Valora Washington Keynote
VALORA WASHINGTON: Hello, everyone. I am delighted to be here, as well. I'm a great admirer of the work that you all do, and it's my pleasure to be here with you. So the message that I have here today is very simple. Shall I change it or would you? While he changes the slide, would you'd like to see me sing, dance?
[LAUGHTER]
Or maybe I should stick with something I know, which will be early childhood education. Thank you, thank you very much.
Change is All Around Us
So the message that I want to give to you here today in Seattle is really simple, and that is that there is change all around us, and it's not going to change. The change is going to keep coming. So we have to notice it, and we have to decide how it can best serve us.
Sometimes we feel stuck in circumstances that we cannot change or control, like compensation. But we also have to recognize that we have strengths that we can preserve, we absolutely can preserve. And if we really gleaned the best from the practitioners all around us and anchor our work in the essential principles that guide change, we can be architects of that change.
And so my comments today are really going to be a long explanation of what I just said. So I'm inspired, and I hope you're inspired, too. I'm inspired because it is very crystal clear to me that early childhood education helps children when it's of good quality. It helps the teachers who work with the children. It builds community, and it strengthens local economies. So what's not to like?
We're inspired, and you, like so many of us, are ready to facilitate change and to be change makers. So this past year, I have traveled to Panama, China, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, where we're offering the child develop associate credentials. And every time that I'm there, I wonder, 'Why are so many people drawn to this work?" Because every place I've gone around the world, this is a profession that is not richly rewarded financially or in public prestige.
But the answer becomes immediately obvious when you meet early childhood educators. Most of us have entered this field because we want to make a difference in the world. We want to make a mark. And even without the data, you already know that the people who work in this field are making a difference in the world one child at a time.
And in every place that I've gone, and we work with people earning the child development associate credential, I know that we have a shared sense of pride, a shared community, about being part of this world profession, and we come face to face with the wisdom and courage and perseverance of people who are doing this work every day.
So last year, for example, we awarded 50,000 child development associate credentials. But we award them one person at a time, and we know that we do this in every language, in every community, everywhere. And we do it in remote Alaskan villages and in big cities, and this is what we know works in early childhood education and in professional development. So all of that is the good news, but there is also the news that we are very challenged.
We are very challenged by the change that's all around us, and the puzzle pieces just aren't fitting together. And why is that? And how are we going to deal with the change that's all around us because these puzzle pieces just don't fit? So I've been thinking about this for a long time. 12 years ago, my colleague, Stacie Goffin, and I wrote a book called Ready or Not, where we were really asking questions about what is the purpose of this field? Can we even agree on a name for the field?
What is it we can agree on? What's our professional identity? What is it that we want to be responsible for? And we asked this because this is really a challenge for us because actually we don't know. We disagree. We haven't thought about it, and it really shows, and it shows up and not a good way. It shows up in not a good way because too many children right now are being denied the opportunity to realize their potential, and the same can be said for early childhood educators because we don't seem to have that sense of collective urgency to deal with the change that's all around us.
So after 12 years of writing Ready or Not, Stacie and I got together to take a look at the situation 12 years later. And we begin to say, what has changed in our field? First of all, I should ask, how many of you were in the field 12 years ago? Oh, a lot of you. So I like it. These are the senior-citizen club like me.
[LAUGHTER]
Changes in the Field
So we begin to ask, ourselves what has changed? I mean, be proud. Don't be ashamed. But we ask ourselves, what has changed in this field, and what hasn't changed, and why aren't the pieces fitting together? And fundamentally, what we found was our basic issues still aren't resolved. We still haven't resolved the issues of what is our purpose? What is our identity, and what is our responsibility? We still don't know.
And many of our people are, for the most part, minimum-wage earners. They have poor or no benefits. They have no retirement funds. They have marginal working conditions. They're doing very physical labor. And in this mix, we're all asked to get degrees. A degree which costs more money than they're going to earn or expect to earn. Bachelors degrees in early childhood education are the lowest paid college degree earner in our nation.
We're asked to meet rising requirements for education program quality. We're asked to achieve results like third-grade reading scores, and you know what? We really want to do all this. We really do, and we've proven over and over and over again that we can do it, and we will work to do it. But the puzzle pieces just aren't adding up, and I'm sure all of you know right now, there is a crisis. There's a crisis in every state I go to.
