Grades are a standard part of the American educational system that most students and teachers take for granted.

For nearly two decades, Scott Kern has worked to make history feel more alive for Newark students. He does so through close readings of Fredrick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech or, most recently, by weaving artificial intelligence tools into his classroom.

Kern, the AI innovation lead and history department chair at North Star Academy’s Washington Park High School, teaches AP U.S. history to ninth and 11th graders. He joined North Star in 2007 and has spent the last decade at the charter network’s Washington Park campus.

Kern didn’t always envision himself in the classroom. In high school, he enrolled in a world history course instead of orchestra after realizing he had reached his full potential on the violin. That switch set the tone for his career. A standout teacher sparked his fascination for the past and “started a love affair with history that hasn’t abated since,” Kern said.

Now, in his 19th year of teaching, Kern reflected on the lessons that shaped him, why his favorite lesson still surprises him every year, and how AI is influencing what happens inside his Newark classroom.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How and when did you decide to become a teacher?

I was certain I would do something with history as a ninth grader. In middle school, I played the violin and was in the orchestra, but it was pretty clear that I had peaked. So I had to meet with my guidance counselor to reconfigure my schedule and replace orchestra. That replacement class happened to be world history. That class and that teacher – Mr. Bentivegna – changed my life and started a love affair with history that hasn’t abated since. I majored in history in college and earned a bachelor of arts, then headed to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in history. One day, when I was at the library working on an esoteric paper for a graduate medieval history class, I started to wonder if this was really what I wanted to do with my life (the answer was “no”). I thought about the people who really changed my life and why, and it was my teachers. After that reflection, I finished my master’s degree, went for yet another master’s degree, and have been teaching history ever since.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

My favorite is our close reading of a portion of Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech from 1852. I just love everything about it. You have one of the greatest speakers in American history, invited by a group of abolitionist women in New York to give a speech honoring American independence. I try to transport students there. We picture all of these women sitting in their seats and imagining that he is going to thank them and deliver this soaring speech about the Fourth of July and instead, it’s an excoriation. Abolitionists in 1852 are losing – America has just passed a fugitive slave law that endangers all African Americans, including Douglass himself, and slavery is becoming increasingly entrenched in American society.

We zoom out to consider Douglass’s purpose, audience, and word choice. Why would Douglass have come out so intensely in this way? Was this the right message for this audience at this moment in history? What can this tell us about how leaders of social movements try to effect change?

Students are absolutely enthralled every year. We only read a few paragraphs, but they always find something new that surprises. ����’s a reminder that history is complicated and beautiful and that we need to bring it to life for students.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom?

Artificial Intelligence is affecting Newark and pretty much every other community in America. I’ve been using AI tools with students for the last two years, such as custom chatbots that I’ve built to help students revise their writing and or debate ideas before class discussions.

The results so far have been really encouraging. Last year, I had my highest AP scores and pass rate ever. I’m also co-teaching an AI literacy class for seniors starting in January and hope to expand it next fall. The goal is not just to teach them how to use these tools, but how to think about them and the world in a humanistic way.

How do you approach news events in your classroom?

We often look at how history echoes the present. Sometimes it’s in the hook and close of class to engage students in the content and then connect it to broader events that will help them see the trends in history.

When we studied the Douglass speech example from earlier, we started off class with pictures of the American flag – one at an ICE protest in L.A. and another from a Fourth of July parade. Students reflected on how the symbol of the flag can evoke different meanings depending on the context. That helped students see how Douglass and his audience could experience the same holiday in very different ways.

Tell us about your own experience with school and how it affects your work today.

I was an underachiever and a procrastinator for a long time. Some great teachers tried to pull me along, but it never clicked for me. That experience makes me hyper-aware of students who are capable but aren’t intrinsically motivated. If my teachers had let me just float in that state, my life would be very different. I’d like to think I’m doing the same thing – trying to nudge students along to reach their potential.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

The best advice I ever got was from my father, who encouraged me to be committed to whatever I chose to do. That has framed much of my life since. I knew I wasn’t going to be the smartest or the fastest at anything, but I could control my effort. Over time, I was determined to commit to things and try to out-hustle everyone else. Teaching isn’t a competition, but it has required extraordinary levels of commitment over the years. I credit my father for instilling that drive in me.

What’s one thing you’ve read that has made you a better educator?

Reading Zaretta Hammond’s “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain” felt like a strong pedagogical approach to teaching that I believed in and had seen in class. Her explanation of how the brain’s amygdala shuts down when threatened makes higher-order learning nearly impossible. When students feel threatened, their brains shut off the ability to do meaningful learning. It spoke to me deeply and reinforced my belief that a physically and intellectually safe environment is important for meaningful learning.

How do you take care of yourself when you’re not at work?

Friends and family are my priority outside of work. We have family rituals that keep me grounded. Family dinner at the table with no devices is obligatory except on Friday, which is movie night. We spread a blanket on the floor for our kids, and we have dinner and a movie together. I also try to get together with a group of friends at least once a week, usually to play board games. I love that board games bring people together in an analog way that promotes dialogue and human connection.

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

Wildfires devastated the Los Angeles community of the Pacific Palisades that night, destroying homes and businesses, transforming a neighborhood forever. Palisades Charter Elementary was among three schools that burned there. 

Palisades Charter Elementary has since moved to a temporary home at a school in Brentwood, while L.A. Unified executes a multi-year plan to replace its ravaged Palisades campus. 

In an interview with LA School Report, Herman shares how she’s keeping her school community together amid the loss and trauma of the worst wildfires in the city’s history.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What did the burning of your school community and your school’s campus in January mean for the individual members of the community?

I remember thinking on that night, ‘I don’t know how to be the principal of a school that’s burned down,’ because that’s not actually in the principal playbook anywhere. They don’t teach you that in principal preparation school. 

I don’t actually know how many members of my school lost their homes. However, anyone who lived up in the Palisades has been displaced, and their lives changed inexorably since that moment. 

It certainly has changed all of us and brought us together in a really unique way.

How are your students and staff reacting to life at Brentwood Science Magnet (school) where your school was relocated after your original campus burned? 

����’s been a really great place for us to land. The students are very happy to be together. They’re very happy to be with their teachers. That’s really critical. They’re having a lot of fun. 

We didn’t have tetherball at our old school, so tetherball is a big hit. And the fact that the students get to just enjoy this great space is kind of amazing. 

So it’s been really joyful to watch the students interact with one another and process what’s been going on, and be together. 

Immediately after the school burned down and you knew that students wouldn’t be able to return very soon, did they immediately go to Brentwood Science Magnet? Or was there a period of online school or other transition?

The school was lost on the evening of January 7, and by the Friday of that week, I knew that we were coming to the Brentwood Science Magnet school. 

We had Monday and Tuesday of the following week for teachers to prepare, and on Wednesday, March 15, we opened our doors for students. 

So there was no online school. There was no real loss in continuity. I knew that when we had a return, it would be a rolling return because families were trying to organize themselves.

Do you think that’s led to the community staying together more easily than if there were a period of online learning? 

I think it has had a hugely positive effect on our community, and it has really been instrumental in laying the foundation for the healing process. We are not suddenly all better, but I think in-person learning really did provide continuity for kids.

How do you keep displaced families from leaving the school?  

On January 6, our enrollment was, I think, 406 students. And as of today, it’s about 350 students. I know that we lost a good number of students who moved out of the area pretty immediately. 

Then, there were a number of families who were displaced and unable to return. 

And then there are some other families who we’re in conversation with regarding their personal situations, and providing them options. 

How are you addressing trauma?

Students are still experiencing trauma. Teachers are still experiencing it. For all of us, we lost our school. This is a very, very, very significant event.  

The district has been wonderful about providing mental health support. We have several partnerships that we are working on and extra personnel from the district who have that background that can really support students, not just in this moment, not just for the next few months, but in the years to come.

How has this whole ordeal of the fire and relocating impacted academics and attendance?

We don’t really know yet about the impact for students. We’re preparing to take state tests, and we’re monitoring students to ensure they have support. I have an amazing faculty, and they are adapting and adjusting their instructional practices. 

In terms of attendance, this is a moment, again, where our old playbook is not really applied any longer. I know the district has been very focused on making sure students come to school. 

We do pretty well. We’re at about a 90% daily attendance rate. Sometimes we’re super flexible about when students arrive, because they may be coming from one place last week and a different place this week. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I’m super proud of the way that we have come together as a community. I’m super proud to work with Los Angeles Unified [School District] and have their support in addressing this crisis in a very thoughtful and careful and fast way to ensure that our students have a safe place to go to school. 

I’m happy to be at the Brentwood Science Magnet campus, and I look forward to whatever our next steps are. 

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

’s K-8 public school students are being taught a new literacy curriculum starting in the 2024-2025 school year. ����’s called , and it conforms with what literacy experts call the , which are research-based skills needed to become a strong reader.

Just 43.1% of LA Unified students met state proficiency targets in reading in the 2023-24 school year, compared with 44.1% in the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, Families in Schools is one local organization that’s trying to boost literacy rates in LA whose ideas seem to be catching on.

In an on the district’s literacy crisis published in February, the group called for LAUSD to adopt more approaches aligned with the science of reading, which .  

And now, Families in Schools is working on more programs to boost literacy in LAUSD schools under an effort called ReadLA.

In an interview with LA School Report, Olga Corona de la Cruz, the Senior Campaign Director of the ReadLA program at Families in Schools, discusses the work underway and what the district should do next. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Could you tell me a bit about yourself and your background? 

I am a first-generation and former English language learner. When I think about the key factors that influence my ability to learn to read, I think about my parents, who did not have a formal education. However, they knew the value of attaining an education. 

And, while I know that it’s not on our families to ensure we’re learning to read, it is definitely a partnership between our school systems, our educators and our families, that helps young people and students to thrive and succeed. 

You grew up in Watsonville, CA as the daughter of Mexican immigrants. How does your personal experience in the public school system inform the work you’re doing today? 

Watsonville is a small agricultural town. It’s mostly Mexican immigrants. My parents became my biggest advocates, and that’s what Families in Schools does. We uplift our families, we inform our families, and then we give them more tools and resources to become the biggest advocates of their children. 

What did it feel like to learn English at school, for you personally? 

And as soon as I was dropped off [for class], I realized I had no idea what was going on. Everyone was speaking English. I remember going into my classroom and feeling confused and feeling scared. I remember trying to interact with other students, and because I didn’t know English, I was made fun of, I was bullied. 

What’s one thing that LAUSD is getting right, in terms of its efforts to raise literacy rates for poor kids of color? 

Something that they’re doing really well is they created a that shows the LAUSD strategic plan. And one of the pillars is academic excellence. When they talk about academic excellence, specifically, they’re talking about the quality of instruction, having enriching experiences for students and ways to build equity within all the students that they’re working with. With that, they also have a goal to increase ELA assessment scores by 30 points. 

Having clear goals is so important, and so just them being able to share that with our families, I think it’s one right step in moving forward.

What’s your take on how programming for minority kids in LAUSD , and where should it be going?  

The fact is that we need to do more. We need to be more intentional about listening to families, collaborating with community leaders, designing programs that directly support the needs of our students.

Why is the science of reading important as part of that effort? 

Science of reading is not a method nor a curriculum nor an approach. It is a body of evidence based on decades of research that explains how the brain learns to read and the foundational skills that students need to become proficient readers. 

����’s about how the brain works and how children learn to read. So this requires explicit, systematic instruction, what are called the foundational skills, which are phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency and oral language. 

What’s the best evidence we have for the success of this approach?

Often the state that is referenced the most for implementing statewide policy and seeing change is Mississippi, where they went from being ranked 49th in ELA in 2013 to 21st in 2022. That’s a huge change. It took time, but the positive impact of implementing evidence based instruction is there. 

Is there anything that was done there that you think would be effective in LA as well? 

This begins with ongoing professional development. LAUSD science of reading and evidence based instruction practices. But ongoing professional development for teachers, coaching, support for all principals, to ensure that literacy instruction is aligned with science of reading, more intervention and support for students who have more challenges and closely monitoring data, and stronger family engagement practices and communication [would also be good]. 

Different groups could help solve this issue. There’s school districts, the state lawmakers, local lawmakers, parents and families and then other community partners. Which group would you say has the most responsibility in this crisis? 

We all have a role to play. This education system is so intertwined. And everyone that is impacted has an opportunity to play a role, whether it is parents advocating for their children, the district continuing to support evidence based instruction, and then at the state level, enacting policy change that will support all of this work. This is really a problem with a responsibility that falls on all of us.

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

Early Learning Nation: I’ve seen you speak a few times, and one of the moments that always gets a strong reaction is when you show that the early childhood field makes it all more complicated than it has to be.

Marica Cox Michell: We throw all these terms at families — child care, day care, early learning, preschool, Head Start, pre-K —�� and are like, “Figure it out.” The response tends to be, “I don’t know what these even mean.” ����’s too much complexity to throw at families and for the workforce as well.

