Maintaining a holistic view of care avoids characterizing any one type as more or less worthy of public investment so we can forgo arguments about whether seniors or young children are more deserving; the care sector is stronger united than divided.

I spoke to Julie Kashen (senior fellow and director for women’s economic justice at ), Anna Shireen Wadia (executive director of ) and Robert Espinoza (CEO of ) to learn more about other parts of the care sector and what child care advocates should understand.

These conversations took place before Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President and before she named Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, but Kashen, Wadia and Espinoza’s insights couldn’t be more relevant at this moment. As Jonathan Cohn has , Harris’s personal and political experience indicates firm commitments to child care, paid leave and related issues. Walz has presided over historic public investments in care.

As Kashen observes, the care workforce is mostly female and disproportionately women of color. Low pay and few benefits and protections are the norm. “It’s a challenging sector,” she admits, “but at the same time, many people doing this work really love the work of care and find it’s incredibly rewarding.”

Wadia says care is distinct from other forms of work because of “the intense and intimate relationship between consumers of care and the workers they are entrusting to care for their loved ones.” Don’t forget that while these are economic issues, they aren’t just economic.

Compensation: The Bottom Line

Care work makes all other work possible. Unless this challenging, skilled labor pays a living wage, caregivers will continue to defect to retail and customer service. Wadia underscores the irony: “In some ways, this is the most important work that can be done in our society, and yet it is among the worst compensated work.”

Kashen offers a grim if undeniable historical perspective. “Caregiving has long been undervalued,” she maintains. “You can look back to the origins of chattel slavery that forced Black women to nurse and care for the children of white landowners, to the detriment of their own children.” Women of every race and ethnic background have traditionally been the default caregivers for children, disabled loved ones and aging relatives. This free domestic labor has tended to make care undervalued and invisible — cultural norms that need to be challenged forcefully if things are going to change.

“Tłó±đ better you’re able to compensate caregivers,” Kashen states, “the more likely they’re not going to be economically insecure and stressed, so they can be more present with the people they’re caring for.”

While the paycheck is paramount, other factors count, such as respect, predictable hours and a pathway for advancement. Without a clear career ladder, Wadia says, “Moving up generally means moving out.” Early educators apply for jobs in K-12 education, and those caring for seniors seek qualification for nursing and other health care professions. Experts are coming up with ways for these providers to gain relevant skills and credentials that retain them in the sector if that’s where their passion lies.

Espinoza foresees technology altering the economics of care, making the job more efficient and supporting workers—without replacing them. He cautions, “We’ll also need strong policies to ensure tech innovators and businesses are drawing on workers’ expertise to inform this technology and safeguards to prevent unnecessary worker displacement.” Family supports, including child care for care workers as well as public transportation and a more equitable system of benefits, would also make the sector more sustainable.

Advocacy: Caring Out Loud

around the time her book, Parent Nation, came out, surgeon and advocate Dana Suskind described the gains for U.S. seniors made possible by the AARP. The organization pushed for the Older Americans Act of 1965, and since then has secured prescription-drug benefits and protection of Social Security, among other measures. Calling for a “National Association of Parents and Caregivers,” she declares, “We have the economic case, and the general consensus, that parents need more support. What we lack is political clout. Older Americans galvanized because there was finally someone looking out for them, not the other way around. Parents need a similar revolution.”

Some of this work is already taking place, though not on anything like AARP scale. ( also packs a wallop.) Wadia sees potential in advocating for significant public investment. “It’s the only way that we are going to have quality, affordable and accessible care, whether for children or older people or people with disabilities and decent jobs for care workers,” she says.

Kashen similarly recognizes the power of workers and advocates joining forces across the care continuum and alongside the people whose jobs are only possible thanks to the care sector: “Bringing together the consumers of care with the providers of care,” she says, “you have a much stronger conversation, especially with , which is now at the center of the Care Can’t Wait movement. We’re all part of the same ecosystem, and we all need the same things.” , the domestic employers network, is another piece of the advocacy puzzle, she says.

“Care is such a powerful mobilizing and unifying set of issues,” Wadia explains, “because people experience care crises and care responsibilities across income and across race. It has become a unifying issue.”

Organizing: Union-Strong Care

One key difference between child care and elder care can be found in the power of unions. Nursing home workers participate in unions — chiefly, and — at greater rates than their counterparts in child care centers, family care and other settings. Membership, as they say, has its privileges, including job security and health benefits.

Although child care workers are a long way from catching up, they are beginning to catch on () — and no wonder. As the , “High unionization levels are associated with positive outcomes across multiple indicators of economic, personal and democratic well-being.”

For Kashen, the care sector as a whole advances with policies supportive of organizing and bargaining, especially where providers have government grants or contracts, as opposed to subsidies that go to individual families.

Thanks to the efforts of SEIU and the , those who care for seniors and disabled people in their homes have gained more traction with organizing. The home, Wadia notes, is a very different workplace setting. “It leads to a lot of challenges for organizing because people are atomized. Employers of home care workers will say, ‘You feel like family to me’—which is often very positive, but it also means that the consumers or the employers don’t necessarily see these as real jobs or see themselves as employers.”

Immigration: Getting the Care Job Done

, immigrants constitute at least 27% of workers in “direct care” — which covers working with seniors and people with disabilities — while a found that 18% of early child care workers were born outside the U.S. (compared to ). The percentages may be even greater, Espinoza notes, referring to undocumented home care and child workers in the so-called gray market, but clearly, immigrants make up a significant part of the care workforce, and solutions to chronic problems aren’t viable unless they make sense for this subsection of the labor market.

Espinoza, who formerly served as executive vice president of policy at PHI, says that as the son of a Mexican immigrant, he has a personal interest in “imagining sound and humane policies that support immigrants and support our country’s economy.” He acknowledges that more work needs to be done to help a considerable portion of the American public see the value in federal and state policies that make it easier for even more immigrants to participate in the care sector. ” might be a solution worth exploring.

In addition to immigrants, Espinoza says older workers and Generation Z men might be engaged to address shortages.

The pandemic made caregivers more visible—their value to families and the gaps and inequities that have persisted for decades. Espinoza points to labor shortages and other trends across the U.S. labor landscape that are buffeting the care sector. “A large percentage of workers are retiring and reducing their hours, and have done so even more since the end of the pandemic,” he says. Looking at new pipelines of people to take these jobs should be a priority.

The big takeaway from these three experts? A thriving, fair economy depends on a robust, equitable care sector — across lifespans and around the country.

And there are costs on top of that associated with missing work to birth or bond with a new baby. America is the only developed country to lack a paid family leave program – so even after a child is born many parents go on unpaid leave to recover. Some who do may put their jobs in jeopardy or delay going back until they can find (and afford) child care. But in the United States, our child care programs are expensive and many families live in places without any access to care — so going back to work may be problematic, adding another cost to the already mounting bills.

All of these anti-family policies — no paid leave, costly health care, and lack of child care — have contributed to the unique stress of being a parent in America. The White House is spot on to want to address this ongoing maternal health crisis, an initiative they unveiled in 2022 which has now seen some positive results.

One of the popular programs involves the provision of Newborn Supply Kits, which delivers a box of baby supplies to new parents. The kits are modeled on successful programs in other countries, such as Finland (though in Finland the kits are delivered as baby boxes and the box can be used as a crib) and the ). And in the United States, we have helping with their promotion, because what new parent doesn’t prefer their diapers to be endorsed by a celebrity?

In addition to diapers, for parents of new babies, such as a thermometer, nasal aspirator, Vitamin D3, diaper rash ointment, diapers, wipes, receiving blankets/swaddle, socks, burp cloth, shampoo and lotion. There’s also a voucher for grocery delivery, and details on how to access the maternal mental health hotline and government services, with a goal of reducing the stigma associated with seeking out such help.

