Mississippi child care workers are strained by low pay and lack of training — but an additional $5 an hour in salary would prompt around half of those workers to stay in their jobs and to seek additional education, according to a new survey by state child care advocates.

The coalition Mississippi Forum for the Future surveyed nearly 700 child care workers, most of whom provide care in centers, to draw attention to the precariousness of the child care sector in the state. Early childhood educators are facing strain across the nation, but Mississippi is in a particularly difficult position: Workers reported an average hourly wage of $10.93 and typically have no benefits. In contrast, a “survival wage” in the state for a single adult is $12.28 an hour, according to the report.

Nationally, child care workers earn $14.22 on average, according to federal labor statistics.

Additional information gathered from the survey:

• Just under 70 percent of child care workers said they worked 40 or more hours a week.

• More highly educated workers earned more, but the differences were not large: Child care employees with a high school diploma reported earning $10.22 an hour on average, but those with a bachelor’s degree or higher said their salary averaged $12.79 an hour.

• Close to half, or 48 percent of the workers surveyed, said they did not have training beyond high school. A similar percentage of child care workers — 47 percent — reported that they are working with children who have mental, physical, or emotional disabilities.

• About 36 percent said they relied on public support programs such as Medicaid or the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

• A little more than a third reported they had looked for a new job, and of that group, most of them were looking for jobs out of the child care sector.

In the midst of these stresses, demand for child care in the state is still quite high.

Lesia Daniel-Hollingshead has provided child care services in her community of Clinton, Mississippi, a suburb west of Jackson, for nearly 25 years. After she taught children in public schools, her passion prompted her to open several child care centers. Since the inception of her child care ventures in 2000, more than 7,000 children have received child care at My First Funtime, Funtime Pre-School and Funtime After-School.

During the pandemic, Hollingshead’s facilities suffered a 50 percent decline in enrollment. But by 2021, an overwhelming number of families with infants sought her child care services. In October 2021, to meet demand, she opened My First Funtime, a center for infants and toddlers 6 weeks to 18 months old.

“We opened My First Funtime in October of 2021, by December we had enrolled 66 infants,” Hollingshead said. “My program is currently full — and not because of the number of enrollments but because I have the number of children for the staff that I can maintain.”

The survey findings did not surprise Daniel-Hollingshead, who said she pays her lead teachers $14 to $20 an hour, based on education and experience. Her less-experienced employees are paid $9 to $10 an hour. Families of infants up through 5 year olds pay $184 a week for her center; the rate is among the most expensive in her area, she said.

Biz Harris, the executive director of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance, said that the state has recently launched an initiative meant to provide extra money to teachers and to provide scholarships for those who engage in additional training.

However, that program is funded through emergency funds that came from the federal government during the pandemic, and thus will sunset when the money is exhausted.

“We would love to see a program like this have the funds to continue, and worry about what will happen to the already struggling child care workforce when it ends,” Harris said. “Other states do provide these kinds of programs for their child care teachers as a workforce investment.”

Daniel-Hollingshead said while that money is appreciated, she still struggles to hold on to employees and has waiting lists at every age level.

“Currently it is extremely difficult to retain staff,” she said. “Due to the pay rates that I have had to increase to keep my best people, we are operating over budget about $25,000 a month which obviously is not sustainable long-term.”

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Transportation to centers is one of the biggest barriers for families accessing Head Start programs, according to a survey from the National Head Start Association — distances that might be manageable for adults on their own can be insurmountable with a baby or toddler in tow.

A new awareness campaign sponsored by the association, which represents Head Start providers, and a philanthropic group called the Civic Mapping Initiative, is hoping to ease that burden by encouraging local transit agencies to add bus stops closer to Head Start centers.

As a kickoff to the effort, the Memphis Area Transit Authority added three bus stops to its existing routes to bring them closer to Head Start programs in the community.

A lot of parents who send their children to the Porter-Leath Early Head Start programs in Memphis rely on families and friends to help them get there, said Sheronda Smith, director of Early Head Start at Porter-Leath and president of the Tennessee Head Start Association.

Often when families can’t get a ride, their children simply don’t attend that day.

“We have had families who we’ve had to place back on the waiting list because they make the decision that it’s too hard to get to the center,” Smith said.

There are more than 16,400 Head Start centers across the United States that provide federally funded pre-K and school readiness programs for low-income families. About 42 percent of those programs are within 0.2 miles of public transit, or what the National Head Start Association considers a walkable distance for families with toddlers.

Another 29 percent of centers are not near any public transit, or more than five miles away. It makes sense that some centers are far from transit because many Head Start programs serve rural areas, said Abigail Seldin, co-founder of the Civic Mapping Initiative.

The rest of the nation’s centers, nearly 30 percent, fall somewhere in the middle: between 0.2 and five miles away from public transportation.

The Head Start association and the mapping initiative are focusing their efforts on a smaller subset of those centers –- the 19 percent that have a bus stop within a mile of their location. Simply adding a bus stop can make the distance walkable for families with toddlers, Seldin said.

“In those cases, the ask of a transit agency is to move a stop perhaps 2,000 feet,” Seldin said. “Anyone who has walked 1,000 feet with a toddler understands viscerally why this concept is so important and why these changes are essential.”

In some of these areas, local transit authorities can add bus stops without significantly changing routes or adding to their costs. In Memphis, buses were driving right past the Head Start centers before the transit agency added three stops as part of this mapping campaign.

“It’s a low-cost solution that makes a big difference for families and for early childcare workers who are commuting,” Seldin said.

