 Wait for them to turn this on. Good morning, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining us this morning, either in person or online. We actually have a large online audience as well this morning. Yes, people didn't want to brave the heat. It was pretty muggy out there. I'm Laura Born-Friend, Director of Early and Elementary Education Policy at New America. New America is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank and civic enterprise committed to renewing American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the digital age. Our early and elementary education policy team promotes federal, state, and local policies that provide all children equitable access to high quality early learning opportunities from birth through third grade. Much of our work focuses on the preparation of credentialing and supporting teachers and leaders. Our team is part of a larger education policy program here at New America that spans the full continuum of learning from birth up through higher education in the workforce. Today, you are joining us for an important conversation on pre-K leaders. And by pre-K leaders, we mean principals and early childhood center directors or administrators who have pre-K age children in their building, so three and four-year-olds. These days, a majority of three and four-year-olds spend their days in a pre-K classroom, which are often located in either an elementary school or a childcare center, but sometimes other locations as well. And while these settings serve pre-K students, the roles of directors and principals are more similar than different, but the educational requirements and expectations for principals and center directors who lead those programs can vary significantly. And in conversations about improving the quality of pre-K classrooms and even improving elementary schools, the focus until fairly recently has primarily been on teachers, and surely teachers are very important. But with the research, my colleague, Abby Lieberman, will talk about later this morning, we aim to draw attention to the importance of early education leaders, those principals and center directors. The quality of an early learning program is largely dependent on this, often overlooked group of professionals. After teachers, research shows that school leaders are the greatest in-school factor impacting student achievement. And there's little reason to think that wouldn't apply to pre-K settings as well. Principals and center directors establish conditions for strong pre-K instruction and learning environments. They matter a lot and they need specific knowledge and competencies to be successful early education leaders. And to make sure that our young and especially our most vulnerable children are getting that start they need and that the gains children make in pre-K are sustained and built upon in kindergarten and the later grades. This morning, just to give you a rundown of how the morning is gonna go, we'll begin with Abby moderating a panel discussion with a principal and two center directors who will talk about their roles and preparation for those roles. Then, Abby will present on her findings from probably one of the report that you hopefully picked up this morning, one of two. She'll be talking about a tale of two pre-K leaders, how state policies for center directors and principals leading pre-K programs differ and why they shouldn't. And finally, I'll come back up and moderate a discussion with a group of policy experts. So let's get started. First though, if you're joining us online, be sure to use the hashtag pre-K leaders and anyone in the room can use it as well. We'll be monitoring for questions and since we have such a pretty good audience online, we'll hope to get to at least one question from our online audience during our Q and A at the end of the event. Abby on the first panel, come on up. And I'll introduce Abby and then she'll introduce the rest of her panel. Abby Lieberman is a policy analyst on our early and elementary education team and she's author of the report that we're here to discuss. So Abby, I'll let you take it from here. Thank you, Laura. Good morning, everyone. And as Laura mentioned, it's great to have you all here today, both in person and online, to join us for this important discussion. So I think I'll start by introducing the panelists. First, we have Mike Goudish. He's a principal of Morton Elementary School in Morton, Wisconsin. Previously, he taught fourth, fifth and sixth grade for nine years before becoming a principal. Next, we have Carly Harris, who is owner and director of Royal Castle Child Development Center, a nationally accredited non-profit school that serves children aged six weeks to five years old in the greater New Orleans area. And third, we have Jennifer Wadner. She is school director of Tulsa Educator, which also serves children from six weeks to five years old. She started working in the field in 2003 as a lead Head Start teacher. So their full bios are all available on this feed that hopefully you picked up on your way in. So I think we'll get started. If you could tell us, if you could start by telling us a little bit about the school or program that you run, the families that you're serving, and then also about how you spend each day. I know there's no typical day for a school leader, but walk us through the general way that you're going to watch them do your figures when you're done doing it. First of all, this is my 42nd year in education. So it's been an honor. It's been my 22nd year at Merton Primary. It's a early childhood 4K through 4th grade school, about 460 children. Children go to an intermediate school next door and then onto Arrowhead High School. So if you want to Google Arrowhead High School, you can find out about, it's a wonderful high school. We're in Waukesha County, just outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The highest per capita in the state. Our free and reduced lunch is three to five percent. That might be very unfamiliar for people in their urban setting. Our 4K program, EC4K, has been going on for about 18 years. It was developed with the help of, over the course of a year with two 5K teachers who wanted to see kids be more ready for school. So we were a little bit ahead of the curve and the school board approved that, which we were very proud of, that it wasn't a monetary decision. My typical day starts out at 4 to 7. School day starts at 8.40. So I'm there plenty early checking things out. Catherine and Sue are our 4K teachers. We also talk with our OT, our PTs, our speech and language. They often make such a big, big impact on decisions we make relative to kids' success in school. So I would say, as a principal, making sure we have contact with those players every day and not just my top 10 behavioral issues in 5K through 4th grade. Once a week I spend, we have grade level meetings. So I kick off my Tuesdays by meeting with 4K, EC4K teachers and we go through what they're working on, curriculum, assessments, behavior issues, parents, special education issues. So my day is, Tuesdays are typically my day for grade level meetings. And then the rest of my day is, I sit on a flotty ball in my office so you get an idea of how I'm not in there very often. Meet the kids on the playground in the morning. Say goodbye to them doing bus duty at night. I'm on the playground between 11 to 12.30 and in the cafeteria with 5Kers at 12.30. The rest of the time is out and about. That's, my day can be very different, but typically my secretary is a hard time finding me. I don't like to turn my phone on, I just like to be in classrooms and be undisturbed and hang out with kids, so it's been a blast. My name is Curly Harris and like you said I'm with Royal Castle Child Development Center, I am the owner and the director. We opened February of 1996 and I've been loving it ever since. We are a national year accredited by NACI and we are a part of the quality rating system of Louisiana and we were like the first five store center in that area so I'm really excited about that, it was a lot, a lot of work. We care and educate 100 children and we are a little bit different because we are a blended center. And so at our center we have 20 hairstyles slots for children, we work with total community action with that and then we also have 23 early hairstyles slots. We have 16 pre-k4 slots with the state and then in that class we mix it in with some private and childcare assistance families and then we have a number of private paying families at the center. We're all mixed together, you don't know who they are because we wear uniforms and we don't talk about it but upstairs we know who they are. Pretty much my day begins when I get a call in because we're open from 6.30 to 5.30 so I call in about 6.30 or 6.45 and I ask my teacher assistant on my assistant director she works as a teacher also and I ask didn't anybody call in, is everybody gonna be there? Pretty much no call in, is everyone there? Good, we good. So then this is my chance to take care of some things before I go to the office because once I get in the center, the things that you plan for that day you really don't get it done. So I take care of important things real quick. It could be submit my food numbers because we're part of the Louisiana Food Program, the childcare and food program. I may take a look at that, I may look at my emails, I'll also check and make sure what our funds look like in the bank, always check that. So once I get that done, I go ahead into the center, put my things down and then I walk. I'm greeting my parents, I always greet my parents, I greet all of the children, I give them hugs and kisses and then I check in with the teachers to see if everything's okay, any complaints, any problems, do you need anything? And if they say they're fine, they're good. Then I go upstairs, I start doing a little bit on my desk, they have messages and they have some tours and I love to do my tours, but if I'm not there, I do have two teachers who can do the tours, but I'm one who really loves to do the tours because I really like to get a feel of the parents who come in here. I check in with the cook because I always like, no, what's cooking? I once even got cooking for today, I check in and then I'm also doing like the health and safety check. So I'm walking around the center, I'm looking for things that might cause a problem with licensing because we don't want any deficiencies, we don't want any problems, so I'm looking for things. And my cook, he serves as the cook part of the day and then he turns into the maintenance guy. So I have a conversation with him, like, okay, we need to get some things fixed or repaired or whatever. And pretty much I am really observing my teachers in the classroom, I'm checking out the lesson plans. We always have a few children that have some behavior issues who need a little bit more help. I'm hugging, I'm checking in with them, I might sit down and read a book with them. I'm very seldom at my desk. I run to my desk, I do a few things and then I keep the phone on me. And pretty much once I do that, I may check my email, look at my mail real quick and then I'm right back downstairs. I don't really sit at my desk until about five o'clock. And I sit there and I may start doing some work. And I usually leave all your cast so about seven. So I have a very long day. But like I said, I love it. I just love doing it, so that's what happens. So I'm with Tulsa Educator and we actually have three in Tulsa currently. And Educator is a nationwide program. So it started in Chicago in 2000 and we just had our 10 year anniversary last August for in Tulsa. So we are an at risk school. We serve at risk populations. I have 160 children in my facility with 16 classrooms. We have 12 infant toddler rooms. So mixed age group between six weeks old, three years old. Eight children about with two to three teachers. And then I have four preschool rooms that is four to five or I'm sorry, three to four year olds. And then about 17 children and again two to three teachers. Oklahoma is not doing great in a lot of things but we are leading the nation in early childhood education. So we have actually universal pre-K programs, four year old programs and all of our public schools. So most of our children head there. So