UIC Research on Urban Education Policy Initiative

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Vol. 1, Book 1

November 2012

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Beyond the ABCs and 1-2-3: The Intersection of K-12 and Early Childhood Education Teacher Preparation Policies
By Celina Chatman Nelson, Jennifer Kushto-Hoban, and Catherine Main

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Celina Chatman Nelson is the Project Director of Appraising Early Childhood Teacher Education in Illinois. Jennifer KushtoHoban is a doctoral student in the Educational Psychology department in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Catherine Main is the Program Coordinator of the Early Childhood Education Program in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Policy decisions for K-12 and early childhood care and education (ECE) have typically been considered in two separate dialogues, and when they are considered together, those for K12 policies tend to be retrofitted to those for ECE. Such fragmentation has raised significant difficulties for ECE teacher preparation. Because there are different learning standards, teaching standards, and requirements for hiring and evaluating teachers across K-12 and ECE programs and services, ECE teacher preparation varies tremendously. This variation presents significant challenges for ensuring that ECE teachers are well prepared to work with all young children across the entire early childhood continuumfrom birth through third gradeand their families

across the variety of early childhood programs and settings. To best meet the learning and developmental needs of children in ECE programs and sustain early learning gains, policymakers should coordinate ECE and K-12 policies governing teacher preparation in a manner that reflects an understanding of the salient differences between the two areas and the important lessons that can be drawn across them. Policies governing ECE teacher preparation should ensure that ECE teachers are prepared in academic subject matter and child development in a way that particularly supports the education of young children but strategically combines practices and principles from both K-12 and ECE systems.

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INTRODUCTION
Policy decisions for K-12 and early childhood care and education (ECE) have typically been considered in two separate dialogues, and when they are considered together, those for K-12 policies tend to be retrofitted to those for ECE. Such fragmentation has raised significant difficulties for ECE teacher preparation. Because there are different learning standards, teaching standards, and requirements for hiring and evaluating teachers across K-12 and ECE programs and services, ECE teacher preparation varies tremendously. This variation presents significant challenges for ensuring that ECE teachers are well prepared to work with all young children across the entire early childhood continuum, which spans from birth through the end of third grade and comprises three distinct stages of development: infants and toddlers, preschool age, and early elementary school age. Recent K-12 and ECE policy efforts focused on improving teacher preparation and qualityincluding the highlyqualified teacher requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, several states adoption of the Common Core Learning Standards, the new requirement for half of all Head Start teachers to hold a bachelors degree in child development or a related field, and Illinois new requirement for all public pre-K teachers to hold a bachelors degree and state certificationall involve such challenges. The move to improve ECE teacher preparation and quality is fueled by the belief that more effective teachers are critical to ensuring young children are ready for school by the time they reach kindergarten, with an emphasis on
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Policymakers should coordinate ECE and K-12 policies governing teacher preparation in a manner that reflects an understanding of the salient differences between the two policy areas and the important lessons that can be drawn across them.

increasing student achievement and reducing achievement gaps. Indeed, raising ECE educator requirements can potentially enhance the overall quality of early childhood settings and, hence, childrens outcomes. But efforts to improve ECE teacher preparation should be more than a matter of degrees and instead should be explicitly connected to efforts to improve the quality of teacher practices across the entire early childhood continuum. Teachers of young children should be prepared with the specific knowledge and skills they need to support all childrens learning and development from birth through the end of third grade. To best meet the learning and developmental needs of children in ECE programs and sustain early learning gains, policymakers should coordinate ECE and K-12 policies governing teacher preparation in a manner that reflects an understanding of the salient differences between the two policy areas and the important lessons that can be drawn across them. Policies should ensure that ECE teachers are prepared in academic subject matter and child development in a way that particularly supports the education of young children while strategically drawing on practices and principles from both K-12 and ECE systems. This brief examines the ECE and K12 policy landscape in the U.S., with specific attention to key challenges in coordinating ECE and K-12 policies as they pertain to ECE teacher preparation. The brief particularly reviews relevant research on child development, early childhood education, and ECE teacher quality, and concludes by offering recommendations for making ECE teacher preparation policies more effective.

