Early Childhood Education Is at an Inflection Point. We’re Doubling Down on Our Coverage of the Field.
The early childhood schooling system in the United States is basically damaged. In a sector that hardly ever sees high quality, affordability and availability supplied in the identical place, that’s extra an announcement of reality than it’s a subjective viewpoint.
As is, that is how the area sometimes works (or doesn’t): Families are sometimes compelled to pay greater than they’ll afford—sometimes as much or more than the mortgages on their homes—for his or her kids’s early care and schooling. Yet those that do the caring and educating are amongst the most impoverished employees on this nation—with salaries that fall in the second percentile when ranked towards different professions nationally, incomes an common of $11.65 an hour—and sometimes require public help to make ends meet. Child care suppliers, in the meantime, barely break even in the greatest of instances and find yourself shuttering in the worst. And kids are sometimes denied the high-quality care that they want and deserve.
This dynamic in the area will not be new, nevertheless it has gotten significantly worse throughout the pandemic.
Take, for instance, the labor scarcity that’s plaguing many industries nationwide. This is especially pronounced in the youngster care sector, ballooning into an all-out disaster in lots of components of the nation, the place some applications are nonetheless not serving anyplace near their pre-pandemic capability attributable to excessive turnover and a dearth of early childhood educators. The scarcity boils all the way down to low wages, excessive threat and minimal respect, that are positive to outlast the pandemic except one thing adjustments.
These challenges got here into full view throughout the nation’s vaccine rollout earlier this 12 months, when Ok-12 educators in a quantity of states had been prioritized over their counterparts in early childhood schooling. Many early childhood educators described the snub as “a slap in the face,” however stated they weren’t shocked—it tracks with the long-standing low regard the public holds them in.
Even as the area has suffered, although, it has additionally, lastly, garnered broad public consideration, curiosity and outrage, which are sometimes precursors to effecting change.
Congress is at present contemplating a invoice that would come with measures to fund common preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, lengthen the youngster tax credit score, improve wages for youngster care employees, and federally mandate paid household depart, although the closing model of this invoice will possible embody diminished funding or complete cuts to some of these applications.
What has turn into clear over the final year-and-a-half, as the pandemic has dragged on, is that the early childhood sector has reached an inflection level. How will coverage be reshaped? Will the area come to be handled like a public good, as many other countries view it to be? Who stands to realize and lose? What does high-quality early studying appear to be, and why does it matter? Will early childhood educators start to earn the pay and respect they deserve?
As tides shift and adjustments unfold, many educators, households and leaders will search for steering, understanding and readability on these points. EdSurge might be right here to cowl these adjustments and put them in context.
Expanding Our Coverage
Two years in the past, our newsroom obtained help from Imaginable Futures to broaden its protection into early childhood schooling, with a selected lens on the workforce, a bunch that’s overwhelmingly feminine and disproportionately girls of coloration. It was a pure subsequent step for us, as we had been overlaying Ok-12 and better schooling for years. But maybe extra importantly was that, as is true in the public sphere, protection of early childhood in the media has traditionally lacked the consideration and assets that’s afforded to schooling at different ranges. We wished to vary that.
After all, early childhood marks the most important developmental stage in an individual’s life, in response to mind science and proof from quite a few longitudinal research. And it’s a developmental interval the place, if kids are correctly nurtured, stimulated and invested in, many events—people, households and entire communities; native, state and nationwide governments; entire financial sectors—stand to realize.
Since we first started reporting on the early years—more and more outlined as start to age 8—that protection has turn into important to what we do and who we’re as a information group, a lot in order that we have now won awards for our reporting, spoken on panels about the points, and in any other case been acknowledged as a spot that tells true tales about early childhood schooling, with all its nuance and complexities.
Now, we aren’t solely persevering with that focus, however doubling down.
With renewed help from Imaginable Futures, we are going to broaden our early childhood protection past the workforce, to incorporate the science of early studying, coverage shifts on the horizon, pathways to credentialing and instructor preparation, investments in the area and extra. We’ll be overlaying what works and why, but additionally what’s damaged and the way it may be fastened.
Early childhood protection has turn into half and parcel of what we do right here at EdSurge ever since we first jumped in. We will improve our protection over the coming years, following rising coverage and analysis, reporting on-the-ground about the most urgent issues and studying from the early childhood educators doing this work every single day.
We need to hear instantly from early childhood educators of all types—together with assistant lecturers, lead lecturers, program administrators and different associated roles. We additionally need to hear from households, researchers, advocates, policymakers and different events who’ve a novel perspective, perception or experience to share.
We invite you to achieve out and share your ideas, be a supply for a narrative or to tell us if you wish to pitch your individual concept. EdSurge is at present accepting pitches from early childhood educators about their experiences in the area, notably how their roles and work lives are altering. EdSurge has editors on employees who would like to work with you on writing a first-person essay about your experiences and observations in the area.
Please attain out by emailing ideas@edsurge.com or by contacting me, a senior reporter at EdSurge overlaying early childhood schooling, at emily@edsurge.com. And when you’re an early childhood educator with a narrative to inform, please pitch your story here.
As coverage, practices and public notion round early childhood schooling evolve, we’re excited to be right here to inform the tales of the actual folks and communities which might be instantly impacted. Join us or observe alongside as we do.
