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 it’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 .

New York City received more than 50,000 applications for its free preschool programs in just two weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Friday.

That number is about half of the total applications the city received last year for its 3-K and prekindergarten programs — some 94,840. But families of 3- and 4-year-olds still have nearly a month to apply, and many families often wait until the end of the application window since applications are not accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Applications remain open through Feb. 27.

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“Every child deserves access to free, high quality childcare – and we’re making sure families across the city know that now is the time to enroll in 3-k and pre-K,” Mamdani said in a statement.

Mamdani seems to be taking a page from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s playbook, when the former mayor launched the city’s massive free pre-K program a decade ago and made outreach a major focal point. De Blasio’s administration to get the word out, particularly in low-income neighborhoods where families were less familiar with the city’s new offerings, and staffers called families of 4-year-olds across the city to encourage them to apply.

Former Mayor Eric Adams, however, did not focus as much on outreach, complained City Council members, who fought for more funding to to families. Last year, about 1 in every 5 seats for the city’s free child care programs for children ages 4 and under, or more than 27,000 of roughly 136,000 seats, went unfilled,

The new mayor has a vested interest in making sure : Not only did he vow to strengthen the city’s 3-K program and ensure that it’s truly universal, showing the demand for the city’s existing programs will help shore up support for his 2-Care program for the city’s 2-year-olds.

In her recent executive budget proposal, Gov. Kathy Hochul to help New York City roll out its 2-Care program and committed to invest $500 million over two years in the program. The city is aiming to create 2,000 new child care seats for 2-year-olds in high-need areas of the city in the fall, then grow to 8,000 seats the following year, and reach all of the city’s 2-year-olds by the end of Mamdani’s first term.

On Friday, Mamdani visited a home-based child care provider in Manhattan’s Chinatown as a way to show his commitment to the providers who operate out of home and often offer care that is culturally and linguistically responsive to families in their communities.

The administration will likely have to rely heavily on home-based providers to scale up its 2-Care program, which will pose many logistical hurdles. That from losing kids to 3-K and pre-K programs and the COVID pandemic. More recently, the Trump administration’s have affected the immigrant-heavy workforce, advocates and providers have said.

Emmy Liss, a former de Blasio administration staffer who is heading the mayor’s Office of Child Care, acknowledged that not all home-based providers fared well in the rollout of the city’s 3-K and pre-K programs.

“We want to work closely in partnership with them in this next phase of work, because we cannot do this work without them,”

Families can apply to 3-K and pre-K online through or by calling 718-935-2009. City officials said any family that applies by the deadline will receive an offer.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Disclosure: Gates Foundation, which supported the RAND research, also provides financial support to The 74.

But when filmmaker Rob Reiner latched onto the science about how young children develop, he not only used his moviemaking platform to convince the public of the importance of kids’ early years, he became a real-life policymaker to champion the cause. 

After successfully steering the passage of a 1998 tobacco tax in California to fund programs for kids from birth to 5, he chaired the statewide commission overseeing how some of the funds were spent. The entertainment community remembered Reiner’s legacy as a director this week, after he and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner were found dead in their home. But others reflected on how he kept early-childhood development in the spotlight. 

“There are plenty of Hollywood actors, directors and leaders who engage in politics, write reasonably sized checks and do their best to make a difference. That was not Rob,” said Ben Austin, a former Clinton White House staffer who handled communications for the California Children and Families Commission and quickly rebranded it as First 5. Twenty-seven years later, the work continues. “This was not a side hustle.”

For an education reporter, it was a big deal. I first interviewed Reiner and his wife in a suite at what was then the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in 1997. Early-childhood education was my beat, and he was there to talk to the nation’s governors about his I Am Your Child campaign. He wanted to start a movement and had the high-level connections to do it. The effort kicked off earlier that year with and a featuring celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Billy Crystal. With big-name corporate sponsors like Johnson & Johnson and AT&T, the initiative included a special edition of Newsweek and a series of parent-focused videos that translated the latest science on early brain development to a general audience.  

As a new mom, I couldn’t help but feel a personal connection to the topic. I reported on the policy goals of the campaign, like parent education and improving the quality of child care, while taking in the advice about reading and having back-and-forth conversations with my infant daughter. 

It was a 1994 report called , from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, that sparked Reiner’s activism. The authors explained how the first three years of life were a critical period of both risk and opportunity. 

“An adverse environment can compromise a young child’s brain function and overall development,” the authors wrote. “A good start in life can do more to promote learning and prevent damage than we ever imagined.”

Michael Levine, a co-author, remembers sitting in the Reiners’ home theater in 1995, presenting the research to a small group, including actor Warren Beatty, actress Kate Capshaw and then-Disney Channel President John Cooke. Reiner, Levine said, wanted to replicate a Hawaii program called , which promoted understanding of child development and parents’ relationships with their babies. Then Beatty spoke up.

“He said something to the effect of ‘I’ve been listening to this whole conversation about programs and philanthropy. What we can do is sell early childhood to America,’ ” Levine recalled.

That pivotal moment took place in the same home where police said the Reiners were stabbed to death. The Reiners’ young children were there at the time, Levine said. On Sunday, their son , 32, was arrested for the murder. On Monday, police said their daughter found their bodies.

Despite being a far-left Democrat, Reiner found agreement with Republican governors, like Pennsylvania’s and of Ohio, over early-childhood issues, Levine said.��

While I Am Your Child was a nationwide effort, Reiner kept his political strategy focused on California. In November 1998, voters narrowly passed his ballot measure, creating a 50-cent tax on tobacco products, beating back a $30 million effort from cigarette makers to defeat it. The revenue would fund programs to improve the health, school readiness and well-being of young children.

Reiner’s ability to combine his creative talent with political mobilization was “unprecedented in the early-childhood field,” Levine said. 

, I met Reiner in his Castle Rock Entertainment office in Beverly Hills, where posters of his hit movies, like “A Few Good Men,” and “When Harry Met Sally” line the walls.

First 5 was facing legal challenges, including a repeal effort sponsored by the president of a business called Cigarettes Cheaper. An author, , was also poking holes in the whole idea behind First 5, arguing that Reiner was oversimplifying the science and creating stress for parents about making the most of their kids’ early years. Reiner brushed off the criticism.

“Let’s say there is no evidence,” he told me. “Would you then say, ‘Let’s not invest in child care for young children; let’s not invest in health care for young children?’ ”

The repeal effort failed and until 2006, First 5 occupied almost as much of Reiner’s time as his movies. He presided over statewide commission meetings, and could “code switch” between directing a scene and handling First 5 business, Austin said. In 2002, Austin remembers grabbing some time with Reiner on the set of “Alex and Emma,” a love story starring Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson.

“We’d schedule with the producer like 15 minutes for me to talk to Rob in his trailer about early-childhood policy,” he said. 

One of Reiner’s biggest wins during that period was getting First 5 leaders in Los Angeles County to toward expanding preschool.

“This is a historic day for the children, not only of L.A. County, but of the country,” he said at the time. “This is going to be the model.”

He didn’t want to stop there. In 2006, he got a measure on the ballot that would tax California’s wealthiest residents to pay for pre-K for all 4-year-olds. With “strong will and enormous confidence,” he had little patience for those who might hurt the initiative’s chances of passing, said Bruce Fuller, a University of California Berkeley professor who advised Reiner’s team on the proposal. 

“Reiner was not necessarily the world’s greatest listener,” Fuller told me. The plan called for the California Department of Education to set standards for the program and county school superintendents to run it. Fuller thought that was a mistake because it would take kids away from private providers — an opinion Reiner’s team rejected. But Fuller described Reiner as someone “who committed a ton of time and had a big heart to advance the issue.”

Voters rejected the pre-K plan. But today, despite , First 5 continues to fund the statewide commission and 58 county-level agencies. They pay for a broad range of services, from home visiting for teen parents to training preschool providers. In 2018, I wrote of articles marking the 20th anniversary of the ballot measure. 

Reiner didn’t agree to an interview that time. But First 5 L.A. shared some of his as he reflected on what drew him to become an early-childhood education advocate. 

He was partly motivated by his own early experiences.

“As somebody who went through therapy, I started thinking about my early years and how they affected me,” he said. 

But he also saw a political opportunity. 

“Goals 2000 had just come out,” he said, referring to the . “The first goal was ‘All children will start school ready to learn.’ And I looked at all this and I said, you know, it seems to me if you could meet that one goal, if you could just make sure that every child has what they need to be healthy and ready to experience kindergarten, maybe all those other goals would kind of fall into line.”

Since then, schools across the state have wanted to offer pre-K, but many lack the facility space to add classrooms or the expertise to hire and manage pre-K teachers. At the same time, child care centers in their communities often lacked the training and resources needed to get students ready for kindergarten.

So in Kansas City, the education nonprofit created the KC Pre-K Cooperative in 2019 to connect traditional public schools and charters with early childhood centers. This systems-level, approach has expanded local access to high-quality early learning, currently collaborating with 28 partners serving approximately 700 students a year. 

In addition to adding pre-K seats, our goal has been to improve kindergarten readiness as measured by a tool known as the , which was developed by a regional council serving Missouri and Kansas. Readiness is not about mastering every skill before school begins. It’s about being prepared to learn, connect and thrive in a classroom setting. The observation form or PKOF identifies five areas of development that help determine if a child is ready for kindergarten: language and literacy development, cognitive development, social and emotional development; physical development and health and approaches to learning, also known as self-regulation.

SchoolSmart KC leads the pre-K co-op, uniting schools and early childhood providers to expand access to high-quality pre-K education and align funding across the system. We support partners by offering them resources they wouldn’t otherwise have. This includes professional development and instructional coaching, grants to help “mom-and-pop” centers raise standards, and technical support to help centers become accredited with the state.

We then connect these early childhood care providers with schools. Together, they coordinate enrollment and instruction through ongoing, combined professional development with pre-K and kindergarten teachers. The goal is preparing students for kindergarten and ensuring a smooth transition into our local school system.

An example of the co-op’s success is Kids in Christ Academy, founded and directed by Christina Puckett. The child care center serves children from 6 weeks old to age 5, and has distinguished itself by providing expanded hours to support working families and offering specialized care for children on the autism spectrum. Puckett’s dedication to early childhood education and her collaborative approach have helped the academy serve a diverse community and grow, recently opening a location that offers a larger space and more seats. SchoolSmart KC helped her gain accreditation for her site, as well as funding for the process. The staff received training.

The co-op has had an impact across the city. At the beginning of last school year, 23% of Kansas City’s pre-K students were kindergarten-ready. By the end of the year, that number had skyrocketed to 74%. Our goal is to achieve 90% kindergartner readiness citywide by 2027.

To achieve that goal, we recently launched a pilot to gauge the impact of providing early intervention services to pre-K students who need additional resources such as speech or occupational therapy. So far, we’ve seen a noticeable difference in students’ behavior, as well as their cognitive and academic abilities.

All of these students receive hearing, vision and developmental screenings. If any flags arise, their pre-K provider can institute a response to intervention before the student reaches kindergarten. We look forward to learning more from the data to strengthen our support for students with learning challenges.

The co-op has created shared success in a city where families seek more affordable pre-K options, child care providers have both capacity and expertise, and schools want students ready for kindergarten. SchoolSmart KC was an early champion of this collaborative model to expand pre-K access, and our approach can serve as a blueprint for other communities. It begins by connecting schools and early childhood providers, then aligning their strengths to deliver high-quality pre-K through joint enrollment and coordinated instruction.

And bedrock attitudes about attendance seem to be changing. A recent noted that one in four students now doesn’t think being chronically absent from school “is a problem.” The study found that about 40% of school districts consider reducing chronic absenteeism among their top three most pressing challenges. One in 12 ranks it as their biggest challenge. 

As school districts push to lower absenteeism rates, the software company , which helps schools keep track of students and communicate with parents, examined four years of its own attendance intervention data across hundreds of school districts. It analyzed 3.3 million text messages across 15 states, representing 88,000 students and 22,000 educators. 

In a , it finds that improving attendance often comes down to a handful of basic tasks. Here’s a breakdown of the key takeaways:

1: Early intervention works

Contacting families before students become chronically absent is crucial. Once a student crosses the 10% threshold, fixing their attendance becomes much harder, so intervening when students register just three to five absences is most effective. Contacting parents early with a letter improved attendance dramatically, reducing absence rates by 28%.

Researchers found that 51% of students whose families receive just one letter don’t need a second one. The “save rate” for these students suggests that many families simply don’t realize how quickly absences accumulate. 

2: Timing and communication methods matter

Parents are highly responsive to text messages, researchers found, with 73% of texts garnering a response from parents in just 11 minutes. They’ll engage with schools when communication is “accessible, timely and specific.”

“The method does matter,” said Joy Smithson, a SchoolStatus data scientist. “We get a lot higher rates of response with text messages.” Placing a phone call, on the other hand, is “for those more critical conversations,” she said.

Kara Stern, the company’s director of education, agreed. “Not every parent is in a position where they can pick up a phone call during the day. For many people, it might jeopardize your work situation, and so to assume that that’s the best way to reach a parent is not necessarily to be in tune with the actual realities of the parents in your community.”

The best times to text families, the data suggests, are either around 8 a.m., when parents and students are preparing for school, or 2-4 p.m., typically during pickup times. These align with natural breaks in parents’ daily routines, when they’re most likely to check their phones.

The best time of year to engage families is August or September. Parents who hear from schools early maintain higher response rates throughout the year — 77% vs. 71% — and respond, on average, one minute faster. By January, 33% of these parents are still engaging with schools, compared to just 16% of parents who first heard from schools later in the fall term. 

That suggests that early conversations “do extra work,” researchers maintain, establishing trust, opening communication channels and signaling to families that working together matters.

“It’s important to reach out at the beginning of the year, so that you’re not waiting for a crisis,” said Smithson, “because it’s too late to build a relationship at that point.”

