Hello! I am wearing a couple of hats these days. On Saturdays, I conduct child care provider training for Virginia’s Community College Workforce Alliance and during the week I engage in coursework toward the completion of my doctorate degree in Measurement and Assessment. As a trainer, I am very interested to know if the hours I spend on the weekends working with these preschool teachers and day care providers really translate into better care for the little people who work with them during the week. Is all that money the government is giving me to teach actually resulting in happier, healthier children? The participants’ evaluations of my training sessions all say that they learned something that they can use in their classrooms on Monday, but how do we know that we are getting the most bang for our buck? The Perry study and other research on the ROI of preschool says that for every dollar spent on quality care, we may save seven dollars down the road on reduced court costs, remedial classes, and medical care. How can I roll this research that documents investing in the children into a meaningful statement about investing in their teachers? I believe the link is there, but I’d love your advice on how to best present a convincing argument that investing in the teachers is the best way to get the most return on our investment in our future citizens.

Since psychologists have been saying for decades now that each generation is getting more neurotic than the one before, and I think we can all see that that is true, what you are doing on the weekend is extremely important. If you want to read tons of studies related to the ROI of investing in teacher training, take a look at the Journal of Individual Psychology.