I picked the Center for Child Care Workforce (CCW) because I am looking for a more professional position in the Early Childhood field and was interested in learning more about the workforce. I would like to either create, implement or provide services, curriculum or programs that support the early childhood field. While reading over the website, in one of their newsletter i came across the article 'Strong Licensing: The Foundation for a Quality Early Care and Education System Preliminary Principles and Suggestions to Strengthen Requirements and Enforcement for Licensed Child Care.'
http://www.naralicensing.drivehq.com/publications/Strong_CC_Licensing_2011.pdf
I found this article interesting because I felt like it correlated to the overall theme of this week of improving early childhood education. The article is research based. This article really hones in on the importance of high-quality and effectively early childhood licensed programs and what needs to be done to achieve this. I agree with the article and have always known how important the first 5 years are. I remember when I was getting my A.A from 2002-2005 and how the resources then were talking about the importance of the first 5 years... why is just now really being brought to the attention at state and national levels and a deeper issue? Isn't it just obvious the better quality and higher standards that are implemented and set for the Early childhood field is obvious?
This article not only describes the importance of high-quality licensed child care, who it serves, the issues and trends with providing high-quality child care but also goes into the policy aspect of creating higher-quality child care licensing. In order to achieve high-quality child care licensing the state, regulations and licensing agency have to all work together and agree upon the requirements.
http://www.ccw.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=41
http://www.naralicensing.org/Strong_Licensing
Rica first the font colors and background make your blog very hard to read, maybe select a darker color font with a light background?
ReplyDeleteImplementing standards for the providers is definitely key to improving quality. If there are not high standards there will not be high quality. Some providers will provide high quality without the regulations, however more will only meet the minimums. So we must set the minimum high!
What an interesting article. My state has an ongoing debate about our child care system in that we have three options: licensed child care (both centers and homes), exempt care providers (home that care for a small number of children) and child care ministries (faith based organizations that operate a child care). The regulations are different for each, with the child care ministries having the least. There have been two high profile child injuries in child care ministries and the accidents were caused by factors that if the ministries had to follow the same rules as the licensed centers, would never have happened.
ReplyDeleteEhat an interesting resource.