This article is written from the perspective of Larry Schweinhart's work with HighScope. It is the intention of the provocations presented here to stimulate discussion and thinking around issues of teachers and caregivers, whatever a program's curriculum might be. If you have ideas or feedback to share, please share your comments.

Early childhood programs are not institutionalized like educational programs for children and youth. Instead, they operate in schools, several types of community agencies, other people's homes, and parents' own homes. Several long-term studies show that high-quality preschool programs can have long-term effects and strong return on investment. However, several other, short-term studies show that most existing preschool programs have at best modest effects on children's development. A central task of university-based early childhood teacher educators is to provide prospective early childhood teachers with coursework towards bachelors' degrees and certification. But these apply mainly to schoolteachers and are not required of most teachers and caregivers in community agencies or private homes or parents in their own homes. Early childhood teacher educators in community colleges and pre- and in-service training programs of all sorts must train adults for these roles as well, beginning in high school. Thus, an early childhood curriculum must not only provide basic principles and practices of teaching and learning that are accessible to caregivers and parents as well as teachers; it must also provide teachers with a fully articu-lated structure that specifies content objectives consistently with a lifelong curriculum supported by an assessment system. The HighScope Curriculum, for example, serves these two purposes.

A national U.S. survey found that in 2001, the country had 20.2 million children under 6 years old who had not yet entered kindergarten (Mulligan et al., 2005). Three-fifths of these children had some type of nonparental care and education arrangement at least weekly: one-third received care and education in a center under various auspices, a proportion that grew steadily from 8% of infants to 65% of four year olds; 16% received care and education from a nonrelative in a home; and 22% received care and education from a relative in a home.

The need to emulate model programs
Longitudinal research on the effects of early childhood programs shows that they vary greatly in what they can achieve. Three studies show that high-quality preschool programs can have long-term effects and strong return on investment — the HighScope Perry Preschool Study (Schweinhart et al., 2005), the Carolina Abecedarian Study (Campbell et al., 2002), and the Chicago Child-Parent Centers Study (Reynolds et al., 2001). At least two of these three studies found positive effects on children's intellectual performance in childhood, school achievement in adolescence, reduced placements in special education, reduced retentions in grades, improved high school graduation rates, reduced arrest rates, and reduced teen pregnancies. All three studies found economic returns that were at least several times as great as the initial program investment. Leading economists regard this evidence as stronger than the evidence for most other public investments (Heckman, 2006).

In contrast, three recent studies of government-sponsored preschool programs in the United States show that typical Head Start and state preschool programs — some of the best-funded early childhood programs in the U.S. today — have no more than modest effects on children's development. These three studies are the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey or FACES (Zill et al., 2003); the Head Start Impact Study (Administration for Children and Families, 2005), and a study of the effects of five state-funded preschool programs (Barnett et al., 2005). Looking at representative samples of children, these studies found small to moderate effects on children's literacy and mathematics skills, less than half as large as the effects of the model programs studied longitudinally.

Effects have been found for these various programs in schools and community agencies in contrast to parents raising children at home or child care in other settings. Further, the studies finding effects have almost all focused on children living in poverty. Few studies have been conducted, hence few effects found, for programs serving children in middle-income families, except for one conducted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by Gormley, Gayer, Phillips, and Dawson (2005), which found strong program effects on reading and mathematics achievement test scores.

Generalizing findings
Narrowly defined, the task of univer-sity-based early childhood teacher educators is to provide prospective early childhood teachers with coursework towards whatever degree or certification they are seeking. Even then, the match between these degrees and available jobs shapes the content of the coursework. Teachers with bachelors' or masters' degrees will probably focus on teacher certification and jobs in schools not only in pre-kindergarten but also in the elementary grades. Some of them will find teaching jobs in community agencies. But they will serve only a small fraction of young children in child care.

The gap between professional recommendations and government regulations regarding child care in the U.S. is very wide. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (NACCRRA, 2007) recommends that child care center directors have at least a bachelor's degree, but only one state has this requirement; and that child care center teachers have at least a Child Development Associate credential or associate's degree in early childhood education, but 21 states require no education and 28 require only a high school diploma or the equivalent. Various states require teachers to have from 0 to 30 hours of training a year, an average of 12.6 hours, while NACCRRA recommends that states require that child care center teachers have 24 hours of training a year. As long as the govern-ment expects so little of child care teachers, it is difficult for child care directors to insist that more training and professional development is necessary. It is estimated that only 33% of center teachers and 17% of family child care providers have a bachelor's degree or more (Center for the Child Care Workforce and Human Services Policy Center, 2002). >> Next Page