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Anna Evans Murray (1857-1955) was a racial justice activist, day nursery and kindergarten advocate, and educator whose contributions to advance public kindergarten focused on Washington, D.C. (Smith, 1996). In the national public kindergarten movement, the District of Columbia was one of the shining examples of successful efforts to secure public funding. The $12,000 allocation for the district’s public kindergartens approved by Congress with the 1898-1899 appropriations act is repeatedly mentioned in an early report detailing highlights from the city (Association for Childhood Education International, 1939). However, the process to secure public funding, the role of Black women’s leadership, and the national Black women’s movement undergirding these efforts was not noted by the Association of Childhood Education International (ACEI). Although earlier histories attribute the congressional appropriations to White women (Vandewalker, 1908), more recent and influential works credit Anna Murray for her leadership (Beatty, 1995; Allen, 2017).In this profile, we take a deeper dive into Murray’s trajectory as a public kindergarten advocate in the context of early childhood education’s broader history. Anna Murray’s story not only demonstrates the importance of public funding for early learning’s sustainability and growth, but also underscores the challenges of providing training for Black teachers. As Black kindergarten advocate Haydee B. Campbell saw in St. Louis, early public kindergartens in Washington, D.C., were denied, delayed, or segregated for Black children. Murray’s advocacy of public kindergartens for Black children also included a crucial parallel strategy to train Black kindergarten educators.

In the late 1800s, the groundbreaking yet segregated public kindergartens of St. Louis, Missouri, included separate leadership and teacher training for Black women, with Haydee B. Campbell as the Superintendent of Black Kindergartens in St. Louis. While the history of early education in the city often focuses on well-known White leaders like Susan Blow and William Torrey Harris, the contributions of Black women have been erased and ignored for too long. By turning the spotlight on Haydee B. Campbell, we make visible not only Black women’s leadership as teachers, trainers, and pedagogical leaders, but the contributions of Black women’s clubs to the kindergarten movement in which Campbell worked as the supervisor of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC) Kindergarten Department. Centering Campbell provides a different view of history, where a win for public kindergartens meant incorporation into racially segregated school systems, often with disparate access by race (fewer Black kindergartens than White), disparate funding (less funding allocated to Black kindergartens), and segregated training schools for Black teachers (fewer locations where Black women could be trained).One consequence of devaluing Black women’s contribution to the kindergarten movement is their scant presence in the archives. We are only beginning our work of searching for the historical “dots” we hope to connect into a more fully developed understanding of the kindergarten movement from marginalized perspectives. This profile pulls together the fragmentary information we have on Haydee B. Campbell’s career in the context of a city considered “the sun of our kindergarten system,” her contributions to the kindergarten movement, and her role within the NACWC’s national efforts to establish kindergartens for Black children.

Expanding high-quality ECE would not only generate economic output through the higher earnings of ECE workers, but would have an even greater impact on the state’s economy by increasing the employment, earnings, and productivity of parents.

This report examines teaching staff assessments of their work environments in Miami-Dade County across the five SEQUAL domains: Teaching Supports, Learning Community, Job Crafting, Adult Well-Being, and Program Leadership with a focus on how their program environment contributes to or hinders their ability to apply their knowledge and skills and improve their practice. In addition to teaching staff perceptions of their work environments, assessments of how responses varied by teacher and site characteristics are documented. Findings reveal that common workplace challenges pose barriers to early child care educator well-being and classroom effectiveness. Findings also demonstrate the value of program policies that ensure dependable workplace supports and policies such as provisions for paid planning and reporting time.This report is part of our Teachers’ Voices (SEQUAL) series. To facilitate bringing teachers’ voices into quality improvement strategies, the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) developed Supportive Environmental Quality Underlying Adult Learning, or SEQUAL, as a tool to document teaching staff perspectives about workplace conditions that impact their practice and program quality. SEQUAL can be used as a research, educational, or technical assistance tool.

This report examines teaching staff assessments of their work environments in Minnesota across the five SEQUAL domains: Teaching Supports, Learning Community, Job Crafting, Adult Well-Being, and Program Leadership with a focus on how their program environment contributes to or hinders their ability to apply their knowledge and skills and improve their practice. In addition to teaching staff perceptions of their work environments, assessments of how responses varied by teacher and site characteristics are documented. Findings reveal that common workplace challenges pose barriers to early child care educator well-being and classroom effectiveness. Findings also demonstrate the value of program policies that ensure dependable workplace supports and policies such as provisions for paid planning and reporting time.This report is part of our Teachers’ Voices (SEQUAL) series. To facilitate bringing teachers’ voices into quality improvement strategies, the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) developed Supportive Environmental Quality Underlying Adult Learning, or SEQUAL, as a tool to document teaching staff perspectives about workplace conditions that impact their practice and program quality. SEQUAL can be used as a research, educational, or technical assistance tool.

This report examines teaching staff assessments of their work environments in New York state across the five SEQUAL domains: Teaching Supports, Learning Community, Job Crafting, Adult Well-Being, and Program Leadership with a focus on how their program environment contributes to or hinders their ability to apply their knowledge and skills and improve their practice. In addition to teaching staff perceptions of their work environments, assessments of how responses varied by teacher and site characteristics are documented. Findings reveal that common workplace challenges pose barriers to early child care educator well-being and classroom effectiveness. Findings also demonstrate the value of program policies that ensure dependable workplace supports and policies such as provisions for paid planning and reporting time.This report is part of our Teachers’ Voices (SEQUAL) series. To facilitate bringing teachers’ voices into quality improvement strategies, the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) developed Supportive Environmental Quality Underlying Adult Learning, or SEQUAL, as a tool to document teaching staff perspectives about workplace conditions that impact their practice and program quality. SEQUAL can be used as a research, educational, or technical assistance tool.

Teaching in early care and education (ECE) programs is one of the lowest-paid occupations in the United States. In 2017, median wages for early educators ranged from $10.72 per hour (or $22,290 full-time per year) to $13.94 per hour (or $28,990 full-time per year). These are quite literally poverty-level wages: the federal poverty threshold for a family of four in 2017 was $24,600.Low wages for early educators are not a new challenge. Compensation has been low in this field since its inception, but only recently have the public, policymakers, and other stakeholders begun to appreciate the full ramifications of paying such low wages for this crucial work – work that is performed mostly by women, nearly half of whom are women of color.As a result of this increasing awareness of the problems of low wages, a growing consensus within the early childhood field recognizes that something must be done to improve compensation. Yet, little consensus exists on the primary reasons for compensation reform, what compensation reform looks like, and how to achieve compensation reform. To provide clarification and guidance, this report summarizes recent research on wage standards and critically assesses existing initiatives intended to address the problem of low wages in ECE. The report also outlines the position of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) on the following three core areas of debate: why we need compensation reform, what compensation reform looks like, and how to achieve compensation reform.