Access to high-quality early childhood education (ECE) is the foundation toward educational equity, a core American value promising equal opportunity in the United States. Research shows that high-quality ECE programs have significant impacts upon children's long-term outcomes due to the rapid cognitive, social, and emotional skills developed…

Latino children constitute a large and growing segment of the U.S. population. By 2060, it is estimated that they will comprise one-third (32%) of the three-to-four-year-old population. More than four million children enrolled in preschool programs in the United States are dual language learners (DLLs), and more than 75% of Latina/o children over…

While changing demographics reflect an increasingly multicultural and multilingual U.S. population, Latinos continue to experience under-representation and lack of recognition inconsistent for such a growing segment of the U.S. population. Latinos face a myriad of inequities across systems that impact early childhood development and that continue…

Increasingly, policymakers for federal and state preschool programs have raised credentialing requirements for early childhood education (ECE) teachers. Nationally, about one in five (19%) of all ECE teachers are Latina (NASEM, 2017). Latina teachers bring an incredible amount of experience to the classroom: 27% have between 10 and 15 years in the…

Black and Latinx educators make up a critical portion of the early child education (ECE) field; 31% of the center-based workforce and about half of those employed in Head Start. These diverse educators are from communities where the impacts of the pandemic have been the most detrimental -- according to the Centers for Disease Control and…