Chris Riback: Deb, welcome to the studio.

Deborah Leong: Thank you.

Chris Riback: What is and are tools of the mind and how do mental tools extend our mental abilities?

Deborah Leong: We’re a comprehensive early childhood program for preschool and kindergarten, and our goal is to empower teachers with the skills that they need, the tools they need to help children develop tools of the mind. It’s the ability to learn on purpose, to be self-regulated, to have good social skills, so all the developmental things. But I think what distinguishes us is the use of the Vygotskian approach and its ideas about scaffolding and the zone of proximal development, which is sort of aiming at each individual child’s level of challenge, as well as helping them become independent.

Chris Riback: And is it a flexible approach that can be accommodated for different children, different abilities, different stages?

Deborah Leong: Yes, exactly. So that’s exactly the crux of it all and that is all the activities are multilevel. But what each child gets within that activity, so you can have children of different ages working on the same thing, but each child is challenged and supported by the teacher at their own level. So the teacher’s kind of dynamically scaffolding as the children go along. If you ever use the word scaffold-

Chris Riback:  Yes.

Deborah Leong: … that comes from the Vygotskian tradition. Your question about the tools of the mind, so Vygotsky believes that-

Chris Riback: And Vygotsky was the Russian born, maybe not founder, but one of the main drivers of early education in the world.

Deborah Leong: Right. So he was a developmental psychologist and educational psychologist, and he was born a month apart from Jean Piaget. So it’s interesting that-

Chris Riback: Quite a year.

Deborah Leong: … and I think Montessori is born at around… I don’t remember the exact year, but that two giants of developmental psychology born at the same time. The idea of a tool is, like you were saying, it extends your mental capacities the same way physical tools extend our physical capacities. A hammer allows you to hammer in a nail and you couldn’t do that with your hands.

Chris Riback: Sure.

Deborah Leong: So the same in the same way, mental tools extend our ability, they make it easier to learn your ability to remember on purpose, pay attention, all of those involve the use of mental tools.

Chris Riback: Through the teaching, through the scaffolding, are those tools something that become second nature to the child? The child isn’t thinking about, “Where’s my hammer, I got to pull up my hammer because I see a nail.” It just becomes part of who that child is?

Deborah Leong: Right, in the way they think. So it’s totally internalized. The idea is that mental tools, like language is a mental tool that helps you remember. Writing is a tool that helps you remember.

Chris Riback: Second concept, related I know and you will relate them, what is the pedagogy of poverty?

Deborah Leong: So pedagogy of poverty is an idea that was brought up by a researcher named Martin Haberman in the 1990s. What he pointed out is that the way we teach children who are at-risk or in poverty is different than the way we teach middle-class children. It’s a very deficit oriented model.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Deborah Leong: So we’re looking at what children are missing, emphasizes a lot the content of what they don’t know, a lot of very early ability grouping, and then the use of drill as the main method of teaching these small facts. In fact, we know that that is really not the answer. Current neuroscience actually emphasizes the development of something called, executive functions. These are skills associated with the prefrontal cortex like your forehead. It’s your ability to inhibit one reaction. So it’s inhibitory control, working memory, your ability to remember things, keep two things in your mind at the same time, and then cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to move back and forth between skills and to pay attention harder at different times. So we know now that actually, executive functions are more highly correlated with achievement than IQ, social class, the child’s entry level literacy skills. I think that’s one of the things that our approach really emphasizes. We’re a child curriculum in the sense that we have activities, but our main goal is through those activities to teach teachers how to teach.

Chris Riback: The point that you were just making, I took the liberty of reading some of your writing and the tough aspect of what you’re characterizing really came across, there was a line, “Many schools serving children in poverty approach teaching and learning differently than schools serving more privileged children.”

Deborah Leong: Right.

Chris Riback: Doesn’t that just go to the heart of one of the major challenges we face?

Deborah Leong: I think it goes to the heart of the issue of equity. What happens is, when you put children in different ability groups, even though we’re doing it because we’re trying to individualize, what you end up doing is you bake in inequality because the children in the lower reading group don’t read books that are as interesting or have the same vocabulary. So what we’ve tried to do is to develop ways of supporting children so that children all learn the same thing, but they actually have individualized supports. We’ve actually developed a new app to support reading instruction in the classroom called, Power Tools-

Chris Riback: Those might be the “Power Tool solutions?”

Deborah Leong: Yes. What that does is children read in pairs and they can read in heterogeneous pairs, like a higher level reader and a lower level reader. So it makes reading much more social and gives children a chance to practice together before they’re actually asked questions by the teacher.

Chris Riback: Am I wrong? There’s also a way for the parents to be involved and for the parents to either be aware of what’s the reading, which has to add another layer of support?

Deborah Leong: Yes, so it’s really important that children learn world knowledge and the vocabulary so that they can really participate in the outer world. We’ve created parent materials to help parents help their children do that. This whole idea of creating equity in the classroom where children help each other and they know the same thing so they feel, even though they’re a lower reader, their ideas are just as important and worthy as the ideas of a child who’s a higher reader.

Chris Riback: And making the opportunity available for all children and really working to close that opportunity gap.

Deborah Leong: Right.

Chris Riback: Deb, thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio, and thank you for the work that you do.

Deborah Leong: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Tonia, welcome to the studio.

Tonia Durden: Hello, glad to be here.

Chris Riback: You have been on the research side of early childhood education. You’ve been on the teaching side. And you are now on the teaching of teachers side.

Tonia Durden: Yes, yes.

Chris Riback: So you’ve got the whole thing down I assume?

Tonia Durden: I have it all wrapped around and still learning because that’s a big part of being an educator at any level is to learn from your students. So I’m also learning from the teachers who want to be teachers as well.

Chris Riback: I’m sure you are. Tell me about them please and tell me about the Birth to Five program at Georgia State.

Tonia Durden: Well, I originally started my career at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which is a predominantly white institution. When I transitioned to Georgia State University, one of the unique elements of Georgia State is that it is one of the leading universities in the country for successfully graduating African-American students. Not only was it my alma mater, I got my early childhood degree from Georgia State’s undergraduate program, but also the Birth to Five program that I run is what I actually helped to start when I was a graduate student there. So, it’s bringing me around full circle.

Tonia Durden: Now the actual students there, about 90% of the students are African-American or Latino students who are interested in pursuing a degree in early childhood and also learning how to teach very young children, birth to kindergarten. What’s unique about that is typically in our field with teachers who are birth to kindergarten, only about 35% are African-American. We have this huge, huge push in early childhood to diversify our workforce with more black and Latino teachers. So I’m really excited to have the opportunity to be a part of that work where we’re actually increasing our diversity in teachers.

Chris Riback: I want to ask you about workforce development-

Tonia Durden: Yes.

Chris Riback: Because it is a big challenge-

Tonia Durden: Yes.

Chris Riback: In early education. But first, what inspired you? How long ago was it that you helped design the Birth to Five program and what inspired you to design it?

Tonia Durden: Very good questions. So this was 10 years ago that we were really interested at Georgia State in developing a degree program where individuals who are interested in working with our youngest citizens had the opportunity to learn competencies and skills and how to teach them. Now we’ve had for over 20 years, elementary ed, secondary ed, middle school teacher certification, but not for birth to kindergarten, particularly birth to age five because that’s always been perceived by the public, and even by professionals, as that’s babysitting or you don’t have to have a certain level of competencies or skills to teach infants and toddlers. So advocates such as myself and researchers and teacher educators were really trying to push legislation in Georgia to think more critically that we do need individuals who are teaching infants and toddlers to be just as competent as those who are teaching fifth grade or seventh grade.

Chris Riback: What changed the perception? It couldn’t have just been, “Hey this would be nice to have.” Was it the research? Was it tied to science of learning and development?

Tonia Durden: There were four main things that contributed to that shift. The first thing was that we had a legislative body that was really seeking ways in which we could improve the economic vitality of the state because more and more parents were entering to the workforce and therefore, needing child care and not just child care but quality child care. The second is there was this huge robust amount of research and the science that was coming behind the benefits of starting early even from the womb and so that was another kind of big incentive. Thirdly, is that we had one of our landmark universities in the state that actually began to pilot the Birth to Five program and saw that there was a huge market. The fourth thing, of course, was all of, I call us giants. The very silent giants in early childhood finally got our voice and said, “We’ve known this all along. We have not only experience but we have the data to prove that we do need quality teachers teaching our very young children.”

Chris Riback: And fifth, of course, your personal entity. Who in government is going to say no to you?

Tonia Durden: Well, that’s one of the things I learned in Nebraska as being an early childhood specialist is I learned how to do these elevator speeches with parents, with policy officials in order to truly get across how it’s very important to start early with young children.

Chris Riback: How does workforce development… Really connect those dots for me. How does it translate into an improved early education experience for the children?

Tonia Durden: That’s very key and I’ll start even from the womb because just from the talking and the conversations and the vocabulary, all of that starts very early of what children are exposed to, their literacy rich environments. If you have one child who has experienced a robust exposure to environment literacy and language and responsive experiences from their primary caregiver, whether it’s a parent or whether it is a grandmother or whether it is an early childhood provider, then it’s a remarkable difference than that child who has not experienced very intentional teaching and learning experiences.

Chris Riback: I love it and I know you put the emphasis there meaningfully. The use of the word intentional.

Tonia Durden: Intentional.

Chris Riback: Because this stuff’s not accidental.

Tonia Durden: It is not.

Chris Riback: It doesn’t happen by chance.

Tonia Durden: That’s why we have to prepare teachers. We have a cadre of teachers that already, “Oh, I love teaching. I love children.” Well, love is just the foundation. You also need to know how to teach children effectively and intentionally and also what’s developmentally appropriate for young children as well. It’s not developmentally appropriate to have children sit in desks for eight hours a day and have this kind of direct instruction learning. They learn through play. They learn through curiosity. They learn through conversations. Then they learn through all types of manipulation as well.

Chris Riback: It’s just so important to keep in mind and, Tonia, to close out, you have an anti-bias book coming out.

Tonia Durden: Yes. We’re so excited, the authors and I.

Chris Riback: I’m sure you are. Give me the thesis. Give me the ideas in the book. What have you found? What do you propose?

Tonia Durden: We have over 30 plus years in early childhood of ways in which to create racially equitable educational experiences for black and brown children. However, we really haven’t seen, even in those 30 years, a market increase in graduation rates, in articulating to higher education and to overall success that we should have seen. What this book does is it really does unapologetically say, “Look, these are the individual issues that we have to address from our microaggressions, our biases, the way that we see children and do or do not affirm the culture, the language, the knowledge that they bring with them to the classroom.” Then we have to look at systems and we have to look at how our systems, our policies, how our educational practices, how our classroom observations do or do not allow children to truly demonstrate their knowledge and their skills.

Tonia Durden: Once we critically examine the systems and the individual framework that impact young children, then we have very specific solutions that we provide to leaders, to educational leaders, to directors or principals, to teachers themselves, to policy leaders and also to those who are responsible for creating these systems. We’re really excited about the book that’s coming out, because it really does do a critical examination of where we are and where we could be if we’re intentional in our work.

Chris Riback: And solutions.

Tonia Durden: And solutions.

Chris Riback: And speaking to the full audience range of the folks who are responsible for early childhood learning in America.

Tonia Durden: That’s right. Because if we have the will, then we truly can create racially equitable education experiences for all children.

Chris Riback: Well, listening to that from you, I believe it.

Tonia Durden: Great.

Chris Riback: Tonia, thank you for coming by the studio.

Tonia Durden: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Chris Riback: Good luck with the book.

Tonia Durden: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Cailin, welcome back to the studio and thank you. Thank you for spending more time with us to talk about the progress rating tool.

Cailin O’Connor: Thanks.

Chris Riback: Thinking about the children and thinking about outcomes, what are the outcomes for children who live in an early learning community?

Cailin O’Connor: There’s a lot of work going on about how to define that and how to measure it. So at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, we’ve been working with some of our communities to define how we want to talk about those outcomes. Everyone’s measuring different things or some of the same things and some different. So what we’ve worked with a group of our community leaders to organize those outcomes into three main areas around health learning and safety and being in a nurturing community.

Cailin O’Connor: So within those areas then we can look at indicators that communities can use that are available at the population level because we really want to look, when we’re talking about the whole early learning community, we don’t just want to know how the participants in one particular program are doing. We want to know how the community’s doing, but that data sort of public health level data is harder to find for the questions that we have.

Chris Riback: Where do you get those indicators? Where do you get the data?

Cailin O’Connor: So the data can come from a lot of different systems, like mostly public health, but also the education system if they’re kindergarten readiness measures that are being used across the system. And the communities that we worked with on those outcomes and indicators actually said this is complicated, it’s different in every community, but what we want to look at more is what we are doing as a system and how we can improve so that we can affect those outcomes.

Cailin O’Connor: So we kind of took a step back from the population level outcomes and said, what is the system doing that contributes to those outcomes. So that system leaders can then tweak what they’re doing to get even better and to then see those outcomes change down the road.

Cailin O’Connor: The fundamental question is why would children be better off in a community that has a well-functioning early childhood system than in one that just has good programs?

Chris Riback: And I assume that that is exactly why you have said that a well-functioning system is far more effective than simply having good programs.

Cailin O’Connor: Right. So when you’re looking across the community at the full system, you can answer questions and solve problems that you just can’t from an individual program. No matter how good an early care and education center is, they’re serving the families that walk through the door. They can serve them wonderfully, but that doesn’t answer questions about are we serving everyone in the community? That’s not in the purview of an individual program. But when you look at the system level, you can solve that.

Cailin O’Connor: So we came with four areas-

Chris Riback: Yes, tell me about the toolkit.

Cailin O’Connor: We created an early childhood system performance assessment toolkit, which describes ways that the early childhood system can improve outcomes for the community. So we did that by saying when you have a good system, you are better coordinating between the different services in this community. You’re improving the reach of services. Making sure everyone’s getting what they need. You are improving the commitment of the community to early childhood and you’re also improving equity because you’re looking at who’s being served, building parent leadership across the whole system, all of that.

Chris Riback: Making sure there is not only access but then high quality capabilities once you’ve got the access.

Cailin O’Connor: Exactly.

Chris Riback: The concept of equity, just one of the central concepts right now in early childhood learning.

Cailin O’Connor: Absolutely. And I think-

Chris Riback: Not just right now, I should say, I mean it’s been forever, but even heightened focus on it.

Cailin O’Connor: Right. A lot of our communities that have been doing really good work on early childhood unfortunately have not been reaching everyone with that good work. So we know that certain neighborhoods are less likely to have access to high quality care. That’s the kind of thing you can solve at a system level that individual programs just can’t.

Chris Riback: Give me a specific example. First Five California, tell me about that.

