High-quality, stable child care and early education (CCEE) can have lasting, positive impacts on children. However, the challenges of recruiting, strengthening, and retaining the CCEE workforce are well documented. CCEE educators typically have low levels of formal education and compensation; limited opportunities for education, training, and…

Following calls to 'bewilder' (Snaza 2013) the pioneers of early education, this article positions Montessori pedagogy as a 'desire path' that acts as resistance to normative policy-driven pathways in early childhood education and care. Desire paths are alternative tracks made aside from officially established walking routes. In this paper I think…

California is expanding transitional kindergarten (TK) to become a universal preschool program for all four-year-old children. Upwards of 300,000 children are expected to enroll in universal transitional kindergarten (UTK) by 2025, requiring thousands of additional lead teachers and classroom aides to meet lower student-to-teacher ratio…

The "Early Childhood Workforce Index" provides a state-by-state look at policies and conditions affecting the early care and education workforce. This biennial report has tracked state progress since 2016. This third, 2020 edition of the Index continues to track state policies in essential areas like workforce qualifications, work…

In this paper, I discuss how professional identities in early childhood education in Chile are performatively constituted within the interplay between a religious discourse of vocation and gender. 'Having the vocation' has become a regime of truth that regulates and governs educators' behaviours, motivations and relationships in their workplace.…

Increased attention has been paid to qualifications and training of early childhood education and care staff in order to improve the quality of the service they provide. However, less attention has been paid to the demographics of the workforce itself. Men have consistently made up 2 per cent of the early childhood education and care workforce.…

The State of the Early Childhood Workforce (SECW) Initiative is a groundbreaking multi-year project to shine a steady spotlight on the nation's early childhood workforce. The SECW Initiative is designed to challenge entrenched ideas and policies that maintain an inequitable and inadequate status quo for early educators and for the children and…

The purpose of this article is to explore the complex interrelations between educators' work environments and their experiences as an entryway for thinking differently about workforce stability and sustainability. Concepts of macro- and micropolitics (drawn from the work of Deleuze and Guattari) are used to explore one educator's experiences in…

Adults who provide early care and education are critical for the healthy development and well-being of young children. Although many people in the early childhood care and education (ECCE) workforce are skilled and dedicated, their ability to provide high quality experiences for children is hampered by a lack of shared purpose and identity,…

The study explores the relationship between child care program administration, organizational climate, and global quality. The recently developed Program Administration Scale (PAS; Talan & Bloom, 2004) was utilized in the study. Both program administration and organizational climate were found to be positively correlated with preschool…