Emerging Leader Fellow Marnie Kaplan and Sara Mead share their findings with Bellwether Education Partners from examining over fifty years of Head Start Workforce policy.
In 2007, Congress and then-President George W. Bush set out to improve Head Start by passing a law that made significant changes to the program. These changes included a requirement that half of all Head Start teachers hold a bachelor’s degree with training in early childhood education by 2013.
We examined the impact of the 2007 law and the current state of the Head Start workforce with the goal of informing both future efforts to improve the quality of Head Start teaching and broader efforts to strengthen the early childhood workforce.
In our new paper, “The Best Teachers for Our Littlest Learners? Lessons from Head Start’s Last Decade,” we trace the evolution of Head Start Workforce policies over 50 years and detail how shifts in the broader early childhood landscape, especially state-funded pre-k programs, have influenced these policies.