People can't find staff. We're in a full-employment economy right now, and people can find other kinds of work that pay more against the opportunities they have. But many things have changed in the field. Those are things that haven't changed, but many things have changed. And our field has become more complex over the past 12 years, making the response to the question of "What are we going to do?" even harder.
And many people are really trying to figure out, "How can we solve this problem? How can we move in all this changing environment? How can we get the puzzle pieces to figure out?" And so we see now that philanthropists, business leaders, executives from national organizations, cities, states, national leaders, they're all coming together, trying to be change agents on the field's behalf, especially for children who need special things.
And so there's so many more people now, and so many more groups now that have inserted themselves into higher education, standard setting, performance expectations, child outcomes. And so our ability ourselves, as the early childhood community to define ourselves, I think is waning. And we need to think about how we're going to lead change in this changing era.
So despite a lot of the similarities between things that happened 12 years ago, and things that are happening now, there are a lot of things that are decidedly different. For one thing, a lot of our once emergent realities are now firmly established like kindergarten-readiness assessments, or things that we used to think about like, "What's our purpose?" which we have a lot of ideas about our purpose.
But now, I think there's a coalescing around this idea of school readiness, which 12 years ago, people did not accept, that there seems to be a lot more acceptance around now. Or we see that our knowledge base has really exploded. We see that there's a lot more commercialization of childhood that's going on. So there are things that challenge our values about who we are and what we stand for in this changing era.
Leading the Change
So how do we get together and lead change in this changing era? That's the question and the challenge that is really lying before us. How do we lead when there's change all around us? And so that's what we really need to think about. So if I think about it, I try to have some conceptualization to help me make sense of all of this. And one thing that I've turned to is this idea of Sankofa. Have many of you heard of Sankofa? So a lot of you haven't.
Sankofa
So Sankofa-- what you're looking at, this is a Sankofa bird. It's a mythical bird so some of you who never saw it before, there's a reason. It's mythical. And it's basically a bird from the Akan people in West Africa. The bird moves forward. But it looks backward, and it has an egg in its mouth which represents the future. So it's about how do we preserve the strong things when we look back at who we are as a early childhood community.
But at the same time, we need to move forward and think about the future. So I'm using this analogy a lot as I'm thinking about how we can lead in a time of change, how we can really reach deep and think about our roots, and the good things about us as we change. And so this idea of Sankofa is something that I use to think about our field.
And so as I take it further, I say, in this idea of Sankofa, there's three things we need to do to lead in a time of change. One, we need to use our heads. We need to use our hearts, but we also need to use our hands. And so this is what I'm going to talk about right now if we're going to put these puzzle pieces together.
Using our Head
So let's think about Sankofa and this idea of using our head. First of all, what we know for sure is that our knowledge base has completely exploded. Now, I'm not ashamed to say that I got my PhD in the late '70s. I'm going in the '80s. It was the '70s, OK. In the '70s, pretty much everything I learned in my PhD program-- null and void.
At that time, most of the work we were doing-- how many people got degrees in the '70s also? Don't be ashamed. Just raise your hand proudly, OK. And you didn't have to help her raise her hand, OK? She's going to raise her hand on her own. Back then, and you know what I'm talking about, we learned a lot about animal studies. And so we would take animal studies, and from the animal studies, we would infer what child behavior was.
But now, you can look on the internet right now on your phone and see brain scans of things that we used to imagine. So back when I got my PhD, I would say that we believed a lot of things about young children. We believed it. But we believed more than we knew. Today, I would say, for all of you who got your degrees in the aughts, the 'OOs, or whatever. Now, you're in a different phase. Now, you know a lot of stuff, but you're not doing it.
So I was in an era where we believed, but we didn't know. Today, I think we're in an era where we know, but we're not doing. And that's part of the era of change. We know now the critical importance of the first 1,000 days of life. We know that 90% of critical brain connections occur before kindergarten. We know that there are profound, long-term effects of high-quality early learning. We know the economic benefits of society of investing in young children.
We know, but we don't do. And our societal investments just haven't caught up with this exploding knowledge base, and so we see that the United States is 28th in the world in the percentage of 4-year-olds who are enrolled in some kind of program. We see that there's a clear need to increase quality, quantity, all across the board. And that's why, all across the United States right now, we're in this huge conversation about professionalizing the field.
