 For those of you who know the work of the early education initiative, you probably know that we focus on birth through age eight. We put a lot of pride in the fact that we're really trying to cover the full spectrum of early childhood as understood by developmental science, and that includes the youngest years of children's lives, and we certainly have been talking about that here today, but also the years of kindergarten, first, second, and third grades. And I want to just put in a quick little note about how we see this work really connecting. These really important issues, really connecting to that birth through eight strategy. The points about a birth through five financing system are incredibly important because there's such a difference in financing those teachers in the birth through five age span. And what we're also recognizing is that if we really want to build that alignment all the way up through those grades of kindergarten, first, second, and third grade, the teachers themselves need to see themselves as on the same playing field, in level with each other, in terms of their compensation, in terms of the kinds of training that they've had to go through, in terms of the way that they've absorbed a lot of the lessons we've learned from neuroscience and cognitive science and social science over the years. And to enable that kind of true alignment, will take an increase in the compensation levels of our birth to five workforce. So that's one of the reasons why we really see this as a really critical component of that birth through age eight strategy. Okay, so let's jump into our discussion here today. Let me just quickly introduce everyone who's with us. So to my right, as Carol Brunson Day, who's with, is on the governor, president of the governing board for the National Association for the Education and Young Children, and who many of you know as well through years of fantastic work on behalf of children in many, in many settings and organizations. Jason Sacks at the Boston Public Schools, who's the director of Early Childhood there. Nancy, but I'm sorry, I'm just now just reading everybody's markers here, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who can give us an economist's perspective. And Joan Lombardi, who many of us have been following for years and who is now a senior consultant with the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, among many international consultancies as well. So thank you to you all for being here. What I want to do is start with Joan. I want to ask you, Joan, if you could provide us a little bit more historical perspective. Despite policy changes over the years, and there have been quite a few policy changes over the years, and despite this incredible wealth of research we now have on brain development, we are still grappling with this low-wage, low-status issue among our early learning, early care and education staff. Why? Well, thanks, Lisa, and I'm really happy to be here representing Grandmothers since they gave me the opening in the last panel. I really first want to congratulate the authors, all three of you, for once again giving voice to this issue, and that's what they're doing, they're giving voice to this issue. I remember, I want to go back a little further than 25 years, I remember being out of a preschool class for myself. It was 1979, I think, when I read Marcy Whitebook's Exposé on Whose Cares for the Child Care Worker, and I want to particularly recognize her for her absolutely tireless effort and ask you to join me in thanking her. Because it has been a really, really tough and long road. I think that, you know, I went into the archives in my basement and pulled out the original report and many other reports that talked about this issue over the years, and there was a sentence that I wanted to share with you. It said, lack of attention to quality has its costs. Inattention, I think the word was, to quality has its costs, and I think the findings and the conclusions in the report should open up everyone's eyes to the immediate need to focus on teachers as the heart of quality, and the twin issues of supporting parents. And they're two sides of the same coin, and we have to remember that. It was pretty amazing to me to sit here this morning to remember that day back. I was reminiscing with the authors this morning when they walked into the room and there were all these cameras for the first time hearing about this issue and almost hearing the same words that we heard today and the same reactions that we heard today. What's been interesting over the years, 20, 30, 40 years and many of you have been with us on this journey is that teachers have never really known how to talk about this. They were afraid to talk about it. They didn't know how to bring up their own compensation and their own working conditions. And I'm hoping that that changes as of today. And that we go through a dialogue across the country of teachers talking about this issue and how it's affecting them. And I thought Angie was so articulate about this and then parents talking about how it affects them. It's that two way dialogue. The context today is so completely different. The expectations on teachers are amazing when I think of what we're asking them to do. But I think the other important thing that's different today and before I get to your question Lisa is what Megan and Deborah pointed out. And that is that the science has taught us that this report today is about children. Let it be clear that this report today is about the well-being of children and the parents' ability to pay. It's also about fairness and justice and we have to continue to talk about that. But I think in our figuring out our metaphors we've got to continue to focus on the working conditions of teachers are the living conditions of children, which was something we used to say years ago. Getting to your question, I think the key issue has