Early Care and Education – ��

For Young Kids, Screen Time Isn’t Just an At-Home Issue Anymore

Emily Tate Sullivan — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Screens are everywhere these days. So, it seems, is the debate surrounding their role in children’s development.

Much of the conversation about how much and what type of screen time is appropriate for young kids is focused on the use of digital technology at home, under the purview of a child’s parents and primary caregivers. But the reality is that a of children age 5 and under spend at least part of their week in an early care and education setting, where screen time may be less visible, but is often present in some form. And when communication between parents and early educators falls short, young children may end up spending more time with screens than experts recommend — and their parents intend.

In early learning environments, screen use varies widely, said Rebecca Parlakian, senior director of programs at Zero to Three, a nonprofit focused on early childhood development. Some settings are screen-free, while others set parameters like time limits or restricting screens for educational use only, and others allow children to watch movies or short videos for entertainment.

“Depending on who cares for your child and what the practices are, it could go the whole range,” Parlakian said.

Although expert guidance around screen time has begun to move away from offering clear duration-based limits, there is still a large body of research informing best practices around children and digital media — and that research emphasizes the importance of in-person, hands-on and relational interactions for young children. But often, program staff and parents are not communicating with one another about how much or what kind of screen time a child is getting in each environment, said Kate Blocker, director of research and programs at Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.

“We have to acknowledge that has to apply across the contexts they’re in and is not repeated,” Blocker said. “The communication gaps are really real, I think.”

Although some states are beginning to whether and how screens can be used in early care and education settings, a program’s approach to screen time is more often driven by the philosophy and preferences of its owner or director. In the absence of clear, cohesive guidelines for the field, that can be a daunting task, said LaTonya Richardson, owner and director of The Academy of Learning and Early Care, a licensed, nationally accredited family child care program in Jacksonville, Florida.

“Technology in early childhood is not a black-and-white thing,” Richardson said. “We need clearer guidance, and we need realistic goals.”

Many of the best-known early childhood advocacy and membership organizations do offer some recommendations for programs around screen use. The National Association for Family Child Care, for example, includes guidelines for “television and computers” in its , including limits of 30 minutes of screen time per day for children over age 2 and none for those who are under 2. But the field lacks a set of go-to guidelines that all program leaders and staff can reference, much the way that many families view the from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Instead, Richardson said, her approach has evolved over the years as she’s learned in real-time what works well for children and what doesn’t.

Today, she and the other two teachers in her program use some technology with the 12 children they serve — who range in age from 7 months old to 5 years old — but they keep it brief and reserve it for times when a screen can add something to the learning experience.

Teachers in LaTonya Richardson’s family child care program use technology occasionally with children — and only when it is able to offer an experience that kids otherwise couldn’t have, such as being able to watch a short video of a nursery rhyme they’ve been reading. (Photo courtesy of LaTonya Richardson)

“Technology is used as a tool, not as a replacement for teaching,” she said. “We believe children learn best through play, conversations and movement.”

When screens come out, Richardson said, they are used with intention.

Earlier that week, one of the program’s teachers used a tablet during circle time to play short videos of a few nursery rhymes the group had recently read together. It was intended to recap the lesson and deepen the children’s understanding of the stories, Richardson said.

One video was of Humpty Dumpty. In it, the kids could see Humpty Dumpty falling, in motion. They could watch as he cracked into several pieces. Another video was of Jack and Jill. The children were able to see Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill.

“It’s to give them something else than we’re already doing so they can see and feel and interact in different ways when we’re using the tablet,” Richardson explained.

The older kids can also access a tablet to practice concepts like counting or the alphabet. Her staff limits this activity to five minutes at a time.

“If a child wants to see the tablet, they know now, when they see the hourglass, ‘My time is up.’ There’s no getting upset. They put it down and move on to the next thing,” she said. “It’s all about guidance, support and making sure everyone’s clear on what the role is when it comes to using those devices.”

It helps when those messages are communicated consistently across both home and school settings, Richardson added.

Preschool-aged children in LaTonya Richardson’s family child care program are allowed to use a tablet to practice concepts such as counting and matching for up to five minutes at a time. (Photo courtesy of LaTonya Richardson)

At one point, she held a workshop for families to help them understand what healthy technology use looks like for young children, and to understand the trade-offs of granting their kids screen time at home. Some parents expressed that their children were getting into the car after pickup demanding a tablet, and they didn’t know how to set boundaries.

“It’s not to shame any parents,” Richardson said of the workshops and resources her program provides to families. “It’s to work with them so they can work with us.”

At the Primrose School of Evergreen, a private early learning program located in the heart of Silicon Valley, parents overwhelmingly view technology as a positive, said owner Bejal Patel.

The preschool is part of Primrose Schools, a national chain of more than 500 early care and education centers. Patel’s center is piloting a new learning app from Primrose Schools called Balanced Learning that will be made available to all programs this fall. The app was designed for children ages 3, 4 and 5 and is intended to complement the hands-on activities and lessons that children are working on in the classroom.

“There’s so much external content that might be fun and flashy … but we’re trying to get kids to think critically, solve a real-world problem,” said April Poindexter, head of curriculum and innovation at Primrose Schools, about the new learning app. “So it requires active engagement.”

Primrose students engage with technology to complement hands-on learning. (Photo courtesy of Primrose Schools)

One experience children may have on the app, she said, would reinforce a learning unit on gardening and pollinators. In the classroom, children may learn about gardening and taking care of the earth. Outside, they may plant seeds and tend to the school’s real garden. In the app, they can read further about pollinators or design their own pollinator garden based on information found in the app.

Another app experience, Poindexter said, offers children an opportunity to view short videos about age-appropriate social challenges, such as starting a new school, and then use a handheld mirror to observe their own facial expressions.

“It’s all designed to be short, sweet, brief and very purposeful to what they’re learning,” Poindexter said.

Primrose centers, she added, do not use any digital media for entertainment and do not introduce any children under age 3 to screens.

Patel, the owner of the Primrose location in Silicon Valley, said that aligns with her school’s approach.

“Screens don’t enter classrooms until preschool,” she said. “Infants and toddlers — that’s non-negotiable. At this age, we know there’s no app that can replicate what a caring adult and a sensory bin can do for a 2-year-old’s development. When children reach preschool age, that’s where technology enters, but very carefully.”

Children may use the Balanced Learning app up to twice a week, for no more than 15 minutes, Poindexter noted.

Patel acknowledged that the transition away from the app can be a challenge for children and staff, but noted that, “we’re fighting neurochemistry, not kids.”

Children get a two-minute wrap-up cue on the app. Patel’s staff also offer verbal reminders and try to empower the children by letting them turn the tablet off and put it away themselves. Sometimes the kids try to bargain for more, Patel said. They’ll say, “I just want to finish this,” Patel said.

“We’ve given our teachers certain things to say, like, ‘I know it’s hard to stop,’” she said. “We always try to positively redirect a child into doing something else.”

Sometimes there is a disconnect between that approach and what happens at home. Some parents, Patel said, may give their child an hour or two to watch whatever they want.

“We do sometimes get worried that we have to start all over again [when] Monday hits,” Patel said.

Still, despite these challenges, Patel feels strongly that children in the program benefit from having some exposure to technology, rather than none at all.

“The best thing is to not pretend that this thing doesn’t exist,” she said.

She offered an analogy. If a child is not allowed to have any cake on his birthday for the first 10 years of his life, and then is given a cake on his 10th birthday, he might be inclined to eat the whole thing. Whereas if he’d had one slice of cake each year on his birthday, he may have learned how to consume the sugar in moderation.

“You’re teaching the kid to learn things in small quantities,” she said. “Using the iPad or screen time for smaller chunks is better than not having limits.”

Blocker, of Children and Screens, offered a counterpoint.

“I think it’s important to acknowledge there’s no evidence that a lack of technology is bad,” she said. “There’s no research to indicate that not having it in there is a problem.”

Blocker and other child development experts pointed out that screens are not the primary risk here. It’s actually what screens are replacing — hands-on learning, real-world experiences, free play and close caregiver interactions — that is the bigger concern.

“Every minute a child is spending on a device isn’t spent on serve-and-return or physical development,” Blocker said. “Research is pretty clear young kids don’t learn as well from screens. What is the screen taking away? That’s one primary challenge: making sure it’s not displacing vital developmental inputs.”

Parlakian, at Zero to Three, would not necessarily suggest that technology should be absent from early care and education programs altogether, but noted that when it is present, it must be used thoughtfully and intentionally. That kind of approach, though, places the burden on already-overextended program leaders and teachers.

There may be value in children seeing a concept they’re learning about come to life in a video. Children may understand the book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” better if they get to pair it with a video of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, she said. But there is no place, Parlakian feels, for screen use that is strictly for entertainment in early care and education programs.

“Life is entertainment for young children,” she said. “There should be plenty to explore, experiment and solve in their setting.”

Hawaiʻi Families Need Preschool. Who Will Fund It?

Megan Tagami — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Affordable preschool options are few and far between for Hannah Miller, a Waikōloa mom of a 2- and 4-year-old.

For more than three years, Miller has relied on a free early learning program run out of a church in Waimea.

The program has taught her two children new skills, like counting to 10 in Hawaiian and socializing with other kids, Miller said, while also introducing her to a community of other parents. But the program is set to close in the fall as federal funding runs dry for up to 17 early learning sites across the state.

“We feel like we have nothing for him, so he’s just going to be home with us,” Miller said about her son, who still has another year before he’s eligible for kindergarten. “We’re heartbroken.”

Hannah Miller began attending a family learning program with her son when he turned one. Her daughter has attended since she was six weeks old. (Courtesy of Hannah Miller)

Across the state, early learning programs are struggling to stay afloat amid potential federal funding cuts and reluctance from state lawmakers to fund preschool and child care initiatives this year. While the state faces an ambitious goal to provide preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032, the future of the initiative remains unclear as one of its champions, Lt Gov. Sylvia Luke, takes a amid a state investigation.

Most early learning bills this year requested state funding to build the teacher workforce or keep child care and preschool programs afloat. But nearly all the proposals died as lawmakers faced significant budget constraints from federal funding cuts and Kona low storm damages amounting to $1 billion mid-way through the session.

“They’re supposed to vote their priorities, and it was just not a priority this year,” said Malia Tsuchiya, early childhood policy and advocacy coordinator at Hawaiʻi Children’s Action Network.

But failing to invest in early learning programs could have significant consequences for working families and the state’s economy as a whole, Tsuchiya said. High-quality preschool and child care not only prepare kids for school, she said, but they also allow parents to reenter the workforce and maintain stable employment.

While Hawaiʻi runs some of the highest quality public preschools in the nation, it ranks among the worst states for 4-year-old children’s access to these programs, according to a from the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Coming off a challenging legislative session, advocates worry that momentum around universal preschool could further stall as Luke steps away from office. Luke led lawmakers in appropriating hundreds of millions of dollars for in 2022, but investments may slow unless lawmakers continue to make early learning access a top priority, Tsuchiya said.

“We’re going to need our lawmakers to support that investment,” Tsuchiya said. “Our priorities shouldn’t come and go because one person goes.”

Funding Shortfalls

Oʻahu parent Danielle Alefosio faced multiple roadblocks when she tried to enroll her 4-year-old daughter in preschool last summer. Some programs had waitlists, she said, while others required $200 to $300 deposits that her family couldn’t afford.

But Alefosio found another option: Parkway Village Preschool in Kapolei, which opened as the state’s last year. Since starting school, Alefosio said, she’s seen her daughter progress from speaking in gibberish to talking in full sentences and develop a love for learning.

“They’re top tier,” she said.

