1. The first was the dawning understanding that children were not in fact tiny adults nor blank slates, but instead led vibrant, unique mental and emotional lives that required special cultivation; early pioneers like Maria Montessori helped lead this revolution.
2. The second transformation was grasping that child development was inherently and inextricably connected to relationships with their caregivers; here, we can thank researchers like Harry Harlow, Jean Piaget, Peter Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.
3. The third paradigm shift was connecting the dots between child development, brain science and future life outcomes; still-active names like Jack Shonkoff, James Heckman and Patricia Kuhl are among the many deserving of accolades here.

Now, in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, we face a fourth turning: an opportunity to center early learning as the core of a family support agenda that ensures all children, regardless of zip code or anything else, have an opportunity to thrive.

There are some serious crossroads facing the field right now:

• Will we continue marching the K-12 system backward — universal pre-K for toddlers? — or flip and go with a birth-to-five developmental approach?
• What do efforts like mean for the next generation of would-be early childhood educators?
• How does an early learning sector that has studiously avoided partisan politics advance an agenda in a hyper-partisan world?

The way to answer all of these questions is by starting with a set of transcendent principles. As I detailed in of this series, we have in some ways lost the forest for the trees: we have forgotten that child development is a constant interplay, almost a dance, between child and environmental stimulus. The realities of brain development demand that the family, not the child (though certainly inclusive of the child!), be the core of early childhood policymaking. Shonkoff himself recently when asked on a podcast about what lessons we should take away from the current crisis:

“We absolutely have to pay attention to the needs of families who need extra support, who don’t have the reserves or the resources themselves — it’s an absolute imperative certainly for the well-being of the children. Give families security and stability, and they will provide a protective and safe environment for their children.

…Fast forward, at some point we’ll go back, and we will know that everybody with young kids is doing the best they can to raise healthy kids, and we all depend on that as a society. And some people are struggling more because they have less money, they have less education, they have less economic opportunity. We all benefit if we all take care of each other and do our job, and we all suffer, and we all pay a price if we don’t take care of each other and share the responsibility. I’d love that lesson to come out of this pandemic.”

What might a new north star for early childhood look like? Well, what if we substituted the old goal from the National Education Goals Panel — “All children in America will start school ready to learn” — with a very different goal that better reaches, and indeed surpasses, the same destination? Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, former Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, about how our Northern European peers instead focus on family support:

“Consider, in contrast, the mission of the Danish childcare system, which is similar to most of the state systems in Northern Europe:

‘Danish child and family policy is based on the overall principle that the family is the foundation of a child’s upbringing and that the living conditions of children are mainly the responsibility of their parents. Public authorities have an overall responsibility for providing a good social framework and for providing the best possible conditions for families with children. In addition, public authorities must protect children and young people against abuse and neglect, and they must offer advice and guidance to parents so that the parents will be able to meet their parental obligations and responsibilities.’”

Providing the best possible conditions for families with children — that’s the fourth turning, the new era ahead. It’s a mission statement that synthesizes everything we know about child development, as well as providing a ‘third way’ that confounds old binary ways of thinking.

Take the question of whether it’s better to have formal or informal child care, as I covered in Part III. If you want to provide the best possible conditions for families with children, the policy response is to ensure all settings are high-quality and give parents the means to choose what works best for their needs and preferences. Passing critical questions through this new prism has real implications. For instance, overly focusing on 4-year-olds to the detriment of infants and toddlers fails the family support test, as does continuing to have a fragile child care system with horrifyingly underpaid educators, and a lack of direct income supports for families with children.

Establishing the best possible conditions also demands that early learning stakeholders engage in coalitional work with groups they have historically not been aligned with. Take housing, for instance. Unstable and substandard housing are tremendous , to say nothing of environmental toxins. Getting all low-income children into adequate, stable housing could arguably have more of an impact on school readiness than advancing all child care programs up a star-rating level (although these are not, nor should they be seen as, mutually exclusive!). A similar case can be made . And these other sectors could certainly use the infusion of passion and talent and moral valence that comes along with young children and families.

The future of early learning will be written in the future of families. That future, at the moment, is unfortunately one filled with , , and ultimately . If the early learning field can step back and position itself as the essential partner for families, the horizon brightens considerably. We have the science. We have the moral high ground. We have a moment right now when gratitude for caregivers is perhaps higher than it has ever been. Now is the time to pivot away from parochial concerns and incrementalism. The field needs to coalesce around a bold, comprehension, long-run vision — one that is truly universal in nature.

