More recently, though, the preschool decided to establish protocols for another kind of emergency: the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the area. 

Ever since the start of the second Trump administration, when immigration enforcement activity across the country intensified, staff and families have experienced extreme stress and anxiety about the possibility of masked agents apprehending children at their own schools, said Leah Cates, executive director of Second Street Youth Center. (Previously, education settings like Second Street would’ve been protected from immigration raids under the so-called sensitive locations policy, but the administration that designation in January 2025.)  

Cates is glad she put that new lockdown protocol in place, she said, because they’ve had to activate it twice already. 

One of those times, a teacher heard a young boy at the school yell, “Pistola! Pistola!” — Spanish for “gun” — after he saw, through a window, an ICE agent with his weapon drawn, trying to detain someone on the street right outside the school.

“We had to pull our children off the playground, bring them in and immediately go into lockdown,” Cates said. 

Some children go on walks in the community with teachers throughout the day, she added. During lockdowns, the staff use radios to communicate about the presence of ICE and determine whether groups on walks should return to the school or go to a nearby church or the fire department to seek immediate shelter. 

Their fears are not unfounded. So far, five of the 210 children enrolled in the state-funded preschool, which serves ages 3 to 5, have experienced a parent or primary caregiver detained by ICE, said Cates, who is keeping track of the impact on her school community. Many other students have relatives who have been detained, deported or otherwise apprehended by the federal agents. More than 80% of the students are from immigrant families, she added, and most are from South and Central American countries. 

Second Street offers just one example of the terror echoing through homes and early childhood programs across the country, in red and blue states, in rural and urban communities, and in documented and undocumented families. 

Researchers at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a national, anti-poverty nonprofit, have been examining the impact this administration’s immigration agenda is having on young children and their caregivers.

Between June and December 2025, CLASP staff held focus groups with 56 “at-risk” immigrant parents and primary caregivers of 74 children ages 6 and under. They also interviewed nearly 70 individuals who provide services to these families — many of them as early care and education providers, but also some home visitors, health care workers and others. Their findings, which anonymize the participants, are detailed in a pair of reports — centered on the experiences of young children and their immigrant families, and focused on early care and education providers in their communities.

The interviews were conducted in seven states: Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and Washington. In those states, immigrant families with young children range from 13% of the population in Michigan to 41% in New Jersey, according to from the Urban Institute, which combines from 2022 and 2023. Nationally, about 24% of children ages 5 and under have at least one immigrant parent. 

What emerged from the research is a clear picture of communities that are experiencing toxic stress and trauma, said Kaelin Rapport, policy analyst at CLASP and an author of both reports. 

“People are really scared, and they’re struggling immensely,” Rapport said. “Care providers are not feeling secure. Parents are struggling to feel safe themselves. Children are internalizing these stressors and these pressures.”

The concern that many immigrant adults feel, Rapport added, is preventing some of them from leaving their homes, whether ����’s to go to the grocery store or to work. 

“It’s confining the entire family inside this emotional pressure cooker,” Rapport said.

Many parents attempt to shield their young children by avoiding conversations about immigration enforcement, yet their fears and anxieties still permeate the household.

“It was very clear that children are feeling the trickle-down effects of stress,” said Suma Setty, senior policy analyst for immigration and immigrant families at CLASP and an author of the two reports. 

During an interview, the director of a child care center near Dallas shared with Setty that, before 2025, children in the program used to be so curious about visitors who came to the center. Now, when they see new faces, they hide behind the teachers’ legs. “That’s been a marked change she has observed,” Setty said. 

Cates, who was interviewed for the CLASP reports and shared details about the experiences of her preschool community with The 74, has seen the way information about immigration enforcement reaches children at Second Street — and how they respond. 

It’s a regular practice at the preschool for staff to ask children how they’re feeling each day, she shared. One day, a little girl said she was scared. Her teacher told her she is safe at Second Street. But the girl said, “No, ICE can get me,” then started to cry, Cates recalled. 

“The child knows,” she said. “They may not understand everything, but they know someone was taken in their families. They see the upset of parents, the upset of family members.”

Then, she added, they take what they learned and tell their friends. Cates and other staff have overheard children talking about ICE on the playground, she said. 

“We think we’re doing a great job of shielding children, but little children have big ears. They put their listening ears on, and they hear everything,” she said. “We’re not doing as good a job as we think. Those 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds are hearing, and being affected by, the trauma.”

In interviews for the CLASP report, Rapport said, several families and early care and education providers described children as “clingy” now. Some children who had been sleeping independently through the night are now insisting on sleeping in bed with their parents. Others, he heard, are less friendly, more emotionally reactive, more frightened of strangers and less adaptable to changes in routine. 

As for the caregiving staff he interviewed, Rapport said a word that comes to mind to describe their predicament is “desperation.” They are stressed and traumatized from the past 15 months too. They’re also depressed, burned out and dealing with compassion fatigue. 

“People who work in child care and early education do it because they love children and want children to succeed in life. They want children to have a healthy upbringing,” Rapport said. “They pour so much of themselves into that work. They’re pouring from that well, and sometimes that well runs dry … for themselves and their families.”

Most early care and education providers are underpaid, working in under-resourced programs, and in some cases are immigrants themselves or have immigrant family members to think of, the researchers said. Yet, as they write in the report focused on providers, “ECE service providers are being asked to do more than the work that they trained for; they are asked to be immigration law experts, administrative law experts, second parents, and even work for free.”

That certainly rings true at Second Street Youth Center. 

In addition to the new lockdown protocols, the preschool has made changes to other procedures. 

The program has implemented “very stringent rules” around access into the building. “If we don’t recognize who you are, we aren’t letting you into the first doorway,” Cates said. The maintenance staff, as part of their duties, now regularly walk a two-block radius around the building to scan for ICE activity. Families know to text school staff about any ICE activity they’ve seen or heard about in the area, and staff then distribute the message to all families so they can make alternative pick-up arrangements for their children. 

On top of that, Second Street has held events to educate parents about their rights. The school partnered with an immigration attorney who volunteered to help families make a plan for their children in the event something happens to them. 

The work is taking a toll on staff, she said, noting that staff are increasingly asking for a day off here and there because “����’s just all too much.” 

“But my staff … understand the No. 1 concern is the health, safety and well-being of children,” Cates emphasized. “Before we do anything else, our job is to keep children safe.”

The child care closure at UNO is reflective of a concerning trend: Across the country, universities, school districts and hospitals are shutting down affiliated child care programs at an alarming rate as the cracks in America’s child care system begin to widen into fissures.

Since the beginning of 2025, a growing number of institutions have closed or put forth plans to close on-site child care programs that serve employees and, in the case of universities, student parents. These include universities such as , , and the , along in Washington, Arizona, and Kentucky. During the same time, public K-12 districts — including in Michigan, in Missouri and in Colorado — have announced similar closures, as have hospital systems in , and .

In almost every case, administrators are pointing to rising costs as a key culprit. Indeed, absent public funding, large institutions cannot run a sustainable child care business, particularly as most institutionally-affiliated programs offer tuition discounts to employees. In the case of Baptist Health, a nonprofit health care organization in Arkansas, the system said it $2 million a year operating two of its child care centers.

While there may have been a time when such losses were manageable, these institutions are being buffeted by other headwinds. Many colleges, universities and school districts are dealing with declining enrollment numbers that have . A key federal funding program that helps colleges and universities subsidize child care for student parents — Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) — has been held flat, which is a functional decrease in the face of inflation and rapidly rising child care costs.

Meanwhile, hospital systems are struggling with Medicaid cuts, rising labor costs, and tariffs increasing the costs of imported medicines and supplies; The American Hospital Association a “perfect storm of financial pressures.” 

The rash of institutional closures should be a stark warning about the future of employer-sponsored child care. That term usually conjures the concept of private companies offering on-site centers or subsidies for child care as a workplace perk. But in practice, these institutions function similarly: They operate on-site child care for their community members, such as staff, students or patients — and in many cases, the programs have been around for decades. In a sense, we might consider institutionally-affiliated child care programs the best-case version of employer-supported care. The institutions are often anchored in public missions, subject to greater accountability and backed by generally reliable funding streams. Yet, even these programs are disappearing.

If institutions designed to serve the public can’t sustain employer-linked child care, it raises a larger question about how realistic it is to . 

It seems clear that, reluctant as the decision may be, child care quickly finds itself on the chopping block when budgets tighten. Often, it is viewed as a nice-to-have for institutions, even while ����’s a must-have for families. When programs close and families lose subsidized care, they’re often forced into a wild scramble for a spot among scarce options. With the aforementioned headwinds only projected to worsen, more closures are, unfortunately, likely on the way. 

To be clear, the closures don’t signal that on-site child care is inherently flawed. In fact, the passionate reaction of families and providers show just how valued these programs are. The question is, how should such programs be funded? A model that relies on institutions themselves bearing the cost seems to be breaking down. Similarly, depending on a single funding stream, like CCAMPIS, is clearly risky, as it keeps programs in a constant state of vulnerability — just one unfavorable grant cycle away from collapse.

What’s needed, instead, is a way to wrap institutionally-affiliated child care into a broader publicly-funded system, as is done in nations like and . 

The child care sector may well be entering a phase where Band-Aids like incentivizing employers to offer child care benefits like on-site programs or stipends can no longer hold back the bleeding. If universities and hospital systems — to say nothing of Fortune 500 companies like and — are increasingly unable or unwilling to maintain their child care programs despite evidence of their positive impacts, then a course correction is needed. 

Policymakers are rushing to incentivize employer-sponsored child care at a moment when the American economy is slowing down and financial headwinds are picking up. If there’s any good news, ����’s that about five thousand years ago humans invented a way to pool individual resources and redistribute them for collective benefit. In other words, the antidote to institutional child care closures is the same as the antidote to mom and pop child care closures: tax dollars. 

What gets discussed far less often is that this pattern rarely begins in third or fifth grade, when participation gaps become easier to see. It begins in children’s first classroom experiences, where they learn whether speaking feels safe, whether mistakes are survivable and whether the classroom has room for the way they enter language.

The problem is not simply that some children talk more than others. It is that schools often mistake fast, public participation for understanding and then build opportunity around that mistake. A child who speaks quickly and often is usually read as engaged, confident and capable. A child who hesitates, watches or offers little is more likely to be read as uncertain, underprepared or less able.

Yet speaking in front of others is not a simple measure of understanding. It requires children to process a question, organize language quickly, tolerate public attention and respond while everyone is listening. For multilingual learners, it may also mean searching across languages while monitoring pronunciation and trying not to make a visible mistake.

What can look like “just talking” is often thinking under pressure.

When schools confuse reduced public response with reduced competence, they begin shaping a trajectory. That trajectory is rarely built through cruelty or obvious exclusion. More often, it emerges through small instructional decisions that seem reasonable on the surface. When participation in whole-group discussion decreases, teachers—often out of care—may call on certain students less, simplify questions or stop asking for elaboration. Meanwhile, other students are invited to explain, justify, extend and defend their thinking.