that's why we just have the three to four year olds. But again, we're serving the at risk populations. So we have blended funding as well. We have some early hazard start money, some OECP money which is a local one but DHS money, those kind of things. We do the food program as well. But we're really trying to eliminate the achievement gap that at risk children typically have when they enter kindergarten. So what we found is the longer they're in our program the less of an achievement gap there is. So for some of our kids that have been in our program a couple of years they're entering pre-K or kindergarten the same as any other child would be which is really exciting for them because as you guys know at any time you start out behind it's really hard to catch up. So that's a little bit about our program. And then my typical day we're also open 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and we're a year round program so we're always going, they're going now. I do have a great team that supports the school and I. So I have master teachers that supervise and coach the classroom. I have a mental health specialist. I have an assistant director who does a lot of the family piece of it. So we have family advocates that support the families. Our families are some of the most at risk so we have a lot of risk factors that we're trying to support them through and empower them to be advocates for themselves and for their children. So we have a lot of programs that we offer for the families. We have reading night once a month. We have hallway happenings. We have nutrition class weekly. We've got lots of things going on for the families and the children. But my typical day it starts around 7 a.m. and I try to get my office as much as possible just to get that work done because there's the budget and there's the data. Where data and research is a huge piece of what we do. So we have all of our classrooms assessed annually. Our children get assessments done on them twice a year and we've got all this data that we're looking at to help us change our practice or continue doing pieces or stop doing pieces and that kind of thing. We spend a lot of time with data. We have lots of data meetings and such but I do try to get around and say hi to the classroom staff and the families and my door is always open. So that's why it's hard for me to get work done because when you have an open door, it's often moving but I really appreciate that and I've been in this role for over three years and so I might finally be getting the hang of it. Great, thank you all for sharing. It sounds like a lot of similarities and a lot of very busy long days. So up what you just shared, do you think you could, what do you believe is the most important part of your job or what role do you play that you feel is most important? You're all wearing a lot of hats throughout the day. You have something ready? I think for me, the most important part of my day, the most important part of my job is empowering my staff and my families and my children to be the best that they can be and as the research shows, the teaching staff are the ones that are in there engaging with the children, doing the intentional activities and intentional teaching and they're the ones that are interacting with the families the most often. So I just really want to empower them to do the best that they can do and come and ask for help when they need it and the same for our families. We know we only have them with us for a short amount of time so we want to empower them to be the best advocate they can for themselves and their families. Engaging the families, connecting with them, making sure that we're meeting their needs and not assuming that this is what they want and helping them to prepare, to transition to the bigger picture, the bigger school and helping them become advocates. So really connecting with the families and I find when they're happy, the children are happy and it's not a problem when you ask for permission. So yeah, yeah, so that's always a big part and most of our money does come from private paying families. I'm going to jump in and say building capacity in all our learners from the little ones up through our adults who have their masters and going on to the higher levels of education. I think some people don't always believe what they have inside them and what they can deliver to kids. So part of my role is finding out those strengths and enhancing those strengths as best I can and removing any barriers there in the way of people moving ahead, be it budget or space or safety or any of those things. You're comment about giving tours. That's probably one of the best things I can do. With School of Choice in Wisconsin, it's all about competitive schools and making sure you put your best foot forward and I love bringing parents and families into classrooms. A family will come in, a one year old in the arms and a two and a four year old tagging along behind and I'll walk them right in the classrooms and they'll start interacting with kids. So our staff knows that when we're on a tour, they're gonna find out what's going on in school and there's nothing right. So I think going back to the original question, building capacity and people to understand just what is possible for them as educators and learners? A big challenge is just trying to motivate the staff, keep them motivated because they are underpaid and you're always constantly bringing in new information, new things that they need to do, adding to their workload. So just finding ways to just keep them really motivated and inspired to do what they do. That's always a big challenge also. So based on the answer you just gave, did you feel when you started as a principal or school director, did you feel prepared to do those things and if you could just reflect a little bit on your preparation, whether you wish you had known before you became a leader that you didn't get in your preparation? I had no preparation for this. I taught fourth, fifth and sixth grade. I taught splits of four, five and five, six in a rural school. After a year and a half of teaching, I became the building principal. So I had to become very active in the school along teaching and managing it. I think I've learned so much in the past 22 years primary school from proper use of vocabulary and how to relate to kids versus seventh and eighth graders who are to hold a different world and understanding the role of support services, OT and PT and speech and language and recognizing those people as being experts and how much they can teach me. So preparation was slim and none and so I was on a fast track when I hit the primary school about learning from those who have committed their lives to three, four, five, six-year-olds. That's why I get mine. I think for me was just really trying to understand how the state pays the childcare assistance part. I really didn't have a clear understanding of how that worked and of course at the beginning 20 years ago you had to do a lot of stuff by hand and so I really at the beginning lost a lot of money because not having a clear understanding of how it works and what was required for families and for me for the center to be able to get paid so that was like a big issue for me and then also just trying to collect tuition, collect tuition and making sure we had enough money in the budget to make sure everyone would get paid and get paid on time so that part was really difficult. I think working with the families I had a good understanding of how I work with patients and so I pretty much understood the culture that I was working with but it was really just understanding how to keep the flow of funding coming in and then tap it into resources. I didn't have a clear understanding of that at all. The business piece wasn't difficult. It's just understanding how to get those fundings in from the state. Yes, what was required? So yeah, I don't think they prepare you well for teaching in the classroom and they definitely don't prepare you well for managing a school but I jumped in and got the hang of it eventually. I think one of the things I kind of wished I had known then was the best way to help staff and parents feel heard. I think a lot of times when people walk in my office they just want to be heard. They're not necessarily looking for me to fix it. They just want to be heard and that's a huge piece of education what we do is reflection and so I feel like that's part of what helps me be successful. It sounds like a lot was learned on the job and in real time. Is there, do you participate in any type of ongoing professional development or anything that was particularly helpful? Do you have supports like that? It's ironic, since I got this invitation went out from our state CESA's. CESA's are Cooperative Education Service Agencies and throughout the state they're offering full day seminars early childhood and 4K programs for directors, principals, administrators and it was just like, so I get the call from Abby and here comes the invitation so I sent it, I went right to my superintendent and I said I'm going to go to this in October. So it's those kinds of things are ongoing but I think we need to give it another real shove because you can get buried in the content and the curriculum and way too easy. It's just kind of the nature of the business so we really have to refocus on that and your paper speaks to that about what we need to do so. It's one thing, I serve on a principals board at a small university in Wisconsin and one of the things that I'm going to be encouraging is for us to have a strand of development for 3K, three principals beyond technology and personalized learning and trauma in schools we could certainly have a strand for this self but we do have professional developers. One of the things I did to really help with the business side of it was I linked myself into the small business network that we have there in New Orleans and we have several so I'm a part of the good work network, small business network so they're always having free trainings on like quick books and then you can get the quick book CDs, et cetera. They have things on how to put your business on social media, it's always free things that you can attend and I always try to go to those different classes. I look for things that I think would really benefit Royal Castle on the business side and then I also connect with, we have a group of directors that we come together monthly and so a lot of times there's things I don't know I can ask another director and they can share information all the time and then we have a way of saying you know what, we need more help on writing our handbook, our human resources piece and then we can get that brought in to the person to come in and talk to all of us. Sometimes they don't wanna talk to just one but they'll come in and talk to a group of directors so I'm always participating in that and then when you go to this you can get your clock hours that we need for the state. So it's a way where you're getting what you need but you're also getting your clock hours that serve what we need for the licensing and then there's always things like with NACI because I'm a NACI accredited I try to go to a lot of the conferences that they have I mean I'm always looking because I really wanna make sure that we have a solid, solid center and then of course collaboration as a big piece so yes, professional development. So I'm lucky because I'm part of the education network so we get together and have communication back and forth and then there's also three educators that tell us so most of my professional development as far as my role probably comes just internally a couple of online classes and some conferences and things but we have great professional development for classroom staff for sure and just mine is kind of here and there and from those that are in the field that have had more experience than me is a great way to learn. So Mike I know you participated in the Pre-K Third Group with the National Association of Elementary School Principles and you have it with you here today. If you could just tell us a little bit about that process and what you learned through that role. Representatives from around the country through the National Association of Elementary School Principles met in