Smith, with the Porter-Leath program in Memphis, hopes the added stops will help stabilize attendance for students whose families don’t have reliable transportation.

“Moving this closer to the centers and making it more accessible to them is important because now they don’t have to depend on someone else,” Smith said.

This story about child care transportation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Laura Jackson became seriously concerned about her daughter and math when the girl was in third grade. While many of her classmates flew through multiplication tests, Jackson’s daughter struggled to complete her 1 times table. She relied on her fingers to count, had difficulty reading clocks and frequently burst into tears when asked at home to practice math flashcards. At school, the 9-year-old had been receiving help from a math specialist for two years, with little improvement. “We hit a point where she was asking me, ‘Mom, am I stupid?’” Jackson recalled. 

Then, when Jackson was having lunch with a friend one day, she heard for the first time about a disorder known as dyscalculia. After lunch, she went to her computer, looked up the term, and quickly came across a description of the learning disability, which impacts a child’s ability to process numbers, retain math knowledge and complete math problems. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my kid,’” Jackson said.

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of students face challenges learning math due to math disabilities like dyscalculia, a neurodevelopmental learning disorder caused by differences in the parts of the brain that are involved with numbers and calculations. There are often obstacles to getting help.

America’s schools have long struggled to identify and support students with learning disabilities of all kinds: Kids often languish while waiting to receive a diagnosis; families frequently have to turn to private, often pricey, providers to get one; and even with a diagnosis, some children still don’t get the supports they need because their schools are unable to provide them.

That’s slowly changing — for some disabilities. A majority of states have passed laws that mandate screening early elementary students for the most common reading disability, dyslexia, and countless districts train teachers how to recognize and teach struggling readers. Meanwhile, parents and experts say school districts continue to neglect students with math disabilities like dyscalculia, which affects up to 7 percent of the population and often coexists with dyslexia.

“Nobody uses the proper term for it, it’s not diagnosed frequently,” said Sandra Elliott, a former special education teacher and current chief academic officer at TouchMath, a multisensory math program. “We’re all focused on literacy.”

Nationwide, teachers report that up to 40 percent of their students perform below grade level in math. And while students with math disabilities may be especially far behind, math scores for all students have remained dismal for years, showing that more attention needs to be paid to math instruction. Experts say learning the most effective methods for teaching students with math disabilities could significantly strengthen math instruction for all students. “You’ve got a huge number of students that are in the middle ground,” when it comes to math achievement but may not have a disability, Elliott added. Those students could also be helped by having explicit, multisensory instruction in math. “If it works for the students with the most severe disconnections and slower processing speeds, it’s still going to work for the kids that are in the ‘middle’ with math difficulties.”

“It’s not the fault of schools. I think it has to do with the amount of resources schools have to provide intervention to children, and reading takes priority over math.”

Lynn Fuchs, research professor at Vanderbilt University

Covid exacerbated the nation’s problem with math achievement. The number of children who are several years behind in math has increased over the past few years and achievement gaps have widened. For some students, learning struggles may be due to an underlying disability like dyscalculia or other math learning disabilities that affect math calculation or problem solving skills. Yet only 15 percent of teachers report that their students have been screened for dyscalculia.

“There’s not as much research on math disorders or dyscalculia,” as there is on reading disabilities, said Karen Wilson, a clinical neuropsychologist who works with the organization Understood.org and specializes in the assessment of children with learning differences. “That also trickles down into schools.”

Related: Why it matters that Americans are comparatively bad at math

There are a host of reasons why math disabilities receive less attention than reading disabilities. Elementary teachers report more anxiety when it comes to teaching math, which can make it harder to teach struggling learners. Advocacy focused on math disabilities has been less widespread than that for reading disabilities. There is also a deep-seated societal belief that some people have a natural aptitude for math. “A lot of times, [parents] let it go for a long time because it’s culturally acceptable to be bad at math,” said Heather Brand, a math specialist and operations manager for the tutoring organization Made for Math.  

Some signs of dyscalculia are obvious at an early age, if parents and educators know what to look for. In the earliest years, a child might have difficulty recognizing numbers or patterns. Children may also struggle to connect a number’s symbol with what it represents, like knowing the number 3 corresponds to three blocks, for example. In elementary school, students may have trouble with math functions like addition and subtraction, word problems, counting money, or remembering directions.

Still, schools may be resistant to assessing math disabilities, or unaware of their prevalence. Even after Jackson learned about dyscalculia on her own, her daughter’s Seattle-area public school was doubtful that the third grader had a learning disability because she was performing so well in all other areas. Teachers suggested Jackson spend extra time on math at home. “For so many parents, they assume the school would let them know there’s an issue, but that’s just not how it works,” said Jackson. (She ultimately wrote a book, “Discovering Dyscalculia” about her family’s journey, and now runs workshops for parents of children with dyscalculia.)

Experts say universal screening, like those provided in many states for dyslexia, should be in place for math disabilities. Early diagnosis is crucial to provide children a stronger foundation in the early concepts that all math builds on. “Many times, if a student is caught early with the interventions that we all know work … these children can perform math, if not equal to their typically developing peers, they can get very, very close,” said Elliott from TouchMath.

As with other learning disabilities, a diagnosis is only the first step to getting children the help they need in school. In particular, students with dyscalculia often need a more structured approach to learning math that, like reading, involves “systematic and explicit” instruction and provides ample time to practice counting and recognizing numbers, said Lynn Fuchs, a research professor in special education and human development at Vanderbilt University. These students also may need strategies to help them commit math facts to memory, she added. To do this well, they often need small-group or one-on-one teaching, which is non-existent in many schools’ math instruction. “It’s not the fault of schools. I think it has to do with the amount of resources schools have to provide intervention to children, and reading takes priority over math,” said Fuchs.

