Early Childhood Preparation Policy
Academic Requirements:
Nebraska requires candidates who are adding the early childhood endorsement to an existing K-6 license to complete "a minimum of 18 semester hours of coursework specific to early childhood education that address preschool and kindergarten."
The early childhood inclusive license requires "a minimum of 51 semester hours, including 39 semester hours of coursework in Early Childhood Education and Early Childhood Special Education for children birth through grade 3, and 12 additional semester hours of coursework in one area of concentration, either birth through kindergarten or age 3 through grade 3."
Candidates for either endorsement or license are required to pass the appropriate subject-matter assessments.
Require preschool teaching candidates to earn a bachelor's degree.
Teaching preschool is as important and complex as teaching K-12 classes; therefore, Nebraska should require a bachelor's degree for all preschool teachers. Doing so would result in greater consistency between the preschool and K-12 workforces. It would help ensure that preschool teachers can benefit from a foundation in liberal arts coursework that provides a firm grounding in a range of content, much like elementary teachers need.
Nebraska recognized the factual accuracy of this analysis and provided that it continues to disagree with NCTQ's analysis that does not recognize Nebraska's Guidelines to which all institutions are held accountable. The state further provided that based on the NCTQ standard, the criteria used, and the standards for acceptable documentation, Nebraska concedes that the analysis is factually accurate. The state also indicated that more information would be found in the Guidelines, which are not subject to NCTQ's review.
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.