 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Abby Lieberman and I'm excited to welcome you today. We're looking forward to having this group of early childhood advocates together. We know this is a busy time, so we appreciate you stepping away to join us for this discussion about navigating higher education policy. We invited you today because of your interest in early education and more specifically the early education workforce. High quality access to high quality higher ed is an important component of strengthening our early childhood workforce. But for more early educators to realize the promise of higher education, we need significant reform to improve access and quality of degree programs. That's why we think it's important for our early community to have a strong understanding of higher education policy. It can be helpful to know how higher ed laws impact early educators and what levers advocates and policymakers can pull to help federal rules and regulations better serve our community. We recognize that many of you have been working on issues related to higher ed, maybe navigating your state higher ed systems for many years. There are also some of us joining today who have limited knowledge of higher ed policy or who could benefit from a refresher on the basics. So regardless of where you're at we know you might still have questions coming up and today we want to help connect the dots between higher ed and early ed. So on the next slide. For today's agenda we'll start off with introductions and some brief background on New America's recent early childhood and higher ed collaboration. Then we'll cover how higher ed issues pertain to early educators broadly and also explain how our team is thinking about these issues in the current context of coven. And lastly, we'll leave a good chunk of time for Q&A. We really see this webinar as an opportunity to ask New America's higher ed policy experts questions you're grappling with. So please don't be afraid to speak up we really want to hear from you. You can ask questions in the chat function throughout the webinar and just know that we will have a good chunk of time set aside at the end. Slide please. So as I mentioned I'm Abby and I'm a senior policy analyst on our early and elementary education team. And today you'll also be hearing from Claire McCann and Iris Palmer, two of our teams higher ed experts who are excited to share their knowledge with you. Slide. I'll start with just a little bit of background on New America's education policy program. We work to strengthen and improve our educational system so that all students have equitable access to high quality learning and prepare them for college careers and civic life. Our team uses original research and policy analysis to help solve the nation's critical education problems. New ideas for policymakers, educators and the public at large. Our work explores the full range of educational opportunities from early learning to secondary education up through college and the workforce. So this slide just shows the different education teams at New America and on our early ed team, much of our work focuses on birth through third grade educators, both teachers and leaders. And today we're focusing on the intersection of our early ed and higher ed work. Slide. So this webinar actually builds off an ongoing body of work where our early and elementary education team has been exploring how two and four year institutions can better equip those teaching and caring for young children. As we know many early educators pursuing their degree are balancing full time employment caregiving responsibilities and low wages with their coursework. And we think higher education can do more to remove the unnecessary hurdles that make it difficult for this population to complete their degrees. And with early ed programs increasing qualification requirements in recent years. This is becoming a more urgent issue because we need these new policies to help build up the current workforce instead of keep people out slide. Too often in discussions about early educator preparation faculty members deans and higher education policy content experts are left out of the conversation. So last fall we partnered with our higher ed team to convene the supporting early educator degree attainment working group, which consisted of 18 experts across fields to delve into the barriers institutions face and explore opportunities for reform. We released the findings of this working group in a report earlier this month. And you can find the report at the address listed above on new america's website right at the top. And I'm just going to give a really brief overview of what's in this paper before I hand it over to Claire and iris. So that on the next slide. In this report we identified key barriers that institutions face to preparing early educators are working group discussed several barriers but these are the five that rose to the top. So you know making sure supports are in place for this population of students to be successful. Serving the unique needs of the linguistically diverse workforce, supporting developmental remedial education requirements, navigating requirements for clinical experiences and supporting faculty recruitment and development and thanks iris I saw you out of the link in the in the chat great idea. Next slide please. We explored ways that institutions are overcoming those barriers so here's a list of the programs that we profile in the paper. In some categories like student supports, we were able to identify numerous examples, and it was difficult to narrow it down. In other cases it was difficult to find even one or two promising practices so if any of these are of interest in you we encourage you to check out the report for profiles. I'm just explaining what