Preparing Early Educators: A Career Pathways Approach

In response to
stagnating wages and high unemployment among non-college educated populations,
several states and localities have embraced career pathways as a workforce
development tool. The career
pathways model aims to deliver a seamless educational continuum of well-articulated
steps, each with a corresponding certification or degree, coupled with strong
supports and connections to employment opportunities and wage increases. This comprehensive
approach to workforce development is believed to be a promising strategy to
better train and educate low-skill workers for the early childhood field. The U.S.
Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and the U.S
Department of Labor have each commissioned reports to evaluate the
role career pathways could play in preparing early educators.

In response to a
recommendation to increase educational requirements of lead early childhood
teachers in the 2015 Transforming
the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation  report, New America set out to determine whether the current system of higher
education and workforce training was prepared to support the advancement of the
current and future workforce.

We  identified promising efforts at
the state or local level that support educators in their pursuit of additional
education and training – efforts to meet the unique needs of a workforce
largely comprised of minority, low-income women. Strategies identified included
flexible class scheduling and online courses, career and academic advising,
stackable credentialing and articulation, job-embedded training models, and
financial assistance. While acknowledging the effectiveness of these strategies
in increasing access to an individual course or easing the transference of
credits to a subsequent degree program, the authors of a recently released report commissioned
by the U.S. Department of Labor, Career
Pathways in Early Care and Education,
conclude that these strategies fall short of a
formal career pathways approach.

An
important assumption
in such an approach is that graduates will find enough higher-skilled job
opportunities and access to – as well as increases in – livable wages. Yet we
know that a large portion of early childhood educators across all settings are earning wages close to or below the poverty level. The median
hourly wage is about $9.77 for child care workers and $13.74 for
preschool teachers and any of the 1.7
million early educators seeking advancement – to move into a
leadership role for instance – are competing for just 64,000 center or program director
jobs.

Adequate
funding to appropriately compensate early childhood educators is a major
barrier to creating a promising workforce development strategy. Sue Russell,
Executive Director of T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood National
Center explains that “we don’t pay teachers well enough to
keep them in the teaching profession. Wages are insufficient and it makes it
impossible to stay.” Low wages are also a deterrence to pursuing additional
education and training that could improve the quality of teaching. The T.E.A.C.H.
program is one of few current initiatives that provides the kind of
comprehensive supports included in the career pathways approach, including
corresponding wage increases to steps along the pathway.

As a follow-up to the Transforming the Workforce report, the
National Academy of Sciences recently released a report
looking at ways to fund a high-quality early care and education system that
aligns with the recommendations in the 2015 study. The 2018 study estimates the
total cost of providing a high-quality early care and education system to be $140
billion a year and recommends that a coalition of public and private funders
support development and implementation of such a system. Importantly, the
report recommends that the incumbent
workforce bear no cost for increasing knowledge, competencies, and
qualifications, and costs should be limited to a reasonable proportion of
postgraduate earnings for the incoming workforce.

It is important that increased
funding for early childhood systems finds its way down to educator salaries,
and that these educators have opportunities to advance within the early
childhood teaching field and see associated salary increases.  Efforts to professionalize the early
childhood workforce are an important complimentary strategy to calls for
increased funding. Initiatives such as NAEYC’s Power to
the Profession are raising awareness of the needs for a
high-quality, well-trained, and adequately compensated workforce and are
building towards consensus on the skills and competencies expected of early
educators at various levels.

Increased funding to provide robust
salary structures for early educators, coupled with efforts to professionalize
the workforce and better define the roles and responsibilities of teachers, can
open the door to promising workforce development strategies like career
pathways. Rather than throw out the idea of career pathways for early educators
because of the current structure of the early childhood workforce, structural
changes are necessary to create advancement opportunities for the current
workforce and to attract, prepare, and retain the next generation of educators.