Early Childhood Teachers
Returns to Experience
Early childhood educators engage in complex, highly skilled work that supports the development of 0-5 children. It seems obvious that more experience engaging in this work would improve early educators’ practice. However, we have little evidence on this question, given the dearth of data on early childhood educators across sectors. Our paper explores returns to experience over a three-year period for all new Louisiana school-based prekindergarten, Head Start, and child care center teachers using a measure of classroom quality (the CLASS). We find substantial growth (about two-thirds of a standard deviation) over this period.
Understanding Barriers to Credentialing
Early childhood teachers, particularly teachers within child care settings, typically have fewer educational and preservice training requirements than their peers. Increased credentialing could help professionalize the ECE workforce; however, increasing credentialing requirements may have unintended consequences in terms of driving out valued members of the existing workforce (if not implemented properly). Through a research-practice partnership with the Louisiana Department of Education, we examined a statewide credentialing program (the Early Childhood Ancillary Certificate, or ECAC) designed for ECE teachers.
With Kate Miller-Bains, Anna J. Markowitz, and Daphna Bassok, we find that only 31% of early educators who begin the ECAC complete the program, even when tuition is fully subsidized and completion is associated with tax incentives (report available from the Study of Early Education in Louisiana website). We also published a short piece on our findings in Brookings (available here).
With Daphna Bassok, Walter Herring, and Anna J. Markowitz, we identify barriers to completing the ECAC, including high levels of administrative burden - as well as early childhood teacher turnover (report available from the Study of Early Education in Louisiana website).
Turnover
Although stability is particularly important for very young children, early childhood educational settings are likely more unstable than K-12 schools, in part due to low public funding for early childhood education (ECE). Daphna Bassok, Anna Markowitz, Katharine Sadowski, and I provide statewide estimates of turnover for ECE teachers, using unique administrative data from the state of Louisiana. We find that about one-third of ECE teachers observed are no longer teaching at the same program the following year; in comparison, about one-fifth of K-12 teachers leave their school each year. We are unable to find the majority of teachers leaving their program at another publicly-funded ECE program in Louisiana, suggesting that, in most cases, leaving the program results in workforce exit. We also note that teachers who leave have lower scores on a measure of classroom quality (the CLASS) than teachers who stay.
In another paper (published version here, public version here), we examine longer-term retention patterns, tracing a cohort of ECE teachers observed in the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2019. We find that only 39% of ECE teachers remain at their initial program of observation after three years. These patterns mask large amounts of variability by sector: while nearly half of school-based prekindergarten teachers are observed at the same program after three years of teaching, only 30% of teachers at child care centers are observed at the same program after three years. We also note higher levels of turnover for teachers of toddlers and new teachers, regardless of sector.
