The national nonprofit plans to the occasion with an “intentional year of celebration, reflection and doing what we’ve always done — center the voices of educators,” said CEO Michelle Kang. 

A century is a long time for any organization to exist. It is a long time — period. Thus, NAEYC’s centennial presents an opportunity for longtime early childhood educators and leaders to recognize the progress the field has made, and to consider why, 100 years later, some systemic issues remain unchanged. 

Founded in 1926 and first known as the National Association for Nursery Education, NAEYC has a long history of promoting high-quality education for children from birth to age 8, advocating for improved working conditions in the field, and helping families and the general public understand the value of early childhood education. Today, it is the largest early childhood education association in the country, with affiliates in nearly every state, reaching hundreds of thousands of educators through its research, advocacy and membership network.

Over the past century, NAEYC has been involved with a number of the profession’s major . The organization participated in the creation and expansion of , a federal program that provides high-quality early care and education to children from low-income families; collaborated on the development of the (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for the field’s educators; and built the first national to demonstrate quality in early learning programs.

But at the same time, the field has been defined by stagnation in critical areas, such as low compensation, insufficient public funding and a lack of professional recognition. 

“It’s a lot of ‘two steps forward, one step back,’” said Marcy Whitebook, who co-founded the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) in 1999. “It’s not that we haven’t made progress. It’s that these problems we’ve had for a long time endure.”

Whitebook, a septuagenarian, recalled meeting with other child care workers in the 1970s and 1980s to campaign for better working conditions. At that time, these teachers felt their contributions to society were underpaid and undervalued. 

“People who did the work had no rights, raises and respect,” Whitebook said, referencing the of a campaign from that era. “That’s still true.”

Few would dispute that. Early childhood educators today make an average of to care for and teach the nation’s youngest children, according to the CSCCE 2024 Workforce Index — despite a growing body of research and increased awareness among the public that the early years are foundational for learning and development, and deeply connected to a person’s eventual success. 

In a of the early childhood workforce, released by NAEYC in February, educators reported high levels of burnout and increasingly unstable personal financial circumstances. One teacher in California said, “I’m constantly worried about making rent and affording groceries, which distracts me during the day.” 

Many teachers are also dealing with the consequences of working in understaffed programs. Teacher turnover remains high and recruitment challenging, largely because many educators leave the field for better-paying jobs elsewhere. 

What would most help them stay in the field, the survey respondents said, is better pay and more employee benefits. Instead, many providers are experiencing stagnant federal funding and a perceived reduction in public support. 

Carol Brunson Day, who became a NAEYC member in 1969 and later served as the organization’s president, believes that wages and compensation remain the biggest issue facing the field. 

“That problem was there when I entered, and it’s still there,” she said. “We’re working on it, but we don’t seem to be getting the kind of traction we should be.”

Day added: “Until we solve that problem, we are still going to have high turnover, which is not just not good for teachers, it’s not good for young children.”

Day also spent 20 years as president of the Council for Professional Recognition, a nonprofit that NAEYC helped form in the 1980s to oversee the administration of the CDA credential. 

That credential, she said, has not only helped “produce competent caregivers,” but has also created a pathway for a racially, culturally and linguistically diverse workforce — primarily women — to advance their careers in early childhood education. As a result of getting many community colleges to recognize the CDA and award credits toward an associate degree, some early educators have been able to use their CDA as a springboard to earn four-year degrees and beyond. “It’s not perfect yet,” Day said, “but it’s there.”

Kang called the credential “one of the best first steps into the field of early learning,” noting that at her own son’s high school, students can pursue coursework to earn their CDA before graduation. 

“It has represented the path for so many people who would not otherwise have been able to be part of the field,” Kang said.

Even still, it’s not a solution to the lack of professionalization that early childhood educators face. There is still, among much of the public, a perception that adults who care for babies and toddlers are not teaching, but “babysitting.”

“We have not gotten to a place where we fully understand, as a community and a country, that these are professionals doing this work,” Kang acknowledged. “We push back against the narrative that anybody who loves children can do this work.”

That misconception likely perpetuates the low compensation in the field and the limited federal investment it receives. If the public and policymakers recognized the importance of the early years, they would, theoretically, want to pay the professionals who work with young children a living wage while also investing public dollars to boost quality and accessibility. 

“The entire system depends, basically, on very underpaid people doing the work,” said Whitebook. “The whole thing has been operating on cutting corners with the people who do it.”

Indeed, the current structure of the system is unsustainable, said Kang, resulting in a “” of early care and education. And yet she finds herself thinking back to at least one point in the field’s history when that was perhaps not the case.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, in early care and education allowed the field not only to survive the disaster, but to come out of it, in some respects, stronger than before. That was also a time when many families and government leaders referred to early childhood education as “essential,” though Kang said she hasn’t heard that sentiment expressed for several years now. 

“There is very little about COVID that I would say we want to go back to,” Kang said, “but I do want to go back to that moment where policymakers on all sides of the political spectrum, families, community leaders recognized the importance of early childhood education and the investment needed to have it work well.”

It proved that it is possible for public dollars to buoy early childhood education and to raise the stature of the professionals who work in the field, she noted. 

“I don’t want to see us have another global calamity to get there,” Kang said. But when she reflects on NAEYC’s 100 years and the narrative around high-quality early learning, she said one thing is clear: “We need to support the professionals who are doing this work … so children can get everything they need to become the citizens we want them to be.”

In doing so, it will become the latest in a wave of states that have established standalone departments for early care and education in recent years, joining the ranks of , and .

The shift toward unified governance structures comes at a time when the sector is getting more attention and, in some states, more investment. That, plus an effort to improve families’ experiences in accessing public programs for them and their young children, seems to be driving this trend.

Whether a state’s governance structure can make a meaningful difference in how its system of early childhood education functions, though, is a question worth asking — and it’s one many early childhood policy leaders are trying to answer.

. . . . . 

Every state has a unique organizational framework, but historically, programs and services for young children and their families have been housed across several common agencies, such as an education department, a department of health, and a department of welfare and social services.

That was the case in Colorado before it launched its Department of Early Childhood in 2022, explained executive director Lisa Roy, and it made for a disjointed experience. 

“Having things scattered across different agencies just makes things confusing for families,” Roy said. 

And that is the case in Illinois now, said Teresa Ramos, secretary of the new department that is slated to on July 1. 

“What excites me, over time, is building a system that can more seamlessly serve parents and providers,” Ramos said. She wants to lift “some of that burden” off of families and educators who have to keep track of “which 12 people to call” and ultimately simplify their experience of engaging with government services. 

The other consequence of programs being spread across different departments is that it creates a leadership vacuum in early care and education, said Elliot Regenstein, a lawyer who has studied early childhood governance and recently wrote a on the topic.

“It’s a complicated ecosystem,” Regenstein said. “When oversight of that ecosystem is splintered across multiple agencies, with none as their primary expertise, it shows.”

Cynthia Osborne, executive director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University, which , used the pandemic as an example. During that time, a state education secretary’s focus was likely on reopening K-12 schools, even though their department also oversaw Head Start and pre-K programs, while the health secretary was probably thinking primarily about hospitals and health care, not child care licensing and quality. 

“What you had in early childhood was a system entirely run by middle managers,” Regenstein said. “Halfway up the org chart, they may or may not be empowered to interact with the legislature. Their orientation was to run a grant program, rather than think systemically about how those pieces fit together.”

He added: “That’s not a knock on those people. But when it was literally nobody’s job to think about the system as a whole, it just made everybody’s job harder.”

The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center has identified 13 states that have established standalone departments or offices of early care and education. In those 13 states, there is a senior leader whose entire job is to think about, organize and prioritize issues affecting early childhood. That change is both symbolic and actual — or it can be, when managed thoughtfully. 

Another dozen or so states — while not going as far as creating a new department — have made meaningful changes around early childhood governance and leadership, Regenstein added. 

“The question I’d ask,” he said, “is has a state taken action to elevate leadership in early childhood and done something to unify oversight? Even if they haven’t gotten all the way there, I want to give credit for progress.”

Of course, the formation of a new government agency, and the appointment of a senior official to lead it, is not in itself a victory. Only once those pieces are in place does the hard work begin. 

“Early childhood programs are historically under-resourced. Putting them all together doesn’t give you some kind of economy of scale — ‘oh, good, we’re all here and we’re all under-resourced,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department, acknowledging the challenge these departments face. 

She added: “We’ve focused on building a system of programs and services that are well connected and aligned. We’ve done a really good job. We still have much work to do.”

. . . . . 

One thing all of these states seem to have in common is a governor who is willing to prioritize young children and families and make early childhood education a signature part of their platform. 

Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois, Jared Polis of Colorado and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico all ran campaigns that emphasized early childhood education and later stewarded the creation of a standalone department. That is no coincidence, Osborne of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center said. 

For this organizing structure to be successful, she said, “it has to come from the governor.”

Helene Stebbins, executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, made a similar point. “What matters more than any org chart or structure is leadership. Full stop,” said Stebbins. “When you have a strong governor, it is like wind in the sails.”

That significance doesn’t evaporate once the department has launched. These governors appoint cabinet-level officials, such as Roy in Colorado and Groginsky in New Mexico, to lead the new agency and work alongside them as they make decisions that are relevant to early care and education providers, children and families. 

In practice, these states end up with a dedicated early childhood advocate attending cabinet meetings with the governor and other department heads.   

“It’s not just symbolic. It’s really important,” said Osborne. “The secretary of early childhood is sitting side-by-side with the secretaries of … education and health. They can make decisions at that level, think about how to work together and leverage resources, in real-time.” 

That’s an enormous improvement over the “middle manager” dynamic that Regenstein described.

“It is much more likely that you’re going to be able to get the resources that you need,” Osborne added. 

In Colorado, that has had a real impact, Polis shared. 

“It certainly elevated the discussion about early childhood education in our state,” Polis said. “Dr. Roy attends every cabinet meeting. We talk about early childhood education every week. Before, no one owned it in the state.”

That access has given Roy opportunities to communicate directly with the governor about nuances in the field and to get a broader perspective of his competing priorities, she said. 

“The governor is a partner with me in thinking through these things,” Roy said, adding that “having that access and having his ear has been so important.”  

That kind of centralized leadership and governor’s support have been essential in enabling New Mexico to make groundbreaking progress on early care and education in the last several years, according to Groginsky. 

“There’s no way this kind of rapid, system-building growth could’ve happened with three different agencies, middle-level managers and staff working cross-departmental,” she said, referring to the recent transformation of early childhood education in the state, including the launch of the first statewide universal free child care initiative in the U.S. 

It is much more efficient and effective, she added, to channel all that time, energy and resources “in one direction, under one leader.” 

. . . . . 

This recent burst of activity in the development of early childhood education departments has precedent. In the early 2000s, a trio of states — Georgia, Massachusetts and Washington — each created a new agency to focus on early childhood. 

Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning, , is considered to have been the first state-level early childhood education department, said Amy M. Jacobs, the agency’s commissioner since 2014. She said her office has received numerous requests and questions from leaders in other states who are now trying to stand up a similar governance structure (which she describes as a “one-stop shop” for families). 

To those leaders, she typically tries to impart a few key lessons. 

One, she said, is to take their time. It’s OK to go slowly, especially if it means getting it right. Georgia’s department underwent many iterations before the final pieces were in place in 2017 — a full 13 years after it launched. 

Another, Jacobs said, is to create a system that makes sense in the context of their state. “There’s no ‘right’ way to create your agency. There are no ‘right’ set of programs,” she explained. “Every state is going to have their own pathway.”

In practice, that means that New Mexico’s department may have more programs and services under its umbrella than Colorado’s, and that shouldn’t be a critique of either agency. 

Finally, Jacobs said, it’s important to understand that anyone involved in this work may need patience if they want to see ideas about the field of early care and education meaningfully change. 

“Culture change will take longer than you ever think it will,” Jacobs said, noting that after more than two decades, she believes that the perception of early childhood educators as “babysitters” has changed and that the field is now highly valued by Georgia state leaders and policymakers. “It’s been a long process. … It just takes a lot of time to change that mindset.”

The formation of these departments is in itself momentous, many policy experts said, because it signals that early childhood is an issue that’s so important it deserves — literally — a seat at the governor’s table. But their existence does not guarantee their long-term success. 

Many of these agencies are still very new, having been ushered in by the sitting governor. One of the major tests is whether they can withstand leadership change — a new governor, perhaps from an opposing party, who maybe isn’t as keen on putting early care and education toward the top of their platform, said Regenstein. Some states, like Georgia and Massachusetts, have survived that type of leadership transition. 

“We still cannot answer the question to states, ‘Is this something we should do?’” said Osborne. “But we think there are models of these new departments that really can make it so you’re prioritizing early childhood, so you can use funds more efficiently, and decisions can be made that will enhance programs.”

While teachers of all grades shape their students’ lives, kindergarten teachers play a unique role in that they build a formative early bridge from home to school. They introduce fundamental academic skills, build foundations for social and emotional development and help young learners develop confidence, curiosity and a lifelong love of learning. 

“As an educator, my mission has always been clear: to ensure every student, regardless of background, zip code, or circumstance, has access to a high-quality education,” Gray wrote in a published by the NEA Foundation. “I see my work as an act of justice.”

Gray has started a number of programs at her school to support students in need, including working with classes to raise funds to donate to peers and creating opportunities for families to volunteer as tutors. She has also participated in various teacher advocacy efforts. Gray has testified before her state’s legislature about issues such as mentorship and compensation, and has participated in the , which aims to improve the teaching profession and student outcomes.

In the conversation below, she reflects on her career, the importance of mentorship in education and what drives her to make change — whether launching a new initiative at her school or using her voice to advocate for change across her profession. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m curious about your career and how you got to this point.

I have been an educator for 13 years in the public school system in Texas. I have [spent] the majority of my years teaching kindergarten in Temple ISD [Independent School District] in Temple, Texas … but I have taught at multiple campuses with different demographics.

One campus I was at was all about teaching students social-emotional skills … I got a chance to build relationships, and I learned a lot [about] emotional growth.

I had an opportunity to teach my first year at a campus that had … a lot of attendance issues. On my first meet-the-teacher night, I had maybe three parents show up. By the end of the year celebration, every single parent and grandparent showed up. That was probably the turning point to let me know I was in the right space. 

What has mentorship meant to you in your career?

Before I started as a teacher, I was working at a day care, and I was in a pre-K 3 class, and that was really my first official class, but it wasn’t at a public school. When I had the opportunity to get my certification, I got a chance to teach in the school district with my mentor, Leah Suchomel, who taught kindergarten. She taught me so many things that I didn’t get in the books or in the classroom. Yes, I learned a lot about … the different theories and Harry [and Rosemary] Wong’s but until you’re actually in a setting with a teacher that is willing to trust you enough to teach her class — and just that compassion that she showed, not only to me but to her students — I still take [that] to this day.

How have you paid that forward as a mentor?

My mentee came from Texas A&M. Her mom was an assistant principal. Her grandma was a teacher. Her aunt was a principal. So she came from a long line of educators, but when she told them she wanted to be a teacher, they asked her, “Are you sure?” Because it is different from when they were teachers. 

I thought about what my mentor taught me, and I tried to see what my mentee needed to be successful for when she would become a mentor. It’s like a torch being passed.

How did the pandemic change your experience as a teacher?

During the pandemic, you could see a difference in the social-emotional status of our students. Before the pandemic, we were trying to get kids to learn how to use technology, but after the pandemic, I noticed my students wanted to have me read them big books. They didn’t want to just always be on a tablet to learn. I mean, that’s a tool as well, but they really craved that attention. 

Right now, I feel like we have so many students that are having to learn how to regulate their emotions. When they are playing … or working with classmates, they have to learn, How does this person feel before I react? If they’re on an iPad, nobody is there to tell them, “Hey, you’re being rude on this game.” They have to learn … the body language of someone who needs space. They missed a lot of that during their first years of growing up.

You’ve started a few programs and clubs at your school. Why did you start the Stars Helping Stars program?

I started that program when I began here at this school. I saw one of my students that was kind of struggling. I overheard him tell one of his classmates that he had slept in his car last night. And then his mom had called me and let me know that they had lost their housing. So, what I did with our kids — since it’s a STEM campus — we repurposed items from recyclables such as snowglobes, jewelry boxes, guitars, water guns and containers and sold them in order to get gift cards for homeless families at our school. 

The next year, that effort evolved into a tutoring group. Parents would come in and tutor kids on Tuesdays before school or after school. … And we saw a significant increase in our students’ accountability. 

What about the Breakfast Club program?

Once a month I’ll have mentors that will come through and just do different activities with about a group of 25 kids that range from kindergarten all the way to fifth grade. The high school volleyball team volunteered to come in, and they played volleyball. A group of soldiers came, including my spouse, and they did different stations where they had to talk like a soldier, act like a soldier, sound like a soldier…. Maybe one day they want to grow up to be in the military. We don’t know, but just planting those seeds so they can see things outside of their home and outside of the classroom, that’s the whole point.

Do you think being someone who gets things off the ground is part of why you won this award? 

I do believe that it plays a big role. … That and also just being a person of action. That picture behind me — that is me signing with the governor of Texas. (House Bill 2 authorized $8.5 billion in new . A portion of that funding went toward teacher and staff pay raises.) And that day, I sat at the table speaking for 384,000 teachers that are in Texas that needed that extra pay. There were other teachers in different parts of Texas … who had to work pick-up jobs during Christmas just to make ends meet. And I wanted to do something about it. And so just being able to tell our stories together, bring our stories together — to sit and pass a bill of one of the largest allotments that has been passed in Texas. 

As the only elementary school teacher to win this NEA Foundation award, what do you have to say about the early years?

I think that early childhood sets such a big seed … for our students to have character, to have work ethic, to understand the importance of [this] journey. … I always have kids that end up being best friends, and I have at least one or two that end up being best friends all the way up to high school.

I’ve been teaching long enough to have those memories. Thanks to Facebook, I can see where they tag [me in photos from when] they were in kindergarten and now they are getting ready to graduate. It’s like, “This all because of you, Ms. Gray.” 

How do you cultivate friendships and relationships that last a lifetime? 

Part of it is the atmosphere in a classroom. It’s just everyone uplifting each other. And if someone doesn’t, if you don’t like what someone else said, it’s okay to disagree, but it’s not okay to just totally not listen to that person.

That’s what some of it is. Also, just being able to have … relationships with families. 

Whenever we have parent conferences — I don’t just do the beginning of the year, I do the middle of the year as well because I want [parents] to know that we are partners. The majority of the time they’re here with us, with the teachers, not at home. And so just building their relationship … you can understand like, “Oh, I understand the reason why he may need the extra hug today.”

States including Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have garnered attention in the media for offering lessons other states can learn from — a February New York Times opinion piece heralded the trio as “.”

Yet the Southern surge narrative has, so far, largely ignored another commonality among those states: tremendous improvements in early childhood education.