Professionalize the field
Well, what does that mean? One thing, it's good news. Yeah, let's professionalize the field. That shows that more people are getting the message. It's a signal about change. It's about change as accelerating in all direction. There's two million strong of us now. When I started in this field in the '70s, this field was so obscure that my grandmother didn't even know what it is. Now, we have presidents of the United States who know what it is. We're not obscure anymore.
And so how are we going to lead? So it's time for us to get our act together and think about how we're going to resolve a lot of these challenges and deal with a lot of these changes and make decisions about how we're going to move forward. We've got to solve and close this gap between what we know, and what we do. And that's why we have to use our head.
We have to face realities that we're facing. We have to really deal with these realities. That's a leadership principle of the modern world. We cannot put our heads in the sand. We have to think about it. And so what do we know? We're going to use our heads. The first thing we know, early childhood educators are the key to quality. That's the secret sauce, and so the first step that comes to mind if we want to lead in an era of change, is that we have to invest in the educator.
Take that reality check and understand that we know a lot of the answers here and that we do have a solid base of evidence about how to do this thing. So what are we going to do? How do we invest in the early educator? Many of us realize that as we think about the early-childhood educator, we are dealing with an asymmetrical challenge.
This is a power conversation. This is a conversation about power. And many of us in early childhood were so nice; we don't want to really deal with power struggles. But that's what this is. I mean, how many of you are nice? OK there's a few of you who didn't raise your hand. Everybody look at them. We're not sure they belong. But anyway, this is a power struggle that we're in.
Why are early childhood educators making minimum wage? A person decided that. A person in power, people in power. It doesn't have to be that way. And so we're going to have to come to the grips that we're going to have to take on some asymmetrical challenges. So the next thing is use our heads and use our hearts.
Using our Hearts
So we're real big on using our hearts. That's something that we have pretty much under control, and we've made a lot of strides in using our hearts. A lot of the changes that we have already made really come from that heart place because we're really good with that. One of the things we have learned over the decades is that there are effective patterns of action, and there are ineffective patterns of action, like that bake sale, we keep having-- ineffective pattern of action. Anyway, one of the main things-- I have a lot of ideas about what are effective patterns of actions that we gleaned from our experience.
ABC's
But I'm going to boil it down right now to three basic things, and I call it the ABCs. And that is, we have to learn more about how to affiliate, belong, and connect with each other if we're going to do this work. And that has been a trouble for us because we have so many silos. And my silo is more important than your silo. And so we have not figured out how to affiliate, belong, and connect.
And I think that is the place that we're going to need to go in this era of change, and we need that shared focus to counter feelings of isolation and low prestige that many people in our workforce feel. That's going to allow us to lead together and not simply advocate for our own silo. That is going to help us to define the attributes that make us who we are, what our distinctive competencies are, and then help us to really deal with these asymmetrical conflicts.
So we're going to have to learn more about shared leadership. And the way we start with that is really thinking about our everyday challenges and the issues we face every day and dig deep into those challenges and align what we know with what we do. So what are some of our next best steps. For one thing, we've got to get better organized, better equipped, and more empowered to lead the change that's all around us.
We have to participate in leading the change. We have to know and realize that change is not optional, and we have got to move forward. But just like freedom is not free, moving change the way you want it to go is also not free. Change doesn't occur without a lot of effort, and we have to face our realities. Horace Mann said education is the great equalizer, but that idea of education being a great equalizer is something that gets constantly tested. Every generation it's tested.
Once upon a time, they had to say, "How do we deal with the plight of former slaves?" We had to ask ourselves once upon a time, "How are we going to deal with children with different abilities?" We have to ask ourselves, "What are we going to do with children who speak languages other than English?" So every time something comes up, a change issue comes up, you have to go back and retest that theory about being an equalizer.
Using our Hands
The way you test that theory is you have to put out your hand. You have to do something. You just can't think something, and you can't just say something. So what we are really good at in this field, in addition to being nice, we are very good at talking. We are very good at talking to each other about all our issues and all our challenges. What we have to do now is reach out our hands and do something.
