Op-Ed: Attitude Adjustment: Early Education Edition By Eileen J. Rakhunov, J.D., EdD

Eileen J. Rakhunov, J.D., EdD., wrote this Op-Ed. The opinions and research mentioned in the article are her own and do not represent the website’s overall stance:

Let me be direct with you.

The people responsible for the cognitive, social, and emotional development of our youngest children are being paid poverty wages, locked out of credential pathways they cannot afford, and dismissed by policy, by culture, and by the very systems that claim to support them as babysitters.

That ends here.

This think tank was founded on a premise I have spent my career proving true: the people most directly involved in early childhood education are too often the last ones consulted when policy decisions about early childhood education are made. I say that as someone who has stood on every side of this issue. I am a Massachusetts-licensed attorney. I am a Doctor of Education. I am a former childcare center owner and director who spent nearly a decade in the rooms we are talking about before earning the credentials to speak about them in policy spaces. I have managed licensing inspections. I have watched talented, expert, devoted educators walk out of classrooms they loved because the conditions made staying economically irrational. And I have spent two years researching exactly why that happens and exactly what it will take to stop it.

So let me tell you what an early childhood educator actually is.

She is a teacher. She is a child development specialist, a curriculum designer, a behavioral support professional, a developmental screener, and a family advocate, sometimes all before 9 AM. She is documenting state compliance in real time while simultaneously managing a classroom of children who depend on her for their safety, their relationships, and their earliest experience of what learning feels like. She is doing this with expertise that took years to develop and a credential pathway that would exhaust anyone carrying a full-time job, zero schedule flexibility, and rent due on Friday.

She is not a babysitter.

Researchers Bezaire and Johnston have a precise name for what she experiences: "under-minding." It is the institutional suppression of professional self-concept, the systematic reframing of rigorous early childhood expertise as maternal instinct rather than developed knowledge. As if building secure attachments, scaffolding language acquisition, and supporting a child through a behavioral crisis were things that happen naturally rather than things that require training, study, and sustained professional judgment.

The numbers make the cost of that attitude concrete.

Massachusetts early childhood educators are 4.9 times more likely to live in poverty than K-8 teachers. Thirty-eight percent receive SNAP or TANF benefits. Turnover runs nearly four times higher than elementary school teachers, not because educators lack commitment, but because staying is economically irrational for anyone with credentials sufficient to leave. The Commonwealth has committed $1.56 billion to early education in FY25, and attrition is still winning.

The reason is straightforward: you cannot fund your way out of a culture problem.

One of the educators in my research described being unable to make a doctor's appointment because calling out would break required child-to-staff ratios. She could not leave at shift's end without a confirmed replacement. She could not pursue her next credential because the coursework required assumed she had weekday mornings free. The system demanded her expertise and penalized her for needing a life alongside it.

Another educator said something I have not stopped thinking about since she said it: "If we don't see ourselves as professionals, how is anybody else going to look at us that way?"

That is the attitude adjustment.

It is not only a cultural shift, though we need that urgently. It is a structural one. My research identified three conditions that must change simultaneously, because they reinforce each other and they collapse together: professional recognition, credentialing pathways designed for real people's real lives, and compensation that signals materially that this work has value.

On pathways: Neighborhood Villages, right here in Massachusetts, operates a registered apprenticeship program that produced 83 percent retention and 72 percent compensation increases at no cost to participating educators. The argument that earn-and-learn models compromise professional quality is not supported by evidence. It is supported by assumption. And that assumption is exactly the attitude this field needs to correct.

On compensation: the funding exists. The C3 grant is permanent at $475 million annually. The capital is in the system. The failure is in how it is conditioned, or rather how it is not. Funding without wage floors, credential advancement requirements, and equity access provisions is not reform. It is a delay with better branding. Senate Bill S.346 would establish the commission that begins to change the conditions, not just the dollar amounts. That bill needs organized, coalition-backed pressure built on the voices of the educators themselves.

Here is what my research proved that the field has long suspected: when early educator testimony is structured as evidence, policy audiences receive it as evidence. One hundred percent of stakeholders in my study found educator voices credible and analytically authoritative. The credibility of the practitioner voice is not the obstacle. The absence of infrastructure to deliver it is.

That is the work.

This think tank exists because the people closest to young children deserve to be at the center of conversations about them. My research, my law practice, and my years in these classrooms all point to the same conclusion. Early education is education. Early educators are professionals. Their voices belong at the table where decisions are made, not as a courtesy, but as a requirement.

The attitude adjustment is overdue. And the people who do this work every day are more than ready to lead it.

Eileen J. Rakhunov, J.D., EdD is a Massachusetts attorney, former early childhood center director, and education researcher. Her doctoral dissertation,Elevating the Authentic Voice of Early Childhood Educators (Northeastern University, 2026), examined the factors shaping professional identity, credentialing access, and compensation equity in Massachusetts early childhood education. She advocates as Dr. Law Edvocate at the intersection of classroom practice, research, and public policy.