“How are the children?”
“How are the children?”
Saturday, September 23, 2023
11:53 AM
Many years ago this was a common way we would have opened an early childhood policy conference or training conversation. A reference to a Masai greeting among travelers, it prioritized the welfare of children as the important indicator that it is. But we have moved a far piece from this wisdom, for a variety of pressing issues. It seems from here that there is more interest in how to convince people to come care for children than whether they are any good at it. Of course both are necessary efforts but I take the frequent absence of the word “quality” from the conversation about accessibility and affordability as an obvious hint as to where our real efforts are going. Corporate America wants their money makers (parents) back to work and children are “resilient” anyway.
I despair at what this means. We used to spend hours debating what kind of puzzles were developmentally appropriate for 3 yr olds so teachers would score well on environmental rating scales. I have a lot of opinions on the matter actually, so I am talking about myself. Now I wish we had seen that, in the future, puzzles would become pretty irrelevant and that what we really needed to pay attention to were how the adults were supported to relate – or not – to children. We apparently went for the “low-hanging fruit” (always a mistake, a misdirection, an easy distraction) and gave less intellectual, policy and emotional energy to the health and strength and wisdom of the teacher her/himself. Too late, throwing money at them alone will not really nourish them. When will we realize that the answer to “how are the children” is not really related to “how much does their teacher make”?
On the other hand, as a dastardly underpaid ece educator for my adult life, believe me, I know how important salary is. But it is not the only thing – apparently we can think about policy for compensation band-aids (apologies) but not about funding for teacher education, professional development, better working conditions (see actually implemented Model Work Standards) and, finally, professional acknowledgement, sometimes meekly referred to as, respect.
Please lets put ALL the needs of the teachers on the table – not just break times, and bonuses, but child development science and how to tend each child with informed attention and understanding. Fostering those skills benefits teachers commensurate with their responsibilities, while also helping to inform the answer to “How are the children?”
We can’t be entranced by the very mention of “compensation”. Lets demand what is good for us and the children.