In 2023, 3000 newborn supply kits were distributed and the expectation is that 10,000 more will be delivered in 2024. The program is part of the White House’s larger effort to make life easier during major life transitions — having a child being one of them.  The initial program was piloted in Arkansas, Louisiana and New Mexico, and in 2024, it will expand to seven more states (Alabama, California, Georgia, Mississippi, New York, Tennessee and Texas). The goal, according to the White House, is to expand this to a national program supporting all families with the basic items they need in the vulnerable postpartum months.

But running a successful program takes resources, which is why a bipartisan group of four members of Congress (Republican Rep. Julia Letlow of Louisiana, Democratic Rep. Kim Schrier of Washington, Republican Rep. Marriannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Nanette Barragan of Califiornia) that would appropriate $5 million in funds over five years to create a new national program for the Newborn Supply Kit initiative. Instead of operating as a pilot program in just 10 states, it could operate as a national one.

But can our maternal mental health crisis really be helped by diapers?

The newborn supply kits are one-time gifts — designed as more of a peace offering to families and a way to share what government services might be available to other families, without the stigma typically associated with seeking out such assistance. The idea is that bringing crucial supplies directly to new parents will reduce the time, stress and burden on them.

But the problem with newborn supply kits is that they are just that – supplies. Diapers and wipes may cost time and money, but it’s a fraction of the cost and time associated with the biggest single expense for most families: child care. Within the long list of achievements and initiatives lauded on the White House Blueprint for the Maternal Health Crisis, providing more access to affordable, quality child care is largely absent.

This is not to make light of the White House’s accomplishments on maternal mental health, particularly with respect to extending Medicaid coverage and coming up with better metrics and information reporting surrounding maternal emergency, obstetrics and pregnancy-related deaths. And yes, receiving diapers from a government agency may be the olive branch needed to show that further assistance might be available. But without a targeted look at the , the true costs and stressors of raising a child in the United States continues to climb.

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

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

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

Transforming from Student to Teacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Rich Resource

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

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

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

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

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

These proficiencies are nurtured, the committee wrote, when educators design learning opportunities that meet children’s needs, engage responsively with children’s ideas and interests, and when they can hear children’s ideas and see their successes.

The Next Generation Preschool Science team, led by education nonprofits and the and public media foundation, has been working to promote science in preschool by co-designing innovative STEM resources that can be used across home and school. Their work, funded by the involved co-designing resources with teachers and families, to ensure they leveraged children’s interest and families’ funds of knowledge. Through this partnership, researchers, teachers, parents, curriculum developers and media designers created Early Science with Nico & NorÂź, a multifaceted program that includes a teacher guide with sample curricular activities, a “family science fun guide” and innovative digital apps to support science investigation in ways that integrate math and engineering.

The program builds on the researchers’ previous findings about technology and young children—not to replace human interaction, but to explore how digital journals and gamified simulations can strengthen and complement young children’s engagement in and understanding of science concepts. A rigorous, randomized control trial study found that children who used the      Nico & Nor curriculum supplement in classrooms showed significant improvements in their science learning. Children’s science learning also significantly improved when Early Science with Nico & Nor¼ was used across school and home environments.

Making Use of Everyday Magic

Though shadows, ramps and floppy tomato plants may not be something most of us pay attention to, they certainly get a 3-year-old’s attention. Children wonder about the world in practical, concrete ways—Why does that ball roll faster on the slide than on the dirt? What makes my shadow look so long? What is a shadow actually 
 how it is formed? In the program’s three units—Light and Shadow; Force and Motion; and Growth and Transformation— Early Science with Nico & Nor¼ explores such questions with carefully designed materials that foster the child’s ever-present wonder. Without a whiff of, “OK, class, we’re now going to learn about science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” that’s exactly what they do.

“Tłó±đ project is built around children’s natural curiosity to understand the world around them,” says Danae Kamdar, an early STEM researcher with Digital Promise. “We asked, ‘How does children’s natural curiosity about the world drive them to ask questions and understand?’ The question was not only how we could support children’s learning and curiosity in preschool classrooms but how we could support learning in communities and families as well.

“As children begin to explore how shadows are made, they notice through these different activities that they need a light source, an object to block the light, and a surface on the opposite side of the light source for the shadow to appear on. Or they’ll observe that the size of a shadow changes when you move the light source closer to or farther from the object. Their observations create a natural way to connect to that science and they begin to use the visual spatial vocabulary in a meaningful way.”

Playing Around

The key to all this learning, both in the digital and hands-on materials, is play. Play not only helps children in their social-emotional learning and ability to collaborate, but it’s also essential for reading proficiency and, as Early Science with Nico & Nor¼ demonstrates, can be an important tool in learning math and science skills.

Through play, the children learn that bringing the light source closer makes the object bigger, and that the light source must be behind the object. In the unit on force and motion, the preschoolers learn how items on a steep ramp move downhill faster, and that different surfaces on the ramp—grass, dirt—or on the item affect how smoothly or quickly the object moves. Friction slows things down! Whoa.

Although many preschool curricula already include activities in which the children sprout, plant and observe a bean plant, activities in the Growth and Transformation unit enable the children to focus more deeply on the core ideas about plant parts and what they need to live and grow, with some math for good measure: Matt’s plant is seven units tall. Mine’s nine. It’s taller!

The Nico & Nor program didn’t evolve from a group of adults deciding what kids will like and going with that. It’s the result of co-design and iteration, based on design ideas and feedback from educators and families, and observation of how the children themselves engage with the materials. Do they actually play with them?

“When our team is in the co-design phase with preschool teachers and families, we get together to brainstorm seed ideas—initial concepts of what we think would work in the preschool space or be interesting for the children,” says Tiffany Leones, an early STEM researcher for Digital Promise. “From there, the teachers share their feedback about what is engaging for the kids. We then go through the process of iterating and testing it out.”

“For example, in the Shadow Cave app,” Leones says, “the children can actually be in a dark cave. They can manipulate the flashlight, turn it on and off. They can control the conditions in which they’re investigating to understand the core ideas of light and shadows. Within the app, we’ve designed it so there are audio and visual scaffolds to support children since especially in the 3 to 5 range, children can be anywhere on the developmental spectrum. There are differentiated levels within the app, which get developmentally more complex.”

She adds, “Tłó±đn, to keep play at the forefront, we developed some levels in between where children can create their own fun shadows in the cave, so they can explore that space freely.”

(Full disclosure: this author played all levels of Shadow Cave and Puppy Park and is a bit alarmed to say they weren’t a slam dunk. I thought for sure those triangles would fit together and that bush would shade two puppies 
)

Collaboration at All Levels

The Next Generation Preschool Science project is based on building collaborative relationships among researchers, educators, families, curriculum designers and media developers, while putting children and families at the center of the action.

An exceptional dimension of the project is the degree to which the researchers sought feedback and input from the preschool teachers, who brought a rich degree of their own creativity to the activities and freely shared what worked and what didn’t work as well, which often led to modifications to the materials. One realized that before she introduced the bowling activity to her kids, she should show them a video so they could see what bowling was. Another teacher created a “ramp center” in her classroom where children could explore the unit’s materials and variables on their own, in their own time.

Parents were also an important part of the feedback and design loop. Though many initially expressed some doubt about their knowledge of engineering concepts, through their discussions about the materials, they found instances where they and their children engaged in engineering practices. They pushed and pulled boxes (Force and Motion) and when they explored their neighborhood to find ramps, they saw plenty of examples, from playground slides to moving trucks with dollies.

Addressing Inequity

In the same study mentioned in the introduction of this article, “Science and Engineering in Preschool Through Elementary Grades: The Brilliance of Children and the Strengths of Educators,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) decried America’s struggles to support children in historically marginalized communities in engaging in science and engineering. The educational system is often set up to work against children developing and demonstrating proficiencies in science and engineering, the report stated. Teachers may feel underprepared to teach these subject areas and may lack curriculum materials or other resources to support them in doing so. The children themselves may start to lose enthusiasm for sense-making about the natural and designed worlds if they aren’t supported.

