Reply to DC now requiring day care workers to have college degrees

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "DC now requiring day care workers to have college degrees "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What exactly does D.C. hope to accomplish with this new requirement?[/quote]

To make kids safer and better cared-for?

Seems pretty obvious [/quote]

Except having a teacher with a degree doesn't make a kid any safer or better cared for.  If we were talking about CPR training or some other training specifically tied to the job you might have a point, but a degree (which could be in something wholly unrelated to childcare/early education) doesn't provide that.

I would much rather have a 50-year old with years of experience caring for kids (her own and others in a professional capacity) than a 22-yr old who happens to have a degree.[/quote]

I don't like creeping credentialism either but isn't the degree in child development / early education?

otherwise yes it's totally insane.

What DC should do is form a partnership with UDC, AU, Trinity, Catholic etc-subsidize this degree and have a 'payback requirement'. IE loan forgiveness for working two years in a DC daycare facility. This type of set up is common for school teachers. They should also grandfather current workers so they have time to do this, subsidize daycare for their kids while they do this, and of course expect salaries to rise and address the impact of that. Last, they should have a non-traditional route that accounts for those who have proven or can prove they have the skillset in other ways. Teachers have hated creeping credentialing as it has inadvertently kept as many good people out as in, and that should not be the result here.[/quote]

I understand the need for some level of training and education, but the CDA and associate degrees exist, and I'd like to know why those aren't adequate.  [/quote]

Well an associate's degree is a college degree, and is what DC is now requiring. Assistants have to have CDAs.

I'm a director and honestly (and generally), [b]there is a HUGE difference in the quality of care given by degree holding caregivers vs. non degree caregivers. And this just happened a few minutes ago: a CDA-holding assistant teacher at my center was asked to take an online training on SIDS. There was a simple 7 question quiz at the end, requiring a minimum score of 60% to pass. After 4 tries, she still had not passed so I sat down with her and reviewed the material and helped her take the test. 
[/b]
I thought this article was very enlightening:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/16/the-famous-word-gap-doesnt-hurt-only-the-young-it-affects-many-educators-too/?utm_term=.c6f19ce2321d[/quote]
LOL.
Again, how does that affect her ability to take care of babies/infants?
Uneducated women have been taking care/raising kids from the beginning of time.[/quote]

Well, one of the questions on the quiz was regarding tummy time. She thought that tummy time meant putting a child to sleep on it's tummy as long as the child was supervised from time to time. So you drop your infant off, ask her to do tummy time with your child. Then be surprised when your kid who you put to sleep on her back suffocates in her crib at day care. Kids are at higher risk for dying from "SIDS" at daycare than they are at home, and one reason is that babies who are normally put to sleep on their backs at home then put on their stomachs at daycare are at higher risk.

Look, this person I'm talking about is wonderful with children. She really is. But do not pretend that her functional illiteracy does not impact her ability to do some child related tasks. [/quote]

I'm sure that there's a correlation between people who are able to get Associate's degree, and their literacy and degree of factual knowledge about childcare.  I also agree that all childcare workers need to have a degree of training about essential safety (eg tummy time).  But that training has to be in a form that they can learn from -- there's no reason to think that a 7-question online quiz is the way to do it.  Yes, in an ideal world all of our daycare workers would be Mary Poppins with PhDs in child development.  But we're in a world where we pay minimum wage for childcare workers, so we need to be able to train and supervise them without requiring college degrees.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics