Investments in quality early childhood education services, from birth through age five, can be one of the most cost-effective strategies for school districts to fulfill their overall objective of ensuring that all children in their districts succeed in school and go on to success in college and careers. This guide provides key questions and principles to guide how school boards can be thoughtful in their design, implementation, and funding of early learning programs to ensure that they are effectively investing in programs that will contribute to the district’s long-term goals.

The Challenge

Children with a strong start in math by age 5 are critical thinkers and problem solvers—and are more likely to have a bright future ahead of them. Research shows that early math is a strong predictor, even more than reading, of academic achievement in elementary school, high school graduation, and college enrollment.

Yet, math is rarely emphasized in early childhood, and low-income and communities of color, in particular, have limited access to early math learning opportunities.

PBS SoCal’s Compton Family Math Initiative aims to create quality resources and experiences that empower families to engage with their children in math early and often. The team at PBS SoCal engaged The Early Learning Lab (The Lab) to build their human-centered design capacity and ensure their family math curriculum and future initiatives would resonate with local families.

In this blog post, Start Early vice president of translational research, Debra Pacchiano, highlights her recently published research on the importance of providing strong and nurturing leadership to early childhood teachers in order to improve child outcomes.

Recent early childhood research has confirmed that— if we want teachers to nourish children, we must first nourish teachers.

When a child begins their life-long learning journey, parents and families expect they will be cared for and taught in safe, positive, and effective environments. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. The quality of early learning programs varies tremendously with the highest quality programs disproportionately serving children from the most advantaged homes. By contrast, lower quality and less effective programs disproportionately serve children from under-resourced communities—the very children who stand to benefit most from top-notch early childhood education (Valentino 2017).

Teaching is complex work. In early childhood, teachers work with young children, often from vulnerable populations, who are in critical developmental stages. Variations in children’s early learning outcomes are often attributed to under-engaged teachers and low-quality teaching. Yet, all too often teachers face their complex work without needed sustained supports from leadership and their peers.

Start Early has worked at the intersection of research, practice, and policy for more than three decades, spearheading innovation and quality improvement in early childhood education. We activate creativity to design solutions rooted in research and applied science to address chronic issues in the field.

As part of this work, we spent time observing early childhood education programs, some that were high functioning and some that were not. We talked with leaders, teachers, staff, and families about what supports and what hinders their effectiveness advancing young children’s learning. Differences in their organizational mindsets and practices were unmistakable. Simply put, high-performing programs had organizational environments far more supportive of teaching, learning, and family engagement than lower-performing programs. In response, we built The Essential 0-5 Survey (formerly known as the Early Education Essentials), an organizationwide measurement system that elevates the voices of teachers, staff, and families in early childhood settings and empowers collective action towards improvement.

A recent Education Week study found substantial gaps between the perceived and real impacts of leadership on teachers. By highlighting teacher and staff perspectives on organizational strengths and weaknesses in key areas of climate and culture, The Essential 0-5 Survey can help close those gaps between the impacts leaders believe they have, and the impacts teachers and staff actually feel.

In a Young Children journal article, published by myself and other Start Early researchers, we highlight the positive impacts The Early Education Essentials can have on early childhood environments and teachers’ experiences. The article features the clear differences that were identified, through The Early Education Essentials, between organizations strong in the areas of effective instructional leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environment, and ambitious instruction, and those that were weak in those areas. Listen to what one teacher in a strongly organized program had to say about her organizational culture:

I feel like it’s empowering [here]—it’s not just from the top down. It’s right here, and we believe in this stuff and I have something to share and it’s valued by our administrator. Then your co-teachers and your colleagues also buy in too, and you have that energy and you have that love. Then you have an administrator that pushes you in that way and supports you and guides you and nudges you a bit farther. I think it’s kind of what we try to do with our students too, now, even when they’re only 3. I think [the principal/ director] leads by example, for sure.

Strong organizational environments in early childhood education empower leaders, teachers and families to aspire to and realize higher-quality practices and better outcomes for young children.

The Start Early national policy team provides policy consultation and advocacy expertise to early education leaders and advocates across the country. We work to improve and expand the policies and programs that create quality early learning programs and effective early childhood systems.

Our 2019 State Policy Update provides a snapshot of states’ early childhood education policy priorities and budgetary changes during the 2019 legislative sessions.

Included in the report:

• Legislative, budgetary, and administrative changes across 33 states organized by topic to demonstrate the breadth of the work done by state early childhood leaders and advocates.
• Data that illustrates trends across state-level early childhood policy changes, how states are thinking about priority populations, and how state advocates are involved in federal-level policy advocacy.
• Stories from state advocates that give voices and faces to the policy wins and demonstrate the direct impact of their work.

The Illinois Policy Team works closely with partners and legislators to help shape the foundational elements of the state’s early childhood system, including major funding streams, legislation and federal and state initiatives. With a long history of work that is rooted in our deep experiences in Illinois, the team diligently advocates for high-quality early childhood services that children and families need beginning prenatally and through the first five years.

Over the last year, through legislative, administrative and grassroots advocacy, we successfully championed a number of noteworthy bills to became law that are significant to young children, parents, teachers and other early childhood practitioners. Perhaps most notably, the Illinois General Assembly passed the state’s fiscal year 2020 budget with significant funding for the state’s early childhood system.

This account of Illinois’ work from the 1980s to the early 2000s to raise young children to the top of its policy agenda offers insight to other states as they continue to push for public policies that respond to accumulated research findings about the importance of the early years. This publication shares what policymakers, advocates, and funders in other states might learn from Illinois’ approach and a breakdown of which strategies hinged on conditions unique to the state, and which hold promise for success elsewhere.

This publication provides an overview of Preschool for All and the Illinois Early Learning Council’s recommended next steps for funding and implementing it in Illinois. In 2006, our state had made significant advancements in its early learning system. Implementing a Preschool for All program could help ensure that the excellence that is available to some young children is available to all of our preschoolers and families.

In this 2011 report to the Illinois State Board of Education, the Illinois Kindergarten Readiness Assessment Stakeholder Committee details the context for how and why the Illinois Kindergarten Individual Development Survey (KIDS) was developed, as well as the assessment’s potential benefits and the necessary conditions, priorities, and next steps to successfully undertake KIDS in Illinois.

We have heard both enthusiasm for and skepticism about the use of technology in the early childhood field. One area of discussion is the use of technology to reach and support parents and other caregivers of children. Because of technology’s potential to engage parents and the many questions surrounding its efficacy, The Early Learning Lab decided to focus on this issue. After a comprehensive information gathering and interviewing, we’re excited to release the report NextGen Technology: Insights and Recommendations to Support the Parents of Children Ages 0–3 with our insights and recommended action steps.