In my work, I interchangeably use the terms “Hispanic” and “Latinx/e” to refer to individuals whose cultural background originated in Latin American and/or Spanish-speaking countries or are descendants of persons from those countries. I want to acknowledge that Hispanic or Latinx/e individuals in the United States represent diverse countries of origin with unique histories and cultures. Hereafter, I will use “Hispanic” to describe this population.

Over recent decades, the racial-ethnic demographic composition of children in the United States has rapidly shifted, with Hispanic children largely contributing to these changes. Only 9% of U.S. children were Hispanic in 1980; today, over a quarter of children are Hispanic, and by 2050, it is predicted that nearly one in every three children will be Hispanic. This represents a dramatic increase in the number of those who are eligible for early care and education (ECE). In response to this rapidly growing population, new lines of research have emerged to inform and advance practices and policies that support Hispanic children and families’ well-being.

Recent studies consistently demonstrate that participation in high-quality ECE programs is beneficial for Hispanic children’s academic, developmental, and family outcomes; and in some instances, such programs serve as a protective factor in mitigating adversity or negative experiences among Hispanic children and families. As this evidence continues to mount, some researchers have shifted their priorities to focus on linkages between Hispanic children and families’ enrollment in ECE and their well-being in the challenging landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic. The tumultuous nature of the pandemic has corresponded with new studies unpacking hardships experienced by Hispanic children and families; these studies are often grounded in a deficit viewpoint. While researchers are building a much-needed knowledge base, the use of a strengths-based view is essential for uncovering protective factors, like engaging in ECE programs, that may serve as a buffer for Hispanic children and families from the challenges of the pandemic.

In contrast with other ECE research and the mostly bleak narratives circulating in the media about the negative effects of the pandemic on child and family well-being, results from these descriptive analyses of Educare Learning Network data found that Hispanic children and families demonstrated a variety of social-emotional related strengths. Findings and data from this sample may not generalize to other Hispanic children and families given that these children and families are enrolled in Educare—a model Early/Head Start program demonstrating higher than average program quality. However, changing the narrative and highlighting positive findings related to child and family well-being during the pandemic can potentially inform Early/Head Start and other ECE programs’ efforts to effectively support Hispanic children and families. These descriptive findings cannot yet speak to why this sample of young Hispanic children and their families did not demonstrate declines in these indicators of well-being or how child and family well-being will look in the long run; but they can help emphasize the importance of high-quality ECE and contribute further evidence that positive experiences in the early years may provide a buffer to the challenges faced by children and families, including those resulting from the pandemic.

Find information about research and evaluation within the Educare Learning Network at EducareSchools.org.

In this peri-Covid period, it would be fair to ask, “How can we go beyond recruitment and retention given the shortage of home visitors right now?” After all, supervisors in community-based programs have never worked so hard to find and onboard new home visitors who are racially, culturally, and linguistically representative of families served while also trying to retain the ones who remain. For those of us connected to home visiting who are not supervisors, it is time to examine the systemic conditions that fuel pervasive vacancy and turnover, and to consider changes that could make a real difference both now and in the future for local programs.

Supervisors Know What’s Wrong With the Home Visiting Sector at the ‘Front Door’:

Interested candidates don’t meet educational job requirements set at the systems level. Are we turning away candidates with racial, language and community experience in common with the families served because they didn’t have an opportunity to pursue a degree? Perhaps we could make progress in achieving greater cultural alignment in the workforce with the families in home visiting, if we re-weighted personal attributes, life experience, and competencies as ‘proxies’ for job requirements based on economic opportunity.

Salaries are not competitive nor commensurate with the nature of the work. Let’s face it, there are many jobs that require less training, breadth of expertise, and emotional resiliency that pay the same or more. To retain this critical workforce, we need to advocate for higher salaries that match the expertise that home visitors bring to their work with families, nurture existing job benefits (e.g., partnership and support of peers; ongoing on-the-job professional development), and support opportunities for advancement.

Supervisors Also Know What’s Wrong with the Home Visiting Sector at the ‘Back Door’:

Job expectations keep expanding. Constantly expanding and/or changing expectations for breadth of expertise to keep the job they have, and at the same salary, is experienced by some home visitors as an invitation to leave their work with families.

Lack of opportunities for advancement. There is a need for better defined career ladders driven by the goals and aspirations of the workforce. This isn’t new, but we seem stuck in thinking about this as a challenge at the community, program, or agency level and not more broadly at a systems level.

Perhaps we need to expand our thinking about how to expose practitioners to other sectors of the home visiting field: research, training, administration, CQI, policy, etc. Gains could be made especially with a focus on BIPOC practitioners whose perspectives in these leadership and decision-making sectors are largely missing and yet, who are uniquely qualified to represent the perspectives of the minority families served in home visiting.