these programs are doing. Slide. And a primary goal of this work is to suggest concrete ways that the field can improve the quality of early educator preparation. The federal government states localities institutions and philanthropy, they all play a unique role in shaping policy and practice. In some instances, simply bringing attention to a barrier can spark change, while other times a financial incentive or a change in law is necessary. We explored which levers policymakers and other stakeholders can pull to alter the system to better meet the needs of the workforce. We came up with a quite an extensive list that is included in the paper. And today, on the next slide. I want to give an overview of the main federal levers that the government can pull based on the barriers that we explored in the paper. So, as you can see, increasing funding for various programs like Pell grants, or federal childcare programs also was a main theme of how the federal government can play a role. I was not familiar with some of these programs that make better support the early educator workforce or not as familiar as I'd like to be. So I'm looking forward to learning more from Iris and Claire today also. And with that, I will transition it over to them to share their knowledge and fill in some gaps for us. Thank you, Abby, and we can go to the next slide. Once again, this is Claire McCann with new America's higher education program. We thought we would start off today with a little bit of an overview of the Higher Education Act and its framework, and then talk a little bit about where things stand today. The Higher Education Act is the primary law underlying federal investments in higher education. It was first authorized in 1965. In contrast to other education laws, including the childcare law, states play almost no role in the legislation. Next slide please. Instead, the federal government authorizes funding directly to institutions of higher education through the student as a voucher program. As stated in Title IV of the Higher Education Act, they include about $30 billion a year in Pell grants, around $130 billion every year in federal student loans, which are not pictured in this chart because much of the funding is later repaid, as well as other smaller grant programs like the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant called SEOG and Federal Work Study. As you can see, federal spending on Pell grants actually dwarfs federal investments in other educational programs like CCDF, Head Start, Title I of the K-12 Authorizing Law, the ESEA, and IDEA, Special Education Dollars. So let's dig in a little bit on Pell grants. Only about half of Pell grant recipients are dependent traditionally aged students. The other half are independent students who are often older than 24, they might be married, or they might have a child, for instance. So as you can imagine, plenty of early childhood educators who go back to college are likely eligible for the Pell grant to help them pay for the cost of enrolling. The maximum Pell grant award right now is $6,345 a year. Two-thirds of all Pell grant recipients come from a household income of $30,000 or less. And since nearly three quarters of center-based early educators are making $15 an hour or less, they very likely are eligible for Pell grants, even if they're working when they go back to school. But with college costs growing fast, that amount actually covers the smallest share of the cost of attendance in decades, even as the size of the grant has continued to increase year-over-year. Next slide, please. While the Pell grant covered 79% of tuition fees, room, and board at a public four-year college in 1975, today it covers just 29%. So as Pell grants cover less, states are failing to keep up their investments in public higher education, and costs are continuing to grow at colleges. So more of that is being shifted to students in the form of debt. So no doubt you've all heard a lot about the rise in student debt, since it's so often in the news. But actually with undergraduate loan limits fairly strict and unchanged since 2008, the amount that's borrowed by undergraduate students hasn't actually changed that much. More than half of borrowers, 55%, who have outstanding student loans today owe less than $20,000. And instead, what we've seen as much of the growth has been in borrowing for graduate school. 40% of the loans made every year for graduate school. And in fact, more than 40% of all outstanding federal loan debt today is held by the 10% of borrowers who owe $80,000 or more. Next slide, please. The federal government has invested significantly in making student loans more affordable for those who need it. So chief among those investments is the creation of income-driven repayment plans that help make borrowers payments more affordable. The different repayment plans are ones that allow borrowers to repay based on a percentage of their income. So 10% or 15%. With any remaining amounts forgiven after 20 or 25 years, depending on the plan, borrowers are eligible for different versions of these plans depending on when they took out their loans. So what we've seen is that many of the borrowers who need this assistance the most, likely including many of the low-paid borrowers who are in the early education workforce, aren't necessarily taking advantage of them. Almost 9 million student loan borrowers, which is a third of all borrowers, and half of student loan debt held by the Education Department are now in an income-driven repayment plan. Disproportionately, the people in those plans have very high debt loads. They're more likely to be doctors and lawyers and other people who took on debt for expensive graduate school programs than they are to be early educators who sought an associate or bachelor's degree to meet