Principals as Early Learning Leaders

Around the same time that Illinois was rethinking principal preparation, there was a coinciding movement in the United States to improve access to and quality of early childhood education, namely pre-K. From 2002 to 2018, the percentage of four-year-olds served by state-funded pre-K programs in the U.S. more than doubled.¹ Many school districts and cities throughout the country also saw the potential of pre-K and started investing in programs during this time.² The Obama administration accelerated state and local efforts to serve young children with competitive grant programs like Race to the Top–Early Learning Challenge and Preschool Development Grants.³ Support for early childhood education became largely bipartisan, with a strong majority of voters supporting investments in young children’s care and education.⁴

Much of this progress was in response to a growing body of research showing how crucial the earliest years of development and learning are to children’s future success.⁵ Research shows that it is the quality of interactions that young children have with adults and the skills those adults bring into interactions that truly matter. The 2015 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation, details the knowledge and competencies that educators, both teachers and leaders, need to work in settings with young children.⁶

To be effective instructional leaders who can help advance teacher practice, elementary school principals, who are increasingly responsible for overseeing pre-K classrooms, must understand how young children learn.⁷ Teaching and learning should look different in a kindergarten classroom—where it is more developmentally appropriate for children to be engaged in dramatic play than sitting at desks completing worksheets—than it does in a fourth grade classroom. Principals need to be able to make that distinction. As leaders in their communities, principals are naturally positioned to help align early childhood programs with elementary schools to create a seamless continuum of learning and support for children and families, even when pre-K classrooms are not located in their school buildings. Yet when New America conducted a series of focus groups with elementary school principals around the country in 2015, we found that principals felt ill-equipped to promote high-quality teaching in pre-K and the early grades.⁸

Principals are naturally positioned to help align early childhood programs with elementary schools to create a seamless continuum of learning and support for children and families.

The exclusion of early learning and child development in principal preparation programs or licensure requirements is partially to blame. Of 45 states that responded to a 2017 New America survey of policies related to elementary principals, only six reported that they require principals to take coursework that covers early learning. It is also rare for states to require elementary school principals to have clinical experiences specifically in elementary schools.⁹ The Center for Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes found in a 2014 review of principal licensure standards that, “Although many states include pre-K in the scope of principal licensure (PreK–12, for example) the extent to which that involves any childhood content or experience is varied, but generally extremely limited.”¹⁰ Couple this with the fact that only three states require elementary school principals to have experience teaching in the elementary grades and there is a recipe for leaders who are not prepared to serve their youngest students.

Illinois’s 2010 reform set out to change this. State policymakers wanted to see pre-K and early learning covered in principal preparation in a meaningful way. Among the many reforms in the 2010 law, lawmakers included a requirement for all preparation programs to incorporate early learning into their curricula and provide candidates with internships across the PreK–12 continuum. Early childhood content was added to the state’s principal licensure exam as well.