Each decision appears minor, but over time they accumulate. Opportunities to demonstrate complexity expand for some students and quietly contract for others. This is how underestimation takes root in schools — not through overt exclusion, but through a subtle redistribution of opportunity.

The problem deepens when educators collapse many different experiences into the single category of “quiet.” From the outside, quiet students can look similar, but the reasons beneath the silence are not. Some are fluent and expressive in low-pressure settings but constricted in public ones. Others understand directions in two languages and still shut down the moment speaking becomes public.

In everyday classroom moments — during snack, in play, or beside one trusted peer — these same children often become animated and engaged. Expression can expand quickly when pressure is lowered, home language is welcomed, or an adult creates space for response.

In one kindergarten classroom, a child who rarely spoke during group instruction began, almost invisibly, by moving his chair a few inches closer to the circle each day. The teacher noticed and named the shift without demanding more than he was ready to offer. “You came closer today,” she told him, and later, “I see you’re staying with us.”

Within days, he began whispering answers to a partner, and within weeks he was participating in small-group discussion. His language had not suddenly changed. The environment had. That is the point schools too often miss: Participation begins before speech.

In early classrooms, many children participate long before they do so in polished verbal form. They move closer to the group, track the teacher’s face, point instead of answering, imitate actions, sort materials, whisper to peers or respond through gesture and gaze. These are not lesser forms of participation. They are participation in its earliest form.

Yet schools often reward only the most visible and verbally fluent version of engagement, while everything that comes before it is treated as secondary. For multilingual learners and other cautious children, this creates a profound mismatch: their bodies are already engaged while the classroom waits for a kind of public speech they are not yet ready to produce.

If schools want to turn this around, they do not need an expensive new program. They need to stop treating the fastest and most exposed form of response as the clearest proof of understanding.

That shift begins with classroom routines. Before asking for a public answer, teachers can build in real “think time” —10 or 15 seconds that give students a chance to process before the quickest voices take over. They can let students rehearse with a partner before whole-group discussion, so the first public response is not also the first act of language formation.

They can ask students to point to evidence, sketch an idea, jot a sentence or sort materials before speaking aloud. They can return to a child after another voice has entered the conversation, instead of treating one missed moment as closure. And they can widen what counts as participation so that gesture, writing, peer explanation, and home-language processing are recognized as evidence of thought.

Teachers can also lower the social risk built into participation by slowing the pace when questions become more demanding, avoiding rapid-fire questioning that rewards only the quickest responders, and making hesitation less punishing. “Take a second and think” invites participation differently than “Come on, you know this.” “Show me first” opens a door that “Use your words” can close.

Just as important, teachers can look for patterns instead of drawing conclusions from isolated moments. A student who is silent in whole-group discussion but expressive in play, writing, small groups or in another language is not showing an absence of understanding. That variability is information: It shows that expression is conditional, not fixed, and that classroom conditions shape what becomes visible.

These moves do not lower rigor — they make it more accurate. Rigor is not how fast a child can speak in front of others. It is whether a classroom can recognize thought before it arrives in its most polished, public form.

When silence is misinterpreted early, the consequences extend far beyond one discussion. Expectations drift downward. Opportunities narrow. Referrals increase. Children acquire identities they did not choose: hesitant, low, disengaged, behind. What begins as a participation gap becomes an opportunity gap, and over time the system names what it helped create.

The student who lowers her hand is not always unsure, unmotivated or disengaged. She may be calculating whether the room is safe enough for the way she speaks, whether there is time to find language without being rushed, and whether what she is about to say will be met with patience or correction. If schools want more students to participate, they should stop treating voice as something children either have or do not.

Participation is not a trait — it is a condition. Quiet students do not need louder prompts. They need safer entry points. If schools understood that earlier, they might stop asking why some students do not raise their hands and start asking the more important question: What have we taught them participation will cost?

After struggling for months to sustain her child care business at home, Minerva Caba Toribio thought she would have to close due to rent increases and high costs. But now, she’s able to operate out of a classroom located on Granite Street in Worcester at the Guild of St. Agnes, the largest early education and care agency in Central Massachusetts. Caba Toribio has space for 10 children, with five currently enrolled and three others that will soon be joining.

“We serve Brazilian families, Latin American families, immigrant families,” she said. “They feel comfortable to see that we can speak the same language and we have the same traditions.”

Caba Toribio will be able to use the space rent-free for two years. By saving on rent, utilities, meals, and other expenses, she hopes to restart her home-based child care service once the time is up.

It’s all part of a pilot program called the , formed in partnership by the Guild of St. Agnes – which serves almost 2,000 children across roughly 150 child care establishments — and the Worcester-based Seven Hills Foundation — which provides supportive services to children, adults, and seniors with disabilities and other life challenges. Their new family child care incubator — only the third of its kind in the nation — provides two classroom spaces that were empty due to a lack of staffing to two licensed educators to operate their child care businesses while they prepare to later offer the service in their homes. The program is meant to provide more child care slots in an area where demand is high but supply is low, while also making it easier for family child care entrepreneurs to get their start.

“In addition to expanding care to more children and families by using classrooms that were otherwise empty, we are able to share services such as transportation, healthy meals, and business support to the resident educators as they establish their new businesses,” said Sharon MacDonald, president and CEO of the Guild of St. Agnes.

The program, which can accommodate up to 20 children, was modeled after in Boston, which was the first of its kind in the Commonwealth and provides short-term program space, resources, and training for newly licensed family child care entrepreneurs. The other incubator program in San Francisco in 2019 and has trained and established more than 100 new child care businesses, creating over 800 new child care slots.

“I was thinking about closing my business, so when I heard about the incubator, I thought, ‘That can’t be possible. I will have a space where I can keep working with the same families that I had at my home?’” Caba Toribio said.

The other resident educator, Eva Fajardo Marroquín, is a newly licensed provider who will lead the second classroom with 10 children.

Around 59,000 (70 percent) of infants, around 43,000 (43 percent) of toddlers, and around 10,000 (5 percent) of preschoolers in Massachusetts live in a child care . The state defines this as areas where for every three children there is only one child care slot, though there are regions in central Massachusetts where the ratio is greater than ten children to one slot.

Granite Street is in the heart of one of Worcester’s child care , according to Leslie Baker, program director for the Seven Hills Foundation’s Center for Childcare Careers.

The children’s tuition is covered by state subsidies, meaning the Guild of St. Agnes and the Seven Hills Foundation are not responsible for the educators’ salaries. A $1 million grant from the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts allows them to pay for the building, the classroom equipment and supplies, and a full-time project coordinator who provides case management, business training, and professional development support for the two educators. (The foundation also provides grant funding to CommonWealth Beacon.) The educators will soon establish savings accounts so the coordinator can document their progress towards their long-term business goals.

Cost isn’t the only barrier that aspiring educators face in trying to open family child care businesses. Many, including Caba Toribio, face landlord resistance and struggle to find homes or apartments that allow family child care to operate. Others struggle with navigating the licensing process with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care.

Many of the families served by the Guild’s child care programs qualify for (CCFA) vouchers from the state. But that system remains underfunded even after the Legislature approved Gov. Maura Healey’s proposal to change the income eligibility threshold from 50 percent of the state median income to 85 percent last year. That move added 4,000 low and moderate-income families to the program, but more than 30,000 children were on the statewide waitlist for the program at the end of 2025.

“It’s opportunities like this that are making sure we are creating pathways for early educators, because the more classrooms we can fill with great educators, the more slots that will become available for the littlest learners in our community,” said Sen. Robyn Kennedy, a Democrat representing Worcester, at the pilot program’s ribbon-cutting event on Monday.

The Commonwealth’s early child care system continues to suffer from a due to low earnings, a lack of employee benefits, and subsequently high turnover.

Among family child care program owners and employees, just over 40 percent receive paid time off, around 25 percent receive paid sick leave, around five percent receive discounted child care, and less than 8 percent receive dental insurance and retirements benefits, according to a 2025 published by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Just 4 percent of employees receive health insurance compared to 15 percent of owners.

“I don’t think we often think of childcare as a business,” said Sen. Michael Moore, a Millbury Democrat who represents Worcester. “You can’t be successful if you can’t operate it, put the business model together, and be able to afford it.”

Caba Toribio said many families prefer home-based family child care over center-based child care because it is often less expensive, more flexible, and tightly knit.

“We have a small group. Some parents prefer that. The children have the opportunity to feel like they are part of a family,” she said. “Here in the center, I keep the same concept. Because it’s a small group, they feel safe.”

Baker and MacDonald want to ensure that the program is sustained after the educators move out in two years.

“As they eventually launch their business, part of the project is to backfill it and continue this on,” MacDonald said. “One of the questions, obviously, is: What does it cost to do that without the grant funding?”

They are confident that eventually, other cities and programs across the state will pursue their own incubator projects.

“We’re trying to develop a model that could be replicable by other family child care systems,” Baker said. “We’d like to be that resource for other systems that are interested in developing this.”

This article is part of CommonWealth Beacon’s ongoing coverage of early childhood education issues and is funded, in part, by the .

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Child care during nontraditional hours — including early mornings, evenings, nights and weekends — is a growing need for American families. Flexible care with variable hours from week to week is also in demand.

In many homes across the country, work happens outside of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The best available data, drawn from the past decade, suggest that in some states live with a parent who works nonstandard hours, and that accommodate those schedules — though these figures rely on data collected before the pandemic. These data also indicate that work outside traditional hours is common in families that have lower incomes. 

Expanding access to equitable child care options requires careful attention to the diverse child care needs of working families. For a parent who starts a shift as a nursing assistant at 7 a.m., works overnight as a hotel receptionist or drives for a ride share service as a second job on the weekend, , as many licensed child care programs follow a more conventional schedule. Challenges also exist for parents who work jobs with rotating shifts, who not only require care outside of normal business hours, but also need the hours to be flexible. 

To ensure that working families can thrive, the child care sector needs more public investment in child care settings that offer care during nontraditional hours and increased support for the workforce needed to deliver it. When designing a universal child care system, policymakers must consider the growing population of parents working outside traditional business hours and should incorporate the following three principles.

Include home-based child care providers in policy design. Right now, most child care during nontraditional hours is , rather than by licensed child care providers. In other words, by people families trust who care for children in ways that resemble parental care. This type of arrangement — known as family, friend and neighbor (FFN) care — is in the U.S. child care system. This trend points to both a preference and a gap: Families rely on familiar, home-based care during these hours, yet the supply of licensed child care that is open during these hours simply isn’t there. Building a universal child care system that is responsive to families’ needs will require recruiting and investing in licensed family child care providers and FFN caregivers who operate outside of child care licensing systems. Building policies that include the full range of home-based providers will require creative solutions, such as community-based peer support groups and access to resources and materials related to caring for children. 