been said. It's financing but it is synchronicity that we have the bill that passed last night. But let today be the beginning of a new campaign. We're happy that that bill passed and we're happy that it made important step forwards. But today is a new day and I think the fact that this report came out. I'm getting old, I believe in signs. And I think there is something about the fact that we need a new campaign around financing. Not only more but what the sources of it is, new creative ways of thinking about the sources. How is it structured and I think Miriam got to some of that. And what does it pay for and we're going to have to have a big campaign again around this issue. And I'm hoping a new generation takes us forward on that campaign. To me there's been three issues that have caused us not to talk about financing. One and all three of them have been said. One has been that child care continues to be seen as a family responsibility, not a public good. That the history in the field has been a dichotomy between care and education. And I love that Anne started with care. I think the word care is important. And third, this lack of understanding between the relationship of the working conditions and the well-being of children. And I think that's been, it's the science, it's the two generation approach that brings it to it. I'll come back and say a few more words about the financing and what I think we need. But let me leave it there for now. Thank you. So I have a question for all four of you. And maybe we'll just go down the row and Carol, I can start with you. There is a place in the report where we see that child care workers as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those are the terms they use in this particular section, that their pay has only increased 1%. Preschool teachers, again these are the words being used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, their pay's increased 15%. And we have this differentiation even in that one chart and that one graph between care and education. I want to ask you all why the dichotomy and what might this tell us about how policies should shift to enable not only higher compensation but as we're all talking about here, better learning environments for children. The dichotomy that I see is historical. We have since certainly my time in this field, we've always had a discussion about the difference between care and education with care being seen by the general public in some ways almost more than by people who work within the field but also by people who work within the field. As a form of making certain that young children are safe and are cared for, there was a time when we inside the field resisted using the term education for providers or workers who are working with younger children because we thought that what that brought with it was a commitment to a restrictive, very highly structured curriculum as teachers use in elementary schools. But I think over the years while we have seen some work, in fact a good deal of work to have us use terminology that is inclusive of care and education and promoting the concept that care and education really are one if done well. Care that's done well is equivalent in all ways to early childhood education done well. While we worked to make that happen, there is still a dichotomy. It still exists. The language, and I took a look at the, I went to the occupational, what is it, occupational handbook that the Department of Labor puts out. And we have, each time that document has been revised, the profession is asked, what do you think of the two categories because the workers are divided into two categories. One are listed as early childhood educators, those are the people who educate young children, and the other is the care category. And they make very clear distinctions about them. They're care, people who care for care for kids are service workers. And so there's a real distinction made. We always have said let's get rid of this distinction, but Department of Labor has not been that responsive. So those two categories still exist. What I am struck by is that the, while care is different from education, care and education are the same, or vice versa. Care and education are the same, but there is a difference between care and education. And it's really about the quality, and I'm going to speak some more later about this whole issue of training and preparation and how it affects what people do and how they perceive themselves as well as how we are perceived by policymakers and the general public. Jason, what about the dichotomy? And does it teach us anything in terms of whether pay might be able to be increased? Sure. So I think just looking historically too is that you have a health and human service model that was funding women to go to work, right? That was sort of the Republican argument, that's how Chris Dodd and Orrin Hatch got together, and that's how we got this stuff started, right? And so it was that willingness to sort of make that compromise. So that's one funding stream. It's a health and human service model that was really more around workforce, not around educating or parenting. So that's one history to this. Then I think the universal pre-K programs have since are newly funded, they're state generated, and those come with more of a degree requirement and the educational value of selling for the student closing the achievement gap. So I think it's sort of an intersection of those that have sort of created multiple funding streams that have influenced wages and categories. Now, the way I guess I would say this, so I work at the Boston Public Schools, we have a union, everything's negotiated by the union, teachers are paid $70,000 a year, ratios are negotiated by the union. All our teachers start with a bachelor's degree, have to have a master's degree within five years, and we'll talk more about training. But I just, even on that end, I can