Early Childhood Preparation Policy
Academic Requirements:
Arizona requires early childhood education candidates to have a bachelor's degree and complete a preparation program in early childhood education or complete 37 hours of coursework in early childhood education. The state also requires passage of the Arizona Educator Proficiency Assessment (AEPA) in Early Childhood Education as well as a pedagogy test.
However, new legislation in Arizona allows candidates to demonstrate subject-matter knowledge with a bachelor's degree or higher in early childhood education or passage of the test above.
Due to Arizona's strong policies in this area, no recommendations are provided.
Arizona recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis. The state also indicated that proposed amendments to state board rules are currently being considered by the board.
The available research finds mixed results on whether having at least a bachelor's degree makes preschool teachers more effective.[1] However, these conflicting results may be more indicative of the fact that current training programs that certify teachers to teach preschool (and often cover a wide span of elementary grades as well) pay too little attention to the requirements for teaching preschool. Despite the inconclusive research, the National Academies of Sciences, the National Institute for Early Education Research, and a number of other organizations support requiring at least a bachelor's degree for preschool teachers for several reasons.[2] These reasons include that teaching preschool should be considered a career as important and complex as teaching K-12 classes, and so this role is deserving of the same educational requirements; this degree requirement would create greater consistency between the preschool and K-12 workforces; and preschool teachers would benefit from a foundation in liberal arts coursework that gives them a firm grounding in a range of content that they will teach, much like what elementary teachers need.
However, to make a training program meaningful, it needs to be narrowly targeted to the early childhood grades. As the grade span of a teaching certification broadens, training programs are less likely to provide the specific emergent literacy and oral language skills that preschool teachers need. [3] To support this focus and to make training for teachers more meaningful, the state should require that preschool teachers have a specialization in early childhood (rather than, for example, a bachelor's degree in K-6 teaching), or can demonstrate that they have the knowledge needed to teach early childhood.