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Stories:
Suffer the Children
Suffer the Children
High teacher turnover rates plague Missouri's early childhood education programs. Because pay is low and benefits few, teachers often will not, or cannot, stay put. Each time they leave, children suffer.
"Young children really have to be able to trust adults in their lives before they can become more autonomous," says Kathy Thornburg, director of the Center for Family Policy and Research at MU. "If people they trust leave, children begin to feel a loss, and that loss may elicit more negative behaviors."
To help stem the tide of teacher attrition, Thornburg and her colleagues two years ago launched a program called the Workforce Incentive Project. Now in its pilot phase, the program is geared toward teachers in school-day programs for children less than five, along with teachers in before-school, after-school, and summer school programs for children less than nine years old.
It works, in essence, by trading cash for commitment. The researchers offered incentives of $500 to $2,500 annually to 700 educators in nine Missouri counties. To receive the money, the early childhood educators agreed to work at least 30 hours each week, nine months per year, in a licensed facility in good standing with the state. More important, they pledged to stay on the job.
Because the amount of incentives paid is based on teachers' education level, the program encourages educators to learn more about their field. "We really want to keep those teachers who are already trained," Thornburg says, because previous research shows that educators with formal education in childhood development run higher-quality classrooms.
The program is already having an effect. Thornburg reports that teacher turnover rates fell by more than 60 percent in pilot counties, where only 9.8 percent of Workforce Incentive Program educators left their jobs, as compared to almost 25 percent of non-participating educators. In addition, just 1.2 percent of program teachers abandoned the childhood education field, while 6.5 percent of those not in the program walked away.
Funding for the project has come primarily from the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation, but that support is scheduled to end next year. As a result, Thornburg and program supporters have recently begun a new, equally challenging, education program: teaching state lawmakers about the program's benefits.
"The greatest growth of the brain occurs in the first few years of life, and that's when we spend the least on education," she says. "So I think as a state, we need to look at investing more in our younger children. We have to provide them with high-quality, educated early childhood teachers."
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