New Report Highlights Path to Equitable Access to Higher Education for Early Childhood Educators of Color 

Educators’ experiences guide recommendations for supports needed to maintain and grow diversity while increasing educational qualifications for the field

WASHINGTON — The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) today releases new research, in collaboration with The Education Trust, that explores the responses, reactions, and recommendations from 50 early childhood educators (ECE) of color, located in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, around the structures, supports, and funding needed to support early childhood educators in increasing their educational qualifications, without deepening existing divisions along racial, geographic, socioeconomic, and linguistic lines. 

The report, Increasing Qualifications, Centering Equity: Experiences and Advice from Early Childhood Educators of Color, provides policy implications based on the experiences and guidance shared by early childhood educators in response to three main questions: (1) How do early childhood educators of color perceive policies that raise the educational requirements they have to reach in order to keep their jobs? (2) In what ways, if any, has the implementation of these policies impacted the career trajectories of early childhood educators of color? (3) What advice do early childhood educators of color who have “lived through” these policy changes have for policymakers and leaders heading toward similar change? 

“We are committed to growing equity and diversity in the early childhood education field,” said Rhian Evans Allvin, CEO of NAEYC. “This commitment requires listening to early childhood educators of color, and being guided by their experience and expertise to ensure that, as the ECE field professionalizes, we maintain and grow the workforce diversity that benefits all children.” 

Increasing Qualifications, Centering Equity: Experiences and Advice from Early Childhood Educators of Color recounts participants’ initial reactions to the prospect of earning a credential or degree; their reflections on their experiences; and their recommendations to policymakers on how to support this transition to increased qualifications for others. The report’s findings indicate that when policies change so that credentials and/or degrees become requirements, it is our collective obligation to support early childhood educators of color in tangible ways that respond to their expressed strengths and needs. 

“Research and experience show that educators of color benefit all students. As a nation, we must do more to ensure that our children—including our youngest learners—have access to excellent and diverse educators who can provide developmentally appropriate and academically and culturally rich learning experiences in their classrooms,” said John B. King Jr., president and CEO of The Education Trust, and 10th U.S. Secretary of Education under President Obama. “As the early childhood education field increases its qualification requirements, state and district leaders must also invest in teachers of color through strong preparation programs, quality professional development, increased compensation, and other supports that can help educators of color do their best work with children.” 

In the focus groups which informed the report, early childhood educators of color highlighted four interconnected buckets of support systems—financial, workplace, higher education, and personal—that policymakers should focus on to maintain and grow ECE workforce diversity. Relying on these reflections, as well as the ideas and experiences early childhood educators of color shared, the paper proposes the following ten policy implications and recommendations that should be implemented when policy changes that increase qualification requirements for educators go into effect:

1. Make It Affordable and Accessible: Combining Debt-Free and Loan-Forgiveness Policies
2. Make It Possible: Reduce and Eliminate Non-Financial Barriers to Success
3. Make It Align with Our Realities: Count All Settings
4. Make It Meaningful: Establish Comparable Compensation for Comparable Qualifications
5. Make It More Efficient: Create Seamless, Articulated Teacher Preparation Pathways
6. Make It Feasible: Lessen the Time It Takes Educators to Reach Attainment
7. Make It Real: Value Experience With College Credit
8. Make It Supportive: Use Cohort Models and Mentors
9. Make It Consistent: Streamline Accountability Systems
10. Make It Bigger: Think Outside the Classroom 

“Implementing these ten recommendations would go a long way toward making sure that the early childhood education profession of the future is diverse, effective, well-prepared, and well-compensated for their valuable and complex work,” Allvin said. “The research is clear: when early childhood educators are supported, children, families, businesses, communities, and our economy all benefit, too.”

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The complete report is downloadable and available here. 

NAEYC would like to thank The Education Trust for their collaboration on this project. 

About the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)

NAEYC is the foremost professional membership organization committed to transforming the lives of young children and delivering on the promise of high-quality early learning. NAEYC represents 60,000 early childhood educators who care for, educate, and work on behalf of young children, birth through age 8. Learn more about NAEYC at www.NAEYC.org.