Preschool or Day Care?

(This is a picture of just one of our paper mache puppet making days. )

I got this Harvard Letter as a press release. I think the article is very timely and very interesting. At a time when the nation seems up in arms and at the same time a loss about what to do with early childhood education, but the grant money is being passed around like free tickets to someplace wonderful, this opens some question doors that should be asked.

When center day care is considered preschool, the questions we must ask are about the curriculum. We need to separate day care from preschool because often they are not the same thing. In the most popular childcare center in my city, the one with all the grant money, there is no teaching at all. I know this because we just hired one of their teachers (with a license) who was not allowed to teach there. If this is happening here, it's happening all over the country.

When teachers get the credentials, and have their teaching skills suffocated, it makes grant money look like a game of wink and nod. At the same time, it's no wonder teachers don't stay in the early childhood field - what for?

Over the years, children who have come to our little place from their place at 4.5 routinely don't know how to hold a crayon, can't recognize their name, can't draw a picture of anything, even a face, and can't listen to a story mainly because they've never heard one. Yet every time there is a grant available, it goes to this place and the end product is new doors or windows that are kept shut. Their play ground is concrete with politely placed toys that you never see a child on. That's because the first consideration for care is getting these kids off to a 3 hour nap.

So a division should be established between day care and early childhood education. And that division must be made by the people who administrate these places. What is the mission of the center or school? Is it a school, or is it babysitting? Can you legitimately offer babysitting until a child is five and then shove him off to big school not knowing anything and still call yourself an early childhood learning center? It amounts to fraud.

If a center intends to teach, then hire teachers and pay them. If a center gravitates toward babysitting, be frank with parents. "We don't teach here because our staff is not equipped to teach. Your child will leave our center not knowing anything but what you teach him at home."

Degrees of Improvement
By Michael Sadowski

Harvard Education Letter
Published by the Harvard School of Education
January/February 2006

Better preparation for elementary reading, writing, and math. Lower rates of special education placement and grade retention. Higher incomes and lower incidence of arrest during adulthood. The short- and long-term benefits of quality preschool education are well documented by research dating back decades.

Yet at a time when recognition of preschool’s importance seems to be growing, the educational qualifications of preschool teachers are steadily declining. Around the country, advocates, policymakers, and teacher educators are struggling to find ways to improve the skills and credentials of those who teach our nation’s youngest students.

Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of Pennsylvania’s Keystone Research Center, is one voice in a growing chorus of researchers calling for higher standards for the nation’s
preK educators. An MIT-trained economist who has examined workforce trends in a wide variety of fields, Herzenberg says preK education stands out as a profession marked by abysmal pay and an exceptionally high percentage of workers without health care and other benefits.

In a recent report for the Economic Policy Institute titled “Losing Ground in Early Childhood Education,” Herzenberg and coauthors Mark Price and David Bradley note:

• Center-based preschool educators (teachers and administrators) have an average hourly salary rate of just $10.00 per hour, slightly more than half that of all female college graduates ($19.23).

• Only about one-third of center-based preK educators have health-care benefits through their jobs, less than half the percentage for all workers nationally.

• The proportion of early childhood educators without health insurance is three times as high as in the overall workforce (21 percent vs. 7 percent) Although educators in school-based preschool may fare somewhat better, the researchers note that school-based preschool makes up a relatively small percentage of the profession (less than 20 percent). As for home-based preschool educators, the researchers say their pay and benefits are even lower.

Declining Credentials

Herzenberg and his colleagues are particularly concerned about the declining professional credentials of preschool personnel. According to their report, in the last two decades the percentage of centerbased preschool teachers and administrators with a bachelor’s degree has declined from 43 percent (in 1983–85) to just 30 percent today, while the number of preschool
educators with only a high school degree or less has risen from 24 percent to 30 percent.

In particular, younger preschool teachers and administrators are significantly less likely to have a bachelor’s degree than their middle- and retirement-aged colleagues, suggesting that these downward trends are likely to continue. This decline in preschool educators’ level of educational attainment has occurred even as the average educational attainment of U.S. workers overall has increased.

