Preparing Early Childhood Teachers: Credentialing and Preparation Programs in Four States

Almost every state in the United States has invested in expanding publicly funded preschool and developing early childhood teaching credentials to ensure a high-quality preschool workforce. Research indicates that early childhood educators’ formal preparation and skills in early child development are particularly important in successful public preschool programs.

Teachers of young children need a wide range of knowledge and skills that prepare them to support children’s physical, social-emotional, and academic development. They need to be able to support learning in language, literacy, and math; establish safe, caring, and positive relationships with children and families; and recognize and effectively support children’s culture, language, and individual needs. States need to ensure that teacher credentialing programs offer opportunities for candidates to gain these skills, and credentialing programs need to support the development of these skills through coursework and clinical experiences.

Through a national scan, we found that 46 states (including the District of Columbia) offer a stand-alone credential that certifies teachers for early childhood grades; however, there are considerable differences in requirements. Out of these 46 states, 44 also offer an early elementary or elementary credential that overlaps at least one grade with their early childhood credential. Although most states offer an early childhood teaching credential, fewer than half of states (19) require lead public preschool teachers to hold such a credential.

Many early childhood educator candidates face barriers to obtaining a teaching credential, including the high cost of tuition, a lack of time, and the difficulty of navigating higher education systems. These obstacles also pose challenges for preparation programs striving to recruit and retain diverse credential candidates.

This report provides policymakers and practitioners with a comprehensive understanding of the national landscape of early childhood teaching credentialing, identifies the key decisions states and preparation programs face when developing or revising early education credentials, and highlights common strategies that can strengthen early childhood teacher preparation programs. 

We selected four states—Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York—for study due to their efforts to implement high-quality early education systems. Within each state, we chose two IHEs that represent different approaches and pathways: Louisiana Tech University and Northwestern State University; Boston College and University of Massachusetts Boston; Montclair State University and Rutgers University–New Brunswick; and Bank Street College of Education and City College of New York.

State Early Childhood Credentialing Choices

State-level decisions play a critical role in shaping early childhood teacher credential programs, affecting their design, demographics of participants, and career opportunities for candidates. Among the four states studied, the credential age ranges considered “early childhood” differ: preschool to 3rd grade (P–3), preschool to 2nd grade (P–2), and birth to 2nd grade (B–2). 

Administrators balance the need for broader labor market flexibility with the benefits of focusing more closely on early childhood development. To ensure that programs equip candidates with essential knowledge and skills, states either mandate specific courses or require accredited programs to align with professional standards. However, gaps remain in key areas such as math and partnerships with families. 

The requirements for supervised placements, crucial for teacher preparation, vary from one semester to a full year. Louisiana stands out with its full-year of clinical experience, while Massachusetts and New York ease certification barriers by recognizing prior classroom experience. All four states require candidates to pass exams covering both prekindergarten (PreK) and early elementary content. Massachusetts and New Jersey also incorporated performance assessments to evaluate teaching readiness, while New York required them within teacher preparation programs. Massachusetts  improved accessibility through a pilot program offering alternative assessments.

Preparation Program Design Choices

State guidelines outline the essential knowledge and skills required for credentialed teachers, but it is up to individual programs to decide how to organize these areas, determine the emphasis on each, and design effective field-based learning opportunities. Research on quality early childhood teacher preparation finds the following.

• Establishing a unified vision for preparation that informs courses, clinical work, and selection of partner schools enables success.
   
• Ensuring a deep grounding in all areas of child development and learning serves as a foundation and lens for other coursework and builds candidates’ pedagogical skills.
• Integrating coursework and field-based experiences makes for a more powerful learning experience.
   
• Providing sustained and intensive supervised clinical experiences, such as full-year supervised clinical placements with strong mentorship and opportunities for reflection individually and in groups, strengthens practice.
   
• Developing strong partnerships with schools that instantiate best practices and provide a well-supported setting to learn to teach is crucial for providing quality clinical experiences.
   
• Offering personalized advising and mentorship enables close relationships with candidates throughout their education journey, particularly targeted support to meet credentialing requirements and mentoring during field placements.

Numerous approaches to structuring preparation programs enable early childhood educators to develop the necessary knowledge and skills. As the diverse cases we look at illustrate, these strategies for expanding quality can be implemented across a range of programs­ and pathways.