3. Plain language outperforms edu-jargon

Researchers found that being specific about how much school a student has missed outperforms vague messages such as, “We’ve noticed some absences.” 

Direct offers of help, such as “Reply if you need support with transportation or health concerns,” also outperform lengthy explanations of attendance policy.

And when students are older, direct messages can be very effective.

“What this data shows us is that connection is really driving so much of a student’s experience,” said Stern. “When a school is able to reach out to the kid and say, ‘Hey, Greg, we missed you today, what’s going on? What do you need to help you come to school?’ that’s a really different experience than having a form letter appear at your house saying, ‘Greg has missed school six days.’” 

She added, “What I hope districts will take away from this report is that communication is intervention,” she said. “It’s not extra work. It’s the work that makes everything else stick.”

4: Three key moments merit extra attention

Students at three moments in their school careers are more likely to be chronically absent: in pre-K, sixth grade and high school. Stern called them “high alert moments.”

Surprisingly, pre-K students have the highest chronic absenteeism rates of any group, mostly due to the high frequency of illness and families underestimating the impact of missing school. 

Sixth grade is “the tipping point,” said Stern, with chronic absenteeism spiking by 3.3 percentage points from fifth to sixth grade, the sharpest increase across all grades.

Smithson said middle-schoolers typically have more autonomy. They’re often getting their first mobile phones. And current sixth-graders, she said, were in kindergarten when COVID hit in 2020. “So just imagine knowing that patterns get established in kindergarten,” she said. For those kindergartners in 2020, school “really got disrupted,” with their baseline experience of school being “categorically different” from what it should have been.

And for many students, the transition from elementary school to middle school represents a shift from a safe, contained environment, where both students and parents are highly engaged, to a less personal one, with less consistency and connectivity, said Stern. Students “don’t know that there is someone who’s really paying attention, who cares that they’re there, who knows what’s happening with them, and so maybe it doesn’t really matter if they’re there or not.”

And middle school can also be the place where many students first experience bullying, which also worsens attendance.

In high school, chronic absence rates more than double, and students have lower response rates to traditional methods like letters, suggesting that schools should contact students directly — actually, they found that direct student messaging could work for students as young as 11. 

A text message to a high school freshman can start a conversation that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Pairing these messages with notes to parents can improve response rates in these critical years, researchers found.

“The chronic absenteeism numbers in high school suggest that kids are really voting with their feet,” said Stern. “And so one way to get them back would be to invite them in to be part of the solution, to say, ‘What is it that is not meeting your needs? How can we include your voice in the process of making high school what you want it to be?’”

In many ways, the new findings echo what researchers like Johns Hopkins University’s and have long suggested. Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit , said Wednesday’s report “reflects what we know from common sense and research. Improving attendance is possible when we use data to take early action as well as determine where we should invest in building relationships so we can partner with students and families to encourage showing up, monitor absences, and address barriers to getting to school.”

But Chang said that while timely, data-informed engagement of families is essential, “it is not always sufficient and should be combined with other strategies for identifying and addressing barriers to getting to school.” Those barriers could exist in the community or in schools and should be addressed in “a comprehensive, systemic approach.”

She suggested that of interventions is sometimes necessary, including “intensive interventions” for students who miss more than 20% of school days. It could include housing supports, a student attendance review board, a community-based, non-criminal truancy court, individualized learning and success plans and even, as a last resort, legal intervention.

Stern and Smithson said the findings boil down, in a larger sense, to the importance of what they call “active noticing” about attendance. 

“I really think that it would be a big plus for faculties to actively notice every week and go through their rosters,” said Stern. “‘Who do we not know? Who can’t speak about this child? Who doesn’t know anything about this student’s life after school? We have someone that we need to actually pay attention to learning more about — who’s suddenly not coming to school, who’s turned it around and suddenly being there?’ ”��

Smithson said the biggest takeaway for educators is that “Timing is everything. Do not wait. Act with urgency. It’s about building those relationships, and it’s just so important — and it’s so important to start right away.”

In a who work in public schools across the country, conducted in March and April 2024, respondents reported experiencing work-based stress at nearly twice the rate of comparable working adults in other kinds of jobs — those of prime working age with bachelor’s degrees who put in at least 35 hours a week. “Teachers of public school-based pre-K were generally more stressed,” noted Elizabeth Steiner, senior policy researcher at RAND and a lead author on the report. Two top stressors the teachers mentioned were dealing with student behavior and addressing students’ mental health.

Another top stressor they named was low compensation. And indeed, the survey found that pre-K teachers earned nearly $7,000 less, on average, than teachers in K-12 positions and $24,000 less than similar adults in other kinds of jobs. Steiner said that finding was “a little more surprising” given that the school-based pre-K teachers in their sample had similar educational backgrounds as K-12 teachers. But teachers overall face long-standing wage gaps with other fields. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the difference in pay, adjusted for factors like education and work history, hit a record in 2023.

Pre-K teachers also reported working eight more hours, on average, each week than they were contracted for. Perhaps it’s little surprise, then, that another top challenge they named was administrative work that fell outside of teaching.

All of that stress while working for low pay seems to have pushed a lot of teachers to question their jobs. Nearly one in five survey respondents said that they intended to leave their jobs by the end of the 2023-24 school year. That’s “commensurate,” Steiner said, with rates of other workers, but it could still signal trouble. While Steiner noted that not all teachers who say they’re going to quit actually follow through, she said “it’s a measure of teachers’ job satisfaction” and “an early marker of attrition.” Other data has found high actual turnover rates among early childhood teachers. In Virginia, of teachers serving children from birth through 5 years old left between fall 2023 and fall 2024. In Louisiana, of early childhood educators working one school year are gone by the following one, according to a working paper published by Annenberg Institute. 

And while the turnover rate for pre-K teachers may look similar to other occupations, it has a greater impact when they leave their jobs. “Teachers gain a lot of experience and skill the longer they’re in a position,” said Anna Shapiro, associate policy researcher at RAND and co-author of the survey, and there has been “a lot of research on the importance of having stable environments for children in particular.” Losing experienced teachers who have connected with children is highly disruptive. It “can have knock on effects on quality,” Shapiro said. 

These troubling findings about how pre-K teachers feel about their work come at the same time that states are heavily investing in preschool. The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)’s reported that the share of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool for the 2022-23 school year reached an all-time high of more than 1.6 million, and 35% of 4-year-olds now attend a program. States that have enacted new universal preschool programs helped to “push the nation to these record high percentages,” the report says. The enrollment highs came on the back of record funding: States spent $11.73 billion on preschool in 2022-23, an all-time high. 

There are plenty of challenges to continuing to expand preschool enrollment if states want to make further progress. One is finding physical space for new students; another is developing quality curriculum and standards. But “the biggest expense is teachers,” Shapiro said, and “one of the biggest barriers. You can only have so many children enrolled if you have a limited number of teachers.”

A particularly troubling trend that emerged in the RAND survey, then, is that teachers with five or fewer years of experience were more likely to say they intended to leave their jobs than those with more years under their belts. States that want to expand are going to need to recruit more new teachers and hold onto them. “Those numbers feel cautionary,” Steiner said. “States considering expanding pre-K might wish to think carefully about how they’re supporting and thinking about retaining their newest teachers so that the negative impacts on students in the classroom environment can be mitigated.”

“If you want to have a big staff pool, you need to have people who want to stay,” Shapiro added. “Well-being is really important in that retention.”

Shapiro noted that states will also have to contend with teacher pay gaps. The survey data suggests that “potentially for a teacher who has a similar level of experience and education that being a pre-K teacher is maybe less attractive than being a K-5 teacher,” she said. “It’s a very similar job but you’re getting paid less to do it.” That won’t just make it more difficult to recruit qualified and talented teachers, but to hold onto them once they gain more experience and keep them from seeking a better paying job in the K-12 setting. Tackling pay parity, then, is “an important policy step” to take to recruit more teachers, Shapiro said. 

There may also be a temptation for states to expand part-day preschool programs, serving twice as many students with the same pot of money, given limited resources. But the survey data shows that could be a poor direction to take. Part-day pre-K teachers, who report the same number of work hours so are therefore likely saddled with teaching two different groups of children every day, reported higher levels of stress and intentions to leave in the survey than full-day teachers. “Our data does caution against attempting to do more with less,” Shapiro said.

The RAND findings are all the more troubling because, as Steiner noted, “public school-based pre-K teachers are just one piece of the overall pre-K landscape.” Teachers in other settings, such as center- or home-based child care programs, which cities and states sometimes include in their preschool systems, are likely to be faring even more poorly. “This sample of teachers is probably the ceiling,” Shapiro said. “We’re probably talking to the teachers that have the most resources in terms of pay and benefits.” 

If states want to expand preschool enrollment, “part of a successful expansion would be supporting staff and ensuring that they are retained in their jobs to get the best benefits for students,” Steiner said.

But those increases are skewed by a small number of states making progress; others are not doing as well. Quality remains uneven from state to state and even within states, quality and availability often are a matter of ZIP code. While some states have increased funding, enrolled more students, and worked to meet national quality benchmarks, others have lagged, offering programs that meet fewer national quality benchmarks — or none at all.

Shifting sands at the federal level have left much of the sector uncertain about what the future might hold and how the Trump administration’s  to the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies might affect  and other early childhood programs. NIEER reports that eliminating Head Start funding would mean a decline of more than 10 percentage points in access to public preschool in several states and more than 20 percentage points in some. 

The 2024 State of Preschool Yearbook underscores how essential it is for states to proactively prioritize and expand investments in early childhood, and a special section highlights four states — Alabama, Michigan, New Mexico and Oklahoma — a bipartisan mix that NIEER identifies as pre-K leaders and strong examples others can emulate.  

Though this might seem like a clarion call for states to step up, W. Steven Barnett, NIEER’s senior director and founder, says it is not that simple. For many states, Head Start is the  foundation their preschool programs are built on and it is on the . 

“Federal Head Start money is about the same magnitude of all state pre-K spending,” he says. “The notion that states could replace that funding, especially overnight, is not realistic. If you had said, ‘Over 10 years, this is going to go away,’ maybe. But overnight? It would be a disaster.” In some states, like Mississippi and West Virginia, 23% of 3- and 4-year-olds are in a Head Start program. 

“We don’t know if they’re going to zero out the program, but if they do, the money to serve a half a million 3- and 4-year-olds disappears. In some states that’s almost a quarter of the kids who benefit the most,” Barnett adds. “They say, ‘You need to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,’ but also, ‘I’m taking your boots away.’ Where are these states going to find the money to replace that?”

Setting New Records

The 2023-24 school year saw new records set for funding and enrollment for state-funded preschool programs. Across the country, enrollment increased by more than 111,000 children nationally to reach 1,750,995 children, an increase of 7% from the previous year. This marked an all-time enrollment high with 37% of 4-year-olds and 8% of 3-year-olds enrolled. Despite the increase for 3-year-olds though, most state pre-K programs continued to serve primarily (or only) 4-year-olds.

States spent more than $13.6 billion on preschool in the 2023-24 school year, which included $257 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds, an increase of nearly $2 billion over the prior year. State spending on preschool increased in all but five states that have a public preschool program. California, New Jersey, New York and Texas led funding, spending $1 billion or more on preschool. Together, these four states accounted for 51% of all state spending on preschool. 

State spending per child increased in all but eight states with preschool programs. Including state, local and federal sources, spending per child was $8,856, an inflation-adjusted increase of $635 per child that reflects a strong growth in state funding as federal recovery dollars decreased. 

Room for Improvement

Over the past two decades, NIEER’s research has consistently found that higher quality preschool programs yield increased and enduring benefits for children’s learning and development. Based on classroom data, monitoring, surveys and assessments, the institute’s research has developed 10 benchmarks that measure the quality standards for preschool programs that support that growth. 

The 2024 Yearbook finds that 2 1/2 times more children in the U.S. attended lower-quality programs that met five or fewer of those benchmarks than children attending programs that met nine or 10, underscoring again the tremendous variation across states and zip codes. 

According to the report, many states aren’t hitting the quality standards that would set their programs up to provide  that give pre-K its greatest value for children and taxpayers. Five states, for example, have no state-funded program in 2023-24; eight states spent less than half the cost needed to meet minimum quality standards. Others just aren’t serving enough young learners.

“If you do pre-K right, you put in place a foundation for future success in school and in life,” Barnett says. “We have strong causal evidence linking quality pre-K to educational attainment, whether you graduate from high school or go to college, and strong causal evidence that links educational attainment to other positive life outcomes. Not just how much money you make, but good pre-K sets in motion this chain where people will live longer, healthier lives. Taxpayers make out great when that happens.” 

Barnett adds: “If that [foundation] is not there, then we’re focusing much more on remediation, special education, dropout prevention, incarceration — all these negative expenditures rather than positive outcomes. If you’re meeting five or less benchmarks and you’re not spending enough money to pay for a quality program, it may look like you’re saving money, but you’re throwing it away.”

Alabama, Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Rhode Island are the only states nationwide to meet all 10 benchmarks. Other states come close, meeting nine benchmarks. On the other hand, 21 state-funded preschool programs meet five or fewer of these quality standards. 

Information Gathering

Over the years, the NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook has become a sort of Bible for legislators, school officials, researchers and other early learning stakeholders to understand what’s going on in the sector. Barnett points out that people might hear “survey” and think the reporting is based on sampling. In reality, he says, it’s more like a census because it consists of 300 questions sent to state school administrators. By the time all the appendices are organized, the final report is inches thick. 

“There have been changes in state governments where no one with institutional memory was left,” Barnett says. “They used the Yearbook to figure out what their own policies were — which is fair because they’re the ones that filled it out in the first place. The Yearbooks have been a long-standing partnership with administrators. It’s as much their product as it is ours. We write up the narrative up front, but all the state page narratives are constructed with state administrators to make sure we represent their programs correctly.” 