Create fair working conditions and compensation for providers who offer care during nontraditional hours. Increasing child care access for working families must prioritize investment in the workforce caring for children during . These providers face some of the in an already strained sector: low pay, unpredictable schedules, on-call demands for families that need last minute child care or need to change hours without notice, and the strain of balancing their own family responsibilities with offering child care. Many FFN caregivers provide child care for their families . Expanding child care options that meet the needs of families working nontraditional hours requires intentional strategies that ensure a livable wage for paid child care workers and compensation for FFN caregivers — many of whom indicate for their work. These approaches must also reflect that the cost of care varies by time of day. 

Right-size standards and regulations to reflect the realities of providers caring for babies and children during nonstandard hours. Finally, quality and regulatory frameworks must evolve to recognize that care at 10 p.m. does not look like care at 10 a.m. Children’s development during nontraditional hours is shaped by like shared meals, bedtime stories and quiet, unstructured time. Systems that measure quality solely through daytime standards risk missing — such as healthy sleep practices and creating calm and comfortable environments — while placing unnecessary burdens on providers. Universal child care systems should offer tailored professional development that reflects the realities of care at night and on weekends — focused less on building lesson plans and more on developing routines, relationships and supporting children through transitions like bedtime or early wake-ups.

As states and cities build universal child care programs, ensuring access to child care beyond standard work hours must be a central goal. By embracing a mixed-delivery system that values all types of care, investing in compensation and professional development, and developing appropriate standards, early adopters of universal child care initiatives can provide an example of how to create policies that meet the needs of all working families.

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 ����’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, ����’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 ����’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, ����’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.”

For Emily Knox and her wife, Forever Young Child Care Learning Center in Manchester was a dependable cornerstone of their daily routine for more than two years. But on March 5, her wife arrived to pick up their son and found the center’s staff in tears. It would be, they abruptly learned, the center’s final day, as staff members rushed about, packing up children’s art projects and medical paperwork to give to parents.

“It was surreal, honestly,” Knox said. She was aware of the pressures that the early childhood education industry faced in Connecticut, from a lack of available spots to an underpaid workforce, but watching her son’s own facility suddenly shutter, seemingly without warning, was “an eye-opening experience.” 

The closure of Forever Young hits as vanishing federal aid and runaway Medicaid costs threaten an ambitious new initiative to expand affordable child care.

The Early Childhood Education Endowment, as a vehicle to create thousands of new affordable child care program slots by the early 2030s, is projected to receive $30 million from the budget surplus after Connecticut’s fiscal year ends June 30 — less than a tenth of what lawmakers pledged last June.

Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration said Monday ����’s unclear whether the fiscal bleeding has stopped.

“It is too early to speculate,” Lamont’s budget spokesman, Chris Collibee, said Monday, adding that while global economic instability is a concern, the administration remains committed to supporting affordable child care.

“Gov. Lamont has taken a leading role both locally and nationally to increase investment in early childhood education,” Collibee said. “He’s fully dedicated to making sure that we deliver on that vision and promise.”

“I think we are all committed to the vision that we’ve set forth, and we stand ready to take the action that we need to take based upon the funding that is available to us,” added Elena Trueworthy, commissioner of Office of Early Childhood Education.

The state already opened 1,000 Early Start program slots in January and has earmarked nearly  from the endowment for various expenditures, including grants for local school districts to expand their preschools, increasing the rate that providers are paid and a planned study that will assess the need for a health insurance subsidy for employees.

Eva Bermúdez Zimmerman, executive director of Child Care For CT, said that the Manchester closure reflects broader pressures eroding the existing care infrastructure.

“The system is interconnected,” and the network’s financial needs are greater than even the hoped-for deposit in the hundreds of millions, she said. “I really do hope that elected leaders understand that you can’t build up a system and ignore the pressure that’s gotten us to here.” 

CT still forecasting big surpluses – but not for child care

Lamont responded to the child care crisis with a big step 13 months ago, proposing that Connecticut dedicate a portion of the massive budget surplus it generates annually toward early childhood education.

But much of that surplus is already accounted for. Using a series of aggressive caps set in 2017, Connecticut has since left an average of $1.9 billion unspent each year, which represents 8% to 9% of the General Fund.

About three-quarters of that, roughly $1.4 billion, involves certain income and business tax receipts lawmakers cannot spend easily. These protected dollars are immediately stripped from the budget and used chiefly to whittle down Connecticut’s pension debt, a that ranks among the largest, per capita, in the nation.

The remaining tax and fee receipts, federal grants and other revenues flow into the budget, where additional spending controls typically force hundreds of millions in additional savings each year.

And — with an initial investment of $300 million — they and Lamont stipulated much of this second-tier savings would be dedicated to the child care initiative each year.

that would translate into a $309 million deposit in the summer of 2026 and almost $560 million 12 months after that.

Medicaid spending plagues CT finances for 3^rd year in a row

But while the program that saves funds to reduce pension debt continues to save big dollars, the second-tier savings effort is in jeopardy. And some of the problems that shrank this year’s estimated payment to the child care program could get much worse.

One big obstacle is Medicaid, a federal health care program run in partnership with states. Medicaid demand has remained greater than pre-pandemic levels, even though enhanced federal aid ordered in response to COVID expired in 2023.

the state Department of Social Services will overspend its $3.7 billion Medicaid line item by $85 million this fiscal year. The department overspent on Medicaid by  last year and almost  two fiscal years ago.

Congress last July ordered cuts to Medicaid and other programs worth more than $1 trillion by 2034 to help finance big federal tax cuts aimed chiefly at high-earning households.

The Lamont administration hasn’t projected yet what Connecticut could lose next fiscal year. But , a New Haven-based policy group, estimated in January that federal Medicaid grants and aid sent directly to households — such as health care-related tax credits — would be down about $579 million in the next state budget cycle.

That federal tax relief also has softened state tax revenues.

Connecticut links its corporate tax system to the federal code, as do several other states. So, when Congress extended federal corporate tax breaks set to expire, Connecticut lost hundreds of millions in expected revenues from big business.

CT has options to bolster child care services

But this doesn’t mean Connecticut lacks options to bolster funding for child care.

Analysts estimate the state program that forces lawmakers to save a portion of income and business tax receipts will have a banner year, grabbing to pay down pension debt.

Lamont already has proposed scaling back these savings rules — albeit just once — to return $500 million to 2.2 million Connecticut residents in the form of a $200-per-person state tax rebate.

The checks would be sent in late October, just days before the gubernatorial election, and some Republicans have charged the Democratic governor’s proposal is merely a political stunt to help him win reelection to a third term.

But many of Lamont’s fellow Democrats in the House and Senate majorities have said those savings rules should be rolled back somewhat to permit greater investments year after year in child care and other core services, including health care, education and municipal aid.

Legislators from both parties have advocated big ongoing tax cuts this year, which also would necessitate saving less to reduce the state’s pension debt.

House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, a proponent of the Early Childhood Education Endowment, has said a modest amount of tax relief could be considered, but said nothing should be allowed to jeopardize a program that could benefit thousands of children from low- and middle-income households.

“It’s a reminder we’re going to have to prioritize at some point,” he said. “I personally think that, before we start implementing new tax changes to the tax code, we ought to be very mindful of how important this child care endowment could be in the long term.”

But House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, who also supports greater state investment in affordable child care, said Lamont and the General Assembly aren’t doing enough to trim spending in other areas.

Republican lawmakers have said Connecticut should look to tighten raises for state workers, cut Medicaid programs for undocumented residents and seek greater efficiencies at public colleges and universities.

“Democrats were more interested [last year] in a press release than creating a sustainable early childhood program,” Candelora said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

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 ����’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, ����’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.”

In early 2026, a small group of first-grade students at Lucy Wortham James Elementary School in St. James, Missouri, sat together sounding out words.

Kim Williams, the school’s principal, watched as they worked through the lesson. One young boy caught her attention.

“This student had struggled significantly the year before and often avoided reading tasks,” she said. “This time, I watched him carefully tap out each phoneme, blend the sounds and read a multi-syllable word independently.”

What stood out wasn’t just that he read the word correctly – it was how he approached it.

“He didn’t guess. He didn’t look to the teacher for the answer. He applied a strategy he had been explicitly taught,” Williams said.

She has observed several meaningful changes in students over the past year.

“Students are approaching unfamiliar words with greater confidence,” she said. “Instead of guessing, they are using strategies and applying phonics patterns they’ve been explicitly taught. You can hear the difference – they are sounding out words more accurately and blending more smoothly.”

The breakthrough she observed is part of a broader effort across rural central Missouri. Through the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative, literacy coaches from the national nonprofit TNTP work directly with teachers in Phelps County schools, helping them implement structured reading instruction grounded in the science of reading.

Coordinated locally through the Phelps County Community Foundation, coaches visit classrooms regularly throughout the school year. They observe instruction, model lessons and provide feedback, strengthening foundational reading instruction for kindergarten and early elementary students.

The effort is taking place at a time when reading proficiency remains a challenge across Missouri and the nation. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, only 27 percent of Missouri fourth-grade students scored at or above the proficient reading level, while 42 percent scored below the basic level.

Education leaders say improving early literacy is critical because reading proficiency by the end of third grade is closely linked to long-term academic success.

Before the collaborative began, the biggest challenges for K–1 teachers in St. James R-I centered on consistency, skill gaps and limited structured support.

“Teachers were using a variety of reading strategies, programs and materials,” Williams said. “While many approaches had strengths, there was not a cohesive, research-aligned framework guiding K–1 reading instruction across classrooms. This sometimes led to uneven student outcomes and confusion when students moved between grades.”

Some students entered kindergarten with limited literacy exposure, and teachers needed clearer tools to systematically build phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding skills. Identifying and addressing skill gaps early was challenging without a unified approach.

“From my perspective as principal, the most significant change since TNTP coaches began working with our teachers has been the shift to consistently structured, research-based literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading,” she said.

Instead of learning strategies in isolation, teachers now receive feedback tied directly to classroom instruction. Coaching conversations are specific, practical and immediately applicable, accelerating growth in instructional practice.

“I have seen a significant shift in teacher confidence, collaboration and mindset around early literacy instruction,” Williams said. “Teachers understand how students learn to read, have a stronger grasp of foundational skills — especially phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding – and can clearly articulate the ‘why’ behind their decisions.”

That clarity has reduced uncertainty and increased instructional precision.

“Early literacy is no longer just an initiative,” she said. “It’s a unified commitment supported by knowledge, collaboration and confidence.”

A first-year teacher finds support

For Ashley Wood, a second-year kindergarten teacher in Newburg, the coaching model provided unexpected support.

“You see so many posts online telling new teachers to run from the profession,” she said. “But when you have a support system – coaching, small groups, someone to talk through what’s working and what’s not – it makes you want to stay. It takes away that feeling that if a student struggles, ����’s all your fault.”

Wood said the approach reduces “teacher guilt” – the feeling that struggling students are solely the teacher’s responsibility.

Her literacy coach, Kelly, follows a predictable rhythm each month: a Zoom planning meeting before a visit, in-person classroom observation, immediate feedback afterward and ongoing email check-ins.