So there’s a better way to talk about it.

We had to create a new lexicon to make it make sense. And so, there are two child care options. Only two. One is an Early Childhood Education Program. This can exist in a school building, a house, a condo, a church basement or community center. The other type is a Trusted Caregiver. This is essentially the family saying, “I can handle this myself.” It could be someone working from home. It could be an amazing grandmother living in a three-generation household.��

Neither option is inherently better than the other.

There’s no hierarchy. ����’s also fluid. A family, for the first six months, might want a trusted caregiver. And things might shift, and they might want an early childhood education program. Child care policies should flatten the hierarchy to better align with what families want.��

That sweeps away a lot of the confusion and cobwebs. There are programs, and there are trusted caregivers, and the families themselves need to have a say in which is right for them.

I often say, “Simplicity is going to be the child care innovation.”��

And then we can tackle the real problems. How does the Bainum Family Foundation view the state of child care in the United States?

Child care is under-resourced and undervalued.��

Funding tends to be episodic, whether it’s philanthropy or government. This funding is bringing some long-term stabilized resources to this sector. It also allows our partners the freedom to be innovative and to develop solutions that can pave the way for systems change.��

We are not episodic with our funding. We are committed to the early childhood sector and dedicated to supporting its advancement. For example, our initiative is about partnering with “proximity experts” (families and early childhood education professionals with lived experiences and specialized expertise) to define solutions and to direct our investments.

Do you feel a sense of momentum around child care right now?

I’m excited about the visibility of the discourse around child care and the diversity of who’s engaged in this conversation. Gone are the days where you show up at a national or local meeting around issues impacting young children, and you only see the early childhood advocates talking amongst themselves.��

Where else do you see opportunity?

There’s also been a shift from focusing solely on the problem to focusing on the solutions. The conversation’s shifting away from, Tell us more about how bad the child care system is. Now it’s about What can we do?��

����’s about tangible solutions, whether they’re incremental or transformative.��

There have been important advances in D.C., but then a few months ago they were almost lost.

Yes. Advocates were able to increase awareness, and a large portion of the D.C. Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund that was not in the Mayor’s budget was restored.

It shows that you have a network of advocates ready to respond when there’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. People come together and know how to work together and collaborate.

It also shows the importance of stabilized long-term funding. It creates stability for the rapid response that we saw from the advocates in D.C. It is important for the sector, whether advocates or direct service providers, to have that level of stability to respond to the ever-changing context that they operate in.

What should our readers know about Florida?��

For us, as we look at the early childhood landscape there, it reinforces the notion that early childhood issues are bipartisan.��

For example, early learning is being elevated in conversations around economics and labor productivity, so the Florida Chamber of Commerce is very active, because it’s about the workforce of the future, but the well-being of young children and families is also a part of the discussion.��

How did you get into this issue? What makes you passionate about it?��

I started my career almost 26 years ago as an early childhood educator, and I always saw the gap between research, policy and practice. I was always committed to narrowing that gap.

You experienced the inequities firsthand.

Oh yeah, definitely. My work was as rigorous as that of my peers in elementary schools and high schools. We were on the same college campus, oftentimes taking the same courses, but our compensation and societal recognition varied. We were penalized because we chose to work with younger children. I also saw what families were asking for, and how their needs were not prioritized.��

When I left the classroom, I sought to narrow that gap. To flip the script.

There’s a feeling that the stakes are high right now for child care. Things are changing, but are we going to get it right this time?

����’s Define yourself or be defined.��

I recall a quote from one of our proximity experts, who said, “I don’t want to be a victim of the future, I want to shape it.” Through WeVision EarlyEd, we are creating room for those most proximate to shape the future of child care. And as philanthropists, taxpayers, lawmakers and policy influencers we should shift our focus and funding to making their ideal real.

is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Q: Can a school ban a child from praying, or do schools have to provide accommodations for children with certain beliefs? – Isaac T., 17, Flint, Michigan

Swartz: How does your team determine the degree of play-based learning?

Pyle: Our Continuum of Play-Based Learning breaks down play-based learning into sub-components. Each type of play in the continuum is determined by how much agency children have and how much agency adults have. The intent behind this continuum, and all the research that we do in the lab, is really to support teachers by building on what they know and helping them do better.

Swartz: Where is the sweet spot along that continuum?

Pyle: The research points to shared agency as the point where educators can make learning really meaningful and still give kids agency and excitement.

Swartz: How did you get into play research?

Pyle: I was a classroom teacher for several years before I went back to graduate school. I had every intention of returning to the classroom, but in 2010, as I started to do my dissertation, the Ontario government started to phase in its play-based learning model for 4- and 5-year-olds. Teachers were struggling with the new reality.

Swartz: What kind of challenges were they experiencing?

Pyle: We don’t have high-stakes testing like in the States, but there’s still a real accountability lens in our system when it comes to assessment and evaluation. Teachers were asking, “How do I do that when I’m supposed to do play, so I’m following their lead?” I wanted to find out where they got the message that play meant always following children’s lead. We started to unpack the reality that, actually, our curriculum is intended to be child-centered, not child-directed. We needed to understand how to help educators recognize the difference.

Swartz: What did you learn from talking to teachers?

Pyle: They all see the social-emotional value of play. They understand it’s important for young children, especially because they need to learn cooperation, good social skills, problem solving, how to communicate effectively, how to self-regulate their thoughts and emotions and reactions to things. But there’s a group of teachers who believe that the academic piece, all the other learning stuff, happens totally separately. With this group, while the kids were playing, they would be pulling kids over. They’d be like, “Come over here and I’ll do some serious teaching with you at the table.” And then they have whole group lessons where they bring everyone together and the kids just sit and listen.

Swartz: So play and learning are separated, and you’re talking about integrating them.

Pyle: Maybe I’m just being optimistic and I do prefer to live in that mindset, but I feel really positive that actually these things can still happen in the context of play.

Swartz: Some teachers already get that, right?

Pyle: Yes, there are many who align with more contemporary notions of play-based learning. They see it as a useful approach for engaging kids, giving them agency in their own learning. They see it can be used to teach academic skills as well and social-emotional skills. So they still have that free play that’s child directed, and they don’t get involved in unless they’re needed.

But then they also thoughtfully design playful contexts or games that will help. So when it comes to fundamental literacy skills, they design games to help them learn those skills—games where they look at rhyming words or alphabet games. And then they’ll thoughtfully design contexts of play where they can interact with kids and sort of scaffold kids’ learning.

Swartz: What does that look like in the classroom?

Pyle: I visited a classroom that decided to set up a pretend veterinary clinic and observed how the teacher then infused other pieces into it. So she was just like, “You know what? We should have patient charts so you can record who came in and what they needed. We should have appointment cards so they know when they’re supposed to come back.”

Swartz: You can take that in a lot of different directions.

Pyle: One day the kids were having a heated argument about whether or not the giraffe’s leg was broken. And one of the kids finally shouts, “You can’t know that because you can’t see inside.” So the educator comes in and says, “Actually, there’s a tool for that.” And another child shouts, “Oh, I know about it. ����’s an X-ray, because my brother had one of those because he broke his arm.”

So then it became really exciting again, and the kids were like, “Okay. Well, we need one, obviously. To solve this giraffe mystery, we need an X-ray machine.” Of course they made it out of cardboard boxes. And then the educator points out, “You need the X-rays that are going to come out of it, so let’s look up what that looks like online and you can create your own.”

Swartz: And she worked reading into the game, too?

Pyle: Right. ����’s a bit unfair to think four- and five-year-olds are going to teach themselves really hardcore difficult skills like reading and writing, but the educator incorporated books about animals, so that kids could look things up if they needed to, and she provided direct support to students using their sounds to label the x-rays they created.

Swartz: What’s next for your research?

Pyle: We’re just finishing up a project right now that looks at creating a tool for educators to help them determine how successful their play activities are, from their children’s perspectives. ����’s a self-reflective tool that we designed with researchers and educators in Colombia, Bangladesh and Uganda, where there’s very limited access to education and professional development for teachers.

Swartz: Do teachers in the U.S., Canada and Europe have something to learn from the teachers in the Global South?

Pyle: Absolutely, we have a lot to learn from them. I think their creativity has to be better than ours at the moment. As I worked on this project, I had a lot of humbling moments. ����’s been very useful to try and think about how we can help support educators and create resources for the majority world, where they don’t have all of these things that we think we need in every classroom.

Casey Stockstill, Dartmouth College sociologist and author of , and Halley Potter, senior fellow and director of PK-12 education policy at the Century Foundation, want to change that. They’ve joined forces to identify successful economically integrated early education programs and document what they look like and how they make it work. I was excited to hear about their work. In my reporting, I too have explored those , including a my kids attended. So, I reached out to Stockstill and Potter to learn more about their work. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Kendra Hurley: Why do you think segregation in early education remains so under the radar compared to K-12, and what do we lose when we don’t speak about it, or address it?

Halley Potter: Part of the challenge of talking about segregation in early education is that we haven’t fixed the question of access yet. For all of the challenges in our public schools, at least we have a guaranteed right to an education for students once they start kindergarten. But in early ed, because we still need to make sure more children have access to quality early learning, that’s where most of the conversation stays. But we do need to be having the conversation about segregation as we’re having the conversation about access. If we don’t, then we can end up expanding access on the backbone of our highly inequitable and segregated system.

And that’s a big missed opportunity, because in many ways, early learning environments are best set up to take advantage of a lot of the benefits of diverse educational settings. High quality early learning is play-based — it’s about children interacting with each other— so there’s this great opportunity to have children coming in with different experiences and different vocabularies, creating a really rich learning environment.

Also, parents are talking to teachers more, and [it’s] kind of the whole family coming in to the learning environment, so a diverse community in a classroom can lead to benefits for families as well. You [might] have social connections between a parent who’s looking for a job and a parent who’s looking to hire someone, or knows about a job opening.

There’s evidence that parents are the most receptive and excited about diverse learning environments, during children’s early years. I think of that, and I think, “Let’s capitalize on that.” Getting kids in early education programs when they’re young could help families see the value in that early on, and that might influence their education choices and the ways that they show up in different educational spaces as their kids get older, too.

Casey Stockstill: For many parents, child care is their introduction to school.��So, it’s what��they get used to in terms of their child’s classmates, and how to engage with the teacher, and what to expect.

Also, teaching kids can look really different when you have segregated classrooms. In my book, I observe a Head Start classroom where you have six kids experiencing issues at home because of poverty, or they’re new to preschool because their family moves all the time because of poverty.

Teachers are dealing with those issues, and that can take away time from things like sitting down and reading a book calmly with a child. We add a list of demands to teachers when we give them a classroom of students who are all in poverty. And when you think about majority white preschools, where there’s one or two kids of color with a white teacher, sometimes that doesn’t communicate that it’s welcoming to kids of color. So, I wonder how segregation is making it harder for preschools to do this work of closing equity gaps. I don’t think separate is equal here either.

Hurley: There are so many barriers to integration in early education, parent choice being one of them. How did you choose to focus on programs that are tackling it with funding solutions?

Potter: We have this fractured early education system. We have private programs that charge tuition that is typically unaffordable to lower income families. And then we have many public programs like Head Start which are only open to low-income families, or to children who have met certain other criteria for risk factors. So, we’re set up for segregation.

The real solution is big public investments in early education that make it possible for everyone to access this together. But until we get there, we have to work with the fractured, flawed system we have, and one of the ways to do that is to create more programs that are accepting multiple types of funding streams. And then we can have multiple types of families enrolled.

Stockstill: Bringing different funding streams together (called blending and braiding funding) is the first step to increased accessibility for Black, Latino and Indigenous families. That’s because we have racial gaps in income and wealth. So, if you have a private program that is expensive and inaccessible to middle-income or lower-income families, that program is going to shut out a disproportionate share of Black, Latino and Indigenous families. There’s a hope that programs that do the blending and braiding will also consider racial equity and inclusion, and make their programs welcoming to children and families of color.

Hurley: Tell me about the project you’re working on to that end.

Potter: We’re building a list of early childhood programs that are doing different types of blending and braiding of funding, and are using that as a way to enroll children from diverse backgrounds, diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, but also diverse racial backgrounds, and in some cases linguistic diversity and diversity of ability. And part of that will be in-depth profiles of some programs. We’re hoping that showing examples of where a funding strategy has been leveraged to create diversity will help increase the appetite to do that, answer some questions about strategies that work, and also serve as an advocacy tool.

In most cases, blending and braiding really feels like pushing against the tide. If you are a Head Start provider and you want to enroll families who pay tuition, there aren’t a lot of supports to make that happen. If you’re at a private preschool and you’re interested in taking children with child care subsidies, again, it’s usually up to you to figure it out.

Stockstill: I hear quite a bit from directors who say, “We accept the subsidy, but we don’t have any families using it.” And if a family goes through an income loss or can’t make a payment, there are programs that want to be able to continue supporting them. And what I tell them is, “Having a [mixed] funding structure is the answer.” So, there’s this appetite for inclusion, but there are these missing links.