Alexandria three years ago and we put together a continuum of competencies for the effective Pre-K Third Principle and it was an outstanding opportunity to share research and stories and narratives about what was going on, what was going on in classrooms and so what this does it gives principles a chance to take a look at where they're strong and where they're weak and places where you can self-reflect and see what you can do for setting goals and so forth. So it's a handbook, this isn't a binder but any ESP put it in a spiral so it's one of those that you can leave open and you can turn back the page and it's real handy. The one I have back in the office has got tags on it and highlighting and so forth. So it's, I also share it with new aspiring principles in our school who are in the graduate program so I can tell them here's some things that can help you when you're thinking about where you want to go with your graduate work but this was a document that was Kelly Povat and this team really helped push and last little commercial at the National Principles Conference last week in Philadelphia there were professional development strands about Pre-K Three and what's happening with ESSA and funding and all those kind of components that as principles we really need to know about but this is a terrific piece that all Pre-K Three principles should get their hands on. Thanks. I think this is the last question we have time for before I'll include this panel but what would make your job as an early education leader more effective? Is there some type of support that you need that you're not getting or if that doesn't apply maybe a piece of advice you have for early education leaders? Probably what the ladies have talked a little bit about when you're getting into classrooms and you're offering feedback to staff about what they're doing. I visit classrooms, an average teacher sees me about somewhere between five and 10 times a year formally or informally and somewhere on cohorts for evaluation. What I'd like to be able to do is have more shared feedback after visiting classrooms and that I could talk with somebody. In the past I've had mentees from universities where they learned about the practice of being a principal and some of the best conversations we have is observing a classroom, leaving the classroom and then talking about what we both saw. That's one of the best things. Getting feedback and sharing feedback and really help you growing and acquire insights that you might not get otherwise. So that would be one of the things I'd like to do more of as well as getting feedback about what I'm doing. I get seen once a year by my superintendent sometimes twice a mid-year evaluation. But I'd like to get more feedback from him about pre-K3 and what we're doing to enhance pre-K3. So those are the two pieces. I guess for me would be more of what we're doing right now, getting the word out there, letting other people know out there how important zero to five is. That this is a very important age for our young children and that the people that care and educate these children, they matter. And it's really hard for someone to go on their job and do what they love every day. But then when they take home their check, they're still having to apply for food stamps and they don't have really good housing. They really cannot have a toothache and you're working with a toothache because you don't have the money, you're trying to save money to just go to the dentist. I just think that this is important and why not pay the people that care for these children and educate these young children. The same fare, depending on whatever else, they could have chose another profession but they decided to do this. Why not pay them what they're worth and what they do? So I just think if we can get more money into zero to five, it would be so much better and it would be, you could really inspire and motivate our staff and they'll be happy. So I guess that's the biggest piece for me. And then just change the way we say the name. Stop saying daycare and nursery and it's, we're educating and we're caring for our young children and we should call it what it is and not say. So I just think we're moving and I love it. I love it. So you're not there yet though. I think they both brought out great points. I think the importance of having peers that you can interact with is really helpful. And because this is a hard job, just like the teacher's job is hard. And yeah, I mean, pay for our teachers that are doing this amazing work to move our children forward. And just the policies, the funding for this work. This work is expensive and childcare is expensive. And yeah, we see ourselves as a school as well and so it would be great for more people to see it that way and that will hopefully help move us forward. That's all we're out of time for today but thank you so much for sharing. Give a hand for the panel. And we'll have time for questions at the end of the event. So if you have questions for them, hang on and they'll be able to answer at the end too. And again, anyone following along on Twitter use the hashtag 3K leaders and we'll be screening Twitter for questions as well. So thank you all again. Please join me in thanking our first panel once again. Their perspectives are so important to this conversation. And now welcome up Abby who will talk about the findings from her report. Can you hear me? I don't know if my, can you hear me? Yeah, okay, great. So yeah, thank you to our first panelists for telling us more about your roles as early childhood education leaders. While the job of principals and center directors are not identical, I hope that conversation shed light on some of the similarities between the two. Whether it's in an elementary school, a pre-K center or child care center, leaders are responsible for determining how well their programs run day to day and they influence the quality of learning experiences off to children. Those center directors and principals are usually expected to be both operational and instructional leaders. They often are responsible for making sure finances are in order for often limited resources, for recruiting, retaining and managing personnel, and for communicating with families. They may also select curriculum assessments and also work closely with teachers to ensure that they are best serving students. Principals and center directors essentially establish conditions for quality of the rest of the staff. For these leaders to know whether their teachers are providing appropriate instruction to their students and to best support both teacher and child development, they must understand how young children learn. So this year, New America conducted a 50 state scan of policies on leader preparation requirements, licensure, professional learning and compensation. We wanted to shed light on the current expectations for center directors and principals, identify areas for improvement in state policy, and highlight states that are leading on leaders. So these are some of the job responsibilities and tasks that we saw in common when we talked to principals and center directors and many of them came up today during our panel. So even though their days are spent similarly and their programs are serving some of the same kinds of students, the state policies and standards that establish requirements for principals and center directors look very different. Our scan of state policies shows how these roles are treated differently both across and within states. Past research has shown that principals too often come to their jobs without a strong understanding of how young children learn. On the center director side, they're often well versed in child development that have limited training and instructional leadership. We found that state policies are doing little to address these issues. Despite the similarities in their jobs, center directors are consistently held to lower standards and often given less support than elementary school principals. So our team partnered with the McCormick Center for early childhood leadership to collect data on state leader policies. We collected the data via survey to state departments of education. We also scanned state websites and did a comprehensive review of state child care licensure laws, child care director credential requirements, and quality rating and improvement systems. The McCormick Center's work culminated in the lead early childhood clearinghouse, which I encourage you to check out on their website. It's a really excellent resource that gives a lay of the land for leaders and we'll be hearing more about it from Terry Talin on our next panel. So we collected information about state early childhood education leader policies in these four areas. Preservice requirements, inservice requirements, compensation and retention, and efforts to encourage diversity. In addition to our 50 state policy scan, we also conducted interviews with multiple center directors and principals around the country to learn more about their roles, similar to the conversation we had this morning. So preservice was our first and largest category and by preservice we mean any preparation prior to officially leading a program. So here's a list of the five indicators we had for state preservice policies for principals. We looked at minimum education level, grade span of state's license, specific coursework in early childhood education, prior teaching experience and clinical experience. And in the interest of time today, I'm just gonna highlight a few of our findings, but all of them are laid out in the report. So first we asked states what is the minimum education requirement to be an elementary school principal. There is actually limited research around the appropriate amount of post-secondary coursework for principals, but all states seem to agree that being an elementary principal requires formal training beyond a bachelor's degree. We found that 40 states require elementary school principals to have a master's degree or higher. Those are shown in the darkest color and then Connecticut is the only one in the very darkest color. So it's not whether a principal's training culminates in a master's degree that necessarily matters, but whether he or she gains the specialized knowledge and skills needed to lead an elementary school. More coursework might mean more opportunities to master the competencies needed, but it's really the relevance and quality of the learning opportunities that matter most. Unfortunately, we also found that most states do not require preparation programs to offer any coursework around early learning or child development. Only two states require elementary school principals to have prior teaching experience in elementary schools, and only a handful of states reported that they require elementary principals to have clinical experience in an elementary school. Here are pre-service indicators for center directors. So we looked at minimum education level, amount of prior work experience required, and whether the state offers the director credential. The Seminole Transforming the Workforce Report released two years ago by the National Academy of Sciences recommends that all early childhood leaders, center directors included, earn at least a bachelor's degree with specialized training in the field. NACI, Child Care Aware, and Head Start also view a bachelor's degree as best practice. State qualification requirements for center directors, however, are all over the map and are usually far less than what the experts recommend. Low educational requirements can make it difficult for aspiring center directors to gain the knowledge they need to be effective leaders. They need to know the basics of running a business because like Perley, they are often in charge of an independent program that isn't part of a school district. They also need to have a strong understanding of child development and early learning, especially since they're a leading staff who may have limited education and training themselves. These topics are not usually covered with a high school diploma, yet seven states do not require center directors to have any formal higher education or training. Those are shown here in the lightest color. 