tell you that we have to spend a tremendous amount of time doing professional development and really getting this right. This is very complex work. And I don't think there is a dichotomy because I think when you do strong, engaging education of young children that's developmentally appropriate, you are taking care of the social-emotional thing. If I put a dinosaur in the middle of the room, I'm not going to have behavioral issues. I'm going to have a lot of kids playing with a dinosaur. It's going to be very interesting and intriguing to them. And so all that excitement and joy and the joy of the teacher is going to get commingled together. We may have to work on executive functioning and self-regulation if there was a dinosaur in the room. But the idea of separating out education and care is, you know, for a four-year-old, a three-year-old, they don't make those dichotomies. I think it's a historical sort of between different political compromises we've had to make. But in the end, it'd be very hard to explain to anybody why we make this dichotomy at all. Nancy? You know, economists like to think that I like to argue and would like to persuade all of you that workers are paid basically in proportion to the value they create. And I think there's a certain amount of acceptance of that paradigm when you struggle with this dichotomy between care and education. And you want to say, oh, but really the care is really worth more and it's really being undervalued. Let me just back up a little bit and suggest that people are really not paid according to the value of what they produce. They're paid according to their bargaining power, which is very much affected by conditions in the labor market as a whole. And we live in a very segmented labor market where most low-wage workers haven't enjoyed wage increases for the past 20 years. There's been a process of technological change and globalization and institutional backtracking that has really disempowered the low-wage market as a whole. So, I mean, I'm really glad Jason used the word union. That word union is really important. That is probably the key determinant of earnings for workers in the public school system and education rather than care. And I think I would like to change the conversation a little bit more towards the issue of bargaining power and away from the issue of what's the value of what people are producing. It's very great. The value of what childcare workers and education workers is very great. But the market does not really have an incentive to recognize it. And that is the basic problem. Nancy and I had a conversation before this about the fact that there is a new dialogue about low-wage work in the United States. And in many ways, I said to Marcy that childcare teachers have been like the Canary and the coal mines. They were paid less, long before everybody else's wages went down. So we're really in a difficult position now. On the hopeful side, I do think things are changing. When I think of the Department of Labor Statistics and the article that you wrote how many years ago, Deborah, I think Linda Smith is here and can talk about the progress that the agency is now making towards changing that. But there's other changes too. I think this false dichotomy is coming together. If you look at the words in the bill that passed last night, and for those of us in Helen's here that remember what was in the original bill and then what was in the bill in the 90s in Barbara, the word quality was hardly in and child development was hardly in the second version that was reauthorized a few years ago. And now there's a lot of, at least words in there that I think the agency can build on to bring these worlds together. So I do feel hopeful. The financing is the challenge. And let's visit. We need a third-party funding stream. I mean, that's what the new campaign has to talk about. That's starting today. That we need a third-party, you know, that is not taking the, not the hidden subsidy in child care wages or the lack of ability of parents to pay, not pitting those two things against each other, but bringing in a new funding stream that can take the pressure off parents as well as taking the pressure off providers. That's the hope of the preschool and child care grants. That's the hope of the early head start in child care grants. Even if we didn't get all the way there, that's the right direction. And so I think, again, it's the financing that we have to continue to focus on. Speaking of funding streams, this is a question for you, Nancy. And it goes to the real, one of the real mysteries in this report. Haleen Stubbins asked about it at the other panel and we put off the answer. So maybe you can finally enlighten us here. But it's the mystery that at least right now we think about funding streams, especially in the world of child care, it really is parents, and unfortunately in many cases who are having to finance this system. And yes, there are many places where we're seeing some public investment as well. And the pre-K movement is a great example of that. But for the most part, it's parents. And yet we're seeing so these parents fees have been almost doubling. And yet pay for those working in these centers has barely budged. How do you make any sense of that? What's going on there? I don't think it's a puzzle. I think there are two words, market forces. And let's just look at them. I mean we've become more dependent on the market and conditions in the market and particularly the labor market have been very, very bad. Okay, so we know that subsidies are really inadequate. They're reaching less than 20% of the families that are eligible for them. We know that the subsidies are too low that they don't actually cover the cost of care that needs to be provided. We know that subsidies have declined, especially per child in child care and especially between 2003 and 2009. So we also know that there's been