“It definitely makes you feel like you are not alone,” Wood said. “As a new teacher, there are so many moments where you wonder if you’re doing it right. Having someone come in, observe and then talk it through with you – it changes everything.”

At the beginning of the year, some students did not yet recognize their starter letters – A, M, S and T – or the sounds they make.

“Now almost every single one of them knows capital, lowercase and sound,” she said. “That growth has been huge. Kindergarten is such a growth year. They come in barely recognizing letters, and by the end they’re reading.”

Wood admitted feeling nervous before Christmas break, wondering whether students would retain their skills.

“I sent home decodable passages because I thought, ‘They’re going to forget everything.’ But they came back after break and every single one of them just took off. It was like something clicked,” she said.

The improvements teachers are seeing in classrooms are reflected in early assessment data from participating districts.

In Rolla Public Schools, more than 94 percent of first-grade students demonstrated year-long growth in reading after coaching support began. In Dent-Phelps R-III School District, the share of first graders reading at grade level increased from 25.5 percent in the fall to 89.4 percent by the spring.

At Newburg Elementary School, 100 percent of kindergarten and first-grade students demonstrated growth in reading assessments, with gains that more than doubled typical annual progress.

From classroom change to district strategy

For April Williams, assistant superintendent in the St. James R-I School District, the impact is most visible during classroom visits.

“As an administrative team, we met every Wednesday morning and did literacy walks,” she said. “We wanted to be grounded in the work, too – not just supporting teachers but really understanding what effective literacy instruction should look like.”

Those visits give district leaders a firsthand view of how instruction – and students – are changing.

“Just last week I was in a kindergarten classroom, and the words students were decoding and understanding – for February – I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Seeing that difference in students’ abilities has been incredible.”

What began as a local effort in rural Phelps County is now expanding across Missouri.

Through the state’s Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) grant, the coaching model is being implemented in 60 schools statewide, including 40 K–5 schools and 20 middle and high schools. Literacy coaches trained in the same model used in Phelps County now support teachers across multiple regions of the state.

Education leaders say the expansion reflects growing recognition that improving reading outcomes requires not only strong curriculum but also sustained coaching and support for teachers.

For Williams, the goal is simple: ensure the work continues long after the original grant funding ends.

“Probably what changed the most is we renewed our commitment to literacy district-wide,” she said. “It wasn’t just something happening in elementary anymore – we started asking how the entire district supports literacy and keeps it at the forefront of everything we do.”

She added: “The goal is for this model to live beyond the grant — and beyond all of us. So that it simply becomes what we do.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

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.

When she recently separated from her partner, it became critical that she get a job. She was hired for a position with a nonprofit last summer, and shortly after that, she went online and applied to get a subsidy so she could afford child care for her three children, ages 2, 4 and 8 years old.

Two months went by before she got a response, she said, only to be told that she had been put on a waitlist. It gave her “a moment of panic,” she recalled. “I need my bills to be paid but I also need somebody to watch my children.” There was no way she could afford the out-of-pocket cost of child care on her pay. It costs a year, on average, for center-based care for a toddler in Virginia.

A growing number of parents have been confronted recently with a situation similar to Moyer’s. Strapped for child care funding, have started waitlists for child care subsidies — or lengthened existing ones — putting new applicants in limbo when they need immediate help paying for care. Virginia is one of 14 states that have recently instituted or expanded waitlists, according to Child Care Aware of America. 

Moyer ended up asking neighbors and friends to watch her children, “people that I normally wouldn’t have asked to watch my kids,” she said. She installed some cameras in her house to make herself feel more secure. But “I wasn’t as comfortable as I would have been had they been in a licensed, insured day care,” she noted, adding that she had to work around the schedules of the people who agreed to watch her children, even though she wasn’t able to control her own schedule at work. There were some days when the person she had arranged to watch her kids canceled at the last minute, sending her scrambling to find someone else.

“It was very, very emotionally stressful, because I had never been away from my kids up until this moment and suddenly I’m leaving them at home with other people,” she recalled.

Moyer had to wait four months to get off Virginia’s waitlist, she said. Then, when she was finally taken off, she had to fill out all the paperwork again, which required getting documents from her employer and finding a child care center that she could enroll her children in. It took her another two weeks before she was actually getting help, she said. 

Waiting lists for child care subsidies are not new. “It has been true for a long time that there are not enough resources to provide subsidies to every eligible family,” said Anne Hedgepeth, senior vice president of policy & research at Child Care Aware of America. “We’re not meeting families’ needs with our current subsidy system.” In 2021, were eligible for subsidies under state rules, but just 1.8 million received them, or less than a quarter of those who qualified. 

But the child care sector has, in the past five years, received more funding that it typically does. It received in federal COVID relief funding meant to prop the sector up, which some states to eliminate waitlists, among other changes. The Child Care and Development Block Grant, which mostly funds state subsidies, received a increase in funding in 2023 and then another increase in 2024. Some states, for their part, also devoted some of their own dollars to the sector.

Now with the billions in COVID relief funding gone, and with big state budget cuts looming due to to Medicaid and other safety net programs passed by Republicans in Congress, many states have searched for ways to reduce spending. Waiting lists have become a common tool. States are “not able to serve all eligible families, and they’re having to do things like institute waitlists that limit families who are coming in,” Hedgepeth said. 

Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia have recently started putting at least some parents on waiting lists for child care subsidies or have significantly expanded the number of parents on their lists, according to Child Care Aware of America. Missouri also   a waitlist starting March 1. 

The number of states with waitlists has nearly doubled since early 2022, according to Child Care Aware of America. “Many on this list did not have waitlists when there were additional dollars available,” Hedgepeth said, and “were able to serve all of the families that were applying.”

This situation “does tell us that the funding amount that was flowing to states during the pandemic was an amount that better reflected the total need in the system,” Hedgepeth said. The increase in states using waitlists as an approach to cut costs is bad on its own, but ����’s also a canary in the coal mine, she said, signaling deeper troubles in the child care system.

“A single state may not be able to replace federal funding,” she noted, but if ����’s only spending the bare minimum without dedicating general funds “that’s a real opportunity for state policymakers.” , for example, has instituted waitlists without investing any additional funding for the sector. 

For parents like Moyer, the impact of state waitlists can be devastating, Hedgepeth said. Many families don’t bother to go through the steps to get a subsidy or might not even know that they’re eligible in the first place. For those who actually fill out the paperwork and submit it, “which is often no easy task,” she said, finding out that they won’t get any help for a number of months or, possibly, indefinitely “can be really disheartening.” Parents likely face impossible choices about how to make sure their children are cared for while they work. “This is not something they have time to wait for,” she said. “They need care today for their kids.” That’s especially true for mothers, as women’s labor force participation has , and many parents child care problems are keeping them from work. 

Providers, meanwhile, often suffer as well. In Indiana, for instance, the freeze in new subsidies left some providers who were counting on enrolling new infants with empty infant classrooms. The freeze, along with deep reimbursement cuts, has put them in a difficult financial position. “Your highest rates of pay comes from your infants,” Dionne Miller, who runs Room to Bloom Learning Academy in Indianapolis, previously told The 74. “We no longer have that stream of income coming in.” More than 100 providers closed last September and October after the state’s changes were put in place.

On top of the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds, ongoing federal funding has become increasingly unstable. In December, the Trump administration announced that, after resurfacing fraud allegations in Minnesota’s child care and other public programs, it was freezing all child care funding to the state and reinstituting a Defend the Spend requirement for the Child Care Development Fund, which provides key funding for state subsidies across the country. With the change, all states now have to provide justification, including receipts and photo evidence, in order to draw down the money that was already appropriated by Congress. 

The administration also sought to completely freeze CCDF and other federal funding to five states, although that action has been by a judge. And the administration rescinded Biden-era rules that paid child care providers in a more stable way. 

Given all of this, Hedgepeth said, “I would not be surprised to see more states institute waitlists.” 

“We are in some ways back to the pre-pandemic conversation of the way in which child care and early learning are situated in our priorities,” she added. It’s “not receiving the full support that it needs despite what we know about its critical importance to families and economies.”

The Iowa House passed a measure Monday to make the current pilot program providing free child care for child care workers permanent.

Iowa’s Child Care Assistance (CCA) program is available to parents with a gross monthly income below 250% the federal poverty level, if they are gone during the week days due to their job, schooling, vocational training or state activities. However, Iowans working at least 32 hours a week in the child care field have also been able to access the CCA program outside of the income restrictions through a pilot program implemented in 2023 and extended in subsequent years.

, passed 86-3, would make this program permanent. Rep. Ryan Weldon, R-Ankeny, said since July 2023, 2,105 families have received child care through the CCA pilot program, with the average family receiving support being at 302% of the federal poverty level. The funding for the program has come, and will continue to draw from the state’s Child Care Development Fund, which Weldon said had $112 million in the previous fiscal year, with a projection of carrying forward $107 million in FY 2026 and $91 million in FY 2027, alongside federal funds.

According to the , the bill would have an estimated cost of $11.7 million in FY 2027 — with the state paying $7 million — and $12.1 million in FY 2028, with the state paying $7.3 million.

The bill was amended to require an annual report on state and federal costs, the number of participating families and children and the average household income of those receiving the CCA program support.

Rep. Tracy Ehlert, D-Cedar Rapids, said she was “excited” the bill was introduced, as it was a proposal House Democrats have introduced in previous legislative sessions and Iowans working in child care have called for lawmakers to approve.

“As I have talked to different programs, this is one of the number one things that they said they needed to stay in place to help them,” Ehlert said. “It’s helping communities, ����’s helping children, ����’s helping our early childhood workforce.”

Another proposal — which survived the first legislative funnel as  and  — also contains language to codify the CCA pilot program. These companion bills are the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services’ larger proposal including a shift in some funding from the Early Childhood Iowa system to HHS.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com.

Ohio received a bump in funding for child care last week, a small win in a sector that is still facing uncertainty and an affordability crisis.

Analysis by advocacy group Groundwork Ohio shows at more than $9,500 per year for preschool-age care, more than $11,000 per year for toddler care, and more than $12,000 a year for infant care.

The Ohio Department of Children and Youth was awarded $14.7 million in federal grants “to support access to early care and education services,” according to a press release from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.

The federal funding comes from the Preschool Development Grant – Birth to Five, distributed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“This funding will help Ohio better support families and make sure young children have access to quality care and learning opportunities during their most important years,” DeWine said in a statement.

The state said the money will be used to upgrade technology and research, help early childhood education workers with curriculum development, professional learning opportunities, and “business support resources.”

A total of $250 million was distributed through the federal grant program, and Ohio’s director of the Department of Children and Youth, Kara Wente, said the grant would allow the state “to build on the work already happening in communities across the state.”

“By improving coordination and planning, we can make it easier for families to find the services they need and ensure young children get a strong start,” she said in a statement.

The state General Assembly approved funding for child care through its most recent budget, with funding going to the Child Care Choice voucher program and a pilot cost-sharing child care model.

