There is a serious need for early childhood intervention practices for children who are living at or below the poverty line. Since 1965 Head Start has provided a federally funded, free preschool program for children in this population. The City of Phoenix Head Start program consists of nine delegate agencies, seven of which reside in school districts. These agencies are currently not conducting local longitudinal evaluations of their preschool graduates. The purpose of this study was to recommend initial steps the City of Phoenix grantee and the delegate agencies can take to begin a longitudinal evaluation process of their Head Start programs. Seven City of Phoenix Head Start agency directors were interviewed. These interviews provided information about the attitudes of the directors when considering longitudinal evaluations and how Head Start already evaluates their programs through internal assessments. The researcher also took notes on the Third Grade Follow-Up to the Head Start Executive Summary in order to make recommendations to the City of Phoenix Head Start programs about the best practices for longitudinal student evaluations.

Although open access publishing has been available since 1998, we know little regarding scholars' perceptions and practices toward publishing in open access outlets, especially in the social science community. Open access publishing has been slow to penetrate the field of education, yet the potential impact of open access could make this publishing method an important innovation for understanding how to support the publishing needs of education scholars. To discover these perceptions and practices that education scholars have toward open access publishing, a 51-item web-based survey was provided to scholars with known investment in open access publishing. Participants had either (1) a publication in one of 34 United States education-based open access journals or (2) a manuscript submitted for peer review in one of those 34 journals. The survey contained subscales focusing on contemporary open access themes--issues identified through a comprehensive analysis of the major outlets for scholarly news in education. Through open and axial coding, several themes were extracted. They included rights and ease of access, ease of publishing, costs, support from colleagues and administrators, and perceived quality of open access outlets. The survey showed moderate to high reliability using Cronbach's alpha. Correlation and MANOVA testing showed significant results in scholars' teaching status and peer review status of manuscripts. Additional findings indicated that non-tenured education scholars responded more strongly than tenured scholars to issues related to rights and ease of access, promotion, and quality. Scholars with manuscripts currently in peer review felt strongly about themes of rights and ease of access, cost, and promotion. The results imply the following: (1) If scholars want their research read by a wider audience, they should publish in open access journals. (2) Pro-open access policies and procedures could gain more support by ensuring open access is promoted to non-tenured scholars seeking to publish. (3) More research, forums, discussions, and education about open access need to occur in greater abundance to continue to ameliorate scholars' views about the benefits of open access publishing. (4) Institutions and departments can offer their unconditional support for open access publishing as a method of meeting promotion/tenure requirements.