Parkway Village is one of two preschool-only charter schools in the state, which serve a total of roughly 180 students and are tuition-free. The two schools receive $171,000 per classroom in state funds, but advocates say it’s not enough to run high-quality programs and entice others to join the charter school model.

Providers need roughly $275,000 to $285,000 to run a charter preschool classroom, said Caroline Hayashi, president of the Waikīkī Community Center. The center works as a nonprofit partner with , which serves nearly 100 students.

Waikīkī Community Preschool opened as the state’s second preschool-only charter this fall. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat)

Charter schools can work with their nonprofit partners to raise money to cover funding gaps, Hayashi said. But it’s not possible for nonprofits to cover such significant shortfalls, she said, and insufficient funding from the state could discourage other people from starting their own charter preschools.

“There’s more sites where this could really work,” Hayashi said. “But in order to make that a reality, the key is making it more financially sustainable.”

Parkway Village Preschool faces a budget shortfall of roughly $100,000 per classroom — or $400,000 for the entire year, said Trisha Kajimura, vice president at Parents and Children Together, which serves as the preschool’s nonprofit partner. would have helped to close the gap by raising state funding to $250,000 per classroom, which is closer to the true costs of operating charter preschools, Kajimura said.

The bill passed through the House but died when it failed to receive a hearing in the Senate Education Committee, chaired by Sen. Donna Kim. The bill did not have an appropriation amount, although the Hawaiʻi State Public Charter School Commission estimated the proposal would cost $790,000 in addition to the existing funds charter preschools receive.

Funding shortfalls are also affecting early learning programs targeting low-income, rural communities.

A handful of nonprofits across the state run a network of family and child interaction learning centers, which provide free educational programs to infants and toddlers and their caregivers. The programs have historically relied on roughly $20 million from the federal Native Hawaiian Education program.

But one of the primary nonprofits, Partners in Development Foundation, is in the last few months of its three-year grant, and there have been no opportunities to reapply for federal funding, said president and chief executive officer Shawn Kanaiaupuni.

Nonprofit leaders like Kanaiaupuni asked state lawmakers to fill the funding gap earlier this year, warning that could close if the federal government stopped awarding grants through the Native Hawaiian Education program. would have set aside an unspecified amount of state funding to support the programs, but the bill died when it failed to receive a hearing in the Senate Education Committee.

Hawaiʻi nonprofits operate more than 60 family learning programs, which are often located in rural or low-income areas and incorporate Hawaiian language and culture into their lessons. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat)

Partners in Development was able to find other sources of funding to keep 19 of its locations open, but it plans on closing 17 family learning sites in the fall, including all four of its Kauaʻi programs. The closures will affect more than 1,000 children and 1,000 caregivers, Kanaiaupuni said, although she’s hopeful some county funding will come through to save four sites on Maui.

“How much can our families sustain?” Kanaiaupuni said. “The impact is really devastating.”

Other nonprofits operating similar family learning programs are able to keep their sites open for now, but the future of federal funding remains uncertain. The proposed version of the 2027 federal budget eliminates funding for the Native Hawaiian Education program entirely, and there’s no guarantee that the federal education department will award grants in a timely manner even if Congress appropriates the money, U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda said.

“It’s a huge impact on our communities,” Tokuda said. “We need to continue to make sure that this funding is available and that it’s awarded and it gets to where it needs to go.”

Pre-K Needs A Champion

Despite a tumultuous session for early learning programs, Tsuchiya said she’s still optimistic the state can reach its goal of providing preschool to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032. The state has renovated and constructed 81 preschool classrooms in the past three years and plans on opening another 26 this summer, according to the School Facilities Authority, the agency tasked with building new preschools.

As of October, the state projected it needed to build to provide universal access to preschool by 2032.

But the state needs continued investments in preschool expansion to maintain its progress and hit its 2032 goal, Tsuchiya said. While the School Facilities Authority requested $31 million for preschool construction, lawmakers set aside $20 million in the most recent version of the budget.

Early learning providers have also raised concerns that the teacher workforce can’t keep up with the state’s demand for new classrooms. aimed to address the problem by setting aside state funds for an apprenticeship program, which would allow prospective teachers to work in early learning classrooms and get paid while earning their early educator credentials.

A national report recently ranked Hawaiʻi as one of the lowest states for 4-year-old children’s access to public preschool. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat)

“My desire here is to focus more on the workforce pipeline to make sure we have these early childhood education workers ready to fill these buildings as they get built out,” said Rep. Andrew Garrett, who introduced the bill. He estimates the program would cost roughly $8 million.

The bill failed to pass out of conference committee.

Moving forward, it’s critical for preschool access to remain a top priority for state officials, said Kerrie Urosevich, executive director of Early Childhood Action Strategy. While Luke has pushed for the aggressive expansion of preschool access in recent years, Urosevich said, she’s worried progress could stall unless the governor or next lieutenant governor continues to champion the issue.

“I don’t think it has enough momentum on its own,” Urosevich said. “I think it’s going to require a champion.”

This was originally published on .

Ohio May Scrap Hard-Won Pay Reform Amid Fraud Crackdown

Bryce Covert — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:30:00 +0000

Last year, childcare providers in Ohio secured a huge victory: After years of advocacy, state lawmakers included in the budget that put the state on a path to pay providers who accept government vouchers based on how many children are enrolled in their programs, not how many manage to show up each day, giving them more consistent revenue despite children’s unpredictable absences. It was a hard-fought win; providers lobbied lawmakers of both parties and a rally with hundreds of providers at the state capitol last year to demand the change.

But now, in the wake of a new focus among Ohio lawmakers on supposed fraud in the state’s childcare system, they are on the verge of ditching the idea altogether. A under consideration would require providers to be paid based on attendance rather than enrollment as they are by parents who pay out of pocket.

In December, conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video claiming to uncover widespread fraud in Minnesota’s childcare program, particularly among daycare centers run by Somali American residents. The video went viral and reached federal officials, and the Trump administration cited it as motivation to pursue an and various efforts to restrict federal childcare funding. Despite the video offering no verified evidence of fraud — and the fact that the state was several cases of fraud in its childcare system — some states have responded by intensifying their focus on supposed fraud. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agencies to launch investigations into childcare fraud, while Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare heightened reviews of funding. (The reviews found of providers guilty of any wrongdoing.)

Shirley’s video sparked an immediate reaction in Ohio, according to Tamara Lunan, a childcare organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The state has the Somali American population, just behind Minnesota. in Columbus, Ohio claimed centers were receiving public funding for nonexistent children even though evidence at least two of those claims. According to the at The Ohio State University, just 0.43% of all the providers who accept vouchers through the state’s publicly funded childcare program were found to be misusing funds in 2025. In a of 124 complaints sent to the state’s Department of Children and Youth last year, the agency found no evidence of fraud in 100 of them.

In January, Ohio lawmakers two proposals — House Bills 647 and 649 — they said were aimed at combatting fraud in the state’s publicly funded childcare system.

Marquita McClendon, who has operated a childcare program in Cincinnati since 2023, acknowledged that fraud exists. “But I feel like the systems that we already have in place already do the job necessary,” she said. “We’re changing laws over an unsubstantiated claim. It’s just beyond me.”

The state made some changes ahead of implementing the new enrollment-based payment system that have led to sacrifices for providers. It a requirement for counties to use presumptive eligibility, which allows families to receive childcare vouchers if they already qualify for another program like food stamps, and allows parents to enroll immediately once they get a new job, rather than waiting weeks for their paperwork to be approved. Some providers accept children into their programs during that interim period anyway, Lunan said, but often aren’t paid for all of that time. The state also reimbursement rates for some types of in-home providers and increased the threshold for children to qualify as full time, which allows providers to be reimbursed at a higher rate.

“There were things taken away from us,” McClendon pointed out. With those reductions, she’s making $10,000 less each month, she said. “We’re in the red.” The loss of revenue has meant she can’t buy new equipment for the children in her care or do field trips this summer as she normally would. “I can’t run an effective program,” she said.

If providers were paid based on enrollment, it would help them weather children’s absences for illness or snowstorms, “things that providers can’t possibly be able to plan for when they’re making their budgets,” Lunan said. It “would help to stabilize the programs.” Instead, “Providers are hemorrhaging income based on these changes,” she said. “It’s killing their bottom line.”

Reversing the decision to pay based on enrollment is just one of the changes included in the legislative proposals Ohio lawmakers have put forward in the name of fighting fraud this year. Some others have since been toned down or removed. initially that would have given the state’s Department of Children and Youth the power to cut off funding or suspend a license for any provider merely suspected of fraud, waste or misuse of dollars without a hearing. That language has since from the bill; now those actions can be taken if “evidence demonstrates” that a provider knowingly engaged in fraud or misuse of funds. But providers remain concerned about lawmakers giving the attorney general more power to prosecute perceived fraud, which in the bill.

“We don’t want to see childcare providers get penalized because the state made an overpayment to them,” Lunan said. Both overpayments and underpayments are included when states calculate their payment error rates, and those can be due to the state government’s error, not providers acting with ill intent. Her organization is pushing for the state to create a committee made up of childcare providers that could distinguish between clerical errors and actual, intentional fraud.

The original proposal for , introduced by Republican lawmaker Josh Williams, would have mandated the installation of cameras in all childcare programs that receive government funding to “allow visual inspections in real time,” . It would have given the Department of Children and Youth the ability to view the footage at any time. McClendon pointed out that she has diaper changing stations in her classrooms. “There’s no way to protect my children’s privacy,” she said, calling the idea “a bit extreme.”

While that idea has since been abandoned, lawmakers have adjusted the bill to facial recognition for children who attend programs that receive public funding. Such technology won’t work on young children, particularly infants, given how rapidly their faces are developing and changing, McClendon and Lunan pointed out. McClendon also noted the challenge of keeping kids still long enough to take a photograph. Lunan pointed out that there is already an existing mandate for programs to have an attendance system in place that takes pictures of parents when they sign children in.

An made to that bill the storing of photos of the children. But many parents are still opposed, Lunan said: a against mandating facial recognition has been signed by nearly 900 people.

Lawmakers are also reducing the time given for allowing a child to be checked in retroactively, if their attendance was originally missed, from 30 days to seven. “That would be a tremendous hardship,” Lunan said, on both providers and the parents who are the ones who have to go into the system and fix the problem.

The legislation calls for spending up to over two years on data analytics to detect patterns of fraud or abuse. The facial recognition proposal alone would be “expensive for the state and providers, diverting scarce public dollars and provider time away from care itself and toward unnecessary surveillance infrastructure,” said Ali Smith, senior project coordinator at Policy Matters Ohio, . Lunan agreed. “We don’t need funds to come out of childcare,” she said. What Ohio childcare providers need instead, she said, is more funding, not less. “Providers are not defrauding the system. They are barely breaking even — most providers are in the red,” she said. “The conversation really needs to shift from fraud to funding.”

The anti-fraud bills “would just destabilize childcare, or destabilize it further, because it’s already unstable,” Lunan said.

Q&A: With Childcare Expanding, What Does High Quality Access Look Like?

Jessika Harkay — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:30:00 +0000

The expansion of accessible early care and education has increasingly become a top priority for lawmakers across the country.

New Mexico has recently launched the United States’ first model, followed by Vermont and that are working to build capacity to support similar systems.

A national spotlight has also been cast on New York City’s efforts after promises on the campaign trail from Mayor Zohran Mamdani to expand free care for children as by the end of his term in late 2029.