Going Forward

Preschool spending has reached an all-time high, but fiscal uncertainty could reverse the trend, the report warns. Several top economists  weak growth in the U.S. economy, or even a recession, which, combined with federal cutbacks could create powerful headwinds for state pre-K programs. It wouldn’t be the first time: According to the report, the 2008 recession led to lower pre-K funding for more than half a decade. Barnett says it’s a critical time for states to learn from each other and take proactive steps with policies and programs that prepare their youngest learners for their best possible future. 

That adds up to 70,000 or more pre-K teachers working inside U.S. public schools — a growing workforce that warrants distinct consideration and research as states seek to make the most of early childhood programs.

Policymakers and district and state education leaders often consider public school-based pre-K teachers part of the early care and education workforce. But in fact, they are distinct in several ways from those who work in community-based programs or child care centers. Public school pre-K teachers have and better .

They are required to attain higher degrees, and they . Still, they are often excluded from K-12 education research. Most federal data collection pre-K teachers in with kindergarten teachers or them entirely.����

Last year, RAND added teachers to its to learn more about this overlooked population. , revealed that many public schools aren’t yet making the most of their pre-K programs.

For example, our survey found that there is not as much coordination happening between pre-K and elementary grades in the same school building as one might expect. In theory, putting pre-K inside a local school would ease kids’ transition into kindergarten and increase instructional alignment across early elementary grades. We found that only half of pre-K teachers reported having dedicated time to coordinate instruction with early grades; less than one-third had dedicated time to coordinate kindergarten transition. Just sharing a building is not enough, as other research has also shown. Principals and educators have to consciously work at producing the benefits of coordinating with their pre-K program.

Pre-K programs in public schools also need high-quality educators. Yes, school-based pre-K teachers typically earn much higher wages than other early childhood educators. But full-day pre-K teachers were paid, on average, $7,000 less annually than elementary teachers — despite working similar hours and experiencing similar workplace stressors.

States that want to expand pre-K access through school-based programs will need to recruit and retain during a period of already high turnover. They may also have to resolve disparities in pay, benefits, and other working conditions to make sure they don’t lose pre-K teachers to better-paying elementary jobs.

Teachers who lead the of public school-based pre-K programs that are part-day have even greater challenges. Part-day pre-K teachers in our study were less likely to report having adequate time for planning or to complete administrative tasks than those who work a full school day. They were also less likely than full-day teachers to have gotten curriculum-based professional learning, even though both groups use similar materials. These are important differences to consider, especially for states that are expanding their pre-K programs by adding or that guarantee funding for only a few hours per day.

As more young children enroll in school-based pre-K, understanding the experiences and needs of their teachers will be crucial. We hope our ongoing surveys can inform all those working to implement high-quality early learning programs as they consider how to recruit, train and retain pre-K teachers, and how their school will coordinate learning from pre-K through elementary classes.

Pre-K expansion in public schools, a bipartisan policy priority for years, has tremendous potential to . But public school leaders and pre-K program administrators can do more to ensure they’re getting the most out of this investment.

COLUMBIA — Hundreds of 4-year-olds across South Carolina are on waitlists to access state-funded preschool programs, even though there are thousands of open seats, presented Monday to the state Education Oversight Committee.

The state funds a dual system of full-day kindergarten for 4-year-olds deemed “at risk.” Students are eligible under state law if they qualify for Medicaid or free or reduced-price meals, or if they are homeless, in foster care or show developmental delays. Many public school districts use local property tax dollars to expand that eligibility.

The state Department of Education oversees programs in public schools, while First Steps, a separate state agency, oversees state-funded classes in approved private schools and child care centers.

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As of November, 400 4-year-olds were waiting for spots to open up to enroll at their local public school. At the same time, First Steps 4K reported more than 2,300 open seats, often in the same counties as the districts with the longest waitlists, according to the report.

“It’s just a matter of finding an open seat for a child on a waitlist or finding an eligible child for the open seat,” said Jenny May, a committee researcher who presented the report.

Because 4K is a one-year program, students who are on the waitlist are unlikely to end up in a preschool program before starting kindergarten. Children need at least 120 days of preschool to prepare, so even if a slot happens to open up toward the end of the school year, they will start kindergarten less ready than other 5-year-olds, according to the study.

It’s not clear why some 4-year-olds are on a waiting list for a public school when vacancies exist in private programs, May said.

In some cases, the issue could be that another preschool program isn’t available nearby. The four counties with the longest waitlists — Lexington, Anderson, Berkeley and Newberry — all have at least one First Steps 4K program with availability, according to the report. However, that doesn’t account for potential cross-county drives.

Other parents may not know that other options are available, May said. Having a person designated to help direct parents to other preschool options, such as the nearest First Steps 4K program with open seats, could help reduce that waitlist, May said.

“It’s likely that if we had a more efficient process, we could serve most of the 400 kids on a waitlist on one of the First Steps seats,” May said.

The state already has several websites meant to help parents figure out what programs they’re eligible for and how to enroll. , launched in 2020, tells parents whether they’re eligible for state-funded preschool programs. does the same but includes all early childhood programs with federal or state funding.

But having a person parents can call, or who can reach out to families with children on waitlists, could help reach some parents who might not know about the websites or have other concerns, the study suggests. That person, who the committee dubbed a 4K navigator, could then talk parents through the differences in programs, find available seats and answer any other questions parents might have, researchers said.

First Steps 4K has a similar program, in which applicants are directed to a central phone line or website that helps parents find the right fit for their child. That has helped prevent First Steps from having its own waitlist, May said. The 4K navigators, who the study suggested trying out in areas with the largest waitlists first, would have a broader knowledge of pre-K programs, the report said.

If a school district has a persistent waitlist of more than 20 students, that suggests the population has risen in that area, and state officials should consider giving the district more funding to create enough slots for those students, the report suggested.

The waitlisted students represent less than 1% of students who are eligible for the program but not enrolled. More than 18,000 4-year-olds, or about 55% of all eligible, are living in poverty but not enrolled in a 4K program, according to the report.

That’s a decrease from the 2022-2024 school year, when 60% of eligible students were not enrolled in districts. Still, it’s not enough, May said.

Even if every student on a waitlist enrolled in one of the available spots, programs would have space left over to take on at least 1,900 more students, according to the report. That suggests there are barriers other than program space keeping parents from enrolling their students in state-funded preschool, May said.

In many cases, the problem might be that parents don’t know about 4K programs or their benefits, May said.��The state should put more funding and effort into outreach to help those students, the report suggests.

Data shows preschool programs are highly beneficial, helping students learn skills in reading, math and socialization, studies have found. According to the report, at-risk students who attended a state-funded pre-K program were more likely to be prepared for school than their counterparts who didn’t, according to the report.

“So, we want those students who are eligible and not served to be able to access it, and we definitely want those students who are on a waitlist to be able to access the program,” said Dana Yow, executive director of the committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com.

Williams and her children with relatives, but in late November were told they had to find somewhere else to live. She called the city’s homeless response team at least three times seeking help, but her situation wasn’t deemed an emergency, and she never received assistance in finding somewhere to stay; in November she said she was no family rooms were available. So they began living out of a van, frequently parking in the casino garage where her two children died. It was only after that tragedy that she was finally given a spot in a shelter.

Homelessness has seen a sharp uptick across the country in recent years, but the increase has been the most dramatic for families with children age 5 and younger, multiple data sources suggest. “The most common age that someone is in shelter nationally is under the age of 5,” said Henry Love, vice president for public policy & strategy at Win, the largest provider of family shelters in New York City. This trend means more and more families with young children are scrambling to find somewhere to live.

This housing instability can have a lasting impact on children, affecting their cognitive and social-emotional development and leading to learning delays and academic challenges. Those challenges are likely to follow them throughout their education and even later into their lives.

In its of homelessness in America, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) reported that the number of homeless people increased by 18% last year, reaching the highest level ever recorded. The problem is even more acute for families with children: They experienced the largest single-year increase, with a rate that climbed by 39% between 2023 and 2024. That came after a increase in homelessness for families with children in 2023.

Those numbers are alarming, said Donald H. Whitehead, Jr., executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, even as he noted that the department’s data is an undercount due to challenges with identifying homeless people and how they’re classified.

HUD doesn’t break the data down further by children’s age. But other sources indicate that the youngest children are increasingly at risk of living in homelessness. “What we know to be true is more young kids are experiencing homelessness,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a nonprofit focused on homelessness and education.

According to an estimate generated by SchoolHouse Connection and the Poverty Solutions initiative at the University of Michigan, there were 681,180 children nationally under age 6 experiencing homelessness in the 2022-2023 school year, the most recent data. That represents an approximately 23% increase over the 2021-2022 school year, “twice the increase for school-aged children,” Duffield said in an interview. The nonprofit expects to publish the data in April.

In January, SchoolHouse Connection for the 2022-2023 school year, showing that 451,369 children ages 3 and younger were experiencing homelessness that year. That represents about a 24% increase over the 2021-2022 school year. 

The same trend appears in more recent for children attending Head Start, which provides free early childhood education to low-income children below the age of 4. Homelessness among those children rose nearly 13% between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years, the largest increase since the start of the pandemic. Overall, the figure for children attending Head Start is up 28% since the 2021-2022 school year. 

The increases are “unfortunately consistent across data sources,” said Erin Patterson, director of education initiatives at SchoolHouse Connection.

The higher numbers could reflect better efforts to locate children experiencing homelessness. The American Rescue Plan provided $800 million in pandemic-relief funding that to identify more children in unstable housing. Head Start’s former director, Khari Garvin, was particularly on increasing enrollment among homeless children. “If it’s about finding and enrolling and identifying, that’s a good thing,” Duffield said. 

But the increases are also driven by troubling forces. Pandemic-era protections and funding that helped keep people housed have come to an end. Until it was by the Supreme Court in August 2021, a federal eviction moratorium barred eligible tenants from being kicked out of their homes; state and local eviction moratoria lasted longer, with Oakland, California’s in July 2023. Some converted empty hotels to housing for homeless people. States from Congress’s CARES Act to offer rental assistance, and then Congress passed two rounds of rental assistance totaling $46.5 billion. All of those measures have now expired.

In the meantime, the cost of housing has climbed dramatically nationwide. Rents 29% between 2019 and 2023, far outpacing income growth, and last year a record number of American households spent more than 30% of their incomes on housing. Such increases often trigger evictions, and the people of eviction are families with babies and toddlers. 

Homelessness among young children may also have risen with the arrival of migrant families, many of whom had nowhere to stay except shelters. Domestic violence often forces victims and their children to flee their housing situations and enter shelter systems, and there was an in such incidents during the pandemic. Many families have also recently been pushed out of their housing by natural disasters, from the flooding in North Carolina to the fires in Los Angeles. “Those have lingering effects,” Duffield said. “People don’t get their feet right away and the more vulnerable you are the longer it takes.”

Having children is also expensive and can tip families into poverty. Research has that a quarter of all poverty spells start with the birth of a child. “People who are on the cusp can quickly slide into homelessness,” Patterson said. 

Even as homelessness among young children and their families is on the rise, they often get left out of homeless counts and homeless services. The vast majority of these families don’t live on streets or in shelters, but instead double up inside friends’ and families’ homes, which HUD doesn’t count as technically homeless and may be harder to identify. Others live in motels and hotels, which again doesn’t count for HUD’s purposes. 

“The homelessness system itself doesn’t see families with young children and it doesn’t prioritize them,” Duffield said. “They’re often an afterthought.” As Williams’s story showed, they can get turned away if they technically have somewhere to sleep, like a car or a couch.

By contrast, the federal McKinney-Vento Act, which provides school districts with money to support students experiencing homelessness, includes in its count those who are living with other families, in hotels and motels, or in substandard conditions. 

The difference shows up in the data. The U.S. Department of Education’s estimate of the number of homeless students has since 2004, with a spike during Hurricane Katrina and a dip during the pandemic. And yet the number of homeless families reported by HUD has remained relatively flat in comparison over all of those years. 

One thing is clear, though: Homelessness has huge ramifications for young children. “It is a traumatic experience,” Whitehead said.

Research has found that children who experience homelessness are to have developmental delays. It can even interrupt such basics as potty training. Housing instability means many families move frequently between schools, disrupting a child’s education. “As a former teacher, if a child can’t feel safe and is not stabilized, they can’t learn,” Love said. 

Children who experience homelessness are more likely to and suffer from . Once they reach school age, homelessness is tied directly to higher absenteeism rates and lower test scores.

“Any experience of homelessness, even short-lived, can impact a child’s development even after the family has been stably housed,” Patterson said. But, she added, “The younger and longer a child experiences homelessness, the greater the cumulative toll of negative outcomes.”

Enrolling children in safe, high-quality early education programs can mitigate those issues and “help create a sense of normalcy and calm in otherwise tumultuous and toxic circumstances,” Patterson said. But just 7.4% of Head Start eligible children who were homeless in 2023-2024 were actually enrolled in Head Start or Early Head Start. Young children in public pre-K classrooms or Head Start programs run by school districts can receive help through the McKinney-Vento Act with transportation, food and other priorities.

Other solutions range from the specific to the systematic. Prioritizing homeless families for services, including early childhood education, could help. More accurate counts would also give a clearer picture of who is homeless. Another solution would be to offer more housing vouchers targeted for this population, similar to those offered to veterans or unaccompanied youth, or simply to provide cash without strings attached.

“Give people money,” Love said. “That’s really the crux of it. People are under-resourced.”

Looks like we’re going to spend 2025 debating which bathrooms different kids should use when they need to relieve themselves and whether we really want to follow through on the administration’s plans to allow armed immigration enforcement actions on school campuses. Jury’s still out on whether or not the U.S. Department of Education survives the year — let alone Trump’s entire term. 