A study currently under way at California’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, among others, will investigate the downward trend in preK educators’ educational attainment, but Herzenberg has some theories about the causes. First, he believes the field’s persistently low compensation has not kept up with other career options for college-educated women and has thus made maintaining high professional standards difficult. (Women make up the vast majority of the preK teaching force.) Second, Herzenberg says that due to population trends and increasing numbers of women entering the workforce, the number of young children who now attend preschool has grown dramatically in the last two decades.

“When it was a smaller field, ECE [early childhood education] had a highly qualified workforce,” Herzenberg says. “But as the field has tripled, it has been hard to hold on to
this workforce.”

New Jersey Raises the Bar

One state that has made a massive effort to upgrade the educational qualifications of preK teachers in certain districts is New Jersey. A 1998 state Supreme Court decision in a long-standing educational equity case (Abbott v. Burke) required the state to fund high-quality full-day preschool for all three- and four-year-olds in New Jersey’s 30 lowest-income districts. Among the provisions mandated by the court—including class size capped at 15, teaching
aides in every classroom, and developmentally appropriate curricula—was the requirement that all preschool teachers have at least a bachelor’s degree, specialized training in early childhood education, and state certification in the education of children from preschool through grade 3.

The court gave preK teachers working in the so-called Abbott districts four years—later extended to six years at the recommendation of early childhood education advocates— to obtain a bachelor’s degree and the appropriate preK–3 certification if they wanted to continue teaching
in the districts. This meant that many teachers who had not been on the other side of the desk for years—even decades—had to become college students again.

Ellen Frede, an associate professor at the College of New Jersey and former assistant to the commissioner in the state’s Office of Early Childhood Education, says that prior to the court ruling, only about 35 percent of the preschool teachers in the Abbott districts had a bachelor’s
degree. “And that was 35 percent of many fewer classrooms and many fewer teachers,” Frede notes, pointing out that the preschool student population in the districts has grown dramatically in the period since the court ruling.

Yet a decision that might have precipitated a workforce crisis instead resulted in a tansformation of the preK teaching profession. A large majority of preK teachers in the Abbott preschools took on the challenge to obtain a bachelor’s degree, in part because the reward for doing so was considerable: the same salary and benefits for preK teachers as for elementary school teachers in the same district.

The state also made the degree programs accessible, both financially and geographically. Through the state’s Commission for Higher Education, teacher education programs received funds to help expand their early childhood faculties and offerings, and prospective students received substantial scholarships to help them pay tuition and other expenses. In addition, about 60 percent of the colleges and universities brought classes directly to the Abbott
school districts so that teachers could meet their degree requirements without having to travel far from home.

“Some of the colleges became very creative about offering the courses within the school district,” says Kathleen Priestley, supervisor of early childhood education for the Orange (NJ) Public School District. According to Priestley, all but two of the preschool teachers in Orange have completed the requirements for their bachelor’s degrees, and she expects the other two to do so soon.

Frede estimates that about 80 percent of preschool teachers in the Abbott districts now have a bachelor’s degree and state certification in teaching preschool through grade 3. Researchers note, however, that these credentials go only so far in preparing teachers for preK and early
elementary education. Carrie Lobman, Sharon Ryan, and Jill McLaughlin, three researchers in early childhood education at Rutgers University, recently studied 12 of the 14 institutions credentialing early childhood educators in New Jersey. They found that while these programs’ outreach and recruitment efforts were highly effective, they were lacking in some areas in which preK teachers say they need the most help, such as special education and teaching English-language learners. More attention was also given to early literacy than to areas like math and
science.


Making a Difference

Overall, however, the Abbott initiative seems to be making an important difference in the quality of preK instruction in the state’s highest-poverty cities and towns. A recent report by Frede summarizing a set of evaluations in the Abbott preschools notes “a sustained and dramatic improvement” in the quality of preschool education in those districts. By one measure, the percentage of classrooms scoring in the “very low quality” range dropped from 12 percent in 2003 to just 2 percent in 2005. The evaluation also noted substantial positive effects on children’s development of key early literacy skills.

For Further Information E. Frede. “Assessment in a Continuous Improvement Cycle: New Jersey’s Abbott Preschool Program.”

New York: National Early Childhood Accountability Task Force of the Pew Charitable Trusts. “This article is part of an ongoing series on the education of children from preK through grade 3, made possible through the support of the Foundation for Child Development. For additional information, visit the Harvard Education Letter online resource, Focus on Early Childhood Education, at www.hel-earlyed.