increased demand for child care and in particular demand at the high end. So we've seen a big expansion of for-profit care provision. So for-profit revenues in child care have increased by a factor of 10 over the last 20 years. And the for-profit sector is filling a gap. It's meeting some needs. It has a very strong incentive to minimize wage costs and it can do so very effectively under labor market conditions where there is really high unemployment and workers are in a very weak fallback position. So again, I think we really need to link the plight of child care workers to the plight of low wage workers as a whole and see this as something that minimum wage and collective bargaining policies are going to have to be deployed to address the issue. And there has been certainly that expansion in the for-profit sector. One thing that I found interesting in the report is there also seem to be a real expansion in the non-profit sector, but private, but non-profit. And so yeah, it feels like it just begs these really big questions about those private entities and how they're spending the fees that are coming in. And it's fine because the whole landscape is institutionally so complex. It's really hard to figure out what is being spent per child and what is the subsidy per child and how does the subsidy per child vary according to income. I think there's a real need for more economic research just on that. That's interesting. By the way, let me just say as a member of the public university system, what's going on is very, very similar to what's happening in public higher ed. People say, why are costs going up? Why is tuition fees, how is this possible? It can't be that much more expensive. Well, it's really simple. Public support has gone down, so it's cost shifting to private families that's driving up the cost of tuition and fees. And also, in higher ed, you see the growth of a for-profit sector, partly because of the inflexibility and sort of bureaucratic rigidities of public provision. So it's actually the two sectors are moving in very similar directions, much more market-based. So I know we need to go on some more questions, but I think Carol, you wanted to reference something. I just wanted to say that I would love to have someone take a closer look at this because I would think that there's some other factors that are in play here. For example, our standards around ratios, for example, have changed over the same period of time. And that conceivably... Ratio of adult to child. Yes, adult to child ratios. And there's a cost factor in that that certainly has absorbed some of these dollars. There's been an expansion and the provision of infant and toddler care as well during this period, which is a more expensive form of care. So I just think that while the purely economic analysis could answer some questions, I think we need to look at some of the trends as well that have affected the delivery of services in centers that are just more costly over the years. I think we have to admit that we don't know. And I was glad that Helene asked the question and we got this question before the report even came out. But we have to be honest that the report doesn't necessarily tell us what the answer is. To me, what we have to do is not necessarily get caught up in that, but to keep the focus on the fact that neither parents or providers are able to make it in the current system and we need new financing. You can hear me like a broken record. Thank you, Jen. Jason, I want you to give us the perspective of someone who has worked very hard. It's amazing to see what you guys are doing in the Boston Public Schools. Very hard to not only improve the quality of the teaching in Pre-K and in kindergarten and other settings all the way up through, but who is looking at how community-based providers can become part of that picture. Can you talk to us a little bit about why that's important and then explain maybe some of the challenges you might be facing when it comes to that connection between the private market and what the public schools are doing? So in the Boston Public Schools we got about halfway there, meaning we are serving about half the children for free in the public schools. The new mayor wants to double that or actually just make preschool universal and there's been a great push for a lot of reasons to do some of the programming and community-based programs. One is just the business model of a community-based preschool program is dependent on preschool because infant toddler, you lose money. Pre-school because the ratios are higher, you actually have a potential if you don't make any money because you're not paid enough by the state but you at least have a chance of making enough to pay your staff. So that's the economics of it. One comes to public schools and says, okay, we're going to do this for free. Everybody applauds, but then it destabilizes community-based programs and so you sort of cut off your nose just by your face, right? Because then your whole infant toddler, your preschool, your whole system that's set up to lead kids to your schools are put at risk. So now we're at a place where, okay, so we're going to use community-based programs and we want to use the same curriculum, the same coaching, the same infrastructure that we set up at the public schools and you have only 30% of teachers have bachelor's degrees let alone maybe 5% have master's degrees. So now if we're going to require a master's degree within five years and we'll say, hey, we're going to pay them, right? And we'll pay them $70,000 and we'll put all that into the cost analysis. You have the providers themselves going, wait a minute, that's only 30% of my staff have these degrees and it's going to take a lot to get them there to a master's degree and I don't think we can and the diversification, they're a more diverse workforce and they're from the community and so we have all of those issues and