The most commonly cited reasons behind the trend relate to , specifically a commitment to phonics-based pedagogy, and a willingness to who are not reading on grade level. Importantly, this did not happen overnight, and it didn’t occur in isolation: Rachel Canter, who led a Mississippi education policy and advocacy group that was instrumental in shaping the state’s approach, the New York Times that the “Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,” but added that “people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

Indeed, in the same 2013 legislative session in which Mississippi passed the , which codified many of its reforms, the legislature also passed its first state pre-K bill, the (ELCA). The ELCA was a state-funded initiative that established voluntary, free or low-cost, high-quality pre-K programs that operated through partnerships between private pre-K providers, school districts and, in some cases, Head Start programs. These collaboratives had to meet all put forth by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Over the years, enrollment in the Collaboratives has : When they were launched in 2014, the Collaboratives served 1,774 children and by the 2022-23 school year, student enrollment in pre-K had reached 6,800.

In on how the ELCA came about, Canter explained that with major early childhood and K-3 reforms both passing at the same time, the policies were designed to align. For instance, the pre-K legislation required participating providers to administer a school readiness assessment that lined up with the one students would be asked to take in Kindergarten. Substantial funds were invested in instructional coaches for pre-K teachers, and in providing pre-K teachers with access to literacy professional development opportunities comparable to what the state’s K-3 teachers were being offered.

Around the same time, neighboring states were engaged in their own reform efforts. In 2012, the , commonly referred to as Act 3. This unified early childhood governance within the Louisiana Department of Education and set the stage for broad reforms. Over the next few years, Louisiana required every child care program that received a dollar of public money to participate in the state’s accountability system, which included getting a minimum of two quality-focused inspections per year. The bar was also raised for teacher qualifications, requiring all lead teachers in publicly funded early learning settings to have at least an , a state-based professional credential.

The efforts paid off. Researchers that from 2016 to 2019, the percentage of publicly funded early childhood education programs in Louisiana that scored proficient or above on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) rating scale — a commonly-used measure of teacher-child interactions — rose from 62% to 85%. For child care programs specifically, excluding state pre-K and Head Start classrooms, the percentage of programs scoring proficient or above increased even more impressively, from 40% in 2016 to 73% in 2019. The kids in those classrooms, of course, are many of the same kids who later on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ fourth grade literacy exam.

Alabama, meanwhile, has long been a leader in pre-K. In 2001, the state launched First Class Pre-K, an initiative that funds full-day pre-K across a variety of school- and community-based settings. With a focus on quality, the system has been since 2006 as part of the organization’s . However, funding constraints kept the program small. In the mid-2010s, though, First Class Pre-K began to scale. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of participating 4-year-olds from about 3,600 to more than 24,000. Around the same time, the state made a major investment in coaching for pre-K teachers, and its coaching model grew from serving around 200 teachers in 2012 to nearly 1,500 as of 2024. When Alabama began leaning fully into the science of reading with its , pre-K teachers in public schools also started getting on the subject.

Connecting early care and education reform to the Southern surge is, of course, an exercise in correlation and not causation. As Canter pointed out with regard to the science of reading, this is a multifaceted story and assigning too much credit to any one factor is unwise. Moreover, other states that have made major investments to their early childhood education systems — such as California and its universal transitional kindergarten program — have not to date seen the same types of literacy gains. What does seem fair is speculating that in a counterfactual world where Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama make the same reforms to K-3 but ignore early education entirely, the Southern surge would have been blunted. 

These states, then, offer important lessons for both early childhood and K-12 stakeholders around the importance of tightly and thoughtfully aligning both systems — in both directions — and ensuring there are enough resources present to support educators. Leaders don’t have to look far: groups like the have been developing alignment frameworks and tools for years. What’s needed is a renewed commitment, particularly among state and district leaders, to seeing early care and education not as a nice-to-have, a wholly separate enterprise, or even worse, a competitor — but as a core part of ensuring all children are reading on grade level. That might not be a miracle, but it would sure be an accomplishment.

In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers set out a plan to create the largest universal preschool program in the country for 4-year-olds, through a massive ramp-up of an elementary grade known as transitional kindergarten, or TK.

At a , Newsom  “a commitment that all 4-year-olds will get high quality instructional education,” and said that the investment could close learning gaps. “People aren’t left behind, as often as they start behind,” he added.

The state set a deadline that every district offer transitional kindergarten to all eligible 4-year-olds by fall 2025, and in the intervening years, schools have enrolled more than 175,000 children in TK. They’ve also had  and  so that kids have enough space and quick access to .

LAist spoke to more than a half dozen early childhood researchers who say a key piece has been missing in the state’s implementation: California itself hasn’t evaluated the program as it’s expanded, nor does it have plans to going forward. This, despite studies showing how critical the early years are for a child’s learning, and research from another state’s public preschool program that found students tested lower on state assessments and had more behavioral problems compared to those who weren’t in that program..

“ It is a huge mistake to not evaluate the implementation of TK and whether or not the classrooms are providing developmentally appropriate practice,” said Jade Jenkins, associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine.

The criticism comes as California has invested , and is paying about  to administer the new grade level.

“ We need to know whether this investment is actually lifting kids. We know it’s a huge economic windfall for parents, and that’s a great boost for families. But is it lifting kids without government research?” said Bruce Fuller, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.

A spokesperson for the California Department of Education said money for research has not been allocated in the state budget, and the department would “welcome a legislative appropriation” to “study the impacts of TK on students and families.”

“At this time, the Legislature and Governor have not appropriated funding for the CDE to conduct evaluations,” the agency said.

It’s not the first time the agency has brought up the need for a study — especially as the program was rolling out statewide. A state official told LAist in 2022 , but they opted not to suggest how it should be funded.

“You could launch a very high quality study at a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the total funding for that program, and that would help people figure out what we are actually offering our families and how to improve it — and that seems really important,” said Alix Gallagher,  director of  for the research organization Policy Analysis for California Education. “As a taxpayer, I don’t find it acceptable that billions of dollars are being spent with no attention to how our systems can learn to use that in ways that are most beneficial for kids.”

TK experiences can look different school to school

The state sets , which can have a max of 24 kids and need a 10:1 student to adult ratio. Teachers must be credentialed with early childhood educational experience or units. And while the state  should learn in TK, it has — meaning  to more academic.

Lyse Messmer, a parent of a TK child in northeast L.A., has seen even variation between two schools her son has attended in the same area. His first program relied more on screen time and worksheets; Messmer transferred him to another program with more outdoor play. And the teacher at the former school had not previously taught TK, she said, which made for a harder transition into school.

But she said the overall experience has been beneficial for her child, and a welcome financial relief. “I think the benefits of him getting used to a bigger classroom and like a bigger elementary school and navigating all that stuff for him has been really positive,” she said.

Adding a new grade is a massive endeavor for districts. As in Messmer’s case, it can be especially hard to find teachers with experience teaching kids this age, said Austin Land, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood.

“ You can’t require that every kid that wants a TK spot gets a TK spot and then also require this workforce to exist that has all this preexisting training,” Land said.

Land, who has been studying TK before the expansion, said he would like to know basic characteristics of TK classrooms today.

“Do you have a sixth grade teacher that got reassigned leading your classroom or is it somebody who’s been working with little kids for a while?” Land said. “ Is the teacher having a one-on-one interaction with a child or a one-on-two interaction with some children? Or are they spending most of their time up at the front?”

Lack of data on quality

Without data, it’s hard to know what children are learning, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at the  at Rutgers University.

“We want to make sure we’re investing in quality for kids. And one way to know that we’re doing it is to be able to monitor it… we want to make sure that the state can sort of have a pulse on what’s going on in the classroom,” she said.

The institute  across the country on a number of benchmarks of quality. According to the institute’s tracking, about two-thirds of public preschool programs in the country have a classroom observation system in place, she said. California’s TK program does not.

Researchers said it’s especially important to know what these youngest students are doing because early experiences can affect their learning later on.

“At the very least, we want to make sure it’s not doing harm,” Jenkins said.

Tennessee: A cautionary tale

Researchers point to  as an example of where good intentions were not enough to benefit kids. The state has similar standards to what California put in place: max class sizes, low ratios, specialized teachers.

Dale Farran, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, found in her research that children who attended the pre-K program ended up faring worse academically and behaviorally than their peers who didn’t attend. Farran said standards don’t guarantee quality, much less equity between students from different social, economic and racial backgrounds.

“Those structural elements  are the easiest things for states to make rules about, but are they having the kind of interactions in the classrooms that will be positive for children? That’s much harder to put into place,” she said.

Farran has said that one possible reason for this was the overly academic nature of the program and structured settings: kids sitting at desks and listening to a teacher up front, when kids this age need to move around and play.

Katie Flynn, a mom of a TK student in Pasadena, said while she’s had an overall positive experience with her son in TK this year, it still feels more like elementary school than preschool.

At the beginning of the year, her son wouldn’t drink his water all day, or avoided going to the bathroom until he got home, because teachers didn’t remind or prompt him like they did in private preschool.

“ I know it’s also his responsibility, right? Like he needs to listen to his body. So it’s a mutual, collaborative enterprise, but it just shows how limited this age group is in ensuring that that happens,” she said.

What can the state do?

The California Department of Education said absent funding from the state Legislature for the department to evaluate the program, it convenes a regular group of early childhood researchers in the state to share their work into TK. But researchers LAist talked to from that group said that approach can only go so far.

Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said he wasn’t familiar with the Tennessee study, but funding for evaluation is something he will look into.

“We definitely need to make sure that we’re again evaluating our most effective programs so that we can focus on best practices to continue to support those statewide,” he said.

When LAist asked how the state will assess the current program, Muratsuchi and a State Board of Education spokesperson pointed to one large-scale study of TK done by the , in 2017. (The governor’s office also directed LAist to the state board.)

That AIR study found that kids who went to TK when it first started in California had stronger literacy and math skills when entering kindergarten compared to similar-age peers who didn’t go to TK at the beginning of the year. (Those differences mostly faded by the end of the year).

Land, the UC Berkeley researcher, and Gallagher, of PACE, said the AIR study was done nearly a decade ago, and on a TK program that looks different from TK today.

That’s because when TK started in 2012, they said, it was intended for kids who were nearly 5 years old, but had just missed the cutoff for kindergarten. Today, kids as young as 3 are entering TK in California.

LAist also reached out to Karen Manship, principal researcher of the AIR study. She said they’re still investigating topics related to transitional kindergarten, “but we do not have any funding or current plans to evaluate the program overall now that it is fully rolled out.”

The state education board spokesperson also cited research by economist Rucker Johnson, who looked at TK between 2013 and 2019, which found low-income children had greater reading and math gains by third grade than students who did not attend TK.

“These points tell us that an early start has proven to be beneficial for California students,” said a spokesperson for the board, which sets state policy.

LAist reached out to Johnson, who said that while his study of TK in the early years is promising, it’s “not a sufficient condition.”

“For improvements to be sustained, meaning even if they were good in the past, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to be monitoring the success as they’re expanded and expanded that scale to universal,” he said.

Kevin McCarty, Sacramento’s mayor and a former state assemblymember who championed the legislation to expand TK, told LAist funding is a challenge — given  — but that he welcomes evaluation.

“We want to make sure that it’s effective, that it works, and if there are any issues that we need to address and improve going forward,” he said. 

In the meantime, he said the program has given many parents a huge economic relief — and parents have a choice on whether to send their kids.

“This is free, this is — California paid for free universal pre-K,” he added, “which is a big deal because, we reminded people, paying for  than sending a kid to UCLA.”

This was originally published on .

 During his successful bid for mayor, Zohran Mamdani argued these prices, which have increased 43% since 2019, are driving families out of the city.

In response, the Democratic Socialist proposed an ambitious fix: universal free child care for all kids under 5, regardless of their family’s income.

To help him execute on this largely popular, yet hugely challenging promise, he’s brought on Emmy Liss, an expert in the field who was instrumental in the rollout of universal pre-K and 3-K under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. 

Liss has spent the years since working on early childhood policy and advocacy issues, partnering with cities and counties across the country as they launched their own publicly funded programs. She’s also worked as a consultant at and a child care policy advisor at the .

Liss and Mamdani say they plan to strengthen existing free pre-K and 3-K programs, while also scaling to include all 2 year olds, through a program they’re calling 2-Care. The first 2-K seats are set to open this fall for families with the greatest need, followed by an additional the following year. 

The first two years of the program, which the administration has promised will be fully scaled by the end of Mandami’s first term, will be by the state, through a $500 million investment, announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul back in January.

New York City parents can currently access free 3-K and preschool through a variety of providers, ranging from district public schools to community-based organizations and licensed home-based centers. In the almost 44,000 students were enrolled in 3-K and just under 60,000 in pre-K.

For the initial rollout of 2-K, Liss told �鶹��Ʒ that the administration will focus on partnerships with community and home-based providers, the organizations and small businesses already doing this work, a number of whom faced under de Blasio’s rollout of universal 3-K and preschool. 

Integrating this patchwork landscape of care options will not be easy, and ultimately Liss said she’s hoping for more than just a shift in policy: she also wants a shift in ethos, in which early education is no longer seen as a privilege, but rather a public good.

“In the same way that we think about public education being available to every New Yorker, child care should be no different,” she said. 

�鶹��Ʒ’s Amanda Geduld recently spoke with Liss to dig into the key tenets of the mayor’s plans and hear lessons learned from her last time in city government. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you paint a broad-stroked picture of some of the main goals of the proposed universal, free child care program? How quickly will you be able to scale it over the next four years?

The broad-strokes vision is exactly as you said: Our goal is to ensure that every family has access to a free, high-quality, culturally responsive early care and education setting — across a range of different settings — for their children who are under 5. We know that care has to be provided in a range of settings by caregivers who are compensated and respected and trained appropriately, and that families have options that work for them, whatever their specific needs might be. 

We see benefits to that on so many levels: It benefits children to be in high-quality early learning settings where they can learn and grow and develop, and it benefits parents and their ability to stay in the workforce. 

Obviously, the fact that we are pushing for free is a huge saving to families. That’s $20, $30, $40,000 back in their pocket on an annual basis, which changes their own economic status as a family. We see universal child care as a real mechanism to stop the out-migration of working- and middle-class families in New York City, because that’s who we see leaving the city at really an unprecedented rate. 

And then this has broader and wider economic benefits as well. New York City on an annual basis loses over $20 billion because of child care gaps. Families who leave the city, families who do not have the disposable income to spend in our economy, losses to business as they have higher turnover rates, and all of those trends we hope to see reversed with the implementation of universal child care. 

What we’ve laid out as an implementation plan and vision is that by this fall, we will launch our initial 2-K seats with about 2,000 kids, and we’ll really deliver fully on the promise of universal 3-K and pre-K. Over the course of the first term, we’ll continue to scale up the 2-K program so that we are serving all 2-year-olds whose families want to participate in this program by the end of the mayor’s first term (in 2029). And then we’ll continue to grow and scale from there, working really in partnership with the state as we do.

How will you determine where those initial 2,000 seats are? What sorts of questions will you ask families to determine where the greatest need is?

We’re looking at a couple of different factors. We’re looking at family economic need. We’re looking at unmet-need for child care for 2-year-olds — so parts of the city where we see limited supply of free or subsidized child care options for families today. 

We are also looking at where in the city we have child care providers who have the capacity and interest to begin partnering with us right away. We recognize that there are many parts of the city where there is not enough child care capacity today, and so part of our challenge and opportunity over the next couple years will be to expand capacity in those areas. 

We’ll have more news soon on where we’re headed this fall with 2-K, but those are a couple of the factors we’re thinking about. 

Mayor Mamdani has been explicit in his vision that this will truly be a universal, high-quality program. In terms of accountability, it’ll be pretty easy to determine if it’s universal. But in terms of the quality piece, what are you going to be looking at as benchmarks to make sure that each of these centers are not only available but also high quality?

This was something we thought a lot about in the early rollout of pre-K and 3-K, and I think we’ll continue to apply a lot of the same thinking here. We will look at — just as a baseline — ensuring that all of the places, centers and home-based providers we partner with demonstrate a very high standard of health and safety (and) that we know children are being cared for responsibly in those environments. 

But it’s also about making sure that the caregivers and educators are trained and able to provide a highly responsive and developmentally appropriate experience for the children in their care. In the past, we have leaned really heavily on coaching and support as a vehicle to make sure that we are supporting providers to meet those goals, and I think we’ll continue to build on a lot of that same work. 

Quality can look and feel really different from program to program, and we want to honor and respect the range of different setting types that we partner with, and the different ways that high quality early education can look. 

For us, access and quality have to go hand in hand: that as we grow access, we are continuing to invest in quality as well.

There have been debates nationally about targeted approaches to child care (that only serve the lowest-income families) versus universal ones (which serve all families). For folks who aren’t as familiar with this space or might push back on the goal here of universality, how would you respond to them? And how would you respond to those who might be skeptical of an investment this large in child care generally?

First, I would say that we’ve reached a point in New York City where child care is, frankly, not affordable for anyone. Last year, the comptroller’s office put out research suggesting a family would have to make over $300,000 to comfortably afford child care for even a single child. 

So when those are our economic realities in the city, it’s not as though we were talking about passing on a luxury good. Child care is a necessity, and when you are in a position where families earning mid-six figures can’t afford child care, let alone our most economically vulnerable families, I think that’s a real call to action for the economic imperative that we address this. 

We’re also really trying to shift the conversation here from access to early education being a privilege to something where it really is a public good. In the same way that we think about public education being available to every New Yorker, child care should be no different. 

We also recognize that when you restrict access to incredibly important programs like child care, you actually hurt the families who need it the most. When we put onerous means testing on these programs and ask families to supply months — even years — of pay stubs, ask them invasive personal questions in order to gain access to child care, it keeps families out, and it keeps out the families who need care the most. 

By stripping those barriers away, and no longer asking families to demonstrate that they deserve child care — but actually treating it as the public good we believe it should be — I think we will see participation grow from all families, and especially the families, again, who we know need these services most and are kept out when we put these barriers in place.

Mayor Mamdani has talked about making sure this serves all children, including those with disabilities. How are you thinking about including these children and addressing their specific needs?

As we think broadly about making sure that our supply of early education seats matches family demand, we have to be focused on meeting needs of children with disabilities, and then as we continue to expand to serve children who are younger and younger, making sure that we are drawing all the necessary connections between early education and early intervention; that we are equipping program leaders and teachers with the training they need to support children who may be identified as having a developmental delay or disability; and then continuing to think innovatively about the right program models to meet family need.

Another place where we’ve seen gaps historically is for really young kids living in homeless shelters or who are otherwise not in stable, consistent housing. I know that Mayor Mamdani that’s a real priority for him as well. Can you give one or two specific examples of how kids in those environments will be served under this program?

As we look at where to expand 2-K to first, and at areas where there is great economic need, we will look at places where we have large numbers of families with young children in shelter, and as we develop outreach plans to make sure families are finding their way into 2-K we’ll make sure that we’re partnering closely with the shelter providers and others in the community to connect those families to services. 

We recognize that for many families, government isn’t always the most trusted voice, particularly families who have gone through real challenges and have faced government systems in not always the friendliest light. So we have and will continue to look to trusted community partners, who those families may go to for support, to make sure that we can leverage them and they can help connect families to care as well.

