We consider issues surrounding the introduction of the federal educational standards in preschool education (FGOS DO) by analyzing data from a survey of directors and teachers at public and private kindergartens. The results show that teachers are well informed about the content of the new standards. They actively participate in professional…

"Children Crossing Borders" was an ambitious study of the intersection of im/migration and early childhood education in five countries: England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. This article looks back at this study a decade later, presenting the main findings and proposing suggestions about how in the contemporary climate…

Most children in the U.S. spend time in some form of early childhood education (ECE) program prior to entering kindergarten. In fact, children spend an average of 25 hours per week in nonparental care, including center-based care and informal family, friend and neighbor care. Children develop a foundation for learning during these early years, so…

In the past decade, various stakeholders in the public and private sectors in Hawai'i have sought to increase the state's investment in child care and early learning programs. A new Executive Office of Early Learning was established in June 2012 to build a statewide early childhood development and learning system. The state also established a…

Head Start is an essential part of the programs and funding streams that provide early care and education (ECE) services to young children in the U.S. Head Start focuses on supporting children and families with low incomes, but also contributes to the broader effort to expand access to high quality ECE for all young children. Programs and…

The core challenge our proposal seeks to address is how to ensure that every American family and child has access to high-quality, affordable early childhood care and education (ECE) services in a critical period of human development, breaking a shortage of investment in young children. America's status quo asks the most of parents when they have…

There's a lot of conversation in the early childhood community on evaluating teachers to improve their performance. Raising the quality of early care and education is a priority for policymakers and practitioners on local, state, and federal levels. As a result, much attention is being focused on early childhood educators to ensure that they do a…

In recent years, increased attention has been given to executive function and its relationship to the overall learning and development of young children. Because of this, it is essential that educators have the skills needed to effectively facilitate the development of executive function throughout early childhood. The focus of the current paper…

The last 20 years have brought numerous workforce reforms to the early years sector, enacted in the name of professionalisation, including the recent introduction of a new postgraduate qualification, the Early Years Teacher Status. This article features data from interviews with 22 participants who had just completed this award and situates their…

Economic theory predicts market failure in the market for early childhood education and care (ECEC) due to information asymmetries. We empirically investigate information asymmetries between parents and ECEC professionals in Germany, making use of a unique extension of the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). We compare quality perceptions by…

The preparation of teachers for diversity within and between schools is a growing focus in teacher education worldwide, and particularly in South Africa, where the education landscape has shifted dramatically since the democratic elections of 1994. While diversity is a recurring theme in the literature, the matter of contextual diversity still…

The objective of this research is to create a cross-national comparison of early childhood education beliefs and ideals in Switzerland and the United States. The goal is to interview teachers in Switzerland to gain insight into their perspective on various topics in early childhood education. Those responses will then be compared against commonly…

Black students comprise approximately 19% of the preschool population, yet they represent 47% of school suspensions (U.S. Department of Education 2016). Although it is posited that most teachers seek to serve all children to the best of their abilities, research indicates that many school personnel engage in implicit biases that influence their…

Heterotopias are complex spaces characterized by the collision of the real (i.e., physical realm--who and what materials are present) and unreal (i.e., abstract realm--socially created meanings and understandings of the "real"; Foucault, 1986; Topinka, 2010). The early childhood classroom is a heterotopia in that it is a knowledge…

Background: Childcare programs serving preschool children are generally of poorer quality than publicly-funded preschools both in terms of their classroom processes and structural features. Research on childcare programs has typically collapsed them into a single group, yet these programs vary greatly in neighborhood disadvantage and organization…