NLU Alumni Magazine
that was the case for her, too. Like the others, she learned on the job at her center, the Creative Learning Center, in a sink-or-swim fashion. But she knew it made sense to develop training and best practices for brand-new administrators, so that others who followed wouldn’t have to figure it out from scratch. “It fueled my passion for my life’s work,” she said. “When I went for my doctorate, I wanted
to create resources for early childhood administrators to help them in their roles.”
of early childhood centers; evaluation work, which grew
out of an Illinois grant to assess child care programs; research on, for example, the outcomes of different training models and lastly, policy and public awareness. “We want to increase the public’s understanding of the importance of leadership in early childhood programs,” Bloom said. “And we want to provide early childhood practitioners with standards and support for quality programming.” The McCormick Center’s audience started with center-based early childhood administrators, but it expanded to family- and school- based administrators, as well as people who support those administrators, college instructors and organizational consultants. “On the national scene, we support policies that professionalize the field,” Bloom said. Today, the McCormick Center provides a national director credential for early childhood directors; online training to help directors assess their business administration and/or program administration; workshops, presentations and webinars and a national conference for early childhood excellence. Science, economics have validated importance of early childhood Now that she’s retiring, Bloom has had an opportunity to go through files and see how little improvements from year to year have added up
From a $600 grant to major gifts
Bloom ran a lab school while an instructor at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. from 1981 to 1984. She also finished her Ph.D at Stanford University that year and started as an assistant professor at National Louis University (then called National College of Education). “Here was another dream opportunity to develop and implement a field-based program in early childhood leadership and advocacy,” she said. Besides the teaching, she founded an early childhood professional development center in 1985 with a $600 grant. She kept on getting grants, and in 1993, her passion for providing strong management skills to early childhood directors struck a chord with Denise Carter-Blank of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. That led to a collaboration on what today is known as the McCormick Center for Early Childhood Leadership.
From Paula Jorde Bloom, The McCormick Center
“Paula took charge of change and created the highest quality Early Childhood Education leadership and management practices in the country” — Sue Bredekamp, former Director of Professional Development and Accreditation at National Association for the Education of Young Children in Washington, D.C.
In 2004, grants from the McCormick Foundation and the Michael W. Louis Family Foundation established an endowment for the center.
The center focuses on four things: training and coaching programs, which include books and tools to assess the business practices
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