Investing in Educators is Foundational to Successful Child Care Reform

By: Sarah Muncey

With the recent wave of legislation focused on early education and care, we’re seeing an important and overdue acknowledgement that our early education and care system hasn’t just failed our children and families – it has also failed our educators.

While the public conversation about child care often focuses on the importance of family access and affordability, there is another aspect that gets less attention: the need for investment in the people who care for and educate our children.

Currently, the early education and care workforce, which is disproportionately women of color, is paid little more than minimum wage and most do not have access to health insurance or other employer benefits. We do little to invest in early educators’ professional development – and, where we do, we fail to match advanced credentials and degrees with increases in wages. This must change. The recently proposed bills in Washington, D.C. and in Massachusetts, which all call for raising educator wages, are a step in the right direction.

But there’s work that can be done now, while policymakers work to turn bills into law. From the founding of Neighborhood Villages, we’ve prioritized investment in the early education and care workforce: we’ve launched professional development programs such as our Career Pathways for Early Educators credentialing program and we provide instructional coaching supports to partner early education and care providers.

Here’s what policy makers can learn from these successes.

Meet early educators where they are at, to set up them up for success.

If we want all children to be able to participate in high quality early education, we need to ensure we have a steady, stable workforce pipeline of highly trained educators. As many of the recent legislative proposals recognize, this requires not only increasing wages for early educators, but also prioritizing professional development.

At Neighborhood Villages, to increase the number of high-quality, trained, and credentialed early education and care providers in Massachusetts, we launched the Career Pathways for Early Educators (“Career Pathways”) program, which provides a standardized, no-cost pathway to attaining an early education teaching credential and launching a career in the field of early education and care.

The program is a unique public-private partnership that demonstrates an innovative approach to state investment in workforce development: Career Pathways is built around a Massachusetts initiative that provides grant funding to community colleges to support their offering no-cost credentialing programs for early educators. Through partnering with community colleges that are recipients of this grant, we’ve provided participants with a free pathway to attaining educator credentials – as well as college credits that they can take with them, should they pursue post-secondary degrees.

What makes Career Pathways successful isn’t just that financial barriers are removed; it’s that the program places the educator at the very center of credentialing program. It’s designed to meet the unique needs and experiences of the early education workforce. Career Pathways meets early educators where they are at: literally. Before the pandemic, college instructors came to community child care centers on weekends to teach classes in the community. By offering classes in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian-Creole and Mandarin, Career Pathways makes attaining one’s credential as accessible as possible. And, Neighborhood Villages provides technology and other wraparound services to students, to support their attainment of their education goals.

What’s more, Career Pathways is a huge asset to our partner providers.  Our partner centers are able to capture new talent coming through the Career Pathways program and they are able to send the teachers they already employ through the program, to ensure that their staff receive the training and certification they need to grow as professionals.  Neighborhood Villages is also able to help facilitate placements at partner provider centers for Career Pathways graduates.  The result is a higher-functioning, stronger employment ecosystem that better meets the needs of centers and teachers alike. 

Most importantly, it’s a scale-able model that many policy makers and states can follow, just as Massachusetts has done.

Invest in ongoing professional development to build and retain a team of high-quality teachers.

With razor thin operating margins and limited reserves, early education and care providers struggle to find resources to invest in professional development opportunities for teach staff. Compare this to  public K-12 districts, which provide schools and their teachers resources, trainings, professional development opportunities, and more.  In our early education and care system, individual providers - and their teaching staff – are on their own. 

Neighborhood Villages believes in the value of providing early education and care providers with centralized professional development and instructional coaching opportunities. Through The Neighborhood, an innovative model that creates a first of its kind multi-program “early childhood education district,” Neighborhood Villages is showing what this could look like and what it could deliver for providers, for teachers, and, most importantly, for children. 

For The Neighborhood, a network of five partner early education and care centers, Neighborhood Villages serves as a centralized hub of support and offers professional development supports including workforce sourcing, instructional coaching, and mental and behavioral health supports for teachers.  Importantly, The Neighborhood gives early educators and staff the opportunity to create a community of practice where they can find mentorship, discuss challenges, maximize resources, implement programs and problem solve together.

Meaningfully reforming the early education and care system requires this kind of investment in centralized infrastructure supports for providers and teachers – in addition to committing to wage increases and better access to benefits for the early education and care workforce.

Recognize the long-term ROI and continue to invest in professional development programs.

The success of these programs speaks for itself, though we have the data to back it up.  

A recent survey we conducted with our research partners, the Brazelton Touchpoints Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, found that individuals who participated in Career Pathways courses were strongly satisfied with their experience and 95 percent planned to take another course through the Neighborhood Villages Career Pathways program in the next 12 months. Importantly, the program proved to have value well beyond a one-time class. We were encouraged to see that 94 percent of providers intend for their work in early childhood to be a long-term career. In fact, 78 percent of respondents indicated that they have educational aspirations beyond the Child Development Associate (CDA) Credential.

Neighborhood Villages’ interlocking programs – from Career Pathways to The Neighborhood – invest in the success of early educators because investing in those who care for our youngest children isn’t just important, it’s a critical component of building a high-quality early education and care system that works for us all.

Legislative proposals that reflect this reality and invest in early educators will benefit everyone.