Part of the problem is that teachers don’t receive the training needed to work with children with math disabilities. Teacher training programs offer little instruction on disabilities of any kind, and even less on math. In a 2023 survey by Education Week, nearly 75 percent of teachers reported that they had received little to no preservice or in-service training on supporting students with math disabilities. At least one state, Virginia, requires dyslexia awareness training for teacher licensure renewal, but has no similar requirement for math disability training. “It’s pretty rare for undergraduate degrees or even master’s degrees to focus on math learning disabilities with any level of breadth, depth, quality or rigor,” said Amelia Malone, director of research and innovation at the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

Nearly 75 percent of teachers reported in a 2023 Education Week survey that they had received little to no preservice or in-service training on supporting students with math disabilities..

Without more widespread knowledge of and support for dyscalculia, many parents have had to look for specialists and tutors on their own, which they say can be particularly challenging for math, and costly. Even after her daughter received a diagnosis, Jackson felt the girl’s school wasn’t supporting her enough. At school, her daughter’s math teacher demanded “tidy” math notebooks and discouraged drawing or doodling, activities that often helped the girl work through problems. In 2019, Jackson started pulling her daughter out of school for part of each day to teach her math at home. “I am not a math teacher, but I was so desperate,” Jackson said. “There’s no one who knows anything and we have to figure this out.”

Jackson pored over materials online and reached out to math disability experts in America and abroad for help. She started infusing her daughter’s math lessons with games and brought out physical objects, like small wooden rods, to help her practice counting. She worked with her daughter on the core foundations of math, including number sense and basic operations, to help establish the solid grounding that the girl was missing.

Experts say it’s possible to improve math outcomes for those who struggle, if more attention and resources are poured into math in the early years to ensure children do not reach third grade — or beyond — without the support they need.

Yet early childhood teachers are often the least equipped to teach math, especially for children with dyscalculia, said Marilyn Zecher, a dyslexia specialist who created a multisensory approach to math based on the popular Orton-Gillingham approach in reading. Zecher offers training on dyscalculia-related teaching strategies for teachers of all grade levels. Many of her strategies for early educators emphasize that math instruction starts through language. Children learn the basics of mathematics when teachers give them opportunities to verbally compare similarities and differences between objects, and describe how items or activities occur in relation to each other, such as “before” or “after.”

“The early ed teachers are the giants upon whose shoulders everybody else stands,” Zecher said. Early educators, like preschool teachers, not only teach foundational skills, they are also “so critical to identifying children who are having difficulties.”

Related: For teachers who fear math, banishing bad memories can help

At Brand’s organization, Made for Math, intensive tutoring based on Zecher’s approach often stands in for a lack of school-based support. Teachers create individualized lesson plans for students during each tutoring session, employing a variety of items to help students better understand math concepts. Students might use craft sticks bundled together to learn place value, cubes to learn subtraction or addition, and items that can be physically cut apart, like foam stickers, to learn fractions. Math specialists at the organization have found that children with dyscalculia need repetition, especially to understand math facts. Some students attend tutoring up to four days a week, at a cost of up to $1,000 a month. “It’s hard because it’s not something schools are offering, and kids deserve it,” said Brand.

In recent years, a handful of states, including Alabama, West Virginia and Florida, have introduced legislation that would require schools to identify and support younger students who struggle with math. Elliott’s company, TouchMath, introduced a screener earlier this year that can identify signs of math disabilities, like dyscalculia, in children as young as age 3.

“Many times, if a student is caught early with the interventions that we all know work…these children can perform math if not equal to their typically developing peers,”

Sandra Elliott, a former special education teacher and current chief academic officer at TouchMath

Malone, from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said, there are pockets of progress around the country in screening more children for math disabilities, but movement at the federal level — and in most states — is “nonexistent.”

New York City is one district that has prioritized math disability screening and math instruction in the early years. In 2015 and 2016, the city spent $6 million to roll out a new math curriculum featuring games, building blocks, art projects and songs. The district has also introduced universal math and reading screeners to try to identify students who may be behind.

Experts say that there are ways that all schools can make math instruction more accessible. In elementary schools, activities that involve more senses should be used more widely, including whole-body motions and songs for teaching numbers and hands-on materials for math operations. All students, and not only those with dyscalculia, could benefit from using manipulatives to help visualize problems and graph paper to assist in lining up numbers.  

As with dyslexia, figuring out better ways to teach kids with math disabilities will shore up math instruction across the board – and better meet students where they are. “Some kids won’t use [the strategies],” said Wilson, the neuropsychologist. “It’s really about having the option, so the student who’s struggling will be able to find a method that works for them.”

Jackson said her daughter could have benefited from a wider variety of methods at school. After several years of learning math at home, she was ready to try to re-join grade-level math classes. When the teen returned to school-based math classes in high school, she achieved an A in Algebra. “When you really understand what it is to be dyscalculic, then you can look around and decide what this person needs to succeed,” Jackson said. “It’s not just that you’re ‘bad at math’ and need to buckle down and try harder.”

This story about dyscalculia was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, as part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series about math instruction. The series is a collaboration with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Early childhood care and education before pre-K or kindergarten has not traditionally been considered a public school system priority. But as school leaders tighten their budgets, they would be wise to invest money earlier, when the return on investment is highest.

After all, children who receive high-quality early childhood care and education services are more likely to enter school prepared for academic and social success in kindergarten and beyond.

