The main lesson of the American experience is not to bundle functions but to separate them. The bodies that write standards, accredit, certify and lobby are different bodies.
In the American system, the functions bearing on preschool quality are separated deliberately. Licensing is a state competence, setting minimum health and safety requirements. Writing programme standards is the work of NAEYC, a professional membership body of educators. Certifying individual practitioners belongs to a separate organisation, the Council for Professional Recognition. Rating sits with state QRIS. Funding sits with the federal CCDF. And defending the interests of private kindergarten owners is the work of trade bodies such as the Early Care & Education Consortium.
On that last point there is a specific fact worth noting. The Early Care & Education Consortium is a non-profit alliance of the largest multi-state child care networks in the US; its members’ programmes number over 9,000 across all 50 states. But ECEC does not set standards for its own members and does not accredit them. Instead it points to three external quality measures: state licensing standards, the state’s QRIS rating, and accreditation by a nationally or internationally recognised professional body. ECEC itself does policy advocacy, bill endorsements and workforce initiatives.
The reason for this separation is not accidental. When an association of kindergarten owners accredits its own dues-paying members, that is self-certification. American trade bodies resolve the problem by pointing to a third-party accreditor. It is also the source of NAEYC’s credibility: it is a body of educators rather than owners, it accredits both members and non-members against a published standard, and it handed individual certification to a separate body.
A practical recommendation for the Kazakhstani context. Given that mandatory licensing for all kindergartens arrives in 2027, designing the association’s standard as a voluntary tier above the licence — rather than a substitute for it — fits the logic of the system. Over the longer term, two structural choices matter for the association’s credibility: building an element of independence from member-owner control into the governance of the standards and accreditation function, and assessing whether certification of individual teachers should sit in a separate entity.