12 states require at least some college coursework and seven states require an associate's degree. Currently only New Jersey, Vermont, and soon Washington, DC will require center directors to have a bachelor's degree for licensure and that has been very controversial in DC. This map might be difficult to read, so I encourage you to look at it on page 15 of your report. There's a lot of categories. So here are takeaways for pre-service. The professional preparation standards for elementary school principals are consistently more rigorous than those for center directors. Most states require principals to have a master's degree, prior teaching experience, and clinical experience for their preparation programs. However, most state laws do not emphasize the unique knowledge and skills principals need to lead schools with younger children. In some states, it's possible to be an elementary school principal without ever having worked in an elementary school. State policies related to center directors are not as clear-cut or consistent. State licensing standards tend to focus more on basic health and safety than on teaching and learning, and as a result, center directors in most states are only expected to have minimal education and training. However, the education training that is outlined in licensing standards is usually focused on early childhood education, child development, and administration. Some child care centers are subject to regulations that place a higher emphasis on quality, such as Head Start, national accreditation standards, or State QRIS, as we heard from our panelists this morning. So next are in-service indicators. So while aspiring principals and center directors may be best reached through a preparation program, leaders already in the field also need opportunities to learn and improve their skills. Even the most seasoned leaders can benefit from high-quality, ongoing professional learning. Here are the in-service indicators we looked at for principals. So does the state offer professional learning around early childhood or pre-kethered alignment? We found that only a handful of states do. Does the state offer joint professional learning for elementary school principals and center directors? Again, only a handful of states do that. And does the state require principals to be formally evaluated? All states require that, but as we heard this morning, that's not, doesn't necessarily mean it's effective. And here are the in-service indicators we looked at for center directors. So whether director qualifications are included in state quality rating and improvement systems and whether center directors are required to be evaluated. No state requires center directors to be evaluated. We had to limit the number of indicators on the center director's side just because there's a lack of data. So the findings are all laid out in the report, but I'll just go over the takeaways in the interest of time. So overall, we found that states can do more to support meaningful professional learning for both principals and center directors, while states and districts have some requirements and resources in place to support professional learning for principals. Very few states are specifically directing that support toward helping principals become stronger pre-k leaders. States often have less infrastructure in place for center director professional learning. QRIS appears to be the primary way that states are encouraging directors to pursue further education and training. So here are the indicators we looked at for compensation and retention for principals. We looked at average salary, types of benefits packages, and whether the states track turnover. And in the interest of time again, we're just gonna talk about salary. So we think principals deserve compensation that appropriately reflects their significant responsibilities, high level of education, and past work experience. The average salary for principals was about $90,000 as of May, 2015, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This ranged from about 67,000 in West Virginia to 124,000 in New Jersey. The salaries are not disaggregated by elementary and secondary school, and elementary school principals are usually paid less than secondary school principals. So the numbers are probably a little lower than the leaders that we're talking about. We only had one indicator on compensation for center directors, again, because of limited data. And center director salaries remain low across most states and lower than principals in all states. The average salary for a child care center director in 2015 was $52,000. This ranged from about 39,000 in Tennessee to about 68,000 in Washington, DC. And again, we were unable to determine the types of benefits included because there isn't data on that nationally. So this graphic, I think, is interesting. It shows how leader salaries compare across and within states. So center director salaries are shown in blue and principal salaries are in teal. In this picture, I've just taken a screenshot and selected Colorado as an example. But you can see that Colorado center director salary is around 48,000, and their principal salary is about twice as much as 86, and it does vary a lot by state. So this is on our live website, which I'll show you in a second so you can play around and see how your state compares. So despite their similar responsibilities, center directors overseeing pre-K classrooms are compensated at a rate much lower than elementary school principals. This type of disparity is true throughout early childhood education when comparing the child care workforce to the K-12 workforce. Especially if states are going to be requiring center directors to have higher levels of education and training, there needs to be additional public investment to help pay for better compensation, to help these leaders afford more schooling, and to retain them once their qualifications increase. Adequate compensation is key to retaining a high-quality workforce, and leader turnover is disruptive for all staff and can ultimately diminish the quality of care and education for children, and leader turnover is high among both center directors and principals because they're both such demanding jobs. So leader diversity is our last bucket of indicators, and this is an area that we really wanted to explore in our scan because it's hugely important. All students, but especially those from culturally and racially diverse backgrounds, benefit from having diverse school teachers and leaders. Despite their growing ethnic diversity of students in American public schools, 80% of principals are white according to the U.S. Department of Education. Another study from UT Austin and Columbia University found that there may be systemic, gendered and racial biases in principal pathways that lead to an overrepresentation of white male principals. In our survey, we asked states if they had financial incentives and supports in place to encourage diverse candidates to become principals, and no states reported any meaningful efforts to increase diversity. While the child care workforce is more ethnically and racially diverse than the K-12 teaching workforce, people of color have limited representation in administrator and director roles. One concern with increasing the education and training requirements for center directors is that it could reduce the existing diversity in the workforce, requiring expensive degrees without opportunities for scholarships or substantially higher compensation, could discourage early childhood educators who, as we discussed, are making very little money from pursuing leadership roles. McCormick surveyed states and none reported initiatives with the primary purpose of increasing diversity among center directors. So while there's much work that can be done at the local level, states have significant power to improve leader preparation requirements because they're the ones responsible for program approval and they can reform licensure. We think states would benefit from acknowledging the similarities between the roles of elementary school principals and center directors over seeing pre-K classrooms. Here are recommendations for states and this is starting with principal policies. So we'd like to see states embed early childhood education throughout principal preparation courses. States should require teaching experience or clinical experience, specifically in an elementary school. They should offer ongoing professional learning opportunities on early education for principals. And they should track principal turnover and salaries and use the data to determine how districts can better support leaders. On the center director side, we'd like to see states increase center director qualifications to reflect the research on child development and early learning. States should increase infrastructure for child care to improve center director wellbeing and retention. This includes more public investment. States should increase center directors opportunities for professional learning. And lastly, we recommend that states streamline state regulations and eliminate redundancies. As we heard this morning and as Laura and I heard in a lot of our interviews, center director spend a lot of time answering to competing regulations, licensing standards, QRIS, national accreditation. And this is time that we think could be better spent being instructional leaders and focusing on their staff and families that they're serving. So I don't know if I can actually, I was hoping I could click that, but there's no screen up here for me. So that's the link to the online data visualization. And it's all of this, all of the maps are screenshots from that. So it's live, you can go on there, click your state, see what all the data is, there's sources of where we got that data and compare your state to other states. So I really encourage you to check that out. And now I will turn it over to Laura for our next panel. For the second panel, I'm joined this morning by Christy Cowers in the middle who is a research assistant professor and director of the National P3 Center at the University of Washington. Marika Cox Mitchell, who's right next to me, deputy executive director for Early Learning Systems at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. And all the way on my left is Terri Talin. She is the Michael W. Lewis Chair and Senior Policy Advisor at the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership. Thank you for joining me here this morning. And as we get our discussion started, the first question is about your reflections on the report and the data that Abby just shared and feel free to bring in any reflections you have on the first panel as well and some of the discussion around roles and responsibilities and similarities and differences between principals and center directors. Who'd like to start? First of all, I just want to say how pleased I was and continue to be with the partnership that we had with New America in collecting the data and finding that we both had a lot to say in slightly different ways in terms of disseminating and reporting the findings. So I hope to have a chance to talk about some of those differences in a moment. I think the thing that strikes me from both the reports and from our first panel was how in many ways there is more expected of directors of high quality early childhood centers in the sense that they have this balancing act of all the different funding streams and they also have so much less in the way of resources from what they don't have a district to support them a superintendent to support them. They're responsible for raising the money as well as figuring out how to report, et cetera. And so at the same time that there are a bigger range of responsibilities, the expectations for their preparation and what they need to know and be able to do is just so much less than what we expect of principals. So I think the panel just really brought home in real, real time what the findings of the report shed light on. In addition to that, it was great to see you highlight our identity crisis, that there are a lot of ambiguity and complexities related to preparation, expectations for practice, evaluation, certainly compensation. And when we argued that those are all interconnected and the variation across settings, I think language matters. It was pointed out in the first panel and we