After years of political popularity, public investments in early education have mostly struggled to get traction in recent years. Federal momentum toward universal pre-K has stalled, and some successful local experiments from the 2000s and 2010s have struggled to deliver on the optimism that accompanied their launches.
California is a notable, laudable exception to this trend. In 2021, under the leadership of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state embarked on an ambitious effort to more than double its number of public pre-K and transitional kindergarten (or “TK”) seats for 4-year-old Californians from just over 147,000 to roughly 400,000. (TK began in 2008 as a program for children who just missed the state’s cutoff for kindergarten enrollment, but has significantly expanded to serve more 4-year-olds since 2021).
This would be a major accomplishment for the state and for early education advocates. The key, of course, is to show how policymakers can dramatically grow pre-K and TK access while maintaining crucial quality elements that support children’s development. The best way to do that is to ensure that the state’s new early education classrooms have great teachers prepared to meet their students’ needs.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 2022, nearly 60% of California children under 5 years old have at least one parent who speaks a non-English language at home. As such, it’s particularly important that the state fill its new pre-K and TK classrooms with bilingual early educators.
How’s the state doing at building bilingualism into its new public early education system? Let’s start with the good news. California had a wealth of bilingual early educators before it launched its early education expansion. In 2020, according to data from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC-Berkeley, nearly half of staff members working in early childhood education centers were multilingual, and around 40% identified as Latina. Furthermore, as of that year, the state’s early educators were overwhelmingly (98%) women, and had, on average, 15 years of experience working in early childhood education settings. As California expands its early education system to fund — and operate — the bulk of classrooms for its 4-year-olds, this diverse workforce provides a strong foundation of experience.
In a recent report, which I co-authored with my colleague Jonathan Zabala in my role as a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, we uncovered something troubling. The requirements to become an early educator in the state’s growing public early education system are likely to exclude many of these women — and their valuable linguistic and cultural assets — from careers in the state’s growing public early education system. As we note in the report, California is rolling out a new kind of credential, which, over time, will become the standard for TK teachers. That credential “requires candidates to have a bachelor’s degree, complete specific coursework and assessments demonstrating competence, pass the CalTPA, and perform 600 hours of student teaching.”
These credential requirements reflect a choice by state policymakers to align TK teaching credentials with K–12 requirements, which are generally more stringent than early education requirements. This makes California’s public TK classrooms more accessible to K–12 public school teachers whose credentialing largely aligns, but it places these jobs out of reach for many early educators with decades of experience working in private pre-K classrooms.
In the American early care and education system, credentialing and licensure is complicated. Regulations vary by state and there’s no single model that’s been written in the stars as the one true and best policy. Rather, the rules policymakers set reflect a host of tradeoffs that influence the demographics of the teachers children get. And because of an array of factors both substantively wide and historically deep — a generation of California mandates pushing monolingual education, racial and ethnic wealth gaps, cost increases in higher education, and more — even seemingly neutral training requirements can produce a surprisingly homogeneous teaching workforce ill-suited to supporting a diverse population of students.
For instance, there’s nothing inherently racist or monolingually-biased about requiring teacher candidates to practice their future profession as student teachers before getting their license to be a lead teacher. But if the clinical hours spent as a student teacher aren’t paid, even though student teachers are still required to pay tuition to their training programs during that time, then candidates without significant financial resources may be less likely to make it over this hurdle. And that’s part of why, in a country where young bilingual adults and young people of color are disproportionately likely to be growing up below — or near — the poverty line, we have such persistent shortages of bilingual teachers and teachers of color.
Nearly every teacher credential requirement involves this sort of tradeoff — for early educators or for K–12 teachers. The more standardized and less flexible a state’s licensure system is, the more difficult it can be for diverse candidates to reach the classroom. What’s more, as we note in our report, “frustratingly, research indicates that many licensure requirements don’t generally produce higher-quality instruction or better outcomes for students.”
What can California policymakers do to ensure that more of their current, experienced, linguistically diverse early educators reach the state’s new pre-K and TK classrooms? Well, when it comes to policy reforms for diversifying the teacher workforce, there really are only two main options. Policymakers can either:
1) Pursue investments that can provide financial support for non-traditional teacher candidates going through traditional training and licensure systems, including scholarships, large stipends for student-teaching and additional pay to help people miss work to go to classes.
2) Introduce more flexibility into their credential requirements, such as alternative training pathways, credential waivers and equivalency provisions, which would make it possible for candidates with years of early childhood experience to be counted toward clinical hours.
That’s it. There really isn’t some other clever mechanism. Either California needs to invest significantly more so that more bilingual early educator candidates get the (mostly monolingual) credentials the state requires or it needs to change the credentials it requires.
So, as we note in the report, California policymakers urgently need reforms that help early childhood educators have their “language skills and instructional expertise as partially or fully equivalent to the credentials required for becoming a TK teacher.” This could involve creating new provisional credentials that allow long-time early educators to become lead TK teachers in the new public system for five to seven years while they complete further training. It could involve major state investments in waiving tuition or providing student teaching stipends for bilingual TK teacher candidates.
The story of the last big cycle of early education investments makes it clear that effective implementation matters at least as much as political momentum. And when it comes to supporting young, linguistically diverse kids, that means building systems that support the training and hiring of bilingual early educators. California is an emerging national leader in early education, so it’s critical that it gets this early education expansion right. The state already has the bilingual teacher candidates it needs. The next big step is making sure it keeps them in its new public early education system.
Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master’s in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
