Using the Teaching and Guidance Policy Essentials Checklist to Build and Support Effective Early Childhood Systems Sarah M. Garrity 1 • Sascha L. Longstreth 1 • Nina S. Salcedo-Potter 1 • April Staub 1 Published online: 30 May 2015 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract The prevalence of preschool expulsion, coupled with racial disparities in expulsion rates and the potential long term negative effects of challenging behaviors in the early years, has created an urgent need to build early childhood systems to address these issues. The teaching and guidance policy essen- tials checklist (TAG-PEC) has been developed to assess nine essential features of high quality early childhood discipline policies and can be used by early childhood programs in a variety of settings to evaluate, refine, and revise existing policies or guide in the development of new policies. Using data from 282 guidance policies assessed using the TAG-PEC, the authors use 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 help build and support an effective and cohesive early childhood system. Findings indicate that, overall, discipline policies were not high quality and there was a great deal of variability in the TAG-PEC scores. By bringing evidence based practices to the field via a simple to use checklist, the authors hope to help contribute to the development of a comprehensive early child- hood system and that supports programs in the provision of high quality services to children and families. Keywords Discipline policies Á Child guidance Á Early childhood systems Á Challenging behavior Introduction It is estimated that between 10 and 21 percent of preschool children exhibit challenging behavior (Snell et al. 2012), and preschoolers are expelled at more than three times the rate of their K-12 peers (Gilliam 2005). Furthermore, it has been shown that children identified with aggressive behavior in preschool are more likely to experience continuing behavior problems throughout elementary school and into adoles- cence (Campbell et al. 2006; McCartney et al. 2010). Data on preschoolers from low-income backgrounds suggest that they may be at higher risk for problem behaviors, with es- timates ranging from 7 to 31 % for internalizing disorders in Head Start samples and as high as 57 % for externalizing problems in community-based samples (Qi and Kaiser 2003). The need for early intervention with children with challenging behaviors is critical in order to prevent ongoing behavior problems (Campbell 1995; Campbell et al. 2006; Shaw et al. 2000) and support children’s future success. While numerous evidence-based practices exist for ef- fectively reducing challenging behaviors and promoting prosocial behavior in young children (Conroy et al. 2005; Fox et al. 2003, 2010; Webster-Stratton and Taylor 2001), the lack of system-level support is a major impediment to the widespread adoption of these practices. Kagan et al. (2007) have referred to early childhood education as a Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10643-015-0713-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Copies of the checklist can be obtained by contacting either the first (sgarrity@mail.sdsu.edu) or second author (slongstreth@mail.sdsu. edu). & Sarah M. Garrity sgarrity@mail.sdsu.edu Sascha L. Longstreth slongstreth@mail.sdsu.edu Nina S. Salcedo-Potter npotter@mail.sdsu.edu 1 San Diego State University, 5550 Campanile Dr., San Diego, CA 92182, USA 123 Early Childhood Educ J (2016) 44:209–216 DOI 10.1007/s10643-015-0713-6