When children are not ready for kindergarten, schools must use their limited resources on remediation efforts, too often with limited success. School district leaders are facing difficult spending choices, but early childhood care and education is an area to sustain and grow investment, not cut.

Building true school readiness among the youngest learners, when done right, will save school district leaders money and result in stronger outcomes later.

We are seeing this play out now across the nation with literacy rates. With our current, porous early education system, just one in three students achieve key reading benchmarks by fourth grade. State leaders are now redesigning literacy instruction in early grades to address this issue, but we know the foundation for strong reading and writing should begin earlier.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

The pandemic ravaged an already-fragile early childhood care and education industry. Child care businesses all over the country shut their doors or limited their seats, and teachers fled in droves. Working families, in a desperate search for affordable child care, were forced to settle for low-quality services, leave the labor market entirely or juggle working at home and caring for their children. Their children missed valuable opportunities for learning and development.

Congress helped relieve some of these negative effects with historic investments, including relief dollars to stabilize existing services and expand service access for the families who needed it most, including frontline workers. Louisiana, for example, used their dollars to serve an additional 16,000 children from birth to age three.

But the time to use those dollars is quickly running out. The nation now faces a potential $48 billion child care fiscal cliff, and its impacts could be even more detrimental to children and families. Without this funding, states will be forced to scale back efforts that gave working families access to child care — or scrap those efforts entirely.

As school leaders tighten their budgets, they would be wise to invest money earlier, when the return on investment is highest.

Earlier this year, a handful of governors asked the federal government for more funding, but it’s uncertain whether Congress will step up. If it does not, it will be the responsibility of states and localities to prevent the worst for young learners, working families and the early childhood education workforce.

School district leaders must find dollars in their existing budgets to address the greatest needs and prioritize money for younger students. This task may feel impossible, but school district leaders should not be afraid to get creative: Title I, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Rural Education Achievement Program dollars can all be used for pre-K.

Leaders may also be able to redirect flexible state funding to improve early childhood programs’ quality and access. And locally raised funds could be used to serve more children in early childhood settings.

Summit County in Colorado is doing this well. School district leaders there say they have combined local, state and federal funding to pay for high-quality early childhood care and education services. They have a customer service focus that ensures they are meeting the needs of families.

Without this local commitment, children in Summit would start school behind, requiring the district to work extra hard to catch them up.

But school districts can’t fix school readiness with school-run pre-K alone: They must build and strengthen local partnerships, including with public and nonpublic child care sites, local businesses and foundations.

Related: OPINION: Five lessons on how states can invest in high-quality child care and early education

In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, school district leaders built a strong network of local partners around a vision for a high quality continuum of care and education for children from birth to age 5.

They established a clear picture of the needs of their community, and the way they can change year after year, so they are ready to meet them. If there is an influx of English language learners, for example, they are prepared to quickly open more classrooms to serve these children and their families.

The district equipped classrooms with high-quality instructional materials and provided meaningful coaching and professional development to teachers in all early childhood education settings: As a result, they’ve seen the quality ratings of their local sites increase over time.

Once funding is found and community partnerships are forged, school districts can spend money on what matters most for young learners. High-quality instructional materials and adult-child interactions play a critical role in improving academic and social outcomes.

The Dallas Independent School District, for example, invested in a suite of tools to focus, measure and improve interactions between teachers and children in their youngest classrooms. They are now seeing a climb in literacy results.

School districts have a vested interest in making sure the youngest learners have experiences that prepare them to start kindergarten, achieve key reading and writing benchmarks by third grade and progress through the rest of their academic journeys.

Nasha Patel is a managing director at Watershed Advisors, a consulting firm that helps governments design, implement and scale transformative education plans.

This story about early childhood education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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This story about math anxiety was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our early childhood newsletter.

Elementary school teachers often face a significant challenge when it comes to teaching math: their own discomfort with numbers. 

The Hechinger Report recently hosted a live event for people to learn more about efforts to solve this problem. The conversation included commentary from Lisa Ginet, director of program design and operations at the Erikson Institute; Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality; and Ivory McCormick, a first grade teacher at The Galloway School in Atlanta.

As our early childhood reporter Ariel Gilreath recently reported, elementary school teachers often struggle with teaching this subject. In her story, Gilreath writes: “Decades of research shows that math anxiety is a common problem for adults, and surveys show it particularly affects women, who make up nearly 90 percent of elementary teachers in the United States. Put simply, a lot of elementary school educators hate the prospect of teaching math, even when the math concepts are beginner level.”

The story about math anxiety is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series about math instruction. The series is a collaboration with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

The post Experts share the latest research on how teachers can overcome math anxiety   appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CHICAGO — In July, in a packed classroom in downtown Chicago, a group composed mostly of early elementary teachers and child care workers read a story about “Wendi,” a fictional preschool teacher who loves reading but struggles in math.

Even though Wendi was drawn to early education where “math was so easy,” she still felt unsure of her skills. In the story, she decided to skip math concepts, leaving them for the teachers her students would have next year.

Across the room, people nodded their heads as they listened.

“I am Wendi. Wendi is me,” said Ivory McCormick, a kindergarten teacher from Atlanta. Several educators in the classroom identified with Wendi, and that was the point. Decades of research shows that math anxiety is a common problem for adults, and surveys show it particularly affects women, who make up nearly 90 percent of elementary teachers in the United States.

Put simply, a lot of elementary school educators hate the prospect of teaching math, even when the math concepts are beginner level.