The report says that all these negatives can be rectified, and the Next Generation Preschool Science project is a step in that direction. Digital Promise traditionally has worked with educators, researchers, technologies and communities to investigate and scale innovations that support learners who have been historically and systematically excluded, Leones says. Equity is baked into the project and one of the project’s goals was to generate resources that could leverage children’s everyday experiences and families’ funds to promote science in accessible, doable ways. The materials are available in both Spanish and English and are free to everyone with access to an iPad.

Another provider quoted in a by the Cornell University School of Industrial Labor Relations Co-Lab said, “Many of the day cares are not operating at full capacity because we don’t have the workforce. So, even people who are eligible for child care can’t find it.”

With child care, quality goes hand in hand with quantity, and as demand grows, the state’s quality rating and improvement system, , is supporting nearly 2,000 center-based child care and Pre-K programs, school-based Pre-K programs, family child care businesses and Head Start/Early Head Start programs as they get off the ground and provide high-quality care.

The key word is “supports.”

“Tłó±đ providers,” says Sarah Gould-Houde, a quality improvement specialist, “are the most important people that we have. We’re here to help them grow and improve their operations.”

It works like this. When a program joins, it’s matched with a quality improvement specialist, and they work together to reflect on their program’s strengths and challenges through the framework of the research-based . Instead of quick checklist-based visits once a year, Gould-Houde and her colleagues .

Home-based providers often lack the professional networks that drive quality, but the three spoke to value QUALITYstarsNY — and especially Gould-Houde — for the partnership, ideas and research-based insights. Just as important is their ongoing mutual support through text and occasional meet-ups at ice cream parlors, which have the effect of helping them recognize themselves as professionals.

“Tłó±đ delight and insight they get from their camaraderie is invaluable,” says Gould-Houde. “Tłó±đir networking will have an impact on their overall programming and support them with their drive for quality.”

The three operate within an hour’s drive of each other. “We just feed off of each other and support each other,” says Carla Seeley, a 28-year veteran of child care with an in-home site in Ballston Spa, New York, called ABC Daycare.

Recognizing that star systems make some providers apprehensive, Gould-Houde encourages them to remember that even a single star is a mark of quality, adding that the experience of participating in QUALITYstarsNY is about working toward goals aligned with standards, regardless of rating.

In spite of Seeley’s ample experience, she continues to attend training sessions online and in person, logging 158 hours in 2023. QUALITYstarsNY, she says, “Helps you get funding for classes and conferences. They help you upgrade your plastic toys. They help you get high-quality materials for your program.”

Gould-Houde consults with Seeley on setting goals for improving and expanding her business, such as using lesson plans that include developmental goals and opportunities for individualized learning. She has also been working on implementing interest centers from the .

Seeley is also completing an addition that will not only enable her to accommodate more children but also to maintain a workspace separate from her living space. “For the first time,” she says, “I’ll be able to actually go home at the end of my day.” Her next goal after that: a bigger yard with better equipment.

Laura Rysedorph started Tiny Talk Daycare in Stillwater, New York, after losing her job just before returning to work after maternity leave. On a Facebook group, she found Seeley — the unofficial den mother of this cohort—who introduced her to QUALITYstarsNY. “I met with Sarah,” she recalls, “and it opened my world to so many different things. She has been extremely helpful with challenging behaviors as well as contracts and other paperwork. I really feel she’s there to help me grow.”

Adjacent counties within New York State might have different regulations, Rysedorph says, and she values the members of her cohort for the way they can bounce ideas off each other regarding the best ways to comply.

Jennifer Sutherland of Schuylerville, New York, has worked in early education since 1999, opening Country Kids in her home in 2006. “I’m constantly trying to find ways to improve my program,” she says. “My work is my passion, but it can also be very isolating, and that’s where QUALITYstarsNY comes in.”

Sutherland benefits from the energy and support of the providers in her cohort as well as Gould-Houde’s one-on-one attention. “It’s about my individualized goals,” she says. “Instead of telling me what to do, she asks, ‘What do you want to work on first, and how can we get you there?’”

Subtitled “A Cross-Partisan Action Plan to Support Families with Young Children in America,” it builds on a that identified four challenges facing working families:

• Child care
• Financial squeeze
• Time squeeze
• Insufficient government investment

Convergence fielded a group of leaders from a wide variety of organizations and ideologies. The New York Times called it .

They met in person in April 2023 and again in late September, with numerous teleconference sessions along the way, ultimately agreeing upon a set of recommendations that fall under four headings:

• Changing the Story. “We believe the stories about raising children in America are often inaccurate, unhelpful or pushed to the background. We want to change the story. When families flourish, we all flourish.”
• Rethinking Cash Support for Families. “We believe that low-to-moderate income families with young children should have more effective and easy-to-access cash support, while acknowledging fiscal realities.”
• Ensuring More High-Quality Care Options for Children. “We believe that parents should be able to make care choices for their children that align with their family needs and values, and that support their children’s development.”
• Supporting Parents with New Children. “We believe that all parents should have the opportunity to bond with an infant or new child, while maintaining economic and job security.”

To learn more about the process, Early Learning Nation spoke to six of the collaborative members as well as , director of the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families.

Getting Past Skepticism

Going into the process, Bruce Lesley, president, , had his doubts. “I was like, ‘I don’t see how in the world you’re going to get this person and that person on board,’” he recalls. “I was very dubious, but Abby did a masterful job of really herding cats. She kept us on task, striving toward the mission, defining that mission and exploring where the common ground is, not letting people focus on the differences.”

(Podcast, First Focus on Children)

, president & CEO of the (NBCDI), acknowledges that she, too, was initially skeptical, but also curious, and she welcomed the time spent “talking about and disagreeing about, but ultimately coming to a place of commonality” on what it means for families to flourish. “If we don’t start there,” she says, “then we often just recycle the same unhelpful strategies.”

Even McCloskey wondered whether the group would cohere around a framework. “It felt scattered at first,” she says. “I found myself wondering, ‘Why are we talking about this thing at such a high level when there are such urgent needs right here on the ground?’” Over time, however, what seemed like a cumbersome exercise did help the group gel.

Katharine Stevens, founder and president of the , says “I’ve been part of these groups that talk about ‘consensus,’ but it’s consensus by mass bullying.” She objects to the approach where pundits “define a problem as the absence of their chosen policy solution.”

Stevens, whose organization is often identified as right-leaning, came away from the process pleasantly surprised by her interactions with Indivar Dutta-Gupta of the left-leaning (CLASP). “We didn’t expect to connect at all,” she says. “But I would say we ended up connecting on almost everything.”

Rachel Anderson, principal of , who works with faith-based organizations, says most families care more about their well-being and their kids thriving than they do about a given policy, so she came to the process with her mind open to various solutions.

Reconcilable Differences

Mariah Levison, CEO and president at Convergence, says the organization’s collaborative problem-solving methodology has fostered breakthroughs in numerous policy settings, commenting, “We’ve seen past participants do transformative work in their respective fields, and we are eager to see where this group takes things.”

The presence of a professional mediator helped. “This is the first group I’d ever been part of that had that,” says McCloskey. “It felt less like driving towards a particular policy end and more about building trust and relationships.” Stevens also credited the , saying David Fairman, senior mediator, could probably help in the Middle East.)

“Despite some very real differences in opinion,” says Dr. Dana Suskind, founder and co-director, , and author of “.” “Every single person was there to make a good-faith effort to find consensus. In some ways, that was very surprising. But at the same time, it helped reinforce what I’ve always believed: that we all want the best for our children.”

Anderson confesses she found it very moving to see all the participants adding and moving their sticky notes around until it became a collective vision. “That was the moment when I thought, ‘Okay, we will accomplish something,’ she says. “And in classic good group process, once you’ve achieved something together, then you feel like you can achieve the next thing. It allowed us to unsettle the fixed ideas about what policy should look like.”

According to Dutta-Gupta, “We generally worked to find any common ground rather than negotiate compromises. That meant identifying the pieces of policies that conservatives might advocate for and progressives thought would move things in the right direction.” For example, while he personally doesn’t like the idea of limiting paid leave to new parents because of the many events in people’s lives requiring such leave, he came away satisfied that his position was acknowledged and, more importantly that “the basics of what children deserve have everything to do with them being children and nothing to do with who their parents are.”