Cailin O’Connor: Every County in California has an organization called the First Five which is funded by a tax on tobacco products and that entity is responsible. They have a board that’s connected to their county commission and they are responsible for funding and coordinating services to the first five years of life. And we work with several of those First Five entities in California counties to think about how their entire system can function better. Including the programs they fund directly, but also the programs that they can pull together and say, let’s all make sure that we know each other and we’re making referrals to each other and we’re helping families access services.

Cailin O’Connor: We’re coordinating our data so that the family doesn’t have to fill out the same information at every service provider they interact with. Other things that just make it more seamless of a system for families. So in some places there’s a universal preschool application. You fill that out and it goes to the preschools that have openings are the ones that you choose and you don’t have to submit this information to five different programs that you’re hoping your child will get into.

Chris Riback: There are simple ways to simplify.

Cailin O’Connor: Right. And when folks are working together, it usually takes someone like a First Five or in Florida there’s children’s services councils. There are different entities that do this, and some places it might be the United Way and some places it might even be like the mayor’s office that has a real focus on early childhood. But you need someone who is the hub, who’s bringing everyone else together to make those connections and put in place systems across all those providers

Chris Riback: To close out, Cailin, when you’re thinking about a hub and you’re thinking about the progress rating tool and you’re thinking about the toolkit, you’re thinking about the ways to bring together the different capabilities within a community to really create an early learning community. What can the outcomes for kids look like?

Cailin O’Connor: We want to see pregnant people getting the support they need so that children are born healthy and healthy weight and on time. We want to see that then are connected to a medical home and are getting the services that they need. Getting screened for any developmental concerns and getting connected to early intervention if they need it. We want to see families where they’re getting all the support they need and if they need help, they know where to get it and are comfortable asking for help.

Cailin O’Connor: We want strong social networks so that people can help each other out and smooth over the bumps that all families experience-

Chris Riback: We all experience them-

Cailin O’Connor: … When they have young children. And we also want children to have those high quality early learning experiences, whether that is in a formal program or because they go to playgroup and library story hour and have a parent who has all what they need it to provide that stimulation at home.

Chris Riback: That’s terrific. Cailin, thank you. Thank you for the work that you’ve done in the organization and congratulations on the Progress Rating Tool going digital.

Cailin O’Connor: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Cailin, welcome to the studio.

Cailin O’Connor: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming by.

Cailin O’Connor: Glad to be here.

Chris Riback: The Progress Rating Tool, congratulations.

Cailin O’Connor: Thanks.

Chris Riback: Why is it generating so much excitement?

Cailin O’Connor: There’s a lot of interest in learning more about how people can put the pieces together at the local level to really serve children and families better. And this tool is an accessible and really well structured way for people to get into that work and make sure they’re covering all the bases they need to cover.

Chris Riback: So I want to talk to you about the bases. I want to talk to you about the work and really get into the tool. But let’s start more broadly. How do you define an early learning community?

Cailin O’Connor: We define that as a community where all babies are born to families that have the supports they need to really support that child’s healthy development, early learning and wellbeing. And so we’re defining it much more broadly than what a lot of people first think of when they think of early learning, which would be the formal preschool settings, and programs, and services. We really want to think about the whole community that surrounds that family.

Chris Riback: Give me examples of what those community supports might entail.

Cailin O’Connor: We want to have families live in communities where they can get their basic needs met. They-

Chris Riback: Health needs, food needs?

Cailin O’Connor: Health, food, services like childcare, having accessible parks and green space, having policies that support them in their parenting, rather than making parenting harder. And that support families being successful and thriving because that’s what we know is necessary for kids.

Chris Riback: And early learning community is a lot more than just sending your kid to a preschool or some early learning center. It’s the whole community.

Cailin O’Connor: Exactly. Because families don’t say, “We’re raising our child in this program.” Whether that’s an amazing preschool that they love, that’s still not how they define where they’re raising their child. They’re not raising their child in any of our programs. They’re raising their child in a neighborhood, in a city, maybe in a county, in a rural area. But how they define that is much bigger than what we consider the early childhood services. So we really need to work together across lots of different sectors to make our communities places where families want to grow.

Chris Riback: And one of the key concepts that is clear in the conversations we’re having here at the ELN Studio and are being discussed is that children are always learning. It’s not like they’re only learning when they’re in that early learning school, or classroom, or whatever and then they shut it off once they go to the park, or go to the library, or go to the laundromat even. They’re always learning.

Cailin O’Connor: Right. In fact, probably more learning happens in play, in running around, in conversations and interactions with caregivers than if you are sitting there staring at alphabet letters and trying to learn those. That’s not the kind of learning that we’re most focused on. Of course that’s important, but that comes naturally when children are getting the gross motor skill development, fine motor skill development, emotional learning, relational health where they’re really forming those relationships with caregivers that help their brains to make all these connections that are so rich. And all of that is what we call early learning. Kindergarten readiness is a really important concept and a way to think about how we want kids to arrive at school, ready to learn. The kindergarten teachers can manage the alphabet and the numbers, we’ve got to get the other stuff in place first.

Chris Riback: Let’s talk about the other stuff and the measurements of that. What is the Digital Progress Rating Tool and how did it develop?

Cailin O’Connor: So the Progress Rating Tool is a tool that groups can use in communities. So one person would be the community lead and they can share this tool, surveys with other members of their community-

Chris Riback: Is that a policy maker? Who would be a community leader?

Cailin O’Connor: Typically, it would be someone either in city or county government, or someone in a nonprofit, like a United Way or an early childhood hub of some sort.

Chris Riback: But somebody who has an overview of the entire community.

Cailin O’Connor: Right. Someone who’s connecting to all these different service providers and sectors. And that community lead then can send survey links out to other people in their community. So a stakeholder goes into this survey and then at the end of the survey can select items to say, “I want to put this on an action plan.” And then the community lead can see all those results, including everyone’s action plans and pull from that into one solid community action plan. You could do at one time, make an action plan and not come back to it, but ideally you’d come back and then keep growing and saying, “Oh, last year we did this. We had this other item we wanted to do and didn’t quite come together, so we’ll keep that on our action plan, but we’ll add in some other new stuff.”

Chris Riback: And who can access it? Can others beyond the community lead access it or that’s part of the decision making that any community lead might want to make?

Cailin O’Connor: The stakeholders can access all the questions. They can actually go back and revise their answers later, too.

Chris Riback: As things change.

Cailin O’Connor: Yes. As things change, they can always add more items to the action plan. The community lead can see all of that and it prints off nicely with links to other resources that they might want to use as they figure out how to take on this work and they can share that however they like.

Chris Riback: You almost can do a SWOT analysis off of it and-

Cailin O’Connor: Oh yes, definitely. It’s a way to say, “These are the things we’re already doing really well and these are the things we want to try to do better.” And we have … all of the ratings are on a scale from just getting started to doing really well. So you can say, “This is something that we’re doing really well. This is something we really want to be doing, but we’re only getting started at it.” We didn’t want to have anybody come into this tool and say, “Oh no, we’re not doing anything.” Right? There’s something there. All communities have some strengths and have some of this work already going on. So the tool allows you to find where those strengths are and how you can build on them and do new things.

Chris Riback: It’s just like Lake Wobegon, all of our children are above average.

Cailin O’Connor: Exactly.

Chris Riback: I understand. Tell me about the building blocks. What are they?

Cailin O’Connor: So the building blocks of an early learning community are four areas that we think all communities need to focus. The first one is commitment, the second one is services, the third is neighborhoods, and the fourth is policy. And in each of those, we’ve laid out what that really needs to look like in a lot of detail. But those are the four big areas. And we need to be thinking about who our partners are in each of them so that we can do that work.

Chris Riback: And to be an early learning community, those blocks need to build up together into almost a singular structure, I would think.

Cailin O’Connor: Yeah. Or at least a well-connected set of structures, right? So there’s always going to be work happening at the neighborhood level that’s not focused on early childhood. But as long as an early childhood person is at the table and someone from community development is at the table when early childhood issues are being discussed, you’ll have that sinking of their priorities and efforts.

Chris Riback: And in addition, the private screening tool also provides quick links, doesn’t it? To tips, resources and examples, so people can continue to learn about other ideas, opportunities. What should I do now?

Cailin O’Connor: Exactly. So we searched all of our partner organizations and other folks. We were working with the National League of Cities to develop this, and they have a lot of connections as well. So we pulled resources that could help a community that had decided they wanted to focus in a particular area. How they can go deeper, how they can learn more.

Chris Riback: What might’ve happened elsewhere.

Cailin O’Connor: Right. What other communities have done.

Chris Riback: Well, it’s a really powerful tool and really clear how it can be useful for any community. Cailin, thank you. Thank you for stopping by the studio. Thank you for explaining the Progress Rating Tool to us.

Cailin O’Connor: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Julie, welcome to the studio.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Glad to be here.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming by. What is Anti-Bias Education?

Julie Olsen Edwards: It’s an approach to thinking about working with children. It’s a foundational idea as basic as developmentally appropriate education. It says that children are not only their individual personalities, their individual temperaments, but that all children have social identities. That they exist as boys, girls racialized identities around all the ways we categorize people. That children have identities around class, around culture, around language, and that those are as much a part of the child as their temperament is. And then in a world like ours where people are treated unjustly and badly, where the stereotypes come down on children, that there’s a constant process where children’s identity is being put up from the top down.

Chris Riback: Submerged.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Being pushed in from society onto the child and at the same time being created inside the child, which means that those of us who work with kids have the opportunity to help create a sense where children feel strong about who they are without having to feel superior, but can feel strong and proud about who their families, who they are and feel at ease and excited about the diversity of people. That rather than being fearful of people being different, embracing that. Have the skills at age appropriate ways to recognize what’s unfair in the world and kids are very concerned about fairness and have the skills to stand up for themselves and for others. And that frame is what we call Anti-Bias Education.

Chris Riback: And why is it so hard to attain?

Julie Olsen Edwards: I think there’s a bunch of things. One is that the world is still an unjust place, that the world we live in continues to perpetuate and treat people differently based on their identities, and that’s a big thing to shift. Also that as teachers we carry our own identities and our own what we do understand and don’t understand about the world and ended up reinforcing a lot of the stereotypes, a lot of the behaviors that if we recognize none of us would do. And the system we’re in does not create the space or time for teachers to be meditative self-thinking, to work with each other, to learn those things. So it’s very complicated, but it comes through everything you do in this field as basic as developmentally appropriate, is this culturally appropriate?

Chris Riback: Its central.

Julie Olsen Edwards: It’s everything you do. It’s not a curriculum.

Chris Riback: So let’s talk about the curriculum – and I know it’s not a curriculum – let’s talk about the aspects of what it should contain, because you recently wrote a piece titled Understanding Anti-Biased Education: Bringing the Four Core Goals to Every Facet of Your Curriculum. It’s not a curriculum, but you bring the goals to the curriculum. I understand teacher, yes-

Julie Olsen Edwards: You learn well.

Chris Riback: Well thank you. What are the Four Core Goals?

Julie Olsen Edwards: I said them just now, but I’ll be more specific. The children need to learn that who they are-

Chris Riback: Identity.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Who their family is, identity, who they are, who their family is, is a good thing. Not a superior thing.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Julie Olsen Edwards: But a good thing. Second one is diversity.

Chris Riback: Diversity, yes.

Julie Olsen Edwards: We are different, this is exciting, it is something to embrace. Third one is justice. Is it fair, is it not? And the final one is activism and the shorthand version of that is, “I’m okay, you’re okay, that’s not okay. Okay, what are we going to do about it?” So shorthand.

Chris Riback: So let’s get practical. How can this be integrated into actual curriculum?

Julie Olsen Edwards: Just about any curriculum you do has a space where you can talk about how we are all the same and we are all different and everything we do with children can carry that message, all the way from simple things like we all like to play at the blocks, we build differently with the blocks. Everybody’s different in their own way. We all like to eat, we eat different foods-

Chris Riback: You can really think about each activity.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Every activity.

Chris Riback:  But think about it through the Anti-Bias Lines.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Carries that message and every activity carries the opportunity to help children move to, is this fair? Is this say, fairness is safety for children. We figured there’s one rule for our classroom, which is everybody’s feelings, things, behavior is safe here. This is a safe place for children and for families. Once you’ve got that rule established, you don’t need any others. They all fall into that.

Chris Riback: What reactions do you get? Is there ever any pushback?

Julie Olsen Edwards: There’s always pushback. We’re talking about things that are, I mean nothing is more important to parents and their children and it’s pretty scary when their children start learning things that may not match the family’s values. Teachers struggle with, isn’t our children too young to care about issues like bias? Aren’t you putting ideas in their head when we talk about this isn’t fair, this is fair. But children don’t learn prejudice from learning about, they learn prejudice from prejudice behavior.

Chris Riback: Modeling.

Julie Olsen Edwards: They don’t learn it from we are all different, we are the same, we deserve to be treated for who we are.

Chris Riback: You began your early childhood education career working as a Family Care and Family Childcare Provider. You work for Head Start, you taught in private and public preschools and parent cooperatives, kindergarten, reading and elementary schools.

Julie Olsen Edwards: I’m old.

Chris Riback: No, no. You are accomplished.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Thank you.

Chris Riback: The older I get, the more I focus on being accomplished not aging. Even community teen mothers you’ve worked with – you have worked in a range of areas, some uncomfortable areas, some areas where I’m sure success as one wants to define it was hard to attain. What kept you going?

Julie Olsen Edwards: The same thing that started me. I was absolutely amazed at what the young children’s capacity to learn their creativity, their intelligence, this huge capacity human children have. And I also was teaching remedial reading to adults who are illiterate and I thought, what happened? How come we all start with this wide capacity? And for so many of us, the path through education is a path of learning where we’re stupid, what we can’t do, what we’re afraid of, and it tied to a whole political view of the world. What do we need to do to make sure that children can become fully human, can take all of that capacity they come to us with and utilize that. And that’s what drives me, that’s what’s driven my work for 60 years.

Chris Riback: Leaving the world a better place isn’t such a bad thing to do, is it?

Julie Olsen Edwards: No, it’s not a bad thing?

Chris Riback: Julie, thank you.

Julie Olsen Edwards: Thank you very much.

Chris Riback: Thank you for what you’ve done, thank you for coming by the studio. 

Chris Riback: Rhian, welcome to the studio.

Rhian Allvin: Thank you so much.

Chris Riback: Congratulations on the event. More than 9,000 people here, and everything has worked flawlessly. I guess that’s got to really compliment management on that, don’t you think?

Rhian Allvin: It has absolutely nothing to do with me. We have a brilliant team, and it’s so thrilling for us to have so many people here.

Chris Riback: So despite your efforts?

Rhian Allvin: Despite me, it’s all gone well.

Chris Riback: The event worked well. Okay. We’re glad we got this nailed down. So beyond the event, obviously you are responsible for guiding the organization’s direction and their strategic direction. That can’t be simple with an organization this size. But then I read the NAEYC mission, which states in part: NAEYC promotes high quality early learning for all children, birth through eight, by connecting practice, policy, and research. That just about describes your whole career, doesn’t it?