Researchers at the Erikson Institute, a child-development focused graduate school in Chicago, started the Early Math Collaborative 16 years ago to provide educators with research-backed professional development to help them better teach young students math. One of the goals of Erikson’s annual four-day summer math conference, where the teachers read Wendi’s story, is to assuage their anxiety by exploring how young children learn math and strategizing activities they can do in the classroom.

Because math competencies build on each other, with skills like counting and learning shapes forming the basis of later knowledge, it’s critical that students receive a solid foundation in the subject, education experts say. The U.S. has long trailed many other developed countries in terms of student math performance, and then scores tanked during the pandemic. Educators say helping teachers in the early grades gain confidence in math could be one key to unlocking America’s post-pandemic math recovery.    

Related: Seven things parents and teachers should know about preschool math

“If you look at how a child is doing with math when they enter kindergarten, that’s the best way to predict how they’re going to be doing with math later, all the way up through eighth grade,” said Jennifer McCray, an associate research professor at Erikson. “Different types of teaching at an early childhood age make a difference in terms of what children are able to do and understand in mathematics.”

When McCormick started teaching preschool in Atlanta five years ago, she felt anxious about teaching a subject she didn’t feel confident in. “Math was something I always had to work really hard at, and it seemed like I never really got that much better at it,” she said.

Teachers who doubt their math ability often worry they will transfer their math aversion onto impressionable students, educators say.

There are studies that validate this fear: First grade students who were taught by teachers with heightened anxiety about math performed worse in the subject than their peers who were taught by less anxious teachers, one study from 2020 found. 

Math specialists say it is a pervasive issue in elementary classrooms, where educators are typically expected to teach every subject, and it often leads to teachers spending less classroom time on math content.

“I have some kids who say, ‘Nan, we haven’t done math for two weeks,’ ” said Nan McCormack, a retired teacher and math specialist who now tutors young students online from her home in Chicago. “It’s one of those subjects that teachers like to avoid and come up with an excuse, and think, if they don’t get it now, they’ll get it next year.”

At the Erikson Institute’s summer conference, teachers gained practice on concepts they’d use in their classrooms. They drew maps to describe directions: Rosie the hen traveled over the fence, and under the tree branch and through the river, for example. They built large 10-sided shapes out of colorful blocks. The exercises benefited their own math skills, too.

“There’s a misbelief that in order to teach early childhood math, you don’t really need to know math well,” Lauren Solarski, a consultant and coach with the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson, told the group of educators. “But having that deep content knowledge, research finds, makes you then able to draw out what’s happening in a child’s play around math — what they’re doing — and know those trajectories, know the math inside and out so that you can be that expert when you’re with the child.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean early childhood teachers need to be experts in advanced geometry or algebra, said Lisa Ginet, director of program design and operations at Erikson. But it does mean they need to know how different lessons that may not seem to be related to math are connected to mathematical thinking and to topics students will learn as they get older.

“[Instruction] doesn’t just live in the materials — you have to talk about what you’re doing,” Ginet told the educators.

Related: You probably don’t have your preschooler thinking about math enough

It isn’t a coincidence that a lot of early elementary teachers lack confidence in their own math abilities, said McCray of Erikson. Sometimes, their lack of confidence is why they go into early ed in the first place. When college students go to their advisors and tell them they want to be a teacher, but aren’t good at math, McCray said they are often encouraged to teach the early grades.

“There’s this idea that you can probably do the least harm there,” McCray said.

Avoiding high-level math courses was a big part of the reason Stacey Stevens switched her major to early childhood education in college. It wasn’t until Stevens did a yearlong professional development session on math after becoming a preschool teacher in Kentucky that she started to feel that she truly understood how to teach it.

“I think that’s what made me most passionate about it in preschool — I didn’t want kids to grow up having the same struggles as me,” said Stevens, who now works for the Kentucky Department of Education as the director of an early childhood regional training center. “I wanted them to understand that four triangles make a square: to actually see it and do it and not just be told that a triangle is a fourth of a square.”

In preschool and early childhood, counting and learning shapes are big components of math, but more abstract ideas, like identifying patterns and spatial awareness, are also foundational to later concepts. And some research has shown that preschoolers who were taught with math curriculum had stronger oral and literacy skills later on compared to their peers.

Related: How to boost math skills in the early grades

Professional development training like Erikson’s summer program can help teachers on the back-end, but colleges need to better prepare them to teach math before they step into classrooms, said Heather Peske, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Teacher preparation programs should not only show future educators how to teach math to young students, the programs should also spend a substantial amount of time ensuring educators understand math pedagogy and have a firm understanding of math concepts themselves, Peske said.  

But on average, most undergraduate and graduate teacher preparation programs do not spend as much time on elementary math content as NCTQ believes is necessary, according to the organization’s 2022 analysis of these programs.

That year, undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs spent, on average, 85 instructional hours on math content, less than the 105 NCTQ recommends. Meanwhile, graduate programs spent just 14 hours on math content. The recommendations are based on studies that show teachers’ math coursework in college is linked to student achievement.

“Most teachers who are preparing to become teachers at the elementary stages, they’re not getting enough instructional hours in elementary math subjects,” Peske said. “If we prepared them better, they would be stronger at both their math content knowledge as well as their ability to teach math, and this would reduce their anxiety and improve student outcomes.”

For McCormick, the early ed teacher from Atlanta, attending Erikson’s professional development conference was the next step in her journey to building up her math confidence.

This year, McCormick moved up to teaching first grade at the Galloway School in Atlanta after teaching preschool and kindergarten classes at the school for several years. She credits her school’s decision to hire a math specialist last year with helping change the way she feels about teaching the subject.