But advocates were disappointed when eligibility for Publicly Funded Child care was left at 145% of the federal poverty level, despite pushes to raise the level to 160% or 200%.

Programs to provide state grant funding for recruitment and child care provider mentorship went down from previous budget drafts, ending up with $2.85 million in funds over the two years of the budget, .

Lynanne Gutierrez, president and CEO of child advocacy group Groundwork Ohio, has said Ohio faces after one-time federal dollars fade away for good in 2028.

State child care advocates have been pushing the federal government to bring current and further funding to the sector.

They have around the country to urge the government to continue funding the Child Care Development Block Grant, along with $10 billion in funding that was frozen in certain states after fraud allegations about Minnesota child care facilities were circulated by a right-wing YouTuber earlier this year.

The funding freeze for Minnesota and other states was blocked temporarily by a federal judge in January, but the lawsuit in which the ruling was made continues.

As funding comes and goes, the cost of child care continues to balloon, and a lack of access and affordability is costing the country billions, according to a new analysis by ReadyNation, a research group partnered with the Institute for Child Success.

The study, released this week, showed insufficient child care for children younger than 5 costs the U.S. economy $172 billion per year in “lost earnings, productivity, and economic activity.”

It showed a $5.3 billion economic impact for Ohio alone.

“Challenges mount over time: with less training and less experience, these parents face diminished career prospects, reducing their earning potential,” the study stated. “And less parent income, along with parental stress, can have harmful short and long-term impacts on children.”

National polling also shows bipartisan support for further child care support and changes to the system.

A poll conducted in the beginning of January on behalf of the national First Five Years Fund showed 80% of voters find the ability to find and afford child care as “either in a state of crisis or a major problem.”

The polling also showed 75% of participants believe child care funding should be increased or at least kept at current levels, with 75% of Republicans, 97% of Democrats, and 85% of independents giving that opinion.

A majority in all political parties polled said funding for child care “is an important and good use of tax dollars.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

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.

When Lexia more than 200 kindergarten teachers  working with early learners last fall, we wanted to understand what they were seeing in their classrooms. The responses offer both a clear-eyed look at the challenges and a sense of optimism about the path ahead.

Nearly three-quarters of the educators we surveyed said today’s kindergarteners are behind in early literacy skills compared with students five years ago. Among those who described their students as behind, most pointed to phonemic awareness, the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words, as the biggest gap. Others mentioned that children struggle to recognize letters or even to write their own names.

Equally striking were findings around attention and confidence. Almost 90% of teacher participants reported that children’s attention spans during reading-related activities are shorter than before, and more than half said their students are less confident when asked to participate in those activities, to sound out a word, for example, or share during storytime.

But what stood out most wasn’t just the academic data. Eight in 10 educators said their students are less socially and emotionally ready for kindergarten than past cohorts. They arrive less practiced in sharing, self-regulation and cooperation. For many, this is their first experience in a group learning environment.

We often talk about “learning loss” as if it can be measured solely in test scores. But what educators are describing in these classrooms is a quieter, more complex legacy of the pandemic, one shaped by isolation, uneven access to early learning, and disruptions in routine.

When young children miss out on opportunities to play with peers or listen to stories in groups, they lose more than vocabulary. They lose practice in waiting their turn, following a sequence and engaging with other minds. These are the invisible threads that tie social-emotional development to literacy.

And yet, as sobering as these findings are, they also represent a moment of opportunity. Teachers are watching these 5- and 6-year-old children adapt, often quickly. Many describe their students as curious, empathetic and eager to learn, just in need of scaffolds that reflect their unique experiences.

When asked what would most help this generation of learners, educators were nearly unanimous: more family and home engagement in reading.

It’s a reminder that literacy doesn’t start at school; it starts in homes, in the daily rhythm of conversation and storytelling. During the pandemic, many parents of young children were juggling work, stress and uncertainty. Reading aloud may have taken a back seat. Now, as these families reconnect with schools, there’s a chance to rebuild those habits, not as homework, but as bonding.

Districts can help by making family literacy simple and inviting: Send home books. Offer short video tips for parents on how to ask open-ended questions after reading a story. Use communication platforms that make it easy to celebrate small moments, a child recognizing their first letter, a family sharing a favorite bedtime story.

The message should be that literacy is not just a school task; ����’s a shared joy.

The survey also asked educators which school-based interventions can most help support today’s kindergarteners. Their top choice: personalized instruction that meets diverse needs.

No two pandemic experiences were the same. Some children spent their early years surrounded by adults who read to them daily; others spent long days in front of screens or in households where stress limited conversation. Adaptive digital tools and skilled teacher guidance allow instruction to begin at the right place for each child.

Schools can build on this by:

• Using data-driven tools to pinpoint skill gaps in phonemic awareness, vocabulary and comprehension
• Structuring small-group interventions that target those gaps with playful, multisensory practice
• Embedding social-emotional learning into literacy instruction, helping students persist through frustration and take pride in progress
• Offering teachers professional development focused on understanding and responding to the unique needs of post-pandemic learners

These are not radical shifts; they are refinements. But collectively, they represent a new literacy ecosystem — one that treats emotional readiness, family partnership and differentiated instruction as equally essential.

Every generation of educators faces a defining challenge. For this one, it is helping the COVID cohort reclaim what was lost and discover what they can become. The educators in our survey didn’t express despair; they expressed determination. They see that this group of kindergarteners has resilience, empathy and curiosity born of their circumstances. What they need now is consistent support, connection and time.

If we meet this moment with patience and creativity, these children could grow into some of the most adaptable learners our schools have ever seen. It’s not about what was missed, ����’s about what’s possible next.

The evidence for underenrollment is myriad, with data points coming in from a range of sources. For instance, KinderCare, the nation’s largest private child care provider, stated on a that enrollment was down around 2% year-over-year. The Bank of America Institute, an economic think tank that provides insights from the bank’s data, in October 2025 that, among its customers, the share of households with more than one source of income making child care payments had dropped to slightly under 35.5%. That figure is down nearly 2% since 2021, with a more prominent decrease among low-income households. These findings suggest that fewer families are utilizing licensed child care programs, which may result in open slots. 

While these percentages aren’t massive, they are meaningful when applied across the board to the . These data also track with as they wrestle with high costs of living and declines in flexible work-from-home options. 

Child care programs are reporting the phenomenon as well. Over half of child care program administrators in early 2025 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) said they have fewer children enrolled than they would like.

Importantly, the sector’s declining enrollment doesn’t appear to be driven by some sudden drop of interest in licensed care among families, nor by declining birth rates as some nations are experiencing (there isn’t evidence that this is a significant factor in the U.S. yet. 

Instead, households are grappling with a lack of ability to afford their preferred care arrangement. Among underenrolled programs in the NAEYC survey, the top reason (given by 41% of respondents) was parents’ inability to afford a slot. A recent survey of New York City parents from Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy that 16% of respondents had cut back on child care hours or stopped using child care altogether due to cost; the number rose to 34% among single moms. (Other parents reported switching to what they considered “inadequate” care as a result of costs.)

Rising costs aren’t the only reason for underenrollment: A fierce scarcity of early educators is leaving many classrooms dark. In the NAEYC survey, the second and third most cited reasons for underenrollment related to not having — or being able to retain — enough staff. A recent by the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA) illustrates how this plays out in practice. The analysis found that in Wisconsin, most center-based programs are operating at around 75% of their licensed capacity, leaving over 33,000 seats unfilled — and filling those seats would require an estimated 4,000 educators. Low compensation is a primary driver behind these staffing shortages. The WECA analysis also revealed that one-quarter of the state’s early childhood workforce left the field permanently in 2024. That’s a crippling level of annual turnover, to say nothing of the negative impacts on children . And when programs have to pay their monthly bills with fewer paying families, they may be forced to raise rates, ending up in a vicious cycle that can lead to closure. 

The link between poor pay for early educators, staff shortages and underenrollment is not unique to Wisconsin. In 2024, a group of researchers led by the University of Virginia’s Daphna Bassok, the latest in a series of workforce studies on Louisiana, a state with a particularly strong early childhood data system. Bassok’s team looked at programs accepting public subsidy dollars that did or did not utilize pandemic-era grants to boost wages. Among programs with lead teacher pay of $8.50 an hour, 40% had at least one-quarter of their staffing positions vacant, over half had to close classrooms and 70% had to turn families away. Programs with better, but still low, pay of $15 an hour (about $31,000 a year) had reduced rates of vacancies, but 47% still closed classrooms and 59% still had to turn families away.

Underenrollment, then, is a multifaceted problem that calls for multifaceted response. 

For one, the trend adds more urgency to lower parent fees via direct public funding. The more states can follow the lead of exemplars like Vermont, New Mexico and in expanding who is eligible for free or low-cost care, the better. Underenrollment is also a symptom of how much families are struggling right now overall, suggesting the need to put more money in their pockets via mechanisms like expanded and refundable child tax credits.  

On the program side, getting money into providers’ hands so they can should be a priority. Here, states would do well to look at precedents like Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grants, which provide monthly checks to over of the state’s licensed programs, and Washington’s which raises early educator pay through wage supplements by while moving them toward parity with elementary school teachers. While there is certainly reason to continue building out new supply in geographic areas that need it, a major priority in the present moment should be maximizing the system’s existing capacity.

Policy tends to move along lines of “path dependence” — the concept that we do what we’ve done because that’s what we’ve been doing — and it can be difficult to unlearn old narratives or change course even when there is a promising alternative. 

There are now two simultaneous truths about American child care: Families struggle to find child care, often facing long waitlists, while many child care centers sit partially empty. The slots aren’t vacant because families don’t need care. They’re vacant because families can’t afford care — and because providers lack the staff required to operate at full capacity. Policymakers need to adjust their strategies and solve for both problems at once. 

The good news is that there is a solution that addresses each challenge in turn: making child care a right backed up by strong, permanent public funding. While the child care story has evolved, the answer has never been clearer.

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 ����’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.

The U.S. Senate has until Friday night to approve a package of funding measures or else risk another government shutdown. That package includes funding for child care subsidies, Head Start, and other services for young kids.

Senate Democrats have said they oppose the spending measure because it also includes funding the Department of Homeland Security. They want new restrictions on immigration enforcement, and to split it off from the other funding bills in the package in the  by federal officers.

In addition to Head Start and child care, the bills in the six-part package include funding for infant and early childhood mental health, maternal health, and home-heating assistance,

“There is no reason that funding for children, for babies, for meeting their very basic needs should be contingent on whether or not ICE gets funding,” said Melissa Boteach, the chief policy officer at Zero to Three, an advocacy organization for babies and young kids. “[Young kids] are in the most rapid stage of brain development. They have immediate needs that need to be met.”

Head Start disruption: What could happen?

The last government shutdown in the fall lasted 43 days, and several Head Start programs in California . Boteach said there may be a few centers that are immediately affected, and others later on if a shutdown drags on, depending on when the center’s grant cycles starts.

