As California policymakers and the public continue to focus on the availability and quality of early care and education (ECE) programs in the state, an important area to address is the effectiveness of the state’s ECE workforce professional development system (PDS). The ECE workforce PDS is multifaceted. The system includes those institutions that provide education and ongoing professional development for the caregivers, teachers, and administrators who provide care and early education services to children from birth to kindergarten entry. It encompasses the public resources and the associated programs that support workforce professional development activities. The system also includes other infrastructure...

Despite the enthusiasm for state PDSs, practice has largely proceeded in advance of having a solid research base to demonstrate the effectiveness of various approaches to ECE workforce professional development.¹ Policy and practice regarding the professional development of the ECE workforce are limited by the lack of rigorous studies documenting the causal relationship between education, training, and other professional development models, on the one hand, and care quality or children’s developmental outcomes, on the other hand (Whitebook, Gomby, et al., 2009a; Zaslow et al., 2010). And the existing research has yet to fully explore how those relationships are mediated by...

Much of the recent effort to improve ECE workforce PDSs has taken place at the state level, typically in conjunction with other state policy initiatives in the ECE field, such as defining early learning standards, designing and implementing QRISs, and extending longitudinal education data systems to include the preschool years. According to the NCCIC, Delaware was one of the first states to initiate a planning process for a statewide PDS (NCCIC, 2009). As of November 2010, 23 states and the District of Columbia were implementing ECE workforce PDSs, 16 states were making revisions to existing systems, while the remaining 12...

Each of the ECE workforce PDS frameworks introduced in Chapter One included elements that delineate the professional standards for the workforce, variously defined through desired competencies, required qualifications in the form of credentials or degrees, and career ladders or lattices to denote the pathway for advancement in the profession. Such elements may apply to both the formal and informal segments of the workforce—those in both licensed and license-exempt settings—while others may pertain only to those in licensed settings or in publicly funded programs. These elements also form the core of the various state PDS being developed, as discussed...

As states have boosted their efforts to improve ECE workforce quality through PDSs, attention has centered on the quality of the programs that train the ECE workforce. Research cited in Chapter Two has pointed to the importance of the quality of teacher-training programs at all degree levels, as well as ongoing professional development opportunities, for ensuring that ECE providers have the required competencies to successfully support children from birth to age five (Bogard, Traylor, and Takanishi, 2008; Early, Maxwell, et al., 2008). As noted in Chapter One, unlike K–12 education in which a bachelor’s degree is required to obtain...

As noted in Chapter One, there is a wide range in the education and training qualifications of California’s ECE workforce in licensed settings, the formal segment of the workforce, and we can expect that this variation would apply as well to license-exempt providers, the informal segment of the workforce. In an effort to improve the quality of care for California children from birth to kindergarten entry in both licensed and license-exempt settings, federal, state, and local resources are invested in the ECE workforce through a diverse array of programs.

In this chapter, we inventory the major activities funded by public...

In its final report to the state legislature, the CAELQIS Advisory Committee (2010a) placed a spotlight on the importance of ECE workforce professional development, noting the need to “strengthen the links between early educator professional development and effective teaching to improve child outcomes” (p. 4). Consistent with the policy importance attached to ECE professional development, in this study we set out to address two questions related to the effectiveness of the ECE workforce PDS in California:

Does California’s PDS prepare its ECE workforce well and provide ongoing supports to ensure that children receive the developmental benefits associated with a high-quality...