“It was really hard in the beginning for me to find a connection to it — I was kind of just doing it because it was part of my job,” McCormick said. “But this past year, I have kind of revamped my thoughts about what math can be and the ways that we teach it in order to make kids want to learn about it and be enthusiastic about it. Because the way we present it to them holds so much more weight than I think I ever realized.”

This story about overcoming math anxiety was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, as part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series about math instruction. The series is a collaboration with the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times. 

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Making choices can be hard, but in a high-quality early learning environment, young children discover how to make wise choices one step at a time. Teachers help them understand how to work out a problem, make a plan to solve it and, finally, do something about it.

When made poorly, the wrong decision can have devastating consequences.

Early childhood advocates like us understand this. And that’s why we are deeply concerned about a choice that politicians are about to make that could have devastating consequences for families today as well as generations to come.

With the debt ceiling/deficit reduction agreement signed into law in June, federal agencies are being asked to tighten their belts and make spending cuts. Head Start and Early Head Start program directors now find themselves facing a difficult decision: They can choose to pay their teachers a livable wage or choose to continue serving children and families who need access to these life-changing programs. Sadly, current budget limitations won’t allow the program directors to do both.

Children who participate in Head Start and Early Head Start make significant progress in language and literacy and have better physical and emotional health outcomes throughout life.

The Federal government prompted this tough choice when they told program directors that they may redirect funds typically used to serve children toward pay raises for teachers. Their hope was that raises will help directors retain existing staff and entice new workers at a time when Head Start and Early Head Start programs across the country are having difficulty doing so due to shamefully low wages.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

But while that’s a potential win for the teachers, it would syphon away money needed to serve children by limiting access for low-income families in communities where underfunded Head Start and Early Start programs already can’t serve all the children who qualify.

That leaves administrators forced to choose between teachers and children, and it is just one more symptom of a broken system. Over 50 years ago, America made the choice to not fully fund Head Start, and we’ve been paying for it in social spending ever since by leaving families in intergenerational poverty rather than making the investment needed to break that cycle.

Head Start was launched in 1965 to give low-income children a summer catch-up program that would, it was hoped, enable them to start kindergarten on target with their wealthier peers. One summer was never enough to achieve this goal, and over the next few decades Head Start transformed into a full-day program for children between 3 and 5 years old. Early Head Start was created in 1994 to serve babies and toddlers up to age 3. Once again, the U.S. did not invest enough to meet the needs of all families with very young children living in poverty.

Head Start and Early Head Start are still not reaching nearly the number of children living in poverty that they could if fully funded.

These new programs did help close some gaps for the lowest-income households, but never fully met the long-term goal of creating equity in early education. Today, Head Start and Early Head Start are still not reaching nearly the number of children living in poverty that they could if fully funded.

The National Institute for Early Education Research found that in Maryland, for example, only 26 percent of 3- and 4- year-olds who live below the poverty level are enrolled in Head Start. And just 8 percent of children under age 3 in poverty are enrolled in Early Head Start.

That’s why we need to invest in the children. Yet, Head Start and Early Head Start teachers are paid significantly less than public school teachers, and as a result, programs are often unable to fill staff vacancies. Pay raises would certainly help, but won’t do much good if the programs then don’t have the funds to serve more children.

We need to increase program budgets so Head Start and Early Head start can both pay teachers fairly and serve all children who qualify.

Head Start and Early Head Start programs pay so little they end up losing out to corporate chain giants like Starbucks, Walmart and McDonald’s. These chains have resources to pay more, offer better benefits and provide flexible schedules.

But if early childhood educators are earning less than service industry employees, we’re sending a message that we value lattes over literacy, retail over readiness for kindergarten and burgers over brain architecture.

We are also harming children by denying them access to these game-changing programs. Parents lose out, too: Head Start and Early Head Start take a two-generation approach to serving families, coordinating services for children and their parents and improving their economic, educational and health outcomes,

Related: OPINION: The pandemic wiped out decades of progress for preschoolers. It’s time to get them back on track

Head Start and Early Head Start were last reauthorized by Congress in 2007. Washington needs to choose now to recognize how much these programs matter to our communities. The average spending per-child for these programs must be increased to keep up with inflation. We need to expand and open more programs in urban and rural areas to reach all the children who qualify.

We also must raise the pay for the early childhood educators who currently earn the same near-poverty wages as the families they serve. This work is performed almost exclusively by women, and the majority are women of color. They deserve better. But directors, in good conscience, cannot reduce the number of children served even further, and in fact should expand coverage.

Decision making is hard for kids, hard for Head Start and Early Head Start program directors and hard for politicians.

If teaching positions remain unfilled and programs refuse to reduce the number of children, the Office of Head Start could force programs to lose both child enrollment slots and funding. Program directors should not have to choose between balancing the budget on the backs of families or at the expense of educators.

There is a third option: Give all children the strong start they need to succeed.

Laura Weeldreyer is executive director of Maryland Family Network. Christopher Benzing is executive director of Maryland Rural Development Corporation.

This story about Head Start funding was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Is screen time for preschoolers as bad as we think?

A new study from researchers at Ohio State University suggests the answer is more nuanced than popularly believed.

Using data gathered in 2018-19, researchers in the recent study tracked the screen time of preschoolers from minority and lower-income households. Families of 179 children were asked to fill out a 24-hour time diary of their children’s activities, including media use. The study also measured the children’s social and academic performance in the fall and spring.

