Page 3 - Gateways for Early Educators

Gateways for Early Educators
2016
Executive Summary
The Gateways for Early EducatorsTM Program (Gateways) is a coaching and professional development program which offers diverse and individualized pathways to professional development for all adults interested in early childhood education. This comprehensive and multi-faceted program launched in 2010 and received funding through First 5 LA and Los Angeles Universal Preschool from 2011 to 2016. These services are offered through 7 community-based organizations in Los Angeles County called Resource and Referral agencies (3 additional agencies provide referrals and other supports as well). The program offers three main components to licensed family child care providers, center-based staff, and license-exempt caregivers (those who care for children legally without a license):
 Comprehensive training program that exists countywide in Los Angeles and was developed to align with the areas of the California Preschool Learning Foundations.
 Individualized coaching to support early childhood educators in their career development pathways.
 Individualized coaching to support early childhood educators in increasing the quality of their child care environment.
For a subset of participants, coaching services were conducted in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Office of Child Care (LACOCC), and were focused on assisting early childhood educators to improve scores from initial assessments and to achieve higher quality ratings. The Gateways for Early Educators Program provided the “improvement” component and the LACOCC offered the “rating” component in this Los Angeles County Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS).
The typical core participant receiving coaching during 2015-2016 has some college education, is Latino, has 13 years of experience in the field and 8.9 years of experience in their position at the time of enrollment in the program. However, there was a great deal of variability across groups (center-based, family child care, and exempt care). Family child care providers tended to stay in their current position slightly longer (9.7 years) than center-based staff (8.4years) but center-based staff had more experience (15.5 years) in the field than family child care providers (13.1 years). License-exempt providers tended to have the least amount of experience (3.4 years in their current position and 10.4 years in the field). Given that center-based staff have the ability to change positions either at a new location or within the same location, while family child care providers have their position in their own home, it is understandable that there was greater longevity in the current position for family child care providers than for center-based staff. The lack of longevity in the current position of license-exempt providers may be explained by various factors including not perceiving their current
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