Early Childhood Preparation Policy
Academic Requirements:
Louisiana requires early childhood education candidates to earn a bachelor's degree, and Birth-K candidates are required to complete 30 semester hours in a birth to kindergarten focus area. They also are required to complete an additional 24 hours of coursework covering early learners and pedagogy. The state's PreK-3 candidates are required to complete 27 semester hours of coursework covering early learners, the early learning environment, and nursery school and kindergarten coursework.
Due to Louisiana's strong policies in this area, no recommendations are provided.
Louisiana recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis. The state also indicated that it requires lead teachers in publicly funded early
child care centers to hold an early childhood ancillary teaching certificate. See Bulletin 746 for additional information.
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.