A Bizarro World for Infants and Toddlers and Their Teachers

A bizarro world reverses our everyday realities. You may be familiar with the concept if you have ever read DC Comics or watched Seinfeld. In the bizarro world I envision for our nation’s infants and toddlers, family income does not determine whether their parents can afford to take time off work in the first months of their lives nor their right to high quality early care and education. In every infant-toddler program, whether offered in a center or home, staff are steeped in the science of child development and early learning pedagogy, and can depend on good wages and working conditions

By a Thread: How Child Care Centers Hold On to Teachers, How Teachers Build Lasting Careers

Marcy Whitebook and Laura Sakai examine how child care programs and their staff subsist in a field characterized by low pay, low status, and high turnover and what the impacts of these factors are on the quality of child care provided.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1013/thumbnail.jp

An Overview of the U.S. Child Care Industry

Marcy Whitebook and Laura Sakai examine how child care programs and their staff subsist in a field characterized by low pay, low status, and high turnover and what the impacts of these factors are on the quality of child care provided.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1013/thumbnail.jp

Early Childhood Workforce Index

The existing early care and education (ECE) system does a disservice to the educators — largely women and often women of color — who nurture and facilitate learning for millions of the nation's youngest children every day. Despite their important, complex labor, early educators' working conditions undermine their wellbeing and create devastating financial insecurity well into retirement age. These conditions also jeopardize their ability to work effectively with children. As we find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic, child care has been hailed as essential, yet policy responses to COVID-19 have mostly ignored educators themselves, leaving most to choose between their livelihood and their health. Unlike public schools, when child care programs close, there's no guarantee that early educators will continue to be paid. Even as many providers try to keep their doors open to ensure their financial security, the combination of higher costs to meet safety protocols and lower revenue from fewer children enrolled is leading to job losses and program closures. Many of these closures and lost jobs are expected to become permanent. Over the course of the first eight months of the pandemic, 166,000 jobs in the child care industry were lost. As of October 2020, the industry was only 83 percent as large as it was in February, before the pandemic began.

Working for Worthy Wages: The Child Care Compensation Movement, 1970-2001

This report describes the history of the worthy wage movement in its early years, how compensation initiatives came about, and provides public policy recommendations to improve compensation for the child care workforce

Working for Worthy Wages: The Child Care Compensation Movement, 1970-2001

This report describes the history of the worthy wage movement in its early years, how compensation initiatives came about, and provides public policy recommendations to improve compensation for the child care workforce

Early Education Quality: Higher Teacher Qualifications for Better Learning Environments – A Literature Review

This literature review focuses on eight large scale investigations of child care quality as of 2003 and the relative contribution of the B.A. degree and specialized early childhood coursework to program quality

Preschool Teaching at a Crossroads

the Promise may have attracted students from a greater socioeconomic stratum, its effectiveness at keeping them is more subdued. Because exit rates fell overall, more of these types of students stayed in the district, although poorer students were even more likely to stay. These changes, however, were too small to affect the makeup of the student body as a whole, so composition is unlikely to play as significant a role as changes in the numbers of students entering or exiting, and their origins and destinations, on the effects of Promise-type programs. Summary Previous research has documented how the Kalamazoo Promise has increased enrollment in KPS, but researchers have paid less attention to the characteristics of students who were induced to enter—or stay—in the district. These dimensions are more subtle than changes in the volume of students or measures of their individual success, but they are equally important to understand for communities exploring the feasibility of place-based scholarships as a local economic development tool. In the short run, the Promise attracted 500 more new students to KPS than historical patterns would have predicted; they were less disadvantaged than in the past, and a third of them came from outside the metropolitan area. In the longer run, the Promise has helped keep nearly 2,000 students and their families from leaving the greater Kalamazoo area, with no noticeable impact on the socioeconomic characteristics of the district’s enrollment

Universal Preschool in California: An Overview of Workforce Issues

As considered, this report examined the workforce challenges that would face us if the state built its system. The paper provided a detailed analysis of these emerging workforce issues, intended to guide policy makers, planners and advocates in asking the right questions as they designed and developed a preschool system for California

Turnover Begets Turnover: An Examination of Job and Occupational Instability Among Child Care Center Staff

This study extends previous research by revealing the links among the characteristics and stability of the teaching staff as a whole and the retention of highly trained teachers. Research found that highly-trained teaching staff were more likely to leave their jobs if they earned lower wages, worked in a climate with less stability of highly- trained co-workers, and worked with a greater percentage of teaching staff who did not have a bachelor’s degree. The report underscores the multi-faceted benefits resulting from paying higher wages to all staff