relatively neglected corner of the child care policy world. As a professor at the University of Wisconsin he delved into government regulations and discovered that many dealing with child care regulations were not meant to protect children, but rather shield disgruntled neighbors from traffic and noise associated with child care centers. 

Local regulations, including zoning permits, occupancy permits and other restrictive ordinances make it difficult for day care homes and centers to flourish in residential neighborhoods, says Gormley. "That works a hardship on both parents and children," he adds.

But Gormley says some states have done a good job of facilitating parental choice with respect to child care. North Carolina's quality rating system essentially rates day care centers the way some organizations rate hotels and restaurants.

"So in North Carolina you can find a five-star day care center thanks to the state government, and you can also find a day care center that is not as good, and you can take those quality differences into account when you're making your own choices for your children," says Gormley, who also serves as the co-director of the university's Center for Research on Children in the United States (CROCUS). "I would like to see that kind of system adopted by all 50 states."   

Child care issues have been the focus of Gormley's teaching and research since he began his Georgetown career in 1991. He even served on the committee that created the university's first child care center, Hoya Kids Learning Center, in 1997.

Since 2001, Gormley has directed an evaluation of Oklahoma's universal pre-kindergarten program, and focused on the effectiveness of the Tulsa Public Schools pre-K program in promoting school readiness. Results of that evaluation have appeared in the Policy Studies Journal (February 2005), the Journal of Human Resources (Summer 2005), Developmental Psychology (November 2005) and most recently Science (June 2008).

Tracking Tulsa Teaching Methods
Oklahoma launched a new social experiment with universal pre-kindergarten classes, explains Gormley. "The Midwestern state is now the nation's leader in early childhood education, reaching approximately three-fourths of all 4-year-olds with state-funded pre-K," he adds.

Gormley and his colleagues at CROCUS determined that the pre-K program in Tulsa Public Schools functioned as an effective means to enhance school readiness in young children. While the team found that children who have participated in the pre-K program possess test scores that are noticeably higher than those who did not participate in the program, the findings are not the most significant data.   

The study is the first to demonstrate how beneficial high-quality pre-K programs are, not just to disadvantaged kids, but also those belonging to the middle class.

"Disadvantaged children benefit the most, but middle-class children also benefit substantially from participation in a high-quality pre-K program," says Gormley. "And that research has become an important part of the ongoing debate of whether we should have universal or targeted pre-K programs in the United States."

In their recent published paper in Science, Gormley and his colleagues report that participation in school-based pre-K and Head Start programs are more powerful predictors of certain test outcomes than gender, free lunch eligibility, a mother's education or whether the biological father lives at home.

"That is both surprising and encouraging in that it suggests that we can overcome some of the really big demographic constraints that put many children at risk," Gormley explains.

Balancing Multiple Roles
In May 2008, Gormley, who has been serving as interim dean since July, traveled to Tulsa with psychology professor and CROCUS co-director Deborah Phillips, associate professor of public policy Carolyn Hill and CROCUS fellows Catherine Edwards (G'09) and Shirley Adelstein (G'13). The team presented their findings to policymakers, teachers and administrators in Oklahoma.

"It was incredibly rewarding to see how our research was being translated into action on the ground and to observe some of the children and families who would hopefully benefit from our research," says Edwards, who expects to graduate with a master's in environmental and regulatory policy.   

Gormley and his colleagues have visited nearly every preschool classroom in Tulsa, but they still have questions about the program.

"We want to know which teacher choices and which classroom interaction patterns are most likely to benefit children," says Gormley.

They also want to better understand whether children who have participated in pre-K are better adjusted, less timid or less fidgety in the classroom.

Gormley asked former CROCUS fellow Brittany McGill (C'01, G'04) to co-author one the projects' articles, which resulted in her first publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

"One of the things that really stands out about Bill is his commitment to early childhood education and kids in general, both in and outside of his work," says McGill, who is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland. "Bill is a passionately devoted father to his daughter, Angela, and he even offered up suggestions for great child development reference books and sent gifts when I had my first child last fall."

Though Phillips joined the faculty at Georgetown in 2000, she was very familiar with his commitment to child care research before she joined him at CROCUS.

"I met Bill when I was working at the National Research Council, around 1996," she says. "It was unusual, to say the least, to find a political scientist who studied child care."

As for his new role as interim dean, Gormley says there are more duties, but his mission remains the same. "My most important duty is to make sure that we educate our students well," he says.

And his team has taken notice of his balancing act. "He hasn't skipped a beat," Phillips says, "which is quintessential Bill."

Gormley credits CROCUS' success to having multidisciplinary faculty that can take on dynamic research projects. "I think that our research has benefited from the presence of economists, political scientists, psychologists and public policy analysts on the same research team," says Gormley.

Since it was established in 2001, CROCUS has provided support to about three dozen graduate students such as Edwards and McGill. "And in return those graduate students have gathered data, coded data, analyzed data and in many other ways helped us invaluably with our research," Gormley says. "So this has been a partnership, not just between Georgetown University and the Tulsa Public Schools, but also a partnership between faculty and students."

Source: Blue & Gray