 Good morning. Thank you for joining us here this morning, and thanks to all of our watchers online. I'm Laura Bornfriend, director of Early and Elementary Education Policy here at New America, and I really appreciate, again, coming today early in the morning before you start your work day for this important conversation. For those of you who are watching online, and those of you who would like to participate in today's conversation via Twitter, please use the hashtag teacher well-being. Is it on the agenda? And for those of you who are interested in other events on topics related to the Early Childhood Workforce, stay tuned for future workforce-related events throughout the next year, and be sure to check out our blog if you haven't already. We are currently running a series called Moving Beyond False Choices for Early Educators, which is edited by Stacey Goffin, and we have at least one previous author here in the room today. So we appreciate our contributors to that blog series, and we'll continue running it through next April. For those of you who are not as familiar with New America, our organization strives to explain and uncover the implications, the challenges, and opportunities inherent in a time of tremendous technological change. In our education program, we focus on equity for underserved students, while also taking a broad view. We examine learning environments and public education systems of all kinds, starting with our littlest ones and continuing up through adulthood. Over the past several years, our Early and Elementary Education team has focused much of our work on the adults who care for and educate young children from birth up through third grade, and the adults who provide supports for those working with young children in classrooms and other settings. On your way in today, you may have picked up a postcard, and I don't have it to show you, but hopefully you picked it up, showing how to access one of our most more recent projects, the Transforming the Early Education Workforce, a multimedia guidebook. The guidebook includes key takeaways from each of the chapters from the 2015 Institute of Medicine Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth through Age 8, a unifying foundation. Our guidebook includes videos, interactive tools, a glossary, and many other resources. We designed it with three doorways for different but overlapping audiences, educators who work directly with children, educators in higher education who prepare teachers and leaders, and policymakers interested in improving early learning settings for children from birth to age 8. Now to what we're here for today. Today we are going to zoom in on the issue of early educator well-being. Teaching young children is tremendously challenging and exhausting work, but also enriching. The average income, though, for the early childhood education workforce is remarkably low. Right here in the Washington region, where the cost of living is very high, it's less than $30,000. Nationally, 53% of childcare workers compared to 21% of the general workforce are part of families enrolled in public assistance programs, such as SNAP and TANF. And despite high exposure to childhood illness, 24% of the workforce reports no access to health benefits. And in D.C., only 38% of the infant and toddler workforce has access to employer-sponsored health insurance and less than half have paid sick leave. So combine the stress of teaching with poverty-level wages, lack of access to supports, and effects of secondary trauma, conditions become ripe for struggling with well-being. Some research finds relatively high instances of educator depression. We want teachers to be healthy for themselves and also for the children they serve. A stressed-out workforce can be detrimental to the productivity in any field, but it is especially relevant in early childhood education. We know that the quality of relationships and interactions between the adults and children are key to high quality early education and care programs, key to children's learning. If the teachers are frequently switching jobs or are under a great deal of stress at work, they may have more difficult time providing children with the responses they need, with the interactions they need. Healthy caregivers can provide high quality interactions, are more responsive and engaged, can better reduce instances of problem behavior in the classrooms, and are better equipped to support families of children in their care. They may also miss fewer days and have lower rates of turnover. On the other hand, high stress is associated with unhappiness at work and also with high turnover, which means less stability for children. Workforce well-being is a pressing issue that has not yet been adequately understood or addressed. The transforming the workforce volume recommends that all lead teachers working with children from birth through age eight have a bachelor's degree with specialized training in early childhood education. If compensation does not increase and workforce supports do not improve, however, higher education requirements may only worsen the stress and well-being of the workforce. So today, we are here to gain a better understanding of the research and to learn how states and program leaders are addressing these issues. As part of our transforming the early education workforce multimedia guidebook, as I mentioned, we have several videos attached to that that were produced by New America, and they dig into topics that we really wanted to highlight and a topic that's important for a video that's important for today's discussion. So we'd like to share the video, and this zooms in on significance of the conditions faced by today's early education workforce. It gives voice to daily experiences of educators and features experts from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Before we go to the video, I want to just mention the first panel will start right after the video, and that will be moderated by Abby Lieberman, who is a senior policy analyst for our early and elementary education program here at New America. So we will turn to the video, and then Abby will come up to lead the first panel. My name is Quenetta Lewis. I am director of a single classroom preschool in the heart of West Oakland. I remember when I first got out of school, they were like, well, what are you going to do with this nice degree you have? And I'm like, I want to go work in West Oakland. And it's mainly because I feel like these children need more and they need to have dedicated people to help them. See over here? That's a walking sign. One of those people over here. What we found in a study that we commissioned with UC Berkeley is that not only our teachers worried about paying their bills, but many of our teachers are actually just worried about putting food on the table for their own families. 75% of early childhood center-based teachers in the US earn less than $15 an hour. Mind you, but more than a third have bachelor's degrees. They might drive for like Uber in the afternoon. They're working side jobs and then they're still trying to do work that they have to do here. So many times we're asking teachers to be psychologists and janitors and family navigators. And now we're asking people to do assessments and fill out forms and just we keep kind of adding more things we want teachers to do. There's a lot of turnover and teachers don't stay as long and we know that has a negative impact on the children. I'm trying to figure out how we did it. I do know that, yeah. At least half the teachers, they're being supervised by another teacher. So SQL is a survey tool that we developed here at the center and it's really designed to capture the voice and perspective of teaching staff. It looks at teacher well-being and it really provides information about teacher well-being. They together sort of assess their work environment in five different ways. So we're able to make these linkages between teacher well-being and quality of programs that children are in. This information is then used to inform quality improvement, to help us think about policies. If you can't document the status quo then you can't really challenge it. And people are beginning to understand these are the things that are really preventing them from moving quality. One of the challenges, I think, of working with young children is how people perceive what you're doing as being unskilled, something anybody can do, and so there's a real lack of respect. It's seen as the children are just playing and how we say yes, they're playing and when they're playing, they're learning. Their learning is their work and we're guiding them in their work called play. And so the teachers who come along have to be skilled and now in our workforce, more than ever, we're requiring that we have at least a bachelor's degree. What teachers of young children need is adequate compensation. They need to feel like they have input on the decisions that are made that affect children and they really need to also have some self-determination in choosing what kind of professional development path they choose. This issue of teacher pay and teacher working conditions is not some abstract or irrelevant thing. It is front and center to the ability of teachers to function in a professional way and to engage in professional practice. Like why do we stay? We stay because we love it, but it's been a sacrifice. That's why I work in leadership now. We got to change this and we got to keep speaking, but we have to put action into it. I don't want to see scribbling. You guys are going to kindergarten. You should be able to draw your shape. For a lot of the children who come here, this is like, OAS is like some place where they can come and feel happy and that's one of the big things I can say that the teachers and myself, we say I love you a lot around here and we give them a lot of love and a lot of hugs and because that's what they need along with giving them an education. Yeah. Sorry. I always get really emotional because I love being here with them, but it's just really hard because I have my family to think about also. Good morning, everyone. Please excuse my crutches and boot. I broke my foot seven weeks ago and we're still healing here, but hopefully getting better. Thank you all for joining us today and hope you enjoyed the video. I'm really excited to have these three panelists here. They're all leaders in this area of research, so thank you all for traveling far to be with us this morning. On my left, we have Kate Gallagher from Buffett Early Childhood Institute. Next to Kate, we have Rebecca Maddell from Child Trends and at the end, we have George Phillip from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley. I don't want to butcher their bios, but you all should have picked up their bios when you came in this morning, so I encourage you to read their full bios there and today we'll just jump right into their research. So we're going to get started by having each of the researchers give a brief presentation and then depending on how much time we have left, then I'll ask them some questions and then we'll go to audience Q&A. So first up, Kate is going to share her findings with us from the Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Survey and there should be a clicker up there for you to use. Good morning, everyone. It's a privilege to be here today to talk about this issue which I'm guessing we're all pretty passionate about and all started to get a little choked up at the video we just watched