One thing’s certain, though: the biggest issue facing U.S. public schools will remain fiscal. As Chad Aldeman has repeatedly noted here at The 74, falling enrollment is a problem for local education leaders across the country — and most haven’t confronted the ensuing budget problems because those make for difficult politics. 

This is only going to get worse: the Biden administration’s pandemic recovery funds are and increased public investment in private school choice programs is putting pressure on public K–12 budgets . What’s more, falling birth rates were already producing drops in U.S. K–12 enrollment in communities across the country.

Long story short: whatever’s happening in national education politics, the central education dilemma for many school districts will be trying to attract and retain students so that they don’t face stiff cuts in state and federal funding. suggests that pre-K programs could be a useful tool in that effort. 

The analysis explores whether Washington, D.C.’s universal pre-K system for 3- and 4-year-olds could be part of the reason why “the District of Columbia (DC) stands out as one of the few jurisdictions that did not experience declines in public K–12 enrollment between fall 2019 and fall 2021.” 

D.C.’s pre-K program was a leader that just preceded in public early education investments. It as part of District of Columbia education reforms designed to improve outcomes and raise enrollment. This was years ahead of similar efforts in , , , and . 

The program isn’t just old — it’s compared to its peers. The city per pre-K student than any U.S. state, serves both 3- and 4-year-olds and integrates the large majority of its programs into K–12 campuses. That means that pre-K students generally continue into kindergarten (and first grade, and beyond) classrooms that are overseen by the same leaders who run their pre-K programs. This permits for greater from early childhood into elementary school — and, to drop the jargon, it makes parents’ lives way easier. 

Using D.C. enrollment lottery data, the Urban Institute paper found that students who attended pre-K as 3-year-olds before the pandemic “were 9.8 percentage points more likely to remain enrolled” in D.C. schools between 2020 and 2022 than children who did not attend. This was especially true for students who were in kindergarten or first grade during the pandemic period. Further, the enrollment boost effect was particularly strong for D.C. pre-K alumni from low-income communities; they were 25% more likely to remain enrolled, compared to students from higher-income communities

“Public prekindergarten — especially when starting as early as 3 years old — can promote student persistence by providing early exposure to a classroom setting and fostering foundational academic and nonacademic skills,” the researchers conclude. 

The Urban Institute’s findings also echo prior studies indicating that D.C.’s pre-K program has impacts well beyond improving children’s development and well-being. Others have found that it shapes a wider range of families’ decisions and behaviors. It offers a full-day schedule that matches the city’s K–12 schools and their academic calendars. A 2018 study linked this breadth of coverage to — that is, D.C.’s pre-K investments made it easier for moms to work. 

As noted above, the program is relatively well aligned with research on quality early education, so it’s no surprise that it’s producing a host of positive effects for kids and families. I’ve written about the program from that standpoint. 

But I’m also a father of three D.C. pre-K alumni, and as their primary caregiver (over most of our parenting journey), I’ve gotta tell you: these effects almost assuredly underestimate the program’s benefits. D.C. pre-K has saved our family immeasurable money and stress over the years. By the end of the pandemic — when our youngest was due to enroll — we knew that leaving the city for almost any other community would have meant paying for two more years of private early childhood care. In D.C., average child care costs are , and costs in nearby towns are only slightly lower — staying in the city saved us tens of thousands of dollars. 

Shoot, without the four years (two per child) of child care savings D.C. pre-K had bestowed upon us when we enrolled our two older children, we might never have gone ahead and chosen to have that third kid at all. 

Which, incidentally, brings us back to 2025 education politics and how the country’s shrinking pool of children is going to produce smaller K–12 enrollments and school budgets. While other urban school districts are shrinking, , with a third consecutive year of enrollment growth bringing the total to just shy of 100,000 students. 

If civil rights advocates are able to stop the administration’s from sending ICE agents to K–12 campuses and making LGBTQ students , leaders curious about how to better support families in having children — and enrolling them in public schools — might take a look outside the White House at the innovative pre-K program surrounding them.

“How many do you have? One…two..three…four,” Johnson says, before they place another bear in the row. “What if we add more? What comes after four?”

Johnson smiles when Mayeda replies with “five.” The stealth math lesson is working. Mayeda “added” a bear and is starting to understand, in subtle ways, the very early basics of addition.

“They think it’s play,” Johnson said, stepping away to let Mayeda line up bears on her own.. “They don’t always understand that they’re actually learning things.”

Math lessons like this, disguised as a fun activity playing with colorful bears, should be a regular part of preschool, math experts say, especially as older students across the U.S. struggle with math after the pandemic.

But such lessons are a rarity. Preschools devote just five percent of time to math skills, after observing 77 preschool classrooms in seven states —  Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. 

The researchers from four universities also found math instruction between 2018 and 2020 rarely went beyond the most basic math skills, like learning numbers, counting and identifying shapes, which are important for students to learn, but stop short of what most four-year-olds can do. 

“They’re getting hardly any math,” said Michelle Mazzocco, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development and co-author of the study. 

While some may see doing basic counting for a few minutes a day as the right thing for most preschoolers, Mazzocco and other national math advocates say it’s a lost opportunity.

With falling scores on math tests such as the international Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests – which dropped between 2018 and 2022 by two-thirds of a year’s worth of learning – teaching basic math in preschool, if done well, can make it easier to understand advanced lessons later, Mazzoco said. When presented as games or play, even four-year-olds can learn basic concepts behind math tasks like measurement, geometry,  addition and subtraction.

“Some of those children who struggle with math are struggling because they got off to a slow start,” Mazzocco said. “That can be diminished.”

“We need to make sure that preschoolers have more opportunities to engage their natural inquisitive interest in math, to do so regularly and frequently in developmentally appropriate ways,” she said.

Latrenda Knighten, the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, agreed students can learn math concepts at a young age and preschools should teach much more of it. She doesn’t expect a math learning revolution similar to the “science of reading” across the country, but wants math to be a priority, even in preschool.

Though there are vigorous debates over how preschool gains in all subjects fade over time, Knighten said. But if students learn more math early on, and kindergarten and later grades build on that knowledge, not just re-teach it, scores should go up, she said. Preschool math also provides an early start on learning critical thinking, problem-solving and recognizing patterns that pays off later, she said.

“You hear a lot about literacy, literacy, literacy,” said Knighten, a former elementary school math coach. “In an ideal world, you maybe turn those wheels and give math the focus that we’ve had on reading for so long.” 

Historically, preschool math has been a low priority, both because of the traditional focus on reading but also because preschool is often viewed as child care or play-based more than an academic program. States don’t require preschool and few pay for it, so just 35 percent of four year olds nationally attend preschool, according to the National Institutes for Early Childhood Research at Rutgers University.

There’s also no national consensus on what students at that age should be taught. The nation’s last attempt at setting national education standards, the Common Core movement, faced opposition to its kindergarten through 12th grade standards and skipped preschool altogether.

Even the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics promoted math skills starting in kindergarten from 1980 to 2000, before adding preschool in 2000.

The council and many states now have specific recommendations about what preschoolers should learn about numbers and shapes and measurement.

Consider counting, for example. Counting can be just memorizing and reciting a list of names assigned to each number. But the council and states also want preschoolers to learn that each number stands for a real quantity of items. They can be taught that each item should be counted once — not a few times or counting several items as one — which is a common mistake four-year-olds can make.

They can also be taught that the count of one group can be more than or less than the count of another. 

Doug Clements, a professor at the University of Denver and co-author of the highly-regarded Building Blocks preschool math curriculum, said it is easy to underestimate what preschoolers can learn.

“There’s a common misunderstanding that in preschool you learn to count, then in kindergarten you count higher, and then in first grade you can learn arithmetic,” he said. If you give students a narrative, a story behind a problem, he said, and let them use objects to see things physically, they can understand math concepts well.

“People think that arithmetic is a vertical – a three, then a plus sign, two, bar under it, then fill in the numeral — which is not what I’m talking about,” he said.

Teachers can ask four-year-olds, for example, if they have five toys and give a friend two, how many they have left.

The colored bears in Johnson’s class, a common tool for preschools,  offer a chance to show, without any lecture or worksheets, that objects can be sorted by color or size, that a row of six bears, for example, is larger than a row of four bears and that “adding” another bear to a row changes the number to a higher one.

It sounds simple, but teachers need to be intentional about how they handle “play” like this, Knighten said.

“It takes the teacher understanding what’s happening and knowing the right questions to pose to student,” she said. “Maybe ask them, ‘What can you tell me about how you’ve arranged these bears or these cars or whatever they’re playing with? Do you have more of one than you have the other? How do you know you have more?  How can you show me?’ And that’s not even bringing out paper or pencil, it’s just understanding the math that a child at ages two, three or four is capable of understanding and how to provide opportunities for them to explore those things.” 

The counting bears are one of dozens of toys and games packed into the math closet at the Fairmount Early Childhood Center in Beachwood, Ohio, just a few miles from Johnson’s Head Start class.

There, students count off jumping jacks and toe touches to reinforce quantity. Children at one table glue decorations to printouts of the number one to reinforce how the number looks. In another classroom, three-year-olds pick through a box of different-colored blocks of different shapes and line them up in rows by shape and color, counting how many they have placed in each row as they go. 

Teacher Rosanne Stark guides students nearby in the earliest stages of another math skill — measurement. Today, three-year-olds pick between shorter and longer rectangles of colored paper and glue them to a sheet under columns labeled “shorter” or “longer.”

“Would you say that’s on a long strip or a short strip?” Stark asks a student. “Long. Good job. So we’re going to glue it on.”

Clements said comparing lengths with activities like this is a good start.

“Then we move on to actual measurement, which is assigning a number to the length of something,” he said. That can happen first by attaching several, say five, blocks together to see if something is longer or shorter than five blocks, then “adding” or subtracting blocks to the right size.

“They can show you in the count of cubes,” he said. “It’s a very concrete measurement. It’s very easy to understand conceptually for kids, because it makes sense to them.”

How much impact preschool math has, though, is unclear. Researchers can point to multiple studies showing preschool math leads to better math performance in kindergarten and in elementary school, sometimes as late as eighth grade. But as with preschool overall, other studies show students taking preschool math don’t end up further ahead than other students in later grades. This so-called “fade” plagues most debates over whether preschool is worth the effort or cost.

Tyler Watts, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who is researching the effects of early math, said advantages sometimes nearly vanish by fifth grade. He and others are trying to figure out why.

“I don’t think it’s totally clear, to be honest with you,” he said. “I think it’s a hard problem to figure out.”

While he’s still a supporter of preschool and preschool math, Watts believes — like Mazzocco and Knighten suggested – that it can be the first of many steps in improving math lessons over several years.

“If the goal is improving, say, math achievement in grade eight, I think you’re going to need to work on that all the way from PreK through grade eight,” he said. “I don’t think PreK is going to work as kind of like a low-cost silver bullet for that problem.”

There’s another challenge to making preschool math better and more common — preparing teachers. Knighten said that in her time as a math coach in Louisiana, she found many gravitate toward teaching reading because they thought they were “bad at math” when they were in school and view it as an ordeal, Knighten said.

That’s why the council partnered with the National Association for the Education of Young Children this year to offer for teachers on topics like and .

“If we actually provide teachers with more confidence in their ability to teach mathematics to students,” Knighten said. “Then, of course, that means that they’ll spend more time on those activities with students, and students will actually get more of those beginning, foundational experiences.”

Parents with children enrolled in a universal pre-kindergarten program in New Haven, Connecticut, increased their earnings by an average of 20.9%, according to a published by the National Bureau of Economic Research this week.

Families had more money because the pre-K reduced their child care costs while also enabling them to work more hours.

The study is sure to be ammunition in Minnesota’s longstanding debate about child care and universal pre-K, which has been a priority of some progressives for years. Former Gov. Mark Dayton made a strong push for pre-K in 2015 but was thwarted by the GOP-controlled House.

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“Universal pre-K” refers to programs that are free and aren’t means-tested, meaning they are available to all families regardless of household income. The New Haven program in the study had a limited number of slots, which were distributed using a lottery system, allowing researchers to compare the outcomes of families in the program to those who didn’t get a slot.

The authors found that for every dollar spent by the government to support the program, parents took home an additional $5.50, a better return on investment than the and the .

The New Haven universal pre-K program offered up to 10 hours of child care per day — which was key to the study’s findings.

Parents whose children were enrolled in the universal pre-K program got an average of 11 more hours of child care coverage per week, compared to parents of children in other child care programs.

The additional child care coverage allowed parents to work an average of 12 hours per week more than parents with other forms of child care — and reap the economic benefits.

Parents with children in other child care programs caught up to the hours and earnings of universal pre-K parents by the time their kids entered middle school.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on and .

An audit of the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care found the agency could benefit from stronger oversight and equity training to improve governance of the state’s early learning system.

Auditors’ findings, issued in a letter from the Secretary of State’s audits division to agency director Alyssa Chatterjee on July 24, align in part with critiques of the department voiced by current and former staff  published in March. Employees sounded alarms — including one who contacted Gov. Tina Kotek — about what they saw as the agency’s failures to foster equity, retain leaders and manage programs that serve Oregon’s lower-income families.

Auditors  to learn more.

Their  urge agency leaders to regularly review disciplinary decisions made by child care licensing investigators to ensure they are being made fairly; expand required equity and bias trainings; and improve coordination between regional and statewide authorities and among the various preschool and child care programs that the department manages.

Agency leaders said they welcome the feedback and are already working to implement some of the recommendations.

“One of DELC’s values is continuous improvement,” said Kate Gonsalves, spokesperson for the Department of Early Learning and Care. “In particular, Director Chatterjee valued the recognition of the intentionality that went into the launch of DELC. We are proud of this intentionality and appreciative of the chance to have this review so early in the agency’s tenure.”