“At least people agreed that something should be done,” said Lesley. “In a lot of ways, that in itself is progress. We all agreed we should do things to help families with caregiving.”

Holistic and Optimistic

A “holistic care agenda” emerges as one of the agreed-upon values of the “In This Together” report, but what does this term mean? For Austin, it corresponds with her organization’s , saying, “It’s not just about child care or early childhood education,” while Suskind cites  and calling for an “AARP for parents,” adding, “It’s the set of public and private policies, informed by brain science, that empower and help all families to meet the developmental needs of their children.”

Stevens highlighted the way the report puts forward a concept of child care that includes and even emphasizes the role of parents in caring for their own young children.

For Dutta-Gupta, a holistic care agenda “appreciates the enormous public good that care confers our society, and invests in people and systems to ensure that each of us has meaningful, well-resourced and publicly funded care options whenever we need care.”

For Anderson, the term entails an acknowledgement that “there are multiple interventions that will benefit families and achieve good goals. The core ones in this report — cash support for families, paid parental leave and investing in child care as a relevant form of family support — all have a role. It’s not productive to pit one against the other.”

Lesley defines ‘holistic’ as thinking about all the needs of kids rather than in silos. “How can all those things work better together? So how can health care programs work in tandem with child care and nutrition and housing, so that we really do maximize the full potential of children and benefit families?”

The Next (Baby) Steps

Does the Convergence report herald a bipartisan golden era for family policy? Unlikely. Nor is this a particularly easy issue for consensus. “I’m not sure that in our politics today there is any low-hanging fruit,” McCloskey admits, but at the same time, she sees “a tremendous amount of innovation and engagement on family issues right now. In light of this momentum, she believes the time is right for re-upping a National Commission on Children similar to the one commissioned in 1987 by Ronald Reagan. Its report from 1991 paved the way for the enactment of the and the .

“If you really think about what’s happened since,” Lesley notes, “with the exception of the American Rescue Plan, since then, there really hasn’t been anything for kids on that scale.”

In many important ways, our nation hasn’t progressed that much since the Beyond Rhetoric era, but as Suskind observes, “We now have a wealth of scientific evidence pointing to the relationship between a child’s earliest experiences — both positive and negative — and their brain development, their school performance and a host of lifelong outcomes. This is science that simply cannot be ignored.”

“I didn’t have to leave my house,” Antoine said. For a full year, from 6:30-9:30 every Wednesday night, Antoine logged on via Zoom with 16 other early childhood educators who participated in the apprenticeship program to receive their Child Development Associate Certificate, or CDA. It took a single year to complete and she was still paid for her time, receiving a $250 stipend every two weeks for taking the class. Each time she completed 500 hours of training, she also received a 50-cent hourly raise at her YMCA job. By the end of the program, she’d completed 2000 hours and received $2 more per hour.

The apprenticeship required a portfolio, work and homework pertaining to early childhood, as well as in-classroom observation and a written test. Antoine felt the year of coursework left her well prepared for that final exam. “It’s not long and it’s not hard,” she said. She passed, and in February of 2024, she joined 67 other apprentices in Neighborhood Village’s first ever graduation ceremony, with her family and friends in the audience.

The graduation ceremony, where Antoine received her CDA, was “a mini wedding” according to Binal Patel, chief program officer with Neighborhood Villages. Three hundred people attended – graduates with their friends and families, and children of their own. Individual names were read and each graduate walked across the stage. The Massachusetts Secretary of Labor delivered the keynote address. (Massachusetts has for its state support of early child care programs, including creation of $475 million in state funding to sustain Commonwealth Cares for Children operational grants, or “C3” grants, which send funds directly to child care programs.)

Now that she has her CDA, Antoine is certified as a K-1 teacher, which includes working with preschool-aged children. “More doors are opening up to me,” she explained. In addition to her raise, she received a promotion at work and is now the assistant director at the YMCA. She’s still exploring opening her own child care center, either in Massachusetts or in her native New York.

The Value of Apprenticeship Programs

are lauded for combining on-the-job training with classroom instruction, so that workers gain skills needed for the job while still having the requisite experience many employers require before hiring. Many apprenticeship programs, like the one Antoine was enrolled in, are also paid, allowing more people from different socioeconomic backgrounds to take part. Upon completion, the certification, license or degree can lead to future earnings opportunities, and for a field like child care which is experiencing a — particularly in leadership fields — these apprenticeship programs can boost the pipeline of qualified staff.

Patel first learned of such early childhood apprenticeship programs at the ECEPTS conference in 2022, where she connected with someone who had helped launch a similar program in Kentucky at the Governor’s Office of Early Childhood. Though Kentucky has registered and started the program, their cohort has not graduated yet, so the Neighborhood Villages cohort is the first in the country to graduate with a Registered Apprenticeship in Early Childhood Administrator/Director through the Department of Labor.

When Neighborhood Villages graduated 68 apprentices in February, this made its program the largest early childhood registered apprenticeship program in Massachusetts. Over half of the graduates (37 participants) received their Child Development Associates and the remaining 31 received their Lead Teacher certificate, which qualifies them to be a child care or preschool director. The program and its graduation were successful enough that six of the CDA graduates are now continuing on with the Emerging Leaders Program.

Hope Olson is of those recent graduates who is going on to the Emerging Leaders Program. Olson grew up in New Hampshire about an hour from the sea coast and was always drawn to outdoor activities. She majored in environmental studies in college and upon graduation began working at the Boston Outdoor Preschool Network, a nature-based early childhood program.

“I haven’t ever thought of it as a switch, actually,” she said, regarding her pivot from environmental studies to teaching. “I was drawn to the job because I’ve always worked with children. It combined my love for outdoor education with children and working with children.” But Olson recognized that she didn’t have the traditional background for teaching, and when her supervisor mentioned the apprenticeship program, she enrolled. Like Antoine, she was emphatic about the experience, coursework and graduation ceremony. “Adding on this program made me feel capable in this role,” she said. Once she completed her CDA, she enrolled in the Emerging Leaders Program, and plans to keep learning while teaching. “Tłó±đse are stepping stones to pursue teaching further or find myself in a director role,” she said.

Funding the Neighborhood Villages Apprenticeship Program

The Neighborhood Villages’ Apprenticeship Program is managed by Neighborhood Villages but features a variety of funding sources, including the City of Boston, which boosted American Rescue Plan funds, and the State’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development Labor. There was also private philanthropic support for the initial cohort, but Patel said they anticipate that the program will be primarily funded by EOLWD going forward.

Their success with the apprenticeship program has allowed for more opportunities for such programs to grow. Neighborhood Villages has received the designation of “ambassador” to support the expansion of Early Childhood Registered Apprenticeship programs in Massachusetts, and serve as a liaison with EOLWD and programs who already have apprentices, or are looking to register new ones.

Patel explains that they are consulting with organizations that would like to register their programs to ensure they know the process and required paperwork and components, including registering the program with the YMCA and working with For Kids Only to register the first out-of-school time educator apprenticeship program. Other states have heard about their program, and reach out for information and assistance.

“Registered apprenticeships are fairly new in this industry and are continuing to grow very quickly!” Patel said.

This year, Patel plans to present at three national conferences to share their work on apprenticeship and everything they have learned, including returning to the conference where she first learned about apprenticeships, in hope of inspiring another person to start their own. She is returning to the same conference she went to in 2022, “Except this time I was invited as a presenter!” she said. “I am excited to share about our program and all of the lessons we have learned, and hopefully inspire others that they can do it too!”

When we hear the word, “lullaby,” most of us imagine something like the dictionary definition of “a gentle, quiet song that lulls a child to sleep,” a cradle song to soothe a baby’s way to the Land of Nod.

