Young children who lack at least one loving and consistent caregiver in the earliest years may suffer severe and long-lasting development problems. This landmark study of scientific brain research shows environmental stress, even among infants and toddlers, can interfere with the proper development of neural connections inside the brain essential to a child’s proper social and emotional development. This report recommends that early childhood programs balance their focus on literacy and numerical skills with comparable attention to the emotional and social development of all children.

From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development  was published in 2000 by the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Partnership for Pre-K Improvement (PPI) was launched in 2017 to learn together with states about how to build quality, equitable pre-K systems that ensure children succeed in school and in life. The initiative’s unique approach fosters partnerships across program, advocacy, and research organizations in support of a common vision for pre-K systems improvement.

Through the initiative, three states — Washington, Oregon and Tennessee — are partnering to strengthen the program policies, infrastructure, and resources necessary for high-quality pre-K that will result in improved classroom quality and outcomes for children.

State partners are supported by the following organizations, who work together and in concert with other national and state program, advocacy and research partners. Start Early acts as the backbone organization, facilitating collaboration.

• Start Early engages state government leaders to create strategic plans to build the system capacity and infrastructure needed for continuous improvement of quality pre-K.
• The Alliance for Early Success supports advocacy organizations to build advocacy capacity to ensure the policies and resources essential to quality pre-K are in place.
• Cultivate Learning at the University of Washington engages local researchers to build research-practice partnerships with states and generate data for continuous quality improvement of pre-K.

Leaders in each state have made meaningful improvements to their systems, including data, professional learning, and instructional leadership infrastructure that contribute to continuous improvement of pre-K. Additionally, local organizations in each state have built strong partnerships across program, advocacy and research to sustain pre-K systems improvements long into the future.

Based on this learning, PPI partners are collaboratively creating tools and generating knowledge to help other states and communities apply this program, advocacy, research approach and thereby continue improvement beyond the life of the project.

How parents and caregivers speak to children significantly affects their I.Q., literacy, and academic success later in life, according to University of Kansas child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley.

Hart and Risley found that the number of words and encouragements and the breadth of vocabulary heard by a child during the first three years of life can dramatically affect language development and I.Q. Their study was informed by close observations of 42 1- and 2-year olds and their families for more than two years.

From those observations, the researchers estimated children in professional families hear approximately 11 million words per year; while children in working class families hear approximately 6 million, and children in families receiving public assistance hear approximately 3 million words annually.

For more information on the study, read: Hart, B. & Risley, T.R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.

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 importance of early childhood education and its impact on a child’s life is supported by decades of research in developmental science. Here at Start Early, rigorous research and science informs all our efforts in providing and advocating for quality early education.

Recently we spoke to Mallary Swartz, former director of family engagement research at Start Early, to find out more about the subject of family engagement and how our research supports this key element of quality early education.

Our Family Engagement Research: What Do We Do?

All of our research integrates science, program and policy – it is truly applied (and applicable) research. Our team evaluates, tests, and pilots innovative family engagement strategies for both early education programs and parents.

Start Early’s research process is unique in that it involves co-creation and co-design — including family and staff feedback– throughout our work. We do this by holding focus groups and interviews, testing prototypes with families and staff, and having parents, program leaders, and staff serve as advisors.

One innovative outcome of this work is our digital parent self-reflection tool called Growing Together. Our team is in the initial phase of developing this tool for center-based early learning settings, like Early Head Start and Head Start programs.

Growing Together aims to help parents reflect on their parenting, identify their strengths and needs, and communicate those insights with their early childhood provider. Accompanying this work will be a provider interface and training for early education providers to further support them in building quality relationships with families.

Ultimately, our research around family engagement, as with our other areas of focus, is meant to help families and program staff create a nurturing environment where young children can learn and thrive.

The latest study released by Professor Heckman has significant implications for the early childhood field. In this opinion piece written by Start Early (formerly the Ounce) President, Diana Rauner shares some of her insights on this new research and why it matters.

To break the cycle of poverty, start early

This week, Nobel laureate James Heckman released a groundbreaking study on the Perry Preschool Project, an intervention in the 1960s and whose participants are now in their late 50s. Long-awaited in the early childhood field, this research followed at-risk children from low-income families and the impact of early childhood education on their life trajectories. The conclusion is powerful: the improvements in life outcomes for the first generation leads to better life outcomes for their children and, one can expect, for future generations.

The promise of early childhood education has always been its long-term impact on the lives of those fortunate to experience high-quality education. During the first few years of life, children build the capacity to ask for and receive help, manage frustration, persist at tasks, and control their impulses. These skills are developed through interactions with others and lay the groundwork for more complex social and cognitive skills as children grow.

The ability to self-regulate, control one’s impulses and other social/emotional skills have led to better long term life outcomes for our youngest learners: greater high school and college completion rates, higher earnings, better health and less involvement in the criminal justice system, all of which have significant benefits to society as well.

During the two short years of preschool, the children in the Perry program learned skills that they then used in future years to build more skills. At every point of analysis, the Perry Preschool participants have been found to have greater executive function and a more positive outlook on life. By age 50, the participants had used these skills to become better citizens and employees and better husbands and fathers. Their children were therefore more likely to grow up in two-parent families.

Although our work has been anchored in scientific research for decades, Dr. Heckman’s recent findings validate what early childhood leaders clearly know and understand: starting early is the key to a lifetime of success.

The outcomes of the Perry study make it clear that access to high-quality early childhood education and interventions, parental resources, and systems of care are game changers. These experiences will have a positive impact on the long-term social/emotional development of our most vulnerable children and their families. When we get this right for our youngest learners, we create a pathway for them to develop the key skills they need to reach their full potential in school and in life.

So, why should society be as excited about this study as we are in the early childhood education field? We now have evidence-based research demonstrating that despite the pressures of poverty, high-quality early childhood education sets children and their families on a track to break the cycle of poverty for generations to come.