because it's the reality. And as a person who came through that reality as an early childhood teacher in my early career and Center Director, it certainly resonates for me. The work that I'm going to present is work that in combination with others here captures kind of the evolution of some of the study around the well-being of the workforce. And starting with the idea that well teachers have well children, there's only a really honestly a small body of work that connects the well-being of early childhood professionals to outcomes for children and families. But in all honesty, the motivation is from what we know about parenting. We know that sensitive, responsive caregiving is essential for early brain development. And we know that stressed, depressed caregivers struggle to provide sensitive, responsive and educationally promoted interactions that serve and return. One of the projects I've been involved with that I came in late to the game and has really influenced my thinking is the Pennsylvania Head Start Staff Wellness Survey. You may know the study it was done in Pennsylvania with Head Start and early Head Start teachers and professionals across the Head Start system. And it was led by Bob Whitaker who envisioned and imagined that we needed to know how well these early childhood professionals were doing in order to really support them and provide systems around them. So one of the first early things that they found using this study of over 2,000 professionals in Pennsylvania was that workplace stress and depression both contributed to high levels of teacher-reported conflict and their relationships with children. So we can see there some of the importance. And again, this is a survey. And the conceptualization they were using to think about this work was that they were thinking about stress, specifically workplace stress, economic hardships, and trauma, childhood trauma, adverse childhood experiences would be predictive of physical and emotional health of the professionals and that that subsequently would be related to relationship quality and children's learning. In addition to looking at these correlations among survey data, they were interested in what kind of factors might serve as protective. And one thing that served as highly influential in the relationships between the different variables was the presence of mindfulness. And so there were also other things that really were intervening variables, but mindfulness showed out to be a protective factor. And to give one example of that from our work in a study of the professionals across all roles, and when I say across all roles in Head Start, home visitors, family facilitators, teachers, assistant teachers, and administrative staff. So across all the roles. Mindfulness, this one was with just teachers. This one in teachers that were more mindful had less conflict in their relationships with children. But an interesting feature was that that appeared to go largely through depression. What that means is that teacher mindfulness decreased their levels of depression, which improved their relationships with children. So depression and mindfulness act in these interesting ways. And so we did some interesting work in thinking about the individual. Teachers, they were asked at the end of the survey to tell us about anything else that they hadn't answered or told about how they were doing in their work and personal lives. And over a quarter of them responded to this prompt. And we were able to code about 400 of those 500 responses. And this one really captured the essence of what we were hearing from these early childhood professionals. I'm going to read it because I'm concerned you can't see it in the back. My job requires more and more of my time and energy each year with little to no monetary or emotional compensation. The main reason I chose to stay with Head Start is that I believe in the program and enjoy working with the children and families to help them succeed in life. I wish our program showed more care and concern for its staff. This really reflects a lot of the themes you saw in the video before this. And one thing, so over the years having many conversations, is the compensation and the poor health care benefits, poor benefits in general, and the low esteem of the field really over time erodes the sense of purpose and mission that keeps high quality professionals in this field and has them seek other things. So really keeping that sense of purpose and mission forward. A little bit about the Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Survey. It was a survey of early childhood professionals across teaching roles and administrative roles from settings serving children birth to age eight. So included public school settings as well as early childhood settings of family child care and early childhood programs. And in our survey, we did in one of our studies led by Amy Roberts at our institute at the time. We looked at what kinds of things were associated with higher depression in among early childhood teachers. Those who had more adult centered beliefs were more likely to have high depression. And that is using the modernity scale, which you may know, which looks at adult centered beliefs versus child centered beliefs. So those who saw more adult centered roles in their early childhood teaching were more likely to have higher symptoms of depression. Those who had more than one job had higher levels of depression, not surprised there. Those who had higher levels of workplace demands, challenges such as communicating with families and challenges related to children's behavior. We also saw more depression in those who had no health insurance. It is a field where getting sick is a occupational hazard. And it's very surprising how few early childhood professionals, especially those in the zero to five service area, do not have either access to health care or access to health insurance. Lower wages was associated with more depression and fewer workplace resources. And the resources and demands both come from the Kerbo instrument, which looks at stress in the early childhood workplace. And those resources were feelings of personal fulfillment, respect, being influential, being satisfied with their job. So this is a very quick, as you see, overview. So this has been the guiding tome in our field for a few years now, and I assume will continue to be, and transforming the workforce for children birth through age eight. It used the best science we have about how children develop and how we provide those supports around quality for children. And the piece that I've taken and used quite a bit is this factors contributing to professional practice and child outcomes. I'd say one of the genius pieces of this tome is that the science providing documentation the single most important thing for children's outcomes are relationships is an extraordinarily important contribution. And so relationships with families, relationships with children, and relationships with other professionals on the part of the teacher is an extremely important professional, proximal activity related to children's outcomes. But also in this piece, oh, and my circles moved a little bit. Imagine if this circle that says behaviors and actions of the practitioner is over well-being of the practitioner. So central to the model, right? Central to the model is the well-being of the practitioner. We'll see where my next ones land. Oh, that one almost got there. Okay, so we've got professional learning supports and knowledge and competencies and that practice environment. So we've got this ecology around what supports are needed to have the caregiver, the practitioner, the professional be well and how that leads to children's relationships and children's outcomes. I'm gonna return to this idea in a few minutes because this model is largely linear. We started to try to think, how can we think about this in some kind of other way? And so colleagues and I, Amy Roberts, and Alina Rousseau, started to think about moving a little bit from thinking about the individual characteristics of what makes a professional well in the context of early care and education and start to take a look at what is in the workplace, similar to the fantastic work done with the SQL tool. And so we wanted to start to know what we could learn from other fields, psychology, business, medicine, social work, sociology, economics. And we learned several things, some of which were, of course, and some of which started to challenge us in how to think about looking at the well-being of the workforce. One, importantly, well-being is not just the absence of illness. What does it mean to be well? And actually our work in that regard was highly informed by Carol Riff at the University of Wisconsin who really looks at adult well-being. We started to look at the context, systems, and individual contributions as all being important things to start to consider. In everything we read, leadership is the key. Leadership is somewhere where we're really going to need to go to look at the creation of workforce. And I mentioned to you in the Pennsylvania Head Start Staff Wellness Survey, every one of the struggles of teachers and home visitors were shared by the administration in early Head Start and Head Start. We're not talking about a leadership cadre of professionals who are super well cared for themselves. And we learned it's complicated. It's multi-dimensional and we don't think it's very linear. And so we started to think about and generate an idea of what this ecology might look like of teacher well-being. And I'm saying teacher and when I say that I am including home visitors, administrators, family facilitators, all of those engaged in the work of early care and education. So we looked of course at child well-being at the very center and that's surrounded by the relationships and interactions that that child has. That is what quality is. We define quality all kinds of ways but quality is the degree to which a child experiences those serve and return warm responsive advancing interactions. Around that is teacher well-being. And I'm again seeing that my images are a little skewed and that's so forgive them and I can get you new copies after this if you like. Teacher well-being is central to this just as in the home environment, parenting or primary caregiver well-being is essential to child well-being. That's what we're trying to describe here and refine. The first thing we know is important is that teaching role and when we think about that we're thinking about the professional persona of teachers. How much autonomy does he or she have? Self-efficacy. What career stage are they at? What age level are they teaching? The next is personal factors, the characteristics, the traits, the circumstances. Thinking about the teacher as an individual. This is where a lot of the work has been. When we think about teachers' depression and how she's doing teaching, we're thinking about her individual. That is a piece of the story that's important. It's not the whole story, right? And so we're thinking about the personal history of the teacher, maybe the childhood trauma, health, relationships and here's where we find the sense of mission and purpose because that is inherent to the individuals who decide to do this for a living. Knowledge and competencies, these are the things folks can learn. Understanding and skills, social emotional skills, resilience quite frankly and learning that's associated. Next we've got the practice environment. These are a lot of the kinds of