For the past 12 years, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute has been refining that definition with its Lullaby Project, pairing new and expecting parents with professional teaching artists to write lullabies for their babies. Because the parents and caregivers come from a variety of racial, cultural and geographic backgrounds, you’re as likely to hear merengue or the Afrobeat of a djembe as you are to hear a sweet rock-a-bye.

“Tłó±đy’re not all soothing,” says Sarah Johnson, Carnegie Hall’s chief education officer and director of the Weill Music Institute (WMI). “Tłó±đy really become love songs and whatever the parents want them to be. Sometimes a mom will say, ‘My baby is so active, I want to write more of a dance song for her.’ Some of the parents have quite detailed ideas about the music before they even start writing, and others not so much. But it all comes from the parents so the range is huge.”

The began in Jacobi Medical Center, a New York City public hospital in the Bronx, when a cross-disciplinary team invited WMI to collaborate on a program to support the hospital’s teenage mothers and young parents. Medical staff had observed that the young parents were dealing with high stress levels that sometimes got in the way of their bonding with their infants.

The idea of working with a small group of parents to write personal lullabies for their infants and create a simple recording of the song, evolved into Lullaby’s pilot in 2011. Over the years it has expanded to reach parents in healthcare settings, homeless shelters, high schools and correctional settings. The project, which is now part of WMI’s early childhood and family programs, has nearly 60 organizations worldwide, with well over 4,000 unique lullabies having been written in more than 40 languages — and it’s still growing.

It Starts with a Few Words

The process often starts with the parents being asked to write a letter to their child or to write down their hopes and dreams for themselves as caregivers.

“We ask them where they can imagine their child years from now,” says Tiffany Ortiz, Director of WMI’s early childhood programs. “It serves as a pause button for families to reflect on their parenting experiences and their relationship with their child or child-to-be.

“We have a lullaby journal, which offers a range of prompts. One of the most popular is writing a letter to their baby where parents or caregivers are encouraged to express their hopes and dreams or any stories they want to share with their child. Caregivers are encouraged to think about the language they want to pass down, the cultural rituals within their family they want to pass along or any personal stories about their parenthood experience they want to include.

“We encourage them to think about the melody they want to add to the messages that they wrote, in the right key so they feel comfortable singing this lullaby to their child. We want the song to be something they continue to use, not something that sits on a shelf. We want it to be an active part of families engaging with each other and perhaps passing it down generation to generation, so that it ends up being a beautiful gift to the families.”

My babies, sweet babies,
I love you like crazy.
You’re wonderful and fun,
Sweet like honey buns.

The parents or caregivers are paired with teaching artists and songwriters who work with them to structure lyrics from the key ideas they’ve written, expanding on one another’s ideas and trying out possible melodies and arranging the instrumentation. Accompaniment runs the gamut from piano to marimba, flute to cello, and an array of percussion instruments guaranteed to punctuate and enliven any sentiment. A roster of professional musicians works with the families to create and arrange a song that is uniquely, singularly theirs. The lullaby is recorded for the parent to keep and sing again and again. Each year, some of the new works are selected to be performed at the Hall, some sung by the project’s professional musicians and some by the parents themselves. It’s a delicious process, as plainly seen in of the 2023 Lullaby Project’s Celebration Concert.

And the effect apparently lasts. Now that the project is entering its 13^th year, WMI has started hosting alumni days to invite lullaby writers to come back to the Hall and share how they’re doing.

“Last year we had a family who came with their 8-year-old who said, ‘We still know our song and we still sing it.’” Ortiz says. “Tłó±đy were so excited to be in the space again and to share and revisit their songs. We’re seeing some long-term ripple effects — seeing so many families come back after many years with their kids grown to share how meaningful the experience has been for them.”

However inspiring, performance is not the project’s primary aim or value. The design was to strengthen the bond between parent and child, aid child development and support parent’s health and well-being, all of which have been accomplished — and then some — according to qualitative analysis by arts research firm WolfBrown, which WMI commissioned to evaluate the project from 2011 to 2017. Researchers found “marked differences” in participants’ positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and sense of achievement, key markers for measuring well-being. Some of the lullaby writers who performed their songs had never spoken — much less sung — in front of an audience.

“You can see people being brave,” Johnson says. “A couple of years ago when one of our writers, Anya, performed, she was shaking when she introduced herself and told her story. You could tell that it was hard for her, but she has this amazing voice, and in that moment, you see her bravery and you see all these other people leaning in and encouraging her. It was quite beautiful.” (Watch Anya’s performance of her lullaby, “,” accompanied by teaching artists James and Camila.)

Feeding the Artists

The Lullaby Project has nourished not only the families but the participating musicians and songwriters as well. Johnson says WMI offers the musicians who come into the project professional training and development, along with the resources they need to be successful in their role in supporting the lullaby writers. She also acknowledges that the work isn’t for everyone because not every musician is comfortable with the service aspect of supporting another person’s creativity and process of discovery.

For many though, she says, that has been the most magical part of the process.

“We have many local teaching artists who’ve been part of the project since the inception and continue to come back,” Johnson says. “One said that what feeds them about the project is that they always learn something new about themselves and their community. It isn’t just the parents who are vulnerable. The artists learn from the families in that exchange.

“Tłó±đ artists have created this community of practice where they gather and bring their challenges, they bring something they’re proud of, a song they love that they wrote with someone. Those are durable and generative relationships.”

The process is as much about trust as it is about music, Ortiz says.

“We talk a lot about attunement between parent and child, but there’s quite a bit of attunement that needs to happen among the facilitator, musician and the parent. That requires a level of deep listening, trust-building and a lot of generosity.”

Scaling the Project

Part of the Weill Music Institute’s DNA is to broadly share what they’ve developed, Johnson says. They have designed the Lullaby Project to be nimble, portable and scalable. Although they believe in the superpower of artists, she says, they have looked beyond the professional teaching artists they work with to see who else in a community might be able to bring the project to families most in need. For example, they’re exploring a project with a partner in India that would provide a simple set of video resources that would enable health workers to support lullaby writing in their communities. Their lead partner in Australia is experimenting with creating a library of lullaby music templates to which personalized lyrics could be added, expanding the capacity of lullaby writing without benefit of facilitators.

“Tłó±đ growth has been organic,” Johnson says. “When we moved from Jacobi Medical Center, it was because people wanted to take it other places and were knocking on our door asking if they could take it to a refugee camp in Athens or to this or that place. We have access to extraordinary resources — the Carnegie Hall name, our artistic relationships, our human capital and our partnerships — that enable us to develop things that are often useful in other places. And then give them away.

“We dream about a world in which every parent might be able to write a personal lullaby for their child,” she says. “A colleague of ours often says that when a child is born, so too is a parent and when we think about these personal lullabies, they are just as much for the parent as they are for the child. These lullabies are little vessels of love, and who wouldn’t want more of that in the world.”

Taking Your Toddler to Carnegie Hall

If music be the food of love, then Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute (WMI) offers a banquet the whole family can feast on. WMI encompasses the Hall’s education and social impact programs, whose mission is to make great music accessible to the widest possible audience. Hundreds of families in New York City and throughout the world have found their way to music through Carnegie Hall’s array of age-appropriate offerings, from live performances to free online resources to spark the curiosity and enthusiasm that can last a lifetime. More than 800,000 people each year engage in WMI’s programs through national and international partnerships, in New York City schools and community settings, and at Carnegie Hall.

The early childhood programs of are designed specifically with babies and toddlers in mind — colorful, lively and sometimes silly — creating musical experiences that feed the developing brain and imagination. Since its inception 12 years ago, the Lullaby Project has been at the heart of the WMI’s early childhood programs, a rich ecosystem that brings music to life in a child’s earliest years.