so it's like, but you don't want to create a two-tier system where the public schools are offering this free program and then community-based programs are offering a program that has less educated staff and so it quickly becomes a value conversation. Well, maybe we don't really need degrees and so now we're in education field arguing against degrees and I just scratch my head and it's almost impossible to explain or justify that but I'm telling you I talked to a lot of really smart people who are arguing against degrees. Maybe not in the long run, they say, oh, well, let's set it as an aspirational goal but you don't want to do this on the backs of students and so you want degree teachers and we need to figure out how to create pathway programs quickly and so that's sort of where we're sitting right now is I've gotten them to say, okay, master's but we really need to create strong pathway programs and so that's one piece of this. I think I'll stop there. Yeah, no, that's a great segue actually to Carol because I wanted to ask you a little bit more about NAAC and its focus on educational attainment, pathways, career advancement. Well, we continue to do that. However, we are really happy to see this report come out with a statement about financing because we recognize that in order for the workforce to get the compensation that is required to improve stability, et cetera, that it's going to require, as Joan calls it, a third-party financier. Finance or funder, funding. However, and I think that this is something we've known for a long time, but we also know that the profession needs, in order to actually make that work to leverage that funding, the profession needs some tools and one of the main tools that it can use, I think, is the way in which we define our profession. Something that NAAC is really taking a bold new step forward on. We recently have revised our mission statements and we've developed mission statement and we've developed some strategic directions that really land solidly on strengthening, advancing a diverse and dynamic early childhood profession. NAAC has always been about high-quality services for children. Now we are looking at the profession as a partner, if you will, in that endeavor. So it's part of our mission statement. Strategic goals that have also been established, but that focus squarely on the profession, two specific priorities I want to describe. One is getting agreement on the skills, knowledge, competencies and qualifications used to define the early childhood profession. It's something that we've talked about, we've kind of danced around, we've had various iterations, but now we're prepared to really take a bold step in that direction. And second, defining professional development and integration systems that support seamless progression from early childhood education professionals, for early childhood education professionals to advance their education professional learning and careers. And so as we work to do, I think one of the things that Miriam identified is the fact that there's a shaky foundation for our system. We're really talking about building infrastructure that solidifies that foundation. There are a number of things NAIC will be doing, certainly to continue its focus on credentials and standards for teachers and standards for the settings in which teachers work. But we want to underscore the fundamental or foundational belief that there's an interaction between teacher preparation and workforce quality. If teachers are well-prepared, if they get into workplaces where there's not high-quality infrastructure, if you will, they can't exercise the preparation that they bring to it. So we will continue to focus on that and that interaction. We also are going to do some things to educate the workforce on the wages and compensation status of the profession. Thus, this report is very useful and very timely for us. We have gotten a four-year grant from the Kellogg Foundation to really work squarely in this arena. Working to help caregivers, educators, early care and education professionals become better advocates for the structural incentives for improved compensation through policy and policy change at the federal and state levels. We'll be doing some education around that, as well as working to improve the perception of the workforce as a trained and skilled body of workers. So that's pretty much where we are. That's a lot. That's a lot of work. That's a lot. But it's exciting to know that an AOIC is moving forward on this and that Kellogg grant alone is an exciting moment, an infusion of new resources for the field. I want to actually stay on this idea of a third-party funding stream or just an important recommendation. I just want to lift up to the beginning of this report that we really do need to identify and mobilize a dedicated source of public funding to propel this kind of quality. And I want to put that alongside the other finding from the report that really stuck out for me and get your take on this, Nancy, that the amount of public support that our country is paying for to allow these teachers to be able to put food on the table for their children, that's costing our country about $2.4 billion a year. That's how much of public support they're having to dip into. What does that tell you? And I'm interested in the context of the just broader problem of low-wage workers in this country and what it's costing our society in terms of our requirement to kind of be paying public benefits. Well, again, I think what you're seeing is a overall shift in the global economy where less skilled and less educated workers around the world have been increasingly disempowered and are facing declining real wages. And one of the consequences of that is a need for increased wage subsidies and I think the earned income tax credit, which is a policy that many of us have supported for many years for very good reasons and in many