For those who have found a sense of calling in direct service with families, we have an obligation to improve the conditions that support them to stay doing what they feel called to do. At a systems level, ensuring equal access to high quality professional development that reflects the lived experience in the language of practitioners is a critical component. For those who want their experience with families to be a foundation for something next, we have an obligation to support their exploration of where in the field of home visiting they could be.

Home visitors often don’t have a seat at the table. Too often decisions are made that directly impact the work that home visitors do – without their feedback involved in the process. Engaging and authentically incorporating practitioner voice from the very beginning in decision-making processes brings critical expertise to the table.

Our Challenge to the Field:

We invite you to engage in further exploration of these issues with us and others from across the home visiting field at the upcoming virtual National Home Visiting Summit in March, 2023. The National Home Visiting Summit is a great opportunity to become personally and professionally inspired to explore who is involved and what is happening across the field of home visiting. The Summit emphasizes the importance of attracting, retaining, and advancing BIPOC representation and voice in all sectors of the field. It’s an opportunity to ask yourself what else you could do to open the ‘front door’ to a racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse, next generation of home visitors and to inspire today’s practitioners to find the place where they can make a valued contribution to the field.

The Challenge

Without an established Quality Rating & Improvement System, Mississippi leaders sought a common framework for quality to better ensure positive child outcomes among their diverse early childhood education providers. While researching options, the successful outcomes of Educare Schools caught their eye.

Read Full Case Study

With support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, four Mississippi trainers with diverse early childhood experience completed The Essential Practices of Educare’s Train-the-Trainer program and launched a unique, state-wide professional learning model. They hoped to:

• Introduce common quality standards across the state
• Encourage educators from Head Start, public pre-K, and childcare to learn from each other
• Increase positive outcomes for the majority of Mississippi’s youngest learners

“We like that The Essential Practices of Educare is detailed, practical, and easily understood… It makes people more curious about the context in which learning is happening.” – Holly Spivey, Head Start Collaboration Director & Education Policy Advisor in the Office of Governor Tate Reeves

Last month I had the pleasure of co-leading a session at the BUILD 2022 Virtual Conference: Building Systems, Improving Quality, Advancing Equity.

It was a joy to participate en una charla informal, a coffee talk, with my good friend, and colleague Miriam Calderon. We discussed and unpacked the strength and determination required to lift ourselves, our families, and our communities up in the unforgiving world of policy and politics.

BUILD has been a leader in providing spaces and opportunities for Latine professionals and leaders in the early childhood space to come together both informally and formally to talk and hear about what the Latine community wants and needs.

The Latine community is strong. We know that across this country it is Latinos and Latinas who pick, cook and serve our food, clean our houses and hotel rooms, care for our children, elderly and sick and are part of the backbone of the economy in countless ways.

As I joined with other Latine leaders throughout the week at BUILD and listened to their stories, I was stuck that today in 2022, many still talked about “imposter syndrome”, including me. I have had the privilege and opportunity to sit at many tables at the local, state, and national level but I am sure when I opened my mouth to share a recommendation or idea, there was some eye rolling in the room.

At Start Early, we share a commitment to racial equity and have been working diligently to provide individual staff with the support they need and want to grow and contribute to the early childhood field. For my part, I will be leading and providing a space for Latine individuals to participate in a mentoring circle where we will take time to understand our history as a community in the United States, our personal journeys and culture and how systems impact our progress as individuals and a community.

A common theme we explored was that we need mentorship – ongoing mentorship from people that look like us and understand our culture and values. As I have been reflecting on my own journey, it’s clear that each of has a responsibility to support and mentor the next generation of Latine leaders.

My hope is that through mentorship and in our daily work to change systems, Latine professionals and leaders will sit at any table and confidently speak their truth, represent the needs of their children and communities, despite the eye rolls.

The Challenge

At Child Care Associates in Texas, the central office team noticed that, after a period of gains, its CLASS evaluations of childcare and Head Start/Early Head Start providers had plateaued.

System leaders decided it was time to change how they approached outcomes improvement and they made three important decisions:

• Shift ownership of CCA’s education vision from the central office to campus instructional leaders.
• Recommit to using family experience as a critical performance measure.
• Implement The Essential 0-5 Survey across 25 campuses to provide leaders with a unified framework to move program improvement forward.