the educational qualifications for their jobs. And even when borrowers do gain access to income-driven repayment, they sometimes miss the follow-up. So data that are admittedly now relatively old suggested that about half of borrowers in those plans weren't submitting the paperwork on time to renew their annual income information that's used to calculate their payments. So that can cause borrowers' payments to spike because they get kicked out of the plan and onto a more expensive plan, and it can cost them more in interest as well. Next slide, please. So while the vast majority of student loan borrowers are current in their debts and able to repay without much sign of trouble, there are some pockets of challenges in the student loan portfolio. The first one I want to talk about is for-profit colleges. For-profit student loan borrowers default at twice the rate of community college borrowers, 52% versus 26% within 12 years after leaving school. And they're also much more likely to borrow, so they're at a much higher risk. The second one is college dropouts. Students who drop out with debt and no degree are three times more likely to default on their loans than students who graduated. And often these are borrowers with only a few thousand dollars in student loans. And the third is black borrowers. Black borrowers with debt, even those who graduate default at a much higher rate than their white peers. And this is of course likely in large part because of a sizable racial wealth gap and because of labor market discrimination, as well as higher rates of black student enrollment in for-profit colleges and lower rates of college completion. So that's a particular concern given that at least 16% of early educators, maybe more depending on the childcare setting in which they work, are black. So of course today most federal student loans are currently in an interest-free forbearance because of the pandemic. So that means none of those borrowers are required to make payments on their student loans right now. That forbearance is scheduled to expire on December 31st, which means we might see additional new challenges beginning next year as people come back into the system and once again owe payments on their loans. Next slide. So I'm going to take a little bit of a step back and talk about some of the other players in the higher education system as well. In exchange for access to Pell grants and loans, colleges have to comply with a whole host of federal rules, both for the management of those federal dollars and for other requirements that are designed to protect taxpayers. One of the biggest requirements is that all institutions must be authorized by their states, accredited by a recognized accrediting agency, and they must enter into an agreement with the Department of Education confirming that the school will comply with federal rules and regulations. That makes accreditors another particularly important player in higher education for this group to be aware of, since accreditors are the ones charged with academic quality for the college as a whole. States also invest billions in addition to federal spending to support public colleges. And through the authorization process, they're responsible for some basic consumer protection requirements, including receiving and investigating complaints from students. So that states are another important actor in this. Next slide please. So back to the Higher Education Act, the EGA was last reauthorized in 2008, which means it has been overdue for reauthorization since 2013. Last year it was finally starting to look more and more likely that reauthorization would happen. So the House Democrats introduced a comprehensive reauthorization bill called the College Affordability Act. It was approved by the House Education Committee. And Democrats were pushing to bring the bill to a vote by the full house. At the same time, we were hearing rumors that Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray, who are the leading Republican and Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, their pictures are off to the right there. We're seriously negotiating on a bipartisan EGA bill. They had even had some limited success. They worked together to pass a bill that permanently extended funding for historically black colleges and other minority serving institutions after that funding had expired. And it also allowed for data sharing that would help more students apply for federal financial aid more easily. And that bill, which was called the Future Act, was signed into law just before Christmas in December 2019. Senator Alexander is set to retire at the end of this year and the EGA is his last major outstanding education priority. By February or March of this year, it seemed like Senators Alexander Murray were nearing a deal. And so it was kind of this perfect confluence of events for the Senate to reach an agreement and the EGA to finally be reauthorized. Iris, I'm going to hand it to you. Yeah, Angela, if you could change this slide. So then COVID-19 happened and everything of course changed. The focus went to the millions of students who had to leave campuses suddenly and try to do engineered online learning with faculty at home with limited internet access and a lot of cases. I want to just make a note here that the early educator population probably even has more difficulties with this and connectivity. Colleges had to reimburse students for housing and food and states immediately started talking about cutting higher education as it is an easy priority for them to cut because they can backfill it with student fees and tuition. So colleges launched an all out campaign to get emergency funding to cover these losses, and they lobbied hard for their share of trillions of dollars of emergency relief and when Congress passed