Researchers found little effect on children’s social and academic development when they averaged about two hours’ screentime during the day over the course of the year. But when children spent more than two daytime hours on screens, researchers noted that their social skills grew more slowly than those of other children in the study. Children who spent more than an hour in front of screens at night also showed smaller gains in social skills, a result researchers said could be caused by poor sleep.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that families limit screen use to one hour per day for children ages 2 to 5.

“A lot of the conversation demonizes media use, and I don’t think that’s productive for anyone,” said Rebecca Dore, the study’s lead author and the director of research at OSU’s Crane Center for Early Childhood and Research Policy.

I spoke with Dore about the study and what parents can take away from it. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the benefit of using a time diary for this kind of research?

A lot of studies on this subject will say, “On average, how much does your child use media on a typical day?” So, you’re having to recall media use, but you’re having to recall it in this very generalized way that is (a) hard to remember, and (b) really easy to talk yourself into being different. So, it’s like if I say: “Probably on average my kid uses about five hours a day on screens. No, it can’t be five hours a day. It must be more like three.” And in these cases, we expect that people are probably lowering those averages, and there might be differences in how much people are adjusting or misremembering in those average, typical day questions.

We think that this time-diary approach — where you’re just thinking about yesterday, you’re not thinking about media use in this context because we were just asking them to report on the full day, and that just happened to include media use — is likely to be more accurate and less prone to both memory bias and social desirability bias.

Did any of the screen time data surprise you?

In general, there is some literature suggesting that media use might have negative effects on some of these outcomes, but I think it’s very aligned with a lot of previous work coming out of my lab that it really only seems to be these high levels of media use that matter. So, I wasn’t surprised by that. I think the piece we were surprised by is the outcomes for these social behavioral skills and not for academic skills.

So much of this literature and societal hype around this issue is related to academic skills, like: “TV is melting their brains. It’s replacing all this reading they’re supposed to be doing.” So, it was surprising that that’s not what we saw here. And we think of social skills, perhaps, as more resilient to these potential effects. We’re seeing that media use is not necessarily replacing time spent reading or time spent doing a lot of educational activities. Rather, kids who use really high levels of media aren’t having time to interact with peers and with their parents and family members. And that can be leading to these more specific effects on social and behavioral skills.

The study isn’t saying we shouldn’t care about screen time at all. What impact do you hope research like this will have?

Very few families are doing zero media use with their kids, even from a very young age. It’s likely to seem not feasible or practical, or even desirable, to have zero media use with young kids. I hope that this type of research will shift that conversation in terms of not talking only about how terrible media use is, but talking about these more nuanced aspects of the findings.

This data doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no negative effects of media use for other outcomes, like sleep, or obesity, or other populations. I think this data has some important implications for how we think about media use for preschoolers in this particular population, but there is a lot more rigorous research needed to fully explore this topic.

More on screen time:

The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay reported in 2021 on a study of 10,000 kindergarteners that found students from low-income families and Black kindergarteners from families of any income level were more likely to use technology heavily by the end of elementary school.

In 2019, Jackie Mader wrote in The Hechinger Report about toddlers’ struggles to learn at all when taught from a screen, via video chat, rather than in person.

This story about screen time for preschoolers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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One clear lesson from the pandemic: Children lose out when they don’t attend school. Young children learn best through hands-on activities, and parents found “remote” preschool a frustratingly poor substitute for in-person learning. No group of children fared worse than preschoolers during the pandemic, as it erased a decade of progress with drops in enrollment and waivers for quality standards. The nation should respond not just by returning to the pre-pandemic norm but by offering high-quality preschool education to every child.

The pandemic’s impact on children is clear. According to the most recent report released by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), a majority of 3- and 4-year-olds received no preschool education in 2021-22. Despite substantial gains from 2020-21, the worst year for preschool in a decade, over 130,000 fewer students were enrolled in state-funded programs than in 2019-20.

Among those who did enroll, most did not attend a program with the high standards for quality that research has shown produce long-term positive impacts.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Long-term college benefits from high-quality universal pre-K for all

Unfortunately, low access to quality preschool is a theme: In the 20 years since NIEER began collecting data on the state of preschool in America, we have seen only piecemeal steps forward and frequent steps back in funding and access for high-quality preschool programs across the country. During that time, real state spending per child has remained essentially unchanged, making clear that our nation has not prioritized early education despite its proven benefits and ongoing bipartisan support. Without fundamental change, this trend will continue.

One explanation for our lack of progress is that, for the most part, public preschool programs are restricted to serving children in low-income families, as is the federal Head Start program. In 2022, only Washington, D.C., and six states truly offered preschool education to all children. Other programs, including some that are called universal, fail to serve all eligible children because of inadequate budget appropriations and other restrictions.

As a nation struggling to get our financial house in order, universal preschool is the kind of investment we need.

That means that many state programs and federal Head Start effectively cap enrollment. As a result, just 32 percent of America’s 4-year-olds and 6 percent of our 3-year-olds received state-funded pre-K in 2021-22.

This nation’s continued failure to provide preschool education is at odds with a growing body of evidence, from states including New Mexico, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and New Jersey, that preschool programs are a sound investment.

Such programs have been found to improve education outcomes and increase educational attainment. In addition, there is evidence that universal preschool programs, such as those in Oklahoma and Georgia, have better outcomes than income-restricted programs.

Yes, they raise costs in the short-run, but long-run benefits — from reduced school failure to lower crime, better health and increased productivity — far exceed the costs.

Related: Tulsa study offers more evidence of pre-K’s benefits into adulthood

As a nation struggling to get our financial house in order, universal preschool is the kind of investment we need. But at the federal level budget cuts seem more likely than increases to fund universal preschool.