Rhian Allvin: It does. It does. And it’s thrilling. It’s so humbling to me to have the opportunity to be the CEO at NAEYC and to work on behalf of early childhood educators across the country, who are truly… What they do matters to every other economic engine in our country. And so to have the opportunity to work on their behalf is such an honor for me.

Chris Riback: And you’re not new to this. You didn’t fall into the being CEO of an early education organization just by chance.

Rhian Allvin: No. I started out in Arizona and worked with… I was in philanthropy for a while and worked with a number of donors in Arizona to put an initiative on the ballot to create a-

Chris Riback: First Things First.

Rhian Allvin: … system of early childhood education in Arizona. So I come to NAEYC having been the CEO at First Things First.

Chris Riback: Tell me about First Things First.

Rhian Allvin: I was at the Community Foundation actually when we conceptualized First Things First, but had some mentors of mine, and donors, and friends say, “We’ve spent our whole life trying to make things better for young kids in Arizona, and we’ve gone about it every way, and it’s just not paying off. What if we went to the citizens, went to the people and said, ‘How about we create a new revenue stream for a system of early childhood education in Arizona?'” So we crafted a ballot initiative and-

Chris Riback: Took it to the vote.

Rhian Allvin: … took it to the voters, who voted in favor of a new tax and voted to tax themselves, which is really important, to create a new revenue stream to create a system of early childhood education in Arizona.

Chris Riback: Yes, I think there’s a lesson there.

Rhian Allvin: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: Going back to NAEYC, the strategic direction that you are helping lead and perhaps even responsible for, describe for me the NAEYC strategic priorities. What are they and how they evolved?

Rhian Allvin: We have two forward facing policy strategic priorities. One is that every single child in this country has access to high quality, developmentally appropriate early childhood education, and that is birth through age eight. And so there are many things that hang under that, but it is making sure that we have the systems and structures in place, that parents have real choices, that all kids have equal access to early learning opportunities. And then the second big area of work that is policy facing is to work on the profession. And we have expended a lot of political capital and energy in organizing a professional field of practice for early childhood educators, because here we’ve got this extraordinary neuroscience about what high quality early childhood education means-

Chris Riback: Science of learning and development?

Rhian Allvin: Absolutely, and it is very clear. I mean you can argue over dosage, you can argue over approach, but you can’t argue the neuroscience. And so you have this extraordinary science, and then you have the conditions that we’ve created, where individuals doing the most important work that we can be doing are earning minimum wage in many instances. You can make more money at Burger King in many instances, and we just have a mismatch in what the science is telling us and what the policies and systems we’ve created are doing.

Chris Riback: We know the impact that the science of learning and development has had on how we think about the structure of learning, from every child having talent to even the physical structure of classrooms. It’s really rewriting the way we think about the act of educating. The professionalism and the professional staff, that also needs a rewriting.

Rhian Allvin: When the National Academies came out with Neurons to Neighborhoods in 2000, that had a catalytic effect on our field. And then in 2015 they released Transforming the Workforce in Early Childhood Education, 700 page document, easy reading. But why it was so important was because it took the science and said, not just the science is important, but the individuals, the practitioners in the classroom who are in these experiences every day, you can’t just pluck somebody off the street and have them have the pedagogical background to be able to get these kinds of returns and the complexity of the connection between language and math, the complexity of the connection between how you think about problem solving and reasoning and, even as we talk about now all the time, the stage we’re setting for embracing equity and embracing classrooms that really are about every child, and every culture, and every family that walks in the door.

Rhian Allvin: That report did a great job of laying the foundation for us as the field to say, “You’re absolutely right. That is the truth.” And so we have to respond to that. And we’re compelled from a policy perspective to say, how do we create a system where we acknowledge that early childhood educators have to have professional preparation to do this work?

Chris Riback: Well, if we’re going to expect excellence on the output side, we better think about the input side as well.

Rhian Allvin: Absolutely, absolutely. And early childhood educators being fully, professionally prepared, and we’re saying at different levels of preparation, will make all the difference in the world. But then we have to create the compensation structures that tie to that. We’ve done a lot of market research and public polling, and this notion that early childhood educators are just passing through or they’re on their way to another career, our research says the exact opposite. People want to go into this profession, they’re compelled by it, but then we dis-incentivize it in so many ways without the right compensation structures, making sure that we’ve got health care, that they have access to retirement benefits. Like we have to be able to create a structure that matches the kind of economic prosperity that early childhood education instigates.

Chris Riback: Well, luckily for you, you’ve left yourself plenty to do in the next year.

Rhian Allvin: That’s right, that’s right.

Chris Riback: So next year in Anaheim?

Rhian Allvin: … put me out of a job. That’s really what we need to do.

Chris Riback: I’m sorry. There’s no going out of a job for you. Next year in Anaheim?

Rhian Allvin: Yes, we are in… Well, we’re at Professional Learning Institute in June.

Chris Riback: You have other events, I understand.

Rhian Allvin: And in New Orleans. If you think Nashville’s fun, you do not want to miss New Orleans. And then yes, we are in Anaheim next year-

Chris Riback: For the annual conference.

Rhian Allvin: … for annual conference. Yes.

Chris Riback: Well, congratulations again on this year’s event. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Rhian Allvin: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Chris Riback: Amy, welcome to the studio.

Amy O’Leary: Thanks for having me.

Chris Riback: Congratulations on the event. A lot of energy here.

Amy O’Leary: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: Have you had a chance to stop and actually take things in? What have you seen or you can’t stop for a moment?

Amy O’Leary: In my travels and it has been so exciting to feel the energy and momentum of over 9,000 early educators, researchers, advocates, equity warriors here focused on what we need to do for young children and families.

Chris Riback: Is there anything in particular that you’ve noticed or heard? Obviously equity, major theme, major issue, teachers and the professionalization.

Amy O’Leary: That’s right.

Chris Riback: Anything that you’re hearing?

Amy O’Leary: I think just the relationship building and the opportunity to network. When I attended my first conference, I could not believe how many early educators I was standing with.

Chris Riback: Yes. It’s an embarrassment of riches.

Amy O’Leary: It really is, and I think the commitment to supporting our educators from classrooms all the way up through administrators to our elected officials. You can feel that here today.

Chris Riback: So a big open ended question before we get to some of the specifics. I think it’s a central one and given your role, your views would be useful. Where is America on early childhood education? Hypocritical, committed, successful, lacking, aspirational.

Amy O’Leary: I would say America is waking up around early education and childcare.

Chris Riback:  That’s a good feeling.

Amy O’Leary: It is a great feeling. I think we are coming close to a tipping point where it’s not if we’re going to do something, but it’s really what are we going to do and how are we going to do it?

Chris Riback: What do you think is the why? What’s driving the awakening?

Amy O’Leary: Our honesty about how expensive it is for families to find high quality early education for the children. I think the economic arguments that we’ve had for a long time and I think growing our workforce. Making sure that we have people who can do jobs that we haven’t even dreamed of yet in the future.

Chris Riback: Do you know what I’m hearing a lot about as well from the folks I’m getting to listen to is, as we all think about and worry about the opportunity gap and the inequality gap later in life, there’s this sense that if we can attack that early on, if we can address equity and quality education.

Amy O’Leary:  Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Chris Riback: We can start to close that opportunity gap later in life by making the investment earlier.

Amy O’Leary: That’s right. Common sense tells us if we invest earlier we’ll have a better chance. But the research tells us that as well. In fact, I was just on a panel with a woman who works in the innovation space and she said the people who are going to be 150, to live to 150 have already been born.

Chris Riback: Wow.

Amy O’Leary: And I said, “And you know what their parents are trying to do right now is find childcare.” So if we are serious about having people who are going to live to be 150, have long, healthy, beneficial lives. We need to think about that right now.

Chris Riback: So turns out you also have a day job.

Amy O’Leary: I do.

Chris Riback: Maybe it’s a night job. Maybe it’s a day and night job. You are director of Early Education For All campaign of Strategies for Children. That campaign seeks to make publicly funded high quality early education available for all Massachusetts three, four and five-year-olds. That sounds like quite a challenge.

Amy O’Leary: It is a challenge, and I think that’s where I get the waking up. We started the campaign back in 2002, and I think to see the shifts we’ve seen with our elected officials, with the policies that they’re creating with the advocacy community coming together. To really think about what it’s going to take to best serve our youngest children. I’ve seen a tipping point. In Massachusetts, they’ve just passed a new education bill to make sure that districts have money to support young children across through 12th grade and full day high quality Pre-K is part of that agenda.

Chris Riback: You see all levels. You see the education environments themselves and the teachers. You see the families, you see the higher education folks trying to bring in the next generation of teachers. You also see the policymakers. Is there a block in progress in any of those areas or do you perhaps see better integration among those areas. And maybe what’s going on in Massachusetts is an example of what’s possible.

Amy O’Leary: I think what we’ve seen our policy makers wanting to do the right thing, but we need to help with some of those solutions. So instead of complaining and talking about cuts, we have seen a shift in people’s thinking about solutions. This is what we need and not being afraid to ask for what we need.

Chris Riback: So I read your personal mission, which is, “to work to empower early educators and help get them involved in advocacy policy and research.” Maybe listening to what you just said, at first glance, one might ask, well where are the children in that? But I bet you have an answer for that.

Amy O’Leary: You bet, I do. I think if we have confident, well-respected, early educators who come into work every day wanting the best for themselves and the children they serve, we’re going to see a trickle down. And if children are in those environments and learning skills like empowerment and sharing and being kind to each other. We know those are the qualities that we want to instill in children early on because the benefits that we get from that later make the difference. So I think early educators are the key determinants of what a program looks like, what it feels like. When parents report, when they’re visiting programs, they want to know how they feel when they walk in the door.

Chris Riback: They’re the linchpin.

Amy O’Leary: That’s right.

Chris Riback: Amy, to close out, this is your last year as an NAEYC president. It ends in June. I know you’re not counting down the days.

Amy O’Leary: No.

Chris Riback: I know you’re not. What do you think your legacy will be? What do you want it to be?

Amy O’Leary: I want it to be, I started as a preschool teacher and sat in many of the seats where people are sitting today, and now I get to be president of our largest membership association dedicated to early educators, children and family. So I want to make sure people know that anything is possible and that there are people and mentors that want to help you along this journey and that we are the linchpin to the future of this country. And we need to invest in young children and educators to see our vision through.

Chris Riback: Well, thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio. Thank you for the work that you have and continue to do.

Amy O’Leary: Thank you so much.

Chris Riback: Eddie, welcome to the studio.

Edward Manuszak: Thank you very much for having me.

Chris Riback: I get to talk to you regarding two of your roles. You are Superintendent of Dundee community schools, which is part of Monroe County, Michigan, correct?

Edward Manuszak: That’s correct.

Chris Riback: And you’re also co-chair of the early learning cohort of the School Superintendent’s Association, the AASA. Now a lot of folks might think of those as totally separate roles, but my guess is that you see them as different offshoots of your same personal mission.

Edward Manuszak: You’re absolutely correct. When I am a superintendent of a local school district, I obviously am living and breathing what my colleagues around the nation do. Everything from dealing with personnel issue items and then also being able to take care of balancing the budget, but then the thread that kind of weaves it all together is the fact that I have this passion, it’s really a calling to make differences for kids and for especially early childhood education.

Edward Manuszak: Being a former kindergarten and first grade teacher, I still really see myself as teacher in chief, not just a superintendent. I really appreciate the idea that on a local level I can be there to make an impact for my students in my district. But then my scope and sphere of influence in the role as the co-chair of a national committee of superintendents is much broader because as that co-chair, I am doing work that has influenced over 50 million public school students and the scope of the entire nation. It’s really gratifying.

Chris Riback: And I want to ask you about that because, as you know, “early childhood matters most,” doesn’t it?

Edward Manuszak: Yes, it does. In fact, two years ago we had a work session at our National Superintendent’s Conference, which was actually in Nashville where we are right now. And it took us two hours to come up and wordsmith those four words together. We had a group, a national group of superintendents and other individuals pulled together and it took us two hours to get early childhood matters most down pat.

Chris Riback: You know the old joke, right? How many superintendents does it take to come up with a motto? I’m kidding.

Edward Manuszak: Yes, a lot. Actually.

Chris Riback: A lot. A lot is the punchline. I want to hear about that, but very quickly because I know you’re proud: Tell me about Dundee schools.

Edward Manuszak: Absolutely. Dundee community schools, we are located in the Northwest corner of Monroe County. We are a rural community. We’re a growing district so we’ve actually added about 300 students over the last three years since I’ve been there. This is my fourth year in the district and we have just over 1,800 total students. It is just this phenomenal haven for families and children where we really do value every child that comes into our district. I know two weeks ago we had our national conference and the national cohort came and made a visit to our district.

Chris Riback: Some 40 superintendents.

Edward Manuszak: We did. We had 40 superintendents that were all rural based superintendents came and they spoke to our staff and we held a work session where they came and observed our teachers in action and then gave us feedback on what we’re doing. It was a great experience all the way around.

Chris Riback: Are there particular challenges in early childhood education? Let’s focus there, that rural schools and rural districts face?

Edward Manuszak: Yes. Staffing is a big priority. It’s hard sometimes…

Chris Riback: Finding or quality or experience or both?

Edward Manuszak: Retention. Retention of staff, finding staff, it is a major challenge for rural districts around the nation. And then of course the idea that because you’re rural doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re out of step. We are trying to do everything we can from a cutting edge standpoint. I think there is misinformation about how good rural schools really are because in the country, the majority of superintendents are superintendents of districts, almost three quarters are 2,500 students or less in the nation. There’s a lot more of those types of different districts out there than what we think.

Chris Riback: What is the Great Start Readiness Program?

Edward Manuszak: It is a state funded four-year-old pre-K program that Michigan has now had for I think almost 10 years. And so we’ve been very fortunate as a state to offer this. In my district, we have that program. We also have Head Start. We also offer young fives and full day every day kindergarten. We really try and to make differences for our students and their families by offering such a wide array of services.

Chris Riback: You recently created and released an early learning district self-assessment tool.

Edward Manuszak: That’s correct.

Chris Riback: First of all, wow. I looked it, that’s intense. Second, take me through the process. What drove the need? How did you develop it and perhaps most importantly for superintendents, districts out there, how can superintendents use it?

Edward Manuszak: The tool was designed because I am a little bit of a unique superintendent that has a strong background in early childhood ed. A lot of my colleagues around the nation do not have a background in early childhood ed. They may have the ability to make decisions based on budget or based on information that someone else gives them, but they don’t have that finite detail of, okay, what’s going to make a difference for early learning and early childhood ed? This tool quantifies all of that on a systemic level and it gives them the resources because all of the resources are embedded within the tool. It measures from birth through age eight the readiness of your district and the idea of how am I going to have my organization ready to meet the needs of those children? Because it is no longer a case of schools, K-12 schools should not be referred to as K-12 schools. Really it’s P-20 meaning that from prenatal all the way through, when a student is 20. We are redefining schools as a hub.