And there are parents who would like a diverse early learning environment. You just usually can’t find one, because we know two-thirds of these programs are segregated. I see it as being helpful to certain programs to offer an integrated program, and to kind of sell that as a plus to affluent parents who basically have more choice.

Hurley: What about the big chain child care programs like Kindercare, Bright Horizons and Primrose? Few of their centers take subsidies or vouchers and their tuition is often quite high, making them inaccessible to many families. Yet they’re capturing a bigger and bigger share of the child care market. Are you planning to look at what they might do to diversity their funding and families?

Stockstill: This category of child care that are chains that do franchising charge the highest tuition, and they do not pay teachers more. For them, it’s profit-seeking. And the administrative cost of blending and braiding funding streams, and also accepting the subsidy rate does not lend well to profit.

There’s always a gap between the subsidy rate — which is what the government offers you to provide care to a kid on the subsidy program — and what programs actually need to serve that kid well. And a lot of the successfully diverse programs like or All Five in Menlo Park, California, make up that difference, through fundraising, or they’ll charge affluent families even more and let them subsidize the diversity. But all of that takes a commitment and an administrative savviness that I don’t see the chains being interested in.

Hurley: Casey, you’re working on program profiles for this project. What have you seen on visits to diverse child care programs that makes you hopeful?����

Stockstill: My favorite thing is hearing the stories of continuity of learning and care for the children. The Auraria Early Learning Center at the Auraria Higher Education Center in Colorado, serves student parents who are eligible for Head Start alongside faculty who pay full tuition. When the students graduate, they suddenly earn a higher income.

So they’re now past eligibility requirements for Head Start, but they can’t afford the $1,200 a month for care. If a family went to a pure Head Start program, they would have to move centers because they’re no longer eligible for Head Start. But because the program has mixed funding, their children can stay as they increase their income or the reverse, like if someone loses the job. It’s like, “you still get to be in this school; you still deserve to come here; it’s not about how much money your family makes.” I love that.

Are you a teacher or parent in a diverse child care program? Reach out to Halley Potter and Casey Stockstill by writing to potter@tcf.org.��

from the Foundation for Child Development (FCD) explores the impact of the supercharged CTC and other temporary policies supporting young children and their families. It then suggests lessons drawn from advocates and organizers for permanently reducing poverty and hardship among children and families.

Early Learning Nation spoke to FCD senior policy advisor Dr. Olivia Golden, who coauthored the report with the foundation’s President and CEO Dr. Vivian Tseng. Golden is the former commissioner for children, youth and families, and assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In July, she returns to the as interim executive director.

Mark Swartz: What surprised you most about the data you uncovered?

Olivia Golden: To me, the big surprise was the scale of success. The Census Bureau’s published poverty data tell you about children, but to get the data on young children in particular, the did new analysis for us. In particular, the drop from 24% to 11% for young Black children, and the drop from 22% to 9% for young children in Latino families, were hugely impressive.

Swartz: And the consequences rippled out to the states as well.

Golden: Before starting the paper, I didn’t know or even suspect how many states enacted and implemented their own refundable CTCs — three in 2022 and 19 in 2023. The big movement on the federal level during the pandemic not only helped families during the years it was active but prompted this action in some states. We saw a virtuous cycle where federal and state influenced each other.

Swartz: At one point, it looked like the expanded CTC might remain in effect, with Build Back Better legislation that passed in the House and came close to passing in the Senate.

Golden: There was also a guarantee of child care with either no fee for low-income families or an affordable fee for middle- and moderate-income families. There was paid family and medical leave.

Swartz: Build Back Better missed by one vote in the Senate.��

Golden: Having worked on child and family issues for four decades, getting these policies so close to enactment — along with this level of investment in the temporary policies — is an unprecedented, positive change. That’s the reason we wrote the paper. ����’s worth taking a moment to explore how it happened and what lessons can we take forward.

Swartz: One of those lessons had to do with harnessing the power of parent voice, especially from families of color and immigrant families.��

Golden: Yes, the voices and organizing of both parents and caregivers. That was really interesting to me, given my long history in this work. If you go back to the Great Society and Head Start, you see a central role for parents, but then for decades, a lot of leaders in the early childhood community became less focused on it. The conventional wisdom has been it’s hard to organize parents. But this is now happening on an impressive scale.

Swartz: How is policy improved when advocates engage families?

Golden: Here’s one example: When the federal money came, the state of California could use it really quickly because had talked to parents all over the state. Parents had signaled that their biggest priority was getting rid of parent fees required of families who receive public child care assistance. Another example concerns immigrant families. From the first pandemic response legislation to the American Rescue Plan legislation, the availability of help for children in immigrant families increased greatly, in what was a very short period of time. Immigrant families were substantially , and so telling their story helped to correct that policy failure.

Swartz: Which players in the advocacy ecosystem especially stand out?

Golden: We heard from so many people of the value of the , which puts parents and families together with caregivers to focus on . That’s been a powerful force for children. Caregivers matter as much as family members, but they haven’t always been included in advocacy. We also talked to many parent organizing groups and to groups that center children most marginalized, such as the Children Thrive Action Network and Protecting Immigrant Families.

Swartz: What other opportunities do you see?

Golden: When you look at what worked in the pandemic response and what came close in the Build Back Better law, there are so many important policies to go back to. We’ve talked about the CTC, child care and paid leave — there’s also health, nutrition and housing. Housing continues to be a priority. The research tells us how important stability is to young children, but families with young children are especially likely to be evicted. ����’s a very tough period in a family’s life.

Swartz: How do data and analysis translate into policy change?

Golden: We heard one story of a convening that brought together organizers and advocates to talk about child care in the state of Michigan. The state wasn’t drawing down all its federal money. After hearing policy experts say, “Michigan is just turning away tens of millions of dollars,” the organizers said, “Oh, wow. That’s the kind of thing we can organize about. We know how to deal with that.” And they succeeded in changing policy. The whole idea of a coalition is that we don’t all have to be good at everything, but we have to have a framework where we can each do our part really well.

Swartz: And that’s not free, right?��

Golden: The infrastructure of social justice absolutely needs more support, which means staffing, skill-building and time for making coalitions work. Foundations should support those roles and take the long view because change doesn’t happen instantly. They need to understand you have to be able to go through temporary losses to gain a long-term win.

Swartz: And FCD is evolving in that direction as well?

Golden: FCD has a 125-year history of taking the long view in support of children, with the flexibility that’s needed to evolve strategies over time. This paper, based on 30 interviews, exemplifies the approach of first listening to people. FCD is on an exciting journey, as it explores being a social justice funder for young children and centering children who’ve been marginalized because of racism, xenophobia and economic inequality.

Swartz: What do you see as the next steps for advocates?

Golden: Not giving up — and finding inspiration in the amazing people doing the work. Losses in the moment often lead to or underlie the next round of progress. Supporting economic security and well-being for families means paid leave, health insurance, food and funding child care and housing as well as the CTC. Moving forward on these issues is going to be central for the future of the U.S. When parents do better, children do better.

On an upcoming webinar, Lloyd and Shaw will highlight learnings from the recently released study, covering the historical role of public agencies and academia in supporting research on Black families; the implications; how Black family demographics have changed over time; and the ways in which research, policy and practice must shift to attend to historical and contemporary challenges important for Black families. Dr. Shauna M. Cooper from the , Natalie Williams from the and Dr. Brenda Jones Harden from the ��will share their responses to the findings.

Mark Swartz: How did you pick this topic for your research?

Chrishana Lloyd: I try to write the papers that I myself want to read or to cite. This project emerged from the observation that, historically, much of the work about Black families has been problem centered.

Swartz: Can you say more about that?

Lloyd: A lot of the work has been funded by the government, and the government has an interest in ensuring the well-being of citizens, so when you examine research about Black families, you’re seeing papers about poverty, crime, that kind of thing. Someone is saying, “We’ve got these Black people who are not doing very well, and what can we do to fix it?” That’s certainly the case with the 1965 [Daniel] Moynihan Report, . Sometimes that has worked against the interests of Black families. A lot of times, actually.

Swartz: Research costs money. How do funding issues influence research?

Lloyd: The resources shape and set the tone of what gets researched and how it happens. The money has to run through organizations like universities and think-tanks, and those entities have or bring people in to do the research.

As a result, the voices of the communities often get lost. I am very intentional in my work to ensure this does not happen. For example, in a current project, I am collaborating with a community member who is a primary investigator with me. We’ve worked side-by-side on everything from conceptualizing the research design to the final stages of the project.

Swartz: What’s the alternative to focusing on families and their problems?

Lloyd: W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1899, which precedes volume I of this review and he set the stage. He started teasing out systemic issues and noted that societal norms, values and social standards were based on the lives and experiences of white America. There was an idea of what a family is and what it should look like, and that was the ideal. When you didn’t fit that ideal, you had a problem.

Swartz: Stereotypes lead to bad research, which leads to bad policy — is that right?

Lloyd: Yes. Historically, a lot of our social policy is based on research on and ideas about one type of Black family: urban, poor and matriarchal. And that certainly is not what all Black families look like.

Swartz: The U.S. census is a valuable research dataset, if only to shed light on the biases in its design.

Lloyd: It definitely shows us that racial categories change over time. In 1920, the options were white, black, mulatto, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hindu, Korean and “other.” The census taker, known as an enumerator, would show up say, “Okay, there’s a Black guy, or there’s a white guy.”

I discovered that I have a great-great-grandmother, an indentured servant, who was white, but everybody else in that home identified as Black. So if she had been the one to answer that door for the enumerator, that family would have been counted as white.

Swartz: You highlight a number of scholars, Black and white, who put forth iconoclastic perspectives on family issues. Who are some we should know about?

Lloyd: Melville J. Herskovits identified commonalities between African and African Americans back in the 1930s, an uncommon perspective that at the time was refuted.

And Oliver Cox conducted research around marriageable Black men, anticipating the work of William Julius Wilson in many ways. Cox was phenomenal in his thinking and his rigor. He actually drove people crazy. In the education space, there were scholars such as Horace Mann Bond, Cecil Sumner and Charles Henry Thompson who challenged the accepted notions around intelligence testing.

Swartz: Much of the work you discuss takes place against the background of major historical trends such as the Great Migration and the Civil Rights movement. How do researchers gain perspective on what’s going on in their present time?

Lloyd: You could say the same thing about COVID today. It will take years or decades to come to terms with what we lived through, but including community voice is one important way to ensure context is not neglected.

Swartz: How does examining past research help point to a way forward?

Lloyd: We’re looking at the type of research that was happening as well as the people who were conducting it. And I just had an interesting epiphany, because I also do some work with a group of young Black scholars at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). I was at , and heard about faculty members who wear so many hats in addition to being scholars.

I went to an HBCU myself, and I’ve seen this firsthand and I have also experienced it. Mentoring students and staff, taking on administrative responsibilities, serving as the equity representation all things that take time and are typically are unfunded. Understanding this fact in the context of the research that gets produced is important. Black scholars have been key in putting forth broader perspectives of Black family life, including examination of systems that are barrier to their progress.

Swartz: They have one hand tied behind their back.

Lloyd: Research requires the luxury of sitting back and reflecting and coming together as a collaborative. It took about 18 months for this project to be completed because of other demands. We got there and tried to model the reflection and collaboration with this project, but it was not easy.

Mark Swartz: What’s the immediate outcome of the new law?

Allison Gilbreath: It will allow for local departments of to come into a formal partnership with kinship families for children who would otherwise enter foster care. And now, the local agency will be able to offer them financial compensation that will be similar to what a foster parent would receive, which is around $800 in Virginia, depending on the child’s needs. And they will also be able to offer continual services that a typical foster family would receive. It also provides some opportunities for the family of origin to be on a path to reunification with the child.

(VPM)

Swartz: What do you hope will happen in the long term?

Gilbreath: What I hope to see is that all localities start a true kin-first model, which is especially important for young children, because we know for the developing brain from 0 to 5, that attachment is extraordinarily important to their lifelong development.

Swartz: This has been a 10-year journey for you. Did you ever want to give up?

Gilbreath: Never, but the approach has been, “Let’s take bites of the apples over the course of years,” to get here.

Swartz: For example?

Gilbreath: Virginia passed the program in 2018, which was for a small minority of children who were already placed with relatives. It allowed them to stay there and allowed the families to receive some compensation.

(ChildTrends)

Swartz: What kinds of objections did you hear to kinship care?

Gilbreath: Legislators would tell us, “Well, that’s just what families should do. We shouldn’t be compensating them for what’s just the right thing.” And we had to spend a lot of time educating them on, “Doing the right thing and taking on a child that has thousands of dollars of expenses annually aren’t the same thing.”

Swartz: How would you describe the historical roots of the how kinship care was treated in Virginia?