The conversation is growing at several different levels, with some states focusing on pre-K access and others looking into providing care even earlier. But, most are grappling with major roadblocks in scaling larger – and universal – initiatives, including questions on funding models and accountability.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, a former chief academic officer at the New York City Department of Education, and the current president of Bank Street College of Education, spoke with �� about childcare trends and what it’ll look like to create higher quality programs as states look to expand access.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

To kick off our conversation with the idea that there is a lot of movement around early childcare right now and accessibility to it, what are we seeing across the country and what are states investing in or considering legislation around?

We’re not getting any help right now from the federal government. During the Biden administration, it was the opposite. There were federal funds flowing to states specifically to do this work, and that’s part of how you got some really interesting, innovative stuff happening in states not that long ago.

Vermont is one of, I think, only two states now that have a really strong program to for early educators. Kentucky guaranteed for childcare workers that their own children or deeply subsidized care.

New Mexico is one of the most interesting examples right now because in November 2025, they launched universal childcare.

One of the things that is striking about their strategy is that they created a dedicated permanent revenue stream for it, … so it’s not conditioned on the federal government being able to support it, or an annual tax appropriation. That makes it stable in a way that’s unusual. They have also specifically said that competitive educator compensation is a goal which is really different.

D.C. is the other place that has done something similar to this. In 2018, they created a that had an explicit call around pay parity [for early care workers], and it gave people initial one time payments [up to $14,000]. Then, they created a salary scale based on educational attainment. They were also trying to push people to get the training that they needed to deliver at a high quality, and during the phase of that project, the employment in the sector grew by 7% and retention rose to over two thirds.

In most places, including New York City, early childhood folks’ turnover is five times the rate of what you see in K-12 settings. That turnover is a function of the low wages and and sometimes the lack of training as well, because if you’re not doing well in your job, you don’t want to stay in it.

In New York, a lot of our workforce is actually in poverty. More than half of New York’s early educators are relying on public assistance. We have more than 16,000 children statewide who can’t be served because of vacant positions and this is where we actually have state funding for childcare seats, but we don’t have people to fill those positions. So I think those models of D.C. and New Mexico are really worth looking at other states.

What about missed opportunities that aren’t being considered when lawmakers are drafting legislation or proposing new funding?

When you think about elected officials and who they’re accountable to, the most clear promise you can make is X number of seats for X communities.

We’re going to have for 2-year-olds in New York City, … that is the thing that will stick in the minds of the public. That other layer, on quality, is harder to boil down into a sound bite.

When you create access, you could create a system that actually does damage if you don’t have quality. Quality is defined by what are the adults able to do with children once they have this time with them? We want it to be something that has real educational impacts, … and taking advantage of this incredible moment of brain development where 90% of your brain architecture is built by the time you turn 5.

What does high quality care look like? What are signs for parents to look for?

A quality learning environment for early childcare allows kids to move around freely and explore and interact with each other and with adults and the materials that are in the space, whether it’s blocks, or art supplies, or a dress up area, or a water or sand table.

In low-quality settings, a lot of times what’s happening is kids are in some way, physically restrained from moving, and this is done in the name of safety. In that low-quality setting, you don’t have enough adults, the physical layout of the space isn’t totally safe for a toddler to be wandering around and the kinds of things that are going to be interesting for that toddler to pick up and stick in their mouth are not available.

In a low-quality environment, that child is maybe sitting in a high chair or in a playpen, and there’s an iPad going that they’re looking at which is not able to interact with them and is not supporting that development. You may be keeping the child physically safe, but if they aren’t able to interact and move, their brain development is not going to progress the way it needs to.

You want to set up the physical space, and you want to have the staffing to support that flexible movement and exploration, because that is how our brains develop – through those types of interactions with people and with materials. If the person is so stressed, either because their own life is so stressful because they’re not able to make ends meet and or their work environment is so stressful because they’re understaffed and working really long hours, that connection is lost.

When we talk about opening seats across the country, what are the odds that these seats are going to be low quality care programs?

There’s been research done over the years that has looked at the quality of early childhood settings and in general, that number of really good settings are like 20 to 30% of what we have. That doesn’t mean that the other 70% are low quality – it’s a spectrum. My guess is probably only 10%, maybe 15%, fall into that low quality bucket, but there’s a lot in between that high quality and low quality that needs work.

How can states and lawmakers take more accountability when they are considering opening more spots up to ensure that it is leaning toward the highest level of care for the youngest kids, especially developmentally?

Building a living wage is the most important thing because that brings people into the workforce. It encourages people to stay in the workforce. And as people stay, they develop experience and relationships with children. You can’t do that without training. So that’s the other big piece of this, what are we doing to train people well?

From birth to 3, there’s not a requirement anywhere in the country that you have to have a teaching license to teach at that level and there can’t be that requirement given the current compensation structure. So then, what is the requirement? If you’re not going to ask people to have a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, … how do you provide them with training and support that will enable them to accelerate learning and development for children?

The goal is that you build in the resources for professional development for the existing folks who are already in the field, and then resources for people to get trained as they enter the workforce as well.

I’ll give you one example. Bank Street has partnered with New York City during the pre-K initiative because the state actually does require a master’s degree for pre-K teachers here and that’s a relatively new requirement, so there are a lot of teachers who were working before that requirement went into place, and are now out of compliance with that law.

The city asked us at Bank Street to design something specifically for that group that would be attuned to the fact that they already have lots of knowledge and skills and they don’t need to start from the beginning.

We created something called the Advanced Standing Program, which is a mastery based program for teachers who are already pretty experienced, and so they can do it much more quickly than a normal master’s degree. They get credit for their experience, so the cost is lower, and it’s historically been paid for partially by the city or by nonprofits where the folks are working.

So, creating those kinds of programs that are really responsive to the real needs of folks in this workforce, as opposed to a compliance requirement that pushes a lot of people away.

There’s some examples now of universal childcare, but in most states, it is pretty limited to low-income families or at a pre-K level. So, when we’re talking about this quality issue, I want to get into equity also. Childcare programs may be getting some of the highest needs students. How does the issue of quality play a role in development and readiness by the time these students enter the K-12 system?

The achievement gap that we see in K-12 schools between wealthy and low-income students – which is usually like a 20 or 30 point spread in achievement when you look at third grade or eighth grade test scores or high school graduation rates – is visible beginning at 18 months.

If you study toddlers, the same exact graph shows up between upper-income and low-income children. So why is that?

We know that’s exactly that moment where language development is happening in the brain, and so if a child is sitting in front of a TV all day by themselves, or iPad or and no one’s talking to them, no one’s interacting with them, then they’re going to be really low scoring around that language development.

There’s not much that’s different between upper income and lower income children except for the fact that upper income families have much more access to quality care. If we can provide that quality care across the income spectrum, there’s a shot at closing those achievement gaps later on.

We’ve talked about New York City a little bit, and I know through several decades, there’s been a push and pull around expanding this early childhood care access under each mayor. Can you talk a little bit about the history of what New York City has tried, what’s new now under Mamdani’s proposal and whether that will be effective or not?

One of my big regrets, I was senior deputy chancellor under Mayor [Mike] Bloomberg for his third term in office, and it was around that time that we started to expand pre-K, but it was a very modest expansion. As someone who came up as an educator in middle schools and high schools, I didn’t really know what I know now about the power of early childhood. I don’t think any of us at the DOE in those days, other than folks working in the early childhood division who weren’t at the decision making table, understood how powerful the impact on educational equity is if you invest in early childhood.

It took Mayor [Bill] de Blasio making the pre-K commitment as part of his first mayoral campaign to make that the focus for the Department of Education and for the city as a whole. They added 60,000 new seats in pre-K, then expanded pre-K as well in the second term.

Mayor [Eric] Adams made lots of promises about working on this but really didn’t move the ball.

What Mayor [Mamdani] campaigned on is that there’ll be free childcare for kids from birth to 5. It’s beginning with expanding the number of seats for 3-year-olds and expanding 2-year-olds. It’s a fairly modest expansion in this first year, and I think the question that will face the mayor over the rest of this term is how do you get to that larger goal where everyone has access and and how do you do it in a way that pairs access with quality?

I think they’re off to a good start.

I want to pose the question you said Mamdani’s team will have to answer. How do states lead large scale expansion and ensure quality as they try to expand to everyone?

One of the lessons that we learned from the pre-K expansion is that you need to pay attention to the existing ecosystem and not lose capacity as you build capacity.

One of the downsides of the pre-K expansion during de Blasio’s term was that they put a lot of the seats into public elementary schools, and the teachers became part of the UFT. They got regular salary the same way any K-12 teacher, which is great, but then the nonprofits that were running childcare programs as part of the initiative didn’t have the funding to match those salaries, and so a lot of people left the nonprofit daycare centers … and even worse, family childcare, which are small businesses run out of people’s homes that usually serve children birth to 5, were not initially included in the strategy.

We actually saw a loss of childcare seats in the birth to 3 space when some of those folks went out of business.

I think part of the solution this time around, particularly because we’re working with younger children, is how do you support family childcare as part of this? How do you help improve the quality and the economic viability of that?

Last question just to wrap us up. What you had talked about during your time at the NYC Department of Education with not paying attention to childcare, I think is something that was universal for lawmakers early on too. This conversation has really picked up in the last five years or so. How likely is it to continue seeing such acceleration in this movement?

I think one of the interesting things about childcare is it’s a bipartisan issue in most places in the country.

The governor of Ohio, a Republican governor, has done massive investments in early childhood. Nebraska, Louisiana, lots of red states have really prioritized this, and the reason why is that more than three quarters of families have both parents in the workforce, so people need childcare. They need a place for their children to be. They need to be able to afford it, and they want it to be safe, and they want their children to be learning.

From an educational equity standpoint, we need that quality in order to sort of solve our broader problems in terms of achievement gaps in our school system.

We haven’t seen as much investment in the second Trump administration, but the first Trump administration actually saw the biggest increase in early childhood funding since the Clinton administration. Biden went even further. Those were both a Republican president and a Democratic president actively investing in this. We have Republican governors and Democratic governors actively investing in this.

This is something that really speaks to people, and so I think for that reason, we are going to continue to see new public funding flow to this. It may not come as fast as I would hope, but we’re on the trajectory in the right direction.

Kentucky’s Childcare Benefit for Early Educators Is Spreading Fast

Emily Tate Sullivan — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:01:00 +0000

Many early childhood educators can’t afford childcare for their own children — an irony that has long marked the early care and education field.

That began to change in 2022, when Kentucky became the first state in the country to roll out an initiative making most early childhood educators automatically eligible for childcare subsidies.

Novel at the time, this program — which, in effect, provides free childcare to early childhood educators in licensed programs through an expansion of the state’s Child Care Assistance Program — caught the attention of leaders in dozens of other states and has been replicated widely in the years since.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for �� Newsletter

“It’s not just happening in one type of state,” said Diane Girouard, state policy director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit that advocates for high-quality early learning experiences. “It’s happening in [states] big and small; blue, red and purple; rural and non-rural. States are just seeing that it’s working. It’s unique. It’s a really good workplace benefit.”

The idea to make early educators automatically eligible for childcare assistance was conceived as a strategy to help recruit and retain early childhood educators in the wake of the pandemic. By 2022, many families needed childcare to return to a normal work schedule but often couldn’t find spots for their children because early care and education programs were so severely understaffed, leaving slots unfilled and entire classrooms vacant.

The model was so successful in Kentucky that other states took notice and began to fund their own versions of an effort to provide childcare assistance to early childhood educators, primarily through pilot programs. More recently, some states have even moved to make the program permanent.

Last month, both and enacted laws making most early childhood educators automatically eligible for childcare assistance. Iowa’s governor signed a bill on April 9, while Kentucky’s program was made permanent a few days later, on April 14.

“We’re psyched,” said Sarah Vanover, director of policy and advocacy at Kentucky Youth Advocates and one of the champions of this program in the Bluegrass State.