Resources

• To better understand the effect of music in early childhood development, Carnegie Hall commissioned papers from arts research expert Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf. The first, , points to key reasons why investing in children early and often is critical to healthy development and a successful future — and demonstrates the role music can play in everyday interactions that support children.
• , looks at how and why lullabies make a difference, highlighting how the Lullaby Project helps families come together and imagine a positive future for children, and how writing a lullaby often can support a deeper process of connecting and communicating among parents, grandparents, musicians, staff and community members.
• Inspired by the Lullaby Project, the Bernard van Leer Foundation commissioned WolfBrown to write a paper, , which explores the Lullaby Project alongside early childhood programming from around the world.
• Unwind with Lullabies: Hopes & Dreams In April 2018, Decca Gold (Universal Music Group) released an album of 15 original lullabies written by Lullaby Project participants and performed by world renowned artists including Fiona Apple, the Brentano String Quartet, Lawrence Brownlee, Rosanne Cash, Joyce DiDonato, AngĂ©lique Kidjo, Natalie Merchant, Dianne Reeves, Gilberto Santa Rosa and others. The album is available from the  and other online retailers.

Early Learning Nation spoke to six 2023-24 fellows to discover their stories and their strategies for systemic change. As fellow Lara Kyriakou says, “We don’t have yet, but this is our moment, and this fellowship is a springboard for so much of our work going forward.”

Learning from Each Other

Binal Patel, chief program officer at , previously helped launch and then ran an early childhood program for infants, toddlers and preschoolers in Watertown, Massachusetts. “That was the most rewarding, incredible, exhausting four years of my life,” she recalls. “I started that director job a month into my maternity leave, with a 2-year-old toddler as well.”

Patel describes the model at Neighborhood Villages as “pilot, iterate and then scale with government.” That final step is what drew her to the Bank Street fellowship, creating the right circumstances for public investment and systemic improvement beyond a neighborhood pilot. “I’ve learned so much from the people in the cohort,” she says, “from what they do in their own states and the different contexts we all work in, but with the same goal of an equitable early childhood system.”

She adds, “Being in rooms with such strong leaders and women of color in the early childhood space at Bank Street inspires me.” This directly relates to the Registered Apprenticeship Program she launched last year, which is the focus of her capstone project in the fellowship. “Massachusetts doesn’t have a lot of diversity in early childhood leadership roles,” she notes, “and we need to create and support those pathways for educators to continue to advance in their careers.”

Adaptive Leadership

In the wake of a life-threatening illness, Aruna Gilbert, chief program and policy officer at the  pivoted from journalism and economics to early education. “I started thinking about how it influences people’s way of experiencing the world,” she says, adding, “And children were suffering.”

, a philosophy pioneered by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ronald Heifetz, has been Gilbert’s “bible,” as she taps into her agility and emotional intelligence. “When you’re leading and it’s ‘easy,’ it’s often because you’re telling people what to do. Figuring out community voice and leading from where they’re sitting” she explains, “is another thing altogether.”

Gilbert praises the Bank Street faculty, saying, “Tłó±đy’re amazing, individually and collectively. They keep in touch to make sure that we are having the best experience possible.”

The Consultative Stance

Kassandra Gonzales, program coordinator for the  Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation, began her career as an early childhood educator and then shifted to play therapy and behavior management, supporting early childhood programs and public school teachers.

In some of New Mexico’s border towns, she explains, basic needs like running water are scarce. Child care providers in border towns deal with markedly different mental health challenges than from those in, say, Albuquerque. “Tłó±đir struggles are real and their experiences are valid,” she states. Imagine the trauma, she continues, of border checks within the state, where officials require you to state your citizenship status.

“This work is really important for me,” Gonzales says, “not only as a native New Mexican but also as the mother of a 3-year-old.”

The Bank Street Fellowship is supporting her quest to build up her state’s mental health infrastructure for providers. Her approach is rooted in the , a discipline developed by Kadija Johnston and Charles Brinamen that emphasizes “strengthening relationships among early learning and care providers, families, children and representatives of the community.”

Worthy Wages

Suzette Espinoza-Cruz currently works on quality and policy for Seattle’s and this practice is rooted in her classroom work dating back to the early 1990s. “I was really fortunate to be connected with Marcy Whitebook and the activist group,” she says, remembering a colleague who couldn’t afford Bay Area rents and who was living in her car despite a full-time job teaching preschool and two part-time jobs.

Though a lot has changed, she notes that the majority of the people making decisions about the workforce have no background or any lived experience in early childhood education. “We’re still putting a lot of funding toward meeting outcomes for children and exacting what are essentially unfunded mandates around professional development for teachers,” she says, adding that she conducts advocacy work in partnership with the .

“I went from being terrified to get on an airplane, to flying out to D.C. annually to advocate for funding to support early learning nationwide,” she says.

The mother of two (one in college and one in high school), Espinoza-Cruz is also the guardian of a six-year-old grandniece and four-year-old grandnephew. In addition to the lectures and formal learning experiences of the fellowship, she appreciates the “casual connections with brilliant women of color who are grappling with some pretty big questions in their community around early learning.” She singles out Denise Bermudez of , saying, “She is also a Latina, so she understands the cultural nuances of having to navigate systems that were not made for us.”

That’s My People

, says Lara Kyriakou, associate director of Early Childhood Policy & Advocacy, always leads with a focus on racial and economic equity for all students, and specializes in data-informed and data-driven policy recommendations. It largely runs its early childhood work through the . One of its signature efforts is a comprehensive created to guide systemic change for children, families and providers.

“Too many families lack the opportunity to access high-quality programs,” she says, “And if we recognize the true cost of high-quality care, we’ll make better-informed policy and funding decisions.”

A related problem, she adds, is that society fails to see infants and toddlers for the brilliant little people that they are. “This fellowship really values that truth. That’s my people, that’s where I fit.”

Kyriakou appreciates the insights she has gained from lectures by Kerry-Ann Escayg, associate professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and coauthor of “;” as well as Mark Salinas and Erik Fermín from the , founders of the discipline known as .

Two Generations Coming Together

“My heart is working with families and kids,” says Payal Seth, senior vice president of programming at , and improving compensation for child care workers is a top priority for her. “BIPOC women make up a majority of the sector,” she says. “Tłó±đ challenge is raising pay in a way that both honors those that have been in the work while not gentrifying the profession.”

Her organization disrupts generational poverty in nine cities by supporting single mothers in their quest for economic mobility. “Tłó±đy want better jobs but can’t go back to school,” Seth says. “Tłó±đy can’t get child care assistance without being in school or having a job, but they can’t take those steps without child care.” Her job encompasses programming for mothers and for the children, too.

Seth, whose career started in Ypsilanti, Mich., working with multilingual learners and children with special needs, credits Sherri Killins Stewart of the , the coach assigned to her through the Bank Street fellowship, for helping her think through policy solutions. “She asks me, ‘What is the small P towards the big P?’ That is, what are the small policy changes we can make soon that might lead to bigger policy changes down the road?”

“Tłó±đ leaders in our network are one of the reasons I’m optimistic about the future we’re helping to create for children,” she says. “Tłó±đy are updating their playbooks to respond to new, .” The Partnership is strategizing how best to empower these leaders, especially new leaders joining the network, as they navigate the aftermath of a pandemic and the complexities of today’s politically polarized landscape to improve policies affecting children.

Numan adds, “Many long-time leaders have retired and transitioned to other roles, and incoming leaders have more diverse identities and backgrounds.” She shared excitement about the diversity of the new generation of leaders but acknowledges that the nature of advocacy has also changed.

To help Early Learning Nation sample the flavor of this leadership style, Numan introduced Keesa Smith, executive director of the ; Holly Welborn, executive director of ; and Paige Clausius-Parks, executive director of . All three are in their early 40s, relatively new to their positions and serve on the partnership’s board of directors.

Here are five aspects of the way this generation pushes for state and local policy change.

Recognizing the Urgency

James Baldwin said it best: “Nothing can be changed until it is faced.” A big part of advocacy is confronting the problems without blinking. Arkansas, for example, has one of the highest rates of food insecurity in the nation. Its maternal health record is abysmal, says Smith, and it is one of the only states that have failed to despite its progress as one of few Southern states to expand Medicaid to low-income adults nearly a decade ago. The state’s lack of public transportation, especially in rural areas, is a longstanding barrier between poverty and employment. And then there are controversies that arise out of nowhere. For example, in 2023 that were designed to protect minors from danger and exploitation in meat-processing plants. “We’re trying to not fight every battle,” she says, “but there are a lot of significant battles out here to fight.”

