Leadership in Early Education: Connections to Teacher Turnover Intentions and Wellbeing in a System-wide Survey

• In Event: Nurturing Early Childhood Teacher Well-being and Teaching Quality Through Essential Organizational Conditions and Leadership

Abstract

High-quality early care and education (ECE) experiences can boost children’s school readiness and support their lifelong wellbeing; but much of the available ECE in the United States is not of sufficient quality to produce developmental benefits. Typically, efforts to improve ECE quality focus on teachers; however there is a growing interest in the role of ECE leaders, including principals, child care directors, and Head Start directors in fostering large-scale quality improvements.

ECE leaders influence teachers’ experiences in a variety of ways: they set instructional expectations, provide professional supports, shape program climate, and make budget and staffing decisions (IOM, 2015; McCormick Center, nd). They set the parameters for teachers’ work and create an organizational culture that can promote or prevent high-quality caregiving and professional learning.

Despite growing interest in the role of ECE leaders in creating high-quality ECE, there is little empirical evidence linking leadership practices to teacher outcomes that matter for children’s development such as teacher turnover (Tran & Winsler, 2011), wellbeing, and interactions with children (Hamre, 2014). One exception is recent work validating a new tool to measure organizational constructs in ECE, the Early Education Essentials, which showed that teachers’ report of leadership was linked to the quality of teacher-child interactions as measured by the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008). Understanding more fully how leadership relates to teacher outcomes is essential for identifying next steps for leveraging leaders to improve ECE quality.

This study fills this gap using novel data from the Study of Early Education (SEE). In the fall of 2018, SEE surveyed every director, teacher, and assistant teacher working with children from age 0-5 in publicly-funded ECE programs (including state pre-k, Head Start, and private centers receiving child care subsidies) in 2 large counties in the southeast. Response rates were over 80% (N~1000 teachers, N~170 programs), substantially higher than usual for ECE survey research (40%, Russel et. al., 2010). SEE is a large-scale workforce survey that asks teachers about their classroom practice, professional development, program leadership, and general wellbeing.

For this study we use teachers’ report of program leadership as measured by the Effective Leaders scales from the Early Education Essentials measurement tool, as well as 2 items assessing turnover intentions, 3 items assessing job satisfaction, and a 7-item version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale.

We regress turnover and wellbeing outcomes on both the overall Effective Leadership scale and its four subscales, as well as a set of program and teacher-level covariates (Table 1). We find consistent associations between leadership and all outcomes. Associations are modest to large in size, ranging from 0.06-0.18
(Table 2). By January 2021, we will link SEE surveys to CLASS scores and observed turnover.

These data will provide a more comprehensive picture than available to date of the role of ECE leadership in supporting teacher retention, teacher wellbeing, and teacher practice across a diverse set of ECE types, illuminating new ways to support teachers in creating the kinds of high-quality experiences all young children deserve.

Group Authors

Anna J. Markowitz, PhD, University of California Los Angeles; and Daphna Bassok, PhD, University of Virginia

Authors

• Anna Markowitz, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Daphna Bassok, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author