Political scientist John Kingdon coined his “” theory of change back in 1984, and it still rings true today. Kingdon posited that a window of opportunity opens when three “streams” align: a broadly agreed-upon problem; a political context in which leaders feel comfortable acting; and effective policy alternatives to the status quo.

Well, our window is open, and our previous policies lay shattered like glass beneath it: the question remains what policies we will advance, and what future we find on the other side. If we center on families, that future is limitless.

The truth is that the vast majority are cared for in informal settings, ranging from parental care to relatives to small home-based family child cares. Given this tremendous diversity of early learning settings, it’s important to ask when designing a system: is one setting better than another? The short answer, research tells us, is no. Quality can exist in any setting, and indeed quality matters far more than setting — but that’s not how our early learning policies treat things.

Quality in early learning is driven primarily by the warmth and intentionality of interactions between caregiver and child. These interactions are setting agnostic; a child’s brain does not know the difference. The authors of the National Research Council’s blue-ribbon report, “,” put it this way: “All [informal and formal] settings and interactions offer the potential to support healthy development and early learning, and children can meet developmentally informed expectations for early learning when they are immersed in high-quality environments with professionals who are promoting their progress and working in positive ways with their families.”

That said, there is little question that policymakers — and many advocates—prefer formal settings. The implies that all 4-year-olds should be in some type of formal early learning setting. The desire for early childhood educators to is similarly preferential to formal programs.

Consequences from these leanings already exist: for instance, as the nation has lost over the past 15 years, policymakers have done essentially nothing, instead pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Preschool Development Grant programs. Parental care, grandparent care, neighbor care — these settings are barely a blip on policymakers’ radar.

There is some logic behind this. Formal settings are easier to regulate and monitor, whereas it can be difficult to even identify who is providing informal care. Moreover, although all settings offer the opportunity for quality, research has revealed that informal settings are not identical to formal ones. Stanford University education professor Susanna Loeb of a study she co-authored:

“Television watching is perhaps the most vivid contrast. Four-year-olds in home-based, informal care watch an average of almost two hours of television per day, compared with fewer than 7 minutes in formal care. Similarly, in formal arrangements for 4-year-olds, 93% of caregivers reported doing both reading and math activities on a daily basis. By contrast, 68% of informal sector caregivers reported daily reading, and 60% reported daily math.”

Yet these items are proxies for quality, not quality themselves. As early childhood expert Erika Chistakis wrote in her book : “Do preschoolers need all the trappings of elementary school…? The faux academic overstimulation? The enforced choices? The cult-like obsession with readiness? I would say, mostly, they do not. And I think some of these trappings, such as the notorious print-rich environments we encountered with their busy totems to industriousness, can actually interfere with the task of becoming a good communicator and a literate person. We spend a lot of energy on creating print-rich environments but that’s not at all the same thing as creating a language-rich environment.”

Indeed, the conclusion to be drawn from Loeb’s study isn’t “formal good, informal bad,” it’s that informal settings require more support than they are getting. For instance, family child cares have long been on an island, and it’s only relatively recently that groups like and the philanthropic initiative have popped up to begin providing professional development, dollars and business assistance.

These are vital efforts that should be looked to as national examples. More public funding would also allow family child cares to hire additional staff support. As many as providers in some states have a single owner-operator-educator. It becomes much easier to conduct literacy and math activities with another set of hands around to handle a tantrum or bathroom need.

Friend, family and neighbor (FFN) caregivers are perhaps even more isolated —alone in a boat circling the island, to stretch the analogy. There are vanishingly few structured supports for these caregivers, even though they are by far the leading sources of care for infants and toddlers in particular. This is, in a sense, the shadow side to well-intentioned efforts to professionalize the early learning field. After all, if an educator requires training and/or a degree to be deemed effective, what ultimately does that suggest for parents or grandparents who are ‘untrained’? It’s a deeply uncomfortable tension that is rarely mentioned, but one that must be reckoned with.

Promising supports for FFNs do exist, most often methods of providing organic learning opportunities for child and caregiver alike. For instance, a Charlottesville (VA) nonprofit, ReadyKids, offers free weekly where caregivers can observe best practice modeling and also create social connections among one another. Hawai’i has a similar program, , specifically focused on grandparents. In New Orleans, a group called operates a drop-in early learning center which offers workshops and seminars for caregivers. These initiatives are deserving of public funding. Another form of potential support, which exists in many Northern European nations but has only been , is a ‘caregiver stipend’ payment for stay-at-home parents, enabling them to better access early learning resources.

