Families, fellow educators and the general public have begun to see just how integral child care professionals are to a smoothly functioning economy, says Ashley LiBetti, associate partner of policy and evaluation at Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit that aims to improve outcomes for underserved children.

“The pandemic catalyzed this previously unmatched level of attention on early care and education,” LiBetti says, adding that “the potential for aspirational change to early educator preparation is possible right now.”

But it’s more than just the pandemic that has made this a “prime moment” for the field, says Cody Kornack, director of government affairs for the National Head Start Association (NHSA). As the country grapples with its long and enduring history of racism, early childhood educators—about 40 percent of whom are women of color—are well-positioned both to support young children who have experienced trauma from systemic racism as well as to expose children to anti-racist ideas and education at a young age.

In August, dozens of early childhood researchers, educators, policymakers, practitioners and philanthropists convened virtually for a full day of discussions and brainstorming about these and similar topics. That conversation helped spawn a recent report, authored by Kornack and LiBetti, titled “Broader, Deeper, Fairer: Five Strategies to Radically Expand the Talent Pool in Early Education.”

“Radical” is key, as some of the ideas envision an early childhood preparation landscape that looks wholly different from what is currently in place.  Pulling from concepts that already exist in pockets of the early childhood education ecosystem, as well as from programs that are deeply entrenched in other industries, the five strategies are “at once exceptionally simple and frustratingly complex,” the authors write in the report. “Improving early educator preparation is not just about disrupting the current system, but it is a function of designing new strategies and improving existing strategies, then implementing them with fidelity at scale.”

Read the full article about early childhood educators by Emily Tate at EdSurge.