Charter Ed for the Early Childhood Workforce: A Recipe for Disaster
Last month, amid a flurry of natural disasters, the Brookings Institution and Rockefeller Foundation dumped a dangerous proposal on the overworked, underpaid, unrespected early childhood workforce. In "Beyond Bachelor's: The Case for Charter Colleges of Early Childhood Education," Sara Mead and Kevin Carey bring the K-12 charter school movement right on down to the earliest years of education. At the heart of their concept is a simple bargain: increased flexibility in exchange for increased accountability to deliver results.
A Faustian bargain, to be sure.
The early childhood workforce, as I've often noted, inthis space and elsewhere, is a highly challenged species. Qualifications are all over the map across states and settings (that means Head Start, child care, and state pre-K). In some parts of the country, women with high school diplomas are guiding the critical learning and development that occurs in the first five years of life. Levels of education for the workforce have been on the decline, even as the field, after years of debate, has embraced the bachelor's degree, with specialized training in early