Screenshot: Center for the Study of Child Care Employment

Given their expertise in working with children, families, and state agencies, early educators are uniquely suited to be advocates.

Now, a new resource — The E4 Toolkit — gives them more ways to do this work and explain why and how the field of early childhood education can be improved.

“We want to connect early educators to data and talking points about the early childhood education (ECE) workforce and offer potential solutions to some of the issues they face,” Hopeton Hess explains. Hess is a research and policy associate at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

Using the E4 Toolkit – E4 stands for “Early Educator Engagement and Empowerment” – early educators can draw on a collection of strategies and solutions that was created “to support early educators in their advocacy, power building, and engagement with stakeholders.” 

Specifically, Hess says, “Early educators could use the toolkit in group settings to contribute to their shared understanding of the early childhood sector.

“In conversations between early educators and advocacy organizations, the toolkit would be a useful prompt for identifying workforce needs and desires.”

Hess adds that the toolkit can also be used “to support the personal narratives and experiences of early educators in policymaking spaces. Bridging data with personal experiences is a powerful way to push for systemic change in early childhood education and bring about social justice for early educators.”

The toolkit draws on information that early educators have shared to cover four policy areas and offer a range of useful strategies and approaches, including:

• Education and Training, where changes could include:

° creating scholarships for early educators, as Massachusetts has

° providing academic counseling and tutoring

° professional development programs that translate into college credits, and

° creating a way for colleges to recognize and take account of early educators’ past work experience

• Working Conditions, an important area given that “most programs are severely under-resourced.” Progress could be made with:

° better defined quality standards such as how to set staffing levels and how much paid time early educators have for planning, as well as

° using these revised Model Work Standards to create “a vision for ensuring the needs of educators are met.”

• Public Funding, which largely fails to factor in the true costs of providing child care, and could grow so that it:

° ensures higher wages for early educators to provide “economic dignity,” and

° adequately funds early childhood programs “as a public good”

• Workforce disparities, often based on race and the age of the children being cared for. Solutions for creating more equity include:

° investigating which decision-making processes lead to inequities and asking whether “the group most impacted by a policy is missing from the space where decisions are being made?”

° gathering data about “racial and ethnic communities that are underrepresented” in early childhood workforce datasets, especially Asian and Native American educators, and

° requiring programs that receive public funding to “adhere to wage standards”

• Creating Workforce Data Systems that are robust and well-funded to protect against having “anecdotes and bias… drive policy decisions,” and

• Boosting Teacher Power by:

° creating safe spaces for teachers to share their experiences

° ensuring teachers have access to data about the workforce, and

° helping teachers gain access to “policymaking spaces” so that teachers’ perspectives are prioritized

As the toolkit concludes, “There is a pressing need to center the ECE workforce in discussions on policy responses to the child care crisis that is happening now at all levels of government.”

“Early educators themselves are central to helping policy leaders and stakeholders understand the problems of the early care and education system and identify workable solutions.”