Kay Steiger

Kevin Carey and Sara Mead have a really fascinating paper today over at the Brookings Institute that looks at how to best tackle a problem related to preschool in America: How do we ensure that the educators at preschool institutions are properly trained to help maximize the benefits of preschool itself? Their idea is a new one, but it’s one that may just work.

Here, let me back up a minute. Let’s first cover why preschool is so important. Preschool, as Planet Money recently reported, could be one of the key factors in helping the disadvantaged have a better life. Looking at a series of studies in which preschool was the only variable, adults who attended preschool as children had higher lifetime earnings, were more likely to be employed, and were less likely to be incarcerated. Considering preschool is much cheaper than incarcerating people or paying for unemployment, this makes occupying kids with preschool to seem like a fantastic, cost-effective idea.

Here’s the trouble, which Carey and Mead describe in the paper [PDF]:

The more than 1.3 million Americans—nearly all of them women—who make their livings caring for other people’s children are doing critically important work. Yet far too many of these workers are under-educated and underpaid. As a nation, we have decided to entrust our young children to other people, but we are not giving those people the training they need or the compensation they deserve.

Indeed, in another part of the report, they cite that preschool educators make about $23,870 annually, compared to $51,009 for public elementary and secondary school teachers.

From there, opinions of how to get high-quality teachers into preschool diverge. One school of thought is to require all preschool teachers to have a bachelor’s degree (most preschools do not currently have such a requirement). But, as Carey and Mead point out in their paper, that may not be the best prescription to reach the group of people who typically make up preschool instructors, many of whom may come from low-income families, already have children, and would likely have to fit school in around full-time work. Given those limitations, bachelor’s degrees seem like an unworkable solution, and the research shows that there’s little to support the idea that those with a bachelor’s degree necessarily make better preschool teachers.

The second option is to put current preschool teachers into “professional development” courses that will enhance their skills as instructors. But if “professional development” sounds vague to you, it does to education reformers too. Without clear standards of what, exactly, we expect these teachers to get out of such courses, it doesn’t make much sense to allot money for them.

That’s where Mead and Carey’s idea comes in. They want to apply the charter school model to education schools for preschool teachers. They, of course, ask that such a policy would come with clear expectations, metrics to assess knowledge and skill, and hold these schools accountable. Basically, what we need is a solution fostered by the creativity and accountability that can come with the charter school system when done correctly. Ater all, it’s certainly better than what we’re doing now, which is pretty much just continue to pay preschool educators a pittance for doing an extremely important job.