Read Full Case Study

The Impact: Energized Leaders Re-shaping Daily Practice to Improve Outcomes and Equity

Karin Scott, Chief Performance Officer, outlines four key outcomes the CCA team experiences with their annual Essential Survey implementation:

• Outcome One – Our entire team now uses a common framework to talk about improvement.
  “We transformed campus director meetings to bring people together who are working on common problems of practice – to share out what’s working, lift up people getting better outcomes, and talk about pivots when something doesn’t work.”
• Outcome Two – We are reducing leader & teacher overwhelm by focusing on where they CAN have impact.
  “It can get overwhelming when you’re dealing with deep root causes to early childhood issues, like a national labor shortage or systemic racism. The Essential Survey toolkit’s root cause analysis allows us to dig down to root causes and build strategies to affect the most change with limited resources.”
• Outcome Three – Staff at all levels are making proactive, positive changes in daily practice.
  “The Essential Survey got teams into the practice of reviewing data. They’re taking it into their own hands to make easy, accessible processes for people. They’re rethinking how they use their time.”
• Outcome Four – We have more data to help us drive equity for families of color.
  “There is a huge equity piece to the Essential Survey work. We serve majority families of color and we need to know how they’re feeling about the services they are receiving, as well as how we can improve. This is a great tool to do that.”

Looking Ahead

The Child Care Associates team is committed to implementing The Essential 0-5 Survey annually to sustain a culture that values and supports leaders. “It was important before the pandemic, but now more than ever we need to know how people are feeling,” says Karin Scott. “Our long-term hope is that our staff are supported and feel motivated to do their best work, which in turns leads to better interactions with children and teachers and better outcomes for families.”

Teacher burnout, under enrollment, workforce retention and well-being – we know many programs across the US are struggling with multiple problems of practice. Addressing these problems of practice can be overwhelming. How to build trust with staff? How to encourage collaborative practice? How to embed these solutions into our ways of working?

Decades of study by the University of Chicago and Start Early reveals that program conditions at the organization level are more closely linked to child outcomes than what’s happening in individual classrooms. The Essential 0-5 Survey, developed in partnership by Start Early and the University of Chicago, is a measurement system that provides insight into the strengths and weaknesses of organizational climate for programs.

At this year’s Shared Services Technical Conference, hosted by Opportunities Exchange, Start Early co-presented with Pre-K 4 San Antonio (Pre-K 4 SA) to share the amazing work Larrisa Wilkinson, Director of Professional Learning and Program Innovation, and her team are doing to make impactful changes in their community.

Data & Goal Setting

The Essential 0-5 Survey data elevated two Essentials as areas for improvement in Pre-K 4 SA’s program – Effective leadership and Collaborative teachers. After completing their first root cause analysis, the leadership team came up with a shared goal: to improve their organizational culture of growth and learning by starting the year developing stronger relationships with educators at both the personal and professional level. Using what they learned about their teachers (interests, needs, etc.), the idea of collective problem solving became integral to moving forward with organizational change.

Small Action Steps

The PreK-4 SA leadership team begin to implement 30-day Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) improvement cycles. Initially, they implemented a “getting to know you” tool with teachers. Directors and Assistant Directors started classroom walkthroughs during the first 30 days of the program year. They looked for and celebrated strong teacher practice and positive classroom environments. Both the South and East Centers dedicated time for peer learning communities (PLCs) to reduce staff meetings. At the South Center, they established a Campus Leadership Team and read receipts to improve two-way communication. The East Center, in addition to increased staff collaboration time, added need-to-know information for staff to their newsletters.

Results

When staff were asked directly, the overwhelming response was it was an effective practice:

• Staff felt more ownership in meetings
• Staff felt increased responsibility and accountability towards continuous organizational improvement;
• Staff felt connectedness and agency, which strengthened trust with leadership
• Transparency was key for Pre-K 4 SA leadership to build trust during the PDSA cycles of improvement

Key Takeaway

Start small. You cannot solve every problem in the world at once. Use the Essential 0-5 Survey data and toolkit to build common language, guide your efforts and identify areas that will have the most impact. When staff see even small amounts of progress, they are motivated to keep trying and start to trust that change is possible.

Are you interested in making organizational improvements but are not sure where to start? Contact us to learn more about how Start Early can help focus your efforts to ultimately improve child outcomes.

Today’s early childhood organizations are vocal about their commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB). As leaders, we vary in the degree to which we responsively identify and change processes that make those commitments visible. Regardless of how long we have been or where we stand in the field of home visiting, we need not look far to find ways to move from intention to impact.

Consider this quick questionnaire:

• Think about the values and cultural backgrounds of families in your program. Is there cultural alignment between the practitioners and the enrolled families?
• Who is responsible for decisions of policy, job qualifications, and practice protocols for home visitors and supervisors in your program? How many of those who are making system and protocol decisions are actively engaged with families on a day-to-day basis?