things we think about and the characteristics of the work setting including support such as coaching, workplace safety, ratios, all the kinds of things that are inherent in the quality of the early learning environment that impact the teacher's wellbeing. Thinking about organizational factors and leadership. These are things like compensation, power structure, data needs, all the kinds of things related to the infrastructure of the early childhood setting or program. Next we have professional regulations and policy. These are the accountability systems that teachers report for. When I think about what Marcy Whitebook was saying about how the field emerged initially as a place just to keep kids safe while their parents worked and now we know there's so much more needed and the layers added on and on and on on what they're expected to do. When I first directed an early childhood program in the early 90s in Madison, Wisconsin, I think I had about four partner regulators that I had to respond to. When I later directed one in North Carolina, I had 14 partner regulators that I had to respond to as an administrator. The amount of work has gone up so much in that regard and teachers experience it very personally. And then finally social and cultural factors which we think is really important to think about. When we think about cultural, we're thinking about the shared belief systems either in the school or the early childhood program or society as a whole. And then we think about the social, which are the social institutions that rise and the social practices that arise from those cultural circumstances. Oh, my time wise. Oh, I'm on the hard stop. Okay, I gotta look up a little more. All right, our next steps, we're looking at how wages are associated with wellbeing in a group of education programs. We're really trying to start to test this model. We haven't done it yet and we are really excited to have a network come help us and do that because it can't be done by a couple of folks. We continue to be interested in Nebraska. We've got a couple of really interesting initiatives around teacher wellbeing and mindfulness and executive function. And I thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Kate. And now we'll have Rebecca go next. That was really interesting. Hi, I'm Rebecca Madill and I'm really excited to be here today sharing some findings from a report that my colleagues and I worked on under a contract for the federal government. So the question driving this report was what workplace conditions support the wellbeing of the early care and education workforce. We have a lot of quality indicators that we measure in childcare settings, group size ratio, professional development. And what we wanted to know in this report was are these quality indicators also related to the wellbeing of the teacher because thinking about the models that Kate just shared, we should be influencing the wellbeing of the teachers if we really want to improve quality. So to answer these questions, we used the 2012 National Survey of Early Care and Education or the NSECE to understand teachers' psychological distress. We focused on the lead teachers or teachers, not the aides or assistants. We wanted to know what's going on with the teachers in the classrooms. And we only looked at childcare centers. So that's our frame for our work. To understand the wellbeing in the workforce, we focused on distress. So it is the illness. We're not talking about the absence of or the other wellbeing factors. The NSECE measured wellbeing or distress with this measure that you see here. It's a six item measure asking about teachers' symptoms over the past 30 days. And I need to say it sets a very high bar for distress. This measure is looking for individuals who have likely a diagnosable mental illness and impaired daily functioning. So it's a very high bar for distress. Scores could range from zero to 24. So what did we find? What supports teachers' wellbeing or minimizes their distress? In short, we found that several workplace supports did support teachers' distress or were linked to teachers' distress so they supported their wellbeing. But many of them were not. Right here, you can see that we grouped supports into formal supports. So these are things like, was the group size and ratio within the standard set by professional organizations? Was there coaching or consultation available? These basic quality indicators for childcare settings. On the right side, you see the informal supports. These are more about the environment, the social climate in the childcare center. So what we found was that of the formal supports, only stability of classroom assignments not being moved between classrooms every week or multiple times within a week, that prevents distress. And then on the informal support side, we found a little bit more. Teachers who felt like teamwork was encouraged in their center, had lower levels of distress. And teachers who felt respected also had lower levels of distress. So I'm gonna go into a little more detail. This looks at our finding related to stability. I think this should come as no surprise. We found that teachers had less distress and they had stability at work. So one of the facts of the childcare world is that teachers are often moved between classrooms to support regulations like having someone with a bachelor's degree in every classroom or meeting group size or ratio standards. But it looks like this is not great for the teachers. This can make it hard for teachers to learn about their individual students to get to know the needs of those students and then support those children which can make the teacher's job more stressful. It also having a lack of stability just means you're not in control of your daily environment. And we know from plenty of other research that employees who don't have control over their environments have more depression, more anxiety. I wanted to point out that about 17% of the teachers and lead teachers had been moved at least once or more over the past week. And about 84% had never been moved during that past week. But these rates are higher if we were to look at the assistance and aids who are often shuffled between classrooms. Okay, second, we were looking at teamwork. Teachers had less distress when they reported that teamwork was encouraged in their workplace. Measuring teamwork, it was a five point scale with the extremes being strongly disagree that teamwork was encouraged and then strongly agree. So fortunately, most teachers did agree or strongly agree. Right here we're just showing the 50% who strongly agreed. And as their perception of teamwork went up, their distress levels were lower. We expected teamwork to be important for their distress given research that social support is very important in preventing mental illness in individuals. And finally, our finding related to respect. Teachers had less distress when they felt respected at work. Again, this was related to research on the social climate, social support at work, being really important for individuals' wellbeing. Again, this was a five point scale of respect so individuals could say they strongly disagreed that they felt respected at work all the way to strongly agree. And most teachers did agree or strongly agree. And as agreement increased, distress levels were lower. So when we finished our analysis, we were wondering why weren't all of these formal supports associated with lower distress? Our analyses didn't address this, but we do have some thoughts that we want to share, especially because we're not saying that formal supports don't matter. Of course they're important. Teaching a math curriculum is important if you need the teacher to deliver that math curriculum, but it's not necessarily going to support their wellbeing. So first of all, teachers may not actually have participated in the professional development opportunities that were available to them. What we looked at was whether the center offered opportunities for teachers. So that's an indicator that the center is trying to support the teachers, but the teacher might not have actually used those funds or attended the workshops. Second, professional development activities can be a source of stress for teachers. I think this was in the video. Just the pressure to have these educational requirements or get these credits can be stressful. It also means that teacher might need to travel farther than she usually does for her work. It could mean staying at work at night or going in on the weekends to get professional development. All of this adding up to stress instead of reducing stress. Third, the professional development activities may not be individualized to the teacher's needs. This is important right now. We're pushing a lot of coaching supports that are tailored to a teacher's individual needs, but a lot of the supports are more like that math curriculum instruction. So how do you deliver a math curriculum? And that's not going to help the teacher learn how to support a challenging child in her classroom, which would reduce her stress. And finally, our outcome measure sets a very high bar for distress. So the measure that Kate talked about in Nebraska uses more of a continuous measure of depression, whereas in the National Survey of Early Care and Education 2012, our measure, like I said, is looking for individuals who are having impaired daily functioning. And the truth is a lot of those teachers aren't going to be staying in their jobs. So we're missing a lot of teachers who are really distressed. If we'd had a more continuous measure or looking at stress symptoms on a continuum, we may have seen that some of these formal supports were somewhat helpful in reducing teachers' stress. So we are excited that I can say we're continuing to gather national data to improve our understanding of well-being in the Early Care and Education workforce. With the next iteration of the NSCCE in 2019, we've swapped out our measures of distress. So we'll be including the CESD, which is a measure of depression. So we'll be able to get even better knowledge of how the workforce is doing across the entire country and looking at supports for their well-being and see if any of these formal supports seem to be important there. All right, thank you. Thanks so much, Rebecca. And now our last presentation, George. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for having me today. I'm George Phillip. I'm here representing the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. I've been working with them for the last couple of years around their SQL instrument. And I'll express apologies for Marcy and Leah who couldn't be here today, who you saw them in the video. This is a topic that is near to dear to their hearts. I will start off, oh, there we go. I'd like to start off our presentations with a quote from one of our recent studies with teachers. Primarily because we like to begin these presentations with something directly from teaching staff because one of the foundations of our work is that we need to bring the voices of teachers to the policy table, that these voices have been slowly muted over time as we focused in other areas. And it's really important that we get them back into the mix when we're doing policy discussions. So just reading it real quickly because I don't know if there's any other quote I've read that articulates this so well, but my wellbeing can affect my emotional state, ability to be well rested and my enthusiasm and motivation to do well at my job. Being genuinely supported, having security financially, a support network and having human connection with community colleagues, students, families and the individuals that are part of my life are all factors in my ability to educate to the best of my abilities. When I am secure and supported, I can encourage and provide security, support, feel inspired and help encourage and participate in a healthy happy culture that benefits all of us. One of the reasons we began this work is because at the center we feel we really need to reconceptualize our norms about ECE teachers and their needs and their roles in our systems. Around the early 2000s as money started to flow into our system, a lot of our investments quickly turned to human capital investments where we were trying to professionalize our field and we developed competencies and standards and norms and all of these things and QRIS systems to measure quality. And as we did this, we increased all of these expectations but we really weren't asking the central question which is that our teachers in environments and under conditions where they can realistically meet these expectations. So we have not been adding supports for teachers while we continue to add to the expectations. And we've really turned teachers into an object of policy rather than an active voice in shaping it. I had to include, oh, maybe I need to click again, hold on. Got some transitions. I had to include this slide real quickly just because of quote because this is a problem that's been around forever. Marcy found this when she was doing some research on the history of our field. This is from a study done in Chicago of day nurseries in 1918. And I'll just read these because it's kind of small print. It is a false economy to try and secure nursery matrons and assistants at too low a wage to employ an inadequate number of workers or to impose unpleasant conditions of work and living upon them. Another part from that report. As soon as there is no longer a fair margin in the working day for a period of leisure, for interchange between worker and worker and between worker and children, loss results in nursery morale and nursery achievement. That's from a century ago. It was echoed again in the transforming the workforce report where they said, adults who are under informed, under prepared or subject to chronic stress themselves may contribute to children's experiences of adversity and stress and undermine their development and learning. So I have to include this quote just to point out that these are symptoms of our field that have been around since the very beginning. So you heard some of this in the video already. I realized that I probably didn't need as many slides because the video described it, but to address some of this and to work on this issue, the center developed SQL which stands for supportive environmental quality underlying adult learning, which is a multi-purpose tool for examining and improving environments in which early childhood teaching staff work and learn. It's an online survey that's completed by teachers and assistants directly and it's accompanied with an administrator survey which kind of adds context to the programs that we're studying. And it really looks at capturing teacher staff assessments and their perspectives of how their program environment contributes or hinders their ability to apply their knowledge and skills and improve their practice. SQL includes five domains, teaching supports which looks at curriculum, child observation and assessment, materials and equipment, support services for children, professional responsibilities, learning community which looks at professional development opportunities and being able to apply the learning that they're gaining, job crafting which focuses on making decisions in their classroom, the amount of input they have, looks at teamwork which is a topic some of my presenters talked about, a whole section on adult wellbeing which looks at economic wellbeing, wellness supports, quality of work life and program leadership. What I like to say is that this tool and these studies help translate the systemic challenges that our field faces into the daily challenges that our teachers are experiencing every day on the floor. So I'm just gonna share some of the results from some of our recent studies. So less than half of teaching staff agreed that they can depend on getting paid breaks, that they can receive a pay raise if they are promoted. That complaints by any staff member are considered fairly and that no staff receives preferential treatment. So all of these indicators, less than half of staff. A very telling one which looks at economic wellbeing and we have seen, I should mention we've done several studies now, we have seen similar results across all our studies. So here we see, we were asking them how much do they worry about these things on a monthly basis? 51% worry about having enough food for their family on a monthly basis. 71% worry about paying their housing costs. 78% having enough to pay their family's monthly bills and 89% having a large enough savings for retirement. Which I think is, what I like about this slide is that we all know about some of the indicators but there's a lot of things affecting it. And for many of us, I think retirement is a big, for anybody, retirement is a big issue. And you can't really, I can't really think of a great early childhood program that has a fantastic retirement plan with an employer contribution like many of us may enjoy. Another one, some data on educational debt. So 42% of teaching staff reported having student loan debt. 58% were staff with bachelor's degree, 47% were staff with a master's degree. And the Mouthea reported, we found that 52% or over half of those with educational debt had at least $25,000. When we put this into the context of some of the previous comments and some of the work, we're focusing around increasing educational attainment. This is a big factor for people who are, most of whom are not making a livable wage. I wanted to highlight this quote from the Early Childhood Workforce Index, which is done by the center. They just released their second report in 2016. They said it very succinctly, the time is long overdue for moving from the question of why we must improve early childhood jobs to a focus on how to make it happen. And we just recently released the 2018 index, and I wanted to highlight that because this one has an extended section on the importance of work environments. I don't have enough time to go through all of our areas today, but it's a really good write-up of why this is important. Also includes a long list of policy recommendations on how we can start to approach this work. But as I opened with, we feel one of the centerpieces of this is how to bring the voices of teachers and perspectives of teachers back into these conversations around policy development. And how do we look at how all these expectations are impacting teachers' work and stress levels? We have the Alameda Report online on our website, which is the county that was highlighted in the video. We are about to release a major report for a state in the Northeast, and then there's gonna be two subsequent reports for one in the Midwest and then the South coming out very soon. So I encourage you to keep an eye out for those. One of the things we pride ourselves on is that with each report, we work with the state to figure out how we can best adapt the report and change it. So each one looks a little bit different as we work with states to figure out the best way to present this knowledge in the most compelling way and these results in the most compelling way. So please make sure you check that out. And thank you very much for my time. Thank you so much, George. So this was a lot of information for everyone. It's wonderful presentations and it's really interesting to see all of you have different data sets that you're using, but coming up with very similar findings about the well-being of the workforce. So we are a little bit behind on time. I think what I'll do is turn it over to the audience for questions. If you don't have any questions, then I'll turn back to my questions, but I'd like to give you a chance to ask any questions. We have Awade in the back with the mic, so just raise your hand if you'd like her to come over to you. No? Okay. Then we can turn to my questions for a few minutes. So this is a broad question, but I think you can all answer it a little differently. So like I said, you're all using different data sets, different data tools. Findings are similar. What do you see as important next steps? Is that more research? I know George, you work with states based on the findings. So in your work, what is the next step for this issue? And yeah, yeah. So I, it'll go on as you can. Okay. So just in hearing our three presentations together and actually I have worked with both sets of projects a little bit, at least in conversations and thinking, there needs to be more collaboration. As I said, I think we've started in that realm of working, we're working with child trends right now. We've started thinking about using the sequel in our work, but I wanna remind that this work was almost exclusively on or underfunded until very recently. So there was been very little effort around funding study of the workforce. And so these data that we represented and these voices that we shared are really key in guiding our work going on. And we need to really find some funders so that we can do work that isn't piecemeal, but really is collaborative across the country. And of course the Center for Workforce Development is really a leader in that. So that's one of the next steps I think. Yeah, and I'll take a slightly different direction. I completely agree with everything Kate said, but when we were putting this report together, what we realized was a lack of evidence looking at exactly how the teacher's wellbeing is influencing their interactions in the classroom. We know very well that depressed mothers are having less responsive interactions with their children, but we would like to see more research looking at the classrooms and how teacher symptoms translate to their interactions with children. Yeah, and I said this a couple of times, but the need to really reconnect with teachers and engage them in these conversations is really critical. Nobody tells this story better than them. We have not been paying enough attention to the effects of these higher expectations and what it's doing to our teachers on the floor. And I think there's some promising work. I mean, certainly the QRIS systems have become a vehicle for change, but what we don't see in almost all QRIS systems is anything around work environment issues. There are some states that are doing some good work around this, I would mention New York has some great standards around work environments embedded in their QRIS system. And just to say that if we're gonna have a QRIS, that's us telling the field what's important for quality. And if we neglect to include the importance of teachers and their wellbeing into that assessment of quality, we are telling them that's not important. Thank you. And Rebecca, I was hoping you could tell us a little bit more about the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education. That's a really important data set in our field and sounds like you're involved in the next iteration of it. Sure, yeah. We'll expand it at all or follow the measures in different. It will mostly be the same because what we want to be able to do is compare