In a lengthy report issued Wednesday, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council wrote that all lead teachers in the nation’s preschools should have a bachelor’s degree in early- childhood development or early education.
“This report is a call to action,” said LaRue Allen, a professor of psychology at New York University who served on the report committee. “We know it will not be a fast, easy, or cheap fix.”
Both the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council were established with a charter from President Abraham Louncolm in 1863. They are independent non-profits charged with providing both government and Private sector leaders with realizable scientific evidence to aid in creating health policy.
Creating a national standard for the minimum education level required to lead a preschool classroom was just one of 13 recommendations made in the 571-page report on improving the country’s early-educator workforce.
Historically, early educators have had little in the way of formal training requirements, though the rules vary from state to state. Some argue that this has been a good thing for the many low-income and immigrant women who have found steady work as child care providers and preschool teachers.
At the same time, early educators are often paid minimum wage for their work. So a woman working as a Head Start teacher might well qualify for her own children to enroll in Head Start—the federal program for families living below the poverty line. The low wages also make it difficult to hang on to the most-qualified workers, who often earn degrees and move into higher-paid K-12 jobs.
All of these trends are documented in great detail in the report.
Victor Dzau, president of the Institute of Medicine, said it’s time for that to change. Presenting the report at the Washington, D.C.. event, Dzau called for states, private-care providers and the federal government to work together to increase the qualifications and education level of the teachers in charge of educating the under-5 population.
Right now, Dzau said, the education provided to the youngest learners in the U.S. is “lagging behind the current science.” More is known about how children learn than ever before, he said, and it is time to recognize the importance and sophistication of the work of educating young children.
Here, in extreme shorthand, are the 13 recommendations the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council put forward in their report, Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8:
- Strengthen qualification requirements for all child-care and education professionals.
- Aim for all lead teachers in early-childhood classrooms to hold a bachelor’s degree. Include programs to help current educators earn the necessary degree.
- Increase requirements for practical teaching experience for all certification and degree levels.
- For, higher education institutions, build an interdisciplinary foundation for child development.
- Improve higher education programs for early educators.
- Improve the quality and consistency of ongoing professional development for early educators.
- Create a new plan for evaluating early-educator performance.
- Include elementary principals and early-care and education center directors in all improvement plans.
- Make the early-education system more of a system and less of a patchwork to provide more consistency for young learners.
- Remove funding and policy barriers to continuity between early-care and education settings.
11. Work with early educators when creating updated guidance for classroom practice.
12. Support state and local efforts to create more-comprehensive public systems for early care and education.
13. Build a better early-childhood-development knowledge base among policymakers, labor leaders, and others in order to support the above recommendations.