Good News For Early Education In the Higher Education Act Reauthorization

Last week Congress passed legislation reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA), the federal law that authorizes student aid programs that help students pay for higher education. Our colleagues at New America have written and length about both positive and negative changes in the law’s higher education provisions. But the new law Congress passed last week also includes important steps to improve the quality of teacher preparation and training for early childhood educators.

What does HEA have to do with early education? The answer’s in Title II of the act, which authorizes programs to improve the quality of teacher preparation programs operated by institutions of higher education. When HEA was last reauthorized, in 1998, Congress and the Clinton administration added Title II to address concerns that institutions of higher education were doing a poor job of preparing elementary and secondary teachers for America’s schools. Title II has two primary components: First, it authorizes the Teacher Quality Enhancement Grants program to improve the quality of teacher preparation programs. Second, it establishes accountability requirements for teacher preparation programs.

The original Title II focused squarely on improving the preparation of K-12 educators. Early childhood education wasn’t event mentioned. But the new law expands that focus, with new provisions that emphasize the importance of quality preparation for early childhood educators.

Highly Competent Early Educators

HEA establishes a new definition of a “highly competent” early educator, which is intended to be an early education version of the “highly qualified” teacher definition for K-12 teachers (as well as pre-k teachers in programs that are part of a state’s regular system of public education) under NCLB. To be highly competent an early educator must be someone who has:

• Specialized education and training in development and education of young children from birth until kindergarten entry;
• A bachelor’s degree in an academic major in the arts and sciences, OR an associates degree in a related field; and
• Demonstrated a high level of knowledge and use of content and pedagogy in the relevant areas associated with quality early childhood education.

Defining a clear standard of competency for early educators, as this law does, is an important step—particularly since this standard is likely to influence debate over early educator standards in NCLB when Congress takes up NCLB reauthorization again next year. Some early education advocates will likely be disappointed that the standard does not require highly competent early educators to hold a bachelor’s degree—something universal pre-k advocates view as a standard for pre-k teacher quality—but that’s appropriate because this definition is designed to encompass early educators working in a variety of settings, including those serving children from birth through age three.

In fact, this standard is potentially more demanding than NCLB’s highly qualified standard for K-12 teachers. NCLB’s highly qualified definition focuses entirely on coursework completed and subject matter knowledge—it doesn’t look at teachers’ pedagogical skills of how they actually perform in the classroom. Requiring highly competent early educators to have “demonstrated a high level of knowledge and use of content and pedagogy,” could actually be more demanding than that—but of course it all comes down to how the definition is implemented. The Secretary of Education and the states implemented NCLB’s “HOUSSE” standards for highly qualified teachers in a way that made them essentially toothless. Secretary Spellings and her successor, who will likely bear much of the responsibility for implementing the new legislation, shouldn’t allow that to happen with the highly competent standard, but should use it as an opportunity to encourage more states and teacher preparation programs to implement validated, reliable observational systems to determine whether early childhood educators demonstrate a high level of knowledge and competence.

We have one complaint with the law’s highly competent definition, however. By defining a highly competent early educator as someone who has “specialized education and training in development and education of young children from birth until entry into kindergarten,” it establishes an artificial wall between “early childhood education” as what happens to children from birth through age five, and “school” as what happens to them starting in kindergarten. This is an entirely arbitrary division that works against better alignment between preschool and kindergarten programs, and discourages institutions of higher education from developing teacher preparation programs that train highly competent early educators to work with children from preschool through the early elementary years. That’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t eliminate the value of defining competency for early educators at a time when many states still demand far less, in terms of early educator training and knowledge, than is necessary for high-quality programs.

Improving Early Educator Preparation

The new law also creates an opportunity for programs that train early educators to access federal funding to improve teacher preparation programs. Title II’s Teacher Quality Enhancement Grant programs provides grants to improve teacher preparation programs. The grants go to “eligible partnerships” between a college or university that operated a teacher preparation program, and a high-need school or school district—and under the new law, the partner working with the college or university can also be a high-need early education program. (Under the 1998 law, the program also made grants to states and for teacher recruitment, but the new law eliminates those provisions.)

This change will make federal funding available to create, improve, or expand high-quality early educator preparation and induction programs aligned with the needs and work of local early education programs. This is particularly important at a time when states are expanding or raising standards for early education programs. State policies are stimulating demand for early educator training and credentials, but many early educator training programs are of poor quality, not aligned with new standards and expectations for early educators, or simply lack the resources and capacity to meet demand. Making federal funding available for efforts to improve early educator training will help address these challenges and also stimulate innovation in early educator preparation. This policy change also sends a message that improving teacher quality in early education is an important federal policy goal, on par with improving the quality of K-12 teachers.

The majority of HEA focuses on helping students pay for college education, but the road to college success starts long before, in the preschool years and even earlier. By incorporating provisions in Title II to improve the preparation and skills of early childhood educators, Congress demonstrated that it understands this fact. Early Ed Watch is pleased to see Congress taking steps in HEA to improve early education.