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THE EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION POLICY LANDSCAPE
Education policies in the U.S., and Illinois in particular, have increasingly focused on raising requirements for early childhood educators. The No Child Left Behind Act spurred increased attention to issues of teacher quality in K-12 education by defining highlyqualified teachers as those who hold at least a bachelors degree and state certification or licensure, and who demonstrate competence in all academic subject areas in which they teach.1 Although teachers of children in preschool and younger are not held to these requirements, agencies and organizations administering ECE programs and services have begun to follow suit by raising requirements on their own. For example, the federal Head Start program recently adopted a new policy requiring that half of all teachers nationally must hold a B.A. in early childhood education or a related field by 2013. And in Illinois, the first state to offer voluntary preschool to all three- and four-year olds under the 2006 Preschool for All Children Act, all public prekindergarten teachers are required to hold a B.A. degree and state board certification. There are several other ways in which policies are influencing ECE teacher preparation. For example, across the nation, states are beginning to make changes to their teacher licensing and certification systems. In Illinois, teachers
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currently are entitled to teach pre-K3, K-9, and grades 6-12. The state announced in 2011, however, that it is overhauling its educator licensure process and structure. The revised structure will involve a teacher license that includes endorsements for specific age ranges and content areas, with initial recommendations for K-5, 6-8, and 9-12 grades endorsement. This structure was immediately viewed as problematic by many early childhood educators, researchers, and other experts because it seems to leave undesirable options for an early childhood endorsement: birth to pre-K, or an overlapping endorsement such as a pre-K-3 (overlapping with K-5). Structures such as these would serve only to further isolate preschool programs and educators from the broader educational system and thereby disrupt continuity in young childrens learning and schooling experiences. As of the writing of this brief, the state has not yet made its final decision about the grade span configurations for the new license, but other states likely will struggle with similar issues as they adapt their own licensing structures in accordance with the new K-12 Common Core State Standards.

The fragmentation and complexities inherent in the ECE landscape can be attributed in large part to the fact that ECE programs and services emerged out of two separate policy needs and social histories.

HISTORY
The fragmentation and complexities inherent in the ECE landscape can be attributed in large part to the fact that ECE programs and services emerged out of two separate policy needs and social histories. Child care

No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, 20 U.S.C. 6301 et seq. (2002). Beyond the ABCs and 1-2-3

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services are traced back to day nurseries in Philadelphia in the late 18th century and infant schools in Boston in the 1840s, where widowed mothers and women in poor families placed their children in care while they worked.2 During the Great Depression and again during World War II, the federal government subsidized childcare so that women could participate in the workforce to help sustain the U.S. economy. As the numbers of women working outside of the home has continued to risewith more than half of U.S. women in the workforce by 19853 child care services have expanded through both governmental and private resources. Both the childcare and nursery school movements were altogether separate from movements in elementary and secondary education. In its earliest iterations, the Head Start Act of 1965 provided comprehensive education, health, and family services to young children from poor families to support their healthy well-being and development instead of focusing on building academic skills. Private nurseries and preschools grew out of a separate movement, wherein middle class and more affluent families sought professionals to provide intellectual and artistic enrichment to their young children.4 In contrast, common schools in the U.S. began in the mid- to late 19th century partly as way to ensure a workforce that was sufficiently educated to sustain the nations increasingly industrial-based economy and remained almost wholly distinct from early childhood services for much of the 20th century.5

Child care, preschool, and elementary and secondary education originated in response to very different social issues.

CURRENT SITUATION
Because child care, preschool, and elementary and secondary education originated in response to very different social issues, public programs growing out of these movements were funded and administered by separate offices and agencies. Thus, three systems have developed in silos, each with its own issues of internal fragmentation. The federal Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Labor, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Education (ED) all grant money for early childhood services. However, public elementary and secondary education is sponsored solely by ED. As a result, there are several different types of ECE programs with different governing bodies (see Figure 1). For example, HHS governs center-based programs, such as those under Head

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Marly Ann Boschee and Geralyn M. Jacobs, Child care in the United States: Yesterday and Today, National Network for Child Care, 1997, www.nncc.org/choose.quality.care/ccyesterd. html; Sonya Michel, Childrens Interests/Mothers Rights: The Shaping of Americas Child Care Policy (Hartford, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov. Emily D. Cahan, Past Caring: A History of U.S. Preschool Care and Education for the Poor, 1820 1965 (New York, NY: National Center for Children in Poverty, 1989); Abby J. Cohen, A Brief History of Federal Financing for Child Care in the United States, The Future of Children 6, no. 2 (1996): 26. Michael S. Katz, A History of Compulsory Education Laws. Fastback Series, No. 75. Bicentennial Series. (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1976).

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Source: Eun Kyeong Cho and Leslie J. Course, "Early Childhood Teacher Policy in the United States: Continuing Issues, Overcoming Barriers, and Envisioning the Future," International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy 2, no. 2 (2008): 15.