Gilbreath: I think that there are systems of oppression that permeate every system of which we live in. Black children are disproportionately represented in our foster care system. And as a response, the foster care system has been built around white dominant culture. The majority of our foster parents in Virginia are white. ����’s not because folks of color don’t want to be become foster parents. They’re doing this informal system of kinship care, and there hasn’t been support for what is inherently cultural to Black families.

Swartz: How does the system put obstacles in the way of would-be Black foster parents?

Gilbreath: In Virginia, we go far beyond the federal requirements to become a foster parent. The requirement that is probably most talked about is the drug offenses. Basically, if you were caught with a certain amount of marijuana 10 years ago, but you’ve done nothing since then, you can’t be a foster parent in Virginia, and that disproportionately impacts families of color.

Swartz: So, a Black family in the first place might not be inclined to apply to be a foster family because of cultural issues, but then even if they were, there are these barriers preventing them.

Gilbreath: That’s very much the case.

Swartz: What about compensation for the attorneys? What we’re talking about is a legal process. A judge decides where a child goes, and if a family can’t afford their own representation, they’re going to have an attorney appointed by the state. But lawyers aren’t exactly lining up for that role, because the pay is so bad.

Gilbreath: The compensation for attorneys in child dependency cases is $120 for the entirety of the case, which is mind-boggling when I say it, but I always have to repeat. ����’s the entirety of the case. So it’s almost always attorneys who are doing it as a part of their pro bono docket, which means two things happen. One, there’s poor representation. (This isn’t a matter of attorneys who don’t care, but the pay is low and the process can be traumatizing.) Two, because of the lack of adequate representation, those families are less likely to know all of their rights. They often have children removed who didn’t necessarily need to be removed in the first place.

Swartz: You’re a parent as well as an advocate, and you’re also a professor, teaching a course called Power, Privilege and Oppression in the . How do you weave all those strands together?

Gilbreath: has taught me extraordinary patience — for myself, for my children, for the sector, for the work. As a mom, you put in so much time, energy, into your children. And most days you don’t see any of the fruit of that. You might for one minute of a day, but then there are these glimmers where your child does something. For me, this year, my son started kindergarten, and he started to read. And seeing all the years that we put in from 0 to 5, just to try to build the building blocks for him to read, but that was five years of not just myself, but a lot of other people in his life through early intervention, through his teachers, to help us get there.

Swartz: And you get to see another kind of progress with your students.

Gilbreath: I’ve been teaching this class for four years now, and it is really one of the coolest things to see a student who’s now in the sector, and is looking back and saying, Professor Gilbreath, “What you said in your class helped shape the trajectory of my career, or the way that I show up in this work.” There are some things that I want to see changed in our system that perhaps I’m not going to see the change. I’m just going to lay the seed, and wait for the next person to fulfill the harvest.��

Swartz: Did you have a mentor or somebody who inspired you, along the way?

Gilbreath: One I would like to acknowledge is . She doesn’t do policy at all, actually, but that’s the way it goes. She’s an author. She was one of the first people to tell me I was special, which I don’t think people hear enough. I still talk to her all the time, when I’m faced with a hard decision or something like that. And she’s still supportive.

Her organization combines research, practice and technology to ensure that America’s historically excluded learners have access to the resources and experiences they need to eventually lead lives of “well-being, agency and economic security.”

Early Learning Nation spoke to Dominguez about developmentally appropriate learning activities, and how technology and media can strengthen playful, collaborative and socially rich early learning.

Mark Swartz: What does the research tell us about using technology with young learners?

Ximena Dominguez: A substantial body of research suggests that technology and media can be powerful tools to strengthen and extend early learning, if they are designed intentionally, and with the input of educators, families and children. Digital tools and media, for instance, can extend children’s hands-on learning by providing individualized scaffolding within developmentally appropriate and playful game-like activities, and by embedding meaningful storylines and serving as catalysts for rich conversations.

Technology and media can also allow children to visualize or experience phenomena that are harder to see or not available in their local environment, to record observations and data via photos or videos, and to engage in embodied learning [Embodied learning involves the whole body. One example is to have kids toss bean bags while counting]. When I review new digital tools, I often ask, “How does it extend or strengthen (rather than replace) hands-on learning? Does it invite children to explore, deepen their learning, discuss and collaborate?”

Swartz: We often see little kids on an iPad while the parents are trying to get work done. We all overdo it sometimes because we just get overwhelmed, but we know there’s a downside. If you were going to talk to a parent of young children, what advice would you give?

Dominguez: I am sure this question resonates with many parents; many of us allow our children to use technology when we need to attend to other things at home. Assuming children have had other opportunities for hands-on play and conversation, time with technology is okay, especially if parents are able to vet the technology ahead of time to ensure and converse with children about their experience.

Swartz: What does that look like?

Dominguez: I often encourage parents to think of technology the way we think of other tools for learning. For instance, think about books; we wouldn’t just pick any book and start reading it to our children. Most often we skim the book ourselves first or get a recommendation from someone we trust. We do these things to make sure the book is appropriate, relevant to what we’d like our children to learn and likely to be interesting to our children.

The same can be true with technology. As parents, we can vet it and just like we do with books, we can also have later conversations about it if we are unable to engage with it at the same time.

Swartz: A lot of technology claims to be educational. How do we verify those claims?��

Dominguez: When I come across a new resource, I try to find out who created the technology and what the stated purpose is. Did the team include educators? Do they intend to provide a playful experience, promote learning or both?

I then explore the resource a bit to see what their process for doing so is like. For instance, if they are promoting learning, how does the resource give children feedback? I also pay close attention to the behaviors being modeled and encouraged and how characters are represented.

Swartz: How do you reconcile the aims of educational technology companies with the needs of educators and families?

Dominguez: This is something our team has been actively working on in the area of early STEM. Over the past decade, we’ve led a couple of National Science Foundation-funded efforts that bring together researchers, designers of media, educators in public preschool programs and families from historically excluded communities to co-design resources to support early STEM teaching and learning.

Initially we learned that designers and researchers struggled to find the balance between education and fun; designers were often focused on engagement and researchers often focused on learning. Either alone was not ideal, and attending to both was indeed possible as long as goals were woven carefully and intentionally into the design process.

Swartz: What’s the most important part of co-design?��

Dominguez: The resources have to leverage the assets of and address the needs of educators and families. Families want to see themselves represented in the resources. Families and educators alike want to make sure the resources help children learn, develop and thrive.

Inclusive co-design processes help ensure that the resources developed are likely to be used, and help children engage in learning in ways that are meaningful and relevant to their everyday life and community.

We recently completed a National Science Foundation-funded early STEM co-design effort with partners at , which resulted in the creation of — a suite of hands-on and digital resources to promote early science, engineering and mathematics across home and school.

Swartz: Earlier, you mentioned embodied learning. How does technology invite children to engage their bodies?

Dominguez: Technology and media can invite children to move as part of the learning process. Some apps may invite children to move around a space to locate objects. For instance, children may need to move to find or make shadows.

Our team is working with MathTalk, a group of educators and edtech designers in Cambridge who are designing virtual reality resources to support early math skills such as measurement. In one of their emerging apps, children can use the iPad to measure distances in physical spaces with a selected object in the digital space. Children engage in embodied learning as they try to answer: How many panda bears would fit in this yard?

Swartz: Where are the greatest opportunities for progress?

Dominguez: A lot more work is needed around the design of digital tools to promote early collaborative learning. So much of the technology developed to date for early learners takes a one-to-one approach. Given the socially rich nature of early learning approaches, digital tools that can provide unique opportunities to promote learning in collaborative or group settings are very much needed.

Chris Riback: Dr. Austin, thank you for coming to the studio. Thank you for having us at this incredible conference.

Dr. Leah Austin: Awesome. Thank you for inviting me to the studio and thank you all for being here.

Chris Riback: So give me the pitch, what is NBCDI and what do you hope for from a conference like this?

Dr. Leah Austin: NBCDI is a 52-year-old national organization focused on the healthy child development of black children. And our conference attracts over 500 educators. So in particular, we are providing educators with tools, with resources, with knowledge, anything they need so that they can be better in their roles as educators, improving the education and development of black children.

Chris Riback: And what are you hearing at the conference? What are the biggest concerns that people have?

Dr. Leah Austin: A couple of things we’re hearing. One, I would say that we’re hearing from educators that they need a space like this, that they actually need a place where they can go and they can focus on black children, especially in this time where we have a context where that’s not as easy as it one, should be and maybe used to be.

So that’s definitely feedback we’re hearing. And then some of the other challenges that we hear from educators are things around just materials and resources that they have available to them and just trying to be connected to partner organizations that can help them find the tools and resources that they need.

Something else we hear from our attendees is really around, they’re continuing to want to build a stronger relationship with parents, and it’s both a, I think a challenge and an opportunity that they’re seeking. And so they’re talking a lot about how can they partner with an organization like NBCDI so that they can actually engage and reach more parents as they’re fulfilling their mission to educate children.

Chris Riback: So the theme of this year’s conference is unleashing the promise and the genius of black children and families. What are some examples of genius that you are hearing about?

Dr. Leah Austin: So we’re really, really focused as an organization on ensuring that we talk about black children from a strengths-based, assets-based positive approach, and using positive and more accurate language, quite frankly. And we know that black children are often labeled in ways that aren’t really good for them and aren’t actually accurate to who they are in their development.

And so we’re heavily focused when we talk about black genius or the genius of black children, it’s really about understanding that we’re speaking about children that are between the ages of birth and eight years old. Right? So they’re young, early childhood. And so we’re really focused on just what does it mean to be a child during that stage of life. Right? There’s an innate joy, there’s a happiness, there’s a curiosity.

You want to know so much about the world. Their eyes are lit up, they’re so happy, so excited, and they just want to know and they’re hungry for more knowledge. And that’s a major factor in being a genius, right? Is really this curiosity to learn more. And we want to make sure that black children are not, that they don’t lose that.

And it often is lost because systems are not set up to support that joy and support that genius. So we see this kind of convening as an opportunity to really double down on the fact that that genius is there and it’s all of our jobs and our responsibilities to make sure that we preserve it and we promote it.

Chris Riback: And create the room and the space for it. You mentioned a moment ago a little bit, you kind of hinted at the political environment. What are the political realities that you’re seeing and what can you do to help contribute constructively to the political environment?

Dr. Leah Austin: Absolutely. So a major challenge, again, given our audience is really primarily educators, is that educators are very confused about what they can and cannot do, what they can and cannot say. And many are feeling powerless because they want to teach children about who they are. And it’s not just about black children seeing themselves in books, those resources. Those things absolutely matter because that’s the affirmation that helps them with their racial identity and their development.

But it’s also important for all children to see themselves and to see others so that we’re all expanded and so that when they grow up, they’re able to relate to different people because they’ve had this experience where they’ve both seen themselves and they’ve seen other people in their learning environments. And so that’s something that we hear from teachers, but they do. In this day and age, it’s very, very hard for them to figure out exactly how they do that.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Dr. Leah Austin: When they’re in a moment where they could literally lose their jobs if they say the wrong word or something that’s considered divisive. So what NBCDI has done is in addition to this convening and them being able to be here and share that and get resources, literally go to the vendors and buy books and get resources that they can use in their classrooms and at home with their families, we are also an advocacy organization.

And so we’ve done some work with our affiliate network around understanding the legislations that have passed and what the actual language means and where it does prohibit and where it actually doesn’t, things that they can do and say in Georgia. We hosted with our local affiliate, BCDI, Atlanta, a summit with GEEARS, our Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students organization, and just talked honestly about how these concepts even got to the place where we, the people believed that they are divisive and what we can actually do in classrooms with teachers to change that.

Chris Riback: Let’s turn slightly, and I want to ask you about climate.

Dr. Leah Austin: Okay.

Chris Riback: You are part of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force. What is that task force? What inspires you to focus on climate? I thought we were talking about early education.

Dr. Leah Austin: Right. That’s a good question. So the task force is focused on the impact of climate change on our youngest people, our little ones, and understand just from the data that just by way of their age, right? This group of children are vulnerable, they are because they’re developmentally completely dependent on adults. And so what adults have to understand is that everything we do or we do not do impacts them.

And because they are physically developing at a different pace and in a different way than we are as adults, things like living in a neighborhood where there’s a factory that’s next door. Or I’m in Atlanta, so living in a neighborhood where literally a highway has been built and cuts through your neighborhood.

Chris Riback: Yes, it does.

Dr. Leah Austin: And you’re outside playing. You’re not just outside playing and they’re cars going by, you’re outside playing and there are emissions and toxic air that you’re now breathing in. And for a little person, there’s a lot of air that’s going into their bodies and is literally physically changing them. And so the task force is focused on what climate change means for the early years and for our youngest people.

Chris Riback: And if I’m not mistaken, you have some recommendations?

Dr. Leah Austin: There are some recommendations in the plan, yes.

Chris Riback: Give me a couple of those.

Dr. Leah Austin: Yep.

Chris Riback: And is it too early for progress or are you seeing any progress against any of those recommendations?

