The early childhood education (ECE) workforce in the United States faces persistent challenges, including low wages and high turnover rates. These conditions detrimentally affect young children during a critical phase of their development and they are disruptive for working families and for the economy. It is now more widely acknowledged that addressing staffing challenges in ECE is essential. At the same time there is very little systematic data available to understand staffing challenges in ECE, track improvements, and test whether policies aimed to support early educators actually work. This talk will describe how through a decade-long research-policy partnership between researchers and policy partners in the Louisiana and Virginia Departments of Education, we tried to iteratively improve ECE workforce data, evaluation, and policy. I will share examples of partnered studies– both descriptive and experimental– which have improved our understanding of turnover among this large diverse workforce and informed policies to better support them.
Daphna Bassok is a Professor of Education and Public Policy at the University of Virginia and the Associate Director of EdPolicyWorks. She works closely with early childhood policy makers at both the Virginia and Louisiana Departments of Education on research aimed to inform efforts to build more cohesive, higher quality, early childhood education systems. Bassok’s research addresses early childhood education policy, with a focus on efforts to improve early childhood systems at scale. She is particularly interested in policies aimed at supporting the early childhood workforce and is currently leading a multi-year evaluation of Virginia’s Federal Preschool Development Grant Birth-5 initiative.