respects a good policy, but it has a kind of unfortunate side effect that, namely, as a federal wage subsidy, basically it makes it possible for employers to pay less. And I think that's one of the reasons why the minimum wage campaign and efforts for minimum wage and living wage campaigns are so important is that they are based on the idea that employers and consumers should be paying the true cost of production, not taxpayers. So I think to me this is an issue where childcare workers need to work in alliance with other low wage workers and I think I know there's some strategic advantages to singling them out and I do think they are a distinctive group but I also think they have a lot in common with other workers in the care sector in particular who are not unionized and that there should be some thinking about building a coordinated care worker care sector strategy. A really good example of a group that's not being mentioned here today but which is in very similar circumstances are home care workers who are caring for the elderly in their own homes who are also predominantly women of color and are very poorly regulated and increasingly private pay oriented market. So yeah, I know that several of you want to make a comment on this and let's do that and we'll start getting your questions ready and we'll go to those out there as well. Jason, go ahead. I'll defer to Joan. Well, you know, I just building on Carol and Nancy's comments I think that it's exciting to hear that we're going to try to make these jobs less invisible because right now they're, you know, you talk about teachers in America and you don't think about this part of the teaching workforce and so, you know, it's very exciting to hear that they're going to be new efforts to make them visible. You know, I want to start here talking about these as the jobs of the future for America. I mean, these are the jobs, I always say this, they're not going to ship overseas. These are jobs that are here to stay and I do think linking it with elder care I am dealing with elder care right now in my own family and I've been amazed at the similarities across the elder care, child care continuum. So I think we've got to become more integrated into the jobs movement, make the jobs more visible and begin to ratchet up the level of attention to this part of the teaching workforce. So I guess I have a really different take. I think we should embrace the public schools. I think that early education and care should just become early education. I think funding should go to public school districts to oversee birth to five, birth to eight because I think the public funds education. I think that the science tells us that we are leaving academic trajectories up to chance and that we really can do a lot to make a difference in kids' lives and that it needs to be publicly funded and so I don't think we'll get much traction unless we connect to the education world and redefine what education is and trust me, sitting in a public school I know how unprepared it is to deal with early education including engaging families but I think that is our best chance to kind of redefine the playing field for this field. You know, I just want to be clear obviously we all have been trying to bring these two worlds together but I can tell you, a preschool program for three hours a day is not going to be what my daughter needs when she's going to work so we've got to look at both sides of this and bring these pictures together in a way that I think the public school system has not yet been able to do for working families. And maybe there's a spectrum of care if that's what you mean, Joan. And Jason, your point brings me to kind of what I was thinking about when I was writing that first question about that dichotomy between care and education because if we're seeing that it's not obviously just calling them preschool teachers, there's something different about the way they've identified but if in the Bureau of Labor Statistics the preschool teachers are the ones who've seen some wage growth then is that a signal that considering this teaching is an important step toward more pay parity? It is teaching. I think we need to redefine public schooling zero to eight and so I just you cannot just put a kid on a bus for two hours and call that after school which is what the public schools do. Obviously and the thing is you will be so much more successful if actually you greet families and bring them in and those schools do play to learn groups and I just think the consequences of not making this public is a two-tier system so we're seeing low-income kids putting low-income at-risk children in a group with other low-income at-risk children decreases vocabulary decreases the pay of teachers letting sort of the people who have means pay their teachers and supplement it with after school programs and sports and all sorts of wonderful and interesting things is a two pathway academic trajectory and so what we have found that in the mixed income public school programs which are free and attractive to everybody we're seeing peer effects so I think we do not want to make it dependent on market forces I think we need to take control of this and define what education is and redefine what public education looks like so. So I want to start getting some questions from the audience and we'll have about ten minutes for questions here but as we're collecting those if you all could think maybe this is a little unfair to put two requests on you at once but in responding to the questions if you could also think about what gives you hope that same question that we had at the end of the last panel so that we can leave feeling that there are some really strong paths forward. So let's take a first question I see a woman there with her and please just state your name and affiliation and just quickly get to your question. Thank you. Hi I'm Emily Jopkin I'm with the National