The audit examined how smoothly the early learning division transitioned out of the state education department into an independent agency. The Department of Early Learning and Care launched July 1, 2023, and auditors monitored its performance throughout its first year.

Rather than complete a full audit, which takes longer and typically looks at established government practices and protocols, the audits division conducted its analysis in real time, so the findings would be available to the agency in a time frame that allowed leaders to act on them, said Laura Kerns, spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office.

“The benefit of a real-time analysis is that we can get in at the beginning before too much has happened and provide feedback as programs are being shaped and controls are being established,” she said. “Simply put, we hoped our review would help (the early learning department) get off to a good start as a new state agency.”

“We also decided to send a letter instead of doing a full audit because we found DELC was generally on the right track,” Kerns said. Valeria Atanacio was promoted to tribal affairs director of Oregon’s early learning department in 2022. A year later, she was demoted, with little warning, she said. (Amanda Loman/InvestigateWest)

The letter noted the department’s success in taking over management of programs and responsibilities previously handled by other departments, including the Employment Related Day Care subsidy that helps families afford child care. It is a more than $400 million program that is in high demand; since  thousands of families have been waitlisted. Reducing that waitlist is a high priority for staff.

However, the audit said the agency’s recordkeeping and budgeting practices could be improved: One example auditors pointed out was the decision to pay providers of Preschool Promise, the state’s free preschool program, during the pandemic without any enrollment requirement, in order to prevent closures. Preschool Promise is one of the early learning department’s marquee programs, but has come under fire from legislators and the public for under-enrollment, which some employees told InvestigateWest was partly due to mismanagement.

“When auditors asked for documentation to show when and why the initial decision was made and how it was communicated to providers and the public, DELC staff were unable to provide that information,” the letter states. “The pandemic was a chaotic time; it is in these crucial times agencies should provide assurance and accountability for their decisions.”

In a letter responding to the audit, Chatterjee said the programs division will improve such documentation. The agency also launched  to track Preschool Promise enrollment throughout the year and assist in reallocating spots where they’re most needed, and it reinstated enrollment minimums for providers to receive state money.

The agency also implemented a new equity training program for managers in February, and is considering making the training mandatory for all staff, Chatterjee said. Training is one of several strategies mentioned in the agency’s  that was announced in early July.

The department also is completing a “culture assessment” initiated in the spring shortly after InvestigateWest’s reporting was published “to gain a deeper understanding of our workplace dynamics,” Chatterjee said. Leaders expect to review the results of that assessment in the fall, she said.

This story was originally published by , an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Northwest. Reporter Kaylee Tornay covers labor, youth and health care issues. Reach her at 503-877-4108 or kaylee@invw.org. On Twitter .

The released by ImpactSTATS, Inc. and The BEE Collective used National Center for Education Statistics data to compare how often students were being excluded from school as a disciplinary measure at predominantly white versus Black Charleston schools in the 2022-23 school year.

To zero in on the treatment of young students, researchers considered only those schools that offered pre-kindergarten programs. Of the 42 schools in the study, 33 encompassed grades pre-K through 5; six went from pre-K to grade 8; two were pre-K to kindergarten and one school taught pre-K to second grade.

Of those schools, the ones with more than a 51% Black student population isolated children from learning settings for disciplinary reasons at a rate of 98.2 removals per 1,000 students, according to the report. This was seven times greater than the 14.1 removals per 1,000 students at majority white early-grade and elementary schools — and more than double the districtwide rate of 42.7 per 1,000 students.

Exclusionary discipline could include in-school or out-of-school suspensions and expulsion. When looking just at out-of-school suspensions in Charleston, the racial disparity by school population soared, according to the study released earlier this summer.

Students in majority Black schools faced out-of-school suspension rates of 78.8 per 1,000 students in the 2022-23 school year compared to 11.9 suspensions per 1,000 students for those in predominantly white schools. 

The districtwide rate was 34.8 suspensions per 1,000 students. 

“This tells us that we have a problem and it’s not children’s behavior — but adult action and adult decisions,” said lead researcher Melodie Baker. 

Charleston public schools served 50,312 students at the end of the last school year: 24,978 were white, 14,291 were Black and 7,916 were Hispanic, according to the district. 

Baker said removing a child from a classroom or isolating them from their teachers and peers robs them of an opportunity to learn self-regulation and is particularly damaging to the youngest learners.

“It makes kids feel like they don’t belong,” she said. “They feel ashamed. They feel confused. It affects their overall development.”

The practice is seen as : and are among the states that have banned or strictly limited such removals in the early grades.

Charleston County School District spokesman Andrew Pruitt last week pushed back against the study, which raises issues of racism and implicit bias, noting its data does not include the ages of the suspended students or the reasons why they were punished. 

“We take any report that raises concerns about unconscious bias negatively impacting our children seriously. However, we are incredibly concerned that a specific claim of that magnitude was made in the absence of an analysis of the appropriate and relevant data,” he said in a statement. 

The district didn’t start breaking down its disciplinary data by grade until recently, according to Pruitt. Though records were limited, he cited a total of 49 preschool suspensions in Charleston public schools in the 2022-23 school year. He did not separate that number by race.

Preschoolers across the U.S. are expelled at rates than K-12 students. South Carolina in preschool suspensions by a large margin in 2017-18 with 438 preschoolers suspended, according to the most recent available federal data. 

Those numbers have grown significantly worse in the Palmetto State and were a critical focus of . The Joint Citizens and Legislative Committee on Children showing 928 South Carolina public preschoolers received in-school and out-of-school suspensions in 2023-24; 66% of those 3- and 4-year-olds were children of color and 77% were boys.

The committee’s data for Charleston County schools, the state’s second-largest district, cites that 25 preschoolers received out-of-school suspensions in 2023-24 and fewer than five received an in-school suspension. Eighteen Black Charleston County public preschoolers received an out–of-school suspension and fewer than five white students did. Twenty-one male preschoolers received an out-of-school suspension that year and fewer than five female preschoolers did. Six preschoolers classified as special education students were among those removed from school for disciplinary reasons.

The Charleston County School District has taken steps to address systemic inequalities in discipline, Pruitt said, including professional development training for all its early education teachers that focuses on how to appropriately respond to student behavior while taking into account young learners’ social-emotional well-being. He said the district continues to work with early childhood education organizations throughout the state to adopt best practices.

The report by ImpactSTATS and The BEE Collective notes citing the role of educator bias in harsh discipline, including perceptions of Black children as being older than they are, less innocent, more aggressive and more deserving of punishment for the same behavior displayed by white students.

New York-based was founded by Baker in 2023 to bring more diversity to the research field and to provide technical support and research assistance to grass-roots groups working with underserved communities of color. 

The BEE — Beloved Early Education and Care — Collective is that partly funded the study and collaborated on the research. It seeks to improve maternal and child health in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, including in addressing racism and implicit bias in early child care. 

Black children across all grade levels and those with disabilities have long faced higher rates of exclusionary disciplines than other student groups. According to analyzing data from the 2020-21 school year, Black boys were nearly two times more likely than white boys to receive an out-of-school suspension or an expulsion.

“It’s mostly boys who are being suspended — mostly for rough-and-tumble play,” Baker said, speaking anecdotally of the Charleston suspensions after interviewing those who worked with or observed district students. “But there’s a lot of research out there that talks about the positives of rough-and-tumble play. Males tend to perceive that very differently.”

Of Charleston County schools’ 3,673 teachers in the 2021-22 school year, roughly 2,402 were white females, 556 were white males, 404 were Black females and 103 were Black males, according to .

Cara Kelly, a researcher who observed classrooms within the Charleston district for seven years, ending in 2019, recalled several instances where kindergarten children were made to sit alone and in silence for 30 minutes or more for minor infractions such as talking to other students, calling out while a teacher was speaking or standing up when they were supposed to sit for long stretches of time. 

“It’s OK to give a child five minutes to calm down — but not to be completely excluded,” she said. 

Kelly, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oklahoma’s Early Childhood Education Institute, told The 74 she believed the punishments were not developmentally appropriate and often targeted Black children. 

The report recommends the district recruit more male teachers in the early grades, increase pay for all early childhood educators, decrease student-to-staff ratios and raise awareness about discipline reform legislation that seeks to prohibit suspensions, expulsions and corporal punishment while promoting more effective means of managing student behavior. 

Researchers acknowledge that the report, funded partly by the American Heart Association Voices for Healthy Kids, should be interpreted cautiously because of the data’s limitations regarding race and age.

The BEE Collective has filed a public records request asking the Charleston district to release the suspension records for children 5 and under for the last five years broken down by age, race, gender and school. Noting that the response to that Freedom of Information request is due Aug. 31, Pruitt said it was “unfortunate” that the groups moved ahead with publishing the report without that information in hand. 

Tawanna R. Jennings, an infant and early childhood mental health consultant for South Carolina’s Partners for Early Attuned Relationships Network, called the study’s findings “pretty astounding,” adding she hopes the results will be shared widely and that Charleston teachers receive better training and greater support.

“There needs to be more resources so that [teachers] can understand these behaviors,” she said. “How do you teach these children and how do you be empathetic with what they may be experiencing?”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to ImpactSTATS and to The 74.

“Kids interrupt a lot,” Joyce says with a laugh. “And they ask the most random questions that have nothing to do with music. Their curiosity isn’t limited to whatever you’re trying to talk about. They somehow found a way to connect dinosaurs with saxophones. Then I would have to try to redirect the conversation from dinosaurs or ‘Bluey’ to music.

“We tried to teach them how the saxophone works—the reed, the mouthpiece, the keys. My favorite part was when they came up to the saxophone and peered down into the bell, reaching their little hands in to see what was down there. But they were more interested in the weird noises we could make.”

Joyce says he had thought the 4- and 5-year-olds might be impressed with his lightning fast runs on the scales. They were universally blasé about that, but when the sax players made multiphonic train horn sounds, or honked like geese, the class was enrapt.

Transforming from Student to Teacher

What Joyce learned about acknowledging the children’s curiosity while moving forward with class material is familiar territory to teachers everywhere, and such awareness was part of Dr. Daniel Abrahams’ motivation for creating the Music Zoo program. Abrahams is associate professor and coordinator of Music Education at the University of Arkansas/Fayetteville.

“Our Intro to Music Education course is the first Music Education class the students take,” Abrahams says. “We talk about what it means to be a teacher, what schools are for, why we teach, and I thought this would be a good way for them to work with some kids right off the bat and see if they like it. Nobody wants to spend three or four years in college and realize at the very end, ‘You know, I don’t actually like working with kids.’

“To have this experience at the beginning of their journey really helped solidify their ideas of what it meant to be a teacher. These are all pandemic students whose last two years of high school were pretty much on their computers in lockdown. I had students who had never worked with kids before and had no idea whether they were going to like it. After the experience, they were saying, ‘I love this. I know I’ve made the right choice in what I’ve decided to do with my life.’”

The Jean Tyson Child Development Center is located on the Fayetteville campus, so it wasn’t too much of a schlep for the musicians to take their instruments over, from violins and cellos to the woodwinds—flute, clarinet and saxophone. The percussionists were crowd favorites, possibly because they brought a variety of small hand drums and invited the little ones to play along. The saxophone was also popular (see “train horn and honking geese” above).

Best of all were the tuba and the baritone sax, both of which were taller than many of the preschoolers. Seizing the moment, the teachers turned those demonstrations into a brief foray into math concepts: “Let’s guess if you’ll be bigger than the tuba.”

Because this is the University of Arkansas (Go Razorbacks!) and many of the kids are children of faculty members or staff, they were familiar with the school’s marching band and were jazzed to make the connection between the students demonstrating their flutes, tubas and drums with the uniformed marchers they saw at football games. Instant stardom for the musicians.

On a more serious note, Abrahams said he had been discussing the idea of music aptitude with his students throughout the semester, based on the work of music learning researcher who wrote about music development in infants and young children.

“We talked about what influenced them to become musicians and the idea that you ever know what might influence a student into wanting to be involved in music,” Abrahams says. “Children have a musical aptitude from birth that stabilizes around the age of 9, and any musical experience they have will help them have a richer musical life later. That one morning of sitting and learning about the flute or the clarinet and hearing them played might inspire that student to want to play an instrument when they get a little older.

“The students took the assignment quite seriously,” he says, “because they felt they were influencing the next generation of musicians. The experience was transformational in the ways the students began to see themselves as teachers.”

A Rich Resource

The musicians researched to be au courant with music for the preschool set and came prepared to play the theme songs for Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, YouTube’s Bluey, and the classic Baby Shark (doo-doo-ti-doo). The vocalists sang the 4- and 5-year-olds’ songs they’d learned especially for them and the children reciprocated by teaching the college kids some of their preschool tunes— in 4/4 time.

The greatest number of requests were for the University of Arkansas Fight Song, which Abrahams’ students knew by heart because most are in the marching band. In recognizing the theme songs from a few notes the musicians played, the children didn’t know that they were demonstrating Gordon’s theories, but they were. By recognizing or remembering a tune, they were thinking music, which Gordon called “,” the foundation of musicianship.

The musicians were especially impressed by the questions the preschoolers asked about their instruments, Abrahams says. The little kids were blown away by the tuning pegs on the stringed instruments getting higher the tighter the peg was turned and predicted that they would get lower if the peg was looser (Hello, ).

The success of the initial Music Zoo program has earned it a permanent place in the Intro to Music Education curriculum, Abrahams says, with an additional, unexpected benefit.

“The child development center is starving for people to come in and do learning activities with their children and they’re right here on campus” he says. “This great resource just fell into our laps. It’s a partnership that not only provides a valuable first teaching experience for our students but is also fostering positive interactions with the child care staff and our local community.”

And some leave for kindergarten knowing how to read. 