Dr. Leah Austin: Yes, I would share. One, is around supporting early learning centers. So we know that centers and schools are actually a place where there’s a lot of pollution and toxic air because of things like school bus, just in the way centers are often and schools are often built. And so there’s some recommendations there around rethinking how we use green space and even rethinking just the building of schools and just really making sure that they’re actually more appropriate in terms of the build out. I would say in terms of progress, I feel like there’s always some progress happening, but it’s very slow.

Chris Riback: Yes.

Dr. Leah Austin: And so we want to be hopeful and keeps sort of that positive mind, but it’s a slow and steady pace. And I think the fact that we’ve even, the progress that we’re really seeing is that we’re having the conversation, even to your point around the conversation of linking climate change to little people, that’s progress within itself. And now we have to take that conversation and actually put it into some action.

Chris Riback: So coming out of this conference and the 500 people from across the country and the ideas and the inspiration that you’ve heard, and I’ve gotten to hear as well, what’s next for NBCDI and what’s next for you?

Dr. Leah Austin: Oh, absolutely. So we want to keep growing our network and really seeing affiliates in every single state because we know that for so much of this work, the power, the advocacy power is at the state level. And so we want to make sure that we have leaders that understand, that respect our, not only our organization, but the lived experience and expertise of black people.

And so that’s definitely a next step for us and a goal that we have. I think for myself, it’s just continuing to build the organization, continue to amplify who we are, our voices and the voices of the network, and just making sure I have this dream and goal, I guess, dream that one day every single person will know the National Black Child Development Institute and will respect and understand it and be a part of it given its importance to black children – and that importance then being to the entire country.

Chris Riback: And if you had a governor or a state education secretary in front of you, is there a single message that you would give?

Dr. Leah Austin: The single message I would give is that we need to invest more in the early years and we need to invest more in ways that we just talked about very comprehensively. So yes, we need to invest more in their schools and the early childhood education component. We need to make sure that we are paying the workforce, actually paying them well so that they are not struggling themselves, but that they can really thrive and they can focus on the learning that they actually want to provide young children.

Chris Riback: Yes. Well, that’s a message that I think will be very clear to understand and your efforts through NBCDI are impacting communities across the country. Thank you for your work. Thank you for coming by the studio.

Dr. Leah Austin: Thank you for having me. This is wonderful.

In March, Child Trends researcher Winnie Li and her colleagues published that considers the impact of the decline of listed home-based child care providers on parental satisfaction with the child care market. I was excited to interview Winnie and to learn more about this study and the implications of her findings. I am hopeful this work can inspire additional research and inquiry around the effects of the decline of home-based child care on children and families.

Natalie Renew: Can you share a little about yourself and your work in early childhood research?

Winnie Li: I’m Winnie Li, a senior scientist at Child Trends, a nonprofit, non-partisan research organization dedicated to improving the lives of children and families. My focus lies primarily in the realm of early childhood policy research, where I leverage my expertise in data analysis to drive evidence-based policy making. A significant portion of my work also involves researching family access to child care, ensuring all families have equitable access to quality child care services. I believe that early childhood experiences shape the future of our society, and I’m passionate about contributing to this critical area.

Renew: Can you share a little background on this research study? Why did you select this topic? What were you hoping to understand?��

Li: Absolutely. In 2019, my colleagues and I noticed an alarming trend in data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education: the number of home-based child care (HBCC) providers listed on state administrative lists had declined by 25 percent nationwide over the past decade. This sparked our interest, given the vital role HBCC providers play in caring for nearly a third of children under age five in the United States.

We were deeply intrigued and concerned about the potential repercussions of this decline on the child care market. Specifically, our objective was to examine its impact on families’ perceptions of child care access. The dwindling number of HBCC providers raised serious questions for us:

• Would parents begin to perceive early childhood education as less affordable and equitable?
• Would there be a rise in families’ dissatisfaction with the quality of child care?
• Would they start feeling that their needs were not adequately met?

These questions served as the impetus for our research study, pushing us to delve deeper into understanding the shifting dynamics of the child care market and its implications on families.

Renew: What are the key findings of this study?

Li: Our analysis showed that there was a severe decline in HBCC providers from 2010 to 2019 in almost every state. New Mexico saw the largest decline, with only 47% of the HBCC providers remaining in 2019 as compared to 2010.

Our analysis revealed an intriguing pattern: the decrease in HBCC providers correlated with a rise in negative public reviews left online by parents, even after we accounted for a number of factors, such as the number of children and the number of center-based providers in the state. The strongest association was observed in relation to cost. On average, for every drop of 1,000 HBCC providers in a state, we saw an increase of roughly 2 negative reviews on cost. This underscores the impact of the decline in HBCC providers on public sentiment, especially concerning affordability.

Renew: What are the causes of the decline of care in so many states? Does your study help us understand these causes?

Li: While our study sheds light on the decline in HBCC providers and its implications, pinpointing the precise causes of this decline wasn’t our primary objective. The specific policies, economic conditions or initiatives that might be driving this decrease in HBCC providers across states would require further, more specialized research. However, it’s crucial that future research explores this question to fully comprehend the dynamics at play and develop effective solutions.

Renew: How do you interpret these findings? What are your takeaways? What surprised you in what you found?

Li: Our results draw a clear link between the decline in HBCC providers and parental dissatisfaction. These findings underscore the critical need for policy initiatives that address the root causes behind the shrinking number of HBCC providers, while simultaneously advancing child care quality.

The takeaways from our study emphasize the importance of ensuring that families have access to a broad array of high-quality child care options. Access to high-quality child care has wider implications for the health and well-being of our communities, not just the children receiving child care services.

What surprised us in our findings was the direct correlation between the decline of HBCC providers and the rise in public dissatisfaction, particularly concerning cost. It demonstrates a clear indication of the latent pressures families face in accessing affordable and quality child care.

Renew: What are some of the limitations of the study? What would you have wanted to explore further that you were not able to?

Li: Our study has two limitations that are important to note. One is on the data source, and the other is on the methodology of topic analysis. Our study relied on publicly available English-language online reviews, which might not holistically reflect the experiences and perceptions of all parents. It’s plausible that certain groups may be more inclined to leave online reviews than others, potentially skewing the results.

Secondly, our study relied on the use of topic analysis to categorize the reviews into different access dimensions. While this approach has the advantage of being able to handle large volumes of text data, it is subject to potential biases and limitations, such as the difficulty in accurately categorizing complex or nuanced reviews.

Renew: Much of the research work of this study was going on during the pandemic at a time when the role of child care was elevated in the national media and immediately felt among many families including my own. What was it like working on this project during that time?

Li: Indeed, the pandemic has served as a stark reminder of the critical role that child care plays, not just for families, but for the broader economy as well.

On a personal level, the pandemic influenced my own child care decisions. Due to safety concerns, I transitioned my then 3-year-old from a larger, center-based child care provider to a home-based child care.

This experience gave me firsthand insight into the importance of home-based child care. It is a constant reminder of how important this work is and it underscored the importance of our research on HBCC providers in shaping a resilient and equitable child care system during and beyond the pandemic.

Renew: I believe your research offers important and previously unstudied insights on the effects on parents of policies and practices that have resulted in the decline of home-based care. Where would you hope to go next with this research? What other questions might further develop insight into this critical issue?

Li: I agree that our research has brought to light some previously unexplored effects on parents of policies and practices resulting in the decline of HBCC. Building on these insights, we could delve deeper into this issue and understand the differences in parents’ perceptions of home-based versus center-based child care providers.

We could also compare and analyze differences in utilization and topics mentioned across different income groups. We also want to uncover parents’ perceptions and preferences around child care services, particularly their experiences with home-based and center-based providers.

By exploring the unique attributes of HBCC providers and diving into parents’ preferences, our findings could inform strategies to better support and enhance the home-based child care sector. This, in turn, could benefit parents, children and communities alike.

According to Joe Waters, co-founder and CEO of , “Dr. Perera’s work helps us to see more clearly that dangerous planetary change is the most pressing global threat there is to healthy human development in the earliest years of life. Mitigating climate change, adapting to its unavoidable impacts, and building the resilience of societies by building the resilience of our young children is the human development challenge of this century.”

I spoke to Dr. Perera about her work, the dire challenges ahead and her reasons for cautious optimism.

Swartz: What makes children more susceptible to air pollution and climate change?

Perera: Both factors are dangerous, and together, even more so. Take for example, mothers exposed to heat and air pollution during pregnancy. Their babies have a much higher risk of being born too soon. The same synergistic effect can be seen with asthma hospitalizations. We’ve just started to learn about the ways that these two fossil fuel-derived threats combine to increase risk.

We’re seeing 50 million children forced from their homes due to climate-related events. That’s three times more than from armed conflicts and violence. Think of the disastrous floods in Pakistan last year that displaced nearly 8 million people.

Children are not just little adults. There are many biological reasons for their vulnerability. ����’s why we need to protect their development, from the time they’re in utero through their early years and even into adolescence.

What do you wish more people understood about the crisis we face?

Children bear the brunt of the damage but lack the economic and political levers to force action, and not enough adults have been advocating for them. It should be shocking that the United States never ratified the Convention of the Rights of the Child. Other countries have formally recognized the fundamental rights of children to demand that their governments reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

How has your personal journey shaped your climate awareness?

As a child, I was always interested in the environment because I had the opportunity to live in different ecosystems. I started off in the suburbs and then moved to a farm in Vermont, where I realized how very dependent we were on natural systems and how interconnected we are, which I think many urban children don’t know. They don’t have access to nature in the way that I would hope they would.

As a researcher, I started off looking at a class of environmental carcinogens that come from fossil fuel burning, generally called (PAH). We identified DNA damage from these pollutants as a risk marker for cancer. And to my surprise and dismay, we were seeing the same DNA damage in newborns and young children. And I thought, well, this is really something we need to look at, in terms of health effects in children, not just cancer but other effects. In our research over the years we have shown that prenatal PAH exposure is harmful to the developing brain and other organs.

What actions do you recommend for parents, educators and advocates?

First, we all need to be armed with the facts, because there’s quite a lot of confusion and misinformation. But 99% of scientists will agree with the data in my book. We can use these facts and narratives in the book to educate and engage others.

Second, we can take action both as citizens and voters to make sure that we’re represented by people who understand the science and take this problem seriously and will act to protect the most vulnerable. And when I say most ‘vulnerable,’ I’m referring to children as a group, but also to children in communities of color who are even more vulnerable because they don’t have the same supports that more privileged children have against these threats. They live in ‘urban heat islands’ or coastal areas most vulnerable to flooding and storms.

Third, we can lead by example. In the home, we can do a lot to conserve energy. Not so much heat in the winter, not so much air conditioning in the summer. Install solar panels on your own roof or convince your landlord if necessary. It’s been found that if homeowners start putting solar panels on their roofs, then others in their neighborhood will follow. The same goes for things like using mass transit instead of driving cars. We can shift to diets that are less climate intensive. I’m thinking of plant-based meals and avoiding waste. We now waste 30% of the food that is raised. That’s pretty shocking, isn’t it? Neighborhood gardens are a wonderful way to reduce the carbon footprint.

The heavy lift does have to be done by government. We need strong international action. As adults, we can support those initiatives and make sure that we have the right representation.

What gives you hope?

We achieve a lot when we reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on fossil fuel. The is an encouraging example of policymaking, in this case removing coal-burning electricity generating units from 12 eastern states, replacing them with cleaner fuel. The result was much cleaner air and improved child health. You can see other examples internationally in London, in Copenhagen and even in China, with the shutdown of a single coal plant.  Hopefully we’ll see more good news stories as results from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Groups like , and  have been tremendously effective. is an example of an attempt of young people to force the government to take action on climate change. I joined several other authors on a paper that supported their demands in terms of the science on the harmful effects of climate change on the young.

My book’s chapter on power and voice was one of the most fun to write because I was able to talk about the youth but also the fearless grandmothers who have joined them. Religious leaders of various denominations have come on board and basically are saying we must be stewards, we must protect the most vulnerable and we must act.

I have retained optimism. I refuse to believe that we will not be able to take the action we need to avoid the worst catastrophe. At least our children will have a chance of a future that will be viable for them. And so I’m not giving up.

to help with remote school and Dad kept working? Is her work less important, or are women just better teachers?

Children are constantly making sense of the differences they observe. Understanding how they do that is at the heart of , headed by cognitive scientist Andrei Cimpian, PhD. In experiment after experiment, Cimpian finds that children, like adults, default to what Cimpian calls “shortcuts, ”or snap judgments. Often these shortcuts explain differences in terms of internal or inherent qualities of people or things, such as, “Some kids learn to read easily because they’re smart.” Cimpian and his colleagues’ research finds such explanations can have real-life consequences, shaping everything from whether a student likes school, to whether a child considers inequalities fair, to what games a preschooler plays. Research shows even infants use some shortcuts.

Cimpian talked with Early Learning Nation about the benefits and pitfalls of shortcuts, and how parents and educators can help children productively reframe the stories they tell about the world. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

KENDRA HURLEY: What exactly are shortcuts and what purpose do they serve?