Those most at risk are programs that have a Feb. 1 start date, said Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California, of which she estimated there are around 6-10.

Head Start is a federally-funded program that provides early education and other services to children in low-income families. “ For many of these children, these are also the most nutritious meals that they get every day [at Head Start],” Cottrill said.

“It’s not guaranteed that they’ll close their doors if there is a government shutdown. It really depends on whether they have other funding sources,” she added.

Federal funding for childcare subsidies for low-income children (which is administered through the state) is also part of the funding package. Earlier this month, President Trump said he would freeze that funding to California, though  has been tied up in court.

“There’s already been a good deal of instability in these programs and for families who rely on them and are just hopeful that the Congress can finish this off and, uh, be able to move forward,” said Donna Sneeringer, president of the Child Care Resource Center, which runs Head Starts and child care subsidy programs in the Los Angeles area.

“[Parents] feel very insecure — these temporary pauses… the family’s lives don’t pause,” said Mary Ignatius, who heads Parent Voices. “ Real harm happens to the child care providers, the families, and the children who cannot afford any delays.”

This article was originally published by .

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. 

In 2024 alone, more than 6,000 early childhood educators in Wisconsin exited the field, representing about a quarter of the state’s overall child care workforce, according to a from the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), a nonprofit advocacy organization that supports early childhood educators and the children they serve. 

Without qualified teachers to fill classrooms, most center-based programs are not able to enroll as many children as they can accommodate. As of October 2025, more than three-quarters of programs were under-enrolled, with the average program operating at only about 75% of their licensed capacity, according to the WECA study, which analyzed monthly data over the past five years that early education providers submitted to the state’s Department of Children and Families. 

That translates to more than 33,000 licensed but unfilled child care slots across the state. To make those seats available, the state would need an estimated 4,000 additional educators.

Wisconsin’s high staff turnover and worsening shortages have strained its child care capacity, leaving the state with the space — but not the teachers — to meet the needs of families.

There’s clear data proving that this paradox is playing out in Wisconsin. There’s also ����’s other states. It’s not surprising, in a nation where the average wage for early childhood educators around $15 per hour, employer-provided benefits are rare, and nearly half the field some sort of public assistance. 

“We have a precarious workforce,” acknowledged Anne Hedgepeth, senior vice president of policy and research at Child Care Aware of America, a national organization that promotes high-quality, affordable child care. 

In Wisconsin, where the last pandemic-era relief payments are due to this June, that has perhaps never been more true.

“Staffing has always been a challenge, but it continues to get worse,” said Paula Drew, director of early care and education policy and research at WECA. “This business model is not focused on what it costs to provide high-quality care to children. It’s based on what parents can afford to pay. [Providers have to cover] rent, liability insurance, food. What’s left is what goes to staff.”

In Wisconsin, early childhood educators earn an average of just over , while the statewide median wage across occupations is close to $23 an hour. The result is a workforce that can barely make ends meet. 

Across the country, fast food restaurants, gas stations and retail stores have since the pandemic. Early care and education programs, in many instances, are no longer trying to compete with their prices — they simply can’t afford to. They’re relying, instead, on people who love young children so much that they are willing to forego financial stability. 

Drew pointed out that in the K-12 education sector, pay is modest, but public school employees often get rewarded with great benefits. 

“There isn’t something like that in early childhood,” Drew said. 

She added: “It’s great to watch a lesson in circle time play out, to see children use a lesson you just taught them. But when you worry about how you’re going to pay for groceries or get to your second job, there really isn’t something that helps you stay.”

In interviews, several providers in Wisconsin shared that they have lost exceptional teachers to jobs in unrelated fields, strictly because of compensation. 

Virginia Maus, co-owner of Joyful Beginnings Academy in Hortonville, said her program lost 18 teachers in 2025, out of a staff of 38. 

Every single one of them left for higher pay, she said, and 80% of them left early education altogether. (Maus has a day job as a data scientist, so naturally, she collects and analyzes the center’s data on staff turnover.) 

“They all came to me and said, ‘I got this offer,’ and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t match that,’” she explained.

One went to McDonald’s. Another, who Maus said was a “really, really great teacher who really connected with the children,” left for a job at a factory. 

“It’s really saddening, when they’re really talented people and the children adore them — to think she’s now standing in front of a machine,” Maus said. 

Julia Wilridge, who runs Lov ‘N Care Academy, a child care center nearly 150 miles away, in Kenosha, has also seen many teachers leave the industry for better-paying jobs elsewhere. The cost of living has gone up, she pointed out. Pay for unskilled jobs has gone up. But wages for early childhood educators? They’ve remained stubbornly low — at least in her program. 

“Young kids are getting jobs at McDonald’s and Taco Bell, getting $16 to $18 an hour,” she said, “and we’re still offering $12 and $13 an hour.”

Wilridge is in the process of increasing her base pay to staff, out of necessity. Assistant teachers without experience would start at $13 an hour, instead of $12, while lead teachers would start at $15 an hour, up from $14. 

Part of the challenge in Wisconsin, providers shared, is that the state’s child care quality rating system, YoungStar, when more teachers have advanced certificates and degrees, but these programs aren’t making enough money to pay degree-holding teachers what they want.

Wilridge, for example, needs to hire a new teacher to lead her 4-year-old classroom, but that teacher has to have an undergraduate degree. 

“I already know I’m going to run into an issue,” she said, noting that the last time she was hiring for a similar role, candidates all wanted at least $20 an hour. “None of our staff make $20 an hour. I’m going to run into a problem getting people to accept a job paying $16 or $17. I don’t blame them, but I know that’s going to be an issue.” 

Annette Larson, director of Coulee Children’s Center in La Crosse, said her program closed the toddler classroom she was teaching in after she stepped into the director position there three years ago. They haven’t been able to find a teacher to help reopen it, since that person needs to have a degree. 

“You don’t find a lot of four-year-degree people who want to work in child care due to what you get paid in child care,” Larson said bluntly. “That’s a lot of the issue.”

Her center is licensed for 125 children but currently only serves 70, in part due to staffing, she said. 

Child care programs can hire people without experience and education, but then they have to ensure those teachers obtain the required coursework. Even assistant teachers are required to take one or two classes — depending on the age group they teach. That’s a financial investment and time commitment for programs, which are already just scraping by. 

Hedgepeth, at Child Care Aware, described teachers as the “linchpin” of early care and education programs. “It’s critical to figure out what we need to do [to keep them] in our programs and fill vacancies when we have them,” she said. 

Drew, who led the WECA study and plans to continue to track statewide staffing data, emphasized the importance of this issue. 

“Workforce is everything. That is child care supply, child development, child care quality,” she said. “One of the items on the list to do to improve child care infrastructure is shoring up our workforce.”

Constitutions are powerful, both practically and symbolically. After the Civil War, as Congress was debating what defeated Confederate states must do to rejoin the Union, a surprising requirement rose to the top. When Southern states rewrote their constitutions, they were expected to include voting rights — but also . Some years later, in 1881, then-President James Garfield inveighed on the importance of these rights . “The voters of the Union, who make and unmake constitutions, and upon whose will hang the destinies of our governments, can transmit their supreme authority to no successors save the coming generation of voters, who are the sole heirs of sovereign power,” he said. “If that generation comes to its inheritance blinded by ignorance and corrupted by vice, the fall of the Republic will be certain and remediless.” Garfield concluded that, “For the North and South alike there is but one remedy. All the constitutional power of the nation and of the States and all the volunteer forces of the people should be surrendered to meet this danger by the savory influence of universal education.”

By universal education, of course, Garfield was largely excluding the early years — but we now understand how inextricable early childhood experiences are from any desired child outcomes. While more states are moving in the direction of dedicated funding sources for child care (and in 2022, New Mexico even passed a constitutional amendment that committed funding to early education), none have yet tapped the ultimate forcing function: passing a constitutional amendment establishing a right to child care.

In practice, a constitutional right to child care would likely mean that every child in the state would be entitled to — and guaranteed access to — a child care slot. There would be protections in place to ensure that right. For example, every state has a , so if a resident’s local public school district refuses to enroll a child, or tries to charge a fee for enrollment, a parent or guardian can take the district to court — and will likely win. It’s important to note that a hypothetical right to child care does not necessarily mean child care services must be government run, merely government funded; an amendment could be written in a way that maintains a mixed-delivery system including a variety of center- and home-based settings.

There are only a few instances in which early childhood has been addressed by state constitutions, and most of them focus solely on pre-K rather than a comprehensive child care system. Still, they’re notable. The most clear-cut example comes from Florida. As Aaron Loewenberg of the think tank New America explained , “In November 2002, Florida voters voted by a 59 to 41 percent margin to approve a constitutional amendment making their state the first in the nation to grant four-year-olds a state constitutional right to pre-K. The Florida Constitution that, ‘Every four-year old child in Florida shall be provided by the State a high quality pre-kindergarten learning opportunity in the form of an early childhood development and education program which shall be voluntary, high quality, free, and delivered according to professionally accepted standards.’” 

In New Jersey, meanwhile, a decades-long legal battle known as — though not resulting in a right to child care — ended with courts requiring the state to make major pre-K investments in low-income counties as a matter of educational equity. And New Mexico’s 2022 involved dedicating a portion of the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to early childhood education. While it was a major win for the state, there’s an important distinction to make: the amendment created a stable funding pathway that powered the 2025 policy which expanded free child care eligibility, but did not establish a right to child care because the state legislature isn’t obligated to fully fund the system or guarantee a slot. 

It’s also important to recognize that establishing a constitutional right to child care doesn’t guarantee that the service is high-quality or that service providers are well compensated. There have been long-running battles in states from to where the courts tell the legislature they need to put more money into the state’s public education system, and the legislature pushes back or refuses. Similarly, Florida’s pre-K amendment has had a rocky translation into practice: as Loewenberg notes, Florida’s program “has fallen short of the lofty goals announced upon the amendment’s passage. The good news is that sixty-eight percent of the state’s four-year-olds were enrolled … during the 2021-2022 school year, making Florida second in the nation when it comes to pre-K access for four-year-olds. However, the state only spends about $2,200 per child, making Florida 43rd out of 46 states when it comes to per pupil pre-K spending,” leading to many quality concerns. Often, the state only covers three to four hours of pre-K per day. 

Still, constitutionally-protected services present a stark contrast to America’s largely pay-to-play child care system in terms of access and cost. A constitutional right is also extraordinarily difficult to remove once enshrined, and when a state establishes this kind of entitlement, it conveys a sense of values that can shape how society perceives an issue. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of the European nations with strong child care infrastructures, from Finland to Germany, have crafted their systems within . Thus, the very debate over whether child care should be a constitutional right could in and of itself help reshape public opinion.

Realistically, amending state constitutions . In many states, the process is arduous and requires action by state legislatures that may be reluctant to obligate themselves to fund a new entitlement. That said, child care champions would do well to consider state constitutional amendments as a long-term strategy. If child care undergirds strong children, strong families and strong communities, then it would call on a great American tradition to assert the need for constitutional authority enshrining the savory influence of universal child care.