saw it throughout the report. Just the language we use, the word use sometimes do not communicate that the work of comparable. Thanks for highlighting the diversity issue. I think in many ways early childhood education we celebrate the diversity. When we start to unpack the data we realize that diversity of the workforce, we don't see that at the leadership level. So being intentional about diversity and addressing some of those systemic barriers will be important. I think I was also taken aback by the recommendations for the state. In many ways, when I read the recommendations for states, I interpreted them to be recommendations for the profession. That the profession must provide clarity to the states as we look at other professions to see that's how they're organized. The professions organize themselves and provide clarity. If I was to where my state administrator had right now, I would ask you as early childhood educators, so what level of preparation should principals need? What kind of early childhood courses? What should evaluation systems look like? And I think in many ways we give our leadership and sort of turn it over to the states when we need to own our profession and make some of those decisions so that I was able to talk to those policies. Good effort to bring the profession together around doing this, that in a moment. But thank you for making that point. Kristi. I have several reflections on the report. First, I really want to applaud Abby and your team for taking a really complex issue and making it really consumable. As has already been stated, it's a pretty complicated comparison to make. Childcare center directors and elementary school principals. Well, they do have a lot in common. There's also vast differences. I think in particular in sort of the systems behind them, Terry as you pointed out and Maria as you have, so it's really not just a tale of two pre-K leaders, it's a tale of two systems that have different finance infrastructures. One is sort of independent fundraising and family private pay. The other is substantial local levies, state investments. If we look at accountability infrastructures, the systems behind these people are radically different and I think that's really important as we think through sort of policy actions. I also think it's really important to think about and this is a little bit to your point, Marika, about the role of states. States aren't the only players in this. Federal government is, local entities are, in many cases, school districts are establishing policies around principal expectations. We also need to look at the role of higher ed as someone who comes from higher ed. When we think about pre-service and or in-service, the higher ed system is incredibly important and also fairly fractured. Within colleges of education, the faculties that instruct early childhood, professional development, pre-service are almost entirely different from the faculties who instruct in principal preparation programs. How do we think about uniting those? And then I think two last points. One is I want to caution that we don't, we may not always need a one-to-one correlation from system to system. So for example, Abby made the point that center directors are not evaluated in the same way that principals are. I could also argue elementary schools don't have a comprehensive quality check like QRIS does provides on the early childhood side. And so I think there's pros and cons, but to assume a one-to-one correlation that what's good for the birth to five side is equally good for the K-12 side may be a false equivalency. And then I think my last point, which probably won't surprise many people who know my work is that I hesitate, especially on the principal side, to put so much emphasis on pre-K when we know that the K-3 years needs substantive readdressing as well. And so if we can sort of think about the full continuum of learning birth through third grade or fifth grade as sort of help shift principal practice around that full continuum, I think it's going to be, we'll have spillover effects pre-K will get better, but so will those primary grades. And we'll come back to you to talk more about that in just a minute. So, Terry, thank you for bringing up our partnership. And it was in, I'll just take a minute. Last fall we realized that McCormick and New America were sort of working on similar, not exactly the same, but similar projects. And we decided that instead of collecting duplicative data that we divide and conquer, and so McCormick helped us collect data around center directors and we shared our data around principals. So it was a great partnership there. And so I'd love to have you talk a little bit about the LEED Clearing House, which is ultimately where McCormick's were culminated in. I'm just going to change this one. Executive summary of this work, and it is an interactive website that displays a map showing the demographics and statistics cross-sector for the leadership workforce across the country. And so we use the same data, but I think that some of our findings differed slightly. And our intent is to keep this website live and updated in an ongoing basis, and once a year to publish a report online, the way it is now, that looks at the benchmark status of each of the states. So one of the things that we did was create a way of rating states their policies related to supporting effective early childhood leadership workforce. And so partly that was to get people really interested in digging into the data. And partly because we think that policies really matter and that there are, we have many policies in this area, but we can, unlike with the teaching workforce, to look at leadership workforce in silos. And so one of the big takeaways for us in doing the work on the LEED Clearinghouse is to say that we need to not just look at what's how we prepare school-based leaders and how we prepare community-based leaders, or we need to look at them holistically and look at the policies together. And in case anybody wants to know what the LEED stands for, I'm gonna tell you just, because it's not, your guess is probably pretty close. It's for leadership education for administrators and directors. So that's the LEED part. And it came from the work of a collaborative that I'm a part of, the LEED Early Childhood Collaborative, which was a partnership of several organizations and individuals coming together to identify and close the leadership gap. And it started with realizing that our major sources of data collection on leadership have been completely disparate and there hasn't been a good way of looking at that data holistically. And so it was Sherry Cleary from New York Early Childhood Professional Institute, and M.A. Lucas, who's best known for the Military Child Care Act and Sue Russell from Teach Early Childhood National Center and myself and colleague Mike Abel, who came together to really think about strategizing how we're going to move the needle on improving policies. So I don't know if you want me to go into any detail about what those policy levers are. They can be found on our website, but basically we're looking at the qualifications as they're required in policy around child care licensing, principal licensure, administrator credential issued at the state level, administrator qualifications in state-funded pre-K and administrator qualifications in state QRIS. And looking at them as a whole on a rubric, it comes up with an overall score for states and how they did with administrator qualifications that support effective leadership in all settings that children are in. And the highest score possible would have been a 10. We had one state Pennsylvania that achieved a six and two other states that got a five. So as a nation, our policies have a long way to improve. Going back to what you introduced, I know NNA-RACI has launched an initiative to help professionalize the early childhood field birth to eight and provide at a basic level common sense of expectations for birth to third grade educators. So can you talk a little bit, just give us an overview of that initiative, but also specifically the role of leaders within that work? So NNA-RACI launched the Power to the Profession Initiative that is a national profession led initiative to advance the early childhood education profession. We're gonna take two years, 2017 to the end of 2018, to have this internal inward facing conversation that ends up with a unifying framework to define the early childhood education profession. So everything from what language are we using to call ourselves to where do we need to get prepared? We talk a lot about higher ed, but I will argue that we haven't given higher ed very clear expectations about what we want their graduates to know and be able to do. We're gonna have conversations around scope of practice, meaning what should individuals in this profession at any level be responsible for, what tasks we're gonna hold them accountable for performing. We're gonna definitely talk about compensation because we feel like our inability to coherently describe what we do negatively impacts our case for compensation. We see this as a major compensation on Fiji and this is gonna be consistent across setting that we're gonna be settings agnostic and talk about the role of the profession in that manner. And at the end of 2018, what we'll have is a coherent unifying framework for how we talk about the profession and use that to move forward with an aggressive policy and financing agenda. So the role of the administrators right now, what we've said is that those individuals providing instructional leadership as part of their responsibilities are a member of the early childhood education profession and therefore must meet whatever guidelines we've identified. We also acknowledge that there are other professions and occupations in the early childhood education field along with the early childhood educators and business and business administrators are also a part of this field. But their role is not synonymous to the early childhood educators role. And certainly they will need, will encourage them to have some level of early childhood education understanding, but the depth and breadth of that should not look as, it will look for the early childhood educators who will be held responsible for implementing best practices. So certainly leaders have a role. We're gonna zoom in on the instructional leaders role. And I think this is a point for us to acknowledge that it could provide new leadership opportunities for the early childhood profession, maybe a new category of early childhood educators. Mr. Early to tell right now, I think if we talk about leadership using the current labels and our current complexities, language like principles, assistant principles, center directors, assistant directors, it makes that conversation challenging because those labels mean different things in different settings. I think it would mirror what we have, but also gave us room to perhaps define new leadership roles within the profession. So you started and operate a P3 executive leadership program at the University of Washington and understand that aims to build, and I've had the opportunity to visit and have seen that it really brings leadership teams together and aims to support both principles and non-public school early childhood administrators together. So why this craft sector approach? I mean, we really are focused on these issues of silos that have come up that we have these different systems. And while there are certainly policy changes that need to occur within each of those systems to sort of change and up the qualifications and support provided to K-12 administrators and to early learning administrators. But we also realized the importance of relationships in actually doing this work at the ground level. State policy is really important, but ultimately you want that state policy to influence implementation, to influence what children actually experience day in and day out. So part of the strategy and the design of our program, which is a 10 month long credit bearing course of study that co-enrolls administrators from the K-12 world, so principals, assistant principals, central office administrators, with their counterparts in the birth to five world, center directors, program managers. And