In 2010, a young woman walked into my office at the childcare center I directed in Arizona. She was nervous. She didn’t have experience in early childhood education. She just needed a job.

In most centers, that’s where the story would end. Instead, I offered her a working interview — two observational hours in an infant classroom. When she came back into my office, she was beaming. “I love this,” she told me. “Just give me a chance. I’ll learn.”

Her name is Lindsay. Fifteen years later, she’s still teaching.

Seeing the Educator

Lindsay’s story isn’t just about passion or perseverance; it’s about support. We made a deliberate choice — over and over again — to see her as a whole person first and an employee second. We figured out scheduling so she could get her Child Development Associate (CDA) credential. We found coverage when she needed practicum hours elsewhere. I wasn’t there for every step of Lindsay’s journey that followed, but she and I have stayed in touch throughout all these years. She earned her associate’s degree and then her bachelor’s degree; she grew from part-time infant teacher to lead teacher to program coordinator.

Lindsay’s story shows us what happens when an educator is truly seen — something our field has yet to get right. What gets overlooked most in conversations about the quality of early childhood education is that educators are engineers. Every learning opportunity a young child experiences is designed, built and brought to life by a teacher. There is no curriculum three-year-olds activate for themselves. Every moment of discovery, every language-rich exchange and every carefully scaffolded small group experience is built by someone. A teacher looks at a group of children, weighs their individual needs, considers the family’s hopes, aligns these needs and hopes to learning objectives and makes a decision about what to put in front of those kids at that moment. And they do this all day long.

These educators sit at the nexus of everyone’s expectations — the school’s, the family’s, the child’s — and constantly make consequential decisions on behalf of all of them. How well they make those decisions depends on how well we support them. And right now, we are falling short.

New research shows what becomes possible when we get this right. A multiyear randomized controlled trial conducted by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University examined 125 preschool classrooms across public and private settings over three school years. When teachers worked within a connected ecosystem of curriculum, assessment and live professional learning, teacher retention rates increased by 23 percentage points. In turn, children in those classrooms demonstrated gains in social-emotional, language, and math skills, according to the GOLD assessment. Educators reported higher personal accomplishment and lower fatigue, not because the work got easier but because they felt genuinely equipped to do it well.

Teaching young children is weighty work, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t done it. But there is a profound difference between the exhaustion of doing hard work well and the burnout of doing hard work alone, unsupported and without feedback or the necessary tools. The first is sustainable. The second is what’s driving teachers out of the profession.

Our field is philosophically built on the science of the whole child — the idea that social, emotional, cognitive and relational development are all deeply interconnected. And yet the systems we’ve built to support the adults in our classrooms are fragmented, episodic and too often driven by compliance. A one-day training here. An on-demand module there. A checklist where a lifeline should be.

What drove the study’s results wasn’t any single tool; it was coherence. Curriculum, assessment, coaching and both on-demand and live professional learning operated as an integrated system.

I’ve seen up close what the absence of that looks like. During a recent site visit, I walked into a classroom where a beautifully designed curriculum sat on the shelf, spine uncracked. The teacher was running circle time from a bag of worn printables she’d been reusing for years. When I pulled the curriculum down and opened it with her, her face lit up. She had no idea. Nobody had ever shown her, told her she was expected to use it or checked in to see whether she had. That pattern is everywhere. Leaders make good decisions about what to invest in and then underinvest in making sure those tools are actually used and used well.

The Policy Choice

For policymakers expanding access to early childhood care and education right now, the central policy question is not just what to fund, but how to design systems that enable educators to succeed. Funding curriculum adoption without funding the professional learning infrastructure that makes it sustainable leaves impact on the table. We must invest in the connective tissue — the coaching, the feedback loops and the live and sustained support — that moves the needle. And we have proved that live, sustained support can be delivered very effectively in a virtual model. It’s scalable.

For district and program leaders: Start with an honest audit. Are curriculum, assessment, coaching and professional development working in concert? Are teachers receiving consistent, specific feedback on their practice? Those are the gaps where good teachers lose their footing — and where people like Lindsay either take root or walk away.

Lindsay didn’t stay because the system worked; she stayed because someone made it work for her. But we cannot build a workforce on heroic individual efforts alone. We need systems designed to see educators fully — their potential, their development and the weight of what they carry every day.

We’re a field that talks about whole children. It’s time we design systems that support the whole educator. The evidence is there. Now we need to act on it.