We have to focus on what we want and not just what we don't want. So one of the things in my past, I ran for over 10 years, in Massachusetts, huge fellowship programs. And one of the things that each fellowship group had to do was identify something that they wanted to accomplish. And we had to make that happen in Massachusetts--tremendous success that we had there.
But I want to tell you what I learned from that is how hard it is for us to agree on what we do want. We agree a lot on what we don't want, but we have to learn to focus on what we do want. And together, our ally is in the process of achieving that because moving forward is not magic. It's carefully constructed from building blocks.
Building blocks include the staff that's knowledgeable and nurturing, environments that feel welcoming and safe and stimulating, a curriculum that's child focused, respect for parents, effective advocacy--building blocks. But not every building block is equally effective. But one thing that is important, no matter what it is, and that is leadership. A talented leader and leaders who can pull these building blocks together, and that's where we have to use our hands.
So change is not optional. And this is not a conventional leadership challenge because change is all around us. We are really challenged to be architects of change. We are going to have to be more intentional. We're going to have to be jolted out of our comfort zone and go on this journey. Our leadership really matters. What we do today really matters. Sankofa is teaching us that we have to lead with our head, our heart, and our hands. And there's so much more we need to do.
We need to ask ourselves, when change is all around us, what am I going to do? What is the next best steps for me to put these puzzle pieces together? And we have to realize that our work today is very visible, it's highly politicized, it can be disruptive, and we're expected to produce results. So when change is all around us, we have to consider factors that we didn't have to consider before.
Four Puzzle Pieces
So what I want to do is offer you four puzzle pieces that I think help us lead when change is all around us. And there are more than four. I am going to focus most of my remarks on the first two today given the time limitations. And the first one is that I think when change is all around us, something we need to do that we have not done well as a profession is we have to give more voice to practitioners.
#1 Voice to Practitoners
I think that all the practitioners need to get together and say, "Don't do anything about us without us," because we sure do do a lot about them without fail. And I want to tell you that as we give voice to practitioners, this cannot be just national organizations and national people talking about practitioners. Even though I run a national organization, I really believe this has to be a grounded theory. It has to be working from the ground up with the practitioners.
We have got to give a more central role to practitioners in our change strategies compared to what we have been doing in the past. So I wish this reality were otherwise, but I think one reason why we haven't made as much progress as we might have made is because we really haven't positioned practitioners to give their strong voice. We have positioned practitioners to be reactors to what other people say our field should be doing. Whether those other people are the policy makers, or the field's established influentials, or prominent decision makers in philanthropy or other public and private rounds.
And I think that it's not a viable decision-making approach today, if it ever was. And in fact, I think there's more and more of a schism between people who are positioned to exercise authority on this field, and those who are the recipients of the decision making that is being made about this field. And if we're going to move forward, we are going to have to think about... it cannot be a privileged few who are making decisions for this field, and we have got to give more voice to the practitioners. Don't you agree with that? We've got to figure that out.
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#2 Four Guiding Principles
I think the second puzzle piece that I would put together when change is all around us is that we have got to deal with some guiding principles. And I think guiding principles help direct the decisions that we're making as a profession. There's four guiding principles that I'm going to talk about right now that I believe-- that I invite you to think about what your guiding principles are.
If we're making change in this field, we need to base it on principles. We do not need to base it on what the grant said. I mean, who knows what I'm talking about? I think one reason why we have gone so far astray is because we're so broke. So if you want to give me $5, I'm going to take it. And I will promise you that I will give you $25 worth of value for the $5 that you have given me. Has anybody done that? I have, and I think that we need to think about the principles that are going to guide us in any change or proposal or anything that we do.
Respect
And there's four principles that I have settled on that you can think about. The first is that it must be rooted in the principle of respect. Because we, as early childhood educators, deserve respect. We're not baby sitters. We're changing lives every day. And some of you know that I'm talking about when I say a lot of change strategies basically are not rooted in respect for our profession, and we need to examine that.Competence
The second thing it needs to be rooted in is competence, that it takes skill in competence to do this job. And I think a lot of change strategies that we have gone forward with are not really rooted in competence. They're rooted in something else.
Change Strategy
The third thing I think we should make as a criteria for change is that any change strategy needs to build on our strengths and not just say how bad we are and not think about us from a deficit perspective.