Edward Manuszak: And so by doing that work and using this national platform of being a co-chair on a national superintendent committee, we just thought this is the way that we can move the needle internally. And so we really worked hard and I got feedback from that group. But actually the idea of then being able to use like the NAYC, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, they’re going to help me publish this. AASA is going to co-brand it. I know that there’s going to be a book that’s coming that will tie it all together so there can be a true narrative about why it matters most.

Chris Riback: That is terrific. And it’s an impressive piece of work. When most of us were 18, we were struggling to figure out kind of how do we make sure to get out of bed in the morning and get to wherever we want to go and in time. It turns out at 18 you found your calling.

Edward Manuszak: It is. It is very unique. I have a unique circumstance where I actually went to school thinking, and if you would have asked me as a 17 year old as myself, what did you want to do with your life? Pro football player. How’d that work out for me? Not very well. I went to college as an international business major, and I was a first generation college student in my family and so I had no idea. And so my mother-in-law is a big influence and she asked me to volunteer in her preschool. Within 15 minutes of having that opportunity I realized this was it. This is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And to have that luxury to say that I found what I wanted to do so early on in my life, I owe a debt of gratitude to her.

Edward Manuszak: And then of course, I stand on the shoulders of many other people. Dr. Ena Shelley, retired Dean of the College of Ed, also was a huge mentor to me and is really a big influence in who I am today. I owe a lot to people that have done this before I have been here.

Chris Riback: Terrific. And I know that you added as well before we spoke, your wife, who introduced you to your mother-in-law. Just want to make sure that you’re covered here, because you know…

Edward Manuszak: No, my wife is in the field of education herself. She’s a speech language pathologist and just an amazing person, but yes, it’s been a good journey thus far.

Chris Riback: Well, it’s pro football’s loss, but Dundee’s gain. Eddie, thank you.

Edward Manuszak: I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Chris.

Chris Riback: Manica, welcome to the studio.

Manica Ramos: Thank you.

Chris Riback: I’d like to start with two terms that I keep hearing at this conference. One is equity, and the other is developmentally appropriate practice. These, I believe are central to a lot of the work that you do. Why are they so important today? Why are they so hard to attain?

Manica Ramos: The concept of equity is making sure that folks have equal access to opportunity. Developmentally appropriate practices, making sure that you’re taking in to mind the child’s development when you’re interacting with the child, so that the activity is appropriate for the child’s age.

Chris Riback: It’s got to be. You have to keep both in mind for the activity to, not only make sense, but to be able to have an impact and be meaningful for the child, I would assume.

Manica Ramos: Yes. As the adult when you’re interacting with the child, you want to scaffold them, right? So you want to understand where they are. And you want to help them to get a little bit further on their developmental path.

Chris Riback: Better to think like a child, than think like an adult.

Manica Ramos: Yes. Sometimes, yes.

Chris Riback: Sometimes, yes. So often in early childhood education we hear about the programs and the educators and the policy makers, and it feels like we don’t hear enough about the families. What is the difference between involving versus engaging families?

Manica Ramos: Sure, and before I answer that question, I want to start off by saying that oftentimes we forget that parents are the first and the primary teacher for the child. They’re with the child as soon as a child is born. They’re with the child through the programs and schooling, and they’re with the child afterwards. We need to make sure that we’re thinking about the role, the central role that parents are playing.

Chris Riback: Do you talk to parents about that? Do you, do talk to them about that part of the role of parenting is teaching?

Manica Ramos: Yes, absolutely. I do work with many different parent engagement programs, and a key part of that is helping the parent to feel self-assured in their role as a teacher for the child.

Chris Riback: It is a confidence question often, isn’t it?

Manica Ramos: Yeah, absolutely. And self-efficacy as well. Sometimes parents don’t realize how much they know. A parent can very easily change the direction of the child’s emotion. The parent can easily, very easily help a child transition to another activity, and they may not realize that they have that key skill that others, such as a teacher as me-

Chris Riback: And a child is always watching, isn’t she?

Manica Ramos: Yes, absolutely. So, one of the key roles of parents is to model for their children as well because the children are always watching.

Chris Riback: I’m sorry. I threw you off. Involving versus engaging.

Manica Ramos: Absolutely. The idea of involving is very activity-focused, and this is an idea on, I’ll use a preschool center as an example. The preschool center setting activities for parents to engage in, and then inviting the parents to be involved in those activities. While that’s important and necessary, one thing that we know from the research is that you really need to engage parents. Engagement is more focused on a goal or positive goal- oriented relationship. Rather than being activity focused, you’re really focused on building a relationship with the parent, so that you can set goals for the benefit of the child.

Chris Riback: So, it’s not just, Mrs. Jones come over here and help us with the block building today. But it’s Mrs. Jones, let’s talk about the goals for your child. Here are the things that he or she can achieve, and let’s talk about different paths where you can help your child get there.

Manica Ramos: Absolutely. That sense of shared goal-setting and power-sharing is really central to the idea of authentic parent engagement. Really being a partner with the parent, and engaging the parent in a way that’s meaningful for them.

Chris Riback: You focus on the Latino community. And you’ve examined how Latino cultural values and beliefs shape Latino behaviors related to parental engagement in their young children in the learning and development. What have you researched in that area? What have you found?

Manica Ramos: I can tell you a little bit about my dissertation, and for my dissertation I focus exclusively on recent Latina immigrants. I looked at what research says is the definition of parent engagement, any support that the child provides to their parents. Then, I’ll compare that to what surveys we use to measure parent engagement. Then, I also talked with the parents in open-ended way and asked them, based on this definition of parent engagement, how are you engaged? What I found is that Latina parents were engaging in activities that were not captured on surveys of parent engagement, and that those activities really directly backed to cultural values and beliefs. So it is, it’s explaining this is why the parent is doing this. They have these culture values and beliefs, and they’re acting on those beliefs.

Chris Riback: We have a whole category of actions, I assume positive actions in terms of-

Manica Ramos: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: That weren’t even being considered, captured or anything.

Manica Ramos: Yes, and I think that that highlights the importance of moving from these activity basis, to really focusing on the relationship because when you’re focusing on the activities, they’re conceptualized within the culture. There’s some assumptions about what parents should be doing. However, when you focus on relationships, you’re just focusing on building that trust and positive two-way communication.

Chris Riback: Speaking of communication, you do your research in English and in Spanish. How does that help your work? Why does it make a difference?

Manica Ramos: Well, because some parents are don’t speak English and we still value-

Chris Riback: You ask a dumb question, you get an obvious answer.

Manica Ramos: No, I think it’s a really important question because there are not enough researchers who are doing their research in English and in Spanish. Where there’s an entire group of people whose voice who really want to understand and uplift. In order to do that you have to do it literally and figuratively in a way that they can understand. Speak their language.

Chris Riback: Speak their language. I would assume there’s obviously, particularly when you think about the cultural effects that you were just mentioning, if you’re not speaking the language, you’re missing a lot.

Manica Ramos: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: Speaking of culture, speaking of language, and speaking of families, which you touched on earlier, the importance of valuing learning, valuing education at home and the opportunity that can come by finding even simple ways. There’s a lot of talk about equity, and there’s a lot of talk about the very, very real challenges of poverty in various communities. Yet, having that positive engagement at home can really matter. That’s something that’s happened to you in your life.

Manica Ramos: Yeah, absolutely. I will share that. The reason why I became interested in parent involvement and family engagement is because when I look at the literature, I realize that the experiences that I was having, the things that my mother was doing, was just not reflected in the literature.

Chris Riback: What was she doing?

Manica Ramos: Communicating the importance of education. Even though she could not sit down and help me with my homework, she was making space for me to do my homework. She was making it a priority for as soon as I come home from school, I sit down and I do my homework because education is really important. That very communication of the importance of education, and helping the child to develop some grit or some goals around education is family engagement.

Chris Riback: Now she’s got a PhD daughter. I’m sure she’s not proud.

Manica Ramos: Yes, yes. My mom is very proud.

Chris Riback: I’m sure. Manica, thank you. Thank you for your work. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Manica Ramos: Thank you so much.

Chris Riback: Rosa, welcome to the studio.

Rosa Marie: Thank you for having me.

Chris Riback: What is the Marvelous Mind Academy?

Rosa Marie: Marvelous Mind Academy is an early education platform and we are assisting parents and our young learners, move the needle forward and make great strides toward their goals. So currently we are a childcare service that operates through our local Rochester Museum and Science Center. Our parents meet us there every single day and we are getting ready to launch Rochester’s first 24 hour childcare facility.

Chris Riback: I want to ask you about that because 24 hours is a long time. And to that point, on your website, a couple items caught my attention. One of them was, “Day or night, we’re here for you.”

Rosa Marie: That’s right.

Chris Riback: That’s quite a commitment.

Rosa Marie: It is a commitment.

Chris Riback: Why is that commitment necessary?

Rosa Marie: Because the parents need it. So traditionally the childcare in our area, the centers close 6:30, 7 o’clock. But from my experience as a mom and knowing the community that I’m serving, the work day does not look like that.

Rosa Marie: So parents are going to work from nine to five, but then there are parents who work retail, there are parents who work hospital and they’re working those three to 11 shifts and they don’t have the same high quality options as those who work during the day.

Rosa Marie: So for the reasons of parental mental health, for the reasons of this is just what our community looks like and the needs that needs to be served, for those reasons we are affecting change and moving the needle forward and we want to be able to accommodate families no matter where they are in any stage of life.

Chris Riback: I also couldn’t help but notice the Academy Promise.

Rosa Marie: Yes.

Chris Riback: Would you read it for me?

Rosa Marie: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: It’s right here. I marked it with an arrow.

Rosa Marie: Yes. So, “We commit to respect you and your family. Pursue excellence in everything we do. Maintain a positive mental attitude in all of our dealings. Empower everyone through service, engagement and education. Embrace the occurrence of an unplanned series of fortunate events known as serendipity.” Absolutely.

Chris Riback: What does that promise mean to you?

Rosa Marie: To us, it means trust. It means leaving the door, my favorite part is the serendipity because that’s what led us here. We originally thought that what families needed was more summer camp options. We originally thought that what families needed was more personal care.

Rosa Marie: We originally thought a lot of things, but until we started getting ourselves out into the market, meeting with families, meeting with stakeholders, and what we learned was you actually don’t know what you don’t know. And that’s the serendipity part, right?

Chris Riback: So let’s talk about the 24 hour – Rochester’s first 24 hour childcare facility. How close are you to it?

Rosa Marie: Oh, we’re closer than we were year, put it that much.

Chris Riback: Closer than you were yesterday.

Rosa Marie: Yes. It’s been a learning journey. It really has.

Chris Riback: What are the biggest obstacles? Logistics?

Rosa Marie: Finding a facility that will pass regulations is very, very challenging. When you look at traditional childcare, you don’t need a showering facility, right? We can share space with other facilities. So one of the facilities that we were looking at was a common use facility. But what they didn’t have was the fire safety rating, that was very, very important. And the cost to bring our old buildings up.

Chris Riback: Up to code?

Rosa Marie: Yes, exactly. So those are some of the biggest challenges is meeting those New York state regulations. But hey, we put our hand to the plow and we just keep moving forward.

Chris Riback: So speaking of someone who puts her hands to the plow and pushes forward and helps push a community forward. I had the great privilege of talking with Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren…

Rosa Marie: Yes.

Chris Riback: At a previous event, and one of the things that she told me was, “We needed the community to understand that they had a role to play in making sure that our children were getting the best chance at life by giving them the support that they need early on in life, from zero to third grade.” Do you agree with that?

Rosa Marie: Absolutely. She’s one of our biggest supporters. We love our mayor. Our mayor is phenomenal. And just what she told you then at that event is the same mission that she’s moving forward, even now. She’s helped Marvelous Mind Academy find funding. She’s helped us maybe not directly, but through the initiatives that she ordained or organized and helped move forward. So one of our first round of funding came through a Kiva program, which helps entrepreneurs launch their businesses.

Rosa Marie: The second round of funding we received was from our mapping, through the participatory budgeting process. It was a brand new process that helped us hit the ground running. We would still be this little teeny tiny dot in the map of Rochester, if it wasn’t for these opportunities. She’s doing a great job and we appreciate the work that she’s done.

Chris Riback: It’s surely great to have executive leadership like that.

Rosa Marie: It is.

Chris Riback: And I am skeptical that you, as a little dot, still wouldn’t be making a big impact. The sense I’m getting from you, I think you still would be doing it.

Rosa Marie: Thank you.

Chris Riback: I’m sure that the support from Mayor Warren is terrific.

Rosa Marie: It helps.

Chris Riback: How did you get into this? You sign your emails – I know you know this because I don’t think there’s anything accidental about what you do. You sign your emails with your title, “President and mother of two.”

Rosa Marie: That’s right.

Chris Riback: What drives you to make Marvelous Mind Academy, marvelous.

Rosa Marie: My children. So this is how this started, right? So prior to me having children, my grandmother was my daycare provider, right? So she did daycare in her home for 30 plus years. It wasn’t long I was the weekend babysitter when grandma closed her doors. The parents were asking me, “Rosa, do you want to babysit?” So I just carried that with me and until I had my own child, yeah, sure I understood how to care for children. I understood what they needed, how to keep them safe, things like that.

Rosa Marie: But I didn’t understand the relationship from parent to child until I became a parent. And that provided a well-rounded look at what early childhood education and learning should look like. That has certain expectations for my children above education. It was teaching them confidence. I did that for my firstborn son. When he would fall down, it was get back up. I would give him his daily affirmation. Who are you? I’m an amazing man, powerful beyond measure, able to conquer anything.

Rosa Marie: Three years old, stumbling over his words, but now he’s six and he can recite this like the back of his hand. And what I love about it, he regurgitates it back to me when I’m showing him my authentic self. I’m like, oh, mommy’s so nervous right now. And he’s like, “Remember who you are, mommy? It’s okay to make mistakes.” And so having that reciprocated back to me keeps me going every day. So yes, I do. I sign them and mom of two.

Chris Riback: And mom of two. There are some terrific things – marvelous things – going on in Rochester.

Rosa Marie: Yes.

Chris Riback: Thank you, Rosa.

Rosa Marie: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Thank you for what you do. Thank you for coming by the studio and telling us something.

Rosa Marie: I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Riback:  Judy, welcome to the studio.

Judy Jablon: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Riback: So could we go right into the controversial stuff.

Judy Jablon: Why not?

Chris Riback: Why not? Why is training not always, or not necessarily, the best way, or the sufficient way to prepare people for the hard and important work of educating children?

Judy Jablon: Equity has been a challenge in early learning from the get go. It’s the challenge that we’ve all been trying to tackle.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Judy Jablon: You know the issues around wages. You know the issues around staff retention. What training does is it immediately sets the situation up where some people are in the know and some people are not. Someone’s the keeper of the right idea, and someone isn’t. And therefore-

Chris Riback: In the club, not in the club?