“But it’s not because we’re hounding them,” said Heather Lyons, the program’s coordinator. “It’s because we’re constantly trying to help them pursue this love of learning.”

That careful mix of academics and social skills is one reason demand for the program is strong. Parents start calling in January to ask about registering their kids for the fall, Lyons said. Lamar’s program is part a statewide pre-K initiative now serving a quarter of the state’s 4-year-olds — up from about 3% six years ago.

The state helped drive pre-K enrollment nationwide to record levels in 2022-23, according to the recent from the National Institute for Early Education Research. Following sharp declines during the pandemic, participation in preschool is back on the upswing. Over 1.6 million children attended public pre-K last school year, with the percentage of 3-and 4-year-olds hitting new highs. 

Expanding access, however, doesn’t mean states have to cut back on quality by lowering training requirements for teachers or increasing class sizes, the report’s authors note.

They point to Mississippi as an example of a state that’s managed to boost enrollment while maintaining high standards.

In fact, the state is among the few that have written the institute’s “quality benchmarks” . Those include having teachers with a bachelor’s degree, assistants with early-childhood training, and screenings for vision, hearing and health problems.

“We’re keeping an eye on them,” said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor at the institute. “They started small with a focus on quality. They are also working hard to fund more coaches to support teachers, so they’re committed to quality in that way.”

There are now 36 early learning collaboratives — local partnerships that include school districts, Head Start providers and child care centers — that offer the pre-K program.

“We’re moving out of the baby stage and into the teen stage of the law,” said Rachel Canter, executive director Mississippi First, an advocacy group. She added that including Head Start, the federal preschool program serving children in poverty, is one reason the program receives bipartisan support. “People across the political spectrum see how it can benefit their own community. That has allowed us to expand it statewide while also making sure kids who need it most are getting access.”

Due partly to her advocacy, the legislature has increased annual spending on the program five times since 2016.

Now the challenge is to increase the number of child care providers that participate and continue to expand, she said. 

In communities without a program, parents are often left with lower-quality options or end up juggling their child between multiple caregivers during the day. Other parents, Canter said, might take fewer hours at work to stay home with their children. “That’s a terrible situation for a working family.”

Supporting the workforce

Advocates and policymakers are often the forces behind efforts to expand early-childhood education. But in — another state making major moves in pre-K — it was the voters who demanded more access when they passed a by an overwhelming 73%. 

The law creates permanent funding for early learning, resulting in the legislature appropriating last year. School districts, child care providers and tribal governments are now using some of those funds to by boosting teacher pay to match what K-12 teachers receive, using high-quality curriculum and giving preschoolers an extended school day.

The state also provides for teachers still earning their degree and pays for substitutes so teachers can take time off to attend courses.  

“The early childhood workforce has just been historically undervalued,” said Sara Mickelson, deputy secretary of the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department. “We’re really a state that is supporting access to degrees.”

Meanwhile, 70% of New Mexico 4-year-olds now attend public preschool, making the state one of just a handful that serves at least two-thirds of eligible students.

But states serving the most preschoolers — like California, Florida and Texas —  are not always examples of high quality.

California spent over $830 million in 2022-23 on preschool and is moving toward making all 4-year-olds eligible for its transitional kindergarten program by the fall of 2025. That figure accounted for over 70% of the total $1.17 billion increase in spending for the whole country, said Steve Barnett, the institute’s senior co-director.

But since it began a decade ago, the transitional program has met only a few of the institute’s 10 quality indicators. Teachers weren’t required to have special training in educating young children and class sizes were far larger than recommended — , compared with the institute’s benchmark of 20.

“There were no guidelines from the state,” said Rahele Arakabi, director of educational services for the Washington Unified School District in West Sacramento. Classrooms, she said, looked more like first grade than pre-K, with students sitting in rows facing the whiteboard. “Teachers really were in that mode of drill and kill.” 

But the outlook for the program has improved. Statewide, class sizes are now capped at 24 students with two teachers; and charters that don’t comply face fines. By the 2025-26 school year, ratios will be set at the institute’s standard of 10-to-1. The state also offers a new credential for educators teaching preschool through third grade, and by next year, teachers will be required to have or experience in early-childhood education. 

In Washington Unified, which serves 130 transitional kindergarten students in six classes, ratios are even lower, 8-to-1. Some teachers who worked in the district’s separate preschool program have already earned a credential to teach in transitional kindergarten.

Arakabi used a $400,000 to make classrooms more child-friendly, with age-appropriate furniture and play areas. She implemented a new curriculum specifically for pre-K and provided a year of coaching and support on child development. The investment, she said, is making a difference.

“My worry was always buying curriculum and then it just sits there in the shrink wrap,” she said. “This group of teachers is not easy to please,  but they’re actually using it.”

As researchers specializing in linguistics and early literacy development, we celebrate the growing movement to connect preschool instruction with the science of reading. Between 2019 and 2022,  passed new laws requiring schools adopt a scientific approach to reading curriculum and instruction. In 31 states, the laws apply to preschool students as well. 

These mandates are a golden opportunity to capitalize on the unique energy, curiosity, and explosive growth in oral language that children experience during the preschool years. 

Early-learning experiences have exponential power: they can shape lifelong learning habits and accelerate literacy, particularly for English-language learners. To unlock that potential, educators and providers must ensure that students acquire a critical mass of vocabulary and related content knowledge from engaging social studies and science texts and activities.Knowledge-rich preschool curriculum is the key. To assist states and preschool providers as they revisit their literacy lessons, the Knowledge Matter Campaign recently updated its K–8 English Language Arts  to include “Early Childhood Essentials.”

Big Ideas for Little Learners

When students learn to read in elementary school, they draw on their vocabulary and what they already know about the subject to make sense of the words on the page. For decades, research has shown that a preschool student’s vocabulary size is a powerful predictor of their later academic success, and that background knowledge is a powerful factor in reading comprehension. Preschool curriculums that intentionally build student knowledge through activities that engage young children with complex oral language are designed with these insights in mind.

The Knowledge Matters Campaign has identified four major attributes of a high-quality, evidence-based, knowledge-building preschool curriculum:

• They are grounded in read-alouds on science and social studies topics that include target vocabulary and are compelling to young children, like space travel or weather.
• They include texts from multiple genres, such as stories and informational texts, that are presented in sequence and use the target vocabulary words.
• They teach related words, phrases, and ideas, including academic vocabulary.
• They extend learning through individual and small-group activities that prompt students to draw on their knowledge and use complex, content-rich language, such as discussions or sensory learning.

Knowledge-Building in Action

What does a knowledge-building preschool curriculum look like? Such classrooms follow multi-week units focused on a single, high-interest topic. Their walls feature art and photographs about the topic, and teachers actively engage students in read-alouds and discussions that are focused on the topic. A set of vocabulary words are gradually introduced and reinforced in texts, discussions, and activities.

For example, in the  used in New York City public preschools, a three-week Wild Animals unit is focused on an interrelated set of 10 vocabulary words and what information students should know by the end of the unit. Teachers and students discuss these key concepts, such as that wild animals live outdoors and away from humans, and are not kept as pets, and use target vocabulary words like bear, lion, and giraffe. All the while, they connect this learning to “big ideas” such as where wild animals live and how wild animals either protect themselves or need protection from others.

Discussions are grounded in five books: a nonfiction information book, two storybooks, and two “predictable” books, which use repetitive phrases and sentence structure. Varying text types expose students to several types of academic language, in addition to the colloquial language preschoolers pick up from their peers. When teachers read and re-read these books aloud throughout the unit, students are welcomed to chime in and participate in the read-aloud.

Consider the opening lines in If I Were a Lion, an illustrated predictable book about wild animals written in verse:

If I were a lion / I’d growl and roar / and knock the dishes / on the floor.
If I were a bear / I’d have big claws / I’d rip up pillows with my paws.

Students can explore the vocabulary and ideas, learn the cadence of the passage, and build important connections about different animals, habitats, and behaviors—all while they practice early-literacy basics like print awareness and letter knowledge. Repetitive texts and related topic knowledge are especially helpful to English-language learners, since they connect new vocabulary with tangible information about the world.

A  found positive impacts on student vocabulary and understanding of science concepts. And in the dynamic preschool classroom, extension activities about everyday social studies and science topics are at the ready, from a visit to a school garden to a walk around the neighborhood—activities that engage and excite young children.

Plus, learning about lions and bears is a lot more fun than learning about “L” and “B.”

Schemas Make Skillful Readers

Knowledge-building curriculums also prepare students to read and understand texts about unfamiliar topics. Preschoolers don’t just learn about wild animals; rather, they experience how information can be related and organized within a theme or topic. Content-rich texts and lessons prompt students to build knowledge networks and conceptual frameworks, or schemas, that help them identify patterns and take in more sophisticated ideas. When students experience this type of understanding, they develop inferencing skills that they apply to other information.

Strong readers are not born—they are built over time, and those efforts start in preschool. As states take a closer look at preschool education, curriculums designed to build oral language and student knowledge can point the way forward. Today’s joyful chatter can be tomorrow’s persuasive essay, so long as we start early and give these curious, fast-developing students the tools and opportunities they need to thrive.

Given the number of states that now realize the urgency of expanding their preschool offerings, and the challenge they uniformly face in meeting demand, why have cities and states been slow on the uptake of this valuable option and what it would take to remedy the situation? ��What would it look like for family child care homes to be part of states’ publicly funded high-quality pre-K system? And what might that cost?

Such policy questions concerning 3- and 4-year-olds are precisely up the alley of the (NIEER), whose annual has been a rich resource for tracking state-funded preschool efforts for two decades.

“We consider family child care homes one of the options in a mixed delivery system, and we know the numbers are probably small,” says GG Weisenfeld, NIEER’s associate director of technical assistance. “Originally, we didn’t know exactly how many states are including them and what that looked like. So, we developed a survey and sent it to the states we knew allowed family child care homes to receive state dollars, either directly or indirectly. We followed up with conversations with state leaders and a review of policy manuals and from that, we wrote a paper.”

That paper became a yearslong suite of papers that together comprise a sort of “Everything You Wanted to Know About Family Child Care in Publicly Funded Pre-K But Didn’t Have the Resources to Ask.”

The initiative couldn’t be timelier. In late February, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human services issued a joint letter encouraging state school and early childhood leaders to collaborate on a mixed delivery approach to preschool and to leverage federal funding to improve access to high-quality preschool. “Mixed delivery” refers to an approach that provides programs in child care centers, Head Start programs, public schools and family child care homes. Every state except Hawaii operates mixed-delivery systems.

The Department of Education has also released guidance to support public schools that use Title I funds for early childhood programming, aimed at closing educational achievement gaps for children of families with low incomes. To implement those programs, policymakers and community leaders will need a much clearer picture of the country’s early care and education mosaic — and the powerful case for family child care as vital to that effort.

Given all the variables, attempting to present the Big Picture of FCC across the U.S. must be a bit like trying to wrangle an octopus into a mayonnaise jar. Nevertheless, NIEER researchers’ first paper, written in partnership with , a national collaborative of funders supporting home-based child care, presented a comprehensive look at the role FCCs play in publicly funded pre-K systems in the U.S.

The paper, “” and its more recent reveal the complexity of families’ choices for their preschoolers — needs as varied and multifaceted as the child care options themselves. Research shows that families with low incomes or from marginalized communities such as immigrant communities, those in rural settings or communities of color are more likely to use home-based care, frequently drawn by lower costs, proximity to home, or the caregiver’s language and cultural compatibility with the family. Embracing FCC as part of states’ mixed delivery systems therefore presents a ready-made opportunity for the equitable delivery of high-quality preschool.

An important consideration for many of these families is that family child care homes often operate during non-traditional hours — significant for parents working in service industries, medical environments or other sectors that require flexible or non-standard working hours. This necessity puts many FCC homes at odds with being part of state- or city-funded programs, which typically require facilities to offer part- or full-school days over a 180-day school year. For FCC homes to participate in state-funded pre-K, policymakers need to address how preschool programs can be delivered within these flexible hours outside public-school schedules, and how educators will be paid for hours of care beyond traditional pre-K days. This is just one example of the questions facing policymakers seeking to integrate FCC into their public programs.

Lessons from States

States face major challenges in expanding their preschool systems thanks to the “mix” in mixed delivery. The variety of settings and different types of providers, from faith-based centers and charter schools to Head Start agencies and family child care homes, leave administrators and policymakers with the Herculean job of distributing funding and maintaining quality across a profoundly complicated landscape.

NIEER researchers, with support from the , took an in-depth look at how policymakers in Alabama, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and West Virginia have addressed the challenge. As “” shows, each of the five states featured has taken a different approach but has built high-quality systems that serve at least one-third of their state’s 4-year-olds. The paper concludes with recommendations for state policy, based on the authors’ analysis of what worked in all the states’ efforts to support a strong mixed delivery system across settings.

“Many states have not quite figured out how to seamlessly incorporate family child care within a mixed delivery system,” says Karin Garver, an early childhood education policy specialist at NIEER and one of the paper’s coauthors. “Center-based care in a child care center doesn’t look much different from center-based care in a school district setting but are different compared to a family child care setting. In these papers, we’re trying to outline how to make it doable, to see what it looks like to intentionally incorporate family child care into state-funded pre-K programs.

“It’s important to have foundational policies in place when you set up a program before you start adding massive numbers of children to your rolls,” Garver says. “We see states do the opposite and end up with a lot of trouble. They expand enrollment to a whole bunch of kids and then they try to increase quality. It’s very challenging to course-correct like that once the program is established.”

What’s Needed

As the researchers noted in their state analysis, even those that have built high-quality preschool systems struggle to reach all of their 3- and 4-year-olds. Nationally, just 14% of 3-year-olds and 39% of 4-year-olds were enrolled in publicly funded programs in the 2020-2021 school year. One means of ensuring that more children have access to high-quality preschool is to expand to settings beyond school- and center-based classrooms, such as FCC homes.�� NIEER’s “,” spells out what it will take to do so.

