The Department of Public Policy brings you the Policy Talks Series as a way to engage critically with today's global and local issues. Our speakers range from policy practitioners and researchers to diplomats and agency leaders to NGO and social responsibility leaders. The events typically feature a lecture or panel discussion, followed by a Q&A session, and a reception where drinks and snacks will be offered.
Abstract:
Within the OECD, 36% of children ages 0 to 2 are enrolled in child care programs for an average of 32 hours per week. While access to child care is considered essential for parental employment, there is concern among researchers and policymakers that the early reliance on non-parental caregivers may have adverse consequences for children's health and development. Given that the provision of child care services is highly labor intensive, teachers play a central role in determining whether such services are of high quality and thus are beneficial for children. However, there are reasons to believe that today's child care workforce—like much of the broader teaching profession—is less qualified than it once was. This presentation will first use data from across the OECD to document the decline in child care teachers' skills over the past few decades. It will then explore both the implications of this de-skilling as well as a range of potential explanations for why it occurred. Finally, the presentation will identify promising public policy responses that could mitigate or even reverse the decline in teacher quality.
About the speaker
Chris M. Herbst is a Foundation Professor in the School of Public Affairs (SPA) and a faculty affiliate in the School Social Work in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions at Arizona State University, as well as a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. Previously, Dr. Herbst was a Visiting Scholar in the School of Public Policy at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) and a Fulbright Fellow at Aalborg University (Denmark).
Dr. Herbst's research focuses on the economics of child care and early childhood education, early human capital formation, and social safety net policy. His work studies the impact of policy on the well-being of children and parents, examining its effect on female employment, health trajectories, and children's cognitive and behavioral development using theoretical and methodological tools from economics and developmental psychology. His work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed outlets, including the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Journal of Urban Economics, Educational Researcher, and Early Childhood Research Quarterly and has been funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation, NIH, and other institutions.
This work has been featured in major news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, TIME, and Bloomberg. Dr. Herbst has also spoken about child care and early education as a guest on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show and The Indicator as well as Shankar Vedantam's Hidden Brain and KJZZ's The Show.