the CARES Act in March. Higher education got $14 billion in funding, half of which was used to make emergency grants to students who had to leave campus in the middle of the semester due to the pandemic. So, it's looking less and less like Congress is going to pass another emergency relief bill or how big that's going to be. And we've had been speaking to dozens of people across the country about how this is playing out in colleges. We've been talking to college leaders, accreditors. We've been talking to students and faculty and really trying to get a sense of what this pivot is looking like on the ground at colleges. And we've heard about these financial impacts and that they're getting worse. So, the longer the pandemic goes on, as with the rest of the labor market and the rest of our system, the more stress is being put on colleges and also students. So, we've heard that right now colleges are using their reserves and a lot of cases, but those funds are dwindling. And in the spring, many states actually use their CARES funds allocations to backfill a lot of the cuts they were making to higher education mid-year. And so, for instance, Colorado cut higher education about almost $500 million or almost 60% of their entire funding to higher education. But they used CARES Act funding to backfill that and so they only ended up cutting higher education in reality $43 million. But since no new stimulus seems to be coming, we know that these cuts are going to be extreme, I would say, in the spring as the new state budget cycle commences. We've also been hearing about substantial drops in enrollment and this is particularly true at the community college, which is really important for the early childhood educator workforce because many of them are at community colleges. And they educate millions of students every year. And we've saw a 9% so far drop in enrollment at community colleges, which has been particularly steep for black students, and is particularly steep for first year students of 21% of first time students. It's down 21% for their enrollment. That means that many students, particularly early educators, are putting off their education plans and may likely never enroll in higher education because community colleges really are the on-ramp to higher education for many people in this population. We've also heard about expensive nonprofit colleges that are seeing substantial drops in students' enrollment as students choose a gap year rather than paying full price for an online experience. Think about colleges like GW here in DC. These enrollment drops are not only troubling for student access to education, but especially for the early educator population, getting them enrolled and getting them enrolled now, as they put it off, they're way less likely to continue to enroll. So we also heard a lot from college leadership about the pivot to online education. And the leadership of colleges seemed to think that the pivot to online education while bumpy was very successful in the end, that it was a heroic effort that everyone came together and made it work. We're hearing a very different story from students and faculty. So many of them felt that the spring semester was basically a waste as far as learning was concerned. Many of them tuned out. Many of them stopped engaging with their faculty and faculty threw up their hands as they tried to figure out how to offer their courses that were almost always in person online. I will say this is particularly important for early educators because many of them have a part of their education that is taking place in observing the classroom and observing how to engage with young children. And those experiences were moved to simulation and moved to online and we heard a lot about that as well. And I think there's a sense that that doesn't work quite as well. So we also heard from students who didn't have regular contact with their faculty. We heard from faculty who weren't told what was expected of them as far as continuing to engage and teach their students. And we heard a lot about those students that were able to take advantage of some of the flexibilities around grading and things with past fail, but others who couldn't because they actually wanted to go on to transfer to a four year program. For instance, and they didn't know how that four year school would accept that past fail grade. We heard students actually talk about how they were worried about having pandemic degrees right where people looked at when they graduated and saw that the education had pivoted online and was not as rigorous as what it was before the pandemic and they were worried about having that caveat put around their degrees. So this fall we've heard improved things around teaching and learning, but it's still not going very well for many students. There's a strong preference for being in person for many of these students and I will say, particularly for the population that is overrepresented by early child educators, people who are maybe older have caregiving responsibilities being in person is important to keeping them motivated and while they like the flexibility of being online. They also need to feel connected to the people in the classroom and we're hearing that that still isn't going great. So those attending schools with less resources and majors that required hands on learning are particularly struggling. And early educators are more likely to be attending those institutions so it's continuing to be a struggle and we're continuing to see how it plays out as time goes on and it gets more difficult. And I'll with that I'll turn it back to Claire, or I can continue. Okay, Angela, can you go to the next slide. So what's coming next. The Trump administration. If so, obviously there's an election coming and depending on what happens with