Jason Hustedt

Jason Hustedt is interim chair and professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. He is an applied child development researcher focusing on three broad areas of early childhood policy and practice: (1.) research aimed at understanding implications of state and federal early childhood policies, (2.) research with children and early care and education professionals to investigate outcomes of public early childhood programs and school readiness, and (3.) research with caregivers and children on parent-child interactions in low-income families. These studies address questions about “what works best for whom” and the conditions under which services or programs are effective, rather than simply documenting that early childhood programs have overall benefits.

State-funded pre-K programs have been a key focus of his research on child outcomes and school readiness. He led large-scale evaluation studies of state pre-K programs in Arkansas and New Mexico. His article in Early Childhood Research Quarterly looks at the overall effectiveness of the New Mexico Pre-K program as well as outcomes for children who are members of different racial/ethnic groups. Findings from this study raise questions about how to promote more equitable outcomes for all children and are highly relevant to national conversations about universal prekindergarten.

His current Secondary Analysis of Data on Child Care and Early Education grant from the federal Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation is a collaboration with Gerilyn Slicker, a recent graduate of the HDFS Ph.D. program. They are examining the extent to which childcare programs using CCDF subsidies serve demographically diverse children. Childcare subsidies are a policy lever to support families’ equitable access to high-quality care by prioritizing which families are served, and states have flexibility to set some of their own policies. Their analyses are aimed at understanding how state policies contribute to diversity, the enrollment of children from prioritized populations such as children with special needs, and how a national sample of childcare centers groups into latent profiles based on child diversity.

Other research involves analyzing and contextualizing state policies related to availability of public preschool, pre-K program standards, and early childhood finance strategies. Earlier in his career, he was project manager for the first five State Preschool Yearbooks for the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). These annual reports have been widely used and continue as a definitive source of information on state pre-K policies. More recent work involves analysis of pre-K policies in a study of suspension and expulsion standards in early childhood programs. He has also been engaged in the PreK in Family Child Care Project, which uses an equity lens to understand implementation of state and local pre-K programs within family child care settings and provides a conceptual model for how use of this strategy can expanded as pre-K initiatives grow.

Hustedt teaches courses on topics such as Child and Family Policy, Research Methods, and Early Childhood Administration, Leadership, and Advocacy. He previously served as program director for the MS and Ph.D. programs in HDFS and currently serves as Research Director for the Delaware Institute for Excellence in Early Childhood (DIEEC). The DIEEC provides direct services to children and families as an Early Head Start grantee and to the early care and education community in Delaware by providing a variety of professional supports to child care professionals. Both provide primary contexts for DIEEC research. He also serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology and is a Senior Research Fellow at NIEER.