T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood® Project

Description

How does one improve child care? For the T.E.A.C.H. Early ChildhoodŽ Project (Teacher Education and Compensation Helps), the answer is to improve the training of child care workers. Under the T.E.A.C.H. model, additional training is linked to higher wages for child care providers. By compensating child care workers for receiving more training and education, the program works to retain child care providers and improve the quality of the child care workforce. This multi-state initiative, which was started in North Carolina by Day Care Services Association, has spread to other states, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Colorado, and Indiana.

Day Care Services Association in North Carolina—a non-profit service, research, and advocacy group—started the T.E.A.C.H. project. The group now serves as an umbrella agency for the multi-state program. Day Care Services Association licenses non-profit organizations and provides technical assistance for implementing the project. States wishing to implement the model apply to Day Care Services for a license. Applicants must provide information on who the stakeholders are at the state level and how support for the program will be developed in local communities. Each state also must designate a non-profit agency to administer the project. In some cases, there is consensus on where to house the project. In other cases, states issue a request for a proposal and allow organizations to compete for this work. Agencies selected to house the T.E.A.C.H. project must have the ability to serve the entire state and have a proven track record for high-quality service provision.

While the specific partners vary from state to state, they generally include community colleges, child care providers, state agencies, Head Start programs, resource and referral agencies, state licensing agencies, and cooperative extension representatives. Representatives from these groups then join together to form the statewide advisory committee. Business participation is critical as Day Care Services requires the sponsoring child care program to pay a portion of the cost for training.

The quality of child care is a national issue that has received increasing media attention. With the advent of welfare reform and the introduction of even more parents to the workforce, the need for quality and affordable care has escalated. However, studies show that child care teachers are some of the lowest-paid workers. As a result, teachers do not remain in the field for long and the quality of child care is not what it should be.

T.E.A.C.H. was created in response to a 1989 North Carolina workforce study that examined the wages and retention of child care workers. T.E.A.C.H. addressed training and compensation issues by establishing a system to compensate providers for receiving additional education and training. As a result, the capacity of providers to deliver high-quality care has increased and retention has improved since the inception of the project.

Many states were interested in replicating the project and contacted Day Care Services, the project designer. In response, Day Care Services created a system of technical assistance support and a licensing process. In order to maintain the principles of the project and to help adapt the project to the specific situations of the different states, T.E.A.C.H. requires that: (1) each state use the educational system in place to provide training; (2) the diversity of the workforce, including the providers' different educational levels, geographic locations (urban and rural), and settings for the care they provide (center-based and home care options), must be respected; and (3) the project must receive payments from public and private partners involved in the program.

Day Care Services provides technical assistance and support to each licensed state. It also works with states seeking to start the T.E.A.C.H. program. At the heart of this technical assistance is a database that keeps track of all facets of the project. The database tracks students, prints contracts with centers and universities, issues award letters and reports, and provides the information needed to track outcomes. The database is designed in a way that can be adapted to the varying circumstances in each state.

The licensing agreement mandates a series of technical assistance visits. State entities usually come to Day Care Services twice: to receive training on implementing the model and to learn to use the database. Staff from Day Care Services also usually make two site visits to each state. These technical assistance visits continue past the first year in order to share what the North Carolina project has learned in the time that they have used the T.E.A.C.H. model.

The T.E.A.C.H. project usually starts in a small area of the newly licensed state in order to work out the kinks and to help fit the model to the unique circumstances of each state. The project is then scaled up to include the entire state. This often takes several years. Once implemented, T.E.A.C.H. provides a variety of program services in various combinations in the licensed states. These include: the Child Development Associate (CDA) Credential; the Early Childhood Associate Degree Scholarship Program; the Early Childhood Bachelor Degree Scholarship Program; and an Early Childhood Model/Mentor Teacher Program (developed by the state).

Initial funding for T.E.A.C.H. is most often provided by the private sector through business and foundation support. Private partners then continue to provide resources and lobby for funding at the state level. The state and federal government may also contribute funds to expand the project throughout the state. States have been successful at garnering federal, state, and local funds for this effort, but only in North Carolina are enough funds available to cover all interested providers statewide. Part of the philosophy of T.E.A.C.H. is that all parties contribute to the financial costs of the project. Therefore, each student and his/her sponsoring child care program pays a portion of the training costs.

Day Care Services itself operates on funds provided by the State of North Carolina, licensing fees ($1500 for three years per state), and private and corporate foundation grants.

It is the goal of the T.E.A.C.H. project to grow large enough to truly reform the educational system that trains child care providers and to improve the wages received by qualified providers. In North Carolina, the pilot state, systemic change has already begun to occur. Last year in North Carolina, more than 4,000 child care providers were in school through the T.E.A.C.H. Early ChildhoodŽ Project.

The T.E.A.C.H. Project has a built-in evaluation component to track progress towards the goal. Each licensee is required to maintain a database that is used to track and evaluate every facet of the initiative's activities, including a record of individuals who have received scholarships. Sites eventually do their own evaluation, but since this takes time to put into place, Day Care Services initially tracks the progress. Day Care Services also requires quarterly reports from the entity that holds the state's license.

Finally, all of the T.E.A.C.H. projects are collecting comparable data on program services and results. Day Care Services Association will be able to conduct a cross-site evaluation of the entire project with this information.

Issues of sustaining and replicating the T.E.A.C.H. projects come down to one issue: funding. For the project to be successful, states must find permanent funding to compensate providers for additional training. The North Carolina experience shows that this can be done, and all of the replication sites are making progress toward taking T.E.A.C.H. statewide. However, different states have met with very different levels of success. For instance, Florida and Illinois now have funding to operate the project statewide. New York, on the other hand, is struggling to find enough funding to move out of the pilot phase.

Sue Russell, the Executive Director of Day Care Services, says that many of the lessons they have learned along the way come from the fact that the T.E.A.C.H. project began as an experiment, and very quickly grew to statewide and then national prominence. As a result, Day Care Services has had to be more reactive than proactive. In hindsight, if they were to start again, they would have spent more time early on planning for dissemination and technical assistance activities.

What Day Care Services has learned from this experience includes:

Keep focused on outcomes. As an agency, Day Care Services Association is very outcome- focused. From the start, it has kept careful track of customer satisfaction, market penetration, and performance targets (compensation, turnover rates, etc.). "Focus on outcomes," Russell says. "If your program isn't increasing education, increasing compensation, and reducing turnover, then why should it exist?"

Keep records. Careful collection and tracking of data is important to the success of the project. Initiatives should use data in every way. It is important to learn about who the workforce is initially and then what the project has accomplished.

Keep it collaborative. Make initiatives inclusive and collaborative, and then stick to those principles. Keep all players at the table to ensure that the right voices are available when needed and that the project is responsive to the needs of teachers.

Keep people informed. Use instances of success as opportunities to show off the project. When state funds are used to train providers, make sure that the legislators know and understand the results of the project.

Sue Russell
Day Care Services Association
P.O. Box 901
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27514
Phone: (919) 967-3272
Fax: (919) 967-7653