the election changes. I think that we're going to see different things. So with the Trump administration, I think the idea if they get reelected. They're really looking towards deregulating higher education they're thinking about making more flexibility around colleges continuing to offer different types of degrees. They are. They are eroding some of the ideas. I'm just going to take a quick pause and see if I can find the notes for this. There we go. Okay. Congress will likely consider legislation that responds to the pandemic possibly before the election, but if not then during the lame duck session between the elections, and the new year. There's no word yet on what that's going to look like because colleges are asking for a ton more funding this time around. And many students have seen big drops in income so many Pell, so more Pell funding may be needed. And that adds another hole to the budget. The payment pause for student loan borrowers with that my colleague Claire McCann talked about earlier is set to expire at the end of the year and we need to see how students continue to pick back up on those payments and what that does. So, as I said, we're a few weeks away from the election. So it's worth noting that the higher education system could look very different in the next couple of years. The Trump administration as I said has made deregulation particularly of regulations that were designed to crack down on for profit colleges its legacy for the first term. So if Trump wins a second term, we expect to see more of that, and allowing for for profit colleges to offer more low value credentials and continuing to make it harder for borrowers to get relief. If their colleges lie to them or engage in abusive recruiting practices. They could that could harm early educators. If those for profit institutions see early education as a growth market for them. And they might as they see the entire early childhood education field as seeking upskilling so they're really seeing the push for bachelor's degrees as a pop that could see the push for bachelor's degrees as a possibility for doing more recruiting for those students. On the other hand, the Biden campaign has made affordability a major priority, proposing to make community colleges tuition free, make public four year colleges tuition free for low and middle income families and doubling the size of the Pell Grads. So those are all really big ticket items they all cost a lot of money particularly doubling the size of the Pell Grants, which will require Congress to spend a lot more new money. It's not clear if that's in the cards, but additional financial aid for low income students could have a big benefit for our early childhood educators as Claire talked about earlier. But we need to anticipate the administration will be working to reinstate those key Obama administration regulations, like rules requiring colleges to ensure their programs don't lead to affordable unaffordable amounts of debt. That were unwound by the Trump administration will obviously know more about this in a couple of weeks. But that's how we're seeing things in the field now. And with that, it looks like my colleague is back. Claire, did I miss anything. Yeah, that was great. Thank you. So we can move to the next slide. So thank you Iris and Claire and to everyone listening we had so we had some technical difficulties but Claire is back and Iris did a great job filling in for Claire while she was absent for a few minutes. I got it all figured out. So this was a really helpful overview. And now we're going to switch gears to Q&A it seems like we have a pretty quiet group. So just a reminder to ask, ask questions either on the information that Iris and Claire presented or on other higher related issues. It could be more state focused if that's what's interesting to you. I will kick us off. Well first in in the chat Olga did mention that she's interested in the implications of the ECE workforce speaking other languages. So I want to first address that briefly before we move into this and give everyone a minute to put their questions in, but answer to your area of interest Olga so that is something that we talk about in the in the paper that we released earlier this month so you know as we know unfortunately institutions often don't have the capacity to meet the to meet the needs of our diverse early childhood student population. At many institutions courses texts are only often English advisors might only speak English and this, all of these things put students who who English is not the first language out of disadvantage. So in our report we do highlight two institutions that have acknowledged the need for more bilingual courses. That's Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida and Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California. They are taking innovative approaches to supporting their multilingual students in becoming early educators. And so at Miami Dade they offer a certificate program for pre K teachers and another for infant and toddler teachers which have been translated into Spanish and creole. At Southwestern College, which is located in the southern most part of California. They have a Spanish to English associate teacher certificate that balances Spanish with scaffolded ESL instruction so that program uses a cohort model and consists of four child development courses which are taught alongside ESL courses. So the courses begin in Spanish and then the final courses are taught in English. So we encourage you to check out those profiles and the paper, if that's of interest to you, and then I will kick us off with one question before we hear from anyone else. So I know COVID is top of mind for all of us these days and Iris talked a bit about her research on COVID so just curious are there any