ANDREI CIMPIAN: Kids try to make sense of differences they see, such as why some kids arrive at kindergarten knowing more than others. But these are very complex things to explain, and children often don’t have the full information to operate on. So that’s when kids, and also adults, fall back on shortcuts. In this case, a shortcut is a sort of “quick and dirty” explanation that helps them understand. Shortcuts help to simplify the very complex world, but they overlook important information.

Often shortcuts are innocuous, but when applied to societal patterns—for example, “why are there more men in science than women?”— they can lead kids to conclude things like, “men are better at science than women,” or, “women don’t like science.” That can lead to replication of this pattern, because if you’re a girl, you might think, “Science is not for me.” If you’re a boy, you might think the girls in your science class don’t belong there.

In the classroom, shortcuts can deepen achievement gaps. Kids might decide some students do better than others in school because of something inherent about them, like they’re smarter or harder working. that if kids who were initially lower-achieving explain differences in these kinds of fixed terms, those kids think they don’t have what it takes to do well in school, and end up doing less well as a result. Then initial gaps may increase over the course of schooling.

But research also suggests that if kids think other kids are doing better because of qualities that aren’t an inherent part of them, like because the other kids have more resources at home, that can help level the playing field.

HURLEY: Your research found that giving kids context for differences can make them want to make things more equal. Can you talk about that?

CIMPIAN: We : the Blarks and the Orps. We told them these groups are from another planet, and said the Blarks have a lot more money than the Orps, and we asked kids, who were as young as 4, “Why do you think that is?” Usually their explanations looked to features of the groups themselves, like, “The Blarks have more money than the Orps because they’re smarter and work harder.” The more a kid was likely to generate these internal, inherent explanations for the differences, the more likely they were to also say the disparity was fair, that the Blarks deserved to have more money than the Orps, and nothing should be done to change this.

But and had a history to it, like the Blarks live in a place with more jobs, or where they found gold, the children thought it was less fair they had more money and were more likely to endorse changing the way things were. In other words, giving kids the bigger context for inequalities between groups is important for motivating change.

HURLEY: The idea that understanding the historical reason for inequalities motivates people to want change has big implications for current debates around teaching the history of racism and inequality in the U.S. But I’m guessing some people would also ask: What about for the higher-performing kids? Isn’t thinking of oneself as being inherently talented or special a good thing?

CIMPIAN: Not necessarily. We did an experiment where we asked 4-year-olds to draw, then praised them by saying either, “You did a good job drawing,” or, “You’re such a good drawer.” We found the “you’re such a good drawer” praise felt good to kids in the moment, but when those children later made a mistake when drawing, like if they forgot to draw ears on a cat, they reacted more negatively. Because they assumed their initial success was due to some special talent they had, that is then threatened by a later failure. A mistake becomes more personal, and they’re less motivated afterwards. If they’re asked whether they want to draw again tomorrow after a mistake, they’re less likely to want to than the kids who were simply told, “You did a good drawing,” which is still a praising statement, but doesn’t have the implication of “you succeeded because there’s something special about you.”

You want to encourage kids to have a growth mindset, where they learn from failure.

HURLEY: You found that by age 6, kids have already developed different kinds of ideas about the intelligence of girls and boys. Tell us about that.

CIMPIAN: whose gender was not apparent from the story. For example, we told them about a person at the place where I work who was “really, really smart. This person can figure things out very quickly, much quicker than everyone else,” and so on. Then we showed them pictures of individuals they weren’t familiar with and asked them to guess who the person described was. At the age of 5, both boys and girls tended to pick people of the same gender as themselves as the “really, really smart” person in the story. But at age 6, girls stopped doing that and became less likely than boys to pick individuals of their own gender as being “really, really smart.”

We found this bias has real consequences. We exposed children to unfamiliar games and varied whether the games were described as for kids “who are really, really smart” or for kids who “try really, really hard.” They were the exact same games that were just described differently in this way. For 5-year-olds, there was no difference, but at the age of 6, when we portrayed the game as being for kids “who are really, really smart,” girls were less likely to want to play.

This might apply to the real-world context where girls get the sense that, say, math and science are for kids “who are really, really smart,” which is what a lot of adults believe. Then they may see these activities as not being for them. So our research suggests that aspects of the gender gap in STEM fields stretch all the way back to early elementary school.

HURLEY: Wow. Why do you think that is?

CIMPIAN: Some evidence suggests kids’ beliefs about gender and brilliance mirror their parents, that it’s a . Between ages 5 and 6 is when kids often start school, and things get a little more academic. Maybe parents, who are harboring these biases, now have an opportunity to express them more then when the kid was in preschool. We also know teachers endorse some of these stereotypes that .

HURLEY: How can parents and teachers of young children disrupt these kinds of biases from forming in young children and encourage a growth mindset?

CIMPIAN: Role models who come from similar backgrounds can be important for kids. So can providing kids with explanations for differences. For teachers, that might be telling kids it’s important to remember that all kids in a class are coming from different places, that some kids might have more books at home and go to museums often because their parents can afford to. That could be something even a 4-year-old could understand.

These kinds of explanations can be very effective in combatting fixed beliefs. In of 5^th and 6^th graders, researchers gave half of the kids thorough training with a particular task. The other kids received less training. Then researchers put the children all together in a class and let them observe that some of their peers knew the task a lot better than others. Without providing any additional explanation, the kids who were doing less well in this context became demotivated and kind of shut down. But once researchers gave them the explanation for why other kids were doing better — that half of the class received more training — those differences went away. That’s a powerful illustration of how pulling back the curtain and revealing reasons behind differences in the classroom can make for a more even playing field.

But in truth, separating toddlers and preschoolers based on family income is the default in early education. It just usually happens in separate programs rather than the same building, making it harder to see. Early childhood programs are likely the most racially and ethnically segregated educational spaces in the country, according to . Government funding for child care has historically been reserved for the very poor, leading to subsidized means-tested programs for low-income families, with everyone else’s child care options defined by what they can and cannot afford. This has created our current patchwork of early education programs that are rigidly segregated by income and race.

But as Marks and her colleagues sensed, defaulting to segregation is a missed opportunity. It normalizes the experience of segregated schools for new parents, and a growing body of work suggests that racially and economically diverse preschools have significant learning benefits, which some researchers say is not surprising given how much growth in preschool happens through playing and sharing with peers. “Children of all backgrounds learn more on average in racially and socioeconomically diverse preschool classrooms, and diverse early learning settings can help reduce prejudice among young children,” wrote Halley Potter, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, in a that dives into that research and offers ideas for how the federal government can foster integration in universal preschool.

In 2018, Marks and her colleagues began the process of combining the two early education programs which served more than 200 children into one intentionally integrated school. Early Learning Nation talked with Marks about that process and what other programs can learn from their work. She notes that if the Build Back Better plan passes, the growth of affordable and free early education programs could pave the path for more intentional integration.

The interview has been condensed and reorganized for clarity.

KENDRA HURLEY: Educational Alliance’s preschool program has been around since the 1800’s and your Head Start program since the 1960’s. What sparked the decision to combine them?

JACQUELINE MARKS: When I was hired in 2014, there was a new CEO, Alan van Capelle, and Joanna Samuels was the new executive director for the organization’s just-opened Manny Cantor Center. The community center housed the early childhood programs, and our vision was to make it . But that doesn’t go with having two separate schools. You’d walk into the building and push the elevator button to go to a different floor, and then you were going to a different school with a different funding stream, and a different philosophy. So the three of us who were new all had the same wondering: Why are families separated in the first place? Can we change that?

I soon began to also hear from families that having two schools didn’t seem to be consistent with the mission of the organization. At that point it became really clear we needed to find a way to make our school open and accessible to all.

HURLEY: Why were the schools kept separate for so long?

MARKS: The backend finances are very complex. We’re a direct federal Head Start grantee. We’re also a direct grantee from the New York City Department of Education. And we have many philanthropic gifts. Each of those funding streams has very specific requirements that are different from one another.

For example, in the Head Start landscape you need to do developmental screenings of children and there’s a lot of other reporting that needs to happen. And then the Department of Education has their own system for many of the same things, but it’s in a completely different system, and those systems don’t talk to each other.

To blend the programs is a lot of work and takes a lot of resources, so I think what we had done as an organization, and what we have done as a city, actually, is separate children based on how they’re paid for.

HURLEY: How did your funders react to the idea of blending the two schools?

MARKS: There was a lot of lore out there saying it’s not possible. Our funders had questions like, “Why would you want to do that? It’ll make the finances really complicated.”

But we heard that as an opening. We thought, “Great, if we’re able to figure out the finances, this is something that’s possible.”

After that, one of the things we looked for was: Where’s the model for this? Who are the people that we can talk to and learn from? That’s when we kept encountering places that weren’t able to do it. One economically integrated school we found charged tuition based on a sliding scale, but they don’t receive federal and city funds so did not face the same challenges as us.

In the end, we needed to make sure that the money that comes in is spent as intended, while continuing to hold our progressive pedagogy. That required a pretty complex finance team. We are a large organization and were able to make that happen, and at this point, all of our funders are very interested in the work we’re doing. They’re now connecting us to other schools and programs that are interested in doing this. If the Build Back Better plan passes, I think more schools will have an easier time with the funding piece.

HURLEY: How did you decide programming for the blended school?

MARKS: We wanted to combine the best of what we had. Our tuition-based school is progressive and inspired by the schools of Reggio Emilia in Italy. Our curriculum is co-constructed with the children and teachers and families through observing what the children are interested in and creating opportunities that are specific and relevant to them. ����’s based on the idea that all children come to school capable and full of potential, and that every family has much to contribute. We wanted to give everyone access to that.

Our Head Start program, while more traditional in nature, had thoughtful social work supports that we thought all families could benefit from.

To combine them, we were again unpacking the lore around what was possible with our funders. We learned that you actually can have what’s called an “emergent curriculum” like ours through Head Start. On their grant application, you select from a box of options for what curriculum you’re using, and we just had to check “Other,” which means we would need to prove that our curriculum is a research-based effective curriculum, and the emergent curriculum we use is exactly that. Once we knew we could do that, we knew that what we were hoping for was possible.

HURLEY: How did staff and families adjust?

MARKS: Many families come to this neighborhood because they want to raise a family in this beautiful, diverse landscape. So for families it felt right, like this is something that has needed to happen for a long time. Our Policy Council, which is the Head Start term for Parents Association, has been working to create ways for families to come together outside of the classroom too, though due to the pandemic these gatherings have been a bit different and smaller than planned.

With teachers it has been more complex because that’s where we’re asking people to make change. When you have two schools with two philosophies, and both groups of teachers are deeply rooted in their own understanding of early childhood education, it can be challenging to ask for change. If you’re used to taking a curriculum book off the shelf and following it, that can be hard, because that’s no longer the school’s philosophy.

So we gave ourselves lots of time to come together. We started professional development with teachers before we combined the schools as a way for teachers to begin to get to know each other and learn about the strengths of each program. We learned that one teacher may have a really strong background in progressive education, while someone else may have a strong background in building trust with families. For teaching teams we thought about who’s going to work well together and complement each other.

HURLEY: What advice would you give other programs interested in creating economic integration?

MARKS: When programs have different funding sources that serve different populations separately, children then grow up through those different streams. They go to public school according to who they’re in preschool with, and it continues from there and you have these segregated schools. As preschool providers, we can help stop that cycle.

Now, every day during morning drop-off, I see the relationships that families from all backgrounds are building as they help each other fold a stroller, or sit together on a bench and talk about their weekend. ����’s happening because they have the opportunity to be together.

We need more of this, and I think that some of the federal funding that will hopefully soon roll out for child care and pre-K can create more opportunities for economic integration. My advice to programs in diverse neighborhoods is to absolutely do this. This is important.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Elliot Haspel: To start – what is the Raising Child Care Fund?

Rachel Schumacher: The Raising Child Care Fund is a really innovative attempt to shift funds from private foundations into the hands of grassroots organizations that work directly with and alongside parents, early educators and caregivers who are most impacted by our lack of a real child care system in this country, and have the most insight really into how to fix it.

The Fund is trying to center their voices in the discussion, both in calling for change and actually being at policy-making tables or influencing them with their own stories and ideas for what the policy solutions ought to be. For too long, those folks have really not been included in the process.

LaDon, how did you get involved or hear about the Raising Child Care Fund?

LaDon Love (LOVE): So we are one of the founders of the campaign in DC. There were three organizations that started it off. How SPACEs in Action got involved: we are an organization that works primarily in the Black community. And as we began to do this work we affirmed the need to look beyond just the Black community, so we do a lot of work in the Black and brown communities and within that also with immigrants. So looking at early learning, our thing has been, how do we create a space for the families and providers who are most directly impacted to be at the table?

What we do that I feel is different—I like to say our secret sauce—is that we make the connection with the center or the family home. And then our goal is to build the relationship because the trust factor is so important.