Pathways to Support Access

Part of developing a high-quality credential preparation program is being able to attract a diverse candidate pool and support candidates’ success throughout the program. Early childhood educators come to the profession by varying routes. Different pathways are needed for candidates first entering the field of education, those seeking specialized learning related to young children, and those pursuing career advancement. The eight IHEs in this study designed multiple pathways for their candidates, including:

• pathways through integrated bachelor’s degree and certification programs that can be completed in 4 or 5 years and connect undergraduate majors with the credentialing program;
   
• transfer pathways and statewide articulation agreements to facilitate routes that begin at community colleges and routes for nonmatriculated candidates (such as dual enrollment high school programs) that are more affordable for a wide range of teacher candidates;
   
• postbaccalaureate pathways for candidates who already hold a bachelor’s degree to become certified and, in some programs, earn a master’s degree;
   
• dual certification programs in early childhood and bilingual and/or special education; and
   
• teacher residencies that enable candidates to work full time as teachers alongside expert teachers while completing coursework that is integrated with their clinical practice.

States and districts also have designed expedited and tailored pathways to quickly increase the early childhood educator workforce needed to scale access to public preschool. Such efforts include designing programs that can be completed while working, crediting candidates’ prior experience, and providing more customized coursework offerings.

Common Strategies and Enabling Factors to Support Access

Across the preparation programs and pathways studied, we identified common strategies used to attract people to the field of early childhood education and especially to reduce barriers to earning early childhood credentials for diverse candidates. These strategies included:

• subsidizing program costs and offering additional financial supports beyond tuition;
   
• reducing candidate requirements by aligning courses and giving credit for prior experience and coursework, including courses at the community college level;
   
• tailoring the location, modality, and timing of courses to meet candidates’ needs by offering courses in a hybrid or online format, off-site at a community location, or on evenings or weekends;
   
• building a sense of community among candidates and faculty by creating cohort-based models and offering summer orientations for incoming candidates;
   
• conducting multipronged outreach and recruiting racially, linguistically, and culturally diverse candidates and faculty by partnering with local universities and state organizations, creating web-based resources that clearly lay out the pathways available, and diversifying the makeup of preparation faculty; and
   
• providing specialized advising and multifaceted supports, including academic and career advising, mentoring, writing and literacy support, and test preparation.

To offer high-quality programs and attract a diverse pool of early childhood teacher candidates, programs themselves need financial support for capacity building, and states and IHEs need additional data to inform their efforts.

Policy Recommendations

Based on the study’s findings, we identified the following key policy and practice strategies.

• Design preparation program coursework and field-based experiences to develop the knowledge and skills required for effective early childhood educators in the key areas of literacy, early math, social-emotional learning, differentiation, and family and community engagement.
   
• Support the articulation and alignment of coursework across and within IHEs to enable more accessible pathways toward credentials for early childhood teachers.
   
• Develop intensive and coherent clinical experiences with frequent and comprehensive candidate supports by increasing supervised clinical placements to a full year, with frequent advising and opportunities for reflection.
   
• Create and support multiple pathways to an early childhood credential, including pathways for experienced educators, and create outreach strategies that provide information in multiple languages and modalities.
   
• Invest in building capacity for credentialing programs to design and implement accessible programs, provide candidate supports, hire diverse faculty with early childhood pedagogical expertise, and offer convenient courses (e.g., at community sites, on weekends or evenings, and in hybrid or online formats).
   
• Provide financial assistance and financial advising to early childhood educators seeking higher credentials and degrees to help them access local, state, and federal funding that reduces or covers tuition costs and incidental costs (e.g., books, credentialing fees, child care, transportation) and provides compensation for supervised clinical placements.
   
• Offer candidates multiple ways of demonstrating competence to meet credential requirements by crediting prior teaching experience and developing alternative assessments that are more performance-based to address barriers such as test cost, structure, and duration.

The state and city examples described in this study offer valuable lessons for policymakers in other states as they seek to develop or improve their early childhood credentialing systems. To monitor their success in serving candidates from diverse backgrounds and determine strategies for improvement, states can partner with IHEs to track credential candidate data such as demographics, previous education and experience, program enrollment and completion, and job placements. By setting up strong credentialing systems and offering supports to candidates and IHEs, states can develop highly skilled teachers capable of having positive, long-lasting impacts on young children.

Preparing Early Childhood Teachers: Credentialing and Preparation Programs in Four States by By Abby Schachner, Victoria Wang, Cathy Yun, Sara Plasencia, Chris Mauerman, Cordy McJunkins, and Deborah Stipek is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

This research was supported by the Ballmer Group, Heising-Simons Foundation, and Kelson Foundation. Additional core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. The ideas voiced here are those of the author and not those of our funders.