innovations or policy changes happening now in response to COVID that should be carried forward because they're making the experience better for students or no. Yes. So I will say my sort of overall it's not great, but we have done a series of focus groups with students, some of which are more non traditional students and we've heard some encouraging things. One of the encouraging things we've heard about is an increase in doing remote and technology mediated advising meetings. So basically that's really increased the amount of advising that that people have been able to take advantage of and that means particularly students who are really busy who have to be around for care taking responsibilities, who have really busy lives and who are adults and work. There are a lot they can actually access the support services better because they now can do them online and through zoom, and that's huge. One thing I will say is we have heard mixed things about the sort of using synchronous zoom technologies to help support students, but we do hear that people would love to continue to have that option to enter to view their lectures in the future so there's no flexibility to either be in class or watch it online. So they, because of their busy lives have that opportunity so that's another thing we've heard that I think should probably continue into the future. Claire, do you want me to add? I think that pretty much covers it. I would say overall, yeah, we definitely are hearing a lot of students are really struggling, both with the technology and with the isolation that comes with not being in the classroom. That can make it very difficult for students to engage in the work and succeed in their courses and so that's a piece that I think people will need to grapple with institutions in particular will need to grapple with a lot more in the coming months. Thanks both of you. So, my next question would be, what are the most important levers for early childhood state advocates to try and pull on, whether that's state level levers or federal levers. Yeah, so I can talk a little bit about the state levers and if Claire you want to do the federal. So, obviously this sort of cratering and funding of institutions. I don't know if that's something you can prevent necessarily because we are going to see some really difficult budget situations for states and there's only so many places they can cut. But I will say continuing to advocate for adequate funding for community colleges and for regional publics that are, I think, really serving the vast majority of this population is incredibly important. One of the other things we could pull on at the state, state system or system wide level is thinking about bringing colleges together to innovate and provide support services for these types of populations and actually design their programs to support these types of populations and we talk a little bit about that in the, in the paper, the ASAP program for instance. Yes it needs additional funding but a lot of it is also about program design and thinking about how to design the program to support this population and help keep them engaged and enrolled in the college. To add on to what Iris is saying there, you know, one of the biggest problems we've seen that has really driven up the cost of college significantly has been state disinvestment in higher education and inadequate federal funding to make a difference there. So one of the most important things that Congress could do in this regard is create a federal state partnership program that gives a federal incentive to states to continue to keep up their investments in public higher education. Public higher education is educating almost three quarters of students across the country. And if you could really make a meaningful difference in how much, how much funding those schools have to rely on your after year. You could make a sizable dent in what the college, what the cost of college for students looks like and that's what all of the free college proposals that have been floating around for the last few years are built upon is really this notion, creating that partnership and, and, you know, creating a way to use that federal money to create the incentive for reducing college costs to zero for at least some students. And that's, I think one of the most important things, as I said, you know, more funding is needed for some of these students success interventions, the federal government has historically not done a ton to invest in those kinds of programs and they do have significant upfront costs. They require a lot more from college in terms of advising and staff support and tutoring and all kinds of other redesign academic and advising experiences. And so that's another place where the federal government could step up and really make that upfront investment, give colleges or rings and to take on these programs. And then the last one I'll say is title two of the Higher Education Act covers educator preparation programs broadly. And that's a really, that's one place where I think there's a lot of potential for early education to get more of a specific call out in some of those programs to fund some of them, the promising interventions are identified in the report. And, and to spell out that early, the early educator workforce is an important piece of funding educator preparation. Great, thank you so much. That was really helpful so another question we have a few more is, are there supports in place for early educators who are attending institutions that are struggling financially and might need to transfer credits to finish their degree in the event of a closure. You do the closure part Claire. Yeah, sure. So, this is kind of a bit of a trend in recent years has been an increasing number of college closures far too many of