The universal 3-K rollout under the de Blasio administration was largely regarded as a successful program, but one critique was that home-based child care providers — who are typically women of color — often felt locked out of the system. You just mentioned (some other states that) did good work to address this. Can you talk about some of the policies they implemented?

If you look back at the implementation of pre-K and then 3-K in the city, I would talk about those two things differently. There are laws and policies and regulations that exist at the state level that make it much harder to bring (home-based) providers into the city’s pre-K program. In other states, the funding structures are set in a way that makes it much more straightforward for those providers to participate in their state pre-K programs. And so I think that’s an area where we can look at other states as examples.

With 3-K, and then as we think about now the expansion of 2-K, the city has tried to take a really different approach, and is trying to make sure that our programs are inclusive of home-based providers. I think in some other parts of the country, they’ve been really thoughtful in the ways that they have done outreach to providers to make sure that they are aware of the opportunities to participate. They’ve provided business coaching and other sorts of operational and administrative support to help those providers come into their public systems. 

They’ve thought about contracting mechanisms that are responsive to providers, so thinking about ways that providers can enter into contracting agreements that don’t have to be in English necessarily, for example, recognizing that home-based providers often do speak and serve children who speak languages other than English.

I think there’s been a real investment in some other communities, and I think New York has done this in pockets, but there’s more opportunity for us to do this and just supporting these providers — these women primarily — and empowering them as business leaders and giving them resources and support so that they can continue to grow and sustain their businesses. 

And then thinking about the ways in which we can take administrative load off of their plates. These are women who are working 10-, 12-hour days, providing care to children, and then on top of that, doing all of the prep work and the cleaning and the cooking and everything. They’re one-woman operations in many cases. So to then ask them to take on an incredible contractual, administrative business load on top of that, I think just looking at all the ways in which we can simplify and streamline the process for them.

A report out of looked at the economic disparities between caregivers working in these different environments and found that those running home-based programs often earn far less than the minimum wage (on average about $6 an hour) and certainly less than those running center-based programs. 

How are you planning on approaching that partnership and making sure that home-based providers are truly earning a living wage and that they can keep their doors open to keep serving families?

We recognize that there are incredibly inequitable gaps here, and that this is something providers have borne for decades and decades. For too long the work of home-based providers in particular, has gone under under recognized, underpaid, under respected, and it’s something we know we have to address, and we’re going to look at all the different options for how we can close some of these gaps.

Child care and early childhood education are obviously areas where you’ve devoted so much of your career, and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what drew you to this space initially, and why this is such an important issue to you.

I’ve always been really interested in the role that government can play in actually ending child poverty, and so I started working in education policy, because I saw education as a real anti-poverty lever. I was particularly drawn to early childhood education because it’s not just about the child, but really about the whole family and how we can change the economic reality that families face. 

I was also just so privileged to work in government at the time of the expansion of 3-K and pre-K, because it gave me this very front row seat to what’s possible when government sets big goals. What we were able to deliver over the course of eight years for families — with the expansion of 3-K and pre-K — really just cemented my view about what’s possible when the public sector activates around that kind of a goal, and so I’ve been focused on it ever since. 

Then, on a personal note, as now a parent of young children, I really see the incredibly important role that child care plays in a family’s life, and I think that that motivates me as well — just thinking about my own experience and the access I’ve had, and how that allows me to come and do a job like this every day, knowing that my children are safe and nurtured and cared for and developing and growing. That’s something I want for every parent.

It begins with clapping syllables — to-ma-to, ba-na-na — with the children clapping along. The lesson then shifts to letters. A capital H appears on the whiteboard, followed by a lowercase h. The teacher models the sound. Children skywrite it in the air, then return to their desks to copy the letter across a line. Some do so carefully. Others hesitate, gripping their pencils too tightly, unsure where to begin.

Back to the rug. Now vowels. Him, stretched slowly. Back to desks again — this time to write nap. A few children stare at the page. One reverses the n. Another pauses at the p, pencil hovering.

No questions are asked.

No time is wasted.

Children return to the rug to compare ham and nap. Back to their desks once more to write a phrase: a pan. Back to the rug for flashcards: letter names, letter sounds, key words, then a phrase or two. Some letters have two sounds. Some children guess. Others stay silent. The lesson ends where it began: clapping syllables.

This entire 30-minute sequence is delivered with perfect fidelity. In the neighboring classroom, we observe the same words spoken. The pacing is precise. The script is followed. And yet, across the room, children’s faces tell a different story — not frustration exactly, but puzzlement. They are doing what they have been asked to do. They just don’t seem to know why.

Moments like these are easy to misread. It would be tempting to attribute what we observed to classroom management, to the quality of a particular lesson or to children’s readiness for kindergarten. Indeed, debates about early literacy often return to familiar explanations: uneven preparation in pre-K, insufficient “dosage” or children who simply are not ready.

But decades of research point to a different problem. What matters most for learning is not the strength of any single component, but how instructional expectations, opportunities and support are organized over time. When learning experiences come in a coherent sequence, understanding accumulates. When they do not, instruction can feel busy without being productive.

To be clear, this is not a call to slow down kindergarten or lower expectations. Kindergarten rightly reflects ambitious goals for children’s learning by the end of the year. The issue is not rigor, but sequencing. A coherent instructional system distinguishes between what children are expected to learn eventually and when they are given sustained opportunities to consolidate what they’re learning. When instructional demands accelerate too quickly, rigor can give way to fragmentation.

The problem, then, is not kindergarten itself, but a breakdown in alignment from pre-K to kindergarten. At kindergarten entry, this often arises when standards written as cumulative, end-of-year goals are treated as early instructional demands.

This framing challenges a dominant narrative in early childhood education. Much of the research on the pre-K–to–elementary transition has focused on the “fade-out” of the benefits of early education, implicitly locating the problem in children’s preparation or in instructional quality after pre-K. Far less attention has been paid to whether the transition itself is coherently designed — whether expectations, materials, pacing and assessments work together.

Why does this matter? Because the transition to kindergarten appears to affect children across the skill distribution: not only those who enter with lower scores, but also those who begin school performing relatively well. In a of over 800 children across 64 classrooms, researchers found that the transition itself was associated with changes in children’s academic and behavioral functioning, regardless of where children started. How children experience kindergarten is therefore not a short-term adjustment issue; it can shape educational trajectories for years to come.

Perhaps, then, instead of asking whether children are ready for kindergarten, educators should be asking whether early instructional systems are ready for children.

In early literacy, this question is especially urgent. Foundational skills are not acquired through brief exposure or rapid movement across tasks. They are built through repeated, connected practice. When expectations, materials and assessments move faster than children can reasonably integrate new learning, compliance can mask fragility.

On paper, the transition from pre-K to kindergarten often looks well aligned. In New York state, for example, early literacy standards reflect a sensible developmental progression. Pre-K standards emphasize broad print awareness, phonological sensitivity and early letter knowledge. Kindergarten standards build on these foundations, specifying more advanced expectations, such as consistent letter-sound knowledge and simple decoding, by the end of the year.

Viewed side by side, the standards themselves are not the problem.

The trouble begins when these end-of-year expectations are translated into curriculum materials, pacing guidance and early assessments. In many classrooms, children are asked within the first weeks of kindergarten to produce written words, coordinate vowel and consonant sounds, and move rapidly across multiple phonological and print-based tasks — before they have had sustained opportunities to consolidate underlying skills.

The result is a subtle but consequential shift: cumulative goals become entry-level demands.

For a child who is still learning the basics, this acceleration can make learning feel fragmented rather than cumulative. Tasks change quickly. Success depends on coordinating several emerging skills at once. Children may appear engaged and compliant, but their uncertainty is visible: in reversed letters, hesitant pencil strokes, guessing, or silence during group responses.

This is what structural incoherence looks like — not a dramatic mismatch, but a quiet misalignment between what children are expected to do and the opportunities they are given to get there.

When this pattern becomes routine, the risk is not that children are challenged — but that challenge outpaces learning. Compliance can mask confusion. Activity can replace accumulation. Kindergarten can begin to feel like a race before children have learned how to run.

The solution is not to retreat from rigor, but to design more coherent pathways to it. Kindergarten standards are cumulative by design; instructional systems should treat them that way. This means clarifying which skills are meant to be introduced early, which require sustained practice and which are intended to integrate later in the year.

It means reducing overload by limiting how many new demands children are asked to coordinate at once. And it means aligning early assessments to instructional timing. None of these shifts lowers expectations. They make rigor stick.

Kindergarten should be the place where reading begins to make sense — where sounds connect, words hold meaning and effort leads to understanding. When instructional systems move too fast, even well-intentioned reforms can work at cross-purposes, asking children to perform before they have had time to learn. The challenge before us is not whether to be ambitious, but whether we are willing to design systems that honor how learning actually unfolds.

If early literacy reforms are to deliver on their promise, coherence cannot be an afterthought. It must be the bridge that turns high standards into real understanding for every child.

It was January 2022, and Rhian Allvin was in search of a space that could bring her vision to life. 

The early childhood leader had just finished up her nearly decade-long tenure as CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a large, national nonprofit that promotes high-quality early learning. She’d been steeped in early childhood policy, advocacy and research for years. She was ready for something new, something hands-on. She wanted to start her own early care and education program. 

That’s how she found herself, on that winter day, driving alongside a red-brick prison wall, past imposing watch towers, and onto the sprawling grounds that were once home to a notorious maximum-security prison at the Lorton Reformatory, a correctional complex in Lorton, Virginia. 

A pair of the former penitentiary’s buildings were among the first Allvin toured in her pursuit of a property that would become her flagship location. The site intrigued her — how could it not? But she walked away — at least at first.

“I said, ‘I’m already out over my skis. This isn’t a great idea,’’ Allvin recalled. “I must’ve looked at 40 or 50 other spaces in Virginia. They were all so vanilla. Office buildings. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I took friends to see it.”

Allvin saw, in the former prison, a possibility for a second life, a rebirth. Eventually, she decided she would turn this historic site, awash in , “into a place of light and joy.”

It took over a year to prepare the space, but Allvin opened the doors to Brynmor Early Education & Preschool in October 2023, with capacity to serve up to 152 children. Today, the shuttered correctional facility is home to a thriving, high-quality early learning program. 

Inside the 15-foot-tall walls, where , babies now sleep soundly, practice newfound motor skills, learn to communicate with gestures and words, and explore the boundaries of their bodies. 

Under a roof that has overseen riots, escapes and assaults, toddlers now sit at tiny tables for mealtime, learn to wash their hands at little sinks, and attempt to regulate their big emotions under the tutelage of patient caregivers.  

On the same grounds where prisoners were once on lockdown for 23 hours a day, children now move about the courtyard freely, riding bicycles and scooters around a racetrack, letting their imaginations guide them in a mud kitchen. 

To get to this point, Allvin and many others had their work cut out for them. But the program is named Brynmor — Welsh for “great hill” — for a reason. Though Allvin saw a “steep hill to climb” in transforming this site, and in creating a high-quality, profitable early care and education business, she decided to take that first step anyway.

The Lorton Reformatory comprised eight prison facilities across three campuses in the relatively small Northern Virginia community, located about 20 miles outside of Washington, D.C.

The complex, which operated from 1910 to 2001 and was primarily used to incarcerate D.C. inmates, began as a progressive work camp and evolved to include distinct buildings for women, youth and eventually a maximum-security penitentiary. 

By the late 20th century, the Lorton Reformatory, like so many other maximum-security prisons in the United States, had become . Violence became an everyday occurrence, according to former guards and inmates featured in , a documentary produced by former inmates and released in 2022. The facility was described as “unfit for humans” and “dusty, dirty and dangerous.” 

After it closed, the site was to the National Register of Historic Places. Over subsequent years, much of the old prison complex was gutted, redeveloped, and converted into art studios, gyms and luxury apartments. 

There have been several comparable efforts to closed prison facilities across the United States over the last couple of decades, said Nicole D. Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that studies policies impacting the criminal legal system. 

Though a common outcome is mixed-use developments, she has noticed a trend of these spaces being converted into education centers to serve youth — typically teenagers already involved in the criminal justice system or viewed as “at risk.” 

But Porter believes Brynmor is unique; she’s not aware of any other former prison facility that hosts young children. And she pointed out the irony of a program serving early learners in a building that once housed incarcerated people, since early childhood investment has been with lower rates of crime in adulthood. 

“The idea that a site that caused so much harm … is converted into a site of learning, of teaching young people in a healthy way and a holistic way, is very encouraging,” Porter said of Brynmor. “I would hope it serves as a point of inspiration in what could be possible at closed prisons going forward.”

By the time Allvin was touring the maximum-security unit in 2022, only a small portion of the original prison cells were intact, preserved in a separate, undeveloped building on the grounds. 

The two buildings she visited — 9050 and 9060 Power House Road — had already been hollowed out. The two-story-high cell blocks had been removed. There was no HVAC or plumbing. Just two vast rectangular buildings.

“I got a cold, dark shell,” said Allvin, who signed a long-term lease for the buildings. 

But the high ceilings and large, striking glass windows, which Allvin described as “cathedral-like,” drew her in.  

“The buildings were completely empty. We had a blank slate here,” said Theresa del Ninno, principal at Maginniss + del Ninno Architects, a small, women-owned architectural firm that has done a number of adaptive reuse for early childhood, including Brynmor. “You don’t really think, ‘This was a maximum-security prison.’”

One might imagine a former prison as gray and drab, an eyesore. That is not the reality of the Lorton site. 

“There was always talk about what’s going to happen with these beautiful, historic brick buildings,” said del Ninno. “For years we’ve seen them there, so it was exciting to get a chance to work in two of them.”

The symmetrical Brynmor buildings, at about 6,700 square feet apiece, are connected by a brick colonnade portico, with ample green space in between. Inside each two-story building, the ceilings are nearly 20 feet tall. Great big windows — 100 in all — allow natural light to pour in. 

These elements created design challenges and opportunities. 

Natural light is an obvious advantage, the architects shared. “It’s so bright and light-filled and open,” del Ninno noted. 

“I could picture a child care center being there,” said Kim Jesada, project architect, about her first impressions upon seeing the space. 

But the same tall, rectangular windows that allow all that light in also created challenges. “We like to have windows down at a child’s eye level,” del Ninno explained. The bottom sills of these windows, however, sit nearly eight feet off the ground.

The architects made cutouts in interior classroom walls and added internal windows along the corridors to allow light from outside to penetrate the innermost parts of each building. 

They also had to do something about those two-story ceilings, which are more than twice as high as a standard room. 

“Because the ceiling is so tall, and the kids are so small, we wanted to bring the scale down,” del Ninno said. 

They added acoustic baffles — sound-absorbing panels that hang from the ceiling — to create the feeling of a lower ceiling and smaller space without obstructing natural light. 

The buildings’ shape is “very unusual,” Allvin said. That, too, was a problem to solve. 

“Because the buildings are so long,” Jesada said, “we didn’t want to have one single corridor running down that feels like one endless shaft.”

Instead, the corridor charts a diagonal path through each building. That design choice resulted in what del Ninno called “non-rectilinear” classrooms — or what Allvin described as “funky-shaped.”

They landed on a design that had infant and toddler classrooms in one building, and Pre-K in another. The buildings are connected by an open, covered walkway that overlooks a shared play area that’s almost as big as each of the buildings. It includes an outdoor storytime space, a concrete racetrack, an infant play area and natural climbing structures with timber. 

The process of transforming the buildings into the welcoming, child-friendly haven they are today was long and arduous.

“I had moments where I was like, ‘Was this really a good idea?’” Allvin recalled. “There were days where it felt like too much work.”

It was an expensive undertaking, she said. “I was building a 14,000 square-foot child care center on a family child care home budget mentality.” 

She paid for the multimillion-dollar project with a combination of “socially conscious” investors, a loan from a community development financial institution and private foundation support, she said. And fortunately, there was no shortage of help. 

Allvin’s own children, now grown, assembled cribs. A network she built throughout her career, including leaders of other early care and education organizations, such as ZERO TO THREE and Child Care Aware of America, pitched in too, putting together furniture. But it wasn’t just friends and family who stepped up. Members of the community were moved by the transformation and wanted to be a part of it. 

Shortly before the center opened, Allvin realized she needed more hands on deck, so she hired a few workers through a local company to help. One of the workers shared with Allvin that he’d grown up in D.C. with a very clear idea about what Lorton Reformatory represented. “He said, ‘Anytime you need help, let me know. All I knew this place to be was where people came to die. Now it’s a place where babies are born, where light happens,’” Allvin recalled. “So many people have had that reaction.”

Around two weeks before opening day, a local couple who had heard about the preschool showed up to see it for themselves, Allvin said. Both of them were former prison guards at Lorton. Allvin took them inside to see the progress, and standing in the infant classroom, the man commented that he wished society designed spaces as intentionally for incarcerated people as it does for kids, she recalled. The woman, Allvin said, returned every day for two weeks to help get the space ready to serve children and families.

When the ribbon cutting ceremony came, Jesada, one of the architects, brought her young daughter with her. She got to see the space anew through her daughter’s eyes. The girl was not privy to the buildings’ history. Her face lit up as she walked in, Jesada remembered. 

“The kids aren’t coming into this space thinking, ‘I’m going to preschool in what used to be a prison,’” Jesada said. “[My daughter] saw a warm and inviting space filled with light.”

She added: “I think that with any project, seeing any of the users walk in and their reaction to the space, is what makes me want to keep designing. You see how people get to enjoy the space. Seeing this space filled with kids was my favorite part of it. They feel comfortable and safe learning.”

Tiara Smith, an infant teacher at Brynmor who joined a few months after the center opened, didn’t realize the program was housed in a former prison until she started the job. After seeing the still-intact cells on campus, though, she said the significance of the turnaround is not lost on her. 

“We’re the change,” she said. “We’re making a difference to new lives — infants, toddlers and preschoolers. We can give them that foundation to learn to love school and love life and enjoy life. We can be that partnership with families. It’s definitely a powerful thing.”

Brynmor has been open for just over two years, and already, it has demonstrated what so many in early care and education believe to be impossible.  

From the start, Allvin was committed to serving children from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing from her experience as a national early childhood leader, Allvin has been able to build a thoughtful revenue and fee structure that makes that possible. About 60% of Brynmor families receive some form of financial assistance — either through government subsidies, child care scholarships with the of a private foundation, or . The rest pay the full price out of pocket. 

The center recently earned NAEYC accreditation — the gold standard for quality in the field, yet a designation that only a fraction of programs can claim. And it invests in its staff. In a field where the average wage is $13 per hour nearly half of early childhood educators use at least one form of public assistance, Brynmor pays its teachers on par with public school employees, and provides them with health insurance, retirement matching, paid leave and other benefits. 

“That’s why we exist,” Allvin said. “That’s our North Star.”

The model is working so well that Allvin is busy the business. Brynmor now has two more locations, one in the heart of D.C. and another inside a 250-year-old Baptist church in Virginia. Next up, she said, is an effort to into an early learning program.

In a field where scarcity is the default, each of these realities is rare. Together, they’re remarkable. 

Yet it tracks with the narrative surrounding this project. Light chases out darkness. Hope overcomes despair. 

