Danielle Niermann, MEd, PDS

msdanl83

Listen, I get it. A lot of our accrediting bodies want us to hire staff with bachelors or more advanced degrees to keep funding – so we tend to push our less seasoned staff to go back to school. Sometimes that’s great, they’re able and ready and can handle that, no worries. Sometimes though, it’s overwhelming and scary. Some of our field hasn’t been in school this millennium. They deserve professional development just the same and the CDA is such a great opportunity for individuals to demonstrate their abilities in their current setting (think: things they’re already doing in your high quality program) that help them move up the state’s quality ladder or whatever it’s called in your state. It’s a way of demonstrating that they are already capable of delivering quality care and education. It’s a confidence boost. It’s the gateway.

There is more to life than education and as someone who basically has been a student her whole life, I say this with my whole being. Having a bachelors degree in education does not make you prepared to work in the field of early care and education. Those programs are designed to feed into the public school system. We have such a special craft that we should absolutely be advocating for the Child Development Associate. I got my bachelors in Elementary Education with minors in Inclusion (special education) and early childhood education and I was woefully unprepared to lead a preschool classroom. I laughed out loud typing that as I recalled my first week at Mary Crane in Chicago. My students were literally climbing on shelves and running amok. The horrors persist, but so did I. And together, we became a model classroom that our mental health consultant enjoyed visiting and sharing ideas from with her other locations. My point here is that I had a four year degree and was no better off than my peers who had no formal education. I think a degree in psychology may have been more beneficial for my time in the early childhood field to be honest. It doesn’t impress me if you come to the interview dressed to the 9’s and have your transcript for your PhD. If you don’t have a teacher voice, those children will eat you alive. And that teacher voice comes from experience and confidence. See what I did there? The CDA helps build that confidence by exploring the experience already gained and showing the candidate that they can do it — they, in fact, already are. Maybe the CDA is the stepping stone that helps someone find the courage to return to school.

Early care and education is an entirely different sector of education and I don’t mean to brag, but our early childhood educators are literally shaping your children’s brains and helping prepare them to be lifelong lovers of learning. The education system in the United States is not what it should be. Instead, it’s an ancient relic of times past and in desperate need of an overhaul. And when we do that, I think it’s important that we marry early childhood into the system. We need funding. We need support. We need to be recognized as the “essential workers” everyone claimed us to be during the COVID-19 pandemic.