Head Start Association in the Head Start workforce we have a quarter of our staff who began as Head Start parents and who are often cultivated so that our workforce reflects the diversity in terms of language and ethnicity and linguistic background of the children that we work with and so as we continue to pay these families poverty wages even as they're trying to achieve stability through the Head Start program obviously that's an issue that plays into what we've heard today but how do we continue to preserve that value of diversity especially in terms of having the role models for children reflect their own characteristics but also be successful and well educated and well compensated. Yes please Carol. Well we just have to be intentional about it we have and we have some great examples out there like the Teach Scholarship program that really takes the that takes people where they start and structures their experiences to support them to get to really the highest levels of formal education in the field and I raise that partly because we have this report now that says you know globally getting more education doesn't make a difference in your salaries and wages and yet we know that the experience of people within the field as documented by the Teach program is different from that at the same time this may be true globally for us getting more formal education does lead to salary increases. They are small and not they're important to the people who get them and they contribute to stability of the workforce so that you know this is another one of those tension points in the field we have to be very vigilant about how we message this and really what the experiences of individuals are when you talk about public schools for example that's another diversity flashpoint because the early care and education workforce is very diverse culturally and racially and linguistically more diverse than the public school public sector public school workforce will that and that will change as we embrace public schools as a funder unless we do some things to make sure that it does not change for the caregivers or the educators of our youngest children in communities because that's what their parents want. I just want to clarify one thing I do I really agree it's important to increase educational credentials I just want you to think about it in terms of supply and demand if all you do is increase the supply that is probably not going to have much effect what you need to do is increase the demand for the credentials by setting higher standards for them okay but more importantly and this is what going outside away from market forces means you need to think about the relationship between supply and demand rather than just assuming that it's all going to play out and concretely in terms of something like head start this means like setting new standards and then building in on the job training and credentials that can that make it easier for people to attain those credentials in conjunction with working in on the job to bring that supply and demand together so that's an alternative to just thinking about just relying on the market but it's still very consistent with the idea that we need to press for greater investment in education and credentials I really am happy to hear the head start association here because really if you look back to 1990 when this report came out it was the debate around the 1990 reauthorization and the fact that compensation was put and benchmarks were put began to emerge during that period that led the field in many ways we've had this situation where it's been no credential or a BA and I think we are moving towards something different we've had this debate about whether head start should have degrees and what percentage of classroom should have degrees what I think many of us argued for was some time so that you're not so you're bringing the people from that may not have had traditional BA's into the process so you keep the diversity of the workforce that was a very important principle and we're at a point now very anxious to have higher credentials but we're going to have to do it with a process that allows people to move up and give them the time and the resources to do that and we haven't provided the reason we required the BA degrees in a certain percentage of the classrooms we didn't provide enough money for them to get them Jason you wanted to respond I think we really have to spend a lot of time on pathway programs and resources and figure out how to do it well but I want everybody to feel a sense of urgency every year we don't do this there's a 30% difference in the kids who go through our K-1 experience our pre-K experience then go to any other pre-K experience and that's in community based and head start on the achievement and the third grade MCAS scores which is our comprehensive it's a huge difference and that trajectory is a whole lifetime so while we are talking about values we are really talking about academic trajectories and so I just hope that if we're going to do this we need to do it fast and we need to do it well but we shouldn't do it on the backs of students let's go to a couple more questions here I want to white in the back thanks Sean Griffin collaborative communications I'm really lucky because I get to work at the intersection of finance, sustainability policy and communication so I've enjoyed this panel very much Jason and Joan you answered one of my questions which is the strategy of embedding pre-K as part of the uniform student per pupil funding formula we just refigured that here in DC a year ago very it was just an accepted way of operation I have another question about a strategy which kind of came up social innovation funding and creating opportunity compacts to look at taking advantage of or turning around some of those benefits that low-wage workers need to access to be able to live and have economic success what about