🔗 linkedin.com/in/ejrakhunov

Research Focus: Early Childhood Education Workforce • Public Policy • Compensation & Credentialing

“Elevating the Authentic Voice of Early Childhood Educators: A Clarion Call for Examining the Factors That Shape and Influence Perceptions of Early Educators as Professionals”

What research challenge did your dissertation address?

Early childhood educators do the foundational work of human development, yet in Massachusetts they’re 4.9 times more likely to live in poverty than K-8 teachers, and 38 percent rely on public assistance. My research confronts that contradiction by examining the structural conditions pushing experienced, committed educators out of the field: professional misrecognition, certification pathways that are inaccessible to the very workforce they’re meant to serve, and compensation that makes staying economically irrational. My central argument is that these aren’t three separate problems to solve in isolation; they’re one interconnected system. Reform efforts that tackle wages, credentialing, or funding in silos quietly undo each other’s progress.

What inspired you to pursue this research?

I didn’t come to this as an outside observer. I’ve lived inside this field for over two decades: first as an educator, then as a center owner, now as an executive school director. I’ve watched extraordinary teachers who changed children’s lives every day leave the profession because they couldn’t afford to stay. That loss isn’t abstract to me; it has faces and names. What crystallized the research was frustration with how educators are talked about, and talked over, in policy conversations, where their experience is treated as anecdote rather than evidence. As a practitioner-scholar holding an active law license, the state’s highest early education credential, and now a doctorate, I wanted to bridge academic theory with the daily lived reality of the workforce.

What did your research find, and what is its impact?

My two-cycle action research design built the research to create change, not just describe it. The intervention was a live workshop bringing educator testimony, framed analytically, before a statewide audience of policymakers, advocates, and researchers. The results were striking: 100 percent of participants came to treat educator experience as reliable systemic evidence rather than anecdote, and on the question of compensation as a policy priority, stakeholder alignment shifted from 44 percent to 100 percent in a single session. The impact is already extending into concrete policy action in Massachusetts, including advancing Senate Bill 346 toward a budget appropriation and reforming state regulations to enable earn-and-learn certification pathways, with a third research cycle planned to reach family childcare and English language learner educators who remain underrepresented in the research.

“These aren’t three separate problems to solve in isolation; they’re one interconnected system.”

Eileen Rakhunov

Full dissertation: https://link.ezproxy.neu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/elevating-authentic-voice-early-childhood/docview/3365388147/se-2?accountid=12826