Equity
And the fourth is that any change strategy needs to very intentionally look at this issue of equity. So I'm going to talk about each of these individually for just a moment. First, respect. Respect is very difficult to define. But don't you know when somebody is disrespecting you? Right? it's difficult to define. But it's a valuable asset in the workplace. Half of employees say they don't get enough respect.
Respect is a fundamental intention of developmentally appropriate practice when we work with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. How do we demonstrate respect for children? We demonstrate respect for children when we listen to them, when we support them to express their views, when we take their views into account, when we involve them in decision making, when we even share power with children in the settings in which we work. So as a profession, we have a participative ethos in working with young children that conveys a sense of belonging, equality, and active participation. That's part of what we mean when we say developmentally appropriate practice. So if we do all that for children, shouldn't that same if those we practiced with our front-line staff? Listening to them, taking their views into account, all of these kinds of things.
How do we know when our early educators are being disrespected? For one, they're excluded from a lot of conversations that involve them. Their ideas are negated. People misidentify who we are when they're saying that we're baby sitters, or we're just having fun playing with children all day, when we aren't paid, or when our working conditions are poor. There are so many signs of disrespect. And this is really amazing.
It is really amazing that even many of us-- and I will say including myself-- many of the things that we're doing as various strange strategies in this field inadvertently-- I do not say intentionally-- contribute to that atmosphere of respect. I'm just ask you to think about that. And so I think we should have respect as a foundation of everything we're doing in this field.
Now, just to be a little controversy in an early edu setting. You know, competence...I think our field, as we move toward change, has to put more emphasis on competence. So somebody said, if you think you can do something, that's confidence. But if you can do it, that's competence. And so competence, like respect, is an idea that's widely used, but it's often very misunderstood.
If you are competent, you have the ability to do something successfully, proficiently, efficiently. You have knowledge, skills, attitudes, experiences that make you act effectively in a wide variety of situations. Competence is also used to talk about qualities of people. When you say, she's very competent, you're distinguishing her from somebody else.
So competence-- listen to this-- competence is a performance criteria, and competencies are observable and measurable behaviors driving the competence. In other words, a person executes competent competencies to demonstrate that they are competent. What is the real test of competence? The real test of competence is not your credential, and it is not your degree.
The real test of competence is can you do what you said you could do. That's what competence is. Now, before some of you write down on your paper that I'm against degrees, I want you to know I have a lot of degrees myself, and I have four honorary degrees, and I have paid for both of my children to get a degree. So I believe in degrees. But degree is not competence. A credential is not competence.
The Council for Regional Accrediting Commissions reminds us, quote, "that while competencies can include knowledge or understanding, they primarily emphasize what students can do with their knowledge because competencies are often anchored to external expectations, such as those of employers." So what I'm worried about, if I'm worried about anything, is that we could end up with a field full of degrees but no competence. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? So I'm saying that we need to put our emphasis on having highly competent people with degrees-- that would be nice-- but competent, that they can do what they say they can do.
#3 Focus on Strengths
The third principle that I think we should root our goal of change on is focusing on our strengths because a lot of times, change efforts are really built in our field on a deficit model of who we are.
And I think that-- I like the adaptive theorists, Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, who say that being an architect of change is as much about deciding what is essential and what needs to be brought forward, as it is about what needs to be left behind, and that these decision points are really difficult because it can be painful. Because a lot of times, it puts your values in conflict with each other.
And so they give an analogy. They give an analogy that says that plants and animals evolve. This is not a religious message for those of you who might take this as-- this is their leadership theory. I just want to say that for some of you. Plants and animals evolve, and when they give up their DNA as a species, they preserved most of it.
So for example, our DNA as human beings is about 96% the same as a chimpanzee's. But that 3% makes a big difference, doesn't it? So I will ask you, what is our 3%? What's the difference between us and sixth grade, for example. And I want to tell you in working with literally thousands of people in our field, we can not articulate what our distinctive qualities are. Who knows what I'm talking about?
We cannot identify our distinctive qualities... what our symbolic 3% might be. What is the essence of early childhood that makes us different than a loving grandma, for example? And with humility we have to recognize that teaching is not just technical; it's also an improvisational performance art that's also based on knowledge and skill. So just like a fish that's not aware of the water, sometimes we're not aware of our strengths.