the workforce to what we got in 2012 and see how we're making some of the improvements that we hope to see based on a lot of the work that's been done in the interim. I will say one of the improvements, like I said, is the measure of wellbeing. And I also want to mention that it's not just a survey of the center-based teachers. It's a massive survey. We have the home-based providers. We have those who are listed in Operating Family Child Care Homes. We do know about their wellbeing in 2012 and we will know about it in 2019. And we also have the wellbeing actually of the unlisted home-based workforce. So these are people who are friends and family taking care of children in their home because that is part of the workforce and that's where a lot of our especially low-income children are getting their childcare. So lots of opportunities for answering all of your questions. That'll be wonderful. And then, Kate, I was hoping you could expand a little bit on your last slide. You listed a few different things that Nebraska is doing to solutions. I didn't think mindfulness was on there, which I've heard you just present on before. But if you could expand on that slide a little bit since we were cut short for time. So thanks because of this enhanced interest and because of the lack of a national guidance around it, there've been a lot of little pieces. And so there's some really nice work. Holly Hatton Bowers is one of the leaders in Nebraska. Really, she has a program called CHIME that she's doing with early childhood professionals not just to enhance their mindfulness. So she uses mindfulness from a mindful self-compassion frame if you're familiar with that, but she adds to it a very strong and structured self-reflection process. Because she's also looking at the sense of purpose. So how do we help people have the sense of purpose? That's one nice piece of work. Another nice piece of work is some work around executive function and enhancing teachers' executive function in the classroom. And to that, they're using a really interesting tool on a Minnesota that uses an iPad application of executive function. Can be used with very young children up through adults. So it's a really interesting tool that's gonna help us look at that. So those are the individual-based ones. We also have a, Nebraska has an Early Childhood Workforce Commission that is facilitated by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute. And we have state-level partners and stakeholders who are literally focused on how to enhance workforce capacities. Looking at quality, looking at funding so we can address the compensation issue and looking at public will. Because one of the reasons that teachers' voices are not listened to is because they're not respected from the gate. And so when oppressed peoples, and I will say they are oppressed, when oppressed peoples share their opinion on how things are, people find it easy to dismiss their opinion. So that's some of the work. Great, and I think that's actually a really nice segue into our next panel where we're gonna hear from, hear what some states are, some other states are doing as well. So yeah, so if I could have a final round of applause for this panel. Thank you all so much. And I'd like to start by inviting up our moderator for our next panel, Aliyah Samuel. Aliyah is the director of the Education Division at the National Governor Association Center for Breast Practice. Her full bio is also on the sheet and we're so excited to have Aliyah here this morning and I'll let her introduce the rest of the panel. So you can take this seat. Good morning, everyone. All right, so we have survived the midterms. Thanksgiving is two weeks away. The winter holidays are six weeks away so there's a lot on the horizon. I look forward to the discussion. And so what I'd like to do is I call up the rest of the panelists. If you'll just, as I read your bio, if you'll just come on up. So we have Ruth Schmidt, who is the executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. Good morning. Then we have Erin Carroll from the Louisiana Department of Education. Erin Carroll is the director of classroom and workforce improvement in the Office of Early Learning for the Louisiana Department of Education. Then Jamal Berry, who I feel like I know personally now, we seem to continue to be in the same meetings and venues. It is a pleasure to introduce Jamal. He is, he joined Educator Washington DC as an infant toddler master teacher and has now become the associate director. And is actually serving in the role of school director. He has been a real advocate for the early childhood workforce and is just a great voice to this discussion. And then finally, I'd like to introduce Jackie Hines from the DCAEYC and the Washington Teachers Union. Good morning, Jackie. So before we get into the conversation, I'd like to just give a little bit of background. As I mentioned, and I'm sure you all know, the midterms were just a couple of days away. And at the National Governors Association, we actually have been monitoring very closely. We started with the 79 candidates going through the primaries and into election night. And one of the things that we found is that early childhood is fundamentally part of the education discussion, both at the macro and micro level. And I just want to give a couple of recaps. So there were 37 gubernatorial elections. There's two still pending in the territories. And what we found out of all the governor-elects, there were five top education issues. Workforce and education, and not the early childhood workforce, but more broadly the connection between education and workforce. We also found that higher education is going to continue to be a topic of discussion. K-12 funding, primarily looking at funding levels. K-12 teachers and leaders, including compensation. We actually had 17 governor-elects talk about teacher compensation specifically to some degree. And early education, 18 of the governor-elects talked specifically about issues such as pre-K. And we had 15 of the governor-elects talk about early education funding at some degree or another. Now, early education, as we know, can be categorized into several different categories. And so I want to give you what those were specifically. The four top categories that the new governors have talked about are pre-K, early education funding, childcare, and kindergarten. And so holistically, those are going to be some of the topics that we're looking at. Our team actually had a retreat off-site yesterday to look at all of the candidates now that we know who the governor-elects are, to figure out what their platforms are and how we can better support. What's interesting is that there's at least two candidates, or governor-elects, excuse me, one Democratic and one Republican who specifically talked about birth to age three, which we know has been a part of the early education field that has not gotten enough attention. And so we're watching that very closely. But we're not here to just talk about the governor-elects, but how it translates down into the policy piece. And so what I'd like to do is we know compensation is a big part of the discussion. So actually, Erin, I'm gonna start with you. If you could give us a little bit of background on the work that you're doing. But if you could also talk to us a little bit more, outside of raising the salaries or hourly wages, which we know is complex on a lot of levels, what are some creative approaches that you have taken to support early childhood teachers financially? And if you could dig in a little bit about the future of tax credits, that'd be great. Sure. Excellent, thank you. So in Louisiana, as in all states, we are constantly trying to evaluate ways to better support our childcare teachers, along with other states. We see our childcare teachers making incredibly low wages, even in comparison to our public school pre-K teachers, which still, you know, we wish were higher. I think the most unique approach that Louisiana has is through our school readiness tax credits. So this is a very unique package of five early childhood tax credits that are funded by our state. I won't go into all of them, they're all incredibly complex, but the one that is most relevant to this discussion is our staff to tax credits. So this is for directors and teachers working in our publicly funded childcare centers. So our center-based care that's participating or has agreed to participate in our public funds, or receive public funds. So these tax credits have been in place since 2007. They have been increasing in popularity. We have done a lot of work to make them more accessible to our childcare teachers. So in recent years, we've realigned them to really match with what we've set as the minimum bar for childcare teacher preparation to really make sure that all of our teachers that are working in our centers are able to get a wage supplement once a year. These are fully refundable tax credits. They range, there's four levels that you can qualify for. They range from about 1200 to about $3,600. So it's not an insignificant amount, especially if you're considering the wages that our childcare teachers are unfortunately receiving. These are available to childcare and Head Start programs in Louisiana. One of the unique aspects that we just recently added that goes into effect this year, and we're very excited for our childcare teacher population, is that childcare teachers are now able to qualify for a higher level tax credit if they have been in the field for multiple years. So by showing that they are continuing to stay in the field, actually for just one in two years, they can move up to the highest level of tax credit. This means that this year we're expecting a enormous bump in the amount of funding that leaves from the state and goes out to childcare. We're actually able to do this retroactively. So looking back to 2016, even though we passed this policy in 2017. So last year we had about $8 million in this tax credit go out to childcare staff and directors and we are expecting that to increase significantly this year. Perfect, thank you. On one of the previous slides from this morning, they talked about how the professional development requirements, the education requirements can add to a level of stress for teachers. So Ruth, I'm gonna turn to you in talking about wage supplement programs and scholarships as a strategy for the workforce development, can you talk a little bit about that as well as what some of the barriers are? So in Wisconsin, we are part of, in excess of 20 states that offer the teacher-lead childhood scholarship program. And we also have a sort of Wisconsin-specific Reward Wage Supplement Program. So it's kind of similar to how wages is run in terms of North Carolina and other states that do the wages wage supplement program also. The programs have both been operating in Wisconsin in excess of 19, 20 years each. And what we have seen is with our scholarship program, and this was talked about earlier in terms of how we've gotten really good at sort of layering on qualifications, standards, expectations of this workforce. And the good news is when you have a structure like the teacher-lead childhood scholarship program in place, not only is there the financial supports for improving the level of education of the workforce, but there also is the sort of intensive counseling that individuals who work in early care and education get in their relationship with their teacher-lead childhood counselors. So that can be navigating all