“Researching and writing ‘Conditions for Success’ was a lengthy process,” says Erin Harmeyer, assistant research professor at NIEER. “We started with a literature review to look at things such as curriculum usage, environmental recommendations and we put together some drafts. Then we had a lot of expert conversations with other researchers and a couple of other institutes. Through these conversations, we edited, refined and revised the conditions for success. Then we got further feedback from FCC educators themselves and from a few other experts in the field, and revised some more until we came up with a final draft.”

Given that degree of vetting, research, feedback and revision, any policymaker or community leader wanting to see that FCC is included in publicly funded pre-K can use “Conditions for Success” as a GPS-accurate roadmap to undertake the journey.

But What About the Cost?

The roadmap laid out in “Conditions for Success” will require sufficient fuel to reach the destination. Recommendations include professional development for providers, including on-site coaching, training, peer-to-peer networks and mentoring, as well as developing a system that provides funding and opportunities for FCC educators to obtain a bachelor’s degree and specialized training for home-based settings.

“NIEER considers the FCC educator having a bachelor’s degree a baseline for quality,” Weisenfeld says. “This is based on the current research that says pre-K teachers need a BA degree and ECE specialization to get the positive outcomes we know they can achieve, but only through a high-quality program.

“Early childhood is when children’s brains are developing and the most significant part of their growth and development is happening. Why not have the people with the highest degrees and the most qualifications educating that population? The FCC educators want to have those degrees and they want to be compensated accordingly. We feel that if we can support this population of educators who want degrees, want to make a difference and want to operate a high-quality program, why not support this?”

For the paper, “,” NIEER used a previously developed tool called the Cost of Preschool Quality and Revenue. The tool is intended to help policymakers, advocates and state administrators understand the true cost of implementing a state funded preschool program. The tool enables users to consider various scenarios and see the impact of adding or not adding certain quality standards.

“We looked at how much states are spending now, what we think they should be spending and how much it would cost to achieve that,” says Garver. “Then we looked at the difference and asked, ‘How many are within striking difference of what it would cost to serve children in FCC settings, assuming that they pay comparable salaries to teachers in K-12 settings, use a network system to provide supports for providers and so on.’

“It’s interesting that it’s just not that much more expensive. When we started this project, we had some concern that our work would show that the cost of serving children in family child care settings was too high for states to take it up. That’s just not the case, depending on how the state sets up the system.”

The bottom line, the researchers agree, is that states aren’t spending enough on the programs they have. Given their stated commitment to providing high-quality pre-K to all their preschoolers, they need to be spending more on all programs.

“If they’re spending what they should be on those programs,” says Weisenfeld, “they’re not that far away from where they need to be in order to incorporate family child care more systematically into their state funded pre-K program.”

Inside a classroom at the , a group of small children sit in a circle with their teacher to learn about the alphabet, but how they go about learning their letters is what makes this lesson unique — and fun.

These children have , small touchpads loaded with learning games. Distributing the Seedlings to schools, care centers, state and local agencies, and families is the mission of , a nonprofit founded by former State Board of Education member that seeks to prepare underserved children ages 3 and 4 for kindergarten through interactive games teaching letters, numbers, shapes, and colors.

For this classroom game, a child holds a Seedling displaying a letter over their head, and asks their classmate and teacher questions about the letter like, “does my letter make the ‘W-uh’ sound?” or “does my letter come after ‘V’ in the alphabet?”

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The child can then use the answers as clues to determine the mystery letter. Once the letter is correctly guessed, they can trace the letter on the Seedling tablet, successfully learning a portion of the alphabet while using visual, auditory, and tactile skills.

What makes this game and these Seedling touchpads even more special is that the devices were given to Ashe County Schools, and many other locations across North Carolina and beyond, at no cost.

Over 22,000 Seedlings have been distributed to children since 2016, according to ApSeed. The nonprofit distributes them for free to families and locations such as Head Starts, pre-K programs, child care services, at special events, health care practices, or WIC centers.

ApSeed currently serves 16 counties in North Carolina, four counties in South Carolina, and other locations in California, New York, Liberia, and Zimbabwe.

Funding for ApSeed comes from grants and private donations as well as from government appropriations. In 2022, the General Assembly allocated $2.5 million to ApSeed, which in turn provided service for about 12,000 children.

Making a ‘big hairy audacious goal’

ApSeed is part of what Alcorn calls a “big hairy audacious goal,” or “BHAG.” Alcorn said a BHAG is something to achieve on the macro-level at least 10 years out that requires leadership and helps to create a future that would otherwise be impossible.

A BHAG for ApSeed is to promote higher graduation rates to create a well-educated workforce for the future of the state and elsewhere by starting early with a community’s youngest learners. Alcorn emphasized that those who graduate high school are more likely to have higher wages once entering the workforce.

Alcorn said when a student is able to succeed academically early on, the success continues to have a ripple effect throughout the child’s educational journey.

“If you’re pretty good at pre-K you’ve got a good chance of being a good kindergartener, right? And then if you’re good at kindergarten, you’ve got a pretty good chance at first grade,” Alcorn said.

Helping children succeed is a priority for ApSeed, Alcorn said, but helping communities succeed is an additional priority, he said. When schools have success, that encourages others to reside in that area, he said, benefiting that community.

Alcorn is working toward a return on investment, hoping to see long term-results that start with a child first beginning to learn.

Dr. Eisa Cox, superintendent of , said increasing the area’s graduation rates is part of her district’s strategic plan, and that effort is a dedication that begins with early learning. Cox said if a child is unprepared for kindergarten, they will be less likely to graduate.

“It’s a long-term commitment to how we support families and how we support learning, from the time they begin learning clear through postsecondary education,” Cox said. “We want kids to graduate ready with skills and the knowledge and the confidence that they can do whatever they want.”

Planting a Seedling

Terry Richardson, director of exceptional children and pre-k programs for Ashe County Schools, said the opportunity for multi-sensory learning on the Seedlings is important as children develop their unique learning styles.

“It’s auditory, tactile, and visual. Every child learns in a different way. We don’t know what their learning style is until we get them and we are teaching, and to see what their learning style is,” Richardson said. “They can learn every area of literacy and math on the ApSeed tool through the visual, the tactile, or the auditorial because it’s integrated within each app.”

The Seedlings come preloaded with games and have no Wi-Fi or camera capabilities to ensure safety and promote the age-appropriate learning of the child using it.

Each Seedling comes with headphones, a charger, information for families on kindergarten readiness, and a protective case with a handle.

The touchpads have a variety of games that range in difficulty levels from “baby games” all the way to multiplication for those children seeking to explore extra challenges. Colorful and happy cartoon animals serve as the mascots for the games and cheer the students on when a question is answered correctly.

Richardson recalled getting goosebumps during an ApSeed distribution event that brought out over 500 families, and said she has seen children with Seedlings around her community.

“I’ve gone to different activities in the community and you’ll see kids carrying little ApSeed around and things like that because it’s such an engaging, appropriate learning tool for literacy and math that are developmentally appropriate for their ages,” Richardson said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

TOPEKA — Gov. Laura Kelly’s task force on early childhood development outlined Monday a plan for improving coordination of the education and care of pre-kindergarten kids by consolidating services scattered among four state entities into a newly created agency or within an existing department.

The Early Childhood Transition Task Force authorized by the first executive order issued in Kelly’s second term as governor prompted a review of state services for children from birth to 5 and resulted in the recommendation to unify programs within the executive branch. The task force collaborated during the nine-month project with the Hunt Institute, a North Carolina nonprofit associated with Duke University.

Task force co-chairs Sam Huenergardt, CEO of AdventHealth System’s Mid-America Region, and Cornelia Stevens, executive director of TOP Early Learning Centers in Wichita, said state agency officials, private-sector advocates and state legislators on the task force studied Kansas’ early childhood landscape, listened to more than 500 stakeholders and consulted with other states to develop the plan for adopting a coordinated system.

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“As in most states,” the co-chairs said, “Kansas’ early childhood programs are spread across multiple government agencies, creating duplication and inefficiencies that force Kansas families to navigate a needlessly complex bureaucratic maze in order to access time sensitive services. It’s time we did better.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center, an independent organization in Washington, D.C., issued a report this year ranking Kansas 49th in the nation in terms of efficiency and effectiveness of early childhood systems.

About four dozen child care and early childhood development programs have been scattered among the Kansas Department for Children and Families, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the Kansas State Department of Education and the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund.

Kelly on board

Kelly, a Democrat who served more than 15 years in the GOP-led Legislature, said Kansas should reshape management of the state’s overly complex network of programs for children. The state would benefit from centralizing a system difficult for families and external stakeholders to navigate, Kelly said.

“Streamlining the administration of these programs and reducing the red tape around accessing them will save money and make it easier for families and providers to navigate the system,” Kelly said. “This is a nonpartisan issue that affects all Kansans, rural and urban alike, and addressing it pays dividends for everyone in the state.”

Kelly said the earliest years of childhood were crucial to the trajectory of academic achievement, healthy development and social mobility.

After formation of the task force, Republican members of the Kansas Legislature expressed skepticism that establishing a new state agency would do much to help children excel. In the past, the Legislature rejected Kelly’s recommendation to merge the state Department for Children and Families with the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services.

Task force members warned consolidation of governmental services was a complex and labor intensive process that required thoughtful transition planning.

Many states identified the start of formal schooling at kindergarten, but the task force report said achievement gaps could manifest long before children reached schoolhouse doors.

In addition, the task force went beyond scope of their directive to suggest Kansas ought to increase state aid for child care and make use of economic development funds to encourage businesses to expand child care services. Members said Kansas should explore piloting a child care cost-sharing program similar to Michigan’s Tri-Share Program or Kentucky’s Employee Child Care Assistance Partnership Program.

A blueprint

The report of the task force urged Kelly to consider the options of placing authority over Kansas early childhood programs within an existing state agency or a newly created state agency. In 2021, Missouri consolidated programs in the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Colorado advanced its centralization initiative by creating the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.

In terms of an implementation timeline, the task force suggested adoption of a consolidation law during the 2024 legislative session,  creation of an implementation team by September, establishment of the new entity or department by July 2024 and completion of the realignment by July 2026.

The unified entity needed to be led by a “highly qualified, permanent” administrator who reported directly to the governor, the task force said. The transition director chosen to advance the reform law adopted by the Legislature and governor shouldn’t be hired as permanent administrator, the report said.

The task force said all state programs relating to child care services at KDCF, KDHE and the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund should be realigned under one entity.

Preschool programs housed in the Kansas State Department of Education ought to remain there because many were administered by local school districts, the task force said. KDCF should retain authority of child protective services, foster care and adoption services. Likewise, the task force said, KDHE would maintain oversight of programs focused on general health outcomes of children.

Task force members recommended the new entity track more than 40 benchmark statistics to determine whether the unified approach had a positive influence on children, families, providers and communities.

Significant challenges

Since 2019, Kansas invested more than $450 million in state and federal funds to increase support for providers of early childhood programs and broaden access to reliable programs.

The task force’s needs assessment indicated Kansas families with young children experienced inequitable access to high-quality programs and services. Families in Kansas must adopt a connect-the-dots approach to navigating services across administrative agencies. Kansas was experiencing both a workforce and facility shortage across the state in terms of early childhood programs, the task force said.

“Early childhood providers and stakeholders share a desire for collaboration and cooperation, but these efforts are often disconnected and uncoordinated,” the report said.

The task force identified administrative shortcomings that included overlapping program requirements for similar services to the same populations, lack of clear lines of decision making, lack of alignment of workforce policy, funding streams not optimized toward common goals and public confusion over which agencies were responsible for specific services.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

Thanks to TikTok videos, billboards and other creative marketing techniques, enrollment in transitional kindergarten in California appears to be climbing. But advocates are keeping an eye on how those 4-year-olds are spending their class time — which they say will be a key factor in whether the $2.7 billion program is a success.

“Quality is top of mind for us. Some districts are treating it like a second year of kindergarten, which we know doesn’t work,” said Benjamin Cottingham, with Policy Analysis for California Education, an independent, nonpartisan research center. “To be effective, TK needs to be a play-based, developmentally appropriate course of study.”

Transitional kindergarten, which California  in 2010, is meant to ease 4-year-olds into the rigors of elementary school. Ideally, it combines the carefree fun of preschool with a hint of structure and academic know-how, so children are better prepared for kindergarten and beyond. In a high-quality TK classroom, children learn to share and take turns, draw pictures and play with blocks, sit in a circle and enjoy story time, among other skills.

A  by the American Institute of Research found that children who completed TK had stronger skills in math and literacy when they started kindergarten and were more engaged in learning than their peers who didn’t participate in the program. The benefits were especially pronounced for English learners and low-income students.

In 2021, California , requiring schools to provide space for all eligible 4-year-olds whose families want it. With a rollout period of five years, schools have been busy hiring and training teachers, buying more crayons and blocks, converting classrooms to meet state guidelines and getting the word out.

After a lull, enrollment appears to rebound

In 2022-23, enrollment lagged below expectations, likely due to the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic, . Just over half of California’s eligible 4-year-olds were enrolled in TK last year, roughly 22% below state projections. But now enrollment appears to be increasing. The official numbers for 2023-24 won’t be available for several months, but a CalMatters sampling of districts statewide reported better-than-expected enrollment so far this year. 

Schools credit the uptick to improved outreach. District staff are talking to parents at local preschools and child care centers, posting flyers in pediatricians’ offices, buying ads on social media and even going door-to-door.