Judy Jablon: In the club, not in the club. And think about the power dynamics there. What we are trying to do in our work is shape a professional learning model that draws from some of the business sector’s greatest strengths around facilitation, around elevating the wisdom of the group and really creating an inquiry based setting where one person learns from another. And we are seeing, in early results, that as people feel this sense of shared power, they build more trust and the result is that there’s greater buy-in, more motivation, a sense of I can do this, I have a purpose. Most of us have at least 18 years of experience in education, where we experienced a didactic approach.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Judy Jablon: So now we’re asking the people in the lives of children up to five, that period of incredible brain development, we’re asking them to provide experiences for children that many of them haven’t even had themselves. And then the way we’re delivering the methodology is by standing and delivering Power Point presentations. A tenet of our organization is, how we show up with our participants has to in every way model best practices for children.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Judy Jablon: Whether it’s in how we build relationships and form trust with our partners, whether it’s the physical and emotional climate that we create in the learning space and the nature of the learning experiences, they have to be quintessentially mirroring the practices that we’re asking people to do with children. What our participants say is that thy feel almost like they laugh and they say, “So wait a second, we just learned how to shape a learning experience by doing one.” To me that’s a win-win.

Chris Riback: So tell me, how does your program work and who do you engage with? You engage at the state level, local, with the organizations? How does it work? Who do you engage with?

Judy Jablon: With Leading for Children’s approach, we basically enter a community that invites us. And we work either at a state agency level or if it’s a more local level, it’s a large agency that has many programs as part of it. And like Early Learning Nation, we’re building communities. We’re bringing together everybody in the young child’s ecosystem, the van driver, the parent, the cook, the teacher, the director, the coach.

Chris Riback: They’re all part of it.

Judy Jablon: They’re all part of our learning network. And what’s amazing is right from the get go, people say, “I’ve never been in the same room with these people.” And so, this sense of collective endeavor, of shared purpose, we’re breaking down the silos that have yielded competition across roles and really forging partnerships.

Chris Riback: You’re working with communities across the country.

Judy Jablon: We are.

Chris Riback: And I assume that those programs then get evaluated. How do they evaluations look? What do they look like?

Judy Jablon: Well, we’re a new organization. We’re just finishing our third year. Our early impact studies are sort of mind-blowing.

Chris Riback: Wow.

Judy Jablon: Mind-blowing. People are talking about a sense of agency they’ve never had. People are talking about the why of their work with incredible coherence. I’m making this decision for children because it will help them learn. To me, that’s the greatest impact we can have. Program climate is improving because as the adult/adult relationships get stronger, the tenor, the tone in the building is nicer, friendlier and children’s challenging behavior go down. So we’re really cultivating the social emotional skills of the adults. We’re also cultivating them as leaders and their sense of purpose is coming through in our early evaluation material. It’s quite exciting.

Chris Riback: I would like to close by asking you about leadership and you have several frameworks. One of them is the “five commitments of optimistic leadership.” I love that “optimistic leadership.”

Judy Jablon: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Run through the five commitments if you would like – you don’t have to. But overall, what is that concept? What does it mean to be committed to optimistic leadership?

Judy Jablon: Well I think, in my work, one of the things that I know I didn’t learn about in graduate school and in 35 years or more of practice, the word commitment is actually not a conversation. It’s not part of the early learning sector. And yet, all the research on leadership is about being committed and staying committed and in getting others to be committed. So the notion of commitment, to me, feels different from habits. It’s something that we actively do every day and the concept of optimistic leadership is future thinking. It’s not Pollyanna. It’s not positive. It’s really saying if we hang in here, there’s a future for these children that’s unbelievable. Why do I believe that every adult who touches the lives of children birth to five needs to be a leader?

Chris Riback: Yes.

Judy Jablon: Because I believe that the future depends on people feeling a sense of their own agency, their own capacity, to make good decisions and leaders make good decisions.

Chris Riback: And talk about modeling, your point earlier. I would only assume that if that is something that the educators are modeling for the children, that translates. I really hear you talking about the how. How one acts, how one engages, can have as much if not more difference than what one knows or what one does. Is that-

Judy Jablon: At our first convening, toward the end, in Mississippi, one of the participants raised her hand and she said, “In this field, I think we’ve always talked about the what and how, but we haven’t talked about the why.” So we got into a whole discussion and we’ve been really talking a lot about why. But then, in the second convening with the same group of people, they said, “It’s not what you do, it’s how you show up,” and your why drives how you show up.

Chris Riback: There’s a lot there. Judy, thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Judy Jablon: My pleasure.

Chris Riback: Congratulations on what you’re doing and great luck with it.

Judy Jablon: Wonderful. Thank you.

Chris Riback: Lindsey, welcome to the studio.

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming by.

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Thank you for having me.

Chris Riback: What is brain science, and how does Save the Children go about sharing that information with various communities, particularly rural communities?

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Brain science is the information we have now to really understand some of the common ways we know children develop, child development, how it occurs, relationship of parents. Brain science is that ability to really see the mechanisms, the biology, the way this is happening and the direct impacts of life experiences, relationships on children’s development. Save the Children, it’s been such a privilege to be able to share brain science with our community members and really for them to see the critical development that happens in early childhood development. Prenatal through those earliest years and the role that every adult plays in the life of a child. Whether it’s direct that they interact with that child or whether it’s they’re that kind of larger support system community around the family and really impacting the development of that child’s brain.

Chris Riback: Why the focus on rural communities?

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Save the Children has had a commitment to rural communities. We work internationally, looking for the places, the opportunities to really meet families, communities, and to really be promoting healthy child development. In the United States I think we recognize the opportunity we have to partner in rural communities recognizing the higher rates of poverty that occur for children in rural settings, that young children are the most at risk to experience some of those negative impacts that poverty has on health, on education outcomes. So we really see it as such an opportunity to take a national program, resources, partnerships, and to be directing it into communities that often don’t have access to the same level of information, resources, efforts that are really designed to be promoted within their communities.

Chris Riback: It’s a real cliché, isn’t it, that poverty is an urban problem-

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: And not a rural problem. In fact, one of the statistics I think from your site that I got, in 41 of America’s 47 States with rural designated areas, rural child poverty is higher than in urban areas. Why does that message not get out – or does it?

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: I think messages around those effects of poverty on child development, on families, the sources of adverse childhood experiences, of toxic stress, I think that message is common. That it is those universal experiences that families are happening. I think the rates at which it’s happening in rural communities is often population size. By the definition of rural communities you have fewer individuals in those communities and so I think there’s often not the same level of organizations, initiatives, efforts that are really focused because of how dispersed those families then can often be geographically hidden. They’re in communities-

Chris Riback: Hard to get to.

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: That you don’t drive through necessarily. You don’t happen to visit. Where in urban settings it’s often a block to one block you see the disparity. In rural settings you might have to drive 60 miles.

Chris Riback: Tell me about your work with Vroom. How do you leverage it to share brain science in our rural communities and to increase community awareness and engagement around brain development?

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Save the Children has partnered with the Bezos Family Foundation, the Vroom Initiative and for us it has been such a critical resource in these efforts. As I mentioned, so we are hiring locally, we’re building capacity and we’re engaging folks that might not have formal education in early childhood. They might not have backgrounds or degrees in that development, but what Vroom has provided is kind of that initiative, that platform to come together and say, “We all have a stake in this. We all have a role that we play,” and by taking brain science and making it really actionable, easy, fun and embedded in everyday routines, it’s not something that a family feels like I don’t have the resource to buy that new toy. I don’t have the capacity to purchase a curriculum in a center.

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Vroom provides here’s the activity and here’s the brainy background. Here’s that science that’s in easily understood language and it makes it very comfortable for then our early childhood teams to go out and to speak with the pharmacist and say, “This is what child development is all about. Here’s a very simple activity families can do while they’re waiting in line and here’s how you can empower every family that’s coming through to recognize themselves as a brain builder and the work that they’re doing.”

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: So it’s really provided this simple, easy resource to be able to build those relationships and I think a lot of our early childhood teams might not have had the comfort to approach a law enforcement officer, or to approach a business owner and to be able to articulate why should they care about early childhood and what can they do about it? What action can they take? It makes it so simple to say, “You’re a laundromat. There’s activities families can be doing while they’re folding laundry, while they are having conversations in that setting that are going to dramatically impact child development outcomes,” and that people get really empowered by that resource.

Chris Riback: And to bring it home, and the opportunity and the impact that you can have, I mean some of these statistics around how much poverty, the negative impact that poverty can make and how it can extend the opportunity gap and the inequality gap as it goes on. Four year olds from low income families are often 18 months developmentally behind their peers. Disadvantaged children who don’t participate in high quality early education programs, 50% more likely to be placed in special ed, 25% more likely to drop out of school, 60% more likely to never attend college, 70% more likely to be arrested for violent crime. The list goes on. Early intervention matters, doesn’t it?

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Absolutely, and I think what brain science shows us is yes, adverse experiences have a cumulative negative impact on biology, on development, on outcomes, but that critical role of the caring, loving adult in a child’s life, those protective factors that can surround a child and really through relationships build resiliency I think is incredibly powerful. So we come into communities where members, they know their risks, they know what life looks like in their communities, they know the challenges they’re facing that are impacting them, their children, but they also get very empowered knowing that they can be that loving, caring adult. They can be that buffering protective factor and that they can see really positive outcomes. That they’re trends, that the odds are stacked against them, but it’s not final.

Chris Riback: It’s not final. It’s not written and if you make the difference, particularly early on, you can rewrite the story.

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Yes.

Chris Riback: Lindsey, thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio. Thank you for the work that you do.

Lindsey Lockman Dougherty: Thank you for this opportunity.

Chris Riback: Erin, welcome to the studio.

Erin Ramsey: Thanks.

Chris Riback: So, Mind in the Making and Training the Trainers – bringing the Mind in the Making program to the world. What does that mean? What does that look like? How does it work?

Erin Ramsey: What we do is we invite community, states, early childhood systems, elementary education, all different factors of the communities together to really create a surround strategy so that the stakeholders are involved and create a common language around the seven life skills and understanding the brain science and the importance of executive functions.

Chris Riback: Who contacts whom? Do you reach out to the communities? Do they find you and how does that work?

Erin Ramsey: It varies how we develop our partnerships. A lot of people will come to us and have nice systems in place and they’re really ready for something to implement. Then some we reach out to that we hear about that are being innovative and progressive and have the right players at the table and can scaffold their resources to really make a big difference.

Chris Riback: Are there different levels of readiness? Are there different levels of where the communities are at, maybe that difference between aspiration and actuality? How do you need to evolve what you discuss with them based on where they are?

Erin Ramsey: There’s not real strict criteria, but we really look at the factors that are most important to us, which is cross sector collaboration so that it’s not just within early childhood or just elementary ed, but that lots of different people come together to make the difference. We could work with law enforcement, museums, mental health, families, so the whole gamut of the community comes together. That’s the number one thing that we really look at, and that people are ready for it and they’re ready to engage families in new ways. The way that we implement is that Mind in the Making kind of levels the playing field and give states and community something to actually do together.

Erin Ramsey: A lot of communities will come and meet, and meet and talk about the issues, and they want to work together, but there’s not one common thing that they can do. Mind in the Making creates that platform.

Chris Riback: Creates that platform… sounds like also creates that centering event almost or mission. Is it part of the mission or is it maybe an ancillary benefit that you help bring communities together?

Erin Ramsey: I think it’s a really essential part of our work, is that we really need to do away with the silos in the education system and the divide between professionals and families and bring professionals and families together on a learning journey. So one, they understand the brain science, two, they build trust and three, they can collaborate with common goals for themselves as adults. It really starts with the adult first and then how do we help our children?

Chris Riback: How do people react to the brain science and are they interested in the brain science or do they want to know, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but how do you translate that into something actionable that I can really do with my kid right now or with the environment where I’m teaching right now?”?

Erin Ramsey: Yes. It’s both. People love the science and they feel very, very empowered by it. So it is about the science, but the way that we have the learning journey set up is we start with the adult, we talk about the life skill, we share the science and then we have two big paradigms that we’re trying to shift among people. One is that you can’t set a goal for somebody else. You can only set a goal for yourself. So through the process, the adults going through the training and the learning journey who are going to bring it back to their communities, set goals for themselves around their own life skills. Then they learned to set a goal for themselves and how they’re going to promote it and children.

Erin Ramsey: That’s where the research to action takes place. So we know things that they could do to promote executive function, we know things that we can do to promote executive function tied to the life skills in Mind in the Making, and then they get to decide, “How am I going to use this information for myself and then for myself and how I’m going to influence children.’.

Chris Riback: You touched on this a little bit, but you work with different sectors, don’t you? Tell me about the different sectors that you work with and why is the sector work important?

Erin Ramsey: The sector work is really about the surround strategy so that Mind in the Making doesn’t just become another program in a small program or one part of the community, but that actually becomes a common language, a common priority, and it gives people things that they can do together to build the common understanding of good child development and the impact that the adult has on the child.

Chris Riback: Now, I know you love all of your children equally, so I’m not asking you to pick favorites-

Erin Ramsey: Yes.

Chris Riback: … but is there an example that comes to mind of maybe some training or an area where you’ve helped implement the program recently that would help me understand and see what you’re talking about?

Erin Ramsey: Yes. I think one of the really unique things about Mind in the Making is really is a way to engage families. A lot of early childhood programs and schools have challenges with that because families have changed, or because there’s lack of time, or whatever it is. How do we get families really engaged in the process? A lot of communities are using Mind in the Making as a family engagement strategy. One of our really huge successes that just came to an end and they hope to carry on was Providence, Rhode Island. They got several million dollars from the Department of Education-

Chris Riback: Wow.

Erin Ramsey: … using Mind in the Making as a family engagement strategy. All the children that were entering this public school system, their families were invited to go to Mind in the Making. Some of the preliminary findings are that the families were way more engaged with the school after attending.

Chris Riback: You’re transforming communities.

Erin Ramsey: Yes, and people’s lives. The stories that I get to hear being the trainer of the trainers is that they’ve really feel transformed by the experience because they’re setting goals, they’re taking time to think about themselves, they’re understanding the science, and they have something that they could do when they leave, something tangible that’s directed by themselves, not told to them to do.

Chris Riback:  Good for you, good for them as well. Thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Erin Ramsey: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Sue, welcome to the studio.

Sue Russell: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Chris Riback: In our country, we state strongly, “Education matters” – Early education matters. We also state that teachers matter, and that educating our teachers matters. So how come we don’t put our money where our mouths are?

Sue Russell: That’s the million-dollar question, or maybe the billion-dollar question. I think we have forgotten the relationship between good early childhood teachers and positive outcomes, and we’re learning more about that. I think the science behind early childhood is finally zeroing in on how important the teacher is.