Nevada, says Welborn, is “struggling across the board. We have gone backwards in early care and learning.” Economic instability and lack of child care are persistent woes here, and it is the only state in the country that has meaning that landlords have no administrative requirements before posting a notice of eviction.

Rhode Island has a comparably favorable child-related policy environment, but it still has its challenges, says Clausius-Parks. “Economic constraints make it difficult for our state to commit to those long-term investments in early childhood development and learning.”

Remembering Race

Where past generations of leaders have been reluctant to acknowledge the role that race plays in child poverty and other seemingly intractable issues, younger leaders are more comfortable with these uncomfortable conversations.

As the ’s Crystal Hayling , “I think this generation coming up is not asking. I think they’re telling. And they’re going to tell us the kind of society that they are going to build. And I think that, ultimately, is what community power is about.”

Clausius-Parks was a Public Service major and Black Studies minor in college. As she recalls, “We learned about community, service and philanthropy, and it really instilled in me the focus on seeing assets of a community versus seeing the deficits.” Taking part in the Partnership’s race equity board committee allowed her to advance equity in children’s policy. “I loved the questions that were being asked,” she says.

Citing the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s report, Welborn sees “staggering and troubling data that show Black children are less likely to be set on a path for success.” The report ranked the well-being of Black children in Nevada No. 39 of the 46 states ranked, with an index score of 326, and Latino children ranked No. 41 out of 50.

Race isn’t an easy subject to broach in Arkansas, and Smith, who has extensive experience in state government, has grown accustomed to hearing policymakers dismiss poverty with unsubstantiated claims that poor people (without invoking race but strongly hinting) are lazy and want to live off the system. “Tłó±đre are still people who don’t realize that the system is what keeps people in poverty,” she notes. “If we want something different, we really have to do something different, but we are in an area of the country that tends not to do that.”

Among her mentors, she names Sherece Y. West-Scantlebury, president and CEO of the , who is at the forefront of and who nominated her for the .

Drawing upon Lived Experience

Ideals of professionalism are just as generational as those related to race. Where leaders in past eras were cautioned against bringing personal histories into the workplace, these days, hardships endured and obstacles overcome are seen as a superpower. (.)

“I grew up in a household where we struggled to pay bills,” says Welborn. “Multiple families moved into one home in order to make ends meet, and that really shaped who I am and led directly to the way I advocate for young people who were struggling.”

When Smith was a senior in high school and a young mom, her 18-month-old baby passed away. The daughter she had in college is a senior in college today. “She has always directed my purpose,” Smith says. “I tell everyone that she is my number one motivator.”

Smith’s lived experience also includes law school and 17 years in state government, but she has never forgotten what public benefits like child care vouchers, housing assistance and Medicaid made possible for her.

Clausius-Parks has a master’s degree in education administration and social policy from Harvard University, but just as important was the experience of coming out as a student on a conservative Catholic campus. “There’s got to be more than me around here,” she remembers thinking. And sure enough, before too long, the LGBTQ+ society she founded grew. “That really fed my spirit for activism,” she says. Experience as the mother of a baby born prematurely and of being a stay-at-home mom for four years has similarly made her into the leader she is today.

Working in Coalition

Advocacy is a team sport. It’s never one fiery speech or a single coffee with an elected official that alters the policy landscape. Today’s leaders draw strength from each other and from the populations they serve. For Clausius-Parks, mentorship is a big part of sharing the cause. She makes a point of informally mentoring young leaders of color within and beyond her organization. “That’s part of our plan to make Rhode Island KIDS COUNT an organization that uplifts new policy leaders and, particularly, leaders of color. They are the change makers of the future—here, in other organizations and with other state and federal agencies.”

Welborn credits allies across the state for a breakthrough in 2017, when . The Children’s Advocacy Alliance is a lead partner of the alliance, which joins forces with University of Nevada Las Vegas, United Way, the Urban League and others to advance policy issues related to health, early learning and the early childhood workforce.

Smith cites Numan and the Partnership for bringing her into a community of progressive leaders in conservative states. “In Idaho,” she says, “they are attacking vaccines. I have a pretty consistent conversation with my counterparts in Tennessee about school vouchers.”

This network prepares her for dialogue with legislators who tell her things like “You want everybody on Medicaid.” “I was able to respond, ‘Well, it may shock you to know that I would love it if no Arkansans were on Medicaid, but to do so would mean that all Arkansans were paid a living wage and wouldn’t qualify,’” she says.

Combining Statistics and Stories

Today’s advocates find themselves across the table with a range of decision makers. Some are ideological adversaries, and some sympathize with their cause but can’t find any more room in the budget. Time and again, these advocates have found paths to compromise and investment. Often, part of the successful formula includes an irresistible blend of hard data and emotional accounts of real-life families.

Smith often reminds Arkansas policymakers of the days when the state invested heavily in early learning. “We’re still tracking the progress of children who benefited from pre-K funding. That’s a story we’re still telling. (Discover the .)

Clausius-Parks says her work involves, in part, “bringing in the qualitative data with the quantitative. That’s how we shift the idea around whose voice gets heard and what is important and what is valid.” As example, she points to the story of Bernelle Richards, a mother of three who is becoming a labor and delivery nurse.

Reflecting on how her generation leads and activates, Welborn says, “We have circumstances that our parents did not have, the housing crisis being one of them. It’s our unique environment, all the way from what we do that’s mission based, to how we take that internally, in the way that we manage a team. Sometimes, we have to get really creative about ways to bring funds into our organizations to support our teams, to get to the business of driving home systemic change.”

“Enrollment was down,” explains Franklin County Commissioner Erica Crawley, “and they couldn’t pay teachers a competitive wage.”

The City of Columbus supported early educators with $250 signing bonuses and made 250 scholarships available for families. It was a start, Crawley says, but it wasn’t impactful. As an Ohio state legislator at the time, Crawley was elected to the county leadership role and that’s when things started happening.

“Tłó±đ first thing I did,” she recalls, “was meet with our , and they had a list of things to invest in. I said, ‘Cool, let’s do all of them.’” Activating $24 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, Franklin County approved:

• Sign-on bonuses for new staff
• Nearly 600 child care scholarships
• Incentive payments to programs that serve low-income families or care for children during nontraditional hours
• Bonuses for programs that increase their ratings from Ohio’s system
• Subsidizing wages for providers through pilots with YWCA and the Childhood League

“ARPA allowed us to really come from behind and move ahead of the pack,” Commissioner Crawley says. “We’re showing what investment from the government can make possible.”

But Wait, There’s More

When an additional infusion of cash in January, Franklin County board president John O’Grady said, “Our region is expected to add more than 700,000 people in the next few decades, which won’t be possible or sustainable unless we find ways to support high-quality early learning centers and help make child care more affordable for families.”

All told, Franklin County will invest $42 million of its ARPA funds in child care by 2026.

“Tłó±đ initiative is showing other counties how to be bold and strategic in child care investments, and we are seeing to use their federal relief dollars to support children,” says Reginald Harris of the. “Commissioner Crawley, and other visionary leaders like her, play a critical role as champions for funding for kids.”

Commissioner Crawley’s personal experience as a struggling mother of young twins fuels her dedication to child care. “I was on government assistance after I had my children,” she recalls. “When I started working, I didn’t qualify for publicly funded child care and had to pay for child care out of pocket. Without my children’s godmother, I couldn’t have afforded the thousand dollars per month.”

She’s also seen the adverse consequences of under-investment. “What I learned 20-something years ago,” she says, “is that this is how we divert our kids from the criminal justice system.”  On the morning we spoke, Commissioner Crawley had just come from an administrative hearing about building a 2,200-bed, billion-dollar jail. “What would that money do for our kiddos that are 0 to 5? It would change their trajectory,” she asserts.