Start and nursery schools, and home-based programs, such as group child care homes and Early Intervention. ED governs schoolbased programs, such as public school pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and the primary grades. Because each of these agencies and programs has different learning standards, different teaching standards, and different requirements for hiring and evaluating teachers, programs that prepare teachers vary tremendously. This variation across

teacher preparation programs presents challenges in ensuring that ECE teachers are equipped with the specialized knowledge and skills they need to work with all young children from birth through third grade and their families. Recently, the federal government has introduced some promising initiatives to address fragmentation within ECE and attenuate the disjoint between early learning and elementary and secondary education systems. In 2010, ED and HHS announced the formation of an

Interagency Policy Board on Early Learning. One of its main charges was to enhance the effectiveness of the ECE teaching workforce. The interagency board gave rise to the federal Early Learning Initiative and the Early Learning Challenge Fund, collaborative efforts between ED and HHS that are intended to coordinate their programs and services. The Early Learning Challenge Fund provides grants to states to improve early learning experiences for children birth to eight years old, with special emphasis on creating model
Beyond the ABCs and 1-2-3

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Research in child development, economics, and neurological studies converges on the importance of highquality early learning experiences for childrens later outcomes in various domains, including schooling and education, occupation, income, health, and likelihood of going to prison.
integrative systems that break down silos between agencies and create seamless services for young children and their families. Most recently, ED has submitted a proposal to create the Office of Early Childhood, which would administer the Early Learning Challenge Fund grants and develop other collaborative initiatives. As discussed below, such initiatives could clear several hurdles in preparing high-quality ECE teachers regardless of the specific program type or setting in which these teachers will work. critical for sustaining early gains in learning and development in later grades.7 Because most people equate early childhood education with preschool, these practices are too often abandoned when preparing teachers to work with children in kindergarten and early elementary grades, and preparation instead focuses almost exclusively on teaching academic subject matter content.8 Given that early childhood extends from birth through the end of third grade, ECE teachers should understand the commonalities and differences in childrens developmental and learning needs across this entire age range. For example, because as much as 85% of human brain growth and development occurs before children reach three years of age, very young children generally benefit greatly from activities that stimulate cognitive functions.9 Moreover, just as in infancy, the toddler years, and the preschool years, children in the primary grades learn best when teachers take an integrative approach that incorporates both teacher-led and child-guided learning experiences. In addition, older children in primary grades still benefit from opportunities for

RESEARCH
Research in child development, economics, and neurological studies converges on the importance of highquality early learning experiences for childrens later outcomes in various domains, including schooling and education, occupation, income, health, and likelihood of going to prison.6 Accordingly, many education reform efforts have increasingly focused on investing more in early childhood programs and services, particularly those that ensure young children are ready for school. However, these reform efforts ignore the importance of the continuity of the practices that build and support childrens school readiness and are
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James J. Heckman, The Economics of Inequality: The Value of Early Childhood Education, American Educator 35, no. 1 (2011): 31. Donald J. Hernandez, Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2011; Arthur Reynolds, Katherine Magnuson, and Suh-Ruu Ou, PK-3 Education: Programs and Practices That Work in Childrens First Decade. Foundation for Child Development Working Paper: Advancing PK-3, No. 6., Foundation for Child Development, 2006. National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, The Road Less Traveled: How the Developmental Sciences Can Prepare Educators to Improve Student Achievement, NCATE, 2010. National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000); Rima Shore, Rethinking the Brain: New Insights into Early Development (New York, NY: Families and Work Institute, 1997); Ross Thompson, Development in the First Years of Life, The Future of Children 11, no. 1 (2001): 20.

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exploring their environments, taking initiative and interacting with peers. However, each of the commonly recognized stages of development (infants and toddlers, preschool age, and early elementary age) is also characterized by unique sets of needs and circumstances. For example, the preschool years are particularly marked by childrens greater need to self-regulate their behavior and emotions, and thus education and care for this group should focus heavily on fostering positive social-emotional development. In contrast, schoolaged children, who are equipped with more highly developed cognitive and self-regulatory skills, should focus to a greater extent on learning specific academic content while continuing to develop in other areas. Because young childrens gains from even high-quality preschool programs have been shown to disappear when their early learning experiences are not connected in a coherent structure with their subsequent experiences in early elementary grades, it is critical that ECE educators understand the full continuum of early childhood to effectively support childrens optimal development.10 requiring teachers to be certified to teach specific subject matter content or to pass skills tests in academic subjects (such as the Illinois Test of Basic Skills, equivalent to 11th grade academic skill mastery)are applied blindly to early childhood educators, the teaching workforce may lack knowledge of critical content and skills in early academic learning standards and child development. Although teachers might have a solid handle on subject matter content, they may have little to no knowledge about how to deliver that content in ways that facilitate young childrens learning. To ensure that raising requirements for ECE teachers does, in fact, improve the quality of their teaching as well as childrens outcomes, states must improve how ECE teachers are educated and developed by preparation for all early childhood teachersthose working with infants and toddlers, preschoolers, kindergarteners, and children in the primary grades. In particular, all programs that prepare ECE teachers must emphasize critical content, pedagogy, skills, and dispositions known to be positively related to young childrens learning and development. At the federal level, the recent collaborations between ED and HHS have some potential and at least demonstrate that action is being taken to address issues around fragmentation. Moreover, recent efforts by the nonprofit groups The National Head Start Association and The Source for Learning, Inc. have

