Photo: Micaela Bedell for Strategies for Children

Elizabeth A. Gilbert has spent years working in early childhood settings, and she says she has seen too many underprepared early educators, adults who themselves have poor literacy skills.

So in 2010, Gilbert and her colleagues set up a program to help early educators build their skills. Today, Gilbert is the coordinator of this effort, the Early Childhood Education Learn at Work program, which is part of the Labor/Management Workplace Education Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Earlier this month, Gilbert wrote about her program’s work in a Washington Post blog called, “The famous ‘word gap’ doesn’t hurt only the young. It affects many educators, too.”

Gilbert writes that it’s not just children who grapple with the word gap that the Hart-Risley study found. It’s also early educators. 

“It will come as a surprise to Americans to learn that as many as 1 million state-licensed and nationally credentialed early childhood educators are at-risk for functional illiteracy; their reading and writing skills are inadequate to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level,” Gilbert writes in the Washington Post blog.

The statistic of 1 million is Gilbert’s estimate, extrapolated from the findings of a 2012 Government Accountability Office report.

Gilbert writes that in too many cases, “The lives of these low-wage workers mirror those of disadvantaged children. Both face the ravages of poverty, lack education, suffer from greater depression and poorer health outcomes and have no power to change of any of it. Low-literacy early childhood educators struggle with their own word gaps — and for the same reasons low-income children do. They have lived with (and in spite of) academic, social and income disparities for decades.”

Gilbert adds: “Low-literacy early childhood educators and children in their care share misfortunes that perpetuate what I call a mirroring of disadvantage. Each reflects to the other the persistent, durable and complex adversities thrust upon them. Such adversities have consequences outside in the world and inside the classroom, the place they meet for sustenance.”

Educating Early Educators

Funded for five years by the Commonwealth Corporation, Gilbert’s program “measures the base-line adult literacy competence (in reading, writing, math and computer skills) of state-licensed non-college early childhood educators,” the Post blog says.

The resulting test scores are used “to appropriately place early childhood educators” in Adult Basic Education classes and in classes for English Speakers of Other Languages. These “contextualized higher learning courses… are geared to better prepare them to meet state standards and to move them toward college entrance.”

This past fall, the program offered an on-line, introductory psychology class. Students met in a classroom at Springfield Technical Community Classes and used laptops provided by the school, Gilbert said in a recent interview. Not only did students learn psychology, which will help them become better teachers, they also learned about the logistics of how online classes work, a step toward becoming lifelong learners themselves.

Moving Forward 

Funding for this program runs out in June, so Gilbert is looking for new ways to support the program.

In addition, Gilbert has created a plan for what she calls, “an early college for early educators.” It’s an educational proposal that would bring early educators close to earning an associate’s degree in two years.

She would also like to see English language proficiency testing become a more common tool for assessing early childhood educators; for planning professional development programs; and as a requirement for entry-level teacher certification.

In the Post blog, Gilbert writes, “The idea of testing early childhood educators for literacy competence is not to punish or penalize them. The idea is to develop them. This is a multi-faceted problem that demands multi-partner solutions.”

She adds: “For this reason, state and federal departments of early education, higher education and workforce development should work together to create and implement policies and practices to develop this workforce. Determining the vocabulary, reading, writing, math and computer competencies of these workers is an objective way to evaluate who needs help, what kind of help is needed and how best to make that happen.”

In the recent interview she said, “We’re missing the compassion in this. We’re missing meeting people where they’re at.”

Gilbert says that providing early educators with the educational support that they need is one way to inspire them to provide the same thing for the children they teach.