And bit by bit, the promise and potential of our nation’s youngest children rewrites the story of a space that, for decades, represented pain and despair.

A focused on computer science and artificial intelligence aims to teach young kids to build, program and prototype together. In essence, students build their own machine learning models, solving problems, inventing characters and telling stories connected to their interests. The program, designed by Lego Education to be used in K-8 classrooms, offers project-based experiences for kids to work on in small groups. The lessons use Lego bricks, and some are screen free, while others require access to a device, such as a laptop or tablet, so kids can access an app which has a “coding canvas,” with icon-based coding.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, commends Lego for using the science of playful learning to teach computer science. “When children learn to solve problems with hands-on materials,” she states, “they are more likely to not only learn material but to be able to transfer what they have learned. In my experience, the Lego team has always worked with scientists to develop teaching tools that are aligned with the very best science on how children learn. It is one of the few companies committed to this way of doing business.” (Hirsh-Pasek has collaborated with the Lego Foundation on other projects but did not take part in this initiative.)

In a significant departure from many other AI products, data from the children never leaves the computer. “A really strong perspective that we had was that we don’t want anybody else to have the data — we don’t even want the data. We want that to stay in the classroom and on the computer, said Andrew Sliwinski, head of product experience for Lego Education. From a technical and design perspective, Sliwinski said, “It’s much easier to just send data to the cloud or use one of the big APIs [Application Program Interfaces], or one of the big companies that are out there. But when you do that, you sort of betray that principle of being able to guarantee privacy and safety to the child, and to the parent and to the teacher.”

Maybe Big Tech could learn a thing or two from Big Toy.

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Sliwinski explains his role, the evolution of the curriculum and his hopes for AI more broadly. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you do at Lego Education?

My team is responsible for product strategy, design, engineering and, most importantly, the educational impact of our product. So really the development of our learning experiences from end to end. Lego stole me from the , where I worked on creative tools for children for many years, including, most notably, , which is a programming language for kids. 

Were you in the classroom before that?

I started working in education in 2002. I was living in Detroit, working as a tutor, and I was invited to support students in Detroit public schools with the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, the state’s big standardized test [at the time]. I’ve basically been working in some way, shape or form in education ever since. 

What do you see as the through line between that work, and what you’re doing now?

When I showed up in Detroit all those years ago, my biggest reflection was: These are kids that don’t see the purpose in mathematics. They don’t feel connected to it. They don’t understand how it connects to their lives. And so for me, it was like, “Well, let’s solve that problem.” And yeah, the rest is history. 

Were you a Lego kid yourself? 

We didn’t have Legos, but we had all manner of other building materials at our disposal, like cardboard boxes and wooden blocks and access to hammers and screwdrivers and all of that fun stuff. So I grew up building things and learning through making. 

Why is it important for children to understand what’s behind AI?

The phrase AI literacy is being used a lot, and I think it’s being used in a very general way that is sometimes unhelpful. AI literacy is about more than how children use AI. It’s about those foundational literacies that help children understand what AI is, because I’m not just interested in children developing an understanding of how to use ChatGPT to do a specific project or a specific location. I want children to understand what probability is. I want children to understand that machines reason differently than humans do — and why that is. I want children to understand that AI learns from data, and that data can have biases, and that data can have ethical considerations, and that data output is only as good as the input, right? Garbage in, garbage out. 

What does responsible AI education look like for young kids?

What we’re moving forward with with Lego education is really focused on … those foundations. The way that I sometimes like to talk about it with the team is: So much of what is being put in front of kids today is like learning how to use the black box of an AI model or an AI tool — I’m much more interested in giving the kids a screwdriver and letting them take the box apart. 

But that last analogy is figurative. 

Yes. There are no screwdrivers that come in the box, but not as figurative as you might think. In the tool, the kids actually get to train their own machine learning models … So a bunch of kids will work together in a group of four. That’s something that’s different. It is collaborative. 

What lessons can we draw from the use of earlier technological developments, such as TV and the internet, in building products for young kids?

These technologies are most effective when they serve as a catalyst for joint engagement between children and adults together, rather than sort of acting as a digital babysitter, whether that’s cartoons or whether that’s Club Penguin [a Disney game that ran from 2005 to 2017]. … 

One of the most powerful things that you can say to a child is, “I don’t know. Let’s go figure it out together.” And I think that there’s so much that parents and teachers and kids don’t know about AI, but that kids are curious about. And us expressing our own curiosity, and supporting that curiosity and engaging together is a really powerful thing. 

What guardrails has your team put in place for young children? 

When we started working on this, one of the things that was really important was to have a set of principles and a set of lines — we call them red lines, lines that we will not cross — because I think it’s so easy when you’re working in technology development to sort of lose track of some of those principles. We established that way, way early in the project. 

Some of the ones that are maybe less apparent are things like [how] no data from the children will ever leave the computer. It is never transmitted over the internet. It is never saved to disk. It is never sent to Lego. It is never sent to any third party. And if you look at the predominant paradigm and a lot of the tools that are out there, that is not the case. …

…We’re the Lego Group. If we don’t care about child safety and well-being, who does? And so I think it’s been this huge responsibility, but also like this really great opportunity for us to put forward something that we feel lives up to our values. … People are always surprised by how much my team goes around the world testing in classrooms, testing with children and talking with educators and experts. We even have child developmental psychologists that are on staff. And so much of what we do is about developing the right things in collaboration with young people and educators. 

How did you test the experience with young children?

One of the most recent tests that I [did] was testing some of the AI features for the very young kids — the kindergarten to second grade group [in Chicago public schools.] One of the things that we do as the product matures is we stop being the teachers in the classroom and we actually just give the box to a … teacher in their normal day-to-day classroom and we say, “Good luck.” And then we watch, because it’s not enough for the kids to have a great experience when we show up knowing the product and we teach it. … It has to work for the teachers, otherwise it doesn’t matter. 

One of the most interesting, but also humbling things that you do as a designer for children and teachers is taking it into the field, right? Because all of the assumptions and ideas and intentions that you have, they go out the window when you put it in front of a 5-year-old. That process is just so rewarding.

Did anything surprise you about how they put it to use? 

I was observing a group of 4- or 5-year-olds, and they were working on this lesson where they had to build a toothbrush for a dinosaur. Part of that was figuring out how motors work and how sensors interact, but it was kind of a funny setup — the dinosaur mouth that we had built had these big teeth in it. 

The 5-year-olds didn’t see a dinosaur. They saw a swimming pool, because the bottom of the dinosaur’s jaw had these big teeth around it, and they were like, “Oh, it’s a swimming pool.” So then they designed dinosaurs that went into the swimming pool. 

You kind of come in with these stories and intentions of what you think kids are going to connect to. … And then you get there and it’s just one little detail of how the model was designed just throws the whole lesson out the window.

How are educators responding?

We’re doing this in a way where the teacher is able to come along for the journey, where we’ve prepared all of the materials that are necessary for a teacher, who often feels less confident about computer science and AI than their students do, giving them everything that they need to feel not just prepared, but to feel confident. 

There’s this kind of power dynamic that’s happening with AI today, where we’re more focused on what computers can do than we are on what children can do right now. And I think that’s really fundamental to our approach … When you get a bunch of kids together to train a Lego robot how to dance, this kind of fear dissipates. They see the cause and effect between the model that they trained and what’s happening in the world, and they realize that the machine only knows what they taught it. 

The AI is no longer the smartest thing in the room. They’re the smartest thing in the room, and the AI is a tool. 

(NCDHHS) will partner with 16 higher education institutions to launch free, intensive, short-term training and certification programs to prepare participants for child care careers, according to

Traditional programs for lead teacher roles in early childhood education can last several weeks or months. These new training programs, called “child care academies,” will be shorter, while still offering curriculum that “meets or exceeds” minimum training standards, the announcement says. The length of programs will vary depending on the college or university in which the participant enrolls.

The NCDHHS press release says these academies aim to “address the severe staffing shortage that is a key contributor to the state’s child care crisis,” expand access to high-quality early learning, bolster workforce development, and reinforce the state’s economy by helping parents stay employed.

Funding for the initiative will come from NCDHHS’s Division of Child Development and Early Education, the announcement said, using dollars from a federal Preschool Development Grant.

“North Carolina’s early learning system depends on a strong, well-prepared workforce, and the Child Care Academies are designed to meet that need head on,” said NCDHHS Deputy Secretary for Opportunity and Well-Being Michael Leighs. “By providing free high-quality training, we’re opening doors for new educators while supporting families and ensuring children across our state have access to safe and nurturing care.”

These academies have gained popularity in recent months as a way to address early childhood educator shortages. that at least 11 counties across the state had institutions running child care academies. According to that report, a 2024 survey found staffing shortages were affecting three out of every five licensed child care providers across the state.

Earlier this year, a $1.476 million pilot to expand child care academies with state funding was included in the . However, the pilot funding did not make it into the General Assembly’s “,” which was signed by Gov. Josh Stein in August.

A February lifted up child care academies as “scalable local solutions,” and the governor’s North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education highlighted child care academies in its June .

The NCDHHS press release lists 16 new child care academies — including 13 at community colleges, and three at four-year institutions. Of the 13 at community colleges, only two were included in EdNC’s September report, meaning that 11 of the community colleges may be running programs for the first time.

Per NCDHHS, the list of institutions offering child care academies include:

• Appalachian State University
• Bladen Community College
• Central Carolina Community College
• Central Piedmont Community College
• Davidson-Davie Community College
• Durham Technical Community College
• Elizabeth City State University
• Forsyth Technical Community College
• Guilford Technical Community College
• Montgomery Community College
• Nash Community College
• Pitt Community College
• Roanoke-Chowan Community College
• Sandhills Community College
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Wilson Community College

According to the press release, participants in the academies undergo training in different formats — with virtual and in-person opportunities — covering CPR/first aid, health and safety, infant/toddler safe sleep and sudden infant death syndrome, playground safety, and identifying and responding to signs of child maltreatment.

Participants are also introduced to the North Carolina Foundations for Early Learning and Development, trained on the Environment Rating Scales, and briefed on program standards for Pathways to the Stars, the state’s updated Quality Rating and Improvement System. They also receive certification and guidance to complete the required NCDHHS criminal background checks.

“Children in early childhood care and education environments need well-prepared teachers to help keep them safe, healthy and learning,” said Candace Witherspoon, director of the NCDHHS , which licenses and monitors child care programs. “Child Care Academies quickly and fully prepare teachers to provide quality care and education to children and families in their communities.”

Each of these schools will have to offer at least three trainings through July 2026, the release says, though participating schools can set their own start date. Some already began in October, while others will launch in January.

NCDHHS’s press release said those interested in the academies should contact the admissions office of the program at their school of choice.

You can

EdNC’s Katie Dukes contributed to this report.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Amid these developments — some amazing research and resources have emerged for the field. As the year comes to a close, zero2eight asked early care and education experts to share what they consider to be the sector’s must-read research of 2025. What emerged from their responses were a collection of reports, studies and data tools relevant to a number of urgent themes. These include the sector’s ability to respond to current events, new ways of thinking about preschool gains and economic analysis of some of the ongoing challenges facing the early care and education workforce. 

Here are some of the themes, studies and resources identified by the field’s insiders as essential to moving the sector forward.

1. Timely Research and Resources for Challenging Times

Steeply rising costs, and have all contributed to a challenging, fast-changing landscape for families and early educators, and reliant on public benefits. The following new research and tools offer timely insights into how such pressures are reshaping families’ lives and the early care and education sector, with some offering inspiration for how to respond. 

Working Paper: 

Authors: Thomas S. Dee, economist and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: Immigration raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with especially large increases among the youngest students. 

This study highlights the field’s “ability to innovate and be nimble to understand impacts of policy and policy enforcement,” said nominator Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood who studies family well-being. It examines the collateral damage of unexpected immigration raids in California’s Central Valley, documenting a clear pattern in children’s school attendance, said second nominator Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, adding that “ICE raids are associated with increased school absenteeism.” According to the working paper, young children are expected to be the most likely to miss school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade estimated to be far more likely to miss school as a result of immigration raids than high school students. 

Report:

Authors: Children’s Funding Project staff, including Bruno Showers, state policy manager; Lisa Christensen Gee, director of tax policy; Olivia Allen, vice president of strategy and advocacy; Josh Weinstock, policy analyst (former); and Marina Mendoza, senior manager of early childhood impact

Key Takeaway: Facing dwindling federal funds, several states have innovated ways to provide dedicated funding for early care and education and youth programs.

With pandemic-era relief funds running out, states are in desperate need of models for how to continue supporting early care and education, said Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), who nominated this recent report. The report — from Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that helps secure sustainable public funding for children’s services — offers exactly that by providing a crucial, “very comprehensive overview” of how some states are building long-term, dedicated revenue streams for child care, early education and youth programs as federal money runs dry. As the report’s authors explain, stable, dedicated funding is critical to thriving programs, letting states and providers to “budget more than one year at a time, allowing them to make longer-term investments in quality improvement, facilities, staff education, and other key elements of evidence-based programs and services.” 

Data Tools: and

Authors: The diaper need mapping tool was published as part of a research collaboration between the Urban Institute and the National Diaper Bank Network. The affordability tracker was published by the Urban Institute. 

Key takeaway: Families are facing mounting economic insecurity 

The Urban Institute recently released two innovative data tools for policymakers, advocates and researchers that illuminate the increasing economic precariousness facing too many families, said Carman of the RAPID Survey Project. The interactive, produced in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Initiative, shows how many diapers each county across the nation needs to address diaper shortages facing homes with young children that are below 300% of the federal poverty level. illustrates the rising cost pressures facing families across various indicators, including how the price of groceries has changed in counties and congressional districts in recent years. “Being able to see and understand scale and drivers of economic insecurity nationally is very powerful,” wrote Carman. 

2. New Research Reveals Preschool’s Overlooked Impacts

The body of early education research about how preschool affects children often measures child outcomes such as kindergarten readiness, standardized test scores or later graduation rates. While those are all important, Christina Weiland, professor at the Marsal School of Education at the University of Michigan and the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in an email, “we’ve long suspected they aren’t the full picture of preschool’s effects.” Weiland nominated the following working paper as part of what she considers to be a new wave of research that explores a broader set of outcomes than the field has typically examined, such as parent earnings, and subsequent schooling environments. “Together, these studies suggest benefits of preschool programs that have been largely overlooked,” but that are key to fully understanding the potential benefits of early learning investments for children and families, noted Weiland.

Working Paper:

Authors: John Eric Humphries, faculty research fellow at Yale University’s Department of Economics; Christopher Neilson, research associate at Yale University; Xiaoyang Ye, Brown University; and Seth D. Zimmerman, research associate at Yale School of Management 

Key Takeaway: New Haven’s universal pre-K (UPK) program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years.

Weiland said that this notable study, published in 2024 and updated in 2025, expands the preschool picture by looking at how UPK might impact parents’ earnings,” and uses that to estimate the program’s returns on investment. It found that New Haven’s UPK program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years, concluding that the returns to UPK investment are “high.” As one of the first studies looking at “earnings data in modern-day pre-K studies,” noted Weiland, it offers more evidence that the field is “likely underestimating the return on investment early education programs have.” 

3. Spotlight on the Early Child Care Workforce

Back in the spring, child care economist Chris Herbst spoke with zero2eight about how the COVID pandemic demonstrated how the child care workforce is “like a leaf blowing in the wind” — “sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.” Because of this, a new surge of recent research by economists has focused on the workforce, with researchers seeking to understand how early care providers respond to policy and market changes. Nominators pointed toward two such studies. 

Working Paper:

Authors: Katharine C. Sadowski, assistant professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: An increase in minimum wage changes who provides child care

Combining “rich data with sensible research designs,” this study examines how an increase in the minimum wage could impact child care quality and access, noted nominator Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 

Author Katharine C. Sadowski’s findings suggest that an increase to the minimum wage doesn’t lead to a decrease in the number of child care programs or the number of people working in the sector. However, minimum wage policies can influence who provides child care: larger enterprises, such as child care centers, are more likely to open and remain in operation, while smaller, self-employed providers, such as home-based child care programs, are less likely to open or remain in business. Among the smaller establishments that do stay open, the owners are less likely to have advanced degrees, the study found, potentially impacting the quality of child care provided, according to the author. “Unfortunately, minimum wage policy is binding and too important for a lot of child care employers and employees due to chronic underinvestment in the sector,” wrote Sojourner, adding that this is the first paper he’s seen to leverage “restricted-use data available through the U.S. Census Research Data Center system to generate insights on the sector.”

Study:

Authors: Chris M. Herbst, foundation professor in Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs 

Key Takeaway: The education of the early education workforce has dropped over time, possibly due to the sector’s low wages 

This study found that the education levels and cognitive test scores of the early education workforce have been declining over time, suggesting lower teacher quality, which could have implications for children’s development. The study links this dip in teacher skills to the proliferation of early education programs which might divert future child care workers away from four-year colleges. It also looks at how low wages — which have remained low even as wages for other jobs for similarly-skilled workers have increased — might lead highly qualified individuals to choose other occupations. 

“This is analogous to what,” wrote Jessica Brown, assistant professor of economics at University of South Carolina, who nominated the study. It “underscores the importance of the discussion of compensation in early childhood education.” Brown notes that it’s a difficult topic for the field to discuss, because “no one wants to imply that the current workforce is not high quality. But the reality is that compensation challenges mean that child care is not a very attractive job, and that has implications for the quality of the workforce.”

Prekindergarten teachers have been slower to adopt these tools. Our recent of 1,586 public school pre-K teachers found that only 29% used gen AI in 2024–2025. Does this lower usage rate matter? It does if AI can help pre-K teachers manage their work more efficiently or improve learning without exposing children to risks. Insights from teachers — through surveys and focus groups — provide some answers.

Why the big gap in AI adoption? One possibility is that pre-K teachers might be resistant to using technology in general. A second is that gen AI might be less useful for their daily tasks. Compared to teachers for older students, many pre-K teachers are less likely to grade papers, write complex assessments or develop lessons with extensive written material. A third possibility is that pre-K teachers might worry that AI tools are not developmentally appropriate for young children.

Our research shows that general technology resistance does not appear to be driving their lower use of gen AI among these teachers. About 80% of pre-K teachers surveyed regularly use interactive whiteboards, digital platforms to communicate with families and digital resources included with curricula.

It’s possible that gen AI is less useful to pre-K teachers, but that is not the full story. Teachers in our survey held positive views of technology’s potential benefits — including for tasks that gen AI could support. More than 80% agreed that technology could help with instructional planning, administrative work, communicating with families and exposing children to experiences beyond the classroom.

Furthermore, gen AI might be helpful for differentiating instructional materials for students with wide-ranging needs and interests. Already, to adjust the rigor of classroom activities, adapt lessons to fit the individualized education program goals of students with disabilities, and create engaging content tailored to students’ interests and skill gaps. Gen AI could be useful in similar ways for pre-K classrooms.