we encourage them to come as teams because we know that principals are working or should be working with a discrete set of early learning folks in their catchment area. Those kids from birth to five programs are feeding into certain elementary schools. So we really want to encourage co-enrollment of teams of leaders who should be working together in implementation. In this sense, they're getting common knowledge and skills. They all attend the same classes. We don't actually split them up in the coursework. They're all getting the same lectures, doing the same assignments. And so in that respect, we're sort of equalizing the knowledge base. But another really important part of our program is an action research project where we ask our teams to actually think about how to change their practice at home on behalf of young learners, plan it together, together, collaboratively planning and strategizing, and then going back into their local districts and communities and implementing it. So in this case, we're, as I said, not only getting common knowledge and skills, but also building common shared practice back home in local communities. It is both a really exciting model and it's challenging, even to make it a credit-bearing course of study, because, as has already been pointed out, some of our birth to five people don't yet have bachelor's degrees. Some of our principals have doctorates. So how do you sort of get even the course numbering right in higher ed so that those credits can be beneficial to both bachelor's degree seekers and folks who may or may not even want any additional college credit? So that's forced us at the program administration level to navigate all of these systems at the state level. We've worked with our state standards board, which governs K-12 issues, to sort of work on getting our course to count in principals trajectories. And we've worked with our department of early learning to make sure our course counts towards the core competencies and career ladders for our early childhood folks. So there's a lot of burden on us as those who run the program, which I think is fine, because it ultimately benefits the enrollees. But I do really believe this cross-sector approach is what's going to change the game for the full continuum of learning birth all the way through third grade. Sure, I didn't have to do this in advance, but I think people would be interested to just provide an example of an action research project and what that has looked like. There's been so many great ones. We're in our fourth year of implementation, and so we have about 12 to 14 teams per year. So we're now approaching approximately 50 action research projects that have been implemented in the state of Washington. And they range everywhere from sort of data issues because we know that one of the challenges in this is the data portability pre-K teachers might know a lot about the kids in their classrooms, but is that information then being shared with kindergarten teachers? And our kindergarten teachers then sharing information with first grade teachers, and our first grade teachers sharing with second grade teachers. So some of our action research projects have focused on both what data are collected, so really thinking about what's a common formative assessment process that can then be shared grade level to grade level in program to program and community program elementary schools. Others action research projects have focused on family engagement and really thinking about how to both improve the quality of family engagement strategies and again sort of equalize. Early childhood tends to be stronger around family engagement issues than public schools. And so this is another thing I love about the cross-sector approach is that we get to push up some of the best practices from early childhood into elementary schools. It's not just a push down of elementary school expectations onto early childhood. So really empowering some of our early childhood folks to partner with their school peers, their school colleagues in thinking about changing family engagement strategies. I could go on for the future projects. I just want to pick up if I could a little bit about the higher ed piece that you're talking about because it's come up in each of our conversations. McCormick Center is a part of National Lewis University and we have prided ourselves in making sure that all the professional learning opportunities that come out of the McCormick Center are available for college credit and are linked to the competencies of our credentials and also feed into degree programs at the university. But they're not the leadership education programs for principals. And so I applaud what Christie has shared with us because it's not easy getting professional development to count for college credit let alone count towards a degree but bridging that gap between the departments of early childhood and the ed leadership departments that's like the highest bar. And so that's I think the cutting edge as we move into cross sector professional development and professional learning is it needs to count. And so many of our leaders in the community based settings really needed to count towards degrees. And so as I look at what's going on around the country we don't have enough of what you're doing in Washington. I just wanted to share that. Having a common set of competencies that certainly is from a cross sector but also across states will also help that having this unifying framework of competencies will then help to support articulation from two year to four year as well as some high quality professional training programs into higher ed. So having this unifying foundation and unifying framework helps with that as well. And keeping on with higher ed. It seems like with principles and while there is not a national standard but generally every state requires a master's degree it seems like it'll always be more complicated than it seems but plugging those competencies into that sort of existing licensing and standard in states or for principles. But for directors there's not, there's states are all over the map and higher ed when states are moving and DC most recently included moving towards requiring a BA for directors. Sometimes it's just a BA. Sometimes it's a BA in early childhood education which is also what we're talking about for lead teachers but is that BA in early childhood education enough to plug in a set of competencies for leaders are there, higher ed director programs on the pre-service side? Can we talk more about that? How big of a lift is it actually going to be? I'm excited to talk about that. One of our findings that was really shocking is there's 87 times more programs to prepare principles than there are for preparing center directors or other leaders outside the school system. So the preparation gap is huge and about half of those programs are at the two-year community college level. Those that are non-ed leadership school principle-based and half are at the four-year. But we really have a big task in front of us to develop national agreement about a unified foundation for what leaders need to know and be able to do and then to have higher ed be able to deliver it. But I also just have to take this opportunity to say it is not enough to have a bachelor's degree in early childhood to be an effective program leader. If you listen to all of our leaders who were on the last panel, they all stressed the areas that go way beyond the core knowledge of early childhood education and had to do with family engagement, have to do with community issues, with finances, with policy and advocacy. So there are many issues, let alone human resource allocation and talent development that are outside of what we think of as preparation in early childhood education. And those are the competencies that need to be more fully developed. But as we looked outward at other professions to see how they've organized their leadership structure, in some contexts leaders are a specialization. So you generalize, you gain your generalized content competencies like a bachelor's degree in early childhood education and then you opt to specialize in administration. So after you've received that strong base, then you go and get additional competencies through some specialization. So it could be that as we continuing having this conversation about the identity of leaders in this profession, we could explore some specialization structure. It might be obvious to many in the room, but I just want to make sure that we're also calling out the fragmentation that exists in the birth to five system. I mean, I have to say even as I'm sitting here listening to this conversation, are we talking about upping the qualifications for childcare center directors, which is one strand of state policy rules and regulations. Are we talking about upping the qualifications for state pre-K directors, a different strand of policy in many states, most states. And then there's also the head start strand. So this gets to the Marika's point about the profession needs to sort of agree. And then we have to tackle all of these different avenues for actually changing policy. It's not quite as clear cut as it is on the K-12 side where we just changed one law about K-12 preparation. We have to be looking at childcare pre-K and head start. And also assume that childcare will then also apply to family childcare and other sort of delivery mechanisms. Which leads to this larger policy question and how we really fix this problem and what the problem ultimately of leaders being able to provide teachers in whatever setting they are with the guidance and support that they need and the family piece and all of these different pieces. What are the roles of really, in your mind, the local community or school district, the state? Is there a role for the federal government to play? And once the profession gets itself together and has all of this beautiful unifying foundation set that we can use to make policy moves. Or any questions? It is a thorny question. And I keep thinking about something you said earlier about how even though policy, for principle, licensures set state by state, they've come together with great uniformity in terms of what those licensing standards look like. There isn't a huge amount of disparity in that regard, still room for improvement, but they do require basically additional competencies beyond the bachelor's degree in teaching. And I think we could arrive at something similar in terms of leaders writ large, whether they're Head Start directors or Center childcare pre-K directors. I think they're doing the same work and we should not allow the funding to determine the quality of leadership just like we don't want to allow market forces to determine the quality of the teaching. Children deserve, they have a right to high quality early learning experiences. And I think the policy that you're talking about at the national level has to develop after we move to a position of appreciating that early learning is a right for young children and we're just not there yet as a nation. I mean, I think there is a role for state, local, and federal government agencies. I think that at the state level, having a board that even license, early childhood educators and the leaders consistently, when they argue there, there isn't a comparable board for birth to five center directors as we use that term now. While the childcare licensing regulations provide a license to the program, they're not providing licenses to individuals in the program. And so states can definitely focus more on that. Of course, using guidelines established by the profession and ensuring that the funding, the public funding is in place to sustain high quality programs. I think the funding and coherent policies that are driven by the profession is where they should focus. As I said, I think this is a complicated issue. I do think policy is extraordinarily important and at least sort of sets the bar for expectation. We haven't sort of called out what Illinois did on the principal side. It is the only state that has put into state legislation that every principal, P-12, has to have some coursework in early childhood and child development. Now, my understanding is that's in state law. There's a lot of bumps along the way to actually