“We’re known for being frugal and conservative with money,” Vanover said of Kentucky’s legislature, which is overwhelmingly Republican. “And yet this is something we’re investing in. When you have that dialogue with [program] directors, they’ll tell you they have been able to open classrooms and keep staff.”

The reason states have continued to invest in this type of program, Vanover and other state leaders shared in interviews, is because it works. By delivering free or discounted childcare to early educators — many of whom have jobs with low wages and few, if any, benefits — several states have seen workers who are more willing to stay in their jobs. And some educators who had left the workforce to stay home with their young children are finding it’s just enough of an edge to lure them back into their teaching positions, surveys and program directors have shared.

Since 2022, leaders from 38 other states have reached out to Vanover about the model, she said. Many of those leaders have gone on to pursue some form of the program. At least a dozen states, including , , , and , currently have at least a pilot program in place providing childcare assistance to early childhood educators. Two others, New Jersey and West Virginia, have introduced related bills. is the only state known to have initially offered and then ended this type of program, and in that case, it was the result of a severe budget deficit, Girouard said.

While the model has spread, no two initiatives are exactly alike, Girouard added.

Kentucky and Iowa, for example, make this benefit available to early childhood educators regardless of income, while most other states only have enough funding to increase the income threshold above what is available to all families in their states. In Rhode Island, for instance, the state’s childcare subsidy program is available to all families with an income less than 261% of the federal poverty level. For , that income cap increases slightly, to 300%.

And Kentucky’s program includes any staff member working in a center-based early care and education program — from teachers to administrators, cooks to early intervention specialists.

“You can’t run a childcare program without the assistant teachers, without the nutrition staff, without the administrators,” Vanover said. “If you’re looking at doing this without the other staff, you’re going to have teachers get shuffled around. It’s essential for the whole program to take advantage of it — every employee.”

Meanwhile, a in Maine — called the “childcare employment award” — has emerged as unique in a couple of ways.

Maine’s program provides at least a 50% discount on childcare for early childhood educators, according to Heather Marden, co-executive director of the Maine Association for the Education of Young Children, a state affiliate of NAEYC. For staff who were already eligible for childcare subsidies before the pilot, the state also covers the cost of their co-pays, which can run anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000 a year, Marden said.

Importantly, Maine’s program is distinct in that it allows home-based childcare providers — a group often left out of this benefit — to participate. (The legislation that made Kentucky’s program permanent also allows home-based providers to use the benefit for the first time.)

A recent of Maine’s pilot program found that it has had a positive impact on workforce retention, noting that nearly every participant was considering leaving the field before receiving the award.

Moreover, the report found, many of those participants were weighing whether to leave the workforce altogether to stay home with their children, rather than looking for jobs in other fields. The discounted childcare has put enough money back into their pockets that they have been able to stay.

Marden noted that while that’s good for each individual teacher, it’s also good for entire communities.

“The impact of retaining one educator is pretty incredible,” she said, explaining that a single educator gained or retained opens up licensed classroom slots for four to 12 children.

Maine’s childcare employment award program was serving 511 children from 313 families as of September 2025, with nearly as many children and educators on the waitlist. The state has funded the pilot at $2.5 million a year for the past two years, and it just hasn’t been enough to reach everyone, Marden explained.

While many early childhood leaders in Maine want to see the pilot program funded at a higher amount, the reality is that it will likely soon cease to exist altogether. During the recent legislative session, which ended in mid-April, policymakers did not fund the pilot for another year. As of now, the program is slated to end after June 30.

In Iowa, uptake has been strong. As of September 2025, more than 3,600 children from 2,153 families had taken advantage of the benefit, according to data from the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. And a survey conducted by the state agency, the results of which were shared in January 2025, found that 87% of participants remain in their roles, and 12% began working in childcare as a result of the pilot.

Hollie Allen, co-owner of Vine Street Child Care, a large center-based program in West Des Moines, Iowa, said that at least 13 of her teachers — out of about 60 people on staff — are enrolled in the program. They still owe co-pays between $35 and $100 per week, depending on factors like household income and number of children, she said, but that’s a big improvement over the full cost of a spot in her program.

“I don’t understand why they’re calling it free childcare. It’s not,” Allen said, but added that, compared to the $360 per week she charges for an infant slot, “paying $67 is awesome.”

The program has been a “double boon” for Allen, she said, because she was previously giving staff who weren’t eligible for other financial support a 50% discount on childcare at Vine Street — and losing money on those slots in the process. Now, with the state’s childcare assistance program covering the cost of early childhood educators’ childcare, Allen has been able to give every person on payroll a $2 per hour wage increase.

“It was a big cashflow injection for our program,” Allen said. “Those across-the-board wage increases were critical.”

In other states, such as Rhode Island, where the pilot program has been extended through 2028, the impact on turnover in the field has been real but modest, said Lisa Hildebrand, executive director of the Rhode Island AEYC.

“It’s still helpful,” she said. “The intent is there. It’s still retaining some educators. But it could be a lot better.”

Hildebrand added: “We just need way more money in the system. This is not going to solve all the problems. It’s a little bit of Band-Aids. You’re giving free childcare to educators because you’re not paying them enough that they can afford childcare on their own. You’re still not paying people enough, and that’s the problem.”

Why This Childcare Advocate Wants to Be Vermont’s Next Governor

Rebecca Gale — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000

When former President Richard Nixon the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971, it halted what would have become a large-scale, . Historians widely view that decision as a major turning point that pushed the country away from building a comprehensive childcare infrastructure.

It would be nearly fifty years later before the country would again seriously consider building such a system, as proposed in the — though that attempt ultimately stalled when the childcare provisions from the final package that passed.

In the intervening decades, even as most families came to rely on and , childcare largely remained something families had to sort out on their own, with limited state and federal assistance.

But polling data shows that for publicly-funded childcare exists, even as federal legislative efforts have waned. In pockets of the country, there has been state-supported investment in childcare, often due to frustration with low wages, high turnover, poor outcomes and unworkable conditions. In the past three years, for example, New Mexico and Vermont have passed groundbreaking childcare policies, strengthened infrastructure and increased access.

Childcare has gained visibility and some political leaders, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vice President Kamala Harris and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have elevated childcare as a key economic issue for voters. But childcare has more often been a secondary issue in political campaigns, rather than a career-shaping priority for candidates. It’s typically a bullet point for family policy or affordability, rather than the key legislative accomplishment vaulting a candidate to public office.

That may be starting to change.

As more early care and education policies are enacted, the leaders involved in those endeavors have an opportunity to use their experiences to run for higher office.

In Vermont, Aly Richards — who led a statewide advocacy organization focused on improving access to high-quality childcare for nearly a decade — this month that she is running for governor. She will compete in a Democratic primary in August, and the winner will face Republican Gov. Phil Scott in the general election this fall.

Aly Richards, a longtime childcare advocate, kicked off her campaign for Governor in her hometown of Newbury, Vermont on April 6, 2026. (Josh Wallace)

The organization Richards spearheaded, Let’s Grow Kids, drove efforts to pass Act 76, a landmark legislation that brought to Vermont’s early care and education system, funded largely by a new payroll tax. The state raised reimbursement rates for early childhood programs, and provided breaks to most families to cover the cost of care.

Could Richards’ success in passing childcare policy translate to support from voters in her run for governor?

In a conversation with Rebecca Gale, Richards explains why childcare is an ideal upstream issue to tackle affordability for families, why other states keep calling her to ask for advice on their own childcare systems, and how the governor’s office might be the best next step for someone who knows just how central quality childcare is for families — and states — to thrive.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You began with Let’s Grow Kids a decade ago. What was the intended goal at the time, both for the organization and for you personally?

The only focus was the mission. I really had no thought of what I was going to do with myself afterward, because I’m a really mission-oriented person and it was such a gift for me to have a goal and a deadline.

I like to think about what is the one thing a human can do to make the biggest positive impact in the world. And when I realized early childhood education was that lever just sitting there — where our inaction is causing all this detrimental harm to our society and the action [needed] is very clear and concrete — it felt obvious. It’s within our power to [change]. And when you do, it has this immeasurable impact downstream on all these things that we care about.

So the mission was to make that impact through Let’s Grow Kids — like an entrepreneurial-minded enterprise that would do whatever it takes to meet this deadline and this mission of putting in motion a system of high-quality, affordable childcare for the whole state. And we did that.

And while the job is not completely done, we set it in motion in the machinery of the state government. So we really were able to back away having done exactly what we hoped — creating the machinery, the dedicated funding, the ecosystem that will carry it forward and an aspirational model. We showed it’s possible to do this.

What are two or three key changes that you view as central to the state’s early care and infrastructure system?

The No. 1 change is dedicated public investment, because the problem with childcare in this country, since the beginning of time, is that there’s not enough money in the system from parents, who are the only payers.

To fund the system to be functional, to pay early childhood educators a livable wage, to have enough supply to meet the demand — you need a dedicated permanent funding stream. You can have more childcare, it can be higher quality, it can pay wages and it can meet the needs of your community. But that’s the No. 1 thing.

Two and three are the mechanism by which we did it. We basically took a system that already was in place and pushed the public investment into the hands of Vermonters through reduced childcare costs. By going up to that [the threshold in which a Vermont family can now qualify for childcare subsidies], you’re making and you’re seeing reduced childcare costs, which is making life more affordable. We also increased the reimbursement rate to programs.

It put money in the hands of Vermonters to make it more affordable. It put money in the hands of early childhood education programs so they could actually run their programs, pay higher wages and meet the needs of their families. And that’s why I think we’re seeing the implementation work so well. It’s adding more spaces, adding more businesses and reducing costs for families at the same time, which is what’s spurring our economy. It’s the one area of growth we’re sort of seeing in Vermont right now.

There are still very few leaders who’ve built their careers around childcare policy. Do you see this as a structural roadblock to progress? I envision it as sort of a “Lego ceiling” — a barrier built piece by piece through fragmented policy and underinvestment, that could be taken apart if priorities shift. What would change if more leaders made childcare a signature issue?

Yes, yes and yes. Let’s bust that Lego ceiling into a million pieces so they’re on the floor when you step on them accidentally, like in my family all the time.

Look, it is exhilarating for me to be moving into this new world of politics from that background in early childhood education and policy, because it’s not just early childhood education. It’s problem-solving in a dynamic way for the issues we face in the 21st century.

I spent my last decade working to solve this deep crisis that dogged Vermont and has dogged the rest of the country. I grew up in Vermont. I went out of state to change the world, working on Obama’s first campaign. I was so excited by his leadership potential, and yet I was so dismayed by the lack of action in D.C. because people who didn’t agree with each other didn’t speak to each other anymore.

Children turned out to support Aly Richards for Governor at her campaign kickoff, including her twin sons, Beau and Wesley. (Josh Wallace)

I know enough to know that’s not how real change happens. You have to be in the room together. You have to be able to have reasonable agreement and disagreement.

So I raced home to Vermont and started working for the governor, and started realizing — talking to Vermonters from all walks of life — that what was broken in D.C. was not broken here in Vermont. We still talk to each other, and at the end of the day we can get pizza together and a beer even if we disagree. I quickly realized that early childhood education was one of these rare things where if you go upstream, it will solve all these other problems. It’s a way of viewing the world that I think we must focus on in the 21st century. We have real structural issues in Vermont and in this country. We have to go upstream, understand what those structural issues are and change them.

Childcare is a perfect example. Take Vermont. We have jobs. It’s a misconception that we don’t. We just don’t have anyone to fill them. A large reason is because we can’t find or afford childcare.