The biggest source of teachers’ hesitation regarding gen AI appears to be concerns about developmental appropriateness for young children. AI-based tools often rely on computers or tablets. In focus groups, teachers voiced concern about young children spending too much time on screens, potentially limiting opportunities to build social and communication skills. Reflecting these concerns, only 37% of pre-K teachers reported using tablet- or computer-based educational programs with their students.

Many child development experts share teachers’ reservations, but there are no clear answers. Some caution about too much or warn that excessive AI interaction may interfere with the young children need, while others emphasize AI’s .

This is a pivotal moment. Policymakers and educators have an opportunity to ensure that technology supports both the professional needs of pre-K teachers and the developmental needs of students. Education technology companies can help by working with independent researchers to examine how AI interactions affect child development and by integrating the research findings into product design.

Meanwhile, pre-K leaders face immediate choices about which technologies to allow and how often to use them. They should pay careful attention to how well tech products align with instructional goals, and they should make determinations about developmental appropriateness in close consultation with teachers and parents.

Some next steps are clearer. District and school leaders should provide robust training for teachers, specifically on how technology use in preschool settings should account for developmental needs. Leaders should also offer guidance on evaluating the quality of tech products for supporting learning. Only 37% of pre-K teachers in our survey had received such training — a critical gap.

Decisions about gen AI in pre-K require caution and collaboration. Expanding use without understanding its developmental implications could pose risks, while ignoring its potential benefits could miss opportunities. The choices educators make now will shape how technology influences young children’s learning for years to come.

 Disclosure: Gates Foundation, which supported the RAND research, also provides financial support to �鶹��Ʒ.

Yet as her 30th anniversary working as a special education teacher for the approaches, Lengen increasingly feels disillusioned: still happy in her work, but distraught about remaining in what may be the only profession in New York that hasn’t gotten a substantive raise — in absolute terms, much less adjusting for inflation — in three decades. Any modest rate increases the state’s early intervention providers (which include teachers like Lengen and a range of therapists) have benefited from, were generally counterbalanced by cuts. “As a 30-year veteran with a master’s degree, I am working twice as hard as when I started in early intervention, and making less now,” Lengen said. 

Over the same time period, New York’s hourly minimum wage has , from $4.25 in the mid-’90s to more than $15 now. The average salary for public school teachers jumped from in the mid 1990s to about in 2023-24, according to the National Education Association. And, while New York state data is elusive, nationally the for chief executives climbed from nearly $6.4 million in 1995 to more than $20 million in recent years.

The Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould, who researches wages and economic inequality, said she knows of no precedent for a job where the absolute pay hasn’t risen in 30 years. “It’s a little hard to believe,” she said.

Early intervention providers deliver critical services including speech, physical and occupational therapy to children from birth through age 3 who have a range of developmental delays and disabilities. When done well and promptly, that it can reduce the need for costly special education services, as well as other public assistance down the road, and improve life outcomes. 

Early intervention systems are state-led and designed, and the mix of specific funding sources can vary considerably across states. New York relies on a combination of private insurance dollars and county, state and federal funding, including Medicaid, to serve approximately 70,000 children. 

Many of the therapists, special education teachers and others who provide early intervention services are not salaried employees. In New York, they are paid a fee for service rate that is set by the state. After providing the service, they submit a claim for reimbursement and are paid either by Medicaid if the child is eligible, or by the state, which draws from a combination of funding streams. 

For many services, including the specialized therapy and support that Lengen provides, that rate was higher in the 1990s when early intervention began in New York state, than it is today. For instance, a published by The Children’s Agenda, a Rochester-based group which has advocated for increased pay for providers over the years, found that a standard visit — at least 30 minutes — was reimbursed at a statewide average of $79 in 1994, compared to $69 in 2022. Brigit Hurley, chief program officer at the group, said that according to a recent staff analysis, “reimbursement rates would need to increase by 240% to have the same spending power as it did when the early intervention program began.”

People in the field say it’s typical for therapists, who all have at least a master’s degree, to earn between $50,000 and $70,000 a year — far less than they could make doing the same work in a different, often less stressful, setting.

“If you were a governor or a legislator and were stuck at your 1995 salary, would you stick around for that job?” said Amanda Wilbert, the regional director of Step by Step Pediatric Services in Rochester, an agency that coordinates early intervention services. Two of the young occupational therapists Wilbert oversees left earlier this year for jobs doing the same work in a nursing home. The positions came with an approximately $30,000 raise, bringing their pay from about $60,000 to $90,000, and better benefits, Wilbert said.

Partly because of that pay-induced exodus, advocates say that New York in terms of timely delivery of early intervention services to kids. In the spring of 2024, after a long, hard battle by advocacy groups, a pay boost appeared to be on the horizon. a 5% rate increase for in-person early intervention services, plus an additional 4% for those working in rural and underserved parts of the state. But so far, therapists have yet to see that bump, with final approval pending with the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (In late September, federal officials did approve the 4% for those working in underserved areas, but it’s unclear when it will be implemented, or how many providers it will reach.)

Meanwhile, with the Trump administration having recently slashed Medicaid by trillions of dollars, the long-delayed full increase might not get the federal stamp of approval for the indefinite future, according to advocates, and the system will likely continue to bleed providers. Said Lengen: “In the end these kids are losing out, and it’s a very vulnerable population.”

New York is hardly an anomaly. Other states — both red and blue — report similar challenges, including Texas, Rhode Island and Illinois. In Illinois, a 2024 into the finances and pay in early intervention found that the median annual income for independent contractors in the field was about $71,000, which is significantly lower than typical incomes for similar roles in the state. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wages for a speech and language pathologist in various settings in Illinois is about $88,000 and for physical therapists, it’s about $104,000. As in New York, that disparity has caused many early intervention professionals to leave the field, with the number of speech therapists in the program dropping 13% between 2018 and 2023, and physical therapists falling 16%, according to the 2024 report.

The problem is only likely to worsen nationally, said Elisabeth Burak, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families. States will struggle to raise rates for any service that’s funded partially through Medicaid, she said. 

No one knows exactly what the fallout from the Medicaid cuts will be, but untold numbers of families with children could be booted off the program. At the same time, the amount of money states get for Medicaid-eligible families could shrink, forcing state policymakers to make tough decisions about how to make up the losses. “States are already having a hard time but it has the potential to get a lot worse,” said Burak.

New York’s early intervention program was created in 1993 and it’s had a rocky history with compensation. The first significant rate decrease occurred in the late 1990s, according to the state compiled by The Children’s Agenda. Rates stayed the same for over a decade. And then , there were two cuts, said Brigit Hurley, chief program officer at the group.

A few years ago, in 2022, some providers in New York, including physical and speech therapists, . But that “didn’t bring the pay above when the program started,” said Hurley. And the across-the-board pay bump that the brought hope to many providers, but without final approval at the federal level for the 5% bump, they still haven’t seen the increase. 

“I’ve had providers tell me they are getting paid less now than when they graduated 30 years ago with a master’s degree,” said Hurley. “It’s a really dire situation.” 

Much — and on particularly bad days, most — of early intervention professionals’ work is uncompensated: travel time to homes; “no shows” when the families aren’t available; lesson planning and other preparation for the sessions; communication with families between visits; equipment and supplies; mandated annual continuing education sessions; extensive reporting that’s required on each case.

“This year and last year … I come home after seeing four to nine kids and I’m at the computer for two to three hours doing reports,” Lengen said. “With [26] kids on my caseload, that’s a lot of reports to do.”

Lengen, 62, graduated in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in special education and, a few years later, earned a master’s in reading. She worked for nearly a decade in K-12 classrooms, and then shifted to early intervention around the time the program debuted in New York in the 1990s. Initially, she worked for an agency and made a full-time salary. But she left the staff position in 2004 when the agency stopped providing early intervention services. “The pay was decent, but it was a big learning curve on my part,” she said. 

Today, Lengen works in homes and child care programs, supporting kids and their caregivers, often coaching the latter on how to manage challenging behaviors. She also winds up filling gaps left by other holes in the intervention system, like supporting children with autism in their sensory development. “I end up doing a lot of sensory play since most of the kids don’t have occupational therapists — ,” she said. 

Since she began working independently over 20 years ago, the demands of the job — including higher caseloads and increased reporting requirements — have increased but the stagnant pay hasn’t come close to keeping up with inflation and the rising cost of living. There were the two pay cuts across the board — 10% in 2010 followed by another 5% in 2011 — and, nearly a decade later, special educators were overlooked when some therapists got the modest bump in 2022. “At that point, I was really thinking long and hard about leaving early intervention,” Lengen said. 

Despite her financial advisor’s recommendation that she at least consider working in a school district, Lengen decided to stick around, noting that she loves the work and didn’t want to start over late in her career. But many other early intervention providers have left the field.

When Sandra Ribeiro started providing physical therapy through early intervention in 2000, she said, “we were some of the highest paid across our profession, and we had support.”

At that time, all of the early intervention providers involved in a child’s case would gather monthly with each family to coordinate services and brainstorm what could be changed or improved. But that practice began to erode more than a decade ago when the state stopped paying professionals for the time spent in those meetings. 

Ribeiro has a doctorate in physical therapy, and is fluent in five languages (Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish and English). That’s a huge asset in the many multilingual homes she’s visited. She points out that providing in-home therapy to an incredibly diverse group of families — some cooperative and supportive of her efforts and others less so — is a complicated assignment. 

“It requires a high skill level to be able to work with a very young child to start with,” she said, “and then you have to be able to incorporate the family.” Still, she found it deeply rewarding to see the progress a child could make when delays and challenges were addressed early in life. One grateful family still sends her a Christmas card every year, even though the “child” she helped is now 24 years old. “I don’t think you can get that in other settings — you’re not a fixture of the home,” she said.

Over the years, not only did Ribeiro’s pay fail to rise significantly, but it also became much more difficult to get reimbursed for her work at all. “If you forget to do one little thing on your paperwork it gets kicked back and it can be months before you get paid,” she said. Over the last decade, there have been some in the program, and that has led to stepped up reporting requirements and auditing for all. 

On weeks when everything went very smoothly — and there were no last-minute cancellations or no shows — Ribeiro would clear $1,500. But many weeks there were hiccups beyond her control that cut into that income. Two and a half years ago, she decided she had had enough and left early intervention for a job teaching physical therapy at LaGuardia Community College in New York City. Most experienced therapists she knows have also left the state-run program over the years, Ribeiro said. 

“We all know that when you go into health care it’s not for the money,” she said. “But you have to be able to say to yourself, ‘My work is worth something.’ And a lot of therapists have been so demoralized they shy away from early intervention even though in our hearts we would love to still be in those homes.” 

Since Ribeiro left the field, the payment issues have only gotten worse. Over the last year, scores of New York providers have faced because of glitches with the state’s new data and payment portal, the .

Meanwhile, across New York state, countless families no longer have access to critical therapies because of the steady attrition from the field. Rural families have been especially hard hit. In the remote Tri-Lakes region of northern New York, Katie Wheeler’s 3-year-old daughter missed months of early intervention services that she was entitled to because of a shortage of providers. 

Diagnosed with autism around the age of 2, the child qualified for in-home special education services and speech therapy. In early 2024, she was assigned a special ed teacher who came to her home two or three times a week, but a few months later, when the state dissolved the agency providing those special education services, the toddler lost access to that support for about a year. She received speech therapy virtually last winter; in-person early intervention sessions weren’t an option due to the lack of providers in the region. The virtual sessions went surprisingly smoothly for the toddler. “It worked so well, I was surprised,” said Wheeler. “They really pour their heart into what they are doing, and she grew immensely.”

At the start of 2025, however, New York’s virtual early intervention providers learned that they would be getting a sizable pay cut. Ironically, the rate cut for telehealth services, as they are officially known, was initiated to free up funds for the pending 5% increases for in-person services in the state, which is still awaiting approval from the federal Medicaid office.

Wheeler’s daughter’s speech therapist, along with most other virtual providers in her county, promptly quit, which Wheeler says she entirely understands. “We were not given anyone else because there was no one else to be given,” she said. The family did pay out of pocket for some speech therapy, but in the six months that her daughter went without early intervention services over the winter and spring, Wheeler said she could see significant regression. When she was in speech therapy, the child could name an animal when shown a picture, and make its sound, for instance; but without services, much of that language slipped away. 

When the girl became old enough to receive special education services through school, there was another months-long delay to get services set up. In an effort to access more robust special education services, the family recently moved to nearby St. Lawrence County. Wheeler knows that most families would not be able to take such an extreme and expensive step.

With the recent loss of virtual providers, she said, “there are going to be so many kids without anything.”

Research has shown that timely receipt of early intervention, in the years when the brain is developing far more rapidly than at any other point, is critical to child development, and can improve life outcomes far down the road. Many children who receive early intervention do not in kindergarten, including slightly less than half of those with developmental delays, according to one 2007 study.

When delays and challenges aren’t addressed in the early years, they show up — often aggravated — in schools, where there’s rarely the time and resources to address them. “Kids are going to preschool and kindergarten with lower skills than ever,” said Amanda Wilbert. “They’ve never gotten services, and they desperately need them.”

There are many reasons, advocates say, that it’s been such a long struggle to increase pay for early intervention providers in New York. The isolated instances of fraud have been cited by some state officials as a reason for not investing more, said Hurley.

But the unprecedented rate freeze — which long predates the fraud — also speaks to the societal and political invisibility of babies with developmental delays and disabilities, according to early childhood advocates. And it speaks to the invisibility of an overwhelmingly female labor force whose work occurs largely in the private space of the home. 

For now, with the slashes to Medicaid, the push to increase rates in New York is on the back burner, although it is not totally off the table. Hurley and others say they remain committed to advocating for changes that will improve the system, including studying alternative models for delivering services.

Lengen said that many months ago, she stopped looking for the 5% rate increase promised a year and a half ago to finally provide a small boost to her income. “At some point, you stop believing that it’s going to come,” she said.

But unlike so many others, she has no plans to go anywhere. “I hate the fact that the state and county don’t think we are worth giving money to,” she said. “But I love the job and the families,” she added, noting the joy that comes from teaching and playing with the littlest learners on their level.

“I will work in early intervention until the day I can not get up off that floor.”

She wanted to earn credentials that would allow her to advance in the field, but it was slow going. Briones, 55, was working 40 hours a week at the San Francisco Bay area child care center and tending to her own family. It was tough to find the time and money to attend classes on a salary of about $15 an hour.

But in 2022, she saw a flyer promoting an at nearby Skyline College and figured it was worth a try. Three years later, she has earned child care credentials that allowed her to be promoted above colleagues who have been working at the center twice as long as her. And that promotion more than doubled her pay. 

The wraparound support from counselors, teachers, peers and mentors, along with the free tuition and on-the-ground learning helped her get — and stay — on the right path, she said.

“Now I know what I need to get done because they are guiding me,” she said. “I am motivated to keep moving forward.” 

Briones is part of a of apprenticeships in nontraditional fields. While the apprenticeship model has long been successful in industries such as construction and , over the past decade or so policymakers, educators and industry have focused on how such apprenticeships can be reimagined for careers such as child care. 

In 2001, only a handful of states offered for entry level early childhood education positions, meaning an apprenticeship that’s approved by — and therefore eligible for funding by — the U.S. Department of Labor or a state agency. As of 2023, 35 states now have such regional or statewide programs according to a published by the Bipartisan Policy Center. 

To get approved, a program must meet specific criteria: It must be a paid position as part of a business/employer partnership; have structured on-the-job training; provide instruction related to their field (in early childhood that is typically in a classroom setting); earn guaranteed pay increases and an industry credential.

“We want to professionalize the field. We want to ensure that we have high quality educators and that they’re supported,” said Binal Patel, executive director of the Boston-based nonprofit , which operates a for early childhood educators in the Boston area. “However, to require degrees without providing the support that goes with it to employees who are making poverty-level wages and often working two [or] three jobs to do so is pushing people out of the field.”

And the country desperately needs child care workers; the number of child care teachers, family care providers and program administrators has dropped from more than 2 million to 1.6 million over the past decade, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center report. But workforce challenges, especially those related to compensation, make it tough to draw people to the field. Child care workers earn less annually than 98% of other occupations and face poverty rates 7.7% higher than public school teachers, the report stated. 

Apprenticeships won’t fix the myriad problems facing the country’s child care system. Besides the dramatically low wages for employees, employers struggle with wafer-thin margins and parents with paying the costs of child care. 

But they are a move in the right direction. The Registered Apprenticeship Programs can be operated or sponsored by a variety of organizations, including workforce development agencies, employers, nonprofits, community colleges or unions. 

In better resourced industries, such as manufacturing or technology, employers or unions often cover the costs of apprenticeships. In early childhood education, where there is less funding available, those sponsoring the apprenticeships — such as Neighborhood Villages — often rely on a variety of external sources, such as state, federal and private grants to cover the costs of classes and extras that may be needed such as textbooks or laptops.

The nonprofit (ECEPTS) develops and administers 35 early care and education registered apprenticeships in California — including Skyline — that have employed about 1,400 apprentices since 2019. The organization also offers technical assistance to programs and develops apprenticeships in 20 other states.

While the national completion rate for apprenticeships in all industries is about 40%, about 75 to 80% of ECEPTS apprentices finish their programs, said Randi Wolfe, ECEPTS’s founder and executive director. 

“It’s expensive and it’s not quick,” Wolfe said. “But quick doesn’t really give you what you want.”

In a about a California apprenticeship for early educators — conducted by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley — almost all of the 101 respondents said their apprenticeship increased their knowledge of child development theory, leading to changing the quality of care and instruction. The majority also said they planned to seek a role with more responsibility as a result of participating in the program.

While government funding covers the costs of most apprenticeships, the child care program the apprentice works for needs to pay for the required wage increase, which varies. That can be a sticking point.

Temple Beth Shalom Children’s Center in Needham, Massachusetts, is part of Neighborhood Villages apprenticeship program; the center has had eight apprentices in the past two years, all of them entry level workers who wanted to pursue licensing to allow them advance their careers.

Temple Beth Shalom agreed to a $2 per hour increase when an apprentice finishes the 2,000-hour program.That comes to an additional $4,000 per apprentice. 

“It was a big commitment, and we also felt like we really wanted to be a part of it,” said . Ellen Dietrick, Temple Beth Shalom’s senior director of learning and engagement. “So, we figured out how to make it work. But that was definitely a challenge.”

At Skyline, the California community college, these costs for apprenticeships are covered by  government grants. Its Early Childhood Apprenticeship Program grew out of a problem: College officials saw that it was taking on average seven years for students to get an associate’s degree in early childhood education.

Many students “were only able to take one class a semester because of personal commitments, as well as working full time,” said Michael Kane, Skyline’s dean of business, education and professional programs. “We were looking for a way to support them and allow them to at least cut that in half. The apprenticeship gave us the ability to get them full-time employment within the field, and then we could actually push them to do at least two courses per semester.”

Kane and his colleague Tina Watts, Skyline’s education and child development department coordinator and faculty member, studied the best way to run such a program for two years before applying for a state grant. An important goal, Kane said, was to make the program sustainable after grant money ran out. 

The Skyline program places apprentices with six employers who regularly communicate with college faculty about the progress of the apprentices. The apprenticeship requires students to take six units a semester, as well as complete their work and attend community practice meetings three times a semester.