Sue Russell: Not just her education, but how well she’s compensated and supported in doing her job. So I feel like we’re turning a corner, and that both our populace and our policy makers are beginning to realize that without investing in high quality, well-supported, well-compensated teachers, we’re not going to achieve the outcomes we want for young children.

Chris Riback: That’s what I wanted to ask. So beyond the unfairness, what’s the effect? To put it bluntly, there are a lot of professions where folks aren’t paid what they should be or could be. Why does it matter in this instance?

Sue Russell: Well, it matters because the wellbeing of a teacher, particularly with young children, matters. And so, when a high proportion of our early childhood educators are making poverty-level wages, and half of them are living on some form of public assistance, they’re living in a state of scarcity. They’re living under the kind of stress that has to interfere with their productivity and their effectiveness in the classroom.

Sue Russell: And there’ve been a few studies that have actually looked at the depression levels of early childhood teachers, and particularly those working with infants and toddlers. There was a study in Arkansas that found a very high percentage of those early educators were scored as having depression on a scale. And that’s not going to be good for building bonds and relationships-

Chris Riback: It’s terrible.

Sue Russell: … having good language with young children. So we have to care for our early educators.

Chris Riback: What role does T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood play? What does it do?

Sue Russell: The T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood Scholarship Initiative provides comprehensive scholarships to the incumbent early childhood workforce. So what that means, if you’re an early childhood educator in any one of our T.E.A.C.H. states, you’re going to be eligible to get a scholarship to earn a basic credential, the associate degree, the bachelor’s degree, and in some states, master’s degrees. What I mean by comprehensive, and this is really the key and what makes T.E.A.C.H. different, is that we know our workforce. We know who they are, we know what their struggles are. And so we wrap around a system of support that helps them be able to balance work, family, and school.

Sue Russell: So they get help with tuition, and fees, and books. They get paid release time. They get a travel stipend. When they finish so many credit hours, they’re going to get a raise or a bonus. And so it’s this kind of support. And they get a counselor, a cheerleader who’s going to help them navigate that, the dynamic of school, work and family.

Chris Riback: And tell me more about the scholarship recipients. What do they look like – where do they come from, and perhaps most importantly, what do they go on to do?

Sue Russell: Many of them work in childcare centers. Some work in family childcare homes. They work in Head Start, pre-K and childcare settings. Half of our recipients are women of color, or of Hispanic origin. Half are first-generation college students. It means nobody in their family has a college degree. And so, that’s what I mean, about knowing who our workforce is in order to get success.

Sue Russell: As they go through their education and they start earning credentials, and then degrees, and then other degrees, we see real wage progression and career progression. And well, we’re just doing a longevity study, and we’re learning that they don’t leave.

Sue Russell: We studied graduates. We’re doing a three year study. The first year of data, 97% retention.

Chris Riback: That’s quite an investment. That’s an investment that keeps paying off.

Sue Russell: Exactly. Long term. Because once they get their degree, they are embedded in our system. They believe that they are early childhood professionals, and that this is their profession.

Chris Riback: And some of the numbers are just astounding. And correct me if I’ve got any of this wrong, in FY, fiscal year 19, T.E.A.C.H. programs garnered over $40 million to support over 17,000 scholarship recipients.

Sue Russell: That’s correct.

Chris Riback: This represents a 19% increase in funding and scholarship recipients.

Sue Russell: From last year.

Chris Riback: In just one year – 19%. Any investor in the market would love to have a 19% year-over-year increase. How did you do that?

Sue Russell: Well, it’s-

Chris Riback: What do you think’s going on? Why?

Sue Russell: At the National Center, we license and support our T.E.A.C.H. programs in the various states. It’s their job to raise money. And the reason that I think that they’re able to raise more money is because of the outcomes. We’re doing what we say we will do.

Chris Riback: The evidence is there.

Sue Russell: Right, it’s there. And so it’s exciting. We’ve raised, with T.E.A.C.H., Over $540 million since we started, and it’s great to see. We’ve had 165,000 folks in our country get a chance to go to college. And now we see these people everywhere.

Chris Riback: Well, you’re going to have to rent a really big stadium for your reunion.

Sue Russell: Oh yes.

Chris Riback: Sue, thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio, and thank you for the work that you’ve done for all of those graduates.

Sue Russell: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Dr. Christopher, welcome to the studio.

Dr. Gail Christopher: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming.

Dr. Gail Christopher: It’s my pleasure.

Chris Riback: Congratulations – You are in the first month now in your role with the National Collaborative for Health Equity.

Dr. Gail Christopher: Yes.

Chris Riback: I just want to make sure, is it what you thought it would be and, probably more importantly, is it what they told you it would be? Was it a true bill of sale they gave you?

Dr. Gail Christopher: I created this organization a long time ago…

Chris Riback: You knew what you were getting into.

Dr. Gail Christopher: I knew what I was getting into, and I think the potential is amazing, so I’m very happy to be involved. Yes.

Chris Riback: Excellent, so you have no one to blame but yourself.

Dr. Gail Christopher: This is true every day.

Chris Riback: I read where one of your key goals, perhaps your top goal, you’ll tell me if I have that wrong, is to help America develop a true culture of health. What does a culture of health look like?

Dr. Gail Christopher: A culture of health embodies the conditions that we know promote health and well-being. It’s the evolution of the social determinants of health framework where we began to realize that, really, 80% of those things that contribute to health and well-being, they happen outside of our interaction with the medical system, so it has to do with the quality of life which, in a country that’s built on the fallacy of a hierarchy of human value, the quality of life is often less for people of color, and so when we talk about health equity, we really know that we have to make the changes in our society that create conditions that will truly promote health for all.

Chris Riback: Health isn’t about what happens in the doctor’s office. It’s about what happens everywhere else. Connect it for me to early childhood education. What in the world does a culture of health have to do with early childhood education?

Dr. Gail Christopher: So many concepts have emerged in the last few decades. One is called the Life Course Perspective, and it understands that what happens to us both in utero and in early life affects our vulnerability for disease later in life, and so I like to think that the unifying concept is stress and distress, so, when we can create environments for children that optimize their ability to develop normally and naturally and minimize the trauma and the adversity and the stress, we’re actually creating an environment that is conducive to health, we’re creating a culture of health in the classroom, in the early childhood learning setting, and we’re actually developing young people in ways that will reduce their vulnerability to illness later in life.

Chris Riback: Last night, you gave the opening keynote address here at the NAEYC Conference, and one of your messages was we must promote equity and diversity in early childhood education. What does equity look like in early childhood education, and why is it so hard to attain?

Dr. Gail Christopher: Equity looks like, quite honestly, equal access to quality early childhood education for all children, and it doesn’t matter the neighborhood, the ZIP code, the real estate value. It is quality education, and we know what it takes to promote and support optimal development for children, so equity means that we find ways to fund and assure access for all children, and it doesn’t matter their race, their religion, their gender, their location, so that’s one of the challenges.

Dr. Gail Christopher: The other thing is that resources make a difference, so we have to assure adequate funding investment in this very important phase of life, and that actually means paying the educators, the early childhood educators, the salaries that they need to experience less stress and to be more effective in their work, a living wage really.

Chris Riback: A living wage, and, in listening to you, equity maybe begins with access, but, if I’m interpreting you right, access is just the starting point in talking about equity.

Dr. Gail Christopher: We have to understand what are the barriers to equity, and part of the barriers are the basic lack of belief that all people deserve to be treated equal, and that’s another part of the work. Once we address the barriers, we then open up the stream of motivation to genuinely care and take the actions that are required.

Chris Riback: Where do you expect, where do you hope, where would you insist the leadership to come from? You’ve worked in nonprofits. You have worked at Harvard University evaluating innovative approaches to government. I’m going to assume at some point in your life you’ve had some job in the private sector as well. Where does the leadership need to come from?

Dr. Gail Christopher: In a democracy, I’ve learned that it’s a multisectoral strategy that’s required. In my last role at the Kellogg Foundation, we were able to orchestrate a mass collaboration of over 140 organizations to launch a truth, racial healing and transformation effort. The key there was that every sector, business, nonprofit, philanthropic, public, all sectors need to be represented. We do need strong leadership from the government and from the public sector. I think, if we put all the philanthropic dollars on the table, we would not be able to solve our societal needs, so we do need public sector leadership for sure, but I think collaboration is key.

Chris Riback: Speaking of dollars and on the idea of equity, you provided testimony to The Helsinki Commission, the Briefing on Truth, Reconciliation and Healing, where you noted that, “The inequities caused by racism cost our nation almost $2 trillion annually in lost purchasing power, reduced job opportunities and diminished productivity,” and that made me think. Isn’t early childhood education in fact the place to start, that if we are thinking about the back end of society and that financial gap that you just identified is spending, investing and closing the gap at the front end, perhaps a place, the place to start building the foundation?

Dr. Gail Christopher: No question. You are absolutely right, and this is where the truth, racial healing and transformation becomes a necessary imperative, because most of the children in America today are in fact children of color, and so we have to get to a place where we really care that our future receives the investment that’s necessary to assure viability in a democratic society, and so universal access to quality early childhood education should be foundational to America.

Chris Riback: Thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio. Thank you for the work that you do.

Dr. Gail Christopher: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Chris Riback: Sandra, welcome to the studio.

Sandra Duncan: Thank you.

Chris Riback: When most people talk about designing an early childhood education program, they mean the curriculum, the funding, the program. It seems that when you talk about designing, you literally mean designing, not just the building plan and equipment, but the physical structure, the layout, and more. What are the principles of design as you mean it in early in an early childhood program?

Sandra Duncan: In 2010, several coauthors published a book. It was called Inspiring Spaces for Young Children. In that book, we put forth seven principles of design. They are nature inspires beauty, color generates interest, furnishings define space, texture adds depth, displays enhance environment, and elements heighten ambiance. In that book, what we urge teachers to do was to take a strong look, not only of the functionality like you just talked about, but to look at the aesthetic value of the classroom. When I first started talking about making ascetically pleasing classrooms-

Chris Riback: People must have looked at you like you were crazy.

Sandra Duncan: They looked at me like I was crazy, because they’re very used to designing a classroom based on functionality. And so, we urged them to start thinking about environments from a space of beauty. This was very unusual and people really did not get it for a while. But after we started talking about it and we started talking about the research, how beauty increases children’s wonder. We have that research from Dr. Ruth Wilson who is an advocate of beauty, that children need beauty. If you have something beautiful like a pine cone, the child picks up that pine cone and wonders about it, and wonder is the essence of learning. There is really no learning that takes place unless there’s wonder attached to it.

Chris Riback: Which seems to be table stakes. Of course it needs to be functional. Of course one needs furniture where a child can sit comfortably, a desk where, you know, if you’re having a desk. But the ways in which the science of learning and development and the what the research has shown there has affected and changed the way we think about how children learn and how we should teach. We should be thinking about the environment in which children learn much differently as well. Is that right?

Sandra Duncan: The environment absolutely impacts how children move about the environment, how children navigate the environment, how they interact with the environment, what they do in that environment, and the emotional social connection to the environment. At the cornerstone of those seven principles of designed is nature inspires beauty. We’re really big on the idea of not only including live plants, fish, live things, but also including natural elements such as a wicker basket or a wooden bowl. Things that are natural. Children need authentic things to play with, real things. Not the plastic teapot, not the plastic shovel, but real honest to goodness tools and honest to goodness objects that come from real life.

Sandra Duncan: And it’s so important. We have the research that says when children play with authentic items that their language is richer, that their sentences are longer, that the number of syllables that they use in the sentence and the words are longer and more intense. We have research that says if you increase authenticity, if you increase children’s exposure to nature, all of that. For example, when you look at that pine cone again, a child wonders about it so he observes it longer. Observers make good readers because they observe that pine cone, they focus on it, and then they can tell the difference between a lowercase B and a lowercase D.

Chris Riback: You’re actually taking these principles, and your knowledge, and your experience and translating it into a furniture design. How does that work?

Sandra Duncan: Yes. Well, it was a long process, but what we tried to do-

Chris Riback: Sense of place furniture, yes?

Sandra Duncan: Sense of place furniture. What we tried to do is we tried to take those concepts, those seven principles to design, and see how could we infiltrate those into furniture. Because we know that furniture design and furniture lines, and we have some research that says humans are more akin to round curves. Our brain is actually more akin to round curves rather than rectangular, angular types of environments. And so, we tried to infuse those natural elements.

Sandra Duncan: We have four pillars of design. They are: Nature Align, which you know why. Heart-Centered. That means that we are looking at classroom design from an empathic viewpoint, which means we’re looking at that furniture from the end user. What’s the child going to do with that furniture? How is the child going to interact with that furniture? Then we have Sensory Base, which you can understand why, and Authentically Inspired.

Chris Riback: It’s very interesting to hear about and see principles translated into reality and into usable action. Thank you for your ideas, and thank you for stopping by the studio.

Sandra Duncan: Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to.

Chris Riback: Robin, welcome to the studio.

Robin K. Fox: Thank you very much.

Chris Riback: As you know, early childhood education is imperative and challenging under any circumstances.

Robin K. Fox: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Riback: Your research focuses on a few sub-sectors that surely bring their own additional challenges. Families formed through adoption, families with LGBTQ members and children who are gender fluid. Obviously each of these is unique and we’ll talk about them kind of one by one, but at the highest levels, what makes interacting with less common family types particularly challenging in early childhood education?

Robin K. Fox: I think there are any number of reasons it’s challenging. I think personal beliefs of people. I think religious beliefs sometimes preclude folks from thinking about meeting the needs of some of the folks that you’ve listed there. I think that in early childhood we maybe haven’t done a great job of training people to work with, welcome and make inclusive environments. In particular for the three groups that you’ve discussed and the three groups of families that I work with and research.

Chris Riback: Let’s talk about the groups one by one a little bit because they have unique attributes-

Robin K. Fox: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: And unique challenges and opportunities. What guidance do you give to early childhood centers and teachers in building a welcoming constructive environment for families formed through adoption?

Robin K. Fox: I think there are a lot of things that we can do. We can watch our language first of all. As a member of a family formed through adoption, it really is upsetting to me when I hear people use the word adopt or adoption for anything other than forming forever families. So our two children know what we went through in order to adopt them. It was a long process, laborious process. We had to be very committed and we had to stay on task and so anytime they hear something like adopt a highway, or a classroom’s going to adopt a manatee, it negates the power of that word. We could simply use the word adopt or adoption for the formation of forever families.

Chris Riback: And the emphasis, and I’ve had the benefit of getting to hear you a little bit on this and read some of your work. The emphasis is on families.

Robin K. Fox: Yes.

Chris Riback: Families formed through adoption, but families is where the emphasis is.

Robin K. Fox: Absolutely. I think oftentimes we hear things like adopted children or adoptive family. These are families formed through adoption. Being adopted is a lifelong journey and there are many things to work through, but it’s really important I think for our students, and our children, and our early childhood teachers to talk about adoption as a process that has an end.