Could those two trends be related? New research and surveys indicate yes.

In , Boston University economics Ph.D. candidate Abigail Dow finds that when child care prices increase, some American families decide to put off having more children, and many don’t have more children at all. 

Dow looked at child care prices across the country in a compiled and published by the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor with data from 2010 to 2022. 

She then isolated a “shock” to child care prices — an event, unrelated to something like a recession or a spike in inflation, that made the cost of care go either up or down. The shock she identified was that when states mandate smaller group sizes and/or lower child to staff ratios, child care prices rise, so she studied what happened to fertility decisions when states passed such regulations.

“My key takeaway is that child care costs are high in the U.S., and I do find they’re a barrier to having children,” Dow said. She found that a 10% increase in the price of child care for children from birth to 2 years old led to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate among women aged 20 to 44. Her research also found that the price increase leads to women delaying when they have children: a 10% increase prompts women to push back their first birth by four months and to extend the time between a first and second child by half a month. Dow found that women’s decisions about whether to have second and third children were particularly hampered by high child care prices. 

The findings are strongest for women ages 30 or older. This is, Dow posits, because they have more to lose if they can’t get child care: they’ve invested more time and resources into their careers and likely earn more, making the cost of having to give up on work to care for more children in the absence of affordable child care higher. Younger women have less to lose by having a child and dropping out of the work force if child care can’t be secured.

The research is novel: while there have been studies in European countries which suggest that women rethink having children when child care prices rise, Dow knew that those situations may not be applicable to the U.S., where the government spends much less on child care, ����’s a primarily private system, and there is no guarantee of paid family leave. “There wasn’t a robust empirical analysis of: How do child care prices affect fertility rates?” Dow said. 

Dow noted that child care prices aren’t the only factor dampening the country’s fertility rate — other research has found that things like housing and health care prices also make an impact. But ����’s clear that the cost of raising children is top of mind for American parents when they’re thinking about the sizes of their families. In of 3,000 nationally representative respondents by YouGov, the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and Deseret News released in November, a record share of participants — 71% — said that raising children is unaffordable, a 13 percentage point increase over 2024. That high cost of raising children was listed as the single most important reason survey respondents offered for why they’ve limited the children they either had or planned to have. That response was twice as prevalent as the next two reasons they gave — a lack of personal desire and a lack of a supportive partner — and for the first time in the survey’s 10-year history, it was the top reason respondents gave.

The survey also found that support for government resources aimed at parents through direct payments and better programs had increased since 2021, and opposition to such interventions was 10 percentage points lower. A majority favor universal day care, while just 18% oppose it. Survey respondents also supported increased tax credits for parents.

“If you think about, ‘What do I have to think about when I’m raising a family for those early years,’ child care is going to be front of mind,” Dow said.

The situation is poised to get worse for Americans considering whether and when to have children. Dow’s data only goes through 2022. Since then, the billions of dollars in pandemic-era federal relief for the child care sector has disappeared. In its wake, states like Arkansas and Indiana have cut back on support for the sector. Indiana stopped enrolling new children in its child care subsidy program, and the state has reduced reimbursement rates for providers, leading more than 100 providers to shutter. Arkansas has also cut provider reimbursement rates, put new subsidy applicants on a waitlist, and instituted new copays for parents who receive vouchers. More of the cost burden will now fall on parents in states that pull back.

Dow cautioned that her research shouldn’t be interpreted as an argument for relaxing regulations in order to bring child care costs down and boost births. “These regulations are really important for child health and safety,” she pointed out. “I’m absolutely not in the business of saying we should be making these regulations more lax purely to make child care more affordable for parents.” But, she said, her research makes it clear that parents, and particularly mothers, make decisions about whether to have children and how many to have based at least in part on whether they can afford child care. “Anything we can do to make child care more affordable seems important from a policy perspective,” she said. 

“We know what the causes were,” said Leslie Boissiere, vice president of external affairs with the Casey Foundation, known for its , which evaluates child well-being and other measures in each state. “There were significant pandemic-era policies in place, notably, the Child Tax Credit, which was allowed to lapse. Rising costs have also had a significant impact,” she said. are also a factor. Families with workers in low-paying jobs are particularly vulnerable in the current economic conditions.

To make matters worse, cuts to Medicaid, the and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) , said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus Children.

“Children 0 to 3 years old,” Lesley added, “have the highest poverty rate of any age group.”

Measuring child poverty doesn’t involve checking children’s tax returns or bank accounts. Little kids don’t have those. It depends entirely on the financial circumstances of their household, and often their parents. The Casey Foundation, and most other institutions tracking child poverty use the , which counts government benefits to gain a broader view of well-being, rather than the , which relies principally on wages. 

Poverty has serious consequences for learning. “In this period when a young child’s brain is in a rapid period of development, poverty is an impediment to that development,” Boissiere explained. “It increases the risk of behavioral and emotional challenges both at home and in school. And it creates a long-term barrier to a child’s ability to reach their full potential.” 

She elaborated: “If you think of what poverty means for a child, it means I’m constantly worried that I’m going to have enough food to eat. I’m not sure where my next meal is coming from. I may not live in healthy housing conditions. And it’s difficult for a child to focus when those things are on their minds.”

Over the long term, she noted, “There’s a direct impact on the children, but there’s also a direct impact on communities, and ultimately there’s a direct impact on the long-term health of our economy, because children today are the workforce tomorrow.”

Against this troubling backdrop, three pathways have emerged in the fight against child poverty — though none alone can fill the gap left by federal cuts.

States Taking Action

“The federal government sets the policies,” explained Boissiere. “And states implement those policies. And so the implementation can have a direct effect on how kids and families are impacted.” She noted that states can also pass their own child tax credits and earned income tax credits. In New Mexico, for example, anti-poverty programs and policies like reduced child poverty by 19 percentage points between 2022 and 2024, according to the Casey Foundation.

Maryland is pioneering another way that states can help their youngest residents thrive with its . The program provides grants to community partners in regions throughout the state where child poverty rates are especially high. 

The initiative has $19 million in grant funding to 28 high-poverty communities in 12 counties. Two strategies make ENOUGH unique: intentionally listening to community organizations and allowing them to “quarterback” the efforts; and harnessing philanthropic capital through the which is boosting the public funds, with $100 million committed for the next six years.

The investments include high-quality child care and education programs in South End, a community in , and , a cross-sector partnership in south Baltimore aimed to bolster education, community wellness, housing and economic health. as “a promising example for how other states can work across silos, enact evidence-based policies, and partner with local communities to reduce child poverty.

Gov. Wes Moore acknowledged the policy headwinds at a recent event kicking off ENOUGH’s second year, in which residents, officials and nonprofit leaders gathered in Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood to hear about the initiative’s progress. Moore condemned recent federal budget cuts as “the single largest rollback of poverty-fighting programs in modern history.” 

He continued: “Now, at a time when the federal government is effectively telling communities of color and children living in poverty, ‘You’re on your own,’ Maryland is stepping up and doubling down. ENOUGH is about making government work better for the people it serves and ensuring that Maryland’s decade is written by our communities, not simply for them.”

Addressing a group of reporters after his remarks at the event, Moore recalled his service as CEO of New York’s Robin Hood Foundation. “I ran one of the largest data-driven poverty-fighting organizations in the country. We led with data, and that’s really the same type of mantra that we have here.” 

Philanthropy Filling Gaps

Like state and city governments, foundations and philanthropists can play a role in reducing the harm caused by cuts to programs that support working families, but cannot make up for the gaps in federal funding. There are a number of prominent grantmakers focused on child poverty, including the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ballmer Group, W.K. Kellogg Foundation — and their efforts to address a range of issues including early education, child welfare, racial equity, housing and family economic security make a difference. Giving USA, which tracks charitable giving, that nearly $180 billion of the $592.5 billion donated in 2024 went to human services and education. Much of that went to organizations helping children in the United States, though the categories extend beyond this population.

Reflecting on the present moment, Boissiere described the Casey Foundation’s approach: “We do our part to support the ecosystem, both in terms of supporting local organizations, but also making sure that public resources are available and that decision makers have access to data to try to help inform smart choices on behalf of kids.” 

Even if donors step up their giving significantly, nobody expects the generosity to come close to making up for — not even the recently announced from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. The gift is designed to put $250 into the so-called Trump accounts of 25 million children living in ZIP codes where the median family income is below $150,000. Because account holders cannot make withdrawals from the accounts until they are 18, however, the program does not directly influence the child poverty rate today.

Advocates Pushing for Change

The nationwide advocacy community — which also includes organizations like the , , , , the — isn’t giving up on pushing for the federal programs that have been proven to lift families and children out of poverty.

Recommendations from the include rental assistance to reach more people who struggle to afford housing and expanding the Child Tax Credit for the who don’t get the full credit because their families’ incomes are too low.

To this list, Lesley from First Focus adds making SNAP more generous for families with young children, when parents may be earning less because they are . He also said administered by Social Security for children who have experienced the death of a parent should be automatic, rather than requiring an application process.

In a , Lesley argued that advocates should prioritize children over families. The family-first frame, he writes, “has ignored the power of empathy and the perceived deservingness of children, muted the moral urgency of our arguments and made children invisible in policy discussions. It arguably has led to fewer resources for children and families alike.” Pointing to a , Lesley underscored that children are a winning issue with voters.

Real changes result from states directing resources toward solutions, foundations increasing their grantmaking, and advocacy organizations analyzing data and taking steps to build awareness or prompt policy change. But that may not be enough to support the sustained structural transformation necessary to conquer child poverty.

That day marks an important shift for her and other early care and education providers in Nebraska who serve low-income families. On that date, the state intended to begin paying providers a consistent rate for families who use government subsidies to pay for child care. 

Instead of reimbursing providers based on children’s attendance — which can vary wildly, especially this time of year, based on factors like illness and family travel — Nebraska would pay providers the same amount each month based on enrollment. 

Last year, because of the change expected to come in summer 2026, Hampson, who owns a home-based child care program in Lincoln, Nebraska, felt comfortable filling more of her program slots with children whose families pay with subsidies. Today, she does not have one private-paying family. She made the shift assuming the enrollment-based pay would insulate her from the instability that often accompanies subsidy slots. 

“I was super excited to know more of these families were going to get that quality, consistent care,” Hampson said, adding that reaching more low-income families is important in the field. “It’s not that providers don’t want to.”

Now, though, that could all be about to change. 

Nebraska’s transition to enrollment-based pay was part of an effort to get in compliance with a rule . Enrollment-based payments, that administration believed, would create greater predictability for providers, allowing them to serve more low-income families who need child care and, eventually, could entice more providers to participate in the subsidy program. 

The rule was one of a handful of changes made by the prior administration related to the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), the primary federal program that states use to provide financial assistance to low-income families in need of child care. Other shifts include paying providers up front for child care, rather than reimbursing them the following month, and encouraging the use of grants and contracts with providers. timelines for implementing these changes have varied. As of September 2025, 24 states were paying based on enrollment, according to an by New America. For the others, the latest deadline granted was Aug. 1, 2026. 

