I listened to Valora Washington speak at the Vermont Association for the Education for Young Children Fall conference and she got me all fired up again. She pointed out that now that we have drawn attention to our field and that even President Obama is talking about the importance of universal access to early education in his State of the Union speeches, we can no longer hide in our bubble.
She called on us to first imagine for our field. Come up with a unified vision of what is important. In Vermont, many stakeholders have been thinking about a unified vision and have settled on: "To realize the promise of every Vermont child." I think that is pretty nice. It is a vision many early care and education stakeholders can then carve out their missions. Valora (I feel I can call her by her first name since she greeted me with a hug when I picked her up at the airport) wants us to be "Smart Improvisors" as we imagine. Our new ideas can come on the fly, but they come from a deep well of knowledge and experience that we have in the field of early childhood education.
Next, she asked us to know. We are in the midst of a field that has experienced a knowledge explosion in the last 20 years. We have to consider "What should early educators know and do?" as a question we need to answer. Valora says that we know more than we are doing. She also believes that we know what quality is. Our problem is that this is tacit knowledge in our field which makes it hard to articulate what we know. We also know that we do not have the funding to do quality work and for too long we have tried to uphold the myth that we can do for a quarter what really costs a dollar. One of our challenges as a field is to figure out how do we get better funding and then what would we do with it.
Her next step is that we have to act. We have to build networks among our groups. We have to all play in the same sandbox. We are a field that is compartmentalized and we often do not speak well of other sectors (who may actually be doing valuable work, if we could step back and look at the whole picture). She challenges us to figure out how to work together, combine efforts, and mobilize to focus on solutions. Part of this is that we have to be willing to call out bad practice when we see it. We are a field that is conflict-averse, so we have to learn to deal with conflict in creative ways.She also said she is looking for the Disruptive Innovators and the Positive Deviants. The people who are changing things because they know it can work and they are willing to act on their knew knowledge, or they see a new way of delivering an idea and go for it. Those are the people that change are field and pave the way for the rest of us. Change is not optional.
Lastly, she called on us to take personal responsibility. We often try to fly under the radar, when what we need to do now is focus on outcomes and build networks. Workforce qualifications are getting higher and this is a challenge for veteran teachers who do not have those credentials. How do we advance the field and serve the field? We need to take responsibility and unify and professionalize our field.
Currently, Valora stated, there are 1.8 million early educators in the United States. In the often quoted Perry Preschool Project, the teachers were educated at the Masters level, the students had wrap around health services and the program had high family involvement. As we think about the good outcomes that high quality produced, we need to figure out how we can replicate it throughout our varied systems, whether it be home and family providers, Head Start programs, child care centers, or public and private preschool programs. Early care and education has many faces, but in order to realize the promise of every child, every child should have access to high quality early care and education experiences in whatever environment that child's for chooses.
