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The Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America is pointing to a tough knot that’s challenging the field of early education – and New America is proposing ways to untangle this knot.

This “long-standing thorny knot,” New America says, is composed of three of the field’s “most challenging issues: preparation and education, compensation and status, and diversity and inclusivity.”

These issues are addressed in “Moving Beyond False Choices for Early Childhood Educators—A Compendium,” which is “the culmination of an 18-month blog series that engaged diverse viewpoints.” These viewpoints agree in some areas and dissent in others.

Last week, New America hosted a related event (recorded in the YouTube video above) to discuss these issues.

Among those trying to untie early education’s knot is Albert Wat, a senior policy director at the Alliance for Early Success.

How, Wat asks in the opening essay of the compendium, can the field ask early educators to earn higher education degrees and simultaneously preserve diversity? And, “How do we acknowledge the competencies and diversity of the field’s incumbent workforce and at the same time, build an even stronger profession for the future?”

“If we truly value ECE’s diversity, more needs to be done to intentionally cultivate it as an asset in service to achieving more equitable outcomes for children,” Wat writes. “This means fighting not only for fair compensation policies, but also for effective professional training systems and robust ongoing supports that help early childhood educators attain increased competencies.”

Creating this kind of educational equity is particularly important for family child care providers. As Josephine Queen, who is such a provider, writes:

“The family child care providers I know tend to be working or lower income, living paycheck to paycheck. A formal education degree is financially out of reach for most of us. Some also are single parents who lack resources to pay for child care while attending classes. Plus, running a home-based business means few of us can carve out time to gain the required practical experience and requisite hours needed for degrees since, typically, working in one’s own home child care under one’s own supervision and tutelage is not credit-bearing.”

Bela Moté, chief executive officer of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning in Chicago, also writes about family child care providers, adding:

“I have learned from leading an organization that has operated a family child care network for over two decades that, in fact, this delivery model has more flexibility than center-based programs to accommodate the field’s growing decree for credentials and degrees, increased compensation, and sustainable diversity. But for this potential to be realized, home providers have to be understood as more than educators; their settings have to be acknowledged as small, independent businesses, and they have to be recognized as small business owners.”

What can be done to address these challenges?

In an essay about “getting unstuck,” Laura Bornfreund, New America’s director of Early & Elementary Education, writes that despite some positive changes, progress in the field still lags. She points to three reasons:

• “a lack of field-wide agreement on ECE’s direction”

• “fear of letting go of the status quo,” and

• “an imbalance between the push for immediate action and implementation realities”

To make progress, she calls for addressing these issues simultaneously.

“It’s essential to move beyond current thinking and to be prepared to tackle multiple change elements simultaneously in a strategic and coordinated way. A knot cannot be undone until you pay attention to all ends of its threads.”

The early education field can, in other words, untie its knot, but this will take hard, strategic work.