After years of political popularity, public investments in early childhood education have struggled to gain traction in recent years. Federal momentum toward universal pre-K has stalled, and some successful local experiments of the 2000s and 2010s have struggled to live up to the optimism that accompanied their launches.
California is a notable and commendable exception to this trend. In 2021, under Governor Gavin Newsom, the state embarked on an ambitious effort to more than double the number of public pre-K and transitional kindergarten (or “TK”) seats for 4-year-old Californians from just over 147,000 to about 400,000. (TK began in 2008 as a program for children who had just missed the state cutoff for kindergarten enrollment, but has expanded significantly since 2021 to serve more 4-year-olds).
This would be a major achievement for the state and for early education advocates. The key, of course, is to show how policymakers can dramatically increase pre-K and TK access while maintaining critical quality elements that support child development. The best way to do that is to ensure that the state’s new early education classrooms have excellent teachers who are prepared to meet the needs of their students.
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By 2022, nearly 60% of California children under the age of five will have at least one parent who speaks a non-English language at home, according to the Migration Policy Institute. As such, it is particularly important that the state fill its new pre-K and TK classrooms with bilingual early educators.
How is the state doing in building bilingualism into its new public education system? Let’s start with the good news. California had a wealth of bilingual early educators before it launched its early education expansion. According to data from UC-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, in 2020, nearly half of staff members working in early childhood education centers were multilingual, and about 40% identified as Latina. Furthermore, from that year onwards, state educators were overwhelmingly (98%) women, and had an average of fifteen years of experience in early childhood education. As California expands its early childhood education system to fund (and operate) the majority of classrooms for its four-year-olds, this diverse workforce provides a strong base of experience.
In a recent report co-authored with my colleague Jonathan Zabala in my role as a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, we discovered something disturbing. The requirements to become an early educator in the state’s growing public early childhood education system will likely exclude many of these women—and their valuable linguistic and cultural assets—from careers in the state’s growing public early childhood education system . As we note in the report, California is introducing a new type of credential that will become the standard for TK teachers over time. That degree “requires candidates to have a bachelor’s degree, complete specific courses and assessments that demonstrate competency, pass the CalTPA, and complete 600 hours of student teaching.”
Good for all children, pre-K programs are especially beneficial for English learners
These qualification requirements reflect the choice of government policymakers to align TK’s educational credentials with primary and secondary education requirements, which are generally more stringent than preschool education requirements. This makes California’s public TK classrooms more accessible to K-12 public school teachers, whose qualifications are largely aligned, but it puts these jobs out of reach for many early educators with decades of experience working in private pre-Classrooms.
In the American early care and education system, obtaining degrees and licenses is complicated. Regulations vary from state to state and there is no single model written in the stars as the one true and best policy. Rather, the rules policymakers set reflect a host of tradeoffs that influence the demographics of the teachers children receive. And because of a range of factors that are both substantively broad and historically deep—a generation of California mandates encouraging monolingual education, racial and ethnic wealth disparities, cost increases in higher education, and more—even seemingly neutral training requirements can produce a surprisingly homogeneous teacher workforce. not suitable for supporting a diverse student population.
For example, there is nothing inherently racially or monolingually biased about requiring teacher candidates to practice their future profession as student teachers before receiving their license to become head teachers. But if the clinical hours spent as a student teacher are not paid, even though student teachers are still required to pay tuition for their training programs during that time, then candidates without significant financial resources are less likely to overcome this hurdle. And that’s part of the reason why, in a country where young bilingual adults and youth of color disproportionately grow up below — or near — the poverty line, we have such persistent shortages of bilingual teachers and teachers of color.
Nearly every requirement for a teacher’s qualification involves these kinds of considerations—whether for beginning teachers or for K-12 teachers. The more standardized and less flexible a state’s licensing system is, the more difficult it can be for diverse candidates to make it into the classroom. Furthermore, as we note in our report, “frustratingly, research indicates that many licensing requirements generally do not lead to higher quality instruction or better student outcomes.”
What can California policymakers do to ensure more of their current, experienced, linguistically diverse educators reach the state’s new pre-K and TK classrooms? Well, when it comes to policy reforms to diversify the teacher workforce, there are really only two main options. Policymakers can:
1) Pursue investments that can provide financial support to non-traditional teacher candidates going through traditional training and licensing systems, including fellowships, large stipends for student teaching, and additional rewards to help people miss work to attend classes.
2) Introduce more flexibility in their credentialing requirements, such as alternative training pathways, credential waivers, and equivalency determinations, allowing candidates with years of early childhood experience to be counted toward clinical hours.
That’s it. There’s really no other clever mechanism. Either California needs to invest significantly more so that more bilingual K-12 applicants get the (mostly monolingual) credentials the state requires or it needs to change the required credentials.
So, as we note in the report, California policymakers urgently need reforms that will help early childhood teachers make their “language skills and instructional expertise fully or partially equivalent to the qualifications needed to become a TK teacher.” ” This could mean creating new provisional qualifications that would allow novice teachers with long experience to become lead TK teachers in the new public system for five to seven years while they complete their further training. This could involve major state investments in waiving tuition or providing scholarships to bilingual TK teacher candidates.
The story of the last major cycle of investments in early childhood education makes it clear that effective implementation matters at least as much as the political momentum. And when it comes to supporting young, linguistically diverse children, that means building systems that support the training and hiring of bilingual educators. California is an emerging national leader in early childhood education, so it is critical that it properly addresses this expansion of early childhood education. The state already has the bilingual teacher candidates it needs. The next big step is ensuring they stay in the new public early childhood education system.
