This brief is based on findings from the Early Childhood Education (ECE) Higher Education Inventory conducted in several states: California, Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. This brief highlights the extent to which ECE teacher preparation is currently integrated across the birth-to-age-eight continuum, and on variations in field-based practice opportunities for teachers of young children.

The Early Childhood Higher Education Inventory, administered by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley, assists policymakers and other stakeholders to develop a more coordinated and comprehensive professional preparation and development system for the early care and education workforce. The Inventory is a mechanism to describe the landscape of a state’s early childhood degree program offerings, at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels. The Inventory captures variations in program goals, content, child age-group focus, student field-based learning, and faculty characteristics and professional development needs. This information allows policy makers, institutions of higher education and other stakeholders to identify the gaps and opportunities in the available offerings, make informed policy decisions, and assess the capacity of the higher education system over time.

This report identifies the demographic, education, and employment characteristics, including compensation and workplace conditions, of Alameda County’s early care and education workforce in centers that serve children prior to kindergarten. The report offers comparisons to the last study conducted in 2006 and includes a new area of examination related to the working conditions and professional activities of teaching staff.

Identifying similar data for early educators working in licensed family child care programs remains as important as for those in center-based programs but was not within the scope of this study.

In this report, Lea Austin, Marcy Whitebook, and Harriet Dichter demonstrate how assumptions about what teachers need produce per child costs that vary by thousands of dollars.

Recognizing that estimates are important points of information – as they are often used to inform short- and long-term term decisions about early care and education services – the authors examined a set of cost models with regard to assumptions about resources for teachers and their working environments. These assumptions drive the per child and total systems estimates produced for budgetary purposes and ultimately frame the daily realities of early educators.

Notwithstanding valiant efforts and some significant progress over the past few decades, an early care and education (ECE) workforce data deficit has endured, with persistent shortcomings in our data collection efforts at the national and state levels. Yet the early childhood field needs data-driven policy solutions. Only data can reveal inequities in access to professional development and better working conditions for early educators and inequities in access to highly qualified, well-supported early educators for children. Only data can provide the information needed to advocate for change.

As illustrated by the calls for better workforce data beginning in the 1970s, the time is long overdue to prioritize a more robust ECE workforce data agenda and to advocate for the necessary resources. Toward this agenda, we describe the existing data deficit and its consequences and outline the features of comprehensive and sound data. We apply these criteria to understand the strengths and challenges of workforce registries and surveys, the most common data collection mechanisms employed by states. We also highlight several promising practices in the states to combat these challenges.

In 2006, to provide an in-depth portrait of the center-based and licensed family child care workforce across the state and regionally, the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) and the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network conducted the California Early Care and Education Workforce Study. This study built on California’s long history of leadership in early childhood workforce research, which reaches back to the late 1970s. Yet, 12 years after this study, California lags behind a majority of other states when it comes to the status of its workforce data.

The absence of an updated statewide survey or a statewide workforce registry creates numerous challenges to the implementation of evidence-based decision making. Too often, determinations about the workforce are made with scant information, which can lead to deciding that a policy does not work and moving on to developing new initiatives without sufficient or accurate information to assess impact and effectiveness or guide new approaches. Without better data, there is a risk of replicating the very same undetected or undocumented problems that led a previous approach to be deemed ineffective or failing. Additionally, numerous changes in the political, economic, and cultural environment in the past 12 years render the 2006 study severely out of date and underscore the urgency for current and ongoing data to accurately assess the consequences of policy approaches and interventions.

This brief directs stakeholders to three more recent, though not comprehensive, sources of information about the California early childhood workforce: 1) local workforce data sources from three counties; 2) annual federal data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; and 3) California-specific data drawn from the 2012 National Survey of Early Care and Education. Findings from the latter two sources are detailed below.

We caution readers that moving among various datasets on the early childhood workforce can be challenging due to differences in how the population is determined, terminology used to describe members of the workforce, and phrasing of questions. A common challenge that arises is divergent numbers in the estimated size of the early childhood workforce, as we detail in Box 1.

This report describes the early childhood degree programs offered in Arkansas, focusing on variations in program content, age-group focus, student field-based learning, and faculty characteristics, as well as the extent to which Arkansas ECE higher education programs are incorporating early math, family engagement, and working with dual language learners.

This report is part of our Early Childhood Higher Education Inventory. The Early Childhood Higher Education Inventory, administered by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley, assists policymakers and other stakeholders to develop a more coordinated and comprehensive professional preparation and development system for the early care and education workforce. The Inventory is a mechanism to describe the landscape of a state’s early childhood degree program offerings, at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels. The Inventory captures variations in program goals, content, child age-group focus, student field-based learning, and faculty characteristics and professional development needs. This information allows policy makers, institutions of higher education and other stakeholders to identify the gaps and opportunities in the available offerings, make informed policy decisions, and assess the capacity of the higher education system over time.

This report examines teaching staff assessments of their work environments in New York state across the five SEQUAL domains: Teaching Supports, Learning Community, Job Crafting, Adult Well-Being, and Program Leadership with a focus on how their program environment contributes to or hinders their ability to apply their knowledge and skills and improve their practice. In addition to teaching staff perceptions of their work environments, assessments of how responses varied by teacher and site characteristics are documented. Findings reveal that common workplace challenges pose barriers to early child care educator well-being and classroom effectiveness. Findings also demonstrate the value of program policies that ensure dependable workplace supports and policies such as provisions for paid planning and reporting time.

This report is part of our Teachers’ Voices (SEQUAL) series. To facilitate bringing teachers’ voices into quality improvement strategies, the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) developed Supportive Environmental Quality Underlying Adult Learning, or SEQUAL, as a tool to document teaching staff perspectives about workplace conditions that impact their practice and program quality. SEQUAL can be used as a research, educational, or technical assistance tool.