Questioning the equitable well-being of BIPOC ECE professionals in head start

• Video-cued multivocal ethnography highlights Head Start teachers' experiences and counternarratives. • Women of color teachers in ECEC endure and expend considerable physical, intellectual, and emotional labor in culturally appropriate ways among increasing standardization. • Such added labor was not demonstrated within the white community in this study. • This extra labor strains an already taxed workforce and impacts teachers’ wellbeing. • Policy and practice changes can strengthen the workforce by centering the brilliance of BIPOC educators. Racialized disparities remain alive and well in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC). This article uses concepts of justice and wellness to examine the impact of increasingly standardized ECEC approaches, including the field's growing reliance on QRIS (Quality Rating Improvement System) on women of color. Drawing from a four-site ethnographic study of Head Start policy making and negotiation, we examined wellness and justice as crucial concerns among the Head Start workforce. Critical intersectional and transnational feminist labor theory frames our comparative analysis. It demonstrates that women of color must endure and expend considerable physical, intellectual, and emotional labor to combat increased standardization and ensure children's thriving and survivance. However, this degree of labor expenditure was not demonstrated within the white community. Addressing the field's adherence to large- scale commercialized curricula and quality rating systems, we offer concrete steps forward- including accounting for this inequity in policy language and, most importantly, increased pay for this unseen and unremunerated labor.