those have been precipitous closures that happen with little to no warning they might happen mid semester or mid year. They leave students with too few options. The main mechanism that has that is kind of generally used to prevent that from happening and to make sure students have options to continue their education after a closure is a teach out agreement between two institutions, and typically those have been required by creditors of very, very high risk institutions. So this is actually something that the higher education program has been doing some work on is what we're seeing is creditors not doing this early enough, or often enough with institutions that are at a substantial risk of potential closure. And with the enrollment trends the way they're looking now, we would hope to see a creditors increasing their focus on these teach out agreements during the pandemic. That's not really what we're hearing what we're hearing much more of is more monitoring but less less fewer requirements less direct intervention at institutions that do look like they're at a higher risk. And largely what we've heard from creditors is that they're looking for ways to stay stay out of the way as institutions try to adapt and kind of muddle through the situation. So I think this is one really important place that regulators which includes accreditors but also states and the Department of Education can step up to protect students it kind of cuts against the incentive of the institution to do this planning. Because it does make them feel like they're admitting that there's a potential risk of closure. And so it's something it's a place where regulators really need to be the ones looking out and having the backs of the students at the institution. And I'll just add as far as transfer is concerned we actually think there's going to be an increased transfer of students just in general in response to COVID. Because a lot of students maybe are starting at different colleges than where they would have gone otherwise and there's there we do anticipate that there's going to be a large uptick probably including early childhood educators. And so we are working on a brief right now that kind of helps colleges think through what that means and what it means for them to recognize the sort of swirling credits that are very likely to come out of this situation. Right now we're not hearing colleges being really proactive and thinking far ahead about this and so we are trying to guide them in that direction as the situation wears on. Thank you both. So next question we'll we'll respond to is from Sharon Sullivan and she said she asked for said comment question at teach we are finding that support for new online learners has been an essential part of adapting to COVID. Are there good tools that other folks have identified for new online learners particularly around practicum experiences. So I can, I can try to answer this from what I know and clear and errors you can also weigh in I think this might also be a good opportunity if anybody on the webinar has tools that they want to share in the chat. You might also be privy to some that we are not aware of. But so addressing practicum experiences and the the challenges around both access and quality was something that our working group spent time on last year and of course that was that work happened pre COVID. But so you know even before COVID it was difficult for a lot of teachers to a lot of real education students to have time to complete practicum requirements outside of their current place of work and it's even more challenging now. We know that that NACI did a survey in the spring so again you know things have changed since the spring but they talked to respondents about how they were handling field experiences due to COVID and it it appeared that a lot of institutions were you know being quickly and finding ways to ensure that candidates could observe teaching and learning and practice the skills used in their coursework so the most common was using videos and reflections to replace field experiences. Some students were able to meet with children and families virtually others video tapes themselves implementing curriculum with or without actual children present. The use of video and technology is this has was very popular and about one third of survey respondents and again this was in the spring gave their students more time to complete the requirements of course at the time they might not have foreseen that the fall would also be remote for a lot of people. So I'd be curious to hear learn more about what institutions are doing this fall. This was one area that we kind of as a as a group thought that maybe lessons could be learned from COVID. In terms of the reflex the flexibility for teachers and the use of technology that maybe would be useful after the pandemic is over. Since it's a challenge that people identified before. So I don't know if Claire and Iris if you want to add anything to that. And that when we spoke with over 20 community colleges this this summer we were actually trying to dig into what were practicums what was hands on experience in across all different kinds of fields. We heard very similar things to what you're saying Abby that a lot of them were using video. I do wonder though if using video is a high quality practicum experience and what people think about that because it was definitely a lot of the different occupations we heard about in health and in the building trades and some of these others to use videos in that way so I'd be curious to know how that's playing out right now. Yes, many of them were doing socially distance labs so they would have like one person come in but that's even more difficult in a classroom. And most of them were thinking they were going to get back to normal in the fall. So