Any way you cut it, America’s current early care and education policies have a distinct bias towards formal settings. It’s important to note that formal and informal settings are not opposite sides of a see-saw; there’s no reason to deemphasize formal care. Research clearly points, however, toward taking a more comprehensive and differentiated approach to supporting quality care across the board. The entire early learning sector, to say nothing of parents and children, will be better off for it.

The push has been bipartisan: over the past several years, big pre-K efforts have been underway in states both and . Overall, the percentage of children in public pre-K , now serving one-third of 4-year-olds.

But when one looks under the hood, something strange appears: a lot of universal plans in the U.S. aren’t designed to cover everyone. So it’s worth asking: what is “universal” about universal early learning programs? And what does research say about programs that are offered to everybody, versus those that are targeted to certain populations? Ultimately, our indecision about what we mean by universal early learning is, ironically, hampering our ability to advocate for universal early learning.

First, that pesky word ‘universal’. Despite the seemingly clear meaning of the term, it’s used in several different ways when it comes to early learning. Often, it has been used to mean universal access — the idea that every family should be able to acquire a slot for their child if so desired. Access is inextricably tied to two other elements of early learning: availability and affordability. Put simply, there must be enough programs operating for parents to get a slot, and parents must be able to reasonably afford that slot.

Access alone, however, can quickly lead down a path to means-testing, the policy mechanism of phasing benefits in or out depending on household income. Head Start is an example of a means-tested early learning program. After all, the theory goes, if affluent families can already afford a slot, then they don’t need public support, so public dollars should be targeted to lower-income families. In some states like New Jersey, this means-testing occurs not at the family level but at the school district level, with poorer districts having free pre-K for all children, while less poor districts do not. Universal access is therefore many times a confusing cypher for targeted intervention.

The alternative to universal access is what might be termed universal coverage, the idea that every family must have a free, publicly-funded slot available, no questions asked. American public education is an example of a universal-coverage system: Bill Gates is equally as able to send his children to public school for free as I am (K-12 funding does have equity components, of course; although free for everyone, in nearly all states students with higher needs receive higher expenditures). Many of our international peers have a similarly classical interpretation of universal early learning. As the American Institutes of Research after studying 17 other developed nations: “Possibly the most striking and consistent similarity across countries with high rates of preschool participation is that all children in those countries are legally entitled to it. Such an entitlement protects preschool programs from being affected by economic downturns and political shifts. Entitlements also make sending one’s child to an ‘official’ preschool program the default child care option for working parents. Even if it is not mandatory to send 4- and 5-year olds to school, a legal entitlement creates an implicit expectation that children enroll.”

This finding is crucial. Universal systems, even when they strive for coverage over mere access, suffer when they are not framed in terms of being a right. For instance, Georgia is generally credited with starting the first universal pre-K system in the U.S. back in 1995, and they have no means test. Yet even a quarter-century later, Georgia programs still sport long waiting lists, and only 60 percent of the state’s four-year-olds are enrolled. Contrast this again with the K-12 education system, and the . No family in Georgia or any other state has to face a waiting list, nor pay a dollar, to enroll their child in middle school.

The debate over universal versus targeted early learning has been fought for a long time. Back in 2004, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) and senior researcher W. Steven Barnett called “The Universal vs. Targeted Debate: Should the United States Have Preschool for All?” Even then, Barnett and his colleagues noted that there were four possible interpretations of the term ‘universal’ (see below), two of which —free to all and affordable to all – are still in the zeitgeist today.

The NIEER research also concluded that the more truly universal and inclusive an early learning system can be, the more effective it will be at helping children thrive. This is because while targeted programs cost less money to operate — the main reason policymakers may prefer them — there’s a significant opportunity cost.

Targeted programs, in practice, have been found to reach fewer children (including those in the target populations), gain less public support and funding, and as a result have lower-quality offerings than universal programs. Universal programs also have much larger average impacts on children’s school readiness. This finding was recently replicated by Dartmouth economist Elizabeth Cascio, who , “This leaves open the possibility that the universal nature of the program gets families invested, and holds the programs to a higher degree of accountability.”

The research base, then, suggests that the U.S. early learning sector would be best served by rallying around a goal that is straightforward, rights-based and offers as close to universal coverage as possible. This does not necessarily have to mean pursuing universally free early learning, although .

Advocates in British Columbia have found great success in their “” child care campaign, which creates a universal cap on parental expenses. Although technically means-tested (families making under $45,000 a year would pay nothing) the framing of the plan is all-encompassing and feels like a new entitlement. Whatever the specifics of the goal, until the field gets crystal clear on where we want to go and why, universal quality early learning will remain universally elusive.