make sure it's done well and done in a consistent fashion and the devil is always in those implementation details. But that kind of state policy has certainly set a really high standard for others to aspire to, higher ed to aspire to, and for principals to aspire to knowing what needs to be in their toolbox. So I think state policy is really important, but I also always wanna come back to the importance of engaging school districts and Head Start grantees and community-based child care communities. Implementation is what really matters. No matter what degree you have and no matter what state policy says, it's the practice of what's being enacted in classrooms day in and day out that's ultimately gonna make the difference. And that requires all of us. That's not a policy decision. That's really sort of an advocacy grassroots movement that I think is important. Bringing these two different sectors together, to work together, I think this is really important. Okay, so we're gonna open it up to audience questions now and Twitter as well, so if we have any questions from Twitter, we'll get those. But if anyone have a first question for our panel then feel free to have questions for the first panel or for Abby as well. We can just give them a mic. Quick questions and kind of different. One is about technology and the use of technology in early childhood settings. And I was wondering if this panel or the previous panel could anyone wants to speak to how you see the use of technology? Is it more for professional development for the educators within the classroom, for communicating with families? Do you see a role for instructional use with young children, three and four year olds? Is it all of the above? So that's one question. And then the other question is a question of language. We've talked about the semantics and how important language is. I wonder if anyone could speak to the language of the term readiness and kindergarten readiness. That's such a weighted phrase. At PBS Kids, we think about the metacognitive. We think about whole child and we're aware that people in the field when they hear readiness or kindergarten readiness, they think, oh, it's ABC's one, two, threes and we want our kids to be so much more about citizens and success and brilliant and achieving in all areas, not just in the formal classrooms. I wonder if folks could speak about the language and if there's a better term or if that term is okay. I'm happy to start and I'm gonna take your second question first, which is around the notion of readiness. And I wanna even expand it a little more back in the early 90s when readiness really took on prevalence thanks to the National Education Goals Panel. There was, the goal one was that all children should be ready to succeed. And so I think we often think about readiness as being on the back of children and what children should know and be able to do. But what's not talked about as much is that there was also a ready schools working group of the National Education Goals Panel that talked about the readiness of not just elementary schools, but programs and organizations and adults to be ready to support the learning of young children. And I really think we need to get back to that broader definition of readiness, that yes, children to be successful need to have a range of skills and abilities. And we also need to make sure that organizations and we as adults have certain skills and abilities in order to support every child where he or she is. So that's sort of my readiness answer to the technology question. It's so funny, this has come up multiple times in the last even 24 hours. I personally have a love-hate relationship with technology, especially in the professional development world because of the importance of relationships in this work. And so I am a big fan for technology in terms of access and especially making professional development and higher education accessible to populations that may or may not have geographic accessibility, financial accessibility. And I think technology is making higher ed better now that we have much more sophisticated video capabilities. You actually can observe people in classrooms and give real-time feedback. So I think there are some advantages, but I personally still really value the face-to-face sitting elbow-to-elbow grappling with problems together. So I think it's a both and. And in terms of technology, there are other experts in the room who can address this. But again, it comes back to relationships. Three- and four-year-olds should not be interacting so low with devices. It's all about the relational support with adults and caregivers around them and helping to guide that. So it's a bit of a dodging your question a little bit. It's all about implementation, how it's done and how well it's done. I've been involved in reviewing the content areas for our Illinois director credential. And one of our competencies has to do with technology and the question came up, do we still need this content area? After all, everybody is adept at using technology now. And through a deeper conversation, we basically said, no, we do still need this. And for the very reasons that Christy's talking about, because it's about how do you use technology appropriately, whether it's for higher ed, professional learning, building relationships with families. Sometimes technology is a great tool for that. So yes, we ended up deciding we're keeping it. So technology has a place in this work. We have a position statement on the use of technology in early learning settings. And we said, you definitely can use technology as an instructional support tool. You just have to ask the same questions you ask for every sort of tool you use in the classroom. Is this developmentally appropriate? How does it support the child's unique learning goals? And so yes, it can be used. It's just how it can be used is important. Technology readiness to our first panel if anyone with our school or center. And then invite either Lisa Grunty or Shayna Cook from our learning technologies project to just answer any, or address any, make any comments that they'd like. So anybody from our first panel? Nicole, could you bring the mic up to it? Yeah, I can, that's what I got for you. And Merton Community School District, whoa. There we go. Thanks. Excuse me. Line up for lunch. We have a, our teachers are Google certified. So that's the platform we go off of. Our EC4K are also Google certified. We look for a balance of personalized learning as well as motor planning, executive functioning, all those kinds of things, collaboration. Kids getting on the first steps of coding, but you do a lot of pre-coding work collaboratively. And so we have one of our tech integrators sitting down with our 4K kids and teachers in the classroom around a table planning out what they want this to look like. So, and then it goes to through 5K to grade two or two to one Chromebooks with kids. But how we maintain that balance of personalized learning and developmental stages as well as play. I heard the word push up or push back or push in and the balance of okay, first grade, don't tell 5K what to do anymore. 5K is going to tell first grade, this is how they're ready. And what does that readiness look like? Now you do your work based on the assessments we provide you. So it's finding more of that. Thanks. I had a partner with PBS in the past. And the way we work it at Owl Center it's on with the 3 and 4 yo's. And if they sit at a computer it must be with a friend. So they're never at a computer by themselves and then we have a time limit. And so the time limit is no more than I think it's like 10 minutes or something like that. But they get a chance to get on there and they navigate and the teacher incorporates that with the lesson plan. So it works together. So it has a purpose. And then with the readiness, we see readiness. I know a lot of parents come in and they talk about oh yeah I want my child to know ABC and be reading or almost reading et cetera. But parents have a place too. It's readiness for parents. And so I think we should include that because to help parents to be able to navigate in the school system, how to advocate all those pieces and that their role is important too and that they're their child's first teacher and not just put it on the school but also understand that they play a big role. So we also look at parents being ready and we do that in our parent meeting. We talk about okay you guys can do it. You are important. And that what you want for your child, I mean the schools have things that they want to push but there's things that you want to see happen for your child also. So parent readiness and child readiness. I think that they kind of hit on everything we follow in ACES guidelines. So I think those are kind of, it's all about balance, balance of work and for personal life, balance of technology and the non-use of technology and the relationship is the base of everything that we do at this point. This is Alisa Guernsey and I'm with the education policy program and look at these issues as well. This whole conversation, it strikes me, I'm glad this question was raised but I think we can't forget how many things these central directors and principals are juggling and so when we look at the question of technology we have to be really careful to recognize that if it's not approached in a way that it's integrated into what children really need to know and learn and what our adults really need to learn then it is just another burden and another thing for these professionals to deal with. So one of the areas that we're focusing in on is the concept of media mentors and helping a new set of professionals to help professionals and families and it's starting to feel especially given how much we've heard this morning about the just array of responsibilities that are placed on our leaders, the variability in their training. There really may need to be a new level of professional to help these professionals come to terms with what this really means. In this digital age these kinds of roles will be more and more important. Hi, I'm Molly Thomas. I'm a graduate student. Previously I was a public school teacher and a policy researcher. So my question is mostly for the principals and practitioners but the policy experts could also jump in. Chalked a lot about the inconsistency of support and training for both principals and center leaders. You also talked about how this person is the second most important person in the building in terms of driving excellence. So I'm wondering what degree of school level autonomy principals and center directors currently have in their respective pre-K and early learning settings and what level of autonomy should they have in their role? My former superintendent would give me enough rope to hang myself or to swing. That's the best way I can put it. I interviewed, I had a conversation with another superintendent about what if I wanted to try something a little more innovative and the superintendent said we'd have to bring that to our whole administrative team and we decided as a team and I went nope. I need to go someplace that the superintendent trusts the collaboration of the grade level teams and myself as educational experts and doing what's best for the kids. So autonomy will vary dramatically from K-12s, we're in a K-8 that sends our children to a 9-12. So I think it has to do a lot with productivity, the data that you're getting. If you're just spinning your wheels, you're not, I don't think anybody's gonna give you much rope. But we keep striving to feel good to grade. Now there's the grade to grader. That's out there. So when we establish a level for ourselves of performance, we darn better be sure we're gonna continue to do that. So to me the autonomy rests on results. Is the, I think you get more flexibility when you're bringing in the results that they're looking for. But there should always be the sense of accountability and responsibility. So although someone may be very successful doing, doing it completely on their own with nobody holding them accountable, there's still the importance of that because we're the leaders in molding these children to their first five years. I mean all the research is telling us how important those first five years are. So it's