Building the Talent Base

Human capital is the lens we use to study the problem of the educational achievement gap: We believe people matter. Our early education work seeks to build the base of talent in the early childhood field.

Solving the education crisis is a matter of getting the right people, training them well, and holding them to high standards. We seek to:

• Attract high-caliber teachers—individuals with an impressive educational background, a determined and relentless spirit, and the imagination necessary to narrow the achievement gap of low-income young children in their classrooms.

and

• Create new, more effective pathways for inducting and training teachers, giving them the knowledge and tools necessary to nurture and educate young children.

Nationally, the lowest-performing teachers often work in the lowest-income school districts. Within those districts, the least-qualified teachers usually work with the youngest children. What results? Children who are most at-risk for educational failure and are in their most formative years are generally taught by the least-prepared, least-qualified teachers. Forty percent of the teaching staff of child care centers in D.C. hold no more than a high school diploma. And while a relatively high percentage of D.C.’s centers, compared with other states, meet the high standards of national accreditation, more than two-thirds do not.

D.C. has one “ace” to play in attracting high-talent teachers to the early childhood space. Nationally, teachers in child development centers earn only 12 cents more an hour than parking-lot attendants. In D.C., however, the public school system has a high number of early childhood classrooms already established—and D.C. Public Schools plans to increase that number substantially. Early childhood teachers in public schools earn salaries commensurate with other public school teaching jobs—a level that, while still inadequate, provides a baseline much more favorable than salaries in child care centers.