And so with that said, we work to build leadership with the providers and the families that they serve. The goal there is that we want people to speak from their own experiences. And sometimes it’s a pain point. Someone said to us, we should use the term ouchie. So sometimes it’s that ouchie, but we want folks to connect their values because we know on a different level, we connect by values.

Then we begin to tell this story of how those values connect to who we are. Then we talk about that pain point—that ouchie—and give a bold solution to what we want to see different. And then most importantly, what are the steps we need to take in order to move in that direction?

That’s helpful. And what has the partnership in being a grantee of the Raising Child Care Fund meant for your work?

LOVE: Oh, it’s meant a lot. I feel like the relationship has really blossomed into a paradise flower. That’s one of my favorite flowers. And because of the fact that not only are we funded, there’s a relationship that we have with Rachel and with the RCCF. And when they’re working on something, they come to us and see us as a part of their think tank.

I can also go to her and say, hey, I’m stuck. Can you help me think through something? If she doesn’t have the answer, because she has a much broader network than I do, she’ll connect me with someone. I’ve worked to be a connector, but you are limited on who you have in your circle. Rachel has a much broader circle. The Raising Child Care Fund has a much broader circle and she’s always open.

And RCCF is always open to connecting you with folks outside of even what they offer because she wants to understand what we do as a totality. So child care is one of the pieces that we work on, but we work on other issues too. RCCF has been an advocate for us with other foundations and with other funding sources. They have been a resource to us in helping us think through pieces of work that we’re doing, but also a sounding board.

They have been a space that has given us higher visibility because Rachel and the child care fund and even some of the other folks that she works with sometimes do different conversations. Whether it’s a conference, maybe even a conversation that RCCF pulls together itself. She often says, ‘Hey, could you help me think through this piece?’ Or she’ll say, ‘can you facilitate a conversation?’ And then sometimes she’ll just say, ‘what are you thinking about?’ Because actually I did ask her to help me to do a forum with our storytelling process so we can be in front of more funders. I think it’s a give and take, but it’s a beautiful relationship and I wish I had more of those.

Also, RCCF has at least monthly opportunity-centered conversations with the grantees and we’re all in different states. So not only do we get to find out about opportunities like this conversation with you today, we also get to come together and talk about what we’re doing in our states.

There’s so much learning that we can do because, what might be possible in another state may not be possible here. Also what may have been tried in another state has not been tried here. So we get to learn there. There’s also the bonding that happens during that call, and then conversations happen outside of that call. But it becomes, I guess, a Mecca is a good way to say it because we all come together in this space and get to talk about what we’re doing.

HASPEL: And Rachel, so how many grantees are there?

SCHUMACHER: We now have 16 grantees, and we’re in 15 states. I started talking about this as a project of the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative in 2018 and we made our first grants in 2019. We had raised at that point $1.9 million dollars that was going to be spent over three years. And it was sort of seen as an experiment to see what we learn from funding grassroots voices.

A lot of our early childhood funders were recognizing that they had never funded in this space and that it may be a missing element that was really needed, given that we had tried brain science and we had tried return on investment. We tried economic development. We tried just, this is the right thing to do. We tried school readiness and we never really got the kind of public support and investment we needed to actually get to transformation. And we knew we needed to transform the system and we knew some of the best ideas were coming from the people on the ground who weren’t being heard.

So we started it with that amount and we couldn’t reach everyone. We couldn’t reach DC. [Ed. note: SPACEs in Action was rejected the first time they applied to RCCF.] We had to make some hard choices and we had three times as many requests for funding than we actually had raised. So the question of would people apply was clear. And then, just honestly what happened is after making the case over and over again, between the reality of watching the pandemic hit our child care programs so hard… so all this was going on and we started to get funders calling us and saying we think this is important to invest in.

Now we’re at the point where we have 12 contributing foundations. It’s probably about to be 13. And we have raised close to $8 million dollars to be spent over a five-year period. We could spend way more. We know that. And we had to fund at a lower level than we wanted to because we had so much interest in the beginning.

Coming from the foundation world, it strikes me that you all are doing things very differently than traditional philanthropy has usually done. And so LaDon, I’m curious, Rachel talked about how it is resource intensive to do the work that you do. Can you talk a little bit about what went into the campaign there, because D.C. has won some huge gains?

LOVE: Yeah, $75 million [for early childhood in the ], overall it’s like $170 million dollars [for social programs]. So I would say one lesson was the assessment that pushing just child care alone wouldn’t get us the win. So housing was added in and a couple of other issues were added in that built a coalition, but also stopped any infighting across issue areas. The issue-adjacent coalition building was really important.

And the second lesson was to have providers, families, both home-based and centers coming together, calling on the City Council to do something was really key. And the third key was to utilize social media and online tools to engage, inform and to educate people. Because we cannot be on the streets like we used to [because of the pandemic]. I mean, myself, I don’t want to collect paper from people. So we use QR codes, right? But not everybody has a phone.

There are people in our leadership who have flip phones, right. And that’s real talk. And there’s people who have phones where they’ve paid by the minute or they pay for a certain data plan. And before the month is over, it’s gone. So there have been some cases where we’ve helped people with their cell phone. You have technology. The digital divide is real.

The other thing is that the pandemic has really heightened, brought awareness, has elevated, has made it more commonplace for people to talk about mental health issues and mental health wellness. One of the things that we did quickly when the pandemic was at its height was to create a healing justice strategy. Folks were stressed about child care, stressed about their children not going to school, stressed because they didn’t have resources, stress because transportation was a challenge.

Very helpful. You know, I think oftentimes we talk about advocacy and there are two groups. There’s the grasstops, like your traditional children’s advocates. And then there’s more of the grassroots, the people who are most directly affected by these issues. And I think it’s safe to say there can be a tension at times between those two groups. So how do you see that playing out and where does the Raising Child Care Fund position itself?

SCHUMACHER: I didn’t start with this, but we have three stated goals in our grant making, the first one, obviously being centering the voices, the most impacted and getting them a chance to be at the table. The second goal is coalition building and it’s very intentionally an interest of our funders. A lot of our funders started funding professional advocacy and had never done this before, but they really wanted to see whether we could support those relationships. From the start, we’ve partnered with the Alliance for Early Success because they are a major national funder of state- based early childhood advocacy, and they had a shared interest with us.

And our third goal is obviously equitable child care, I don’t need to go into that. We also have an unstated goal of just educating on what organizing is. And we always feel like we do that best when we put our grantees first and we just sit back and they talk. So we have held several conversations like that for foundations to understand what it looks like.

But to your question, we really wanted to be a part of the formation. And we really push hard for grassroots to be seen as an equal partner in that conversation and how the grants were written.

So if people, particularly funders, want to get involved, what do they do?

SCHUMACHER: You know, that’s a great question because first of all, one of the things that I think is unique about the Raising Child Care Fund is the fact that the funders are so involved in helping promote and get the word out.

We really want to build more partnerships with social, economic and gender justice funders who have really come all in on this “care economy” work. We’re excited to see the connections that are being made. We do have one funder that comes out of the gender equity, reproductive equity area. But we need to do more and we need to figure out how better to articulate that.

I think the other thing I haven’t spoken about is our effort to really help folks match with state and local funding by requiring it in our application, although we’ve lowered the expectation with the pandemic. We get on the phone and pitch for our folks—if they’re trying to get funding from a state or local funder—and say why we selected them. We reach out through the foundation community to let people know about the opportunity to apply.

I think one of the other beauties I feel of the Raising Child Care Fund is that the child care community can be more insular; people talk amongst themselves. This is really creating a space for folks to talk outside of their normal networks, and I think it is timely.

Disclosure: Early Learning Nation is an initiative of the Bezos Family Foundation, which is a funder of the Raising Child Care Fund.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Can you give a brief history of how Quebec’s current child care system came to be?

At the end of 1990s, we had a Minister, Pauline Marois, who said we have to do something for child care, as a feminist gesture. At that point, the employment rate of women was much lower than the rest of Canada. So she had this idea: we are going to develop a universal child care system with very low parental fees. So they converted the existing community centers and some of the for-profit centers, and those became what are known as Centres de la Petite Enfance (CPEs) — early childhood centers. The goal was to have a space for all children up to 4 years by the year 2000, which was not realistic at all [the year before the reform, there was only space for 15% of young children].

The demand rose extremely, which also caused a rapid expansion of home-based care. The workforce was not there. Even now, 25 years later, we still don’t have a publicly-funded, regulated space for every child. But the idea was great! Over time, though, the governments changed, the fees went up and the ban on private sector participation was lifted.

So over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a rapid growth in for-profit programs that signed an agreement with the Ministry and could offer these $5- or $7-a-day spaces and still maintain their for-profit status. Then the last government decided that ‘we’re going to open it up for for-profits that aren’t publicly funded.’ So parents pay full price, but get a tax refund at the end of the month. The for-profit sector has grown 1,000-fold since 2009; they have as many spaces as the CPEs now.

Our big issue is the quality. All the research we’ve done here, across Canada, and in other countries, shows that for-profits tend to be of lower quality. Why is that? Because they are for-profit! They have to make a profit. The CPEs are not-for-profits. They are run by a committee that includes parents. They’re not perfect yet, but they’re much better than the for-profits.

Particularly on the American Right, we often see negative research lifted up, particularly those papers by . Specifically, these authors assert that participation in Quebec’s child care system leads to negative child outcomes. How should we think about that research?

We should think about that research as being associated with a pretty conservative think tank. Methodologically, they are not solid at all. There’s a difference between psychological and econometric research. The economists start with the idea, because universal child care was put into place in ‘97 and ‘98, that all children were exposed to the effect. That’s not true! Only a minority of children was in child care when it all started.

And since we have longitudinal data, they try to find effects on vocabulary, behavior, and even the latest article on criminality. In my opinion, it is methodologically incorrect and outright harmful to do this kind of analysis because they did not follow the same kids — they took different cohorts! Then they extrapolated from it. And a lot of people said, ‘well, child care, we’re raising criminals!’ That’s an absolutely false interpretation of those results. You can’t compare apples and pears.

It feeds into a very right-wing philosophy: women stay at home, you take care of the kids, why should the state contribute to child care, it’s your responsibility. So I’m very skeptical about that research.

Does that research take into account the differences in quality you’ve been describing?

No. It doesn’t look at quality, just whether you’ve been in child care or not. You know, it’s a huge sample. ����’s easy to get to an effect size of p < 0.5 or 0.05. But if you look at the score of child care vs. not in child care, it’s a minimal difference. ����’s not at all at a clinical level. ����’s purely statistical acrobatics. But people take it at face value!

On the other hand, we often hear that Quebec’s system pays for itself. Is that accurate?

I think it is. The economist Pierre Fortin that showed it pretty much paid for itself, even bringing in a little bit more. Labor force participation of women with young children has gone up to over 80%, which is much higher than the rest of Canada with less affordable child care. That contribution to the economy brings in money for the state, and if you factor all that in, the money that the state spends on child care balances out.

How is the system funded?

����’s a provincial responsibility — it’s Quebec. Right now it’s a really interesting time, because the federal government has decided we should work on a . So they are signing bilateral agreements, which means the provinces get money for child care. Although there aren’t clear guidelines yet about what provinces have to do with it. For Quebec, we have to work on quality, it’s the Achilles Heel of our system.

I’m curious about the workforce. What does an average Quebec child care teacher get paid?

Wages are low, like everywhere else. But they are higher here than elsewhere in Canada, with wage scales that go up to a bit more than $20 [U.S.]/hour. But we always say, a zookeeper makes more money than a child care provider! ����’s a big problem. Retaining people isn’t easy. ����’s better in CPEs — wages are better, they are unionized [and most have access to benefit packages]. But in the private programs, wages are lower and there is huge turnover.

What would you say are the main lessons the U.S. can and should learn from Quebec?

One is: early childhood education and care should not be a market. It should be subsidized. Invest in a system that provides affordable care for all parents. We must ensure we have qualified personnel and support people in their work, because it’s very demanding. Low ratios are important!

Also, one-fee-for-all has benefited the middle class, but the working poor, $8.25 a day is a lot! So we have to answer, how do we get the most vulnerable children & families into child care, since they benefit the most from it? ����’s not free for anyone (unless you have a social service intervention plan). It should be free for those up to a certain income.

Another lesson is that Quebec went too fast. You have to have a long-term plan — it’s not enough to just open up spaces. They didn’t focus on quality. You have to put in place a strategy that takes into account how many children live in an area, who are the neediest, how do we get them in and ensure our child care system is quality?

To sum it up: Go slow and go thoroughly.

Why did you originally get involved in organizing domestic workers, including nannies, in New York City?

Living in New York City, it’s impossible not to see that the city is really powered by a workforce of women, mostly women of color, who provide essential services for families and especially care that families need. There were just upwards of 200,000 mostly immigrant women of color who were working, pushing babies in strollers to the parks and picking them up from play dates and story hours. When we think about the workforce that makes everything else possible, it’s impossible in New York City not to see this incredible workforce of women of color who do that work. ����’s also really stark how undervalued their work is and how largely unseen it’s been in our culture and in our economy.

