I’m an Early Childhood Educator. This is What That Means.
One of the first things you will learn about me, right after the fact that I’m a mom, is that I’m incredibly proud to be an early childhood educator. And make no mistake — after over 15 years in early childhood environments, I have chosen the way I describe what I do carefully and intentionally.
I still remember sitting in the passenger seat of the car explaining to my mom that I didn’t work at a daycare. I was 23 years old and new to the field, but I was already clear on the importance of the work I was doing. “We’re educating them, Mom. Not just playing.” My part-time job in college was working with Jumpstart as an early literacy tutor with children in Head Start programs. It was because of that experience that I decided I no longer wanted to be an elementary school teacher. I had fallen in love with the creativity, imagination and possibility of children under the age of 5. That job also impressed upon me the importance of high-quality early childhood experiences for children. As a literacy tutor, I focused on getting 3, 4 and 5 year-olds ready for kindergarten by providing intensive, targeted support for children from families experiencing poverty, many of whom spoke English as their second language.
After college, I was selected to be part of a national program called the Pearson Teacher Fellowship. The two year program selected highly qualified college graduates to work full-time in early childhood programs serving low-income children. As someone who didn’t graduate with a degree in education (I double majored in art and theater), this gave me the opportunity to dive into the work of early childhood as a full-time career. After a summer of intensive training in Boston that included several sessions spent working with the faculty at the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School, the lab school on the campus of Tufts University, I began working as an assistant teacher at a Head Start program in Iowa City, Iowa.
Those first two years of teaching, as all educators know, are not for the faint of heart. It was tiring, emotional, deeply challenging work. On top of that, working with families experiencing poverty adds a whole other layer as some of the stories I heard and behaviors I saw were heartbreaking. But it was also deeply rewarding and full of joy, laughter, and lifelong relationships. When one of my students graduated from high school a few years ago, I was honored to be invited to their graduation party. Those first students are the ones I carry with me to this day when I think about building an educational system that meets the needs of children furthest from opportunities as the litmus test for building a system that meets the needs of ALL kids.
In that Head Start program, I was one of the only staff members with a four year degree. Many of my colleagues were working towards their two or four year degree in addition to teaching full time, and some of them had their own children in our program. The reality about the field of early childhood education is that, to this day, the majority of our workforce is paid poverty-level wages so investing in a four year degree doesn’t make financial sense. The wages offered are not only low but employment often doesn’t include benefits, paid prep time or professional development. In fact, over half of the early childhood workforce in Minnesota qualifies for state aid programs like Medicaid, housing, food and child care assistance.
The reason the field of early childhood education is so tragically undervalued in our society, and therefore underfunded, is because it is founded on the historic legacies of racism, sexism and classism that persist in this country to this day — not dissimilar to the challenges facing the profession of teaching as a whole. There is extensive research about this as documented in the Child Trends Report The Mary Pauper Papers if you care to do a deep dive. I also wrote a commentary about this that the Star Tribune published in January.
During my time in Head Start, I aspired to become a lead-qualified teacher, which meant I needed more formal education and hours of experience. So, after a year, I completed my Child Development Associate’s credential, a nationally recognized credential for early childhood educators working in many early childhood environments. However, my life took some turns and I ended up moving back to Minneapolis, the city where I grew up, and I found myself again working as an assistant teacher, this time in a Montessori school.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Montessori, let me give you my 30 second elevator speech. Dr. Maria Montessori was an Italian doctor and scientist who was deeply skilled in the scientific method of observation. As the story goes, after working with children who were institutionalized, she was hired to oversee the care of children in an Italian “slum” in the early 1900s. The observations she made in her time there came to be known as the Montessori Method, and are now backed by brain science and research as the tools of neuroscience have evolved. The Montessori Method has had its ebbs and flows in popularity here in the US, but it is cited by the Trust for Learning Network as an Ideal Learning Environment because of its emphasis on individualized, student-led education and Montessori schools are found all over world. It decenters the role of the adult in the classroom to be one responsible for preparing the environment and “following the child.”
My first week in that Montessori early childhood environment was remarkable. I saw 20 little bodies moving independently around the room, serving themselves snack, cleaning up after their spills and doing puzzles of maps with pieces for every country in the world. I marveled as the lead teacher (in our Montessori training, we are taught to frame our work as a “guide”) gave a single, focused lesson to an individual child, trusting that the rest of the children around her were moving purposefully, independently and peacefully. Of course, children of 3, 4 and 5 years old are still learning social, emotional and physical skills, so it wasn’t always calm and purposeful and I was there to assist them as needed, but the deep trust in the abilities of these very young children was something I could never unsee.
