While many efforts to improve the quality of early care and education (ECE) have focused on increasing teachers' and caregivers' competencies and knowledge specific to the teaching of young children, a small body of research suggests that an ECE workforce that is mentally healthy can provide the best-quality care for children. The primary research…

This study explores the effect of school reopenings during the COVID-19 pandemic on married women's labor supply. We proxy for in-person attendance at US K-12 schools using smartphone data from Safegraph and measure female employment, hours, and remote work using the Current Population Survey. Difference-in-differences estimates show that K-12…

California is expanding transitional kindergarten (TK) to become a universal preschool program for all four-year-old children. Upwards of 300,000 children are expected to enroll in universal transitional kindergarten (UTK) by 2025, requiring thousands of additional lead teachers and classroom aides to meet lower student-to-teacher ratio…

An online survey of 1577 private kindergarten teachers was conducted during the pandemic, and their career situation and its influencing factors were described and analyzed. The results indicate that, although the private kindergarten teachers tended to cope positively with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, their concern for future development…

Stress has been shown to negatively impact early childhood teachers' abilities to provide high quality, responsive environments for young children. Previous studies of early childhood teacher stress have focused on the tasks and responsibilities inherent in the job as well as on structural conditions within the field of early childhood education.…

The present study investigated the structural relationships between Korean preschool teachers' work environments, self-efficacy, and children's peer play interactions; it also examined the mediating influence of teacher-child interactions on these relationships. This study performed SEM analysis on 1193 teachers' survey responses from the 2014…

High turnover rates of early care and education teachers reduce the quality of education; unsatisfied teachers, suffering from stress or emotional exhaustion, are less equipped to promote children's development and more likely to leave the classroom. We used data from a national survey of US early childhood educators (n = 1129) to examine…

In recent years early childhood education, along with the professionalization of staff working in this field, has been at the forefront of public interest. However, the well-being of professionals working in early childhood education has been explored only sporadically. In our cross-sectional, quantitative, descriptive research we surveyed the…

The "Early Childhood Workforce Index" provides a state-by-state look at policies and conditions affecting the early care and education workforce. This biennial report has tracked state progress since 2016. This third, 2020 edition of the Index continues to track state policies in essential areas like workforce qualifications, work…

The way educarers conceptualize their role in the education and care of infants can influence their pedagogical practices and interactions with infants in their care. The Early Years Development Framework was developed to provide key principles, practices, and learning outcomes to guide educarers working with children under 3 in Singapore. It…

Teacher attrition is endemic in education, creating teacher quantity and quality gaps across schools that are often stratified by region and racialized nuance (Cowan et al., 2016; Scafidi et al., 2017). This reality is starkly reflected in South Carolina. Not too long ago, on May 1, 2019, a sea of approximately 10,000 people, dressed in red,…

Research Findings: Teaching is a highly stressful profession due to many stressors that teachers experience. To understand how early childhood teachers internally handle work climate-related stressors, we examined associations between teacher-perceived work climate, teachers' use of emotion regulation strategies, and the degree of stress that…

In this paper, I discuss how professional identities in early childhood education in Chile are performatively constituted within the interplay between a religious discourse of vocation and gender. 'Having the vocation' has become a regime of truth that regulates and governs educators' behaviours, motivations and relationships in their workplace.…

The provision of childcare has been prioritized by the South Korean government as a primary means of decelerating the dropping fertility rate and boosting women's employment by reducing the childrearing burden. Drawing on a Bakhtinian perspective, this study examined how discourses on professionalism and the professional identities of the…

Early childhood education has undergone immense change over the years. In Australia, this has included the introduction of curriculum and quality frameworks [ACECQA. 2012. "National Quality Framework." http://acecqa.gov.au/national-quality-framework/the-national-quality-standard; DEEWR. 2009. "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The…