To ensure that raising requirements for ECE teachers does, in fact, improve the quality of their teaching as well as childrens outcomes, states must improve how ECE teachers are educated and developed by preparation for all early childhood teachers.

PROSPECTS FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION TEACHER PREPARATION POLICIES

Given the research on ECE, what are the prospects for current ECE teacher preparation policies? When K-12 policiessuch as those

10 Hernandez, Double Jeopardy. Beyond the ABCs and 1-2-3

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focused on linking Head Start and early learning standards to the Common Core Learning Standards. But these initiatives are still very new and thus far have focused minimally on pre-service teacher preparation. Moreover, the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge Fund, which is the largest program coming out of the ED/HHS collaboration, focuses explicitly on birth to five, and on ensuring children are ready for school. While such a focus can help to ensure that services for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are addressing both their developmental and learning needs, it ignores the early learning needs of children in kindergarten and the primary grades. Finally, although it is still early, the level of collaboration between ED and HHS is largely superficial, consisting mostly of liaisons across the various departments, offices, and agencies serving young children and their families. As such, collaboration needs to occur on a much deeper level in order to address the issues we raise here. Policy initiatives currently being considered in Illinois would likely have detrimental effects as well. As of this writing, Illinois may enact a new teacher licensing structure that involves a K-5 grade only license. This structure would be problematic because it would completely exclude prekindergarten and younger ages and ignore the need for K-3 teachers to be prepared with critical knowledge and skills in early childhood education and child development. If the structure for early childhood licensing involves
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As it stands now, despite the recent collaborations between ED and HHS, federal supports for young children and their families are still highly complex and disjointed.

the birth to pre-K or an overlapping (pre-K-3, K-5) license, preparation programs would be left with the current difficulties in preparing teachers to work with children across the entire spectrum of early childhood from birth through third grade. The overlapping license option is also problematic because it presents the risk that preparation will favor grades at either end of the continuum (e.g., pre-K, fourth and fifth grades) and insufficiently cover the overlapping grades in the middle.

RECOMMENDATIONS
There are several possible ways to improve the constellation of education policies influencing ECE teacher preparation. In Chicago, stakeholders are discussing the implications of consolidating all early childhood services within a single department, including preschool programs funded through the states Early Childhood Block Grant. At first glance, this appears to be a reasonable way to address fragmentation across the various programs and services. But this is true only to the extent that fragmentation is also reduced at the federal level, the original source of funding and regulation. As it stands now, despite the recent collaborations between ED and HHS, federal supports for young children and their families are still highly complex and disjointed. Preschool is still administered by states and subject to standards put forth by state boards of education. Head Start and Early Head Start are still administered by the

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Administration for Children and Families within HHS, and these programs have their own standards and regulations. Other programs are administered by other agencies within HHS and other federal departments. Because all of these programs have different program standards and requirements for teachers, teacher preparation varies depending on the specific settings in which candidates are seeking to work. One thus might be tempted to offer consolidation at the federal level as a plausible solution. However, there are also several potential problems with such a configuration. First, the federal departments of ED and HHS have established deep expertise and knowledge bases in their respective areas, and consolidation may result in a loss of these intangible resources. ED has established systems that can support young childrens cognitive development and academic outcomes, and HHS has established systems that can support their overall positive cognitive development and healthy well-being. Second, both are connected to other systems within their spectrum of services that can facilitate continuity of childrens development beyond early childhood through adulthood. For example, ED can connect early learning to elementary and secondary education, as well as post-secondary and vocational education; HHS can connect services for young and very young children to services for mothers and families. If ED streamlined its programs to create a seamless pre-K through postsecondary education system, and HHS streamlined its programs to create a seamless system for supporting childrens overall healthy development and well-being, meaningful collaboration between them could focus more efficiently on meeting the needs of the whole child. The currently proposed federal Office for Early Childhood may offer promise in this regard, which might also enable creation of a standardized early childhood career lattice with comprehensive requirements and expectations for the workforce across all ECE settings. Perhaps most promising are policies that combine principles typically associated with ECE and K-12 education. In 2010 the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) released the report The Road Less Traveled: How the Developmental Sciences Can Prepare Educators to Improve Student Achievement.11 This report was followed by a brief that offered concrete suggestions for how to apply developmental sciences in teacher preparation programs, highlighting the disconnect between the way in which institutions prepare teachers and what is known about how students learn and develop.12 While groundbreaking for K-12 education, this practice has long been central to ECE teacher preparation. In fact, child development comprises the