I paint this picture for you because to me that is the whole basis of the answer to your question. [Childcare] needs to take the country by storm, and it’s starting to in places like Vermont.

You’ve mentioned that other states have reached out to you about making childcare more affordable. How do you see this conversation changing if you become governor?

Well, it puts it out in the universe in a very different, meaningful way. Affordability will make or break this country right now. And here’s a concrete example of making life more affordable tangibly for your citizens.

So I’ve been all over the country, honestly — in person and on webinars in the past couple of months — spreading the model of what we did in Vermont through Let’s Grow Kids.

Can you imagine the National Governors Association having a childcare meeting where we all say: What’s worked in your state? What hasn’t worked in your state?

Aly Richards and her husband James Pepper at home in Montpelier, Vermont, with their 7-year-old twin boys, Beau (blue socks) and Wesley (red socks), and their dog Ellie. (BattleAxe Digital)

Who are the leaders? Get them together, accelerate this — because it’s great for your citizens and great for your economy. And it’s now a low-risk proposition because states have already done it and showed it’s possible.

I think there’s an amazing opportunity there.

How Early Childhood Sets the Stage for Student Success

Mark Swartz — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:30:00 +0000

After spending much of her career developing and implementing policies to get young children ready for kindergarten, Jenna Conway is now focused on ensuring that students come out of their K-12 experience ready for career, college, military service or whatever comes next. She refers to this dual mission as “bookends of readiness.”

Recently named as Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, Conway brings extensive experience improving early childhood systems, studying teacher-child interactions and leveraging data to drive performance.

Before coming to Virginia in 2018, she helmed the closely watched early education efforts in Louisiana, and played a key role in redesigning the state’s approach to measuring early childhood education quality. As the assistant superintendent of early childhood in Louisiana, Conway led implementation of (CLASS), a rigorous national measure of classroom quality that evaluates the quality of teacher-child interactions in real time, and contributed to significant improvements in the state’s early childhood system.

When Conway became a leader in Virginia’s school system, she was determined to build a common framework for measuring the quality of early childhood programs but knew the state required its own approach. The early childhood landscape was fragmented: family childcare providers, Head Start programs, early childhood special education services and school-based pre-K programs were all operating largely in isolation. Conway helped change that.

Superintendent Conway during a recent listening tour. (Courtesy Virginia Department of Education)

Working with providers, community members and legislators, she helped in 2020 that moved oversight for all early care and education programs to the Board of Education and the Virginia Department of Education, laying the groundwork for what would become the (VQB5).

The VQB5 system is, in Conway’s words, an “apples to apples” way of measuring early childhood experiences across every type of provider. Twice a year, about 1,200 certified individuals from the local community gather data on Virginia’s early learning environments by observing those settings in person; additional observations are conducted by contractors from Teachstone, the company that developed CLASS.

Conway also implemented the , which exemplifies her data-first orientation. This statewide framework for assessing children’s preparedness as they enter kindergarten gave Virginia a clearer picture of where children stood at the threshold of formal schooling. It also exposed the gaps that early childhood investment needed to close.

The literacy and math results that Conway sees across Virginia’s 131 school divisions are not where she wants them. Her response is characteristically collaborative. As she puts it, the task is to “roll up our sleeves and work with … our school division leaders, our principals, our educators and all of the support staff and coaches to get kids the education that puts them on track for success.”

In Virginia, where the governorship regularly flips between parties, bipartisanship is essential to enacting policy change, Conway said. She consistently works across party lines, making the case that school performance, workforce participation and long-term economic competitiveness all depend on early childhood progress.

As she settles into her new role, Conway discusses school readiness, teacher-child interactions, bipartisanship and how her personal experience has shaped her views on education.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How does Virginia define school readiness?

I have been working in Virginia for nearly eight years with different governors and with stakeholders across the state to improve school readiness. And that has been the True North for the entirety of my experience here. And really, by focusing in on improving school readiness, it allowed us to think very differently about how we work with all of the places that kids are served before kindergarten to improve school readiness outcomes. If you can improve school readiness outcomes, then you then open up all sorts of opportunities for kids throughout school and beyond.

There is no single birth to 5 provider that could serve all kids. You need family childcare and [center-based] childcare and Head Start and Early Head Start and early childhood special education and the schools which offer preschool and pre-K to work together to offer opportunities to families … that put them on track for success. Although Virginia had taken some steps to measure readiness for all kids entering kindergarten, we didn’t have good information about the quality of those experiences.

Superintendent Conway visiting a Virginia childcare center. (Courtesy Virginia Department of Education)

To what extent are you applying the Louisiana playbook to Virginia?

There are two things that we learned from Louisiana. The first is that … kids who were in classrooms that had higher quality teacher-child interactions learn more over the course of that year. We don’t ever standardize test toddlers — it’s not appropriate. It would be a little bit of a fool’s errand to try to test a 2-year-old in that way, and we certainly would never want to do it with stakes. [The second] is that [CLASS] could be used regardless of a teacher’s credential or curriculum use. It provided a way to compare the thing that matters most — the kind of secret ingredient: these teacher-child interactions. But it’s less input focused than something that says, “You have to use this particular curriculum” or “You have to have this particular credential.” In fact, more than 10 years [later] it is still the system of measure in Louisiana. And if you look at some research done by the University of Virginia, you see tremendous gains in quality of interactions across the board, including in very low-income and historically underserved areas from New Orleans to the Mississippi Delta.

How does this approach play out in Virginia?

We realized Virginia had different community members, different parents, different perspectives. And so we worked with the to pilot an effort to think differently about how we might organize early childhood funding. We rolled VQB5 out statewide two years ago. So we have two years of results [from] over 12,000 classrooms. And in each of those classrooms we look at … the quality of teacher-child interactions. We completed 31,000 classroom observations last year, about 2.2 million minutes of insight. These are 60- to 80-minute observations, very rigorous. There’s an infant tool, there’s a toddler tool, and there’s a preschool tool. All of that data goes into determining their ratings, and all of that information is put on a website for families to be able to use.

Have priorities in Virginia shifted with the Spanberger administration, or was it more of a continuation?

It has been a very intentionally bipartisan effort across different administrations. [Democratic Gov. Ralph] Northam [who served from 2018 to 2022] and first lady Pam Northam were really intentional as they worked on a potential early childhood law. When [Republican] Gov. Glenn Youngkin [who served from 2022 until Spanberger took office on Jan. 17, 2026] came on … improving K-12 outcomes was part of his vision for Virginia as well as supporting workforce participation.

During the pandemic, Virginia had some of the lowest [employment] rates, so the biggest drops in terms of moms participating in the workforce. So there was a real bipartisan effort at the time that he came in around investments in making sure that parents can access care so that not only will the kids benefit, but that parents can come back to the workforce. And over that period, you saw some of Virginia’s very low unemployment and very historic workforce participation.

Virginia has made historic investments in early childhood. When I started [in 2018], it was . This year, the initial proposed budget has us at . Virginia is not getting full credit for it, relative to other states. Most people think of childcare as being federally funded. Virginia’s program is now two-thirds state funded.

What motivates you? You’re a mom yourself, you’re from Virginia. What’s a story you think about that helps to center you when you’re doing this work?

My ability to be a working mom is because of childcare. Growing up, my mom did work, although part-time, and many people in my family are in education. My mom is a Ph.D. and was at the University of Virginia School of Education.

As I became a mom, I realized that there’s just no greater act of trust than leaving your child in the hands of an early childhood [provider]. Across three children, I did everything from home-based childcare to pre-K in a school. And I had such tremendous respect for what was being provided to my children and that it enabled me to be successful at my career and to be able to earn money for my family.

I felt so grateful that I didn’t have to face this trade off of: I’d like to be able to work and also be able to know that my kid is well taken care of. And that is the trade-off that we often hear from folks who are working very hard, but whose salaries do not cover the cost of care.

And the thing that sort of struck me more than anything else coming out of the pandemic is that … human beings learn in the context of relationships with adults.

Shifting Immigration Policies Are Changing Daily Life for Child Care Providers

Ashley Álvarez — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:30:00 +0000

For two weeks after President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day, A. Hernandez did not set foot outside her home in Chicago. She stopped grocery shopping. She stopped taking her grandson to preschool — all in fear that federal immigration agents would detain her.

“With pain in my heart, I told my son I couldn’t pick up or drop off my grandson at school anymore,” said Hernandez, who asked to be identified by her first initial and last name in order to protect her safety. “I was scared. If they take me when he’s with me, what would they do to him?”

She cares for her two grandchildren, ages 5 and 6, while their parents are at work. The 5-year-old, who has been diagnosed with autism, attends a preschool with specialized resources. Outside of preschool, Hernandez is the only one his parents trust to care for the boy.

“I dropped him off, picked him up, went on his school field trips, cooked for him after school,” recalled Hernandez. She took three buses to get to the school, a daily roundtrip commute between two and three hours, while carrying a stroller and diaper bag.

But Hernandez had to pull back.

The nation’s child care system relies on the contributions of immigrants like Hernandez. early care and education providers identify as immigrants, and home-based child care — the most arrangement in the U.S. — has a of immigrant providers than center-based programs.

Over the past year, immigration enforcement activities have intensified, leaving providers and families anxious and unsettled. Since he took office, Trump has expanded immigration enforcement and a policy that prohibited immigration activity in certain spaces, including schools and places where children congregate. The administration has also made financial investments in federal immigration enforcement.

These investments and policy shifts have disrupted the child care workforce nationwide, heightening fear and instability among providers. caregivers and child care providers of young children have reported noticing the impact of immigration enforcement activities in their community, according to the RAPID Survey Project at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. Some have left the field altogether.

A conducted by economists Chris Herbst and Erdal Tekin found that increased arrests by federal immigration officers in the first six months of the Trump administration are associated with 39,000 immigrant child care providers leaving the workforce. It also found that, as a result of the increased arrests and shrinking child care workforce, 77,000 American-born mothers also .

Below are the stories of five immigrant women providing home-based care for relatives and neighbors. Located in California, Colorado, Illinois and Texas, they all reported that intensified immigration enforcement has disrupted their work, with ripple effects on the children and families they serve.

Some shared that the young children they care for have expressed fear that their parents could be arrested. Some said they had to change their routines to limit their time in public spaces, and that parents were doing the same. Others said parents stopped taking their older kids to school.

These vignettes — which draw from interviews conducted in Spanish that have been translated and edited for clarity — offer insight into the experiences of immigrants caring for our nation’s youngest children.

A. Hernandez

Home State: Illinois
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 6
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for 2��

After visiting family in the U.S. in 1991 when she was 16 years old, A. Hernandez fell in love with Chicago and decided to stay. She started working at a local restaurant, where she met her husband. She married at 17, had four children and eventually became a stay-at-home mom.

Her children are now adults, and she provides child care for their kids. It’s not uncommon: working parents rely on a grandmother for child care.

But after President Trump was inaugurated, Hernandez said she put cardboard on her windows so no one could see inside and barely left the house.

When she could no longer bring her grandson to and from preschool, his parents changed their work schedules as best they could to account for the disruption in child care. They eventually enrolled their son in a busing program, but the process took over a month, she said. On the days they could not adjust their work schedules, they opted for him to stay home with Hernandez. He missed over a month of school, and a number of sessions with his speech therapist.

“It affected him a lot. Before, he was starting to speak and sing. He was more conversational,” Hernandez said. “Now, he struggles. His communication is more sounds and gestures. He missed over a month of his therapies, and it shows.”

Hernandez said she’s been anxious for months. Once her grandson was enrolled in the busing program, she decided she could pick him up at the bus stop. She began returning to her routine, but said she constantly felt “like someone was following her.”