In exchange, apprentices receive free tuition and potentially other financial support, as needed, for books and transportation.

Since 2021, about 40 students entered the program, the majority of them Latina women, and about half are still in it, Watts said; the others dropped out for a variety of reasons. 

There was a disconnect, Kane said, between excitement for the program, which was high, and the ability to fully commit, which was lower. “Every one of our students has complicated lives,” Kane said, adding that many applicants work two or three jobs, are living in a home with multiple generations, and are responsible for caring for their own children, or finding someone who can. Skyline has had to adjust the application process to consider the ability to commit to the program, Kane said. 

By addressing that issue, more students are in the program who are committed to finishing it, leading to fewer dropouts, Watts said. Even if they stop out, they receive support to return to the program more quickly.

As apprenticeships are , abound that the Trump administration’s proposal to consolidate numerous workforce programs into one funding stream may affect money available for registered apprenticeship programs — and that states, faced with difficult choices about resources, may not pick up the slack.

In 2023, for example, ECEPTS received a one-year $3 million contract from the U.S. Department of Labor, with an option to renew for four more years, to expand its work nationally. Recently the department notified ECEPTS, among numerous other organizations that run registered apprenticeship programs, that it would not renew the third year of the contract, Wolfe said.

For now, ECEPTS has enough of a diversified funding base to continue its work for the next two to three years, she added, but that won’t be true for many other apprenticeship programs.

And that will mean fewer opportunities for people like Rebeca Briones, who sees her apprenticeship as the beginning, not the end. She has her goals planned out now including pursuing the credential needed to become a site supervisor and trained to teach students with special needs. 

“I want to continue providing the best experiences to our children and parents [and] our community,” she said.

Our community’s commitment ensures that third graders get a lot of attention. 

But our work starts well before third grade. 

Early literacy begins with early childhood education. In our community, families of newborns get a custom lullaby to sing to their baby. We give families free books and learning kits so they have tools and resources in their homes. We create opportunities for community learning through our connection centers, events, playgroups and more. 

This type of foundational work is imperative. Educators and nonprofit leaders cannot suddenly lean into the science of reading at first, second, or third grade and overlook the fact that what children experience from birth to age 5 can make or break these efforts.

After all, research indicates that disparities in cognitive and social-emotional development are and tend to widen by the time the child reaches age 2. By the time kids start kindergarten, children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds often in reading and math compared to their lower-income peers. 

To close these gaps and put students in an infinitely easier position to read on grade level by the time they finish third grade, and to do so without making Herculean efforts to catch students up, the solution is simple: provide more access, sooner, to high-quality early childhood education. 

In my home state of Florida, for instance, there are more than a million children ages 5 and younger. Two-thirds of these children’s parents work. For the sake of our economy, this is good news. The bad news is that federal and state early learning opportunities in Florida under age 6. Everyone else is left to pay out of pocket for home- or center-based care or cobble together a makeshift solution. Parents are scrambling to make sure their children are looked after. In these scarcity environments, the priority is finding coverage, not necessarily attaining high-quality care that builds cognitive, language, and self-regulation skills. 

This gap between the early childhood education opportunities available to parents and what parents need is kneecapping our state’s future, and Florida is not alone. As a country, getting third-grade students reading on grade level would be infinitely more feasible if more students were building foundational skills in the pivotal early developmental period. And, in a country where just of fourth-grade students are reading proficiently, we need all the help we can get. 

Here in Indian River County, we do what we can with what we have.  The nonprofit provides  high-quality early childhood education for children and training for educators. The integrates language development and health education into support services for young families. These programs and others are supported by a community of individual donors who make it possible to provide direct services to students and give parents the tools they need to be their child’s first teacher. 

Through programs like — which  prepare parents with modeling fun, loving, language-rich interactions that can be done anywhere and anytime — and Carnegie Hall’s , parents learn tips and tricks for creating a learning environment in their own homes, reading together, and connecting the senses to reading through movement, music, and more. Children who participate in these programs and pre-K are more likely to enter kindergarten ready to learn.

When children reach elementary school, I lead works with the school district to provide instructional coaches and reading specialists in every elementary school, as well as to closely monitor students’ performance on interim assessments to determine where to provide extra support. 

Effective early childhood programming is a tested strategy not only educationally but financially. Nobel Prize winner James Heckman and his team analyzed long-term data from high-quality early childhood programs, and they found a on investment per child when accounting for outcomes such as higher earnings, better health, reduced crime, increased productivity and reduced need for special education and social services.

This return is possible only with investment of not just time and money but also attention. Both the science of reading and the science of learning are based on brain development. How we interact with our youngest children, how we speak with our youngest children, and how we provide for our youngest children – starting before they are even born– will determine the extent to which young people grow up with a fair shot at a world of opportunity. 

The initiative addresses these early learning gaps by supporting municipalities in prioritizing early childhood development across various sectors like education, health and housing. 

La Habra, California was the first municipality to join the initiative, which was launched in March by (First 5 OC), a public agency focused on enabling children to reach their full potential. The city signaling its commitment to prioritize early childhood development. “We’re going to see a whole different La Habra as far as education and success,” declared Mayor Rose Espinoza. “We believe in what you’re doing, we believe in our children, and we believe in our community.”

Erwin Cox, who leads family and community engagement at First 5 OC, says La Habra, which has a population just over 60,000, fits the initiative because of its size and character. “It’s a very small city, and everybody knows each other, and people tend to stay there.”

But what does it actually mean for a city to be early childhood friendly? “For us, it means community partnerships, learning each other’s systems,” said Joanna Perez, executive director for early childhood development in La Habra. 

The early childhood city designation represents a fundamental shift in how municipalities think about their youngest residents, she added. Rather than viewing early childhood services as separate from traditional city functions like infrastructure, public safety and economic development, La Habra has recognized that investing in children from birth through age 5 is essential for community prosperity.

“We’re intentional about where we’re placing things, how we’re doing it, with the ultimate goal of exposing kids to lifelong learning,” said Perez.  “We want them to be able to love learning and be confident.” Early childhood perspectives permeate all aspects of city planning and development. “Always having that early childhood or education person in the room, along with engineers and city council,” said Perez, “means that everybody relates to what we’re doing. It’s also their story.”

It’s Perez’s own story too. The mother of 6-year-old triplets was born in La Habra and benefited from the types of programs she now oversees. Perez explained that she helped design her role leading the city’s , which she said is funded by grants from the California Department of Education, the California State Preschool Program and California Department of Social Services, along with federal funding for food programs.

The city’s early childhood journey didn’t start with the resolution. Tiffany Alva, First 5 OC’s director of partnerships and government affairs, described it as the public manifestation of a long process of engaging government, health care, real estate development and other business interests in the well-being of children. “La Habra already had a strong early childhood foundation,” she said. “The initiative isn’t about starting from scratch — it’s about connecting the dots, aligning what’s already there and expanding access so more families can benefit.”

, a kindergarten readiness program in La Habra, exemplifies the kind of local program the initiative supports. The program has been serving the community since 2019. It brings together educators and families for activities and learning. 

Irish Domantay, a mother living in La Habra, said Little Learners contributed to her 4-year-old son’s development. As a toddler, he had a speech delay, she said.  “I wanted him to get a little bit more exposure to the community and among his peers.” She said he’s been attending Little Learner for three years, and it helped him grow. “Oh my gosh, he doesn’t stop talking now,” she said. At Little Learners, she said, “he’s with his peers and interacting. They also have the food pantry there, and so it’s just a really great way to not only get parent interaction, but also get extra resources.”

Andrea Granados, another local mom, benefited from the city’s efforts on behalf of families with young kids. When Granados moved to La Habra from nearby Buena Park, she felt overwhelmed. In Buena Park,  she said, “I know the whole school system, I know all the school teachers, I know programs of where to go to. So coming here was like, okay, where are we going?” Granados said the Gary Center, a health clinic serving La Habra and surrounding communities provided her with the guidance she needed. “The community liaison said Little Learners is probably a good place for you to bring your children. And we did.” Granados started taking her kids to Little Learners every Wednesday, which helped them build relationships with other families.

With the resolution, La Habra intends to help more families like Domantay’s and Granados’ gain access to early intervention services, peer interactions and high-quality learning opportunities for their young children. The initiative also aims to help parents find community, access resources and build the relationships that make a neighborhood feel like home. When city leaders make decisions about parks, transportation, housing and services, they will consider how those decisions will affect young children.

It’s too early to measure direct changes in EDI scores from La Habra’s resolution. In fact, Alva explained that a variety of efforts contribute to the kind of long-term impact EDI measures, but she said goals include:

• Strengthening cross-sector collaboration so city departments, schools and community partners are aligning policies and practices with early childhood in mind by 2026.
• Building parent and caregiver engagement in early development initiatives, with the goal of 50% of families participating in at least one city-supported program or event annually by 2027.
• Expanding access to quality early learning opportunities so that 90% of children ages 0-5 are engaged in some form of enriching care or preschool by 2028.

In June, the city of Anaheim and the vision is to continue expanding, explained Cox. “We’re trying to push forward resolutions in Santa Ana and Garden Grove as well, in an effort to bring in government, and bring everybody on board to support this.”

While other countries, including Canada, Germany and Finland, have created systems to help support young families, the U.S. remains at a decades-long standstill with most of the conversation focused solely on economics, including how expensive a universal system would cost and the role it plays in bringing more people into the workforce.

“We’ve lost the child from child care in a lot of ways. It’s only and all about the parents and the parents attachment to the workforce – and this is on both sides of the political aisle,” Haspel said in an interview with �鶹��Ʒ’s Jessika Harkay ahead of his book release. “One of my fundamental problems with the economic case, while I think it is valid and it can be useful, is that it is morally impoverished. It has no particular claim on any values or deep human morality. I do think that that’s something that we can recenter if we talk about it like that.”

A universal child care system wouldn’t solve all problems for families, but would be “a massive strike in the right direction,” Haspel said. 

Haspel said all Americans, even those without children, are stakeholders in the mission to reframe child care from just an economic or social issue to a crucial element of community building and one that supports the American value of personal liberty.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You open your book by quoting Bill Clinton back in the 90s, and use several examples of the history of American child care throughout the country’s history. Give a brief summary of the fight for child care, how it’s changed throughout the years and why it’s more important than ever now.

America has a checkered history with child care, and particularly this question of what’s the government’s role in child care, what society’s role and what’s the family’s role. … We actually have these pretty early examples of communities stepping up to help provide external child care: the infant school movement in Massachusetts in the 1820s and 1830s; the federal government sets up a child care center in Philadelphia during the Civil War for women who are working in hospitals and making clothes. … But, it often has this countervailing force that goes along with economic pressures, gender pressures, and part of that is because none of these are really resting on the core idea that child care is essential to the American experiment or an American value in the same way that public education and various other things are.

That thread is there, and I think that’s important to understand, because sometimes today we’re like, ‘Oh, this is the way it’s always been,’ … but, that’s not the case. 

In the modern era, kind of post 1970s when we’ve seen the majority of mothers of young children enter the labor force, we’ve kind of been fighting on the same terrain. At the same time, the problem is so acute right now. The pandemic, I think, shed a very bright spotlight on that. But, child care is a pain point that crosses every line of difference you can think of: It crosses ideology; it crosses geography, it crosses gender, it crosses race and class, so it is a really massive need that remains unresolved.

How has child care become the victim to politics? How has government mistrust contributed to this and are attitudes toward universal child care changing?

The 1960s and 70s were a really pivotal time in the US and across the western world where you’re seeing these tectonic shifts in the global economy, where manufacturing jobs are going down and it was really hard to run a family on one income basically. 

The debate that was happening here and abroad was what is the role of government? What’s interesting is this happens, and it’s a really historical quirk in some ways, that the battles over child care in the US coincide with the breakup of the New Deal coalition, the Vietnam War, the rise of religious fundamentalism in response to changing roles of women. This is also the same era when we’re seeing the rise of the birth control pill and Roe v. Wade and women getting many, many more rights than they had before. 

It really comes together in 1971 with President Nixon’s veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act, and it took this issue that was a problem everywhere, that wasn’t particularly politicized … and it made it this article of culture war.

By the time that bill comes back a few years later, there are chain mail pamphlets going around about how if Congress passes this bill, it’s going to let children sue their parents for asking them to take out the trash – literally. It’s written up in most major newspapers in the country, just about how wildly inaccurate this kind of smear campaign was, but it gives you this evidence of this free market family idea, that deep distrust of the government, people turn to the free market and it becomes much, much harder to have the debate because you can’t get past the first step of is this even something where the government has a role? 

I think sometimes, if the Comprehensive Childhood Development Act had just gone five years earlier, if you think about when Medicaid and Medicare were passed, we would have been fine. But by the vagaries of history, it happened to be going through at the time when there was really this political terrain that was shifting and, unfortunately, American families became a casualty of those shifts.

Another thing you talk about in your book is equity. How does the lack of child care affect equity, particularly for women of color, and concentrations of poverty?

It’s really important to say we’ve had a racialized child care system since the very beginning of this country, and some of the first child care providers were enslaved Black women and girls… There was always this two track view of ‘Women shouldn’t work outside the home when they have kids, except for if you’re a Black woman, or a woman of color, or immigrant, in which case that’s actually OK. And in fact, we’re going to put in work requirements and make sure that you have to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to get assistance with child care,’ and that is a two tiered legacy that absolutely shapes attitudes today. 

Many of the contemporary debates, and I mean the 2020 debates around child care, often hinge on Head Start, which is a program that is explicitly concentrated to low income populations and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which is explicitly limited to families making below 85% of the state median income. So even today, we still have welfare terrain for child care, and it is a huge problem, and the ways in which it wraps into poverty and continues inequality are manifold.

We know that the lack of child care, when you combine that with low income backgrounds, typically have to work jobs with less job security, with more unpredictable hours, shift jobs, and often not unionized, target breakdowns that can easily start a cascading effect of negative consequences. I mentioned in the book the story of one woman and how child care was the reason that she was thrust into poverty. 

The other side of the coin is that the providers of child care are almost all women, and they’re disproportionately women of color and they’re disproportionately immigrant women. Because of the constant neglect of child care as a value, we have them making poverty or near poverty wages themselves, which takes a huge toll and that has effects on the quality and the stability of the child care. It also affects those families of the providers themselves. 

How does American work culture work against community building and child care? Talk about general cultural shaming and the perception of “moral failing” for parents needing help in early childhood.

There’s a sense of rugged individualism.

I think what’s really interesting with child care, is here we’ve put it in this bucket of ‘It’s your job to figure it out, and if you don’t figure it out, there’s something wrong with you, and if you’re really terrible, if you messed up so badly, we might have a little bit of aid for you, but we’re going to be reluctant about it.’

Now, what I find fascinating about that argument is when those kids turn five what we do is meet them with constitutional rights for free education and care for at least seven hours a day, 180 days a year. It’s not, obviously enough, but there’s a very different way that we approach things like public education. We bucket child care as a private individual good. 

In your book, you also discuss how education is a more formal institution that’s harder to change because of bureaucracy, tradition and funding, but child care has more room for innovation. Why is that? What’s the big goal, and how can we get there?

Education in this country has been around for at this point 175 years and it has had a lot of time to grow. We all have a sense of what a school is and what it should be and what the structures are and there’s lots of veto points along the way if you try to change them.

A child care system is a much more open playing field in some ways. … Part of my argument uses a chance to say, ‘OK, based on what we’ve learned from things in the public school system, what do we need to do to build a child care system that’s going to work well for everyone, for all families and all kids and all educators?’

And one of the features … (that) is interesting in child care, particularly talking about early child care, but school age as well, is this idea of we need to be able to meet parents and families where they’re at, so that if a family wants to have a grandparent or stay at home parent, we should honor that… and support that in the same way that (if) they want to have a licensed child care center or a licensed family child care at your home… that supports going to look different. A pediatrician’s office and ER are both part of the health care system, but they’re not the same. 

Sometimes we draw a line around what is actually child care and what isn’t and actually we’re much worse off for it. That’s not what parents need.

That’s one place where we have an opportunity to think about a more inclusive and pluralistic system that, at the most fundamental level, we should guarantee families have access to the care and early learning experiences that they and their kids need to thrive. I think if we start there, it opens up a lot of doors and it cuts through a lot of the noise.

You discuss how one way we view children is through the lens of an “investable child,” or an investment that needs to perform rather than viewing a child as an individual. How would shifting our perspective on children change people’s view on child care? What would it involve? 

We’ve lost the child from child care in a lot of ways. It’s only and all about the parents and the parents attachment to the workforce – and this is on both sides of the political aisle. 

I do think there has to be some affirmative cases made that how a child experiences their childhood and what their day to day experiences are not only shapes their future selves, but there is actually something that is deeply important to the national soul in that as well. 

One of my fundamental problems with the economic case, while I think it is valid and it can be useful, is that it is morally impoverished. It has no particular claim on any values or deep human morality. I do think that that’s something that we can recenter if we talk about it like that. 

The fact that child care programs can come alongside parents and help them parent the way they want to parent and can help children to have joyful childhood – that is actually something that we should want. This will come, in some senses, from the top down. I do think the way that our leaders talk about child care is really important. 

One of the biggest underlying topics of your book and our conversation is also reframing child care from just an economic or social issue, but to one of the loss of the American Dream, which in recent decades has centered more on finances and material possessions than small freedoms. How can we make this shift and “lead with values first”? 

Gallup polled recently, in the past month or two, a bunch of Americans about what values… are the most important values to them. It was interesting that across all political parties, across all geographic regions of the country, across all income levels, one value dominated all the others, and it was family. It wasn’t freedom. It wasn’t like self determination with individuals, it was family. 

I think particularly in this era when there’s a lot of precariousness, a lot of uncertainty geopolitically and the environment, polarization, loneliness – all of these issues that we see around us – that people are really hungry for more. Something else can be seen in Gen Z and Gen Alpha as well, that there’s actually this pulling back, in some senses, from hyper materialism, and so the question is, what comes next? What fills that? And I think there’s an opportunity. 

Politicians need to…, realize that in a lot of ways, family and child care are a key part of where people want to go – they do really value that, not just about their bank account. And so to start talking about it, that’s really important. 

It’s a question too of the mechanisms of narrative change. There are a few levers to pull on for culture change and narrative change, and I think all of them will probably be pulled at once for a broader mind shift to this idea of what is the good life like? What are we even doing here?

The last chapter of the book is pretty philosophical for a reason. When we jump ahead, we are often just talking past each other, because we haven’t even grounded out what’s the goal? What is the ultimate goal with having an effective child care system? In my mind, it is not to maximize labor force participation. That might be a nice side benefit, but the more we say things like, ‘Child care is the workforce,’ or the more we talk about (it) only in terms of its effect on business productivity, the more we lose the American families… a lot of people are stumbling in the dark for meaning and for community and child care can be a really, really important part of that.

With federal funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting now wiped out, one of the few trusted, equity-driven sources of children’s media is seriously wounded. challenge not only the families and educators who rely on PBS Kids, but also the broader media landscape that risks becoming even more fragmented, commercial and inequitable.