Just this week, however, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), that it would seek to rescind many of the 2024 rules, returning these issues to states. 

The cannot be enforced right away. Under federal law, the agency is required to take public comments, review them, and use that input to make final decisions, noted Alex Adams, who leads ACF. He declined to give a timeline for any changes to take effect.

If approved, the changes would not “make any net new policy decisions,” he added. “It simply goes back to where we were prior to 2024 regulations.”

The administration wants to rescind the 2024 rules, he said, because all 50 states had requested waivers related to some or all of these rules due to budget constraints and other implementation challenges. 

“Any time 50 states are asking for a waiver from something,” Adams said, “it suggests to me that maybe the rule isn’t working as intended.”

He also noted that “attendance-verified payment,” rather than enrollment-based, “is more of a deterrent to fraud.” Leaders in the Trump administration are concerned about programs with “phantom attendance” — suggesting they receive government payments but don’t actually serve the children they say they do — Adams said, but he declined to share specifics of ongoing investigations. 

Many early care and education advocates and policy experts have that rampant fraud and abuse is going unchecked. 

Casey Peeks, senior director of early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, called the allegations “unfounded” and worried that they would undo real progress made in the field in recent years. 

“It is very unhelpful and destabilizing to the sector, in the immediate- and long-term, to take some of these most foundational levers we have to stabilize the sector and claim that they result in fraud,” Peeks said.

Upon hearing the news this week, Hampson said she’s had to remind herself to “just breathe.” She knew she was taking a risk by enrolling 100% of families on subsidies.

Now, she said, she will have to rearrange her budget to continue to serve all of those families. Under an attendance-based pay structure, her income is just that much more volatile.

In December, for example, between holidays, vacation time and children’s absences, Hampson was only able to bill the state for 18 child care days. If the children in her program were from private-paying families, she would have been paid for 23 days, she said. 

But Hampson’s operational costs didn’t see a material decrease in December. 

“Without a provider being at fault at all, they could be at 50% attendance one day just because the flu is going around. That shouldn’t harm their bottom line,” Peeks said. 

“It’s really unpredictable and unfair for the provider,” she added. “Just because attendance is down doesn’t mean operation costs go down.”

In West Virginia, where providers have been paid based on enrollment since 2020, Katelyn Vandal emphasized how critical the change has been to keeping her rural, center-based program open. 

“Our mortgage payment doesn’t cost less because two kids in the classroom have the flu,” noted Vandal, director of A Place to Grow, a child care center in Oak Hill, West Virginia. Nor does her electricity bill and a host of other overhead costs. 

If her state returns to attendance-based pay, she’s not sure A Place to Grow would be able to continue operating. The center serves about 100 kids, with 60% from families that pay with subsidies. 

“We run such a fine budget line anyway that if, six months from now, we were going back to attendance, we would be looking at closing,” she said. “We would not survive transitioning back to that.”

Sheryl Hutzenbiler, owner of Munchkin Land Daycare in Billings, Montana, said she suspects that, under attendance-based pay, providers will either raise tuition rates on families — many of whom are already paying the maximum they can afford without one parent leaving the workforce — or, like Vandal, be forced to close their doors. 

But that is not a decision Hutzenbiler will have to face, should the Trump administration successfully restore attendance-based pay. Since she lives in Montana, where enrollment-based pay became in 2023, she and other providers in the state are protected from policy fluctuations at the federal level. 

That’s true for a , which have either passed laws protecting enrollment-based pay or have continued paying based on enrollment, on a temporary basis, since the pandemic. (West Virginia is in the latter category.)

Enrollment-based pay has been pivotal for Hutzenbiler, whose home-based program consists of about 60% of families who pay with subsidies. Back when she was paid based on attendance, she said her first sacrifice during low-attendance months would be her own wages. She would pay her full-time teacher first and make sure program costs were covered, often leaving nothing for herself and relying on her husband’s income instead. With the consistent subsidy income each month, though, she’s not only been able to avoid missed paychecks for herself, she’s been able to add two part-time workers to the payroll. 

Hampson, in Nebraska, said she was part of a group last year advocating for the state to pass around enrollment-based pay. It was ultimately unsuccessful.

“We wanted to know our state had already said yes, so we wouldn’t go backwards,” she said. “And here we are going backwards.”

In an industry where profit margins are at less than 1%, these changes will inevitably leave providers who participate in the subsidy program with less revenue to survive on. The shifts will likely also deter providers who participate in the subsidy program, or who might have considered participating, from doing so in the future, said Peeks. This will likely, in effect, leave low-income families with fewer choices about where to go for child care. 

“When you’re stabilizing providers overall, you’re often creating more options for families overall,” said Peeks. “I think it could definitely have a chilling effect.”

“It’s pretty grim,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, about the outlook for the sector.

“I don’t think anyone is particularly optimistic about child care” in the new year, added Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). 

A handful of early care and education experts noted that 2025 did herald in a number of key victories in the field. 

Some states in policies shaping child care and early childhood education. In 2025, , and were among those that made new investments in the field. New Mexico took its gains in recent years a step further by free universal child care for all families, regardless of income, beginning last November. 

Alongside those wins for early learners and their caregivers came some challenges. Head Start was caught in political crosshairs more than once throughout the year — first when it was for elimination, then when many of its regional offices across the country were , and later when programs serving thousands of children nearly lost access to services during the prolonged government shutdown. And some states, such as Indiana, by the end of federal pandemic relief dollars, began to for families and programs, slashing provider reimbursement rates, instituting co-pays for families who use subsidies, and changing subsidy eligibility, among other actions. 

Now, those experts say, the that many states have experienced as historic pandemic-era investments expired is going to run headlong into another kind of budget shortfall in 2026. That’s one of four main issues they said they’ll be watching in early care and education in the new year. 

1. Child Care Spending: States Begin Tightening the Belt

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed into law in July 2025 includes significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The cuts effectively shift the costs of those programs from the federal government to states. If states decide to pick up the tab, they’ll likely have to pull back on other services.

Most of the cuts won’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterm elections, but states will start planning ahead. 

“It’s less painful to do it slowly than all at once,” explained Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at ZERO TO THREE. 

Unlike the federal government, states can’t spend more than they earn; they have to balance their budgets. So they’ll be looking for ways to increase revenue, such as through new taxes, or cut costs by eliminating or scaling back programs and services. 

“Uncertainty is the word,” said Aaron Loewenberg, senior policy analyst at New America. “There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty at this point about what the next year or two could look like.”

As states look to reduce costs, they will have fewer dollars to invest in early care and education. Certainly the prospect of bold new projects and initiatives seems less likely, experts said, but ����’s also possible that existing programs could be scaled back. 

What will emerge, said Hains of NAEYC, is a divide between states that have the will and resources to fund ECE, and states that don’t. 

“We’re going to be looking at two very different countries: States that have revenue to invest in child care and early learning — [like] Vermont, New Mexico, Connecticut, Montana — while other states are going to be in more constrained and challenging situations.”

Ultimately, funding cuts will be felt by children, families and early educators. 

“There’s no way to nickel and dime investing in children,” Boteach said. “At the end of the day, if we’re going to really transform outcomes for children and families, it requires resources. … Children in this country are going to suffer because we are disinvesting rather than investing in their future.”

2. Expanding Access: Can Promises of Universal Child Care Be Fulfilled? 

New Mexico’s pledge of free, universal child care has buoyed the spirits of many early childhood educators and advocates. 

“It’s an enormous bright spot in an otherwise very difficult year,” Boteach said.

The initiative is in its early days — the income limitation was lifted on Nov. 1, 2025 — so this year will offer state leaders a chance to make good on their promise. Early childhood policy experts will be watching closely. 

Loewenberg of New America said he’ll be looking at how leaders navigate in the system, whether families feel ����’s successful, and how such a policy could be replicated in states that don’t have the oil and gas revenues that New Mexico uses to fund universal child care. 

Meanwhile, all eyes will be on New York City as Mayor Zohran Mamdani settles into his new role and pursues his own for universal child care. 

“I’m holding out excitement or negativity to wait and see what happens,” said Loewenberg. “I think we’re past the point of saying, ‘This is great because people are talking about it.’ The difficult work is being able to make it work. That remains to be seen.”

One critical step is working out the funding mechanism for universal child care, which will likely require from the state government. 

Hains does find the policy pledge in itself encouraging. 

“Reflecting back on the last decade or two in this work, how amazing is it that we are at a place where mayors and governors are putting forward real, meaningful proposals of child care as a public good that’s available to everybody?” Hains said. “As a whole, looking at the big picture, ����’s exciting that child care feels like something that elected officials can deliver on.”

3. Workforce Instability: Immigration Enforcement Creates Chilling Effect

In 2025, the Trump administration intensified immigration enforcement, which has had deleterious consequences for early childhood educators and, in turn, the families who rely on them.

An estimated early childhood educators are immigrants. In large urban areas, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, immigrants make up of the child care workforce, Boteach pointed out. 

New America, a left-leaning think tank, released a in December that found a strong association between the increase in ICE activity and the number of foreign-born child care workers: Between February and July 2025, as ICE arrests increased after President Trump took office, there were 39,000 fewer foreign-born child care workers than the same period in 2024. 

With more funding for immigration enforcement, detention and deportation included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the trend is expected to continue in 2026. 

“Immigration enforcement, to me, right now, is the number one disruptor both to parent behavior and provider behavior,” said Renew of Home Grown. “It is hugely disruptive.” 

Because arrests have been , they have created a culture of fear among immigrants, even those with legal status in the country, New America found. And now that are fair game for ICE activity — prior to Trump’s second term, they were protected under a “sensitive locations” exception — many educators and parents worry about what may unfold before children’s eyes. 

“The amount of stress, the amount of worry about targeting in your community, can affect providers’ mental health and then the health of those kids in their care,” Boteach said. 

In effect, the escalation in immigration enforcement may impact both the availability and the quality of early care and education, she added.

4. Bright Spots: Solutions Emerge Amid Challenges

Even in a challenging political and budgetary environment, there are bright spots to keep an eye on in 2026. 

For one, Loewenberg pointed out, Head Start is still a viable, funded federal program. A year ago, that was not a sure thing.

A second is that a number of states with protected revenue streams for early care and education, including New Mexico and Vermont, will continue to invest in the field. Others are jumping in to commit more dollars to the sector — , and among them.  

Finally, early care and education is proving to be a viable campaign issue. In addition to Mamdani’s victory in New York, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia both won their gubernatorial races by talking about child care. 

“You’re seeing in the elections that candidates that ran on child care, ran on helping families and children, won,” Boteach said. “These are winning political issues, which means both parties should be vying to talk about these issues and govern on these issues.”

Indeed, Hains feels that the country is moving from a place of “whether” child care is a government responsibility to “how” and how much the government should be involved.