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Posts Tagged ‘#EarlyEducators’

Cape Cod forum boosts momentum for passing Common Start bill

Posted in Business and economy, Child care, Early educators, Funding, MA Legislature, MA state budget, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Strategies for Children, tagged , , on February 9, 2022| 1 Comment »

 
Last Saturday morning, parents, advocates, and state legislators came together to participate in a virtual forum to discuss the importance of the Common Start legislation, a Massachusetts bill that calls for establishing “a system of affordable, high-quality early education and child care for all Massachusetts families, over a 5-year timeline.”

Hosted by the League of Women Voters of the Cape Cod Area and the Common Start Coalition, Cape Cod & Islands Chapter, the forum included:

• Senator Susan Moran, who filed Common Start in the Senate

• Representative Kip Diggs, a member of the Joint Committee on Education

• Janae Mendes, a parent

• Rafaela Fonseca, a family child care provider

• Lynda Allen-wan-N’Tani, executive director of the Crystal Garden Children’s Learning Center

• Noelle Pina, chief of staff of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce

• Debra Murphy, the early childhood coordinator at Cape Cod Community College, and

• Amy O’Leary, Strategies for Children’s executive director

Before the forum, Jane Mendes shared her experiences as a parent with the Cape Cod Times, which reports:

“In the summer of 2019, Janae Mendes was forced to leave her job at a Cape Cod bank because she couldn’t afford summer child care for her 7-year-old daughter. (more…)

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The city of Washington, D.C., raises early educators’ salaries by $10,000

Posted in COVID-19, Early educators, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, tagged , , on February 3, 2022| 1 Comment »

Early educators’ salaries are going up in Washington, D.C.

As we blogged last month, the work of advocates led the D.C. Council to create a tax increase for individuals whose annual earnings exceed $250,000. Some $75 million of these new funds will support early educators’ salary increases.

The D.C. Council also created an Early Childhood Educator Equitable Compensation Task Force that was charged with how best to accomplish this goal.

As the D.C. Council explains on its website:

“We all know that educating our youngest children isn’t child’s play. Yet the professionals who tackle this challenging and essential work have long been profoundly under-compensated for what they do. At its most recent meeting, the Council took a significant first step towards addressing this long-time injustice, queuing up payments of $10,000 or more this year.”

(more…)

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“Vanishing” child care workers

Posted in Business and economy, Child care, COVID-19, Early educators, Federal, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, tagged , , on February 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

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Photo: Micaela Bedell for Strategies for Children

“Child care workers are vanishing and it’s hurting the entire economy,” CNN warns in this headline of one of its business news stories, which reports:

“Since losing one-third of its workforce at the outset of the pandemic, the child care industry has seen a jobs recovery that’s been slow and incomplete.

“And now it’s starting to backslide.

“After shedding 4,500 jobs from September through November, preliminary estimates from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the child day care services industry lost another 3,700 jobs in December.”

And, of course, these workers aren’t actually “vanishing.” They’re being driven out of their jobs by low wages and tough working conditions.

Without enough child care workers, there aren’t enough child care spots, which means many parents will struggle to be able to work, and without enough workers the economy can’t thrive.

“Now that we’re seeing a decrease [in employment], that should be worrying for many folks who are relying on these services,” Caitlin McLean, director of multi-state and international programs at the University of California Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, tells CNN.

“This is absolutely a contributor to the wider worker shortage that we’re seeing.”

(more…)

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Washington, D.C., makes bold progress on early educators’ salaries

Posted in Child care, Early educators, Family child care, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, tagged , on January 18, 2022| Leave a Comment »

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Photo: Ivan Samkov from Pexels

In early education, challenges can sometimes overshadow progress, but today we’re happy to blog about inspiring progress that has been made in the city of Washington, D.C.

The Under 3 DC Coalition, which shines “a spotlight on the need for more public investments to support families with infants and toddlers,” has announced that its efforts have led to an investment of “$75 million that DC will use to begin to publicly fund increases in early childhood educators’ compensation.”

Raising salaries has been an uphill trudge for the field, mostly resulting in small salary increases that lag far behind the earnings of public school teachers doing comparable work. Now, however, the coalition – along with its partners DC Action and Educare DC – have advocated for “a tax increase for individuals with annual incomes above $250,000.”

As Under 3 DC explains, “Building a sustainable workforce by adequate compensation is one of the first steps to create high-quality programs that are accessible to families.” (more…)

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Introducing our new Advocacy Network

Posted in Child care, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Funding, MA Legislature, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, Strategies for Children, tagged , on January 13, 2022| 2 Comments »

Here at Strategies for Children, we are excited to announce the launch of our new Advocacy Network for Early Education and Care, a year-long advocacy experience for emerging leaders in the field.

To launch the first cohort, we’ve chosen nine new and established leaders from across Massachusetts, including four from Boston. They are all passionate about advocating for children, families, and educators in their communities, and they want to learn new advocacy skills and knowledge to improve programs, communities, and policies. This cohort approach is similar to the one we used to create our Speakers’ Bureau, a program that prepared early educators to use their voices and share their stories with the media or through event panels or at State House rallies.

“Since the pandemic began, the team at Strategies for Children has learned so much about how to engage the field in advocacy,” says Titus DosRemedios, Strategies’ deputy director. “Our daily 9:30 calls informed our approach to the Speakers’ Bureau, which in turn inspired and helped shape the Advocacy Network.”

(more…)

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Addressing the early educator shortage with apprenticeship programs

Posted in Child care, Early educators, Funding, Higher Education, MA governor, MA Legislature, MA state budget, Massachusetts Cities and Towns, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, tagged , on January 11, 2022| Leave a Comment »

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Photo: Micaela Bedell for Strategies for Children

“Within every challenge lies vast opportunity,” David Jordan, president of the Seven Hills Foundation & Affiliates, writes in a new CommonWealth magazine article.