just to confirm everything you said Abby. It does look like there have been some resources shared in the chat so I encourage people to check those out as well. Okay, and another question we got the clarinaires you might have. You might have some thoughts on so this is from Mary Ma, and she said as a college which is online by design and was already online when the pivot happened. Is there a distinct difference between remote learning and true online education, and that this distinction should be made. Do you have strong feelings about this I know there's a lot of strong feelings about this in the online education community. Yeah, I mean I think what I think a lot of what we saw this spring was not. It was not high quality online education at a minimum. What we saw was people taking their existing PowerPoint and throwing it into a zoom and trying to to run it that way which just simply wasn't a great experience for anyone wasn't a great experience for faculty it wasn't great for students. There are institutions and and instructional designers who have spent many many years trying to to refine and perfect how you can effectively offer a program online. And the difference is absolutely stark between that high quality experience and the low quality one. I think taking a step back from what the nature of the program is. One thing we do see sort of generally speaking in distance education is that certain subgroups of students really struggle with that format regardless. And in particular, first time students and students who require remedial education or do not come in academically prepared will really really struggle with the format. And I think I think, you know, all the best engagement of faculty in the world is not going to completely solve that problem but it does require thinking about it a little bit differently when you're serving those kinds of students and thinking about what kind of supports you're thinking about how you can best meet the needs of those groups that we know are going to have a hard time with an online format pretty much no matter what online is great for self directed learners. It's very difficult for learners who need more support. So the equity concerns here are substantial. We've heard a lot. We've heard a lot about actually faculty really really struggling with technology just in general. So some of the things we've heard around making that better was assigning student workers to different courses to help facilitate the use of the technology and walk the faculty through the technology use. The other thing we've heard about to address some of the issues Claire right raises about how if you're not a self directed learner, it can be very difficult to engage online is a really around creating community in a way that like transcends the online experience so trying to do outreach to students, trying to create cohorts of students trying to really connect students together in breakout rooms and different ways so they're that you're creating a community that supports maybe a learner who's less self directed we heard a lot about how when you're in a classroom and you're sitting next to somebody you get a lot of passive learning from them and you don't necessarily get that in online environments you really have to be deliberate about about creating that and know and and most people didn't know how to do that in the spring. And I just wanted to comment on or raise up a comment so Edith Locke said you know thank you for acknowledging the teacher early childhood scholarship programs, nationally teach administrative homes have been instrumental and higher I've provided additional supports to participants to help ameliorate some coven impact, and I just want to give a plug to you know we do, we did cover teaching or in our report. It came up over and over again teach early childhood scholarships were instrumental to allowing many of the other promising practices that we identified in the report function well for anyone who's not familiar to teach early childhood program provide scholarships to early educators to pursue debt free higher education it covers the cost of tuition fees books recipients work with a dedicated counselor. Employers offer paid release time and agree to provide a pay increase to those who complete their program and remain at their job and in 2019. I believe teach was in 22 states and Washington DC and had somewhere over 17,000 recipients so we. It's definitely a program that we touched on and realize the impact it has and we cover it more in the paper if anybody's interested. I wish more occupations had programs like that. It's great. I think we have we have a few minutes left. If anyone has additional questions I believe we have covered all the ones in the chat if I missed any please. Please feel free to add them now, or if you didn't feel like I answered your address just correctly this is this is your final, final call. Yes, we can. I read it we will read put the link for the paper and I can add that right now. And, you know, this is an ongoing body of work at New America our early ed team is going to be following institutions, specifically related to COVID that we think are doing innovative. Innovative things to serve early educators over the following year so if you know of any that you think might be of interest to us please reach out to us. We would love to love to learn more and keep this work going and alright so we can move to the to the final slide Angela. Great. So that concludes our webinar for today. If you're interested in following our work whether related to this project or early education more broadly, we encourage you to subscribe to our weekly newsletter or follow us on social media. Thank you again for attending. Thank you for the great questions and we hope you have a great rest of your day.