Then, in November 2025, a Chicago child care provider was at an early learning center on the same street where Hernandez’s daughter works. It happened while children were being dropped off.

Federal immigration agents chased a day care worker into Rayito de Sol, the Chicago center where she works, and dragged her out in front of children before arresting her. The November incident is one of many fueling this week’s demands to keep agents away from Head Start, child care and pre-K classrooms. (Photo by Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Hernandez recalled hearing the news. The child care provider “was doing something good, working with children. Now we have to explain this to children, that we’re all at risk,” she said.

Worried for their safety, Hernandez and her husband opened a naturalization case in November with the hope of gaining U.S. citizenship. The legal proceedings are expensive, so to help make ends meet, Hernandez has picked up an overnight shift at a fast food chain. (She is typically paid $75 a week to care for her grandchildren.)

Hernandez has tried her best to shield her grandchildren from the increased presence of immigration officers in their neighborhood. “My eldest grandson saw officers near his school,” she said. When he told her about it, he said he was afraid they were coming to take him. “Their uniforms are green. He said that the ‘green men’ were coming to take children in black vans. I told him, ‘No, they won’t take you.’”

Carmela Enriquez

Home State: Colorado
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 20
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 4

In 2001, Carmela Enriquez came to the United States from Mexico, joining her family in Colorado. She was 15 years old, and enrolled in a local high school as a ninth grader. In 11th grade, she was warned that she would not have access to federal financial aid because, at the time, she was an undocumented immigrant.

Knowing that her family wouldn’t be able to help cover the cost of college, she dropped out of high school. “I was sad, because I always liked school,” said Enriquez.

In 2004, Enriquez got married and the next year, she gave birth to her first son. Soon after, her cousin approached her about caring for his infant, who was around the same age as her son. He liked the idea of his baby being watched by someone in the family while he was at work. Since then, different family members have relied on Enriquez for child care. Today, she cares for four of her nephews, in addition to her two youngest children, who are 2 and 6 years old.

Enriquez said she changed a number of daily routines immediately after Trump came back into office. She typically picked up her four nephews from her sister’s house, but assuming there would be more immigration officers stationed at high-traffic roads, she changed her route.

“I tried not to drive on busy streets,” she said. “But when it snows in Colorado, I noticed they weren’t removing the snow as fast on the roads I traveled on as on the main streets. I told myself I had to stop my fear of officers, because I was also scared of being in a car accident.”

A few months later, Enriquez began volunteering for a local group that alerted community members if federal immigration officers were nearby. Her eldest child, now in college, warned his mother not to participate.

“He said, ‘No, don’t go. You shouldn’t go outside. If you need something from the market, I’ll go,’” Enriquez recalled. “It makes me sad that my children, born here, are scared.”

A woman is arrested by police during a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on June 10, 2025 in Denver, Colorado. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty)

Enriquez said she has witnessed people get arrested by immigration officers, and fear has swept across the community. “Last September, there was a local celebration for child care providers. There was food, flowers. Only three providers, myself included, showed up,” said Enriquez. “There had been immigration officers seen on a nearby street. I couldn’t tell providers to come anyway. I can’t take away their fear.”

“We are essential workers. We care for children whose parents work in agriculture, dairy farms, food transport,” said Enriquez. “I’m crying because I see so many kind providers, and the quality care they give to children. There’s people saying this country is not ours, and that if [immigration] officers mistreat us, we deserve it. But no one deserves to be treated that way.”

E. Hernandez

Home State: Texas
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 12
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 7

E. Hernandez, A. Hernandez’s sister, moved to Texas from Mexico with her husband in 2013, when he relocated for work. Then five months pregnant, she became friendly with a neighbor, who mentioned she could not find before- and after- school care for her 7-year-old son.

“It started as a favor. [The neighbor] said it would be difficult to leave her son with someone she didn’t know,” said Hernandez, who requested we refer to her by her first initial and last name in order to protect her safety. “I said I’d take care of him. I’d drop him off at school, pick him up, and care for him until she came home.”

Hernandez cared for her neighbor’s son until the family moved 15 months later.

Over the past 13 years, Hernandez has cared for more than a dozen children through a variety of arrangements — some steady, others occasional. She began by watching the children of her husband’s coworkers and, once her eldest started school, connected with local parents in need of after-school care.

Today, Hernandez looks after her own three children and provides care for others as needed. She regularly supports one family during school breaks and, in health emergencies, steps in for another family, sometimes caring for all five of their children — four of whom she said are immunocompromised.

“It’s a favor,” Hernandez said. “These are children who are ill, so I always say yes — even if it’s two in the morning.”

Such flexible, around-the-clock care is especially common among home-based providers. At some point, children requires care during nontraditional hours.

Last year, Hernandez was advised by a local parent to pursue a child care license so she could provide long-term care to more families. (In Texas, child care providers are from a license if they do not care for more than one unrelated child or sibling group.)

“I was so excited. I’ve always loved children, so I decided to call the local agency,” said Hernandez. When asked over the phone to provide her Social Security Number, Hernandez specified she had anIndividual Taxpayer Identification Number (). “The woman on the phone said that Texas does not give child care licenses to people without a Social Security Number,” Hernandez said.

Though she’s been unable to get licensed, she continues to care for children. “I do it for the good of the community, for the good of our children,” she said.

Blanca Luna

Home State: California
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 5
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 3

Blanca Luna immigrated to California from Mexico in 2016, when she was 24 years old. She arrived with her then 15-month-old daughter in order to join her husband in the U.S.

She now has two children, 12 and 9 years old. As a stay-at-home mom, Luna began to meet local parents when her youngest son started kindergarten in 2020.

“In our town, many parents work in agricultural fields. Agricultural workers continued to work during the pandemic [stay-at-home orders], and they needed child care because many centers closed,” said Luna. “I wanted to help because they couldn’t stop working. I started providing child care, even if it was an hour or two … If it were me who needed help, I would want someone to help me. I did it out of love, community.”

Luna has continued to provide child care to local families, usually when school is closed for holidays. She provides regular child care on weekdays to a 3-year-old girl, and is compensated between $300 and $400 a month. She also occasionally provides before- and after- school care for two other children. One of those families pays her $25 per day. The other doesn’t pay her at all.

A woman holds a sign during a press event held by family members of people detained by ICE on June 9, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Jim Vondruska/Getty)

Over the past few months, Luna said she has been approached by two local parents who do not have American citizenship about whether she would take care of their children if they were arrested by immigration officers. “I don’t have the heart to say no. But it is a concern for me,” she said. “Taking care of a child needs money, and I don’t have an income. Only my husband does.”

Those fears weigh heavily on the children in her care, Luna said, particularly their mental health. The threat of family separation creates instability, especially when “children see parents being beaten, mistreated and humiliated.”

Luna said there are efforts to support families in her community, but they fall short.

“I’ve seen resources like food banks. That’s good. But people can’t pay rent with food,” she said. “I think people want to go to work safely and build a better future.”

Yanet Martinez

Home State: California
Place of birth: El Salvador
Number of years providing child care: 17
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 6��

Yanet Martinez immigrated to the U.S. 17 years ago, fleeing domestic violence in her home in El Salvador. Her five children stayed behind.

In 2019, Martinez said she qualified for — a program for victims of criminal activity — that has since changed to a, a program for victims of trafficking.

She found her way to Los Angeles and picked up a series of odd jobs. Today, she works at a local community center as a promotora, a Spanish term similar to a community liaison or resource navigator. She’s also a local child care provider.

Four of her children have immigrated to the U.S. She has nine grandchildren, and cares for six of them. She also occasionally cares for her neighbor’s children.

, federal immigration officers and state troopers arrived at a local park on horseback and in armored vehicles in the neighborhood where Martinez lives. One of her children witnessed the raid.

“My daughter was on the way to work, but she ran back inside. I had a doctor’s appointment, and I chose not to go. It was chaos. I saw tanks — tanks I haven’t seen since I was a girl during the [Salvadoran Civil] war,” said Martinez. “Another time, one of my sons saw federal agents at a parking lot close to his job. He managed to see them in time and hid, but six of his coworkers didn’t make it to their cars. The agents pushed them to the ground, beat them and took them away.”

Despite fearing for her safety, Martinez continues caring for her grandchildren, bringing them to and from school. On a local bus, in transit to pick up one of them, Martinez said, “I’m still working in the community. I’m still providing care for my grandchildren. I do it with fear, with precaution. But I do it.”

Reporting for this article was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Story Fellowship.

Kids in State-Funded Preschools Hit Record High, but Program Quality Varies

Emily Tate Sullivan — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:13:03 +0000

If state-funded preschool programs are in a race, then it’s clear that some states are approaching the finish line while others have lost momentum.

So said Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, which has just published its examining state-funded preschools.

“That’s the story this year — that the race is highly uneven,” said Barnett. “Even as some states are racing toward the finish line, more states are moving in the wrong direction. A few states never entered the race. They’re not running.”

The research center has been publishing the State of Preschool Yearbook since 2003, measuring state-funded preschool programs against a set of quality standards and tracking programs’ enrollment and funding. For the first time, six states hit all 10 of NIEER’s , which measure factors such as teacher credentials, staff professional development, curriculum supports, class sizes and staff-to-child ratios. One of those states, Georgia, became the first with a universal preschool program to meet all 10 quality indicators — a feat that NIEER is touting widely and which Barnett said made the Peach State a “symbol” for everyone else.

“You don’t have to choose between serving all the kids and building a high-quality program,” he said. “Georgia shows you can do it and not break the bank.”

In the 2024-25 school year, state-funded preschools saw record high enrollment and funding, though the pace slowed considerably from the prior year, according to NIEER’s findings.

State-supported preschool programs now serve a combined 1.8 million children nationally, including 37% of 4-year-olds and 9% of 3-year-olds. The states that contributed most to the enrollment gains are California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri, adding more than 52,000 new preschool seats.

Enrollment in state-funded preschool programs across the U.S. continues to grow, including programs that serve 3-year-olds. (NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook 2025)

Federal, state and local governments spent a combined $17.7 billion on preschool, with more than $14 billion of that amount coming from states. More than half of states increased their funding for preschool, including Michigan and New Jersey, which increased spending by more than $100 million each. Meanwhile, 17 states spent less, with Arizona, North Carolina and Texas among those seeing the biggest declines. Another six states do not have a state-funded preschool program, as defined by NIEER: Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Thus, the high-stakes race metaphor.

State progress on 4-year-old preschool enrollment continues to diverge, as some states ramp up capacity and funding while others scale it back. (NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook 2025)

“You have states moving ahead,” Barnett reiterated. “But you have states faltering, states that didn’t make much progress.”

Part of the explanation for the faltering states, he said, is that they have less federal funding to prop up these programs than they used to. But that’s not the full story, since even in some states with budget deficits, , they managed to increase funding for pre-K. “It is about how you set your priorities,” Barnett said.

This report found that enrollment for 3-year-olds in public pre-K is at an all-time-high, though Allison Friedman-Krauss, lead author of the report, clarified that it’s only marginally higher than it was the previous year and that it still lags far behind enrollment for 4-year-olds.

Preschool enrollment for 3-year-olds continues to trail far behind that of 4-year-olds, although Washington, D.C. and Vermont are exceptions. (NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook 2025)

Several states have pledged to serve all 3-year-olds, including less populous ones like Vermont and New Mexico and more populous ones such as Illinois and New Jersey.

It takes time to build those programs, though, Friedman-Krauss and Barnett said, so the progress on serving 3-year-olds is expected to be slow and incremental.

As for Georgia, it joins an elite group of states that are lauded by NIEER for quality, including Alabama, Hawaii, Mississippi, Michigan and Rhode Island.