important that there's several people that are in the loop of what are we doing and what's working. Because I think it was very clear in all this research that there's not a lot of data out there about childcare facilities and what we're doing and what's working. So I think there should be a good balance of that as well. Like I said, Jack, we have a student showcase at every board meeting. And one of the student showcases we had last year was about 4K children. And two kids presented to the school board and the audience. And it was about using geometric figures. And the kids, Isabella, demonstrated how the gingerbread man could get from home to Candyland by using geometric figures and helping them understand you can use a triangle, a rectangle, and a square in different patterns for the gingerbread man to get there. She was awesome. Very articulate and I said, well, could I change the pattern, Isabelle? Of course you could. So that kind of accountability and seeing results. We have the quality rating system. So there is a ladder that you, from a director one all the way to a director four. So in order to meet those different levels, there's things that you must do. So in order to be like a director three, of course you go to conferences, you have to have a level of education, et cetera. And then the way they look at how you're performing is how they're doing in the classroom. And so we have the class system that they're, coming to our classrooms, every classroom in your center. And based on those scores, if you're not performing, those classrooms are not performing, they're definitely having a conversation with you. So they have something in place that we have to participate in. If we wanna get state and federal money. And then based on your level, you get a tax credit. So it encourages the directors to actually go after this. And then we had to just cut it. Of course you have it and they cut it, but they also encourage you to go back to school and the state was paying for you to go back. We had what's called Louisiana Pathways. But I just heard, they only gonna pay up to a bachelor's degree. So that's how I earn my master's degree from that. I went back and got there. And then the class assessment scoring system, which is used by some states too as a teacher observation system, but also by Head Start. Exactly, right. So any other questions from? Karen Lohenberg from here at New America. Chrissy, I know you work a lot with principals. So I'm interested in your take on this. There was a study a couple of weeks ago that looked at strategic staffing within elementary schools and found that because the grades of three through five or you have the high stakes standardized testing for accountability purposes, what they were found at least in Miami-Dade County over several years is that principals had incentives to place their more not as effective teachers in those early grades of pay through second because that was considered low stakes, at least for accountability purposes. Is that a problem you see or that's something that comes up in your work when you talk with the principals you work with? And if so, do you see sort of any policy solutions for that problem? With that myself, I know anecdotally we certainly hear that and that comes exactly back to the whole foundation of this conversation is that the principals that I do work with, once they receive sort of the deeper grounding in brain development and child development and they really understand what's happening in those first eight years of life, all of a sudden they realize the high stakes years really are pre-K to second grade because that's when all of the foundations are being laid for later success. So I think it all comes back to sort of the knowledge that principals have. I can say in some of the districts that I work with, they are beginning to engage their HR divisions in this sort of pre-K through third grade work because they realize the really critical staffing decisions that are being made and having HR staff who know how to screen, identify, and place the right teachers or make the right recommendations to principals for hiring is essential. So I do think there's a really important, both knowledge-based for principals that's necessary and we need to be looking within these broader systems to be thinking about the knowledge base of HR specialists and others in these staffing roles. I rarely have ever hired anyone. We always have teams, rigorous. We'll have 150 to 300 applicants for one position and then do a sort through the paper chase. We have to get a certain rubric to determine who's gonna make the cuts. I've been using graduate students and administration to help me go through that, which is a real learning curve for those individuals to understand like, oh my. So we'll have, well, 20 interviewees come in for a 20-minute conversation and then we'll take 10 from that group and then we'll have a rigorous level of writing, technology work, and interview questions and then get down to two or three. But it's a serious level of criteria. The comment that a principal would put less effective teachers at K-2 just, that's, wow. I would want our best there, just from my perspective. And that's not the meaning. And I spent nine years in 456 and I thought it was okay. But I would say what's going on right now, developmentally, those kids need the best as far as teachers who can understand patterns of learning and trends of learning and how they address insufficiencies. So that's what Wisconsin is. Thank you. It'd be crazy for having that kind of pool of qualified candidates to consider, right? Really? I mean, right? And so, not only the skill set involved in creating systems for effectively finding and recruiting and then screening and interviewing and getting the right fit for teachers in your program. The implications then are, for those who are working in community-based settings, they're just looking for people who need the bare qualifications so that they can get their funding. So, no, they need to have a certain level of qualified person and or teaching or else the funding goes away. And so those deeper levels of the right fit dispositionally and the right skill set, those are, that's such a luxury that you just don't find. So I think it's just another interesting difference between the work of a principal and a community-based leader because the community-based leader has to develop the talent once they hire the person. And so the need for them to be able to have the right kind of what I call pedagogical leadership skills to be able to develop the talent on the job is really heightened because we don't have that qualified pool to draw from. Compensation challenge and the lack of the professionalization of our field. My name is Edna Ronke. I live and work in the district and worked in New Jersey for many years before that in the field. And it has occurred to me over the years of a lot of research and a lot of reading and a lot of activity that the attitudes and behaviors that lead to implementation are based on values and belief systems which go very deep into a culture and that we are not really dealing with some of the real basic things. I was reading comments to a recent article in the Washington Post about professional development because the district is dealing with a lot of this right now. And there were about 20 comments and half of them at least said, if somebody loves little children, they don't need to go to college. But they were, and also others said, well, they're getting paid as babysitters because that's what they are. Well, these are people who vote and who write letters and comments. And I think the field needs to plug more deeply into what it is we believe that makes us be so overjoyed about this morning as opposed to just raise and discussion to raise. So responses and then weave in any final thoughts that you have as well. I mean, I'll say that's exactly it, right? So we do see these articles just last week. There was one in Atlanta as well where the public is somewhat confused, right? They're confused. They use terms like teachers and childcare givers and daycare workers also not synonymous. But I think it's up to us to sort of help that, right? We, in many ways, I say they, we're mirroring each other's confusion. So I think while we need to hold a public accountable for understanding our profession, we also need to hold ourselves accountable for having some unifying way of talking about the work that we do. I've been to early childhood conferences, but I've also heard the confusion, right? We too use words like daycare internally. And so I see that as an opportunity for us to lead this profession. It takes some more ownership of our profession and know that words matter and how we talk about our work and what competencies we uphold and how we, frankly, be intentionally exclusive at times in defining our profession will help the public understand us a little bit more. I would absolutely agree with everything you say. And I think that's another important potential outcome of this expanded notion of really being inclusive that early childhood is birth through third grade. As we, as an early learning field, birth through five, partner more with public schools, we're also gaining a whole new realm of advocates. In this cross-sector program that I discussed earlier, there's nothing more gratifying than at the end of the year to have a school principal say, I have learned so much from you, childcare center director. I have such a deep appreciation for the work you do and I'm gonna go tell our legislators about it. I mean, we're sort of, we're creating another rank of really important voices on behalf of early childhood and early childhood teachers. And so I think that's not inconsequential. And then I think my sort of closing thought and I wanna get back to the graduate students' question of autonomy is that I think this overarching issue is really about finding the balance between what needs to be put in policy as sort of really sturdy guidelines about what matters and what needs to be left to local flexibility and local autonomy so that communities can meet the needs of their own children and their own family. One of the issues I worry about with too much autonomy is what if you have a whole group of people who autonomously decide early childhood doesn't matter, wrote reading is the only way to go to teach these little learners. That's not the kind of autonomy that I want, right? So we need to have sort of enough guidance in place that really sets a high bar for what administrators should do, what teachers should do, what families, what roles families should be encouraged to play and then have enough autonomy for people to implement it effectively. I wanna go back to the language matters and the fact that we're talking in our work about leaders really is important because even in the work of community settings, many center directors are uncomfortable calling themselves leaders. And so we need to make sure that as a profession that we own the language that we use and that we're comfortable with being inclusive and being clear about what it means to be a leader, what it means to be an early educator. One of the best schools I ever visited impressed me in many ways but one of the things that impressed me was that every classroom had a, on the outside of the door had the teachers qualifications posted right outside the door. Now, you go to a doctor's office, those qualifications are there. We have to get away from calling everybody who works in our centers, teachers, because they're not all necessarily well qualified in that terminology. And so our field has really contributed to this kind of soup of everybody being in a pot together. And so I think that we own the profession and that we own what we need to know and be able to do and what our qualifications are. But I also think the other piece that's important is to really become allies and build the parent's voice. We have confused parents by calling everybody a teacher. The parents will be our biggest advocates at being able to change that perception. And I just think we've missed that opportunity of advocating for our profession and building advocacy from parents as well. The panel and everyone today. And thank you for coming out to be a part of this discussion.