I went on to get my Montessori Early Childhood Teaching Credential from the American Montessori Society in 2010 and the rest is history. Not only did I discover the age of children I was meant to teach, but also a way of doing so that honors and celebrates the dignity and inherent brilliance of young children, our youngest learners. Since then I have taught in Montessori early childhood centers and schools all over the Twin Cities (and one in Thailand — but that’s a story for another blog), and I am proud to be a highly qualified and highly effective educator that has sent hundreds of children off to kindergarten or first grade with skills like reading, knowing the names of polygons and doing four digit addition. I also got a Master’s degree in Education from St. Catherine University in St. Paul and taught future early childhood educators in their Early Childhood Bachelor’s degree program as an adjunct professor. Though I know there is always something to learn, I am confident in saying that all my years of experience qualify me as a master teacher.
In the fall of 2022, curious to learn more about what was going on in early childhood education outside of the classroom where I taught, I was accepted into the CARE Fellowship to learn about the political process, advocacy and policy making in early childhood. I was part of a cohort of diverse early childhood professionals from all over the state that met once a month while we continued working our full-time jobs, and we were all committed to making change in the early childhood system. Lucky for us, we got a front row seat to the historic 2023 legislative session where Democrats controlled the state house, senate and governor’s office and our state had an 18 billion dollar surplus to do things like adjust the general education funding formula to account for inflation. We also won huge early childhood investments like a child tax credit that is poised to cut childhood poverty in our state by one third and invests in our early childhood workforce with a nation leading compensation support payment program. However, I learned an important lesson during that session: that moment didn’t happen by chance. Early childhood advocates had been planning, preparing and working for that moment for decades. Big changes in government, like how we fund public or early childhood education, don’t happen overnight. It takes persistence, strategy and a little bit of luck.
After that, I caught the policy bug and in May of 2023, left classroom teaching for a one year fellowship with the BUILD Initiative at the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS). My time at DHS has shown me what it takes to turn policy into real-life programs and practices that impact those with boots on the ground. I’ve also worked on projects like the creation of a wage scale for the early childhood workforce and a statewide mixed delivery pilot that seeks to understand how we support communities and our early childhood workforce in creating an equitable early childhood system.
Something I realized in my past year with the state is that the field of early childhood educators is diverse. There are in-home family care providers, center-based providers, tribally licensed care providers, family, friend and neighbor providers, public-school based preschool for 4 year olds, early childhood family educators, Montessori schools and Head Starts. All of these different early childhood environments make up our early childhood education ecosystem and that ecosystem is in a delicate balance. Right now, our society thinks of early childhood care and education as a business, rather than a service like our public schools, and therefore most of them are tuition-based. Ask anyone you know who has or had young children and you will quickly learn how expensive it is, how important it is and how valued it is. The research is clear: the development of a child’s brain from ages of 0–6 lays the foundation for all other learning. And yet the field, just like our K-12 system, lacks critical government investment.
Another thing I’ve learned about policymaking is that it isn’t based on research and logic alone, but requires interpersonal relationships and political will. Unfortunately, investing in funding and policies that are good for kids isn’t solely dependent on the notion of being “the right thing to do.” Which is why I call on all educators — those serving children from birth to 12th grade — to band together to take up this fight as one. We need to build bridges between our early childhood and K-12 educators so that we ALL do better and in turn, our kids do better.
This is why I call myself an educator — because I know there is strength in our diversity and in our unity. My journey from Jumpstart to Head Start to Montessori to being a Master’s degree-holding educator has been an untraditional one, but it is no less valuable or impactful than someone who got their four year degree in education and has been teaching in public schools ever since.
In that same vein, I’ve also come around on some of my original ideas about those in my own field without formal degrees, thinking back to the self-righteous gatekeeping I did with my mom in the car so many years ago. I know better now and I am proud to count myself among child care workers, daycare providers, nannies, grannies and preschool teachers who are doing the work of caring for and educating our youngest learners. We are ALL an incredibly important asset to our communities. Not only do we make our economy run, as we saw during the pandemic, but we are literally building the brains of young children that are learning every day, in every moment, no matter what.