Chris Riback: What guidance do you give parents who have formed their family through adoption and who might engage an environment, in this case let’s just focus on early childhood environments where the sensitivity might not be there? What guidance do you give the parents?

Robin K. Fox: I think reaching out to other people who have formed their families through adoption is a good way to do it. Looking for staff members in early childhood centers who have formed their families through adoption and then really being honest with early childhood educators about maybe activities that don’t work well.

Robin K. Fox: So an example would be you’re the star of the week this week, Chris, and you’re going to bring in pictures from when you were a baby. That’s a lovely thing if you are not in a situation like in a foster care situation where there are no pictures and so in that moment you as a child who was adopted, you’re outed in a way that’s really discomforting. Back in my generation, when children were adopted, oftentimes we didn’t tell them they were adopted. We tried to match forever families with children who might look like them as they grow up and many times children weren’t told they were adopted until later in life. Honestly, the suicide rate for that group of people was very high. We now know that the best case scenario is talking about it from the moment we have those children in our families. So my students will often say, “When did you tell your children they were adopted?” The moment I held them and they probably would have figured it out because they’re both brown and they have two moms. So eventually they would have figured it out.

Chris Riback: Another area of focus for you, families with LGBTQ members.

Robin K. Fox: Right. So I think it’s really important that the very first thing that early childhood educators do is they look at their forms. My whole dissertation was on forms and visual artifacts. So if a form says mother’s name, father’s name, you’re telling me already that my family might not be welcomed here. So early childhood educators need to look at their forms. They need to make sure that they’re inclusive of many different family formations.

Chris Riback: You also work with children who are gender fluid.

Robin K. Fox: Yes.

Chris Riback: I’m curious about their early learning experiences. First, what defines gender fluidity for children that young? And secondly, what does a welcoming early learning experience look like for them, their parents and for other families in the program?

Robin K. Fox: These children don’t fit into the binary that we’ve all been made to believe is the truth. So there are multiple genders and ways of identifying and expressing. So a gender fluid child could one day be fluid and be representing a gender other than what they were assigned anatomically at birth. The next day they might be presenting in a way that does connect with their anatomical sex at birth or it might not change. At three years old they might say to us, “I am a girl even though assigned male at birth,” and that might stay with them for the rest of their lives or it might be fluid and changing.

Chris Riback: And do you offer the same general guidance, awareness, listen, be mindful of language?

Robin K. Fox: Yes.

Chris Riback: Look at all of your different touch points, from forms to, I would assume, the classroom itself.

Robin K. Fox: I think the thing with this in particular, teachers get very nervous. So yesterday we did a presentation and we had books about children who are gender fluid and teachers got very nervous about, well what will happen if I read that book and another parent gets upset. My response to that is you look first at your nondiscrimination clause and if in your nondiscrimination clause it says gender expression and gender identity, you have a responsibility. So I think people need to kind of just sometimes step back and look at policy and procedures and non-discrimination clauses and what’s in their family handbook that then supports them and protects teachers to do this really important work.

Chris Riback: As you think about the work that you do, the families that you know and work with, and as you look at our society, are you hopeful?

Robin K. Fox: I am hopeful.

Chris Riback: Is that because you are purely an optimist or is that based on what you see?

Robin K. Fox: I’m hopeful because yesterday we had over a hundred people who came to a session to try to understand how to be welcoming for children who are gender fluid, but it’s not enough. We need more of a national opportunity to showcase how important this is. The work that we can do in early childhood is not just life altering. It can be lifesaving.

Chris Riback: Well, thank you. Thank you for that work and the lifesaving work that you do. And on a much smaller level, thank you for coming by the studio.

Robin K. Fox: Thank you very much.

Chris Riback: Susan, welcome to the studio.

Susan B. Neuman: Thank you, it’s nice to be here.

Chris Riback: Let’s start with the overview. What is the connection between vocabulary and learning? Why would you say we live in a world of words?

Susan B. Neuman: We do live in a world of words. Oral language development is so critically important to young children, it’s the foundation for early literacy, and their vocabulary actually predicts not only their achievement in elementary school, but in high school and beyond.

Chris Riback: For so many lay people, we might believe, well words just come. We listen, babies listen, they see, they hear their parents, they will listen to television and they learn. But there’s a science of reading. What is it?

Susan B. Neuman: We call vocabulary an unconstrained skill. And what that means is that you and I are learning vocabulary and new words throughout our lifetime. So there are studies that show that our intelligence grows as we develop more vocabulary throughout the years.

Chris Riback: Which comes first, does the growth of vocabulary drive intelligence, or does intelligence, and I put that in quotes, drive one’s ability to gain new vocabulary?

Susan B. Neuman: It’s a great question. One of the things we know is that when I use sophisticated vocabulary words, I’m creating knowledge for young children. Vocabulary and knowledge are synonymous, and so when I use more sophisticated vocabulary words it encourages children to really learn and extend what they already know beyond their colloquial language.

Chris Riback: And you promise you won’t use sophisticated language with me, right?

Susan B. Neuman: I promise, I won’t.

Chris Riback: I appreciate that.

Susan B. Neuman: I’ll use regular jargon – good old teacher jargon.

Chris Riback: Just simple teacher jargon, single-syllables would really be helpful. You have written that word and world knowledge are reciprocal, mutually reinforcing processes related to gains in conceptual development and comprehension, which is a little bit what you were just discussing. What guidance, tangible guidance, specific guidance can you give teachers and parents? Are there easy ways to, and I put easy in quotes, but are there easy ways to connect the world and words for children?

Susan B. Neuman: Yes, definitely. There are wonderful, easy ways to help children. And that is, the key thing that we could do is to be responsive to that child’s queries and interests. So every time the child asks a question and I answer it and I extend it, letting the child know that I’m responsive to their language, and I’m extending it in ways, that is the key to vocabulary development. It’s the responsive adult interacting with child.

Chris Riback: What are book deserts?

Susan B. Neuman: We study book deserts all the country, and book deserts are something that we as a country should be aware of and should really move on. And that is, what we’ve discovered is that there are areas in the country, in communities, where there are virtually no books for children. And so this problem is particularly poignant during the summer because many of our school programs are closed, some of the libraries actually go on hiatus, and so these children are without books.

Susan B. Neuman: And so in one community we noted, and this is in the capital of the United States, we noticed that 833 children would have to share one book in order for them to read over the summer. This is a tragedy that we have not ameliorated in our country.

Chris Riback: And correct me if I’m wrong, because it’s a common misperception in the world, laundromats are not just places to do laundry, are they?

Susan B. Neuman: Well, I’m known as the laundromat queen now.

Chris Riback: Excellent! I’m sure your family appreciates that. But what does it mean to be the laundromat queen?

Susan B. Neuman: We can’t do it alone. In other words, what goes on in the classroom, as good as it is, and what goes on in the home, as good as it is, is not enough to educate our young children. Too Small to Fail approached laundromats and said, “Could you help us? Could you support our children in terms of playing, reading, talking, and singing?” And they were eager to do something good, because laundromats often have a bad rap. People have to do their laundry, they don’t want to be there.

Chris Riback: Laundry has a bad rap, I mean who wants to do the laundry?

Susan B. Neuman: Who wants to do that? Furthermore, you have to bring your children very often on the weekend, and those children sit and stare for two hours at a time. So what happened is in New York, and now in Chicago, and now across the country, we’re creating literacy-related play centers where children can come and play in those centers, and interact and do lots of interesting things. And then in addition we’ve brought in the children’s librarians. So instead of the children’s librarian saying there’s a story hour at the public library, the public library is coming to the laundromat. I mean it’s kind of brilliant if you think of it. And these children’s librarians are showing children how eager and exciting early literacy is.

Chris Riback: That’s fantastic. So at the risk of appearing greedy, because we are all grateful for that work and other things that you have done, what’s next?

Susan B. Neuman: Well, hair salon and barber shops.

Chris Riback: Truly?

Susan B. Neuman: Truly.

Chris Riback: That’s a great idea.

Susan B. Neuman: We’re in car dealerships, we’re trying to say that every child, no matter where are, no matter where they traverse during the day, they’re going to get some messages about the importance, and the excitement, and the joys of learning about literacy. And we’re going to encourage parents to talk to their children, and to engage them in a rich dialogue, telling them about their history. I mean, one of the things that a parent can do that is so poignant and so powerful is the child will say, “Tell me how I was born? Tell me about those first minutes when I came into this earth, tell me what it’s like.” And the parent can start a rich dialogue on the very basis of personal kinds of experiences.

Chris Riback: Susan, thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio. Thank you for the work that you do.

Susan B. Neuman: Oh, absolutely. It’s wonderful. Thank you.

Chris Riback: Chad, welcome to the studio.

Chad Dunkley: Thank you, Chris. Happy to be here.

Chris Riback: Tell me about the New Horizon Academy. What is it, what’s your philosophy, and how do you scale that to more than 70 schools across Minnesota, Idaho, Iowa and Colorado? And maybe I’m missing a state at this point.

Chad Dunkley: Yes, those are the States we’re in at this point. New Horizon Academy was actually started by my mom in 1971. So I grew up as a kid in the classroom. That’s actually where I learned a lot about early childhood and then I stayed with the company in various roles, became a parent as well, so I see it from that perspective, and our family’s just been very committed to early childhood from the early days. We have grown, actually we have 87 locations now and so we’ve been growing quickly in the last few years as we’ve kind of found our way about how to grow in other States, but it’s Minnesota had been our home for a very long time.

Chris Riback: It’s a wonderful place, Minnesota. I spent a lot of time there. Why is it able to scale? What is it about your approach that allows you to scale the way you have?

Chad Dunkley: Yes, I think part of it is just our established reputation and quality and so when families choose you and they choose you [crosstalk]-

Chris Riback: What’s the core of the philosophy?

Chad Dunkley: The philosophy is really about building children’s self-esteem at a very young age and we incorporate all the best practices in early childhood. We stay on top of the research and so, but it’s still primarily children learn through play and learn through being very active and having our teachers create intentional activities that teach children the types of skills they need to be prepared for life. A lot of it’s social, emotional, executive functioning, how to interact and learn from others, how to self-control, all those really important skills. But then the academic skills of early literacy, math, all of those things incorporated into our schools.

Chris Riback: Now with your spare time, and I mean that facetiously, you also were very active in public policy. There’s actually a lack of strong childcare options in Minnesota, isn’t there?

Chad Dunkley: There absolutely is. We have a flawed economic model in early childhood. We’ve really taught families about they should look for quality. They’ve heard about the brain research, but at the very same time as we’ve increased the quality of childcare. We’ve really left a lot of families out. Young families don’t have the financial security, many of them, to afford the type and level of quality they need for young children when we know how important those classrooms are. So I don’t think the answer to early childhood is really going to come from what parents can afford. It’s going to have to come from governments providing more intervention, positive intervention, helping them financially afford what they need for young children.

Chad Dunkley: We have some scary and sobering statistics. We have a declining birth rate in this country. We have a declining work participation rate. Other countries have surpassed us and that’s because they’ve increased investments and said, “This is worth it for our future economy.” These young families need financial security. They need to stay in the workforce. But their children need something much higher in quality than we used to know about to prepare them for kindergarten and beyond.

Chris Riback: Speaking of getting the government involved, you visited the White House earlier this year, I believe it was.

Chad Dunkley: Yes.

Chris Riback: You attended a session on early childhood learning. What was the session? Did you have a chance to comment? If so, what did you say?

Chad Dunkley: I really talked about this broken economic model. Our teachers need to make more. But early childhood, we have to have small teacher-child ratios. We have to have hours that serve working families. So our schools are open 12 and a half hours a day. But that creates very high labor costs and so we’re unable to pay our teachers what we need and yet we can’t raise tuition rates because parents are strapped. So at the White House, I really said, “It is time for this country to do something like we did for seniors years ago.” We need a family security act. We need to take care of families with little kids, help them thrive, and give them the confidence to grow their families. The future of our country is stake.

Chad Dunkley: Many countries have gone through some of these sobering statistics and it’s really not been good for their country and their future. People keep looking at pre-K as the answer. Let’s start at four. Let’s do a part-time program. It’s the cheapest way to supposedly solve our early education problem. The reality is for families, the crisis starts when you have a baby. Those are the smallest ratios. You’re early in your income cycle. You’ve had nine months to plan for this significant household expense and most families aren’t prepared for it. So we really start families off at the birth of a child in an impossible economic place.

Chris Riback: There’s another important lesson I think that one can take from you. Yes, you have a significant footprint. At the same time, you are not in 50 states.

Chad Dunkley: Sure.

Chris Riback: You’re not the Department of Education, and yet even from your platform, you’re able to make a difference.

Chad Dunkley: I might only be in four states, but I do a lot of national advocacy because I’m watching on the ground family struggle every day. I’m watching people like me who would love to raise my teacher pay, but I know what the budget looks like. We’re trapped without some new investment that really lifts this field forward and it’s time. We have all the research to support. There’s no better thing this country could do for our future than invest and support and strengthen the economic stability of young families.

Chris Riback: Are you hopeful?

Chad Dunkley: I am hopeful. I think there’s not a lot of issues that Republicans and Democrats come together on, but this is one of them. We have seen a historic increase in the Child Care and Development Block Grant. We’ve seen some talk about increasing tax credits for families with little kids and we have people paying attention to these work participation rates. We need every educated worker to be able to go to work. But if those workers have young children, they have to know their children are thriving at the very same time. So I do think this is one of those unique areas right now where we can really get something done.

Chris Riback: I hope so. Chad, thank you for coming by the studio. Thank you for the work you do, not just with individual families of course, but for public policy.

Chad Dunkley: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Riback: Barbara, welcome to the studio. Thanks for coming by.

Barbara Willer: Thank you. It’s great to see the studio in the midst of the conference center.

Chris Riback: And it’s great to be at the conference. How is it going so far? Congratulations.

Barbara Willer: Thank you. It’s a wonderful event. This is one of our largest events in years and the excitement is palpable. It looks like it’s working out to be a great meeting and I’m thrilled to be here.

Chris Riback: Let’s dive into NAEYC and the position statements. What are they, and why do they matter?

Barbara Willer: Position statements are a way that NAEYC, as an organization, takes stands on issues that can be controversial, but brings together lots of different experts who are knowledgeable about different perspectives, may not always agree on an issue, but to come together and to reach consensus about an important issue affecting early childhood education. Position statements really guide everything else that we do.

Barbara Willer: Right now we’ve just adopted a position on advancing equity in early childhood education.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Barbara Willer: You see that throughout this conference, but we’re really committed to making that permeate every aspect of our work. We’re also working on a new revision of our developmentally-appropriate practice position statement, which is probably the flagship position for the association. That’s another important aspect, is making sure that the position statements are regularly revised so that they can reflect current research and current practice.

Chris Riback: And updated. I want to ask you about both of those positions in both of those areas, the inequity and the developmentally appropriate. First, quick follow-up on the hashing it out. You and I both know how those things can happen sometimes.

Barbara Willer: Right.

