A call to action

Fix early childhood education mess

To the members of the 94th General Assembly: Arkansas families need your help. Young children spend years in Arkansas child care centers — often from infancy — only to enroll in kindergarten ill-equipped and lacking the basic skills necessary for success. Parents are finding out, too late, that the program they hand-selected and invested in for years didn’t prepare their children for elementary school.

Arkansas needs more than basic child care. We need high-quality early childhood education (ECE).

Here’s what we know: A recent meta-analysis led by the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that “participation in ECE leads to statistically significant reductions in special education placement and grade retention, and increases in high school graduation rates.” The positive impact of ECE is long-lasting, preparing students for kindergarten and beyond. We also know ECE paves the way for parents to participate in the workforce and contribute to the state’s economy.

So where are we missing the mark? Currently, the Department of Human Services (DHS) oversees the licensing and compliance of Arkansas child care centers by focusing primarily on supervised care. Staff qualification standards are low, requiring only a decent background check, a GED, and completion of an eight-hour online course before being assigned to work with children.

This is a far cry from staff competencies laid out by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), long seen as the gold standard of ECE.

In contrast to child care staff, ECE professionals hold educational qualifications in their field, including graduate and postgraduate degrees. These professionals are led by program and pedagogical administrators who hold a degree in their field from a four-year college. Curriculum is not set just by the month of the year, the coming holiday, or some theme selected in advance. Rather, educators modify strategies and materials to respond to the needs and interests of their students. The schools work closely with the true experts, families, to develop their children’s growth and learning. And educators are paid as professionals on pay-scales rewarding qualifications, experience, and effectiveness.

This isn’t to say Arkansas hasn’t given it a shot.

Arkansas Better Beginnings is a quality rating system overseen by DHS. Programs can apply for up to three stars signifying their rating. While the program has merit, the system is voluntary and, according to the recent State of Early Childhood and Pre-Kindergarten (Arkansas), less than 15% of Arkansas centers self-reported as “high-quality.” When it comes to infant and toddler spots, that number drops to only 10%.

The Head Start/Early Head Start program is overseen by the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS). Its work in creating the Arkansas Child Development and Early Learning Standards (201) is impressive. The standards are clear, thorough, based on child development, and aligned with kindergarten-readiness. Unfortunately, these programs are subsidized and limited to qualifying families, leaving a lot of Arkansas families without access. And, to be clear, not all Head Start programs are deemed high-quality.

Then there’s Arkansas Better Chance (ABC), overseen by the Department of Education. Its manual is solid, references the work of NAEYC, but, similar to Head Start, this program is subsidized and limited.

The above menagerie of departments, divisions, and acronyms is problematic, often overlapping in the most complicated of ways. For example, the Arkansas Child Development and Early Learning Standards (Head Start/Early Head Start) are mentioned just once in the Minimum Licensing Requirements (DHS, 2020) calling for staff to plan experiences in all developmental areas found in the Head Start resource. However, the resource is listed only by a portion of its title as “Arkansas’s Learning Standards,” and isn’t cited or linked, leaving compliance difficult and seemingly trivial. The DHS Minimum Licensing Requirements also mention the Arkansas Framework for Infant and Toddler Care (2002), which was replaced by the 2016 Head Start Resource.

So who’s to say which learning standards, if any, are guiding our child care centers?

So I beg of you: Clean up this mess. Create a single, unified system for early childhood education to institute efficient and effective leadership. Call for governing boards to hire highly qualified directors. Empower these directors with incentives for attracting, hiring, and retaining highly qualified professionals. Support these professionals with clear learning standards and educator pay-scales based on qualifications and experience. Finally, empower parents with clear information on program quality, staff qualifications, seat availability, and tuition.

Arkansas’ children deserve no less.

Leigh Keener is an Arkansas early childhood educator with 19 years’ experience. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in early education from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. She earned her National Board Certification in early childhood education in 2008 and her certificate in early education leadership from Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2021.