sorts of planning issues around what path of higher ed do you pursue in terms of how that's gonna play out in your program, how it plays out for you in terms of individual professional development planning, which I think is really important and oftentimes overlooked in this workforce is the need to really look at the individual, not just the program level of what is happening. And so in Wisconsin, we do some really intensive professional development counseling and scholarship counseling for people that are working in this field. When our QRIS system passed back in 2010, we saw 125% increase in demand for our scholarship dollars. So this I think gets to this issue of how you have one policy. So a QRIS policy that then drives the need for other policies and investments to be happening. And at the same time, I think, I also just really quickly wanna address the need to have a robust workforce registry working in states for our wage supplement program for reward. We link that to both levels of tenure. So how long have people been in the field and then linking it to the level that they're at in our workforce registry? And so we have the ability to go into that system to look at those credentials to determine what level would someone be at in terms of receiving a reward supplement. The challenge, so reward is funded, I think our wage supplements run between $100 to $900 a year. That's about 50% of what it was at when it was initially put into the budget in Wisconsin back 17, 18 years ago now. The challenge with all of this, I think, is financing. It's how do you support this workforce with the increase in needed education, needed teacher preparation without looking at additional investments in terms of how that plays out. So I think the layering on of expectations and the need to balance that with policy drivers that are available at the state level is really critical for states to look at. Thank you. So Jamal, I'm gonna turn to you and I'm actually gonna ask you a question that was not on here. And I actually hate it when moderators do this to me, but it's a really good one. We had the pleasure of having a workforce meeting. NGA has launched a second cohort of a workforce project as well in partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers. And we had the states come together and we as well begin our programming with the voices from the field. And Jamal shared a story. He came out to Minnesota, which thank you for doing that in itself, shared a story about his own scholarship and what it meant for him. And so before you get into the teacher well-being but truly at the site level, which we wanna hear about, would you mind sharing your story about how you've benefited from scholarships as an early childhood provider, practitioner and in the field? No problem. All right, thanks for putting me on the spot. Sorry to put you on the spot. So once again, my name's Jamal Berry and in 2002, I told the story that my mother said, either you can work or you can go to school and in order to go to school, you have to get a scholarship. So at the time I was a high school athlete, and I ended up going to Bowie State University on a partial football, partial academic scholarship. From there, I wanted to continue my education. And one of the important things with that scholarships is what made it happen. I magically got an email one day as an assistant director at a childcare facility from George Washington University that talked about Project ITAP, infant toddlers and preschools. So I was able to receive a 75% scholarship at that time to George Washington University for a master's in early childhood special education. So from there, I thought I was going to be this non-categorical pre-K teacher, but that wasn't in the path. What it was was Head Start. And I fell in love with Head Start and what it meant and what it meant for children. And as I continued along my path, another George Washington scholarship came out, which was a 65% scholarship this time for EDS. So one of the things I said was that scholarships was the path. I think it's the pathway that allows people the opportunity. And Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about the Outlier and it talks a lot about opportunity. If people get these opportunities, they can seize it and go from there. Thank you. So you are at Educare and thank you for allowing us to take Mandy Storghi from you, who is our senior policy analyst for early childhood. But could you talk a little bit about some of the barriers to staff wellness that you see here in the DC area? Okay, so I would say some of the barriers are compensation started first. That has to be the word that we start with is compensation. When teachers aren't paid with their worth, when they aren't allowed raises, when there's no money for raises, when the federal government and we're a head start program, when there's not COLA allocated, when there's no other pathways, then that starts it. And so the first start I would say is compensation. The other thing is funding streams, like funding streams for teacher wellness. So where would that money come from? What philanthropists are really interested in that, that are willing to give that money so that programs can be able to do it because at the end of the day, we still have to operate. And I think a lot of the presentations that were told earlier is that as states are asking for more quality, programs have to be more qualified and they have to react to that. And so it's this balancing act of how are you meeting high standards and keeping staff wellness at the top of the forefront. Thank you, Jamal. So on that vein, Jackie, I'm actually gonna turn to you. Jamal mentioned the compensation piece, which we know is a very real issue and a tricky one at that. Can you talk a little bit about the major differences that you see or have experienced or your perspective on compensation for early childhood teachers across the charter, public, private, and community-based programs, which we know DC has all of the above? Yes, thank you. I'm also a graduate of Bowie State University. One of the things that I've found in working in both public school setting, community-based and other charter as well is that the first thing is respect for the profession. The fact that early childhood teachers have been perceived as being the babysitters of the school. When we look at compensation, of course, in the public school setting, there is higher salaries. But we also look at the stresses that are involved in a setting where people aren't quite sure why those young people are in the building. They're not yet testing grades. They are very needy. And the teachers who work in those classrooms are perceived as not real teachers. So they are not included in the planning and implementation. So when we look at that, that's the first thing. The salaries across public and charter tend to be around the same level. But when we look at community-based organizations that, as Jamal mentioned, they are the funding stream. They're unable to pay the salaries that competitive with the charter and public schools. So with that being said, those teachers often have degrees but aren't making a little over a minimum wage. And in this city with the cost of living, it puts them at poverty level just by working. So I think with that being said, the disparity in those opportunities for early childhood teachers, the goal is to strive to be in a public or charter school because that's where the salaries are. But with that, when we look at well-being, it also brings on a different level of stress. I found that in the community-based, you don't have to worry about a lot of the things. You just worry about getting the kids to the level that you need them to be. Thank you. So Ruth, I'm actually gonna turn back to you in staying on this compensation lens. We know equity is a big part of the discussion in early childhood and education, I think more broadly. But how would you say compensation intersects with equity, particularly when we talk about the early childhood workforce? So partly I just kinda wanna say don't get me started, right? You know, when you look at this workforce, which in Wisconsin, the workforce is about 98% women. This is a gender issue. It's very much that we have a entire network of care happening for our youngest children that is quite literally being balanced on the backs of really nice women who are willing to work for really poor wages. Because they wanna provide a good for kids, they wanna provide a good for families, for their communities. And I think because of the way our financing of this system of care is structured in our country where we still look at it as you had the child, you pay to take care of that child, unless you're really poor and then maybe we'll help out, but not enough to really get your child into good quality care. So this is definitely, it's a gender issue that's been going on for way too long in our country. And then when you look at wanting a workforce that looks like and sounds like the kids that are in their care, I think you're budding up against other key issues that are really critical, which is should we be promoting working in this field when the data that was put up earlier in terms of food insecurities, housing insecurities, mental health issues, depression issues, lack of retirement access, is that really what we wanna be promoting from an equity lens to make sure we have a workforce that looks and sounds like the kids that they're taking care of? And so I really grapple with that part of that issue and if anybody has an answer to how we fix that, that'd be great. Okay, anybody else on the panel wanna jump in on that? No, yes, no? No, okay. All right, so Erin, I actually wanted to turn to you. So one of the things we know are the support strategies that need to be in place and Ruth just mentioned the whole laundry list of issues that the workforce is faced with. What strategies have you used or is Louisiana using to really understand the effectiveness of those support strategies and thinking about your, if you could talk a little bit about the Tulane Mental Health Consultation Program, that'd be great. Sure, so as far as looking to understand the strategies, I know we talked a lot about different teacher surveys that are being done in different states. Louisiana also has a few teacher surveys. Primarily, I'm speaking to one that the Department of Education runs, which is much more, a little bit more limited in scope than some of the more research-based ones we heard about earlier, but we do do a survey every year for all of our teachers that work in early childhood. So again, in Louisiana, that always means all of our pre-K headstart and childcare programs. And that survey is really intended to gauge the successfulness of the supports teachers are receiving. It's an online survey. It's relatively quick. We get a decent response rate for it being an online survey that measures how supported teachers are feeling, how much feedback they're getting, are they getting coaching, is the coaching helping. We use that to come up with a teacher support index that's actually reported on our community network profiles. So we share that at a community level. That rating is for information purposes only, but we do want communities to understand how they're doing in supporting their teachers. And then we use that data at the state level to really inform our support. Another program you mentioned, so we have several avenues for coaching for teachers, specifically those working in our publicly funded