COVID has prolonged widespread staff vacancies in early childhood settings. Today’s leaders are faced with the simultaneous challenges of hiring new staff and retaining their current workforce. During this season of workforce upheaval, we need to look for ways to cultivate and elevate the voice, experience, and expertise of those currently engaged in direct work with families to increase DEIB in our programs.

Home visitors, by the very nature of their jobs, are uniquely positioned to support caregivers’ goals for themselves and their child. Parents and home visitors co-develop action plans in the context of the family’s composition of members, culture, community, and economic resources. Home visitors partner with parents and caregivers directly to navigate culturally dismissive, disconnected community systems that are not responsive to the family’s identified needs. Practitioners hold expertise in their local resources, provide in-person and virtual support, are on top of trends and interests of families, and have the experience and perspectives of cultural brokers in the community. They honor a caregiver’s unspoken words, “…nothing about me without me…”.

As we prepare for the upcoming virtual National Home Visiting Summit in late March, let’s keep talking with each other and listening to the perspectives and expertise of home visitors. Let’s challenge ourselves to identify strategies that seek to invite, reach, engage, and cultivate the invaluable input of practitioners. When we return to the routines of our work, let’s commit to create and improve platforms for home visitors’ involvement in decisions related to policy, research and practice that directly impact them.

Interested in learning more about Start Early’s resources and learning opportunities for home visitors and supervisors? Check out our Essentials of Home Visiting online professional development experiences or reach out to us directly at professionaldevelopment@startearly.org.

A Fresh Look at Supporting Your Team This Winter

This is a critical year as programs continue working to offset the effects of the pandemic on early learning. With research-based professional development from Start Early, we can help you get there faster.

During our recent webinar, we explore how Start Early Professional Development can help you navigate a return to live instruction amidst ongoing federal funding opportunities and overwhelmed leaders and teachers who have been working around the clock since the start of the pandemic to serve children and families.

Watch the recording below to learn how Start Early’s portfolio of professional learning opportunities and resources can help you and your team:

• Learn and deploy strategies for workforce retention,
• Support overwhelmed leaders and professionals,
• Discover solutions to under-enrollment and family engagement, and
• Effectively on-board new staff at any experience level

By Debra Pacchiano, Vice President of Translational Research and Isabel Farrar, Research Associate at Start Early

Start Early recently organized a session at the 2021 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) conference that highlighted three soon-to-be published research studies from across the field that push our understanding of whether and how The Essential 0-5 Survey framework relates to other aspects of quality and outcomes we care about in early childhood programs. Together, these studies examine how specific organizational conditions identified in the survey framework impact teacher well-being and retention and how to measure the strength of these essential conditions within programs serving infants and toddlers.

What we continue to find is that nurturing begets nurturing: when teachers, staff and families are nurtured and supported by robust organizational conditions, especially facilitative and instructional leadership and routine collaboration with peers, teachers and staff are more committed, persistent, and competent in meeting the dynamic and changing needs of children and families.

In one upcoming study, researchers Anna J. Markowitz, Daphna Bassok, and Amanda Rosensky of the University of Virginia used data from early childhood programs across Louisiana to explore associations between teachers’ perceptions of their leaders as effective instructional leaders and measures of teacher turnover intentions, observed turnover, teacher well-being and the quality of teacher-child interactions. Their initial findings strengthen the evidence that site leadership is critically important to the quality of teachers’ interactions with children, as well as to teachers’ commitment to the program and decisions to remain in their position. These authors suggest that their findings indicate that coherent leadership development is a “potentially powerful area of intervention” impacting teacher/staff retention and quality improvements in early education settings.

Another study, conducted by Allison Friedman-Krauss, Milagros Nores, Charles Whitman, and W. Steven Barnett at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) examines how differences in teachers’ perceptions of organizational conditions vary by teacher/school/district characterizations and impact classroom quality and teachers’ well-being. This research finds a strong association between teacher perceptions of their school organizational conditions and teacher depressive symptoms, suggesting that supporting teacher well-being is particularly important in today’s pandemic context.

Finding a way to talk about hard things can be challenging and stressful for even the most seasoned home visitor and family support professional. This has been especially true over the past year and a half as we’ve experienced the crises and challenges of the pandemic and more.

In talking to home visitors, supervisors and administrators about how they’re handling the current pressures of their environments, they’ve shared that what they really need right now is incremental support. In response to this need, we are pleased to announce the publication of the 4th edition of the NEAR@Home Toolkit. The NEAR@Home Toolkit is a free, self-study guide for how to safely, respectfully and effectively discuss ACES (adverse childhood experiences), trauma, and other hard things with parents by focusing on hope, respect and resilience. This newest edition features stories and quotes from home visitors to help contextualize the work described in the toolkit, and a framework for thinking about childhood trauma and adversity.