Yet is this all necessary? What does the mysterious phrase “school readiness” even mean? Though rarely remarked upon, what we consider school readiness in 2020 is rather different than how the term was originally conceived. In short, we have narrowed readiness into a limited focus on what a young child knows or can do, and we have set up readiness as a binary outcome instead of an ongoing process. On both of these counts, the U.S. is now askew from the science of early learning.

Modern ideas of school readiness first emerged in 1989 as part of the . Convened by President George H.W. Bush amid growing fervor for educational improvement spurred by the A Nation At Risk report, the Panel’s first goal stated simply: “All children in America will start school ready to learn.” This brief sentence led to much controversy. Early learning luminary , founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute and someone deeply involved in these first conversations, of the types of questions which arose:

“Some pointed out that all children are ready to learn from birth. They need not wait until they are five years of age to be ‘ready to learn’. Others pointed out that the goal ignores individual differences in learning. It will never be the case that all children will attain the same level of performance at a single culturally defined point in time. Individual differences and variations in development associated with both endogenous and exogenous factors make a mockery of our chronological benchmarks when we try to apply them across the board to all children.

Moreover, the term ‘readiness’ is conceptually confusing. Is ‘readiness’ something we wait for? Is it something we impose? Is it a within-the-child phenomenon or something outside the child? Finally, the simplistic or mechanistic interpretation of readiness that can be derived from the goal contains within it the potential for encouraging policies harmful to young children. In an educational world that is oriented toward efficiency and accountability, it is easy to imagine that someone will be penalized if we … find that some children are not ready for school. Often, the least advantaged in our society are blamed when public policies intended to assist them go wrong.”

Sadly, Meisels’ premonition has largely come to fruition. Today, have a version of a Kindergarten Readiness Assessment. Children of color and children from low-income backgrounds are far more likely to be labeled as behind and in need of intervention before ever starting their formal schooling. Increasingly, developmentally inappropriate academic expectations are being pushed down into early childhood, often of critical elements like play.

Again, one need only look at the suggested schedules for young children stuck at home to realize how deeply a narrow view of school readiness has taken hold, and how little we now reflect on the tensions and questions around readiness. Whereas Meisels posited there were four main philosophies around school readiness, our culture is now dominated by one: what Meisels would call the ‘Empiricist’ view. “Fundamental to this view,” he wrote, “is the belief that readiness is an absolute state of affairs — an end point that children and teachers can strive for — and that the criteria for readiness are stable and universal.”

There was one other opportunity to turn the ship around. In the early 2000s, a group of 17 states and several philanthropic foundations came together to create the . This group advanced an ‘Interactionist’ approach, positing that the equation for success was “ready families + ready communities + ready [health care and child care] + ready schools = children ready for school.” This formula demonstrates that readiness is multifaceted, that the ecosystem of relationships and services in which a child exists and the child’s own predilections are interwoven threads that cannot be unwound.

Unfortunately, such nuance was swamped under the of the No Child Left Behind era, or what University of Virginia Education Dean Robert Pianta has called the “educationalization of early care and education.” We have instead zeroed in on the child as the unit of change, like examining whether a plant sprouted with no consideration for the status of seed, soil, water, or sun.

What’s to be done? Returning to the comprehensive approach to school readiness laid out by the National School Readiness Indicators Initiative would be a good start. This approach acknowledges the importance of children gaining basic numeracy, literacy and socioemotional skills while suggesting a broader policy agenda for the early childhood sector. Such an agenda might span everything from perinatal care to lead abatement to directly stabilizing family income through items like a child allowance. This broad perspective also suggests that instead of pushing developmentally inappropriate practices down into early childhood, we should thread early childhood best practices up through the early elementary grades ( on this count). And it clearly means we must pay early childhood educators well while providing universal, high-quality early care and education options.

The other needed revival is an understanding of readiness as a process, not a light switch that’s either set to ‘ready’ or ‘not ready’. If we embrace readiness as a context-dependent process, then we can release our increasingly tight grip on young children’s learning. It allows us to center our policies around relationships instead of products. Consider that in high-performing Finland, their don’t mention literacy or numeracy; instead, they focus on the “promotion of personal well-being; reinforcement of considerate behavior and action towards others; and gradual build-up of autonomy.”

To be clear, knowing a young child’s skill level is not inherently problematic. There are positives to our current approach in terms of enabling more individualized instruction and feedback loops between elementary schools and early learning programs. Left unchecked, however, a narrow and binary view of readiness leads down dangerous policy and cultural paths, as we are witnessing today. With most of America’s young children home for the next couple months, now is the time to reexamine what we think of as school readiness, and chart a different course for the post-pandemic future.