centers. One that we are particularly proud of and really focuses on working with the teachers in the centers more holistically is our Tulane Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation model, which has a funny name, but is a very successful and pretty intensive intervention for childcare centers. It's available to other center types, but it's paid for through the state for our publicly funded centers. So this is a six month program where trained mental health consultants go in. They usually go in in reference to a referral to a specific classroom, maybe even a specific child, but what's really important about this program is that they take a whole center approach. So it's maybe they're brought in there to address one problem, but the thought process is that we really need to evaluate every classroom, work with the director, work with every teacher to really start from a system's wide approach to get an intervention that works for that center. Perfect, thank you. So Jamal, I'm gonna turn back to you as a site based administrator in a high opportunity area. How, what are some strategies that you employ as a director at your school site to really address the teacher wellbeing piece? Okay, so I think it starts with investing in it and outwardly saying that. And so last year we were able to invest in a full time mental health coordinator because we saw that need in the classroom and so we intentionally found the money, found a funder to be able to fund that as a full time position. Also with a health manager, we have a staff wellness team and they're amazing, they coordinate events. And so some of the things that we've done as wellness Wednesday where we just have solid, staff don't have to think about what they're gonna eat for lunch and that's being in war seven. We're already in a food desert and so all you can do is UberEat, which is expensive and unhealthy, or bring your own lunch, right? So we provide lunch on that day, which is solid and nutritious things and shakes and all that. Also mental health Monday, where the teachers were able to just have conversations, play cards in the middle of the day during the lunch break and just to be able to unwind. Reflective supervision is super duper important. We, Robert who's in the audience, laughed and said my office was busy. He was at Educare for a one week training, at every hour there was somebody in there because we were reflecting and we were talking and just talking about the things that they needed from us and that we needed from them. And so reflective supervision is super important. And I think those are the formal things that you can do but like we saw in some of that data is the informal things, the things that you can't write down on paper and just being responsive to teachers. Like we had a male teacher who lost a child late in pregnancy and we gave him two weeks of bereavement and that's not in the policy. That's nowhere written, but it needed to be done. It felt good. Those informal things are more important than anything that you can kind of put down on paper is just responding to staff needs. And I'll say my team and I, we actually went and visited the Educare Center and it's certainly a community. You can feel the sense of community when you go in and visit. So the leadership, he's not just talking about it but you can actually feel it when you're touring or we were touring, we kind of hung out for a little while too. When you spend time in the facility, which I do believe you've done an excellent job in creating that environment. So Jackie, turning to you, so this issue around teacher wellbeing, do you see it specifically talked about either through the DCAEYC or the Washington Teachers Union where they're specifically talking about staff wellbeing, staff wellness? So, oh yeah. So one of the things that we've done in collaboration, we've developed a collaboration task force between the Washington Teachers Union and the local affiliate DCAEYC. And we've developed this team of practitioners who are in community-based schools, charter schools and DC public schools. And we kind of get together once a month and talk about issues that affect us as early childhood educators. What we found is we may be in different settings but the kids that are coming to us are the same kids that are getting rotated throughout the community-based and charter schools and the public schools. So we tend to see some of the same kids at some point in their lives. So what we've done is a couple of things. One, we've looked at professional development and how we can support teachers outside of the traditional school system and collaborate with other childcare centers. So that task force, we've held events at Bus Wasn't Poets. We've held book fairs. We did, because we're an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, we did a first book grant where we gave teachers an opportunity to apply for books that they are able to give to their kids. So all those things in certain areas where kids aren't getting books, that was important to the teachers to be able to give that. So those feel good things that aren't part of what's in the budget of the school or what's available. So with that, we've tried to parlay that into next week. We're actually doing a pamper teacher session in affiliation with the National NEA YC Conference, NEA YC Conference. So we're doing a pamper the teacher night or at next Thursday. So we're trying to find ways to pull all those teachers who work with our youngest children together to let them know you're not alone, you're not in this by yourself and that we all share some of the same things. So I just think having the conversations, first of all, to say because I'm public school, it's just my problem, it isn't, it's all of ours. And then one of the last things, when we look at the city of Washington and the equity of services and resources across the city, we're able to connect with schools that have to be able to share their resources with schools that do not have. So I think those three things are something that we look at and try to support through the DCA YC and the Washington Teachers Union. Perfect, thank you. So Ruth, I'm gonna turn to you and so you could talk to us a little bit about QRAS. We know it's, there's a lot of discussions about QRAS but thinking about the frame of QRAS and compensation and the support for the workforce. How is Wisconsin addressing it? Is Wisconsin, is Wisconsin addressing it. I mean, so George, I think was talking earlier again about how we were going down a path, I believe in our country of really raising up the issue of the workforce, worthy wages, compensation, which apparently has been now being discussed since 1918, it appears. But we were sort of working down that pathway and we had a change nationally in terms of sort of foundationally, what are we gonna look at to help really make the argument for why we should be investing more in this field. And in working with these young children. And so you saw this sort of QRAS sort of wildfire that happened across our country, which has been really great in terms of looking at quality improvement for what's happening in our field. However, when it happens at the cost of investments in the teachers themselves, in livable wages, in employee well-being and wellness programs that are really supporting the workforce, I think we have to continuously raise that up about how can QRIS build those types of elements into their standards and their structure of evaluation. And so in Wisconsin we have incredibly high education standards required within our QRIS system, which again I think is part of the hardest thing for programs to reach is that education level of their staff, especially when we don't have mechanisms that can improve the compensation of that staff at the same time. So you end up with a QRIS system which is moving qualifications forward without the compensation that can come along with it. So we've had subsidy rate freezes in Wisconsin practically since 2007. They've been lifted recently, most recently before the gubernatorial elections are now outgoing governor had put some increases in in terms of our subsidy program, but certainly not enough to make up for what programs have to pay to reach those higher levels of quality. Additionally, I think QRIS systems at their best can actually have indexes built into them that are looking at compensation so that you are cognizant of the fact that we wanna see improvement in working conditions. We wanna see improvements in compensation that go along with it. We don't have that in Wisconsin. Our QRIS system while it raises up from business practice perspective that we want programs that are looking at paid time off, having employees more engaged in strategic planning for their programs and planning time for themselves and the work they're doing with kids. We have those types of things built in, but when it gets to the compensation issue, I don't know many states that have sort of found the trigger that allows us to address that. And I do think it's something that QRIS needs to be really cognizant of trying to build in as we move forward. Thank you. So it is time to open it up for questions. So I'm gonna pause here and see if there's questions from the audience. I have a hand up here in the front. Hi, I'm Cathy Sarri from the Service Employees International Union. And just that there are great policy ideas and I know there's a lot of people working. I'm really excellent policy ideas. I think the big challenges and the reason we're talking about this is something that has existed since 1918 is that this workforce does not have the power that we can come up with ideas and ideas and calculate the numbers, but unless we have the power to make change, this is not gonna happen. And so I guess I would like to say on the policy list belongs advocacy for unions and workers having a voice. I think George was really right to say that this workforce has been the object of policy, not the policy makers. And I think unions are really powerful tools in helping them be policy makers. And just one example is, the show on your list for the governors is Governor-elect Newsom has committed to collective bargaining rights after 14 years that childcare workers in California have been struggling to have a collective bargaining voice. He's committed to it, plus a big new investment in early childhood and to address wages. And then this is on the heels of winning $527 million, the biggest investment in decades, bulk of which goes to wages because the fight for 15 and the state saying, we're gonna have a minimum wage of $15. Childcare workers in California, at least family child care, we calculate are earning $5 an hour. If you look at all their wages. So $15 is huge, even though it is not enough, it's $30,000 a year just to give people a framework. So it's just a base, but I just think that super important that when we have these forums, we talk about the role of how and unions in making this happen. And while we switch the mic over here to Kate, I think one thing I'd like to add to that I know I have been a proponent of, I was never an early childhood provider. I was a teacher assistant principal principal is articulating career pathways to educators so that they know that there are multiple ways to impact the field and not that we wanna lose good teachers in the classroom, but we also need that educator voice at the policy table. I cannot tell you how many rooms I go into where I'm the only person who has any experience or have these walked in a