Early care and education programs like Head Start provide a critical foundation for later achievement for children from vulnerable communities. Notably, recruiting and retaining bilingual teachers is an ongoing struggle for many Head Start agencies. Assistant teachers are more likely to be bilingual than their lead teacher counterparts (Jacoby, in press) and are important contributors to a workforce pipeline that diversifies staff. We conducted this qualitative study with 35 assistant teachers to understand how workplace attributes influence satisfaction and job retention in Head Start. Workplace attributes such as wages and support for professional education and those with symbolic value, such as the robustness of the program, both played an important role. We also found that the instrumental-symbolic framework demonstrated utility for understanding how workplace attributes might be leveraged to recruit and retain linguistically and culturally competent teaching staff.

诸如启蒙计划（Head Start）之类的早期护理和教育计划为弱势社区儿童的以后成就提供了重要基础。值得注意的是，对于许多Head Start机构而言，招募和保留双语教师是一项持续的斗争。助理教师比他们的主要教师（雅各比，印刷中）更倾向于双语，并且是使员工队伍多样化的劳动力队伍的重要贡献者。我们与35位助理老师一起进行了定性研究，以了解工作场所属性如何影响Head Start中的满意度和工作保留率。工作场所的属性，例如工资和对专业教育的支持，以及具有象征意义的属性，例如计划的稳健性，都发挥了重要作用。我们还发现工具符号框架 在了解如何利用工作场所的属性来招募和保留具有语言和文化能力的教学人员方面，具有显着的实用性。