So I would say, just to get started with the conversation, that some of our 3% has to do a lot with relationships. And I think that when you read the literature, one thing early childhood people are good at, especially with children and families relative perhaps to other areas of education, is we're good at relationships and that matters a lot. Because we often know-- you know yourself-- we have a committed, passionate staff... staff who really care a lot about the children they're working with. But think about it. What's our 3% difference? And I think that's a really important question.
#4 Equity
The fourth and final principle that I've come up with is this issue of equity. There's a lot that we could say about equity. It's that principle of being fair and impartial, freedom from bias, freedom from favoritism, an equitable society; advantage and disadvantage doesn't depend on language or race or zip code. It's an ideal condition where people have basic rights and protections and obligations and benefits. It seems very innocuous to say, but actualizing it is very hard.
So right away, we know that beyond this simple definition, there's a lot of complexities because every single one of us in this room has a personal history with issues of equity. In addition we have a national legacy that deals with issue of legacy. And so when a lot of ways, we don't really want to talk about equity because it's uncomfortable, and it gives us a feeling of uncertainty.
And so to join a conversation about equity is really to say, I'm going to be comfortable being uncomfortable. And that's hard to do. It is difficult. But as Margaret Wheatley says, we have to be willing to be disturbed, because I think the era that we're in now, equity has got to be front and center. And this isn't easy to digest because does equity mean giving more opportunity or taking away opportunity? Does it mean that it's opportunity, or does it mean it's outcomes? It's a very complex question, but it's something that we're going to have to address more in our field.
There are so many examples that I hope over the next two days when I'm here we can really talk about equity in our field, inequities in our field, and how states and people are making a huge dent in this issue and question of equity. The third pathway that I'm just going to mention has to do with innovation and pathways that really support our field. And the reason I'm short shrifting this today is because I know that that's what you're going to talk a lot about over the next three days. How do you really innovate pathways? And the fourth goes along with that. How do you build in more resources and support? So these four guiding principles, I think, are really important. If we are going to lead in an era of change, we have to go from the question of "ready or not?" to the defining statement that we are ready.
We're really going to have to say, we are ready, and we've already let too much time pass without achieving the kind of differences that we know we can make in our field. And I know that we can do better. So whether you're a home-based administrator, a center-based administrator, a educator, or some other role in our field, your energy and insights and follow through are very important to really getting that common vision for our future and building on that expertise.
And what all of us have to recognize is that all of us own some of the responsibility for change, for the change that's all around us. It's really going to take all of us. We're going to all have to embrace change and be active learners because no matter what you want to change, there's something you don't know about it that you're going to have to learn. And we're also going to have to come to the conclusion that there's no one right answer. There's no right answer that already exists. We're going to have to co-create it, and that's why we're going to have to do the ABCs and affiliate, belong, and connect because we're going to have to co-create a lot of the answers. And a lot of the answers cannot not be known at the start of the journey. We really are at a turning point. And it really is change all around us. And so we have to decide what we're going to do about that change.
Quick Advice
Three quick pieces of advice. As you're thinking about change, we have to think holistically at the big picture. Because anytime you change one thing, it's going to impact something else. We also have to think about the strategic alliances that we're building all around us, and that involves, in this case, with a lot of the colleges and universities. There's so much going on in the conversation about higher ed today, and I know you're going to be addressing some of these issues.
And the third, we have to think intentionally about leadership strategies that work. Very few of us went to college to study leadership as a field. But there's a lot we can learn from other kinds of professions. Here is the main kicker: We have a vision for our profession that is way up here. We all believe in the children. Teach them well, let them lead the way. All that, big vision. But a lot of our reality is down here. So there is a gap between our vision and reality, and that's why it takes us.
We have to lead in that gap. That gap won't be closed without our leadership. And so if we want things to be different tomorrow, we have to do something today. Whatever we do today is going to be what tomorrow turns out to be. And again, remember, the goal is not just to talk, talk, talk. It's to figure out how we can act... how we can use our hands to get things done.
So the challenge we all have: How are we going to lead using our heads, our hearts, and our hands? How are we going to deal with the change all around us, knowing that there's nobody to do this work except us, and we are the leaders. And so I want to end with this question: If we're in an era of change, what can you do to make sure that every child and every educator will succeed? That's the question I want to leave with each and every one of you. Thank you very much for your attention.
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