Through a concerted effort over the by five years, California is on rails to meet a national requirement that 50 pct of Head Start lead classroom teachers hold a bachelor'southward degree past the end of September. While just 27 percent of Caput Start lead teachers held a bachelor'south degree in the 2007-08 school year, 48 percent now concord one, and an additional 11 percent are enrolled in a baccalaureate program.

"Most [plan] directors are feeling confident that they've reached the 50 per centum mark," said California Head Start Association executive director Rick Mockler.

In fact, the requirement seems to accept worked even though the current police does not impose consequences for individual programs or individual states that do not encounter the criterion past the Sept. thirty deadline. With no fear of reprisals either way, programs in California took advantage of tuition help offered past both the federal and land governments to encourage teachers to pursue higher-level degrees.

This graph from a working paper by Professor Daphna Bassok of the University of the Virginia shows the sharp uptick in Head Start teachers holding a B.A. nationally.

This graph from a working paper by Professor Daphna Bassok of the University of Virginia shows the sharp uptick in Head First teachers holding a B.A. nationally. (Click to overstate)

The new requirement from Head Start, the federal preschool program for low-income children, was added in 2007 when Congress last re-authorized Head Start funding. Information technology was role of a wave of new regulations intended to shore up the quality of Head Start, which studies have repeatedly found to exist minimally effective. The promise is that increasing expectations for teacher teaching will improve the quality of instruction in local programs.

"The push button for teachers to go degrees is more about validating the notion that in the early years nosotros practise more than but babysit kids," said Diane Levin, deputy director for First v California, a statewide agency dedicated to improving care and education programs for Californians to age 5. "We want these real education professionals to be the best they can exist."

Some experts worry that the requirement will bulldoze up costs without affecting outcomes for children. While enquiry abounds showing that students with strong teachers achieve at higher levels, it's not clear that a bachelor'due south degree is the fundamental element of improved pedagogy.

"We know that having great teachers is critical, simply we don't have bang-up evidence showing that requiring teachers to hold a B.A. necessarily implies they volition be 'ameliorate' teachers or that they will do a ameliorate job interacting with immature children," Professor Daphna Bassok wrote in an email. Bassok is an education professor at the University of Virginia who has been studying the implementation of the requirement. "The evidence here is thin."

That hasn't stopped Head Outset teachers in California from pursuing new degrees, and the upward tendency here is mirrored nationally. Since 2007, the percentage of Caput Start teachers with a available'south degree has risen from just over xl percentage to 55 per centum, according to Bassok.

"The 1998 and 2007 reauthorizations definitely led Head Start programs to focus on raising teacher education levels, and the trends have been striking," she wrote.

A statewide preschool quality rating system set to be piloted this spring has added some teeth to the federal requirement. The number of program employees holding bachelor'due south degrees will exist i of many quality measures in the new system.

That'due south a major change in a system where the requirement for a atomic number 82 classroom teacher is a Kid Development Associate let, which calls for less than a year's worth of formal grooming and a few months worth of in-classroom feel. Teachers tin can use several combinations of these 2 requirements to earn their permit. (The requirements to be an assistant classroom instructor are even lower. Xx-five percent have no early on babyhood educational activity credential at all.)

Funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Human activity of 2009 immune many California programs to help their teachers pay tuition expenses for associate'southward and bachelor's degrees as part of the new push. Partnerships with local customs colleges and First five California programs like CARES (Comprehensive Approaches to Raising Instruction Standards) as well helped a significant number of teachers to earn degrees. For many, this was a hazard to take a major step forward on their own educational trajectories.

Preparation ground K-12?

Experts disagree about the usefulness of taking that footstep.

Of course, one concern is price. Head Start programs will at present compete with Grand-12 districts, which pay considerably more, to keep teachers with available's degrees. At that place will be pressure to raise preschool salaries or confront more churn in a profession with a loftier turnover charge per unit already.

"The fear is not that [California programs] won't meet the [new Head Starting time] target," said Mockler, of the California Caput Commencement Association, "but that when the economic system picks up, they won't exist able to concord on to their teachers with B.A.'due south."

The average Head Start salary for teachers who agree bachelor's degrees is between $xxx,623 and $34,794, depending on the specific sub-programme, according to data collected by the California Head Start Clan. (For teachers with simply an acquaintance'southward degree, the average salary range is fifty-fifty lower, $23,614 to $32,756.)

In comparing, the average salary for a 1000-12 instructor in California is $67,448.

"It's hard when the pay scale is and so lopsided for people to come in and stay," said Camille Maben, manager of Start 5 California. "Maybe nosotros don't want to be the neat preparation ground for master [school] teachers."

Maben said elevating the status of teaching preschool by offer higher pay to become with the stricter requirements could help avoid that fate. Merely that's only if teachers with bachelor'south degrees are able to exercise a significantly better job teaching young children, a question that's not yet settled.

Marcy Whitebook heads the Center for the Study of Child Care Educators at U.C. Berkeley. She best-selling that most research on the matter has drawn a weak link at best between teachers who hold a available's caste and improved outcomes for young children. That doesn't change her conviction that teachers of young children should have more than rigorous grooming.

"There's no other level of teaching in the world that we would question whether or not someone needs a college degree," Whitebook said. "Nosotros question it in early childhood considering we haven't tended to retrieve of information technology as skilled work traditionally."

Whitebook said the quality of higher didactics programs for early educators is all over the map, which ways a degree from those programs might not confer the needed skills and knowledge.

The Head Start requirement does not specify required coursework or even call for a degree with a specific major. In California, 65 percent of early babyhood education teachers who concord bachelor's degrees specialized in early childhood pedagogy, according to the 2011-12 Head Start Program Information Report on staff qualifications. The residuum of the caste-holders are classified as specializing in "any related field."

Maben as well said working conditions for the women (early childhood educators are overwhelmingly women) who hold these jobs are often poor. The salaries are low, turnover is loftier and teachers are ofttimes offered cipher planning time.

"We're and then intent on getting at-take chances kids who are going to exist around people who take all these stresses," like high poverty, addiction and minimal didactics, into preschool, Whitebook said. "Then you think about the people instruction early childhood education, and they take a lot of the same stresses."

Improving working atmospheric condition and upping expectations for early education teachers get paw in paw, Whitebook said. A blanket requirement that all teachers earn a bachelor'south caste tomorrow wouldn't work, she said, but she applauded Head Offset for giving programs enough of time and resources to aid their educators earn higher degrees.

Those resources must continue to include tuition assistance since Head Start teachers are generally paid too fiddling to fund their own didactics. And policymakers will have to begin to consider offering increased pay to enable programs to hang on to their top teachers.

Bassok, the professor studying the nationwide implementation of the Head Get-go requirement, cautions that the costs may outweigh the benefits. "It's important to think virtually whether the resources used towards paying more educated teachers could take other uses that would have greater benefits for kids," Bassok wrote.

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