sort of plowing some of that back into some programs to increase wages on the front end say more about what you're talking about social opportunity bonds like giving the private sector a chance to show that they can okay I think it's an interesting experiment I don't think we know enough about it yet I guess I'm skeptical because I think in my opinion it's very hard to measure outcomes in the care sector as a whole this is why the market doesn't work very well there the market works great if you know exactly what the value of the output is it's really great you know like you put $1.50 on a Coke machine you get a Coke you know what you're going to get okay so that is great that is a great exchange the reason why it's so hard with children to use the market you know for 50 goddamn years what the payoff is right and okay yes I'm a social scientist I like to measure you know I think test scores are very interesting but you know the idea that you can actually totally quantify and then use quality measures to make markets work you know oh yeah do that in the family too yeah so give parents more money if their kids do better raising their kids you would never this is why we have non-market institutions right this is why the market isn't everything and yet we seem to live in a world where we think oh if we just moved into the market it would be much more efficient get over it so on that note I want to just take a moderator's prerogative maybe to ask that the last question and just feel free to answer it quickly here but I think about my own kids I have two girls and they're growing up in the world as their oyster I mean there's all sorts of careers they can go into and I want them to see the amazing scientific and engineering work that goes into teaching young children so that they recognize that as an incredibly enriching career option I am unable as a parent who also wants to make sure that they can pay their rent to right now highly encourage this and it makes me incredibly sad so I wondered if you might be able to comment on just kind of try to look forward so my kids I got about 10 years till then college in 10 years will we have a place where an entering freshman college could say yes that is the career I want to take and what is it going to take to get us there do it for the girls yes Lisa do not worry we got this okay we got this and we got this because we have the Leah Ostens and the Mary and Calderons and we have the young people who are in policy positions who understand these issues in ways that we certainly did not when this report came out 25 years ago they understand it they know each other they know we have to work together and they are going to get some traction on this issue for the field in the next 10 years done okay so if you go to our website and just do BPS early childhood weebly who cares about weebly early childhood and it will come out on google you will see the beauty of early childhood education and video so you are going to see Vivian Paley storytelling with done at the children's museum with 100 families going oh my god these kids are amazing you are going to see teachers dissecting kids using primary colors and then going out in the neighborhood and doing regiomelia stuff where then they come back by the whole preschool program you are going to see incredible drawings so you are going to see the intricacy and the beauty of what you can do to show the learning because that is what we really do need to do they can also in 10 years come work in the Boston public schools because they will get paid $70,000 or more right by then because the union has created a place for them and so I do think that I hope that public school education is redefined and that four year olds we are required to serve all four year olds in the public schools it may be in a community based setting it may be in a family child care provider's home it may be but probably community based setting and head start but I hope that that is where we grow to and that we have thought through parental leave and we have thought through a lot of these systems that need to be in place but we are going to have to change a lot of policy and I think that we have to intentionally really think through this public school issue and public education and where we fit in it I deal with this you know every day with my students because they are you know they are asking this question and I just tell them what I think is true which is that if you choose a job that involves caring for other people you are going to pay a penalty in terms of earnings over your lifetime and you are also going to capture a really important reward in terms of intrinsic satisfaction and contribution to your community and what you need to be thinking about is how to design institutional changes that can allow people who do good to be better paid and I think in ten years actually that my students will have made some progress in that direction I have a lot of confidence in there well you know me I am always optimistic and I don't know if it's ten years but I would say that in the 45 year journey that many of us have been on we have seen changes there are signs of hope I think listening to Jason we know now that learning begins at birth and I think that that notion is getting through to people so you know we've got people who something must be with this field there are hedge fund managers they want to do caring jobs so there is something in this that I think is right and starting that way this morning was really perfect I think the most important lesson from today is this is a new day this is the day after and it is day one of a campaign to really have a national dialogue in the next few years about public funding for the early childhood field and that should be our clarion call the final word thanks to everybody on the panel thank you all for being here and thanks to the authors of the report Marcy Debraink and Carol Lee