Linking professional development to classroom quality: Differences by ECE sector

Abstract

Public investments in professional development (PD) as a key strategy to improve the quality of early care and education (ECE) are large and growing, yet little is known about whether PD for early educators is linked to quality, either outside of experimental contexts or across the various sectors in which children are served. We use data from a community sample of early educators working in state pre-k and child care to document the amount of PD teachers received in two content areas and to test for links between PD and teacher-child interaction quality both overall and by sector. We found that state pre-k teachers accessed more PD than those in child care. Moreover, using OLS models with a lagged measures of teacher-child interaction quality, we found that PD was positively linked to teacher-child interactions only among state pre-k teachers. Implications for research and policy are discussed.