To best meet the learning and developmental needs of children in pre-K through third grade and sustain early learning gains, ECE teachers should be prepared both in academic subject matter and child development, combining practices and principles from ECE and K-12 systems.

11 NCATE, The Road Less Traveled. 12 NCATE, Increasing the Application of Developmental Sciences Knowledge in Educator Preparation, NCATE, 2010, www.ncate.org. Beyond the ABCs and 1-2-3

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primary subject matter content in ECE teacher preparation programs. K-12 programs, on the other hand, focus more on preparing students to teach content in academic subjects such as reading, math, social studies, and science. To best meet the learning and developmental needs of children in pre-K through third grade and sustain early learning gains, ECE teachers should be prepared both in academic subject matter and child development, combining practices and principles from ECE and K-12 systems. Licensing and certification structures that align teacher requirements with childrens developmental stages would be ideal. continuity, but this can be done only through meaningful collaboration between ECE and K-12 systems. In addition to the numerous barriers to coordinating ECE and K-12 policies, there are several other issues that threaten the supply of well-trained, high-quality ECE teachers as well. These issues include unequal compensation and work conditions for child care, preschool, and elementary teachers across programs and settings; the need for retaining differentiated roles within the ECE teaching workforce; and a diminishing supply of ECE teachers who have earned a bachelors degree or higher, since most ECE teacher preparation programs are provided by two-year colleges and the current workforce would need substantial supports to successfully complete four-year degree and certification programs. Indeed, if policies do not comprehensively address such issues in addition to the fragmentation in ECE teacher preparation, the prospects for significantly improving the pool of high-quality ECE teachers are likely limited. Still, the coordination of policies governing ECE and K-12 teacher preparation is a critical component of effective reform in this area and a strong starting point for tackling the range of challenges facing efforts to improve ECE teacher quality.

Licensing and certification structures that align teacher requirements with childrens developmental stages would be ideal.

CONCLUSION
Early childhood care and education encompasses more than just preschool, extending from birth through the end of third grade. Policies designed to improve ECE programs and services typically focus on infants and toddlers or preschoolers, and with few exceptions, tend to overlook kindergarten and the early elementary grades altogether. Young children will have better long-term outcomes if they are exposed to continuous high-quality early learning experiences across the early childhood continuumfrom child care through preschool and kindergarten and their first years in formal schooling. Ensuring that ECE teachers are trained with specialized knowledge and skills known to facilitate young childrens learning and positive development across the early childhood continuum is critical to establishing this

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ABOUT US
The Research on Urban Education Policy Initiative (RUEPI) is an education policy research project based in the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education. RUEPI was created in response to one of the most significant problems facing urban education policy: dialogue about urban education policy consistently fails to reflect what we know and what we do not about the problems education policies are aimed at remedying. Instead of being polemic and grounded primarily in ideology, public conversations about education should be constructive and informed by the best available evidence.

OUR MISSION
RUEPIs work is aimed at fostering more informed dialogue and decision-making about education policy in Chicago and other urban areas. To achieve this, we engage in research and analysis on major policy issues facing these areas, including early childhood education, inclusion, testing, STEM education, and teacher workforce policy. We offer timely analysis and recommendations that are grounded in the best available evidence.

OUR APPROACH
Given RUEPIs mission, the projects work is rooted in three guiding principles. While these principles are not grounded in any particular political ideology and do not specify any particular course of action, they lay a foundation for ensuring that debates about urban education policy are framed by an understanding of how education policies have fared in the past. The principles are as follows: Education policies should be coherent and strategic Education policies should directly engage with what happens in schools and classrooms Education policies should account for local context RUEPI policy briefs are rooted in these principles, written by faculty in the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Education and other affiliated parties, and go through a rigorous peer-review process.

Learn more at www.education.uic.edu/ruepi

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