Amid the lack of federal progress, it is encouraging that for the first time in decades several states across the country are taking steps forward by launching new universal pre-K initiatives. For the roughly 25 percent of American children who live in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey and New Mexico, the inability to access pre-K could become a thing of the past.

The initiatives vary in their origins and timelines. In Colorado and New Mexico, ballot initiatives approved new funding streams for early education. In California, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, governors put forward the new initiatives. Timelines range from California’s ambitious pledge to fully offer universal preschool by 2025 and Michigan’s goal of 2027 to states with indefinite schedules to reach all children.

Two decades of tracking state preschool policies have taught us that pre-K promises are not always kept. The first state to enact “universal” pre-K was Georgia, where enrollment peaked in 2017-18 at 61 percent and has since declined.

New York State launched universal pre-K in 1998 but was serving only 54 percent of 4-year-olds 21 years later, when the pandemic hit.

Making sure this new wave of universal pre-K becomes a reality — and even fulfilling the promises of the old wave — will require more resolute leadership and a public that holds leaders accountable.

Without the success of this new wave, it could take another century to achieve universal preschool nationally. Let’s create the public pressure to support the leaders behind it and encourage others to join. Investments in quality universal preschool for all will benefit our children and society as a whole.

Steven Barnett is senior co-director and founder of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

This story about universal preschool was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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On a cold, drizzly morning in early May, I visited an outdoor preschool program in Baltimore, Maryland, to learn about the state’s recent efforts to expand such schools. For several hours, I traipsed around the woods with the children there, watching as they methodically built miniature mudslides and waterfalls, splashed bravely into streams and inspected mushrooms growing on mossy logs. (The full story on outdoor preschool access was published in partnership with The Washington Post.)

While it may seem like children are simply enjoying carefree play time, serious learning is happening when they are outside, educators and experts say. Spending time outdoors in a safe green space can support healthy development, according to a new report by Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, which looks at how physical environments affect child development and health. Conversely, the lack of such opportunity can be detrimental to children, the report states.

Other research shows spending time in nature can improve academic performance, reduce symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, improve mental health and promote physical activity and the development of motor skills.

Despite the benefits, nature and outdoor learning remain largely out of reach for most children. Across the country, a third of families with young children spend time in nature just once or twice a month, at most. Nationwide, access to green spaces varies, and low-income households and neighborhoods where most residents are Black, Hispanic or Asian American are less likely to have parks with amenities like playgrounds and bathrooms. Air pollution and water pollution is more concentrated near communities where Black and Latino families live. Even as outdoor preschool programs have expanded over the past five years — from 250 in 2017 to more than 800 in 2022, according to the nonprofit Natural Start Alliance — the programs still mostly serve white children and most run as private, part-time schools.

In the wake of the pandemic, child development experts and outdoor learning advocates have called for more outdoor play time for young children to help mitigate some of the effects of the pandemic, as well as to address a decline in play and recess in schools.

“Many of us have been concerned … we’re seeing less recess, were seeing less gym, were seeing less art and things like that where kids are kind of naturally moving, touching, seeing, smelling,” said Cathrine Aasen Floyd, director of ideal learning initiatives at the nonprofit Trust for Learning, which recently released a report on the benefits of learning through nature. “We have become a nation that is so worried about the ABCs and 1-2-3s that we lost sight of the fact that children who enjoy a learning environment are going to have better cognitive outcomes,” she added. With nature-based learning, “there is an opportunity to make to bring back the joy.”

Maryland, the home of the preschool I visited, joins a small but growing number of states that are trying to capitalize on that opportunity and license outdoor preschool programs, which could expand access to more children. In the meantime, experts and advocates of outdoor learning say there are ways to bring more nature to young children in a variety of early learning settings, including in states that do not yet support formal outdoor programs:

1. Make any available outdoor space child-friendly: While few child care programs receive funding specifically to improve outdoor settings, there are low-cost ways to invest in outdoor play spaces, according to a recent report by New America. That could mean adding some “permanent centers in response to the children’s interests” outside, like a play kitchen to use with dirt, water and mud, a music wall made from kitchen items or a sand and water area. Such efforts could encourage more exploration, movement and creative thinking during the time children are spending outdoors.

2. Make the outdoors a regular part of the classroom: Current child care licensing systems are “built upon a framework where learning happens indoors and outdoors is a break area,” said Christy Merrick, director of the Natural Start Alliance, which supports nature and outdoor learning programs. “The system never really considers what happens if we learn outside.” Taking indoor materials like books and art supplies outside could be an easy way for programs to incorporate nature into their days, according to officials from New America. Schools could also look for opportunities to teach lessons outdoors or incorporate nature-based topics, like growing plants or the life cycle of butterflies, into the curriculum. Aasen Floyd, of Trust for Learning, said allowing children to move freely between the indoor and outdoor space — as long as staffing allows for such movement — could be another way to give children more time in nature.

3. Bring natural materials into the classroom: Some programs built in “concrete jungles” may not have access to lush, outdoor areas, said Aasen Floyd. Instead, such programs can bring nature into the classroom, including boxes of gardening materials so children can plant or dig, and “loose parts” like acorns and pine branches. This allows children to explore natural materials and compare the textures, appearances and smells of materials that they would typically encounter outdoors. “What we’ve been focused on is this idea of small but significant changes,” said Aasen Floyd. “Not everybody’s going to have an opportunity to completely tear out their playground and turn it into this natural wonderland, but there are things we can do to teach children about nature.”

This story about kids in nature was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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