Linda Smith: On Policy and Persistence

“There was no playbook for building a quality child care program when I entered the early learning field,” recalls Linda Smith, director of the Child Care Trust, a catalyst for designing the future of child care. As a young woman in the early 1970s, she studied child development at the University of Montana and spent a summer working in a tribal Head Start center during the early days of Head Start. Then an unexpected opportunity arose. “My husband took a job at the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and the tribe asked me to set up a child care program since I was the only person in many miles who had a degree related to the early childhood field. I was only in my twenties and new to the field,” she admits. “Still, the tribe trusted me, so I decided to figure out how to set a program up.”

Linda drew on her brief experience at Head Start as she set up a program at the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and went on to launch two more programs for the tribe. “One of the concepts I brought from Head Start was the importance of having parents participate in the program,” Linda says. “We expected them to come to parent-teacher meetings and take parenting classes at the center to better understand their children’s development and growth.” These were requirements that made a big impact on both the parents and the children, Linda points out. “I saw positive changes in the children as the parents became more engaged.”

Still, workforce issues remained a challenge, as she explains. “We were hiring people with no background or training in early learning, something we’re still doing in this country,” Linda says. And now, as then, it led to high turnover rates. “At one of the programs I ran, we received a grant from the Office of Indian Education, and we had to have an outside evaluation of the program. During the first year of the program, the evaluator said that ‘you have a higher turnover rate than a McDonald’s’ and we did,” Linda admits. So, she resolved to turn the program around. “By the second year of the program, the turnover rate went to zero because we gave the staff high-quality training.” And Linda brought this lesson to a new role at the Department of Defense (DOD) where she faced even greater roadblocks to building a quality program.

“My husband and I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and I found a job at a child care center on Williams Air Force Base,” Linda recalls. And she was shocked by what she saw on the first day that she walked into the center. “The program was in an old wooden building, and 30 to 40 children were in one room with no toys. There was a table, a chair in which a so-called ‘caregiver’ sat, and a TV mounted on the wall,” Linda says. She managed to fill some of the center’s dire gaps by getting toys, equipment and supplies. She rearranged the rooms and set up activity centers, but that didn’t solve her bigger problem. “The staff didn’t have any training and were there simply to supervise the children.”

As Linda searched for ways to train the base’s child care staff, she learned about a pilot program for the Child Development Associate® (CDA) Credential™ at Arizona State University. “I put all my educators in the program, even those who had college degrees, and within a year that center turned completely around to become a model program that drew a lot of attention. Soon, someone from Air Force Headquarters came to see it and asked me to take on a major command,” Linda recalls.

“My role would be to set up CDA® training at 18 Air Force bases and then I went on to set up CDA training for the Army, too. Finally, I moved into the Office of the Secretary of the Department of Defense as deputy director in the Office of Family Policy for Child Care and Youth. In this role, I guided my staff in implementing CDA training for educators throughout the entire DOD child care system and required all the educators to meet the CDA Competency Standards within two years.”

The DOD’s support for the CDA was a response to the passage of the Military Child Care Act of 1989 to ensure the availability, affordability and safety of child care on military installations. “One big champion of the act was former Senator Ted Kennedy, and he once asked me where he could go in the DOD to see a good child care program,” Linda says. “I had confidence in the program, and I told him anywhere he went in the DOD, he was going to see a good child care program. And after visiting some programs, I think he was impressed by what he saw.”

There were good reasons for the senator to be impressed. “By the end of the 1990s, 22,000 educators in over 800 child development programs at more than 300 installations worldwide had become competent. “All our programs had gained national accreditation, a number we still haven’t come close to across the country,” Linda says. “I credit the CDA for this achievement and it goes far to illustrate a point I’ve been making for a long time. The early learning field has a place for both credentials and degrees,” she explains. “Still, in this country we have yet to figure out the combination of formal education and competency-based training that will get the early learning field where it needs to go.”

Formal education alone won’t allow us to provide a competent early learning workforce nationwide, as Linda points out. “Professors don’t like to supervise students in the field, as I’ve heard from a lot of people in higher education, so students spend most of their time learning theory until doing some student teaching in their senior year. They need more real-life experience to work effectively in the classroom, and you can’t get that by reading a chapter in a book. Besides,” she adds, “many members of the early childhood field aren’t paid enough to afford the high cost of college tuition.”

At the same time, Linda doesn’t want to completely deride formal education, so she likes the way the CDA often inspires people to later pursue college degrees. “The CDA provides a structured pathway that opens doors for people to advance their careers,” she says. “Many people come into the early learning profession with no experience or training in the field, earn a CDA and go on to earn advanced degrees, like Dr. Calvin Moore, CEO of the Council for Professional Recognition.”

The CDA fills another need, as Linda has often pointed out. “In this country, we can’t yet define early childhood as a profession since we don’t have any widespread standards. We don’t police the standards we already have, and we don’t have any oversight on who’s in and out of the field. So, until we decide to fill these gaps, we face some serious roadblocks,” Linda says. “In the meanwhile, we can make the CDA the baseline for entry into the early childhood field and begin the process of building a profession.”

That’s a big challenge which requires systems change, an area where Linda has a great deal of expertise. After leaving the DOD in 2005, she became executive director of Child Care Aware of America. During her nine years in this role, she led a national nonprofit that supported over 800 state and local resource and referral agencies and managed subsidy programs for Americorps members, as well as the DOD off-base families. “A lot of our focus was on having the Child Care Development Block Grant provide basic training in child care programs, ensuring accountability for results and making the best use of the funding,” as Linda explains.

A lot of her work concerned policy and systems change, areas she continued to address in subsequent positions. For five years, Linda served as deputy assistant secretary for child development at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she managed early care and education policy for preschool development grants, Head Start programs and tribal home visiting, an area that’s captured her interest since her early days on the Cheyenne reservation. She continued to work on tribal child care issues after becoming director of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), where she also worked to get the business community involved in discussions over the wide child care gap that working families faced. “While I was at BPC,” she says, “we did 11 surveys of parents to try and figure out how parents make decisions about child care.”

Nobody was asking parents what they wanted and needed in child care, as Linda points out. “Still, everyone, whether policymakers, parents or members of the public, can now agree that families went educators to be competent,” Linda says. So, she supports the new partnership between Child Care Aware of America, the Child Care Trust and the Council. “The goal of the new venture,” she says, “is to put a CDA in every early childhood classroom across states nationwide by making CDA training more available and breaking down barriers that stop us from having thousands more CDAs.”

This is just part of the answer to building a strong child care system and it won’t happen overnight, as Linda insists. “The solution isn’t just more funding, stronger regulations or better wages for educators, all steps that have inspired wide discussion over the years. But there’s no easy fix, and I’ve continued looking for solutions throughout my career,” she says. So, it should come as no surprise that Linda’s favorite book is The Little Engine that Could, as she wryly reveals. It’s a children’s classic about a small engine that succeeds in slowly pulling a long train over a mountain while repeating the motto “I think I can.”

“Policies that support child care won’t come about overnight as I tell early childhood advocates and providers,” Linda says. “We have all the pieces, but we still don’t have a playbook for building quality child care programs, the challenge I faced when I entered the field at that Cheyenne reservation. So, we have to keep chugging along and decide how we’re going to deliver training to the child care workforce, what it’s going to cost and what issues we face in different states,” Linda says. She’s convinced that “persistence and collective effort,” like the new partnership to expand access to the CDA, can allow the early learning field to surmount a mountain of obstacles so all young learners have the trained, competent educators they need.