“Leading the Way,” is a series featuring the next generation of leaders in the field of early education and care.

Ola Friday

Ola Friday grew up with educators. Her mother was a teacher and an assistant principal, and her father was a teacher. Friday knew she wanted to be in education, but when the time came to choose between Teach for America or a policy fellowship, she was excited about policy.

“What we know from early childhood is that you get your greatest return on investment when you invest in the education of our youngest children,” Friday says. “From a policy and analytical perspective, it just makes sense to be invested in this work.”

Friday invested herself into the work. She earned a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, where she also took classes in the education school. She studied with David Kirp, an emeritus professor of public policy who also writes about early education.

Friday went on to work in New York City, helping to develop and implement QUALITYstarsNY, the city’s first quality rating and improvement system. She moved on to Pennsylvania where she helped overhaul the early childhood education career ladder. And along the way, she earned a Doctor of Education Leadership degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

Now, Friday is the associate commissioner of Workforce Development at the Massachusetts Department of Early Education Care.

“I think of my work from an equity perspective, and I find it very troublesome that the situations that children are born into – through no control of their own — can dictate the outcomes of their lives,” Friday says.

“That seems unfair to me, and it’s something that as a society we should try to remedy. Early childhood education is a way to start to do a lot of that remediation. If we give every child an awesome early education, then we can say that we have done some work in leveling the playing field for children.”

As associate commissioner: “My work is thinking about, ‘What are the training needs and the professional development needs for the educators in our workforce?’ I also think about how to build a pipeline and steer more folks into our workforce.”

Friday wants Massachusetts to develop a “truly meaningful” career path for early educators.

What would that look like in five years?

“We would have a clearly defined professional pathway that includes higher education degree credentials, ongoing coursework, and professional development rooted in the demonstration of competencies for all educators in our workforce,” she says.

“We would then have partners who are responding to this defined pathway in terms of their offerings of training and college coursework.

“We would also have a technology system that would allow us to track the professional progress of our workforce every step of the way: not only in terms of meeting benchmarks, but also working toward higher benchmarks.”

“And I would love to have an incentive structure in place so that people could earn more money as they met higher levels in our professional pathway.”

But it simply isn’t enough, Friday says, to focus on one educator at a time. The key to a prosperous future is developing leaders who can promote all the state’s early educators.

“We talk a lot about job-embedded learning, and that’s so important. But you need strong leadership in early childhood programs to be able to do that, to help educators engage in job-embedded learning. Strong leaders on site, they can help educators embed their training in their work on a daily basis. That can have a huge impact on programs. That’s going to impact more children.”

“Then we can say that it’s not just the individual that we’re concerned about. We’re talking about the whole program and how individuals in a program come together to shape the lives and experiences of children.”

Normally, we ask leaders what they want policymakers to know about their work. But since Friday is a policymaker, we asked her what she wants the public to know about her work. Her answer:

“One thing that I’m learning is that there is a lot of opportunity for change and for us to do things differently and better, and the foundation is really strong. Massachusetts has some of the strongest licensing and professional development requirements in the country. All the work that we’re doing around the workforce is really building on that.”

For Friday, moving forward will mean keeping one eye on the needs of young children and the other eye on the state’s many opportunities for making powerful progress.

“We owe it to children to make sure that we have the best educators in front of them. But we also owe it to our workforce to make sure they we’re responsible in helping to get them to higher levels of qualifications and education.”