Each of the 10 quality benchmarks represents an improvement in preschool quality that can be felt by children and families, Barnett said.

“Children’s experiences can be tremendously different between programs that have all of this in place and programs that have little in place,” he said.

For example, he added, “one of the keys to good early childhood education is the teacher-child relationship.” It is much more likely for that relationship to be strong and for children to get individualized support for their learning and development when a teacher has fewer children in her care.

And better-prepared teachers, he said, are going to have more realistic expectations about what the job entails and will be more likely to stay in their positions for longer. That matters for young children, who benefit from consistent, stable caregivers and teachers.

To meet all 10 benchmarks, Georgia its staff-to-child ratios and maximum classroom sizes, said Susan Adams, deputy commissioner for pre-K and instructional support at the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning.

Georgia is the first and only state with a universal preschool program to meet all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks. (NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook 2025)

As of fall 2024, Georgia has reduced maximum preschool class sizes to 20 and set ratios at one adult to 10 children, Adams said. The state has also achieved salary parity for preschool teachers, so that they now align with the earnings of K-12 teachers, she added.

What sets Georgia’s preschool program apart is that it is maintaining a high-quality learning environment while serving more than 70,000 children per year across Georgia’s 159 counties.

The changes to ratios and maximum classroom sizes did reduce the number of preschool slots statewide, but the state is midway through a four-year effort to build back that capacity, by adding 100 new classrooms each year, Adams said.

NIEER is tracking a number of other states that, with just a few changes, could join Georgia in providing universal access to high-quality pre-K, including New Mexico, which will be on par with Georgia once it meets the benchmark that requires all lead teachers to have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education.

While Barnett believes NIEER’s close tracking of state-funded preschool programs helps with accountability, he clarified that Georgia and other states are not improving their programs just so they can check another box in a report.

“The rationale for the leadership is not to get the acclaim or recognition from us,” he said. “Their rationale, really, is we need to provide a better program for kids.”

Assistant Teachers Key to Early Education, Yet State Policies Don’t Reflect That

Emily Tate Sullivan — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Early childhood classrooms are typically led by a pair of teachers.

To a child in their care, their roles may be indistinguishable. Both teachers play with them, read to them, sing to them and guide them throughout the day.

But each pair consists of a lead teacher — the senior professional in the classroom — and an assistant teacher, who may serve in more of a supporting role but, in many programs, acts as a co-teacher.

Assistant teachers, despite their status as the junior educator, are “an integral part of the teaching team,” said GG Weisenfeld, associate director of technical assistance at the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). They are participating in children’s brain-building, actively contributing to their learning and development, she said.

Yet in most early care and education settings, and in most states, the policies and pay for assistant teachers do not align with that reality.

When it comes to teacher qualifications, NIEER recommends that, at minimum, assistant teachers hold a Child Development Association (CDA), a nationally recognized credential for entry-level early childhood educators, or have equivalent preparation from at least nine credits of coursework. This benchmark for teacher qualifications is accepted by other leading organizations in the field.

Often the first credential in an early educator’s career, the CDA introduces teachers to foundational child development concepts, the conditions of a safe learning environment, how to establish healthy relationships with families and more.

“Having that basis,” Weisenfeld said, “allows that person some comfort and knowledge to be able to” serve confidently in an early learning setting.

But only one-third of state-funded preschool programs have policies in place that require these minimum qualifications for assistant teachers, NIEER found in a .

Weisenfeld, who authored the report on assistant teachers, said the findings were “troubling,” noting that having low or no qualifications can justify low wages and trap teachers in a cycle where they can’t afford the education needed to advance in their careers.

It’s critical to have skilled teachers working with young children, Weisenfeld added. “If we want the child outcomes … they need to be qualified and then they need to be supported once in the classroom.”

The report also found that only 30% of state-funded preschool programs met NIEER’s minimum standard for professional development of at least 15 hours of in-service training for assistant teachers.

In a field where low wages and scant benefits affect early childhood educators in every role, assistant teachers fare worst of all, earning an average of $11.88 per hour as of 2022, according to .

That financial reality makes it difficult for states to set higher standards for assistant teachers. Instead, it’s becoming increasingly common, Weisenfeld noted, for states to see that they aren’t filling open positions for early childhood educators and to respond by — allowing teenagers to fill teaching positions, instituting higher adult-to-child ratios and loosening training and licensing requirements.

“Cutting qualifications so you can justify inadequate salaries is not a good thing,” Weisenfeld said.

She added: “To me, the strategy should be to help people raise their qualifications, help support people getting the qualifications, and ensure they are adequately compensated for their work.”

It’s not the norm, but a few states are pursuing that strategy. New Mexico is one of them.

Assistant teachers in New Mexico’s state-funded pre-K classrooms are required to have an associate degree in early childhood education (or be actively enrolled in a program to earn one). If they have an associate degree in another field, they must earn 12 college credits in early childhood education, said Elizabeth Groginsky, the secretary of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Care and Education Department.

To work in one of the state-funded pre-K classrooms, assistant teachers must also complete 44 hours of mandatory foundational training and an additional 24 hours of training annually.

Lead teachers in these classrooms, in contrast, must hold a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education and complete additional hours of professional development. They also earn more money, as is typical for more seniority across professions.

“The important thing,” Groginsky said, “is they are both considered teachers and are both bringing a full set of knowledge and skills to advance the education of young children.”

Across early care and education settings in New Mexico, assistant teachers must earn a minimum wage of $18 an hour (about $37,000 per year for a full-time teacher), the secretary shared. Assistant teachers in state-funded, community-based pre-K classrooms are also eligible for the , which ensures that teachers with an associate degree and up to three years of experience earn $45,000 and teachers with an associate degree and more than three years of experience earn $50,000.

“The idea is we’re moving up the compensation to reflect the level of education and the skills that both the lead teacher and the assistant teacher bring to the classroom,” Groginsky said.

Alabama is another state that meets NIEER’s benchmarks for assistant teacher qualifications and professional development and that Weisenfeld praised for its “brilliant” approach to building a pipeline of assistant teachers in high school.

Assistant teachers in Alabama’s First Class Pre-K Program are required to have a CDA credential or equivalent coursework in child development, and complete at least 20 hours of professional development each year.

A number of K-12 schools in Alabama offer a pathway for high school students to pursue and complete their CDA, qualifying them for assistant teaching positions in the state’s preschool program upon graduation, said Milanda Dean, director of workforce development at the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. From there, teachers can participate in Alabama’s to earn their associate degree and even bachelor’s degree.

“We’re helping them earn their credentials,” Dean said, “and growing our workforce.”

Although the exact roles and responsibilities of assistant teachers do vary from program to program, it is important that these educators are recognized for the strengths and skills they bring to the classroom, said Ami Brooks, secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education. Assistant teachers are not there just to wipe the tables, walk kids to the bathroom or put the cots out for naptime, she said.

“We want to honor the early childhood development knowledge he or she is coming in with,” said Brooks, “and use that to partner with the lead teacher so they can work together to help the children develop.”

Pay Equity Fund for D.C.’s Early Educators Faces Possible Elimination

Rebecca Gale — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:30:00 +0000

“I love my job,” is one of the first things Ashley Ross says, as she sits down to talk about a looming pay cut that she might be facing. She’s worked at Gan HaYeled, an early childhood program in Northwest D.C., for almost 20 years, and was recently promoted to split her time between two roles: a pre-K classroom teacher and a teacher resource coordinator, who works with other educators to solve problems that arise in the classroom or at home.

Throughout her career, Ross said she has seen a number of incremental pay bumps, including an increase after she earned an associate degree in 2021. That year, her salary was about $47,000. But the most significant change in her income came in 2022, she said, when Washington began implementing the D.C. Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund in an effort to boost wages in the child care sector. The initiative provided funds to make early educators’ salaries equivalent to K-12 public school educators.

Ross received an additional $14,000 that year and her pay has continued to increase. Today, she makes around $67,000. The additional income has allowed her to buy a home and enroll her children in after school activities like boxing and gymnastics.

The Pay Equity Fund — the first program of its kind in the United States — has been as a model for improving early educator retention, creating stability for a workforce largely made up of women, , in an industry with one of the in the country.

But despite its popularity with educators and advocates, the fund has faced instability over the years and now it’s on the chopping block. Mayor Muriel Bowser on Friday, April 10 that included a to the Pay Equity Fund, which would eliminate the wage supplements that provided the city’s early childhood teachers with higher salaries.

Mayor Muriel Bowser presents her budget analysis to councilmembers during her last budget forum on April 10. (Getty Images)

Bowser that what she hears most from families is that they want more opportunities for child care and they want it to be less expensive. But the Pay Equity Fund is “not a child care affordability fund, it’s more of an income support fund for child care workers,” she said. “It does not respond to what people are saying.”

Ross is one of more than in D.C., who would be drastically impacted by this change. Without the extra dollars she receives through the program, her salary would drop precariously, to the point that making the commute to work in D.C. wouldn’t make much economic or logistical sense. She lives over an hour away by car, and with her experience, education and credentials, she could likely find a job in the public school system where she lives in neighboring Prince George’s County, Maryland. A job like that would bring benefits and a stable salary, she said.

Ashley Ross, pre-K teacher and teacher resource coordinator at Gan YaHeled in Northwest D.C. (Rebecca Gale)

“Yes, everyone loves the Gan,” she said, referring to the early childhood center where she works. “It’s a special place. But everyone has to live in the real world. They have to pick between the love for their job or their income. Without pay equity, it doesn’t make any sense,” Ross said. Her partner has encouraged her to think about the long term, but she said she’s having a hard time asking herself,“If they cut the money for me, what is the plan?”

The Struggle for Consistent Funding

Created through the District’s budget and administered by the , the Pay Equity Fund initially delivered direct payments to eligible educators. During its first year, early childhood teachers received a one-time payment of , depending on their role and employment status. In 2023, the fund offered teachers up to four quarterly payments of up to $3,500 each. Then , the model shifted: instead of educators applying individually and receiving direct payments, licensed child care programs that met the requirements could opt in and receive funding through a payroll formula.

The voluntary program was designed to help providers recruit and retain staff by offering more competitive wages, and its reach has been substantial. was distributed to over 4,000 home- and center-based child care providers during the initiative’s first two years, and went to 365 child care facilities in 2024.

This isn’t the first time the program has faced instability. In April 2024, Bowser suggested fter a , the D.C. Council , but advocates warned that with the increase in participation, more money was needed. That same year, to make budget recommendations for the program, which led to the Early Childhood Educator Pay Scales Amendment Act of 2025, a measure that for early educators.

Some centers in the city, including the Gan, absorbed the cuts so that the teachers’ paychecks would be unchanged, said Noah Hichenberg, director of Gan HaYeled.

To be fully funded in fiscal year 2027, the Pay Equity Fund , said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. The program has grown more expensive because of its success, she noted. While the program had lower participation in its first few years, it has since grown in popularity. from Mathematica shows that after the first two years of implementation, there was an in D.C., about 7% higher than the estimated levels in the absence of the program.

Gunderson said more teachers have enrolled in the program, stayed in their positions and gone back to school to pursue an associate or bachelor degree, with the goal of being able to earn a higher income upon graduation.

“The fact that we’re able to increase utilization is a good thing,” said Gunderson. “Normally this would be something that would be celebrated.” Instead, it has resulted in a more expensive program, limiting the number of educators who are able to take part.

LaVonda Butler-Means, an assistant teacher at Gan YaHeled, is one of the teachers who was motivated to pursue a higher level of education. The first year of Pay Equity her salary jumped from $43,000 to over $50,000. Encouraged, she enrolled in an accelerated program to get an associate degree, for which she estimated cost her around $26,000 out of pocket. Her goal was to become a lead teacher at the Gan after graduating in May, a move that would bring her a $10,000 raise. If the fund is eliminated and the increase doesn’t come through, she said she will have to look for another job.