school building talking about education policy. And so I fundamentally believe in the role of advocacy. I also believe in we have to get the right people at the right table to have these conversations so that it is an informed discussion and not just the educator voice, but the diversity as well until we get diverse voices at the table, we'll continue to have the same conversation. So I wholeheartedly agree. Kate. Thank you. So I was so glad you brought up the issue of unions because it was a question I wanted to ask of the panelists. So in the 90s in Madison, Wisconsin, I was director of a union shop early childhood program and the teachers negotiated for living wage. They had benefits that made their life good and we also enrolled very few children with high economic needs. And so it created a niche of very privileged programs in some circumstances. So this blessing and this burden that go with. So I wonder in your associations with the teachers union in DC in running an early childhood program that's a national model for how we can do early care in Edwell in thinking about these tax credits and in thinking about WECA and national representation. I wonder what we could learn from the union movement. If there have been efforts to unionize, they have not gone far. So maybe we can unionize, maybe that's a result. It is what made a difference for public school teachers. It is why public school teachers have a living wage. They wouldn't have ever been given it without demanding it and unionizing. But are there things we could learn from collective bargaining that would be helpful? So I'll just really quickly jump in and say our outgoing governor back in 2010-ish, I believe. We saw Act 10 passed in Wisconsin, which really gutted public unions. At the time, we did have organized family childcare through AFSCME and since that time, that union has largely gone away in terms of supporting family childcare. And we have seen, I think, some really troubling things happening in our public school system. And I also wanna just put out there that while we're having a change now in terms of our governor's office, we still have two houses that are controlled by Republicans in our state. And so I think it's, while I would love to say, I think we're gonna see this tide change in Wisconsin and hopefully get back to collective bargaining and hopefully see a mechanism for that again in early care and education. I think we're still gonna be grappling with that for years. I think the only thing Kate, I would add is we did see teacher activism play a heavy role in how then the gubernatorial candidates were talking about certain portions of education. And so I think holistically, the importance, and again it goes into the educator voice, but identifying the need for teacher activism and really that vocal piece is going to be critical. Because until we, and I'll use the analogy of Lisa Klein from The Alliance, she always says, we have to create the reverberations that create change in the governor's office and also you can feel the impacts at the local level. And if we don't start to really galvanize the teaching community holistically from earlier to K-12, then we're not gonna see those changes. So and I believe I have two minutes according to that clock. So it looks like two questions, two questions, two minutes. Look at that. Good morning, I'm Catherine Kemp from the National Association for the Education in Young Children. And I just wanted to highlight and underscore the Power to the Profession Initiative at that coordinating with 14 other organizations to partner to build a shared framework for the early childhood education profession. Unions, AFT, NEA, SCIU, AFSCME are also part of our task force working to coordinate on what are the conditions and preparation and accountability as well as the compensation measures to advance this workforce. But this piece about teacher voice and the role of how do we make sure educators have a place in this profession to advance for themselves is fundamental. It's in the fabric of power to the profession. So just to give the panel an opportunity, how can we collectively make sure that educators feel that power for themselves and to be able to elevate their perspectives in order to best meet the goals that we have to make sure that this really is a profession driven and profession powered movement? So I agree, I think it is allowing them opportunity and time to advocate. A part of educators model is advocacy. And so we've had teachers testify for the birth of three bill. We've had teachers go to Stroll and Thunder with their children. We've tried to create those opportunities as well as I think it's creating teacher leader opportunities in form and form one. So we've created teacher supervisory roles so that they can gain supervision skills so that they can be ready for their next pathway. We've created teacher coaching roles where they coach the teachers in their classroom so that they're able to get that experience so that when they become coaches, they already have that on their resume. And also just informal things like a field trip coordinator. A teacher said, she wanted to do it. I was like, why not? Look, take some of the pressure off me and gains and gets you skills, right? And so those informal things also, once again, gives them a voice, gives them leadership skills and allows them to kind of have that. So I want to say I commend the whole program. One of the things with the Washington Teachers Union and in conjunction with American Federation of Teachers, we're looking at teacher leaders and finding that teacher voice. I think one of the things that hinders not only union teachers, but teachers who are not in union is job security. The fact that so much can be held against you for speaking out the evaluation piece, the not having job security with right to work, that you are retaliated against for speaking out. And I think we need to look at developing that collaboration piece that we're, and that's the thing I say when I go into schools, they're more of us than it is of them. If we all stand together, they can't get rid of everybody. But I believe in that voice and developing that voice, whether we're a union or not, of course we would love to have that support to say that we're all together under a union. But we also need to realize that our voice matters wherever we are, in the community base, in the daycare homes, our voice together is powerful. And that's the thing that we advocate through the Washington Teachers Union and our group with the DCA USC. Perfect, we had one last question over here. Thanks, I'm Mark Riley from Jumpstart. I hate to take us off all this excitement about organizing in power, because I think all of that is so crucial. So forgive me for kind of getting more policy wonky for one more second. But for those who don't know, Jumpstart is an organization that engages close to about 4,000 college students a year to introduce college students into preschool classrooms around the country around about 15 different states. And one of the things that we're really shifting toward is also activating around advocacy and really trying to introduce various policy ideas into places around the states that we are located. So I was hoping to ask, really just to see to the extent that each of the programs in Louisiana and Wisconsin won a scholarship design program, like the other Teach programs that are around the country and then the other, the Tax Credit Program in Louisiana, I'm very interested since both of those have been around for some time to just know the extent to which each of you have observed kind of changes in the workforce field overall as a result of either approach if you've seen that in terms of data. And again, forgive the policy won't question. No, thank you for bringing us, circling us back. So from the perspective of Teach, I think some of the really considerable wins I would put out there is that over half of the workforce in Wisconsin now has at least an associates degree or better. And that has changed over time. However, the compensation hasn't changed with it. So we still have $10 an hour for an associates degree working in early care and education in Wisconsin. So it's big disconnect and so how do we retain the wins that we get from getting this workforce educated if we can't compensate them? I think that's critical. But the other pieces that I would say is, and we've done this in Wisconsin in terms of how we work within the higher ad system. So articulation agreements between two and four year institutions that really allow for the highest possible level of portability of credits between institutions is really critical. Credit for prior learning and having a system where individuals who work in early care and education can put portfolios together and earn additional college credits for having done that. So I think part of when you do, when you have a system like Teach in place, it's not just the scholarshiping, it's the entire work within a higher ad system that is gonna support the workforce. And I think we've hopefully been successful with that. Similarly, through the tax credits, which are aligned to our career ladder, we've seen a lot of growth and increase in credentials over time. I didn't mention before, we also have a scholarship program that aligns to the credentials that are on the career ladder, which we have seen a lot of use of, which is great, means we have had to increase the budget for it, but that's a good problem to have. A lot of participation in that. We are working to expand, so we have just recently implemented a early childhood credential that's the new minimum requirement in Louisiana. It's also kind of a complicated story, but I will give a plug for a new America piece that's coming out next week. You can read more about it there. But that degree, we are working to get that to translate also into the Associate and Bachelor's degree pathways. It's a big project, trying to work across our community colleges, our non-traditional providers, and our higher ed, but we're seeing some progress, so hopeful for that. And a huge also plug to Governor Edwards in Louisiana, who this legislative session, they passed the Early Childhood Commission. The Governor's Education Advisor, Donald Songhi in Louisiana is a former superintendent, but huge advocate for early childhood there, and was able to bring NGA and the National Conference of State Legislators together to support the legislators and the governor on passing this Early Childhood Commission, which was another big win for early childhood in the state of Louisiana. So if you'll please join me in thanking the panelists, and I'm gonna turn it back over to Laura. Thank you. Thank you. Do you want us to... Okay. Okay. Thank you, Aliyah. And please, in addition to this panel, please join me in thanking the first panel, and... There. Pause there. And thank you to all of you for coming out this morning again and being a participant in this important conversation, which we hope is, as I said before, just the first of a series of conversations that we'll be hosting, and then the next one most likely will be our conversation on teacher diversity. So hopefully you'll join us for that as well. And look Tuesday for a paper on Louisiana and their Early Care and Education Workforce Reform. So if you are not already a subscriber to our Early and Elementary Education newsletter, you can go on newamerica.org to sign up for that. So again, thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day, and thank you to everyone.