Chris Riback: Particularly when you’re looking for consensus. On the one hand they can be contentious, on the other hand sometimes those types of things can get watered down. Do the positions, given the role of NAEYC, how do you balance accommodating a wide range of views with the fact that you got to stand for something?

Barbara Willer: Exactly. That is the balance, and in some ways I think that’s also a balance that early childhood educators and program administrators often need to do. Certainly in policy, wouldn’t that be great if we could find that balance and be willing to bring diverse perspectives together to listen and to take into account what is there that I can say yes, I can support that. It may not be my favorite point of view, but I can support it, and then move forward.

Chris Riback: Well, let me tell you, if you can pull that off, I think there may be a role for you in congress.

Barbara Willer: Yes.

Chris Riback: At the very least you can write a book on that.

Barbara Willer: Well, I would love it if policy makers would take our position statement on advancing equity and use some of those principles. I think they might find them very useful.

Chris Riback: I’m sure that you would. I’m not going to touch that, by the way. Let’s talk about advancing equity and let’s talk about equity in particular. What is it? How does one know it when one sees it?

Barbara Willer: One of the definitions that we really rely on in equity is that there are no differences in opportunity and achievement on the basis of physical characteristics or other dimensions that really have no meaning in terms of determining opportunity, or should have no meaning.

Chris Riback: What one looks like, where one comes from, what one’s physical ability are, what one’s-

Barbara Willer: The language one speaks.

Chris Riback: Language, yes.

Barbara Willer: That these are things that should not be determinants, and yet they are because of a history, in this country in particular, of privilege that have been afforded to some and not others. That’s had lasting consequences that has really resulted in inequitable learning opportunities.

Chris Riback: I want to ask you about another positioning statement and the one that you said was being worked on, that you are revising. The NAEYC position statement on developmentally-appropriate practice, 2020. You’re making revisions. Where are you now, where are you going to, why are revisions needed?

Barbara Willer: This is the foundational document for the early childhood profession that really sets a framework for what our expectations for practice by professionals. It was first adopted in the mid-1980s, shortly after we began our accreditation system for early childhood programs. One of the reasons the position statement was adopted was that as we began accrediting early learning programs, the criteria that were used frequently referenced developmentally-appropriate practice. As we started making site visits, we quickly learned that there were many different interpretations of what that meant or what that looked like.

Chris Riback: Probably both parts, probably developmentally and appropriate.

Barbara Willer: Right, exactly. So we really needed to come to consensus to spell that out. So it’s been a really important statement, but frankly, it’s also had many concerns that it was too focused on normative views of development that primarily reflected the dominant culture of white, English-speaking, middle class professionals who frankly have done most of the research in this area. So over time we have worked to try to make sure that … In 1996, when the statement was revised, we added important concepts about understanding the importance of the cultural context for children’s development.

Barbara Willer: What we say now about this latest revision that we expect the board to adopt in spring of 2020, is that in many ways the principles are exactly the same and yet profound changes needed. The profound change that’s needed is understanding what we need, how as educators and the broader community, to really focus on what are the strengths that each and every child brings to the learning process and how might my biases be affecting my ability to see and draw on those strengths in order to provide the best opportunity for joyful learning for each and every child.

Chris Riback: The so-called traditional definition of talent or capability is being rewritten. I guess just to close this out, it sort of proves that education is not static, doesn’t it?

Barbara Willer: Absolutely. These are lessons that children need to learn as citizens of a dynamic, changing world. Being able to get along with each other, have the skills for inquiry, observation, and working together, those are skills that are laid in the foundation of early childhood and will serve people well throughout their lives.

Chris Riback: I was going to say, lessons for children, perhaps also lessons for adults.

Barbara Willer: Very much so.

Chris Riback: Barbara, thank you. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Barbara Willer: Thanks, it’s been great to talk to you.

Chris Riback: Diane, welcome to the studio.

Diane Trister Dodge: Thank you.

Chris Riback: Thank you for coming by.

Diane Trister Dodge: You’re very welcome.

Chris Riback: Now, I am sure that you would never characterize yourself this way, but if someone were to call you one of the drivers of early childhood education in America, what would they be referring to?

Diane Trister Dodge: I think they’d be referring to the creative curriculum and the assessment system, Teaching Strategies Gold that we developed and published.

Chris Riback: Just that? Just that little thing that you did.

Diane Trister Dodge: Just that little thing, yeah.

Chris Riback: I understand. I read where your goal when you started in education was, and I’m quoting you, was, “To become the best teacher possible.” You ended up in publishing. Did you ever feel like you moved away from your original goal?

Diane Trister Dodge: Well, in a way, I did. I did want to be the best teacher. I had wonderful preparation for that, majoring in child development under Urie Bronfenbrenner, and getting a masters from Bank Street while I was teaching at the 92nd Street Y.

Chris Riback: Great places.

Diane Trister Dodge: And then teaching kindergarten in New Haven. So, I did teach for a while, but then in 1966, I went to Mississippi. Head Start was just starting, and I applied for a job to be a teacher, and OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity] said, “Oh, no, you’re going to be the Ed Coordinator. You’re going to set up the education program. This program is going to serve 900 children, and you’re going to train teachers.” And that’s how I got into training teachers. And then there really wasn’t anything that I could call curriculums. So, I started developing my own materials on a mimeograph machine, very early-

Chris Riback: I remember those.

Diane Trister Dodge:  … technology. And then, in the 70s, I lived in Washington DC working in childcare programs and Head Start programs. And I noticed that how teachers arrange the classroom was working against their goals for children. So, I started taking pictures before and after we would rearrange the classrooms. And I would use those slides in presentations I was giving, and other trainers would say, “I’ve got to have those slides.” So, I thought, “Okay, I’ll get somebody to publish a filmstrip.” And so, I wrote up what I wanted to publish. I couldn’t get any publishers to publish it, so I said, “I’m just going to publish it myself.” And that was the first effort to… And then from then on, I just …

Chris Riback: It was almost out of necessity. You were creating the materials for yourself, they became useful for others.

Diane Trister Dodge: Exactly.

Chris Riback: And all of a sudden, they became useful for tens, hundreds of thousands. You wrote that, “Education coordinators told us that the two questions they found the most challenging were, one, what should a preschool curriculum include? And two, What does it mean to individualize instruction?” Would you say the same questions are relevant and pertinent today?

Diane Trister Dodge: Well, they’re important questions, but we have the answers today. We didn’t have them in the ’80s when teachers were… And ed coordinators were saying, well, what do I mean by curriculum? NAEYC has defined what the components are of an appropriate and comprehensive curriculum for early childhood as has Head Start. And so, we know the answers to that question now.

Chris Riback: One of the slides that you created back in the 1980s were… Apparently, you wrote, “The aim of education is to help children become successful learners and socially competent.” Two things struck me. One is, that seems exactly true today-

Diane Trister Dodge: Absolutely.

Chris Riback: … as it did 30 years ago. And two, that means that any difference today perhaps is not in the what, but perhaps in the how. And maybe that ties back to what you were just discussing. What we’ve learned from the science can change the how, can change the way we get to those outcomes, is that right?

Diane Trister Dodge: Well, we know what high quality looks like. And so, if I were to go into a classroom, I would know by what was up on the wall. It was children’s work, it wasn’t just these pretty posters. That I would see a well-organized environment. Labels, so children know that everything has a place, and each area is engaging for them. I would see children working together, and collaborating, and playing together. I would see teachers asking interesting questions with children, working one-on-one or in small groups, being very intentional about how they were interacting with children and what they wanted to convey to children. So, we know what it looks like today, we just don’t always achieve it.

Chris Riback: No, we don’t. To that point, to be able to achieve it… And thinking back, you mentioned your work with Head Start, teaching in New Haven, studying at the Bank Street, and teaching at the 92nd Street Y. You have seen education in a lot of different formats and teaching in a lot of different formats. If you could today wave a magic wand and remove whatever you see as the major obstacle, the biggest change that can be made, what would that be?

Diane Trister Dodge: Well, it’d be a lot of things if I had a magic wand. But I think I would refer to NAEYC’s new position statement on equity and early childhood programs. I would want to see every child, especially children who are at risk, have access to a high quality program, and those are the children who often don’t have that access. I’d want to see teachers who work in early childhood program, whether they work with infants and toddlers or preschool children, get the respect and support that they need, the resources to be able to get an education, the support to be able to make that part of their life. There’s so much inequity right now for children and for teachers. We really need to implement that very excellent position paper. That would be my goal.

Chris Riback: That would be your goal. After creating Teaching Strategies, you now are focused on the Dodge Family Fund. What is the Dodge Family Fund, and what’s the focus of the fund itself?

Diane Trister Dodge: Well, from that little filmstrip, my first publication, I never envisioned that Teaching Strategies would become the successful company it became. And when I decided that I wanted to spend more time with my five grandchildren and do something different, and sold the company, it was phenomenal what the company was worth. And my husband, and three daughters, and I, decided that we wanted to use that money to give back, to continue the mission of Teaching Strategies, which was to promote programs that would help children in poverty to be successful, and to promote the early childhood profession.

Diane Trister Dodge: And so, we’ve been giving out maybe 40 grants by now, anything from children’s museums so that low income families would have access to it, and Head Start programs to professional development, to bringing the arts into early childhood programs. Just wonderful, exciting programs. And we get to visit many of them. It’s very rewarding.

Chris Riback: I’m sure it is. After having made the impact that you made through mimeographing, and then publishing at scale, this is a new, and I’m sure, very rewarding way.

Diane Trister Dodge: It is.

Chris Riback: Diane, thank you. Thank you for stopping by the studio, and thank you for the work that you’ve done for.

Diane Trister Dodge: Thank you, it was a pleasure.

Chris Riback: Carol, welcome to the studio.

Carol Brunson Day: Thank you Chris. I’m happy to be here.

Chris Riback: So many topics to talk with you about: cultural influences on development, anti-bias and equity work… But I want to start with a concept of yours that I came across, which is the idea understanding that “teaching is a creative art.” What a wonderful phrase. Why is teaching a creative art?

Carol Brunson Day: I say creative because there’s a lot of curriculum that teachers somehow are led to believe that they should copy what they’ve seen other people do with the curriculum. And that’s not in my opinion, the kind of teaching we want for young children.

Chris Riback: We have curriculum, we have foundational skills, but what I’m hearing from you is every child, of course is different. Every situation is different and sure one relies on skills, teaching learning that we have, but you got to be able to improvise. You’ve got to be able to apply it appropriately to the specific situation.

Carol Brunson Day: Exactly. That’s your job as a teacher to do that. That’s what I want teachers to embrace. The fact that, that’s what teaching is. Teaching is not repeating or imitating what other people do. It is creating, it’s an act of creativity.

Chris Riback: But now the challenge or at least one of the challenges in researching for this conversation, I also came across a video of you from 2011, where you stated all children do not have equal access to high quality school-based experiences. At this 2019 NAEYC Conference. Equity is still a key issue. Have we made progress since your 2011 statement? If we have made progress, my bet is it’s not enough. Why haven’t we made enough?

Carol Brunson Day: Have we made progress? Yes. I like to believe that we are always making progress even though I may not know exactly where it is and what it is about. When we look at data that can document growth, I believe that we have seen growth, but we have not seen enough. So in certain communities, we’ve seen kids are doing better. Overall, we still have a long way to go because we want every child everywhere across time to benefit from the knowledge and resources we have to foster their full and complete development. And that we have not achieved.

Chris Riback: Perhaps related to that institutional class, race and cultural bias.

Carol Brunson Day: Yes.

Chris Riback:  A lot of different areas trying to make an impact on that. You mentioned health, the healthcare sector has tried to make an impact in that area. Other activists and areas of activism trying to make an impact in those areas. Is early childhood education a sector that should be making an impact? Should it be a leader in making an impact in those areas?

Carol Brunson Day: Early childhood education practitioners should be in leadership roles around social change in areas that impact families with young children and we NAEYC, the National Association for the Education of Young Children as an organization has just taken that position by virtue of their newly issued equity statement.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Carol Brunson Day: Now, NAEYC has a long history in providing resources for people in this area and fostering discussions in these areas and so forth. And looking at teacher preparation and encouraging that we help prepare early childhood education.

Chris Riback: You were president of NAEYC…

Carol Brunson Day: Yes, yes. And I’ve been a member for many, many, many, many years and, NAEYC has always done a variety of things, but now there’s a concrete tool that can be used. They’ve put themselves in a position to say, all right, we believe that across our field, across our profession that we have a very important role and that we can do things that will level the playing field, if you will. That will foster equity in the institutions in which children are and families are engaged. That means that early childhood educators, I’m not just responsible for what happens in their classroom or in their program. They’re responsible for playing a role in what happens in the communities where families live. In the institutions that they are engaged in and that they have a role to monitor in some ways, monitor the activities of those organizations to understand how those … The policies and practices of those organizations have an impact on their ability as early childhood educators to foster children’s complete development. The context in which children and families operate.

Chris Riback: Is that a responsibility to be an activist?

Carol Brunson Day: Absolutely, and this equity statement essentially is a proposition that that should happen, that we as early childhood educators are-

Chris Riback: It sets the bar.

Carol Brunson Day: Must embrace that role.

Chris Riback: Yes. One of the few things that my kids have come to believe me on is that apples don’t fall far from trees. Your mother was a teacher, kindergarten and first grade, I believe. Yes?

Carol Brunson Day: Yes.

Chris Riback: Did she want you to go into education?

Carol Brunson Day: My mother wanted me to do whatever I wanted to do and she supported that. That she was in education was very important when I began to choose a career, but because I had done so much in the classroom with her growing up, I helped her put up bulletin boards. I helped her correct children’s papers and so forth. I had decided I don’t want to be an educator, but once I really stumbled into a very high quality early childhood teacher preparation program at Erikson Institute in Chicago. I realized that I really did want to be an educator and my mother was very proud of that and I was very proud that I carry this tradition in my family. My mother’s mother was also a teacher, so I was a third generation educator and yes, I’m very proud of it.

Chris Riback: You clearly are. Did you understand her better once you went into the profession?

Carol Brunson Day: I probably through the years, begin to understand her way of embracing her role as a teacher. As I learned more about education and practice. My mother was one who believed in firsthand experiences for kids. Many, many years ago. And I knew that, but I didn’t recognize the impact that it had on them until I had contact with some of her students as they became adults. They would always call her and come by and visit. But once they were adults and had young children who were in school, they really recognized the impact of the experiences that they had had in first grade.

Carol Brunson Day: And they told many stories about how that impacted them. And I began to understand how forward thinking, if you will, my mother was in her practice. And through that, yes, I began to understand her more and really embrace the gift of her being my mother.

Chris Riback: Well, you are proud of all of that.

Carol Brunson Day: All of that.

Chris Riback: And I can only imagine the pride that she felt as well. Thank you. Thank you for what you’ve done. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Carol Brunson Day: You’re welcome. I’m happy to be here.