Teaching the Teachers of Our Youngest Children: The State of Early Childhood Higher Education in New York, 2015. Highlights

In recent years, New York, like many states, has committed public and private resources toward multiple efforts to improve educational services and to ensure that teacher education degree and certification programs can better prepare their graduates to meet the complex needs of young children of all ages. Critical to responding to this need is the establishment of a well-coordinated and comprehensive professional preparation and development system that can prepare an incoming generation of professionals while also strengthening the skills of the existing early education workforce. Institutions of higher education are critical to meeting the evolving and increasing demands which have been shown to improve developmental and learning outcomes for the state's young child population. The New York Early Childhood Advisory Council (ECAC) with its partner members, New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute and the New York State Association for the Education of Young Children engaged the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) to conduct this assessment, by implementing the "Early Childhood Higher Education Inventory." The Inventory is a research tool used to describe the landscape of a state's early childhood degree program offerings at the associate, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral levels, and to provide a portrait of early childhood faculty members. In this report, findings from the "Early Childhood Higher Education Inventory" are highlighted, specifically the extent to which New York early care and education (ECE) higher education programs offer course content and experiences associated with effective teacher preparation. [This report was produced with the assistance of Child Trends. For related reports see ED574300 and ED574301.]