The challenge Jordan is referring to is the shortage of early education and care staff members.

The opportunity to address this shortage, he says, is to set up an apprenticeship program.

Jordan explains, “The path to becoming a credentialed Child Development Associate, which enables one to become a preschool teacher and, with additional training, a lead teacher, is difficult and costly.”

And asking budding early educators to leave work and then go to school at the end of the day ignores the fact that many are parents who need to get home to their own children.

As Jordan explains, an apprenticeship program would address this problem:

“An on-the-job – we call it ‘learn while you earn’ – training program coupled with virtual classroom education form the core of an apprenticeship program that is a vital way to encourage retention and promotion in the child care workforce. Onsite mentoring provides the professional support for the apprentice’s adaptation of classroom learning to practice.”

(more…)

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Experiment: What happens when early educators receive financial incentives? Spoiler: they’re more likely to stay in their jobs

Posted in Child care, Early educators, Federal, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, tagged , on January 7, 2022| 1 Comment »

“In 2019, Virginia received federal funding from a Preschool Development Birth through Five grant (PDG), and allocated a considerable portion of their funds for direct financial incentives to early educators. The goal of this program, the Teacher Recognition Program (TRP), was to recognize teachers’ hard work, lower their financial stress, reduce turnover, and create more stable early learning opportunities for children.”

“Teachers at sites that were randomly assigned to the TRP were far less likely to turn over. About one-quarter of all teachers at sites without access to incentives left their site within eight months (see Figure 1 below). Only 14% of teachers eligible for the incentive did.

“The results were even more striking among child-care teachers: The financial incentive cut turnover rates in half, from 30% to 15%.” 

“President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would provide this type of transformative funding, giving states the financial resources and supports needed to meaningfully improve child-care quality in part through compensation reforms. However, getting the bill through the Senate has proved difficult, with growing calls to cut key pieces. Finding a way to pass this legislation, including the investments in the teachers who care for and teach our youngest children, is essential – not only for the struggling child-care sector, but for the economy as a whole. Public investments in early educators are long overdue, and they are imperative for meeting the needs of children, parents, and society.”

— “How can we improve early childhood education? Use public dollars to pay teachers more.” by Daphna Bassok and Justin B. Doromal, Brookings, January 5, 2022

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Creating pathways to entrepreneurial leadership in early education – a guest blog post

Posted in Child care, COVID-19, Dept. of Early Education and Care, Diversity equity and inclusion, Early educators, Guest Blog, Higher Education, National, Pre-kindergarten, Professional development & preparation, tagged , , on December 7, 2021| 1 Comment »

 
This is a guest blog post by Anne Douglass, professor of Early Care and Education at UMass Boston and the founding executive director of the Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation.

Anne Douglass

Anne Douglass

Early educators are smart, kind, engaging, and supportive and dedicated.

Here at UMass Boston, we also know that early educators are entrepreneurial leaders. That’s why our programs provide an education that boosts their leadership, creativity, and innovation – all to create a better early learning experience for children.

Examples of early educators’ entrepreneurship abound. Last month, the Cape Cod Times featured a front page story about Nature Preschool Explorers, a nature-based preschool at the Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary in Barnstable. The four-year-old school was touted as an example of the wave of educational programs focused on the outdoors that are popping up across the country.

The school was cofounded by Diana Stinson, an alum of UMass Boston’s Post-Master’s Leadership Certificate in Early Education Research, Policy, and Practice (PMC) offered by our Institute for Early Education Leadership and Innovation (Early Ed Leadership Institute). (more…)

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Step by step for the Build Back Better bill

Posted in Child care, COVID-19, Early educators, Federal, Funding, National, Pre-kindergarten, tagged , , , on November 23, 2021| 3 Comments »

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Photo: Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels

 
There’s some good news for early education in Washington, D.C.

The Build Back Better bill has been passed by the House, bringing it one step closer to becoming law.

Next, the bill will have to make it through the Senate.

As Representative Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts) explains, this legislation is vitally important.

“The Build Back Better Act is a once-in-a-generation investment in families. It will help us recover today and rebuild a stronger tomorrow. With this bill, we are fundamentally improving the lives of workers, women, children, and seniors and ensuring that the wealthiest Americans and corporations pay their fair share,” Clark says in a statement.

“When I first ran for Congress, I had a dream that every child in America could have access to a great start through universal pre-kindergarten. With today’s bill, what was once a moonshot will soon be reality. What’s more, we are lowering the cost of child care for 20 million families and finally honoring our child care workers with livable wages.” (more…)

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In quotes: leadership training

Posted in Early educators, Professional development & preparation, Quotes, Research, tagged , on November 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »

“A growing body of research points to the enormous benefits to children and program quality when early educators from all levels of the field have access to relational and entrepreneurial leadership training. Relational leadership recognizes the expertise or authority of each person to exercise leadership to influence change, regardless of formal titles or roles. Entrepreneurial leadership focuses on designing and leading efforts to solve seemingly intractable problems for which there are no existing or predefined solutions.

“Early educators who receive such training experience transformative shifts in their mindsets. They redefine leadership from something that is hierarchical to leadership that is highly collaborative, relational, and purpose-driven. They connect their new understanding of leadership with their past and present actions and capabilities. They see themselves as leaders, often for the first time.

“What do early educators do with their new leadership skills? They pursue entrepreneurial ventures that increase the supply of quality child care in their communities. They provide expert testimony to lawmakers and share their expertise with media to educate the public about the importance of investing in the field. They experiment with innovations that improve the quality of their programs.”

— “Early investment in child care workforce may pay big dividends,” by Anne Douglass, CommonWealth Magazine, November 15, 2021

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