Clara Jennings on opening the teacher preparation pipeline in early childhood education
It is rewarding to see that early childhood education as a profession has finally taken center stage for some state and national policymakers ("Degrees of Improvement"). The importance of quality child development experiences during the early years for a child’s success in school and beyond is well documented in the professional literature on early childhood education. Given what we also know about the importance of highly qualified teachers for preschool children’s readiness for continuous growth and development, it is urgent that we raise the bar for all individuals working in the public and private sector with young children. Requiring at least a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education or child development for teachers is a step in the right direction, and one that early childhood professionals have advocated for decades.Achieving this goal will have implications for supply and demand in the field, as already seen in the state of New Jersey. It will require schools, colleges, and departments of education (SCDEs) to market their programs in different venues to attract the best and brightest individuals to the profession. However, the states and school districts must also address the salary issue by ensuring equal pay for early childhood teachers, regardless of their teaching assignment, as is happening in New Jersey.
Despite all the good intentions that SCDEs may have towards accomplishing this goal, many obstacles get in the way of large numbers of early childhood education professionals moving through the teacher preparation pipeline (See AACTE’s white paper “The Early Childhood Challenge: Preparing High Quality Teachers for a Changing Society”). Searching for solutions, AACTE and other organizations in the education arena have recently begun looking at developing articulation agreements that facilitate the transfer of students from community colleges to four-year institutions. Community colleges are the main venues of preparation for early childhood education teachers and paraprofessionals, particularly those much-needed teachers from minority backgrounds and those that are part of, and knowledgeable about, language-minority communities. Many of these teachers and paraprofessionals are working parents from middle- and lower-income backgrounds, for whom time, accessibility, and affordability are major obstacles that can prevent them from going beyond the community college to complete bachelor’s degrees. Making articulation agreements a standard practice would facilitate this process, but will require strong institutional commitments, along with widespread and permanent state funding. New Jersey and Oklahoma are excellent examples of how good legislation can turn a seemingly impossible project into a clear success.
Reaching the goal of having a “highly qualified teacher” in every early childhood education classroom should be a shared goal of all members of the education community. We all should push our legislators to follow these good examples and not only raise the bar but open the doors by securing funding for the preparation and fair pay of high quality early childhood education teachers.
Clara Jennings is dean of the School of Education at DePaul University.