And these are women who also have families of their own. Really early on when I was still in school, I was volunteering at a domestic violence shelter for Asian immigrant women. I worked the hotline at nights and a lot of the calls that would come into the hotline were about the economic stressors that survivors of violence face and the fact that many of them work in these low-wage service jobs like nannying and caregiving. While they’re incredibly dedicated to that work, they just can’t pay the bills or make ends meet on the income that they earn. And without access to a safety net, they just really didn’t have the ability to provide the care that their own families needed. It seemed like a really important place to dive in if we wanted to really create economic opportunity in our community.

You’ve been working on this project for a long time now. How has the issue of rights for domestic workers and caregivers evolved over the years that you’ve been working on it?

I first started organizing domestic workers in 1998. At the time, even through the early 2000s, when you would say the words “domestic worker,” legislators would ask, “What are you talking about? Is this about domestic violence, what is this about really?” We’ve literally had to bring nannies to the state legislature and to the city council to share their experiences and tell their stories. Then, there slowly became a recognition of just how large and important this work is and just how vulnerable the work is.

In the 1930s, when Congress was debating the New Deal labor laws that would become our core foundational labor law framework, Southern members of Congress would not support those laws if they included equal protections for farm workers and domestic workers, who were mostly Black at the time. That racial exclusion has really shaped how this workforce has been treated under the law and in our culture. The organizing that we’ve done has really tried to bring attention to that and to address it for the 21^st century. The question of how race and gender has shaped what kind of work we value and protect in our economy — that conversation has really evolved thanks to movements for social change over the years.

Now that we have a reality where most working age adults work outside of the home and they rely upon caregivers and professional care workers to support their families, there is an increasing understanding of just how important this work is. But our policies haven’t really caught up. I would say that for the most part in our country’s history, we’ve always treated caring for our families as an individual personal responsibility. If you’re a parent and you can’t afford child care, it’s because of some failure on your part, or if you’re a daughter of a parent with Alzheimer’s and you can’t afford the home care that they need, it’s because you didn’t save or you did something wrong.

What the Covid pandemic has revealed is that our lack of a caregiving infrastructure and adequate support for working families to meet their caregiving needs is actually a huge liability and a huge risk in our public health and in our economy. Now there’s starting to be more of an awareness that care is a public policy priority and need and that care infrastructure is fundamental infrastructure for our economic wellbeing in the 21^st century.

Do you think Americans have become more inclined to support better rights for domestic workers and caregivers, public responses to caregiving needs, in the pandemic?

I would say yes. There’s been a huge consciousness and awareness shift in terms of what work is essential. This pandemic has created this situation where all of these workers who are working in our service economy — who by the way are mostly women and people of color who worked in jobs that were almost invisible to us, everyone from the farmworker to the grocery worker and the delivery worker to the child care worker and the home care worker — suddenly people started to understand that this work is essential to our health and our safety and our wellbeing. I think people do understand that childcare workers, early educators and home care workers are essential.

The other piece of it is the caregiving challenges. We’ve been reading these horrific numbers about women who are being forced out of the workforce because of a lack of choices around caregiving, whether it’s child care or elder care. And it’s disproportionately affected women of color in particular. There has been a real shift in consciousness, both in terms of the workforce and how essential the work is and in terms of just what working families need in the way of a caregiving infrastructure and policy support.

What has the pandemic meant for your organizing — has it impacted it or changed it? The pandemic will someday ebb and end, how do you carry that consciousness forward and what does it look like on the other side of the crisis?

We never stopped organizing, especially in the peak of the pandemic because we have so many care workers and nannies and house cleaners who worked through the pandemic providing essential services to families who needed them. They did so without access to health care, sometimes without access to proper PPE [personal protective equipment], and certainly without access to child care for their own kids who were home from school.

We’ve been organizing throughout, and we’ve had more engagement than ever before from caregivers and domestic workers around the country, signing up to call their members of Congress, to participate in legislative meetings and town halls and online rallies.

There is a real sense [that] now is our time. So we’re working together with unions who represent care workers, with family caregivers and family caregiver advocates, we’re working with early childhood advocates, paid leave advocates, to push together to build the care economy that we’ve always needed. We think that this is a once in several generations opportunity to really reset how our economy functions to better support families. So everything is super charged at this moment in terms of our organizing.

During the pandemic and even before that, have you seen parents getting more involved? I’m often asked why there isn’t a parents’ movement for child care, and there’s lots of reasons for that. But are parents getting turned onto this, are they getting involved and mobilized?

Yes absolutely. The voters who turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers in 2020 and even in Georgia in the Senate runoffs are parents, many of them. The care workers themselves are parents. I think everywhere we turn people are activated because the stakes have never been more clear. Despite all the challenges with the pandemic and otherwise, I do see renewed passion about the fact that it is up to us. ����’s the voters who will decide and communities in motion who can really make change happen.

We have good champions in the legislature, and I think the stars are beginning to align in that way.

Joe Biden made his caregiving platform a central part of his presidential campaign. With that and with champions in the legislature, do you think now is the time? Are you optimistic that policy will change?

I’m going to quote Stacey Abrams here and say I’m neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but I am determined. I say that because these are issues that families have been raising for decades now. We have really seen a big breakthrough moment in the public awareness around the essential nature of the care economy and we have a really good mandate on the part of voters to move real change forward. It is going to be up to us collectively to make it happen. ����’s going to take a very broad, wide and deep movement of families and workers together to realize the possibility or the potential of this moment.

The Biden caregiving agenda was a significant marker for three reasons. One being that it was the first time a presidential candidate made caregiving a core part of their economic agenda. Not the women’s agenda, not the family agenda — the economic agenda.

The second piece was that it really understood that family care is about meeting the needs of families that are intergenerational units. There is a need for child care and early educators, there’s a need for paid leave so that families can take care of the people that they love and themselves at different times, and that there’s a need for long-term care, elder care, and support for people with disabilities, especially in the home and community. While those issues have been siloed in the past, people are starting to understand how they’re interconnected and interdependent and that families experience the need for these policy solutions in ways that are fundamentally connected. That was another big breakthrough.

The third big breakthrough was really recognizing the importance of the caregiving workforce. We need to be investing in our childcare providers, in our early educators. We need to be making sure that home care jobs, that all of the jobs in the care economy, are living wage jobs with benefits and a path to a union and, I would add, a path to citizenship for the immigrant caregiving workforce.

The fact that the Biden care agenda planted those three stakes in the ground is a really significant indicator of how far we’ve come on these issues and what’s possible. Which I think is about building the kind of care infrastructure that really does meet families where they are at this time in our history.

For someone who is interested in organizing their neighborhood and organizing their community to advocate for more resources for children, for better working conditions for caregivers, what advice would you give? Where should people start? What are your tricks of the trade?

There are lots of great organizations to get involved with and support. is one, is organizing parents around the country around childcare issues. is another. Now is definitely the time.

Because of the timely nature with which all of these policies are being discussed in the context of federal relief, I would just say to pick up the phone and call your members of Congress and urge that supporting caregivers and caregiving is a core component of any Covid relief and recovery effort. And if you can set up a meeting with your member of Congress and gather your neighbors, friends and family to do the same, that actually could make all the difference right now.

Our traditional approaches to economic recovery have really evolved. Short-term investments in public infrastructure like roads, bridges, and tunnels and broadband — those are absolutely essential. And child care, home care, these kinds of policies and programs are also essential infrastructure at this time. In order to make sure that we build an economy that actually works better and keeps us safer and is more resilient coming out of this pandemic, we really have to see our caregiving programs in that way and our care workforce as essential infrastructure. ����’s different because it’s human infrastructure. But it is just as essential and fundamental to a healthy economy. Any parent out there reading this will get that.

To get a better idea of what happened, and what lessons can be learned from the election, I interviewed Elizabeth Gaines, founder and director of the Children’s Funding Project. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Elliot Haspel: You’ve talked about how there wasn’t necessarily a blue wave or red wave in this election, but there was a ‘children’s wave.’ What do you mean by that?

Elizabeth Gaines: The Children’s Funding Project and our 501(c)(4) arm, the Children’s Funding Accelerator, supported these seven measures that were on the ballot around the country. They were in places as diverse as Escambia County, Florida – which is basically Alabama – all the way to , which is about as far left as you can get. So I’ve been saying ‘from Pensacola to Portland!’ we saw voters show up and say they were willing to pay a little bit more in taxes to support their community’s children.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that the election showed this country is still so divided, and we have a lot more time before everyone sees the ideas of equity and opportunity for all kids being the central things. So we need to continue to build on this new – not so new anymore – localism concept, and build models where we can, so that when states start to become ready, when finally the federal government starts to becomes ready, we actually have good, solid models of what it looks like for a community to invest in their kids and do so in a progressive taxing way. [Note: Gaines’ use of ‘progressive’ isn’t in the political connotation but rather in the economic connotation; a progressive tax sees the tax burden increase as income increases, as opposed to a regressive tax which disproportionately impacts poorer taxpayers.]

Are there particular lessons from these campaigns other communities can learn from?

Most of the communities we supported were contending with a natural disaster – not just COVID but hurricanes, fires. And people were telling us ‘oh, it’s not the right time.’ And they all won with more of the vote than similar measures have gotten in the past. It was exactly the right time. So that was a lesson.

That’s interesting about these measures getting more votes than in the past — what was different this time that led to increased support?

I do think COVID, and the need for something positive to vote for was a factor. The people who were running these campaigns did a fabulous job; they learned from what happened before, took advice, didn’t rely only on polling to tell them whether to keep going hard or not. Sometimes if there are good poll numbers, people feel like they don’t have to leave it all on the field. But probably more the former than anything else.

So then that makes me curious: in 2022, 2024, when, knock on wood, we’re not in the middle of a pandemic anymore, what lessons from 2020 can be applied forward?

That’s one of the things I’m really focused on doing now – staying with these places, so that we can track their implementation. There are also a lot of places like San Antonio, specific Florida counties, San Francisco, that have really good data on how they’ve been able to improve the odds for kids. So making sure we’re telling the story from these places in a really compelling way. Also, we need to get more national funders to pitch in to these campaigns, because some of them did have opposition and money matters in these campaigns.

One thing that struck me looking around the map is that there are lots of different funding approaches – property taxes, income taxes, tobacco/vaping taxes, and so on. How do communities go about choosing what approach to go after?

Well in some places, there are really slim pickings. They have to just go with what they have the ability to do at the city or county level because state laws differ; not every community is able to do what Multnomah Co. just did with their high-earner income tax.

We are looking at how can you get enabling legislation to create these ‘children’s districts’ at the local level and use more progressive taxation? We want to assist communities to work with local tax experts and figure out what’s allowed under the charter, under state law, and find as fair an option as you can find. If not, we’re pragmatic and we’ll support it, but we’re not going to encourage the unimaginative use of sales tax (a regressive option) as the only path.

You mentioned that localities are having to pave the way while states and the federal government figure it out. So what lessons do you hope state and federal lawmakers are drawing from these local victories?

One, that people don’t actually mind paying taxes when it’s for something good and new that they know their community needs. Two, that your community actually does better when you have a thriving place for families to raise their kids. Those are the main lessons!

When you think about the campaigns themselves, even though the funding mechanisms were different, to what extent were the campaigns similar or different?

So, San Antonio had a lot of business support – state legislative leadership, Republicans and Democrats, lots of bipartisan support. And then you’ve got the Multnomah campaign out with clipboards and selling baked goods. Or Leon County in Florida, where they had good support from leadership and got some challenge from folks on the far left, because there’s a little bit of territorialism that starts to happen: should the money go for this or that issue?

And I say it should go for whatever people are willing to have it go for right now, and early childhood seems to be winnable. So, again, being pragmatic, yes there are many important issues, but voters are willing to do this right now, so let’s get it.

Then there’s a question of what to respond to or not to respond to when it comes to social media, and I saw groups choose to respond in different ways.

One thing that’s interesting about early childhood is that there are lots of different constituencies, some of which you just pulled out – practitioners, parents, government leaders, business. It feels like there’s been a swell particularly around parents, as COVID shines a light on early care and education. Have you seen parents more engaged than in the past?

I do think that it feels like there’s more of a closeness to what people are experiencing, though I have no data; maybe parents just have it more on their mind so they’re paying more attention to the political dialogue around these measures. Even here in D.C. where I live, where they passed ‘birth-to-3’ legislation and just elected a new slate of city council people, so many candidates on the voter guide led with ‘as a parent…’

That makes sense! Anything else you want to share?

These results are just for me a reinforcement of this localism piece. People sometimes challenge me on it — ‘shouldn’t we go for the big federal dollars’? Yes! And yes, we should also go after the state dollars. But if we don’t play the long game, in the way others have done in other issue areas, we’re just going to continue to be behind.