EDUC 8854 Dynamics of Early Childhood Policies and Systems

Dear Colleagues at Walden,

As I mentioned it already, it is a pleasure to share another portion of this journey with you. I am looking forward for the opportunity to continue collaborating with you on this endeavor. For this purpose, I would like to share with you in this first posting the essence of the problem we (hundreds of Early Childhood educators in my district including me) are facing. My school district, the third largest in the nation, is conducting a merge of the federal Head Start (HS) program with the local Preschool program which is named Preschool For All (PFA). The fusion has been implemented in the k-8 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system. As part of this integration, CPS turned several PFA‘s preschool programs into Head Start Programs. CPS also created several new Head Start preschool classrooms within the public elementary school system. Since I have the required credentials to teach preschool, I was asked to serve this new preschool class in our school. I taught Kindergarten for almost a decade and since I was working on my doctoral degree on EC, I thought (and continue thinking) that it was a great opportunity for me to improve my teaching practice and educational impact on my community of practice.

The problem is that Head Start is a massive bureaucratic system that includes subsystems from various diverse areas such as health, nutrition, and social work. CPS is another massive bureaucratic system that also has a voluminous administrative apparatus. CPS hired us as teachers for their system and we must follow all their directives, procedures and policies. Head Start pays our salaries and administers our preschool programs and we also must follow all their directives, procedures and policies. CPS’ Office of Early Childhood Education (OECE) is in charge of overseeing and managing the merge and guess what? They also have their own administrative apparatus, curriculum and system and we must also follow all their directives, procedures and policies. As you may guess it is an administrative nightmare which includes; fragmentations, constant miscommunications, power struggles, repetitions of processes, redundancies and a myriad of supervisors in our classrooms telling us what to do for each one of their departments.

As you may infer, all these dissonant systems are creating a tremendous pressure on the educators and consuming invaluable resources that may be used to improve our educational system and practice. For the purpose of this assignment, I articulated three goals that might assist me in becoming more effective;

1)     Develop a vision of what systems ought to be. Obtaining an essential understanding of what systems are and/or should be will help me to navigate and understand the above mentioned early childhood systems.

2)     Identifying best practices for achieving this vision. In enhancing my systematic awareness it is necessary to learn about research-based best practices for developing and implementing optimal systems. Research may help me to understand what are the major issues affecting this type of merging and what solutions have been effectively implemented in similar situations.

3)     Develop a system approach that would enhance the delivery of services and teaching effectiveness under the current fusion in my school district.

Throughout the Course Project and research and I will further elaborate on the subject in the following weeks and assignments. Thanks for your time and attention!