The cuts present a critical juncture and potential pivot point. How educators, media makers and policymakers respond will shape not just children’s school readiness, but the civic health, creativity and curiosity of a generation raised in the shadows of algorithmic platforms. 

To meet the moment, policy leaders and educators must move beyond screen time limits and cell phone bans — and focus instead on a long-term vision rooted in shared public interest values, powered by human connection and guided by standards that prioritize children’s well-being from the start.

Babies and Toddlers Are Using Screens — Now What?

Recent studies and scholars have the growing use of screen media among infants and toddlers. The , a study of media use for children from birth through age 8 conducted in 2024, showed that the average infant and toddler under 2 years old was spending more than an hour a day on screens, with children ages 2 to 4 using screens more than two hours daily. In Fall 2023, while I was head of learning and impact at Noggin, an interactive platform for kids ages 2 to 8, my team led a study of 400 families with children under 3 and found screen use now begins in infancy for more than 95% of families. 

For overworked and under-resourced families, screens aren’t optional — they’re essential tools for navigating daily life. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok and AI bots like are commanding children’s attention, fueled by opaque algorithms and ad-based business models that promote addictive, low-quality content. Early media exposure can no longer be considered peripheral. Reduced federal support for PBS Kids and other public media will make that imbalance more acute unless private and philanthropic sources step up.

Reimagining Early Learning Media in the AI Era

At the same time, a major disruption in media production for kids is underway, powered by fast, cheap video production, artificial intelligence and personalized learning technologies. Legacy organizations like Sesame Workshop and PBS face pressure to keep pace with viral success stories like Ms. Rachel and , which have shown how efficient, engaging content can reach millions.

I currently mentor entrepreneurs experimenting with how new technologies like voice recognition and artificial intelligence can support young kids. I’ve seen promising innovations that build on the foundational equity and inclusion principles popularized by public media pioneers like Fred Rogers and Joan Ganz Cooney. The ones that shine most brightly are those that reflect the original spirit of Sesame Street: equity through innovation.

The founders are prioritizing three key principles: connected learning, personalized choice and family co-viewing. Each principle recognizes that brain development is most rapid in the first five years of life, that intention for little ones can be easily scrambled by powerful algorithms and that busy parents — like it or not — have chosen to make digital and screen media a feature of daily life. 

By designing products that stimulate curiosity and discourage overconsumption, media developers can encourage children to practice their “I can do it” moments ; use and guide language learning; and deliver “just in time” content to drive school readiness. Some pioneers are taking a playbook from research on Sesame Street’s power to scaffold learning via to create new opportunities for intergenerational play, a critical opportunity for parent-child and healthy development.

These new models rely on modern ingredients, such as AI, real-time data and mobile-first, multi-platform design. In the wake of federal cuts, companies and organizations building tools to support young children’s early learning and development have a responsibility to leverage research on the value public media has brought to young children for decades and the opportunity that high-quality, tech-enabled learning can deliver. 

The reality is that child development experts and educators who have been studying how kids learn and grow for decades now must confront a digital revolution powered by generative AI, immersive media and increasingly personal learning companions. This wave could either democratize access to world-class learning or cement a two-tiered system: premium, voice-based tools for the wealthy; and game-heavy, ad-driven distractions for everyone else.

To prevent that outcome, we need clear public standards for AI in early childhood, informed by early learning experts and advocates. “No AI bots for tots” should be an early mantra of concern for all human-centered designs for children under age 8. We also need an industry-wide commitment to ethical and responsible development of any AI-driven product designed for children that young and transparency about how AI tools are trained, and who they are designed to serve.

A National Strategy for Children’s Media

To ensure the next generation of early learning media — now introduced into the crib — are “helpmates” and rather than substitutes for the warm, responsive adult relationships that fuel real learning, the nation needs a clear strategy for children’s media. The strategy must safeguard the development of young children, blend the trusted legacy of public media with today’s most promising tech tools, and embrace a broad cross-sector alliance.

That strategy begins with restoring adequate funding for PBS, but public dollars alone won’t be enough. To move from patchwork to progress, I propose six coordinated actions:

First, we need a new funding stream for children’s media modeled on the that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Backed by a consortium of philanthropies and individuals, the fund could be sustained by state and community-based financing models administered through public agencies and could galvanize public support for inclusive, research-backed media tools built for children’s developmental needs.

Second, we must establish shared standards for responsible media and AI design in early childhood. Policymakers should work with trusted early learning and development partners to create guardrails that prioritize equity and authentic learning over clicks and virality.

Third, state leaders — who are poised to wield more discretion as federal dollars devolve — should direct resources toward high-quality digital tools and educator training to better use proven public media offerings across Head Start, family child care, and pre-K settings.

Fourth, edtech leaders and investors must design learning tools and business models that prioritize trust, transparency and impact and engage in longitudinal research that tracks how digital tools close equity gaps and support healthy development.

Fifth, educators and families must recognize that they’re not just users, they are catalysts for change who can push for media that’s feedback-rich, culturally affirming and scaffolded for learning; can demand better integration between home and classroom technologies; and can shape the field by voicing what works, what fails and what’s missing.

Finally, pediatricians and health leaders must help reframe the screen time conversation from guilt to guidance. By lifting up high-quality media as a tool for overstretched families, rather than a threat, they can re-center the conversation around children’s real needs: connection, stimulation, and joy.

We’ve lingered too long in the wet cement of funding debates and in a digital marketplace where profit often outweighs purpose. The recent, and sadly predictable, federal cuts to public media should be treated not only as a wake-up call, but as a catalytic moment to act.

This will take public investment, private ingenuity, and political courage. But most of all, it will take national will: the conviction that every child, regardless of income or ZIP code, deserves access to inspiring, developmentally sound, high-quality media content that sparks curiosity, fuels learning and lifts their full civic potential.

Rather than states annually shaking their couch cushions to find extra money to put toward child care and early education, these trusts create “dedicated, permanent funding streams,” said Diane Girouard, state policy analyst at Child Care Aware of America. 

During the pandemic, states received billions of dollars in federal funding from the American Rescue Plan, which they put to a number of like increasing compensation for staff and lowering the price tag for families. With that funding now gone, many have been trying to figure out how they can keep these investments going. Some states have implemented dedicated taxes to fund child care, such as a new in Vermont, the so-called “” in Massachusetts and a in Washington state. Trust funds represent a new way to do something similar without raising taxes.

New Mexico was ahead of the curve. In 2022, voters approved a ballot measure to devote some of the state’s existing Land Grant Permanent Fund, which collects money from oil and gas development, to child care and early education. The money allowed the governor to make child care free for nearly all families in the state. The state has also increased teacher pay and reimbursements for providers who accept subsidies while creating more slots. In April, state lawmakers legislation doubling the minimum amount the fund will spend on early education each year.

This idea has spread. Last year, Connecticut lawmakers created an early childhood endowment but didn’t put any money into it. This year they legislation to fill it with any surplus revenues that haven’t been committed at the end of every year. In Connecticut, that will add up quickly thanks to self-imposed caps that force legislators to spend less than they otherwise could. Much of the excess money has been flowing into the state’s rainy day fund, but the fund is flush with money and the state is in “fairly good fiscal shape,” said Merrill Gay, executive director of the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance. So lawmakers decided to route it into a separate fund for early care and education. 

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont the funding the “largest expansion of access to early childhood education in Connecticut history.” The fund $300 million in July,  and it could get as much as $300 million annually in subsequent years. Gay anticipates it will have nearly $1 billion by 2028.

At that point, lawmakers will draw down a portion and use it to ensure that families making $100,000 or less pay nothing for child care and those who earn more will pay no more than 7% of their income. It is also supposed to create 16,000 new slots by 2030. 

The money will be invested by the state treasurer, which means it will grow with investment returns. Eventually, it should generate enough money that it can be “self-sustaining,” Gay said, meaning it won’t have to compete with other issues like Medicaid or higher education for revenue. 

But Gay noted that it’s nowhere close to creating a truly universal system. His organization’s estimate of the cost of guaranteeing universal pre-K and infant and toddler care, while paying providers equivalent to public school teachers, is $2.8 billion. “I don’t think we’re ever going to get to having $2.8 billion in the endowment,” he said. Meanwhile, if the state budget craters — which it could, for example, once the enormous Medicaid cuts Republicans take effect — there may be no surplus to put in the fund at all.

Montana lawmakers also a trust for early care and education this session, though unlike Connecticut’s, Montana’s is part of a much bigger structure. Dubbed the “Growth and Opportunity Trust,” or the “GO Trust,” it will receive about $600 million in state money the first year and $400 million in the second. Half of the interest that money generates will be spent on a variety of priorities, including infrastructure projects, a property tax credit and grants for child care providers. The child care portion received an initial investment of $10 million and its share of the interest is expected to be about $5 million a year after two years. 

A state senator had a standalone trust for early childhood that would have received $150 million this year, but that instead got sucked up into the larger legislation.  It isn’t a new idea for the state. Legislation to create a trust fund for child care was proposed in 2021 and 2023,  said Alex DuBois, policy and engagement director at Zero to Five, but neither panned out. 

In the 2023 legislative session, as the American Rescue Plan money the state had used to support child care programs and families began to fade, conversations started up about how to keep some of it going, said Grace Decker, coordinator at Montana Advocates for Children. It’s not just the loss of those dollars; before the pandemic, the state received federal preschool development grants that it used to set up pilot preschool programs, but when the state didn’t find ongoing funding the classrooms closed. A trust was seen as a way to keep promising initiatives going. 

The effort to create a trust was aided by the fact that the state had a budget surplus in both the 2023 and 2025 legislative sessions. Lawmakers wanted to find a way to make “an enduring investment” in key priorities, Decker said, that could survive potential fiscal downturns. Lawmakers saw child care as one of those priorities alongside others like housing and infrastructure. In fact, DuBois’s organization was successful in arguing that child care should be included alongside infrastructure investment because it, too, is “part of our state’s infrastructure,” she said. 

DuBois also advocated for the child care trust by pointing to other states that have passed similar legislation. New Mexico was a big inspiration, she said, but so were , which created a fund in 2017 to match money spent at the local level; , which created a fund in 2022 with money from a tobacco settlement alongside state revenues and private funding; and similar structures in a handful of other states.

Decker cautioned, however, against the trust being seen as a final solution for the child care system. When Governor Greg Gianforte another priority for her coalition, a bill to expand child care scholarships for the children of providers, he pointed in part to the creation of the trust in his rationale. “It’s concerning to think that lawmakers may look at the trust as a sufficient source of funding for the kinds of things we know we need to see as investments in the early childhood system,” she said. That’s particularly true, she said, in a state that doesn’t invest as much as others. “It’s a long time before that trust would deliver enough resources to get to an equitable system.”

Even so, advocates are excited about the legislative win. The trust “really shows a commitment to child care and early childhood,” DuBois said. Montana is a particularly significant example, Girouard said, because it’s “a more conservative state.” If lawmakers there can get on board, others in purple and red states could, too.

These trust funds should stand up against the fluctuations in federal funding and state budget revenues. “This absolutely ensures that funding keeps flowing,” Girouard said. “That is just so important to making sure that we have a vital and long-term child care system in place for families to count on.”

“It is something every single state can look into,” she added. “It’s a really great idea.”

At a time when federal funding for Medicaid, public broadcasting and food assistance are on the chopping block, the fate of a smaller program has flown under the radar, despite having enormous implications for the population it serves. The (CCAMPIS) program provides a funding stream intended to help student parents complete their degrees by covering or decreasing the cost of child care. The Trump administration’s for fiscal year 2026, which was submitted to Congress in May, zeroing out funding for the small, yet popular program.

There are more than in the U.S., and roughly half of them have at least one child under the age of 6, according to New America. This population represents more than one in five American undergraduate college students. 

Unsurprisingly, access to affordable child care is a huge challenge for these individuals — and this obstacle is, in part, why student parents are to drop out of college than students without children. A 2022 report co-published by The Education Trust and Generation Hope, two nonprofits that focus on educational equity, “there is no state in which a student parent can work 10 hours a week at the minimum wage and afford both tuition and child care at a public college or university.” 

CCAMPIS, which launched in 1999 and has historically received bipartisan support, has been an important, if insufficient, finger in this dam. The funding, which as of 2025 is , helps around 3,000 students at more than 250 institutions of higher education (IHEs) complete their degrees and move toward a more stable life, according to the Congressional Research Service. And that’s to say nothing of the positive ripple effects for the broader community. 

The $75 million is distributed as grants to IHEs via an application process. The funding can be used to cover the cost of running (which can provide care for young children and offer before- or after-school care for older kids) or to subsidize the cost of off-campus child care for student parents through . 

The impacts can be life-changing. One student parent who was interviewed by researchers at New America , “as a military spouse with no nearby family or built-in support system, I often felt completely alone. This [CCAMPIS program] has changed that. It’s given me a network. Child care funding has given me the ability to care for myself and work toward a better future for my family, all while knowing my children are in safe, nurturing environments.”

In the context of the , the $75 million for CCAMPIS is small potatoes. It represents a tiny fraction of the nation’s annual spending. By comparison, the military parade that took place in Washington, D.C. on June 14, was estimated to cost . 

In a more ideal ecosystem of family policy and infrastructure, campus child care would be folded into a broad-based child care system and student parents would have more overall support, but in the absence of a more comprehensive system, CCAMPIS has become an important interim funding stream that, if anything, should be plussed up.

The rationale given in the budget request is wanting at best. The Trump administration “The Budget proposes to eliminate CCAMPIS because subsidizing child care for parents in college is unaffordable and duplicative. Funding can instead be secured through the Child Care [and] Development Block Grant. Further, IHEs could offer to accommodate this need among their student population, and many do.” Though the suggested is designated for helping low-income parents afford child care while they’re working or attending school, this funding is already stretched tissue-paper thin. It only reaches about and several states are under due to underfunding. And most IHE’s, especially community colleges, do not have the reserves to cover the gap.

In recent years, many colleges and universities due to fiscal challenges. One such casualty is the center at Everett Community College outside Seattle. The Seattle Times “anger, sadness, and frustration” among the student parents served by the closing center, adding that some parents relied on the center for much more than child care. The story highlighted one mother, Phala Richie: “she says she’s built meaningful relationships at the center, and there’s resources for parents. Sometimes, at the end of the year, she can’t afford to buy jackets for her kids, and the center helps families get winter clothes. The center’s pantry also helps when she’s running low on food or diapers. Richie has taken budgeting classes and learned how to do CPR.” 

It’s tempting to suggest that since CCAMPIS serves a relatively small population, it’s not such a big deal if it’s eliminated. But this proposal serves as an example of death by a thousand cuts. If the program disappears, it will represent the failure of an institution that everyday people have come to rely on. It will decrease trust in government, making it harder to pick up the pieces again and move toward a stronger, more solidaristic society where everyone can thrive. 

Hopefully, Congress will have enough sense to reject the Trump administration’s proposed cut to CCAMPIS funding and will instead seek out ways to bolster student parents rather than leaving them on an even more precarious ledge.

Nearly of first and second graders report being “moderately nervous” or “very, very nervous” about math, according to a . This anxiety disproportionately affects and . If bias in curriculum or instruction makes a child feel like they don’t belong, they might not realize their potential for solving mathematical problems and figuring out the world. 

The Racial Justice in Early Math (RJEM) aims to make math accessible and engaging for all children. The one-year program helps kindergarten teachers better understand the intersection between racial justice and early math. 

The fellowship is part of the project, which launched in 2019 as a partnership between and the . RJEM was built upon a theoretical framework and practical applications developed by , associate research professor and director of the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson Institute and , professor of education and mathematics at UIC. 

The RJEM team examines the ways racial bias seeps into the classroom, organizes dialogue around this issue and develops practices for educators. McCray said she often asks educators to reflect on their earliest math experiences. Did they feel proud of themselves? Were they excited to make connections between ideas? Or did they feel left out, concluding that they simply aren’t so-called “math people?”

“Teachers are math anxious,” McCray explained “Math has been used to sort people.” Labeling children as having or not having math aptitude sets them on a lifelong trajectory, and that pressure creates anxiety, she explained. But McCray and Martin assert that there’s no such thing as a “math person” or a “not-math person.” In a , Martin characterizes the question of “who is defined as ‘smart’ and why?” as an underexplored matter of who holds power in the classroom.

The RJEM Fellowship Is Changing How Early Educators Approach Math

Shae Rounds-Kelley — one of six 2023-24 RJEM fellows — teaches kindergarten at Hernwood Elementary in Randallstown, Maryland, where about . She said this experience helped her identify that part of the issue for her students is a lack of racially and culturally relevant curriculum. Working alongside her cohort and mentors in the program, she developed ideas for redesigning her lessons and strategies to help her kindergarteners make meaningful connections to them.

Rounds-Kelly observed that pedagogical strategies should depend on context. “What works there might not work here,” she said. “The beauty of the fellowship came in moments when we realized we had to stop, calibrate and figure out how to be more culturally relevant and responsive.” 

In addition to her classroom job, Rounds-Kelly is also an adjunct professor at Stevenson University, where she works with future educators. She said the lessons she’s learned from the fellowship are also shaping her work with the next generation of teachers.

Sung Yoon, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Woodinville, Washington was also part of the 2023-24 cohort. He said the fellowship changed his approach to teaching. Yoon reported that when he told friends and colleagues about the fellowship, a common response was, “So you think math is racist?” He would clarify, “No, that’s not what this is about. It’s about how we teach math and dismantle the white supremacy that has been embedded since the dawn of time.”

Yoon doesn’t always spell out the racial dimension of his approach to teaching. “At our curriculum nights, I don’t explicitly say to parents that we are killing white supremacy in our math education. I do say it’s about thinking critically and coming up with our own ideas,” he explained.

Reflecting on his family’s Korean background, Yoon acknowledged that math is taught differently in the United States. “A lot of people in Korea talk about how American math is easy, but it’s not really easy… There are more story problems, a lot of critical thinking going on, rather than memorization,” he said.

Yoon said that parents of different ethnicities have expressed curiosity and sometimes concern about the way he teaches math. , for example, which focus on concepts like more and less so that children take time to understand context before rushing into arithmetic, have raised eyebrows. “I tell them, ‘In this math workshop, we’re also learning critical thinking skills that are important in the 21st century.’”

A Math Mentorship Model Provides Ongoing Support for Early Educators

A core element of the fellowship is mentorship. The program convenes participants in Chicago and pairs each fellow with a mentor. 

Yoon teamed up with Sisa Pon Renie, an educational coach with Erikson Institute. “We have very similar backgrounds,” he said, “And we bonded so much over that because finding an Asian American teacher is very difficult in the United States.”

For Rounds-Kelly, the experience of working with a mentor was rewarding and beneficial, but it also revealed a lot about the educational support missing at her school, which primarily serves children from low-income families.  “I just love learning from Black women in education, so when I got to work with Donna Johnson, I was like, ‘I want to learn everything from you! Give me all of your knowledge!’” she said.  

According to Rounds-Kelly, Johnson — the assistant director of school support services at Erikson Institute — expressed surprise that Rounds-Kelly didn’t get a stipend from her school to spend on supplies. “I was like, in what world does anyone get money to spend on their class?” she recalled. “My classroom doesn’t have heat! I can’t do all of these great things when my kids are wearing coats and hats.” 

The fellowship and the mentorship has pushed Yoon to think more about representation.“When we think about assumptions about who is good at math, we don’t always see different races,” said Yoon. A lot of the fields considered mathematical are predominantly white, he added. “I love that things have been changing.”

AI is dominating headlines — and rightly so. It’s reshaping industries, redefining work and increasingly influencing homes and childhoods. But as policymakers and technologists rush to prepare K-12 schools for an AI-powered future, they risk overlooking a critical window: the early years, when than at any other point in life.

My own kids, who are 2 and 4 years old, are AI natives. They follow the blue dot on Google Maps, thank the car when it welcomes us across state lines and ask Spotify to play their favorite songs. They recently had a lively conversation about a Roomba they saw vacuuming the office building across the street. They’ve followed a virtual trainer through an “intelligent” home workout. And when my son asked to see a parrot with pigeon wings, DALL-E helped make it real.

Their ease with AI is both fascinating and a little unsettling. To them, machines are as trustworthy as parents or teachers. As a tech-forward parent, I welcome these tools, but I also teach my children a critical distinction: technology is a helper, not a human.

That distinction is already blurring. Voice assistants and recommendation engines sound authoritative, even when they’re wrong. And without early education on how AI works and where its limits lie, the youngest generation is at risk of growing up to trust machines without question. This is especially concerning for children with learning differences, who may be more likely to anthropomorphize technology and treat machines as social beings, according to .

To its credit, the that inspired the pledge recognizes a real need: America’s youth must be prepared to thrive in an AI-driven world. But waiting until kindergarten misses a key window of opportunity. The foundational skills that matter most, especially in a post-AI world — creativity, critical thinking, empathy, resilience — start to take root long before formal schooling begins.

Teaching AI literacy to 3- and 4-year-olds may seem premature, but with companies like Google , it’s more important than ever to start early. Young children are remarkably capable of understanding complex ideas when taught in developmentally appropriate ways. At my children’s preschool in New York City, they’ve learned about skyscrapers and even touched on the events of 9/11. When wildfire smoke from New Jersey recently polluted the air, they discussed climate and health. If I can trust their teachers to guide these complex conversations, I can trust them to begin introducing the concept of AI in ways that are meaningful to my children.

Supporting early AI literacy doesn’t mean more screens for toddlers. It means fostering the human skills that will help young children thrive in a machine-filled world. But who will teach these skills? Parents play an essential role and deserve access to helpful resources, but early childhood educators are especially well-positioned to lead developmentally appropriate conversations on these concepts. And publicly funded early childhood programs, like NYC’s Pre-K for All, can provide the structure and scale needed to ensure all young children are supported, not just those with tech-forward parents. 

The challenge is, most early childhood educators have not been introduced to the concept of AI literacy themselves. As national efforts — such as the new , launched earlier this month by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — prepare to train K-12 teachers, early childhood educators are being left out of the conversation entirely. 

If we want to build the strongest foundation for AI literacy, we need to start earlier. As economist James Heckman has shown, high-quality early learning programs can . Head Start, which reaches from low-income families across the U.S. through a two-generation approach, presents a powerful opportunity to advance AI literacy early and at scale.

One of Head Start’s unique strengths is its , which outlines five key domains of early learning and serves as a foundational guide for state-level early learning standards. Embedding elements of AI literacy within this widely adopted framework could help ensure inclusive access to essential digital skills. By integrating AI concepts into play-based learning, educators, children and caregivers can engage with technology in thoughtful, confident ways.

Imagine an early childhood classroom where teachers and children discuss: What can machines do? What can’t they do? Why do they sometimes make mistakes? These simple questions can grow into the digital discernment our future demands.

AI isn’t coming, it has already arrived and it’s changing how our children learn, play and create. With the right support from our early care and education system, children can be ready to thrive in a world we’re only beginning to imagine.

Recently, Too Small to Fail released a outlining impact and lessons learned over the past decade. According to the report, research demonstrates that parents and caregivers talk, read and sing more frequently with their children after taking part in Too Small to Fail programming in laundromats, grocery stores, waiting rooms and other settings. One of the key takeaways is that trusted messengers, such as pediatricians and librarians, are the “secret sauce” to supporting families with young children in early literacy. 

Too Small to Fail founder Hillary Rodham Clinton was a child advocate before going into politics. , she helped research the 1974 report , which examined the living conditions of American children and surfaced a number of barriers facing them. The findings in that report shaped her views on education and guided her in shaping the mission of Too Small to Fail. 

Clinton is still actively involved in the work, alongside her daughter Chelsea Clinton, who chairs the initiative’s advisory council of advocates and researchers. The council, which includes Dana Suskind, founder and co-director of at the University of Chicago and Joan Lombardi, principal advisor at has helped Too Small to Fail scale its impact and stay abreast of the science behind reading. 

“As a pediatric surgeon and social scientist who believes deeply in the power of parents and caregivers to build children’s brains,” says Suskind, “I am tremendously grateful for their work. Too Small to Fail meets families where they are, recognizing and honoring their inherent wisdom, and supporting that wisdom with the resources every child deserves. It continues to harness one of our most precious and infinite resources: the support of loving grown-ups to unlock every child’s full potential.”

Lombardi adds: “Too Small to Fail has been a persistent voice in supporting parents’ engagement with their young children and pioneering innovations in communities across the country.”

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Chelsea Clinton recollects her experiences over the first decade of Too Small to Fail and sets her sights on the coming years. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Swartz: What stands out to you from visiting laundromats, libraries and other Too Small To Fail sites?

Clinton: I have so many memories. What stands out is just the joy. There’s so much joy on the kids’ faces and also the parents’ or grandparents’ faces when they’re reading to their children in laundromats, whether in Chicago or New Orleans or Philadelphia. And while I’ve been to quite a few of these sites, it’s only a fraction of the hundreds that we helped build. There’s such a warmth and such a sense of welcoming and hospitality. 

Swartz: What do you hear from the parents and grandparents?

Clinton: Real enthusiasm and excitement and gratitude that there now are more books that they’re able to read with their kids and in whatever language they need to be able to read them, to have those bonding moments, those teaching moments with their kids.

Swartz: You’ve talked to producers and writers about embedding Too Small to Fail messages into their shows, and that has had a tremendous reach. How did those partnerships work?

Clinton: I have this vivid memory of my mom and I going to Hollywood and speaking on a panel with lots of writers and showrunners and creative folks. We discussed the importance of reading, singing and talking to kids at every age whenever possible. Whether Orange Is the New Black or Jane the Virgin or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, they found ways to embed the messages in ways that were organic for them. We believe it has been powerful for the audiences.

Swartz: And they didn’t say, “Thanks, but we don’t need your advice on how to create a story”? 

Clinton: We’ve had really wonderful, delightful, productive conversations with folks in Hollywood over many years. We’ve talked about the importance of parents or grandparents and anyone that’s around [young children] — about the understanding that we are effectively their first teachers. We’ve also had really productive conversations in Hollywood about the ways in which climate change affects our most vulnerable [Americans], including infants and toddlers. We always feel that if we’re sharing recent research and evidence, if it’s something that is in the context of how they’re thinking about future episodes of the future arc of a show, maybe it will be incorporated at some point. 

Swartz: Besides your own mother, who have your early childhood heroes or influences been?

Clinton: Certainly my grandmothers. I was very, very close with both of my grandmothers. I was really lucky to spend a lot of time with each of them as a kid and could not imagine my childhood without them. I only wish that I could have known my dad’s mom as an adult. I always had great teachers, and I remember preschool being so fun. I have quite clear memories of my kindergarten and first grade teachers, Mrs. Minor and Mrs. Mitchell. 

Swartz: How has your own motherhood journey influenced your understanding of the early childhood issues that Too Small to Fail addresses?

Clinton: Becoming a parent didn’t shift what I cared about as much as it sharpened everything I cared about. I cared even more intensely about early childhood education and supporting what parents and other caregivers need to be the best teachers. … Candidly, I didn’t know that I could care any more about the things that I already cared about, and then I became a parent and somehow discovered that I could. That was a revelation to me. Everything feels even more intense because it now feels so personal, because now it’s about my kids and their cohort and the world that they’re growing up in.

Swartz: What are you most excited about for the next 10 years of Too Small to Fail?

Clinton: I’m most excited about continuing to build on what’s working. We have a lot of research now that [shows that] what we’re doing is working, so we should do more of it. We should also be open to whatever our remarkable community suggests that we should try next.

One of the fundamental tasks for early childhood educators is to teach children to cooperate, not just to keep things running smoothly in the classroom, but because it’s a life skill that prepares them for collaboration in their daily lives, in school and in the workforce.  

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Science (I-LABS) have been studying the effects of synchronized movements on social interactions among young children for years and it turns out that synchrony enhances cooperation. published in 2024 by I-LABS in the journal Nature shows that the simple act of moving in time with each other can promote prosocial behaviors, such as helping, sharing and empathizing. 

The study, which analyzed how a group of 4-year-olds cooperated with each other after a synchronous exercise, was authored by Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, a researcher at I-LABS who is now director of the Music & Social Development Lab at Israel’s University of Haifa, and Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of I-LABS. Researchers built a swing set that enabled two children to swing in unison in precisely controlled cycles of time. This study was set up so the children could see each other’s silhouette but not their facial expressions. The purpose was to determine if the synchronized movement itself, rather than facial or emotional cues stimulated prosocial behavior. 

Pairs of children who were strangers to each other were randomly assigned to one of three separate groups: one that swung together in precise time, one that swung together but not in time, and another that didn’t swing at all. After the swinging exercise, the pairs participated in a series of tasks to evaluate their cooperation. One was a “give and take” activity that involved passing objects back and forth to each other through a puzzle-like device. Another was a computer game that required the children to push buttons simultaneously to see a cute cartoon figure pop up. 

The researchers found that the children who swung in unison completed the tasks faster, indicating better cooperation than children who had swung out of sync or hadn’t swung at all. A surprise for Rabinowitch was a strategy the children came up with to synchronize their button-pushing. The strategy was never modeled to them but arose spontaneously in many of the pairs. 

“They raised their hands above the button and signaled each other with these exaggerated motions just before the task, like, ‘OK. Are you watching? I’m going to do it, … now,’” Rabinowitch said. “The kids in the synchronous condition did it much more and came up with it more quickly. It’s interesting because it shows that not only were they better at cooperating, but they were also motivated to do so. The signaling made the task better.”  

The study built upon two on synchrony and peer cooperation for preschoolers conducted by Rabinowitch. The distinct takeaway from the most recent study is the indication that, stripped of all the other elements of music, rhythm alone is sufficient to spark cooperation between children who moved together. 

“It doesn’t even have to take a long time,” said Rabinowitch. “Just a couple of minutes doing an activity in sync with each other signals, ‘We’re together. We’re on the same page.’” Being in sync together enhances social interaction in positive ways.

“They could drum together, swing together, tap or dance together,” Rabinowitch said. “There’s no difference, as long as the children are aware of themselves moving in synchrony with each other. Knowing they are on the same page has a positive effect on their cooperative behavior, and the kids feel closer to each other.”

Rabinowitch, a classically trained flutist, became interested in the connection between music and social behavior as an undergraduate psychology student when she volunteered with children with physical and emotional disabilities and saw how music influenced their emotional communication and social interactions. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on how music interaction enhances empathy in children. 

“When I did that research,” she said, “I noticed that I was always going back to playing rhythm games with them. I felt that there was something in the rhythm, in the synchrony itself that made a difference and that taught them something about how to communicate and listen. So, I continued in my postdoc to study synchrony specifically.” 

Rabinowitch said many studies on the effect of music in creating cooperation among adults have been conducted and the results are the same. In a paper she authored in 2020, about whether , she writes that music has accompanied human civilization since its beginning and likely played an important role in forging human social behavior.  

Music has a lot of potential to foster cooperation, Rabinowitch said. “Music has an ability that’s much more than just synchrony … It’s social glue,” she said. 

“It’s this incredibly simple mechanism. … We’re just doing the same thing at the same time.” This mechanism can support all ages, she said. “It works with adults, it works with kids, it even works with babies. A of 14-month-old toddlers showed that being bounced in synchrony enhanced their helping behavior,” she added. 

Though there is still much to be understood about the mechanisms that link music and social behaviors, Rabinowitch’s studies underscore how uncomplicated, simple and profound it can be to bring people together. She isn’t suggesting a swing in every office, or drum circles in every school. Nor is she saying that synchronous movement is the answer to world peace. But it might be a start. 

“I would love to say something stronger about politics, about how this could be used in very different contexts in the longer term. But I’m not confident enough of the science to say that yet. It is something one can dream about,” she said. 

Undocumented children will no longer qualify for federally funded preschool through the Head Start program under a major policy shift the Trump administration announced Thursday.

In a news release, the Department of Health and Human Services said it was issued under President Bill Clinton that allowed undocumented immigrants to access certain programs because they were not considered “federal public benefits.”

As President Donald Trump pursues his anti-immigrant agenda, this change may be the most direct and far-reaching effort to target children after his . His administration has also and , , and .

Administration officials have said they . Health and Human Services leaders cast the change as a way to protect benefits for Americans.

“For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a press release. “Today’s action changes that — it restores integrity to federal social programs, enforces the rule of law, and protects vital resources for the American people.”

Early childhood education advocates, meanwhile, condemned the change as violating both the spirit and the letter of the 1965 law that authorized Head Start. They also warned the change could scare away eligible families.

“This decision undermines the fundamental commitment that the country has made to children,” Yasmina Vinci, the executive director of the National Head Start Association, a nonprofit that represents Head Start staff and families, said . “Head Start programs strive to make every child feel welcome, safe, and supported, and reject the characterization of any child as ‘illegal.’”

The change is also at odds with how the Supreme Court has treated K-12 education. In the from 1982, the justices ruled that children have a right to a free public education regardless of immigration status. However, the courts have upheld laws restricting immigrants’ access to welfare benefits.

Head Start provided preschool to over 544,000 children from low-income families, from the 2022-23 school year, while Early Head Start served more than 186,000 infants, toddlers, and expectant parents.

The program, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, , from federal staff layoffs to threats of eliminating the program.

Head Start will now be considered a public benefit, the Trump administration said, because it offers services that are similar to welfare. Officials said the change aligns with Trump’s executive orders, including a

“While Head Start provides for school readiness, it also provides low-income children and their families with ‘health, educational, nutritional, and social and other services, that are determined based on family needs assessment,’” . “Further, it may serve as child care for parents of young children.”

Classifying Head Start as welfare, rather than education, could be a Trump administration strategy to avoid having to address whether the protections extended to undocumented children in Plyler apply here, said Nate Ela, an assistant professor of law at Temple University, in an email.

Reflecting Trump’s America First agenda, Health and Human Services officials said in their press release that Head Start will be “reserved for American citizens from now on.”

But a spokesperson for the Administration for Children and Families clarified that U.S. citizens and “qualified” immigrants would be eligible for Head Start. , that includes legal permanent residents, children who’ve been granted asylum, refugees, and children with humanitarian parole.

In its statement, the National Head Start Association said providers were alarmed that programs would have to check the citizenship or immigration status of children before they could enroll. The law that governs Head Start has never required documentation of immigration status as a condition to enroll, the organization said, and “attempts to impose such a requirement threaten to create fear and confusion among all families.”

It is unclear exactly how the new rules will be enforced. Guidance based on the new legal interpretation is forthcoming, the Administration for Children and Families spokesperson said.

“​​Are they going to monitor us when they come out for their federal review?” asked Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, the executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association. “Will there be something attached to our grant that we have to certify?”

The latest version of the law governing who is eligible for Head Start says nothing about immigration status, but it does say that the program can use federal funds to train staff, counsel children, and provide other services that are “necessary to address the challenges of children from immigrant, refugee, and asylee families, homeless children, children in foster care, limited English proficient children, children of migrant or seasonal farmworker families, [and] children from families in crisis.”

The law says that children who are experiencing homelessness or whose families have incomes below the federal poverty line qualify. The Migrant Seasonal Head Start program also guarantees child care for the children of farm workers and seasonal workers.

This is not the first attempt to roll back educational rights for immigrant children and families. for immigrant children or track their immigration status in ways that could intimidate families. So far, none has been successful. Meanwhile, the author of a brief from the conservative Heritage Foundation that now .

Restricting Head Start access could have ripple effects

Federal officials estimated that the Head Start change would free up $374 million a year for U.S. citizens and qualified immigrants to access Head Start, which represents about 3% of the program’s annual budget in recent years.

But keeping children out of Head Start could lead to more costs down the road for public schools, advocates warned. Kindergartners who don’t go to preschool may need more help with basics like learning their ABCs, colors, and how to work with classmates. They also may have missed out on health screenings.

“We’re really shortchanging our community by cutting them off from strong early childhood programs that are going to put them on the right path to be successful in K-12 schools where they have a guaranteed right to attend,” said Xilonin Cruz-Gonzalez, co-founder of the National Newcomer Network and deputy director of Californians Together, groups that advocate for immigrant rights in education.

There are typically many more children in poverty who qualify for Head Start than the program has funding to serve. , for example, that for every 100 young children in poverty, there were typically 28 Head Start seats, with much larger gaps in some states.

Keeping out immigrant children wouldn’t necessarily close those gaps. The main factor limiting Head Start seats is a lack of trained teachers, said Diane Schilder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a public policy think tank.

“A lot of programs are having challenges hiring teachers in preschool and infant-toddler classrooms who meet the requirements because the wages are not adequate,” Schilder said.

Low-income families are less likely to have documents proving their children are citizens, Schilder said, and can scare away even eligible families from applying. Parents are less likely to work when they don’t have access to child care. The effects of these changes would be felt most strongly in urban areas and in communities with a large agricultural workforce.

Head Start providers worry that verifying children’s immigration status will create more administrative work and could make it harder for all families to enroll. Federal officials estimated the cost of assembling documents and reviewing paperwork would be an additional $21 million a year.

And there would be more transition costs to change Head Start protocols, the federal notice stated.

Federal officials said the change would take effect as soon as it is published in the Federal Register. It has not been published, but has been submitted, the Trump administration said. The public will have 30 days to submit comments.

For now, Heather Frenz, the executive director of the Colorado Head Start Association, said her organization is telling Head Start providers to wait for further instructions before un-enrolling any children.

Reconsidering the eligibility or enrollment of children who are already attending Head Start would be expensive and time-consuming, Frenz said. The process involves everything from measuring children’s height and weight to drawing up individual plans.

And if undocumented children miss out on preschool and other services Head Start provides, Frenz said it could “put a lot of strain” on other public entities when those children get older.

“They may not speak English or have never seen a dentist,” Frenz said. “That’s going to be a heavy load on the public school education system.”

Chalkbeat New York reporter Michael Elsen-Rooney, Chalkbeat Philadelphia bureau chief Carly Sitrin, Chalkbeat Chicago bureau chief Becky Vevea, and Colorado bureau chief Melanie Asmar contributed reporting.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.