“There is no way I can go back to make what I was making and sustain life,” Butler-Means said.

LaVonda Butler-Means, assistant teacher at Gan YaHeled (Rebecca Gale)

One of the challenges of building a sustainable funding pathway for the Pay Equity Fund, explained Jamal Berry, president of Educare DC, an early learning program, is that it takes time to see the impact. that access to high-quality child care is a worthwhile investment, but the success of programs are often realized across a child’s education, which do not always translate into an immediate win.

But leaders at programs participating in the Pay Equity Fund do report benefits, including lower staff turnover.

Hichenberg credits the Pay Equity Fund with elevating the quality of care and stabilizing the workforce at his program. Of the 27 educators who work at the Gan, 23 have been there for more than three years since the Pay Equity Fund began. He anticipates it will be much harder to hire people at a lower salary level if the program gets cut. “Its’ not just a burden or headache, it’s a more volatile experience for our youngest learners,” he said.

Staff turnover at Educare DC has also fallen since the Pay Equity Fund was implemented, and more staff are receiving additional education credentials, said Ronnell Nathaniel, the program’s vice president. Like at the Gan, her staff has benefited from the pay increase. Some teachers have shared that they’re purchasing their first home, she said, though the fact that the funding is in jeopardy has worked to undercut the staff’s sense of security and stability. “The inconsistency is every year,” she said. “You have to be concerned about that.”

Gunderson anticipates that the impact of gutting the Pay Equity Fund would be felt most keenly in programs serving infants and toddlers, which are the most expensive to maintain because of high staffing ratios. “They’re the first to go,” she said. Without a dedicated funding stream for the Pay Equity Fund, each budget cycle poses tough choices about which programs to fund and which to cut.

“We’ve scored a touchdown and now we’re fumbling the ball,” said Berry. “States like New Mexico and New York are moving in this direction,” he gestured forward with his hands, “and we are moving backwards.”

Advocates Prepare to Push Back

Advocates are gearing up for a fight to save the program. Ahead of the budget release, educators and supporters turned out in protest at the John A. Wilson building in downtown D.C., where the local government is headquartered, as part of a . The national is slated for May 11, and advocates are encouraging child care providers to close or operate on a reduced schedule to show the impact of their services.

But as compared to 2024, when the program first came under fire, it’s been harder to galvanize support for saving the program. LaDon Love works at Spaces in Action, a grassroots advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. that played a significant role in the 2024 effort to save the Pay Equity Fund and is involved again this year. Love said that when she goes and speaks to early childhood educators, they think the major fight is behind them. “We won, right?” she said. Many do not realize their salaries are on the line again.

When asked if the parents feel some outrage at the cuts and how it could impact the teachers who look after their children, Butler-Means shrugs. “Some take it really seriously,” she said. “Others it doesn’t matter to them as long as their kids have somewhere to go.”

There are a few options that advocates and policymakers are exploring to keep the fund intact. One route involves creating a dedicated funding stream for it, similar to what has done in shoring up their own early childhood infrastructure. Another solution is to develop a new for Washington, D.C., which would increase revenue by adding a broad-based value-added tax to businesses. Experts believe this tax could raise as much as $500 million, and could be routed to social services programs that are on the chopping block, like the Pay Equity Fund. But, a tax like this would likely require a phase-in or implementation lag of a year, meaning that programs that could be funded by it would face a shortfall in the interim. An indefinite pay cut may loom too large for Ross and Butler-Means, pushing them out of their current roles, even with the possibility of a more stable funding source in the future.

But there is something positive to have come from all of this, said Hichenberg, the Gan’s director. “The Pay Equity Fund has given all of us a gift of what is possible when pay is raised, and that has been beautiful to see,” he said.

“It’s a stabilized workforce, more content teachers, more robust work-life balance and vacations,” he added. “It has allowed our core group of educators to stay stable for a number of years and allowed us to move forward as a school, improving quality in the classroom and smoother transitions for the parents. These have always been our goals. But the Pay Equity Fund has been the element of stability that has allowed for it.”

Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Harming Young Children and Their Caregivers

Emily Tate Sullivan — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:01:00 +0000

Children and staff at Second Street Youth Center in Plainfield, New Jersey, are well-acquainted with lockdown drills in the event of a fire or an active shooter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Street Youth Center, a preschool in Plainfield, New Jersey. (Leah Cates)

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

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

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

“Care providers are not feeling secure. Parents are struggling to feel safe themselves. Children are internalizing these stressors and these pressures.”
Kaelin Rapport, CLASP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The window the boy was looking out of when he saw an ICE agent trying to detain someone on the street right outside the school (Leah Cates)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That certainly rings true at Second Street Youth Center.

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

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

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

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

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

Opinion: Why Colleges, School Districts and Hospitals Are Closing On-Site Child Care

Elliot Haspel — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000

In February, the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) announced it would shutter its on-campus child care center, which has operated for nearly 40 years, at the end of the spring semester.The decision caused a weeks-long on campus, with families, staff and students at what many say was a sudden and unexpected move.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opinion: Why Some Students Don’t Raise Their Hands. How Early Education Can Change That

Iryna Liusik — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:30:00 +0000

By the time children reach elementary school, teachers can usually predict which students will volunteer answers, speak easily in front of the class and move comfortably through discussion — and which will hesitate, look down or remain silent even when they understand.

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

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for �� Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pilot Program Provides Early Childhood Educators with Rent-Free Business Spaces

Hallie Claflin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eva Fajardo Marroquín and Minerva Caba Toribio (center) speaking with Leslie Baker (right) and Sharon MacDonald (left) at the pilot program’s ribbon-cutting event on April 6, 2026. (Photo by Hallie Claflin/CommonWealth Beacon)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Opinion: When Work Isn’t 9-to-5, Child Care Can’t Be Either

Katie Hamm and Juliet Bromer — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000

In New York City and New Mexico, policymakers are making history by rolling out ambitious universal child care plans that offer affordable care for families and invest in the providers that drive our economy. As these bold efforts expand access for young children, leaders must consider a fundamental reality of modern work: Child care that ends at 6 p.m. might not work for parents whose shifts start at sunset, stretch overnight or change week to week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As NAEYC Turns 100, Early Education Leaders Reflect on Progress and Gaps

Emily Tate Sullivan — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:30:00 +0000

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), arguably the premier professional organization for the early care and education workforce in America.

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

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

Worthy Wage Day, 1992, in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Courtesy of the ECHOES Project, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment)

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

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

Courtesy of NAEYC

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos from the Boston Area Day Care Workers United, 1976. (Courtesy of the ECHOES Project, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of the ECHOES Project, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy of NAEYC

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

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

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

Funds for Signature Pre-K Endowment in Peril as Surplus Dwindles

Keith M. Phaneuf and Laura Tillman — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

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

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

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for �� Newsletter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CT still forecasting big surpluses – but not for child care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That federal tax relief also has softened state tax revenues.

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

CT has options to bolster child care services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Why Are State Departments of Early Childhood Education So Trendy Right Now?

Emily Tate Sullivan — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 10:30:00 +0000

This summer, Illinois will launch a state-level department of early childhood, bringing under one roof a host of programs for children, families and educators that have long been dispersed across different state agencies.

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

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

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

. . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . . .

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

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

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

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

What matters more than any org chart or structure is leadership. Full stop. When you have a strong governor, it is like wind in the sails.
Helene Stebbins, Alliance for Early Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Rural Missouri Classrooms, a New Approach to Reading Is Taking Hold

William Hehemann — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That clarity has reduced uncertainty and increased instructional precision.

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

A first-year teacher finds support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From classroom change to district strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opinion: An Overlooked Factor of the ‘Southern Surge’: Investments in Early Childhood

Elliot Haspel — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:30:00 +0000

For years, pundits and education wonks have been abuzz about what’s been termed the “Mississippi Miracle” or the “Southern surge” in education: literacy scores in Mississippi and surrounding states have skyrocketed, outpacing counterparts in better-resourced regions and providing a positive story amid America’s generally lackluster educational performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

States Are Increasingly Using Child Care Waitlists, Leaving Parents in Limbo

Bryce Covert — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:30:00 +0000

Taylor Moyer has been trying to get child care subsidies ever since her oldest child was born eight years ago. But she said she was stuck in a Catch-22. In Virginia, where she lives, she couldn’t qualify for the state assistance unless she was employed or actively engaged in a job search, but she couldn’t job hunt without reliable child care — and she couldn’t accept a new position without knowing she could afford it. This problem kept her out of the workforce for years, leaving her dependent on her partner’s income.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House Passes Bill to Codify Pilot Program on Child Care Aid for Child Care Workers

Robin Opsahl — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio Receives Federal Child Care Grant as Sector Continues to Search for Funding Answers

Susan Tebben — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:01:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why We Keep Asking the Wrong Question About Kindergarten Readiness

Susan B. Neuman and Lillie Bukzin — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Eager to watch a foundational skills lesson, we enter a kindergarten classroom in a large urban school district in mid-November. The children are sitting cross-legged on the rug at the front of the room, eyes forward, hands folded. They are well managed, compliant, and quiet. The lesson is about to begin.

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

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

No questions are asked.

No time is wasted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Care and Education – ��������

For Young Kids, Screen Time Isn’t Just an At-Home Issue Anymore

Hawaiʻi Families Need Preschool. Who Will Fund It?

Funding Shortfalls

Pre-K Needs A Champion

Ohio May Scrap Hard-Won Pay Reform Amid Fraud Crackdown

Q&A: With Childcare Expanding, What Does High Quality Access Look Like?

Kentucky’s Childcare Benefit for Early Educators Is Spreading Fast

Why This Childcare Advocate Wants to Be Vermont’s Next Governor

How Early Childhood Sets the Stage for Student Success

Shifting Immigration Policies Are Changing Daily Life for Child Care Providers

A. Hernandez

Carmela Enriquez

E. Hernandez

Blanca Luna

Yanet Martinez

Kids in State-Funded Preschools Hit Record High, but Program Quality Varies

Assistant Teachers Key to Early Education, Yet State Policies Don’t Reflect That

Pay Equity Fund for D.C.’s Early Educators Faces Possible Elimination

The Struggle for Consistent Funding

Advocates Prepare to Push Back

Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Harming Young Children and Their Caregivers

Opinion: Why Colleges, School Districts and Hospitals Are Closing On-Site Child Care

Opinion: Why Some Students Don’t Raise Their Hands. How Early Education Can Change That

Pilot Program Provides Early Childhood Educators with Rent-Free Business Spaces

Opinion: When Work Isn’t 9-to-5, Child Care Can’t Be Either

As NAEYC Turns 100, Early Education Leaders Reflect on Progress and Gaps

Funds for Signature Pre-K Endowment in Peril as Surplus Dwindles

CT still forecasting big surpluses – but not for child care

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

CT has options to bolster child care services

Why Are State Departments of Early Childhood Education So Trendy Right Now?

In Rural Missouri Classrooms, a New Approach to Reading Is Taking Hold

A first-year teacher finds support

From classroom change to district strategy

Opinion: An Overlooked Factor of the ‘Southern Surge’: Investments in Early Childhood

States Are Increasingly Using Child Care Waitlists, Leaving Parents in Limbo

House Passes Bill to Codify Pilot Program on Child Care Aid for Child Care Workers

Ohio Receives Federal Child Care Grant as Sector Continues to Search for Funding Answers

Why We Keep Asking the Wrong Question About Kindergarten Readiness

Early Care and Education – ��

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