In Rescue Union School District in the Sierra foothills of El Dorado County, word-of-mouth has been the most effective recruitment tool, said Superintendent Jim Shoemake. The district bought newspaper ads and put up signs, but nothing compares to the power of parents chatting at barbecues, block parties and soccer games. Enrollment has increased steadily, with 142 students enrolled this year, and the retention rate is nearly 100%, he said.

“TK has benefitted the entire district,” Shoemake said. “It’s great to have a child on campus for six years, but seven is even better. We get a chance to onboard these kids early, so they’re successful not just in elementary school, but middle school and beyond.”

Rescue Union parent Aly Perkins said her twin daughters, Hazel and Scarlett, loved their TK class last year. They learned their ABCs and 123s, but it was social skills that had the biggest impact, she said. 

“They learned things like manners, how to make friends, how to keep friends — those skills will benefit them their whole lives,” Perkins said. “I think TK gives kids the confidence and cushion they need to succeed in school. I’m really glad we decided to send them.”

Even in Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district, word-of-mouth has been key to TK enrollment. In addition to bus ads and billboards, a social media campaign, a hotline and robocalls, the district has enlisted school staff and parent volunteers to hand out flyers within a four-block radius of elementary schools.

“A parent saying, ‘I have my kid in this program and it’s great’ is much better than it coming from me,” said Dean Tagawa, the district’s executive director for early childhood education. “That parent-to-parent connection, that level of trust, is what’s important.”

The tactics seem to be working. Los Angeles Unified has opened TK classrooms at nearly all 488 elementary schools. And children who attended the district’s TK program have significantly outperformed their peers not in the program in reading, writing and math in kindergarten and first grade, . They also fared better social-emotionally, based on teacher feedback on report cards.

In Lodi Unified,  chronicling a day in the life of a Lodi kindergartener has garnered more than 13,200 views and helped fill classrooms. With enrollment exceeding expectations, the district is on track to open at least one TK classroom at every elementary school by 2025-26.

“Overall, it’s going really well, and I believe that by the time these students are in third grade, we’re going to see huge improvements in outcomes,” said Susan Petersen, the district’s director of education. 

Persistent staffing challenges 

While , Lodi Unified has filled all its vacancies, she said. The district is providing training and in-classroom coaching, and using a curriculum focused on learning through playing. Some of the new TK teachers are credentialed elementary teachers, and some are veteran preschool teachers pursuing credentials.

“We’ve found that it’s a sought-after position,” she said.

Recognizing that 4-year-olds learn in unique ways, the Legislature will require by 2025 TK teachers to have credentials as well as 24 units of early childhood education or the equivalent. That extra requirement may pose a barrier to filling positions — many districts are already grappling with teacher shortages. An  last fall found that 80% of school districts in California didn’t yet have enough qualified TK teachers.

Meanwhile, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing is working on  that will prepare teachers for preschool through third grade, with a focus on literacy. A goal: create a  in which students learn by playing, rather than sitting at desks.   

That focus on high-quality teaching and learning is imperative if TK is going to succeed in getting students ahead in the early years, Cottingham said. The state is updating its preschool  to include TK, but schools cannot afford to wait for the new version; they should “work with what we’ve already got,” or students will lose out on the benefits of an additional year of schooling, Cottingham said.

Assessments will also be important, he said, to hold districts accountable for the quality of their programs. Currently, the state is not requiring schools to test students in TK, although it does provide guidelines on how to measure students’ progress.

Hanna Melnick, senior policy adviser at the Learning Policy Institute who co-leads the early childhood learning team, adds that assessment, as well as curriculum, will be important as TK expands. 

“The TK rollout has been faster than we expected, but we don’t have a good way to monitor quality, and district capacities to teach 4-year-olds vary greatly,” she said. “Some have been doing this for a long time, and some are new and don’t yet have the background or training.”

‘A system that’s working’ in Tulare

Tulare City School District, a 9,200-student district south of Fresno, has been offering a cohesive preschool-through-first-grade program for a decade, and seeing positive results. Until the pandemic, third grade math and reading scores had jumped nearly 30% since the district implemented the program in the early 2010s. Now they are again beginning to improve.

The curriculum is linked from grade to grade, and teachers work closely together, easing children’s transitions from one classroom to the next. All sites offer after-school care, making it easier for parents with jobs. And teachers try to get to know families and ensure they feel welcome and part of their children’s education, said Jennifer Marroquin, the district’s assistant superintendent of educational services.

“For parents, it can be scary dropping your 3- or 4-year-old off for the first time. So we try to make them feel supported,” Marroquin said. “We found a system that’s working, and it’s become one of our district’s strengths.”

By the time TK is fully in place statewide, most districts should have programs resembling Tulare’s, said Kelly Reynolds, a policy analyst for Early Edge California, a nonprofit advocacy group that’s worked closely with the state on transitional kindergarten. She expects the challenges with staffing, enrollment and quality will be resolved — or close to it — within the next few years.

Because transitional kindergarten, like kindergarten itself, is not mandatory, enrollment will never be 100%, she noted. And depending on where they live, 4-year-olds have plenty of high-quality options aside from TK — including private preschool, state-supported preschool, child care and Head Start. 

“We want to make sure all 4-year-olds are being served in high-quality programs, and families know the breadth of opportunities available to them,” she said. “I do think we’re on track. Enrollment is trending upwards, and we’re seeing there’s a real demand for TK.”  

“We want to hear smiles,” said Dean Tagawa, executive director of early child education for LA Unified who is overseeing the district’s new Universal Transitional Kindergarten program for 4-year-olds.

Hopes are high the new classes will help bolster declining literacy rates in California and , which has attracted thousands of brand new young students to LAUSD schools.

After seeing the success offering pre-K dual language and special education classes to 14,000 students as of last May, the district has opened the doors to all 4-year-olds for the free UTK program, enrolling an additional 5,000 this academic year in more than 480 schools. The district had hoped to enroll

“Early investment really sticks with kids long-term,” said Tagawa, “You can just see it.”

Inside Lourdes Serrano’s UTK dual-language classroom, the investment comes in the form of hands-on learning of concepts that will also be taught in kindergarten — letters and numbers, and social skills, but at a slower and more deliberate pace for the younger students. 

Obstacles do come with such an early introduction into the classroom. Teachers do not potty train students. Attachment to parents becomes a more prevalent issue. 

“The first day of school, all of these kids cried,” said Serrano, a teacher at 135th Street Elementary.

Yet, the benefits of early education are clear: With young learners in classrooms, it allows students to more likely earn higher wages, score higher on exams and graduate high school, according to the National Education Association. 

UTK teacher Teri Anderson is working hard in her classroom at 135 Street Elementary School to prepare her young students for the future.

“Everyday learning is really a superpower,” Anderson said while teaching children to practice drawing the letter “B” on a worksheet. “I look at these kids, they’re like little sponges. The LAUSD funds us well, and it really gives us an opportunity to work with [kids] right where they start.”

In Anderson’s class, colored furniture complemented by endless crayoned art work of birds and trees adorn the walls. Classes are small, with a 6-1 ratio of teachers to students, helping young children be prepared for kindergarten classes.

“They’re young,” said Serrano, “…but they’re prepared for kindergarten, socially, and even sometimes academically.”

Kids regularly use Play-Doh to sculpt letters in both languages in Serrano’s classroom, while simultaneously learning the various pronunciations. 

“We start with Spanish in the morning now, with English in the afternoon,” Serrano said.

Tagawa acknowledged that some parents may have concerns that such young children attending school is not productive, but emphasized the district would focus on “developmentally appropriate” skills. 

“As long as the students come,” said Tagawa, “we’re in a really good place.” 

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Prior to the Bill de Blasio administration (2014-2021), free pre-K in New York City was a patchwork of means-tested, half-day programs that served just under 20,000 4-year-olds. In his first year in office, Mayor de Blasio delivered on a campaign promise to create an expansive universal pre-K program. By the time of de Blasio’s exit, his administration had created an immensely popular program that served 90,000 children, transformed New York City’s early childhood education infrastructure and was on track to add another 30,000 seats for three-year-olds.

But in the fall of 2022, current Mayor Eric Adams announced a preliminary budget that reallocated $568 million away from universal pre-K and halted the expansion of 3K For All.��So, where did things go wrong? Senior Adams administration officials have argued that mismanagement under de Blasio has resulted in the uneven distribution of seats, including the “opening tens of thousands of seats where there isn’t family need and failing to open seats where the need exists.” Nathaniel Styer, press secretary for the New York City Department of Education, claims that a has resulted in a large number of open slots in low-income, immigrant neighborhoods of the city like Highbridge in the Bronx, and few open seats in wealthy communities.

For my graduate capstone thesis at the Department of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, I sought to understand why some of New York City’s most economically vulnerable residents are not making use of what should be an economic lifeline: free child care. I conducted research interviews with participants in four key stakeholder groups: parents, child care providers, former staff within the Division of Early Childhood Education, and policy experts.��My research aimed to unpack the “demand mismatch” theory and answer two questions:

1. Is there an unmet need for universal pre-K in low-income communities that is not captured by the way the Adams administration measures demand?
2. Are there barriers to information, access and enrollment that may be contributing to underutilization?

Here are my findings.

Finding: Universal pre-K may not have enough flexibility to match the diverse needs and preferences of New York City families.��

Many parents need child care before or after the traditional school day, on nights and weekends, and over the summer. In fact, of children in the United States have at least one parent who works non-traditional hours. The vast majority of New York City’s universal pre-K programs, however, are offered on a school-day/school-year calendar (6 hours and 20 minutes per day; 180 days per year) and only some community-based providers offer extended day and year programs primarily for families who meet Child Care Development Block Grant or Head Start eligibility criteria. found just 15% of 4-year-olds enrolled in universal pre-K received full-day, year round care and in some low-income communities less than 10% of pre-K seats were full-day, year-round.

Interviews confirmed that so few options for extended care may contribute to low utilization rates in low-income communities.��Elliot Haspel, author and expert on child and family policy, explained that “family needs for child care do not exist on a school-year, school-day basis. Often disproportionately, we know that lower income parents and parents of color tend to be those who are working shift jobs, and a high proportion of them are working non-traditional hours… So, the lack of flexibility can certainly be a barrier.”

A former staffer within the Division of Early Childhood Education, who requested anonymity in order to speak with me candidly, told me not being able to offer early or after-school hours was one of the biggest hurdles reported by principals. They also described the lack of extended hours as a “misalignment with what is being offered and what is needed in the community.”

For some parents, inflexible operation times can leave universal pre-K entirely out of reach. One mother, whose daughter is enrolled in a community-based center in Red Hook, said start times for some pre-K centers conflicted with the ferry schedule. Choosing to send their child to one of those programs would mean she or her spouse would be late to work every day, and therefore they did not apply.��

Finding: There may be demand for home-based family child care, but that need is not reflected in the composition of universal pre-K.

Enrolling in universal pre-K programs at district schools or formal child care centers may work for some families, but other families prefer different options. A argues that due to a “lack of multilingual staff, rigid schedules, and limited programming that is culturally and linguistically responsive, formal child care centers historically have not fully met the needs of immigrant communities, and particularly low-income immigrant communities.”

Julie Kashen, senior fellow and director for Women’s Economic Justice at the Century Foundation, said ��that home-based family child care is an option , especially those who are looking for a cultural or linguistic match and/or who require extended or nontraditional hours of care. These program options, however, are not offered for pre-K and are very much awith typically only a few hundred family child care seats.

A former DOE staffer, who requested anonymity, expressed that home-based family child care providers “are not technically excluded, but the way that the system is constructed ends up resulting in it being really difficult for them to be able to participate.”��He explained that New York City’s complex contracting process for its universal pre-K programs can shut family child care providers out, and thus, an arrangement that attracts low-income, immigrant communities remains out of reach.

Finding: Sustained outreach is necessary to engage low-income and immigrant communities, and scaling back the outreach initiatives could contribute to low utilization rates.��

The de Blasio administration focused heavily on outreach to reach families who may not typically have a high level of engagement with government agencies. There were borough- and neighborhood-specific outreach teams equipped with materials like palm cards and flyers available in all DOE languages, and there was on-the-ground support, including canvassing, days of action at shelters and events at libraries to bolster enrollment. Coordinated outreach and partnership with trusted community members has among “hard to reach” low-income and immigrant communities.

My interviews with former DOE staffers, however, revealed that the Division of Early Childhood Education under Adams has been plagued by understaffing and has significantly scaled back outreach initiatives. The Division of Early Childhood Education is across all divisions at City agencies. Members of the neighborhood and borough-specific teams have reportedly been and there is more focus on automated forms of outreach like , which are not nearly as effective in engaging low-income families, especially those who may have had previous negative experiences interacting with government agencies or who are undocumented.

After months of negotiation and just a few weeks after my capstone was published, the New York City Council voted to that restores universal pre-K funding and supports efforts to convert 1,800 3K seats from school-day/school-year seats to extended day/extended year seats. The final budget is a huge sigh of relief for early childhood education advocates who feared Adams’ proposed cuts, but the future of universal pre-K remains uncertain.

My research only begins to scratch the surface of this issue, but it does suggest that demand for universal pre-K is more complex than a simple measurement of seats vs. students. As the Adams administration continues to make staffing, strategic and budgeting decisions about universal pre-K, it should not assume that open seats means that there is no demand.

Instead of strategizing ways to reduce the size and scope of universal pre-K, it should invest in resources to help parents navigate the complicated enrollment process and ensure low-income communities can enroll in programs that fit their needs.

Working with organizations like to increase the number of licensed home-based family child care providers who participate in the program, reengaging the outreach teams and strengthening partnerships with on-the-ground trusted community organizations, and offering more extended day, full-year programming options could improve utilization rates in low-income communities.

At a December 2022 press conference, Mayor Adams stated “A true universal program prioritizes and serves every child, every day, in partnership with families and reflects the needs of the community.” It is up to the Adams administration to continue the legacy of universal pre-K and ensure that it is truly universal.