Little and Incredible

For Rae Stewart, founder of in Columbus, that money made the difference between closing down and thriving. “That sign-on bonus definitely helped get a lot of people in the door,” she says. “And if families tell me they don’t receive public funding, but that it still hurts them to pay so much, I can offer them the right scholarship.” In her neighborhood, she notes, there are many families who make a little bit too much to qualify for publicly funded child care but not enough to really pay out of pocket.

A former kindergarten teacher, Stewart knows the difference that early education can make. Some of her kindergarteners, she notes, “couldn’t even tell me their first and last name verbally. They didn’t know letters. They couldn’t hold pencils.”

She adds, “Once you get to five, sometimes it’s too late. It’s difficult to get children to develop a love for learning.”

From Blueprint to Blue Ribbon

In 2019, when Franklin County released its , the pandemic wasn’t on the authors’ minds, but the thought and planning that went into the document positioned the county to take action on behalf of its low-income residents. Many of the participants in listening sessions mentioned child care as a concern. “Tłó±đre aren’t any child care options to cover [my daughter] when she isn’t in school that I can afford,” said one. “Tłó±đ cost would wipe out my savings and make it hard to cover rent. I’m afraid I will have to quit working and go back on welfare.” The Blueprint calls for increased access to star-rated, quality child care

According to Trudy Bartley, associate vice president for Local and Community Relations, OSU, the Blueprint “enabled Commissioner Crawley to be a visionary. We’re not going to have universal child care, but what can we do in the interim until we get there?”

Bartley describes Franklin County as a “tapestry” of parents, schools, business and nonprofits. OSU engages in the tapestry via its , and , among other efforts.  “How do we really come together and not be so territorial and divisive?” she asks.  “And I think that when you look at the Rise Together Blueprint, that’s what the county has done.”

The question everyone is asking now is how Franklin County will sustain its investment after the ARPA money runs out in 2026. Commissioner Crawley mentions a ballot initiative as one possibility, building on precedents in , . and Kent County in Michigan.

For Little Incredibles’ owner Stewart, remaining afloat means she can focus on her goals of building her “dream team” of educators and getting her five-star rating. “Once I have that under my belt, I’ll seek to open up more five-star-rated centers around Columbus.”

Over the course of any given day, Tiffany Jones manages all of these situations and a hundred more. Drawing upon her knowledge of child development, she recognizes and addresses diverse learning styles and abilities, cultivating a sense of belonging and curiosity within her program. “I see them growing into a generation of confident, empathetic and capable individuals,” she states.

As owner and operator of , Jones educates eight children in two large rooms of her home in Rockville, Maryland. And if it weren’t for American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding, this dedicated and talented educator might have gone out of business, leaving the parents of these children unable to keep their jobs. And Precious Moments certainly wouldn’t be in these bright, capacious rooms without ARPA dollars.

Jones has plans for improving her business if and when more public investment comes — including a better outdoor space and a greater capacity to accommodate families who cannot normally afford child care — but first she has to make sure nobody swallows a Lego.

Jumping through Hoops

Originally from Bowie, Maryland, Jones aspired to be a doctor before motherhood and economics nudged her onto another career path. Enrolling in the rigorous pre-professional program in early care and education at Washington Adventist University meant bringing her three children along with her from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. four nights a week.

“I had to learn the business and jump through all those hoops,” she recalls. Her administrative skills came in handy during the pandemic, when she secured ARPA funding to relocate Precious Moments. It cost $8,000 to move three blocks away and to furnish the new site. The rent is higher here, but it allows her to have separate areas for living and working.

“I was closed for 18 months during the pandemic,” she recalls, “So the funding had to last to pay the living expenses of a single mom to three kids.”

When a facility closes, she adds, it cannot open the next day in the new location, owing to licensing and fire marshal certification. “It was really closer to two years from when I closed to when I reopened and was fully operational. The parents were like, ‘We need this place and you need to open.’”

Since the pandemic, and thanks to ARPA funding, the racial makeup of Jones’s class transformed. “For 15 years,” she says, “I didn’t have one Black client. Child care is very expensive, and in Rockville it’s just really hard to find high-quality, affordable care. But when I started to accept pre-K funds, that was the first time that I had a client of color.”

The expanded space she secured helped her qualify for the pre-K expansion funds. On the day I visited, Margie Ryan, the pre-K coach assigned to Jones by the , was there to observe class. “Tiffany is way ahead of the game,” Ryan told me, praising her vocabulary-building games centered on everyday household objects. Jones serves on the board of the Montgomery County and received a Montgomery County Innovative Leadership Excellence Award in October 2023.

Erica Phillips, executive director at the (NAFCC), praises Jones for “taking full advantage of ARPA to upgrade her program.” Thanks to the pre-K expansion and other factors, Phillips explains, Precious Moments is a more sustainable business today, which matters for Jones and her family, for the families she supports and for the local employers and economy that rely on her. Jones is the Maryland State Representative for NAFCC as well as an NAFCC policy fellow.

Jones’s financial situation is far from unique. “I know lots of providers that have used the ARPA funding,” she says, “and that’s what sustained their business.” Obstacles to receiving money included not having a separate bank account for their business or not having sufficient English-language skills to navigate the application. Montgomery County, Maryland has an unusually robust that helped providers with the process.

Beyond Precious Moments

Having learned to advocate for herself, Jones has proven effective at advocating for family care educators in Maryland. According to Phillips, “Peer leaders like Tiffany were incredible in disseminating information during the pandemic. Our child care leaders really stepped up, sharing information and making sure that no family child care program was left behind.”

Last year, care providers successfully lobbied Montgomery County to pilot a program for wellness benefits, including access to mental health counseling. A new goal on the horizon is what Jones describes as “a shared services model, where we’re all in a consortium of sorts to get access to benefits.” The vision includes business coaching, bulk purchasing and child care management software.

As Phillips points out, most family child care providers don’t have the means to save for retirement. Jones opened a self-employed pension at her credit union, but it is on her to make contributions to it. Given her slim profit margins, the account’s growth is slower than she would like.

What does the future hold for Precious Moments? “Any kind of funding would be helpful,” Jones says. “That outdoor classroom would be at the top of my list.” She also mentions curriculum upgrades, wraparound supports for her families and a backstop for her constant cash flow problem.

“I could resolve the cash flow issue by taking all privately paying families who pay before care is given,” Jones notes, “but then I wouldn’t be able to help families that really need care in order to work their jobs, and are looking for high-quality early education.”

Support for this reporting was provided by the Better Life Lab at New America.

The initiative’s director, Jocelyn Rodriguez, adds that child care also improves family economic stability, ensures healthy child development, and increases the ability of parents and caregivers to work and earn more. Early Learning Nation magazine spoke to Rodriguez and explored how the initiative taps into the dynamism and wisdom of trusted community-based organizations to inform systems-wide change.

Mark Swartz: How does investing in early childhood programs reduce poverty?

Jocelyn Rodriguez: Robin Hood operates from the core belief that your starting point in life should not determine where you end in life. The data shows that there is no better investment than ensuring accessible and affordable high-quality child care for all New Yorkers. By catalyzing improvements in child care across the five boroughs, we’re ultimately impacting the $1 billion dollars of public funding.

MS: What previous experience do you bring to this initiative?

JR: I am a first-generation New Yorker and a proud daughter of immigrants. Most of the child care workforce are women and immigrants, which is personal for me. So this community is my community. This initiative is a huge part of why I’m here at Robin Hood and helping to push forward this work. Prior to coming to Robin Hood, I worked at several multi-service community-based organizations serving New Yorkers living in poverty, and I had the privilege of leading one of the city’s local child care resource and referral organizations.

One misconception facing the sector today is that many people think of centers as the only place where child care is offered, and it’s important to remember that the home-based or family child care sector is where more than half of the children and families receiving subsidized care are being looked after. They’re also the programs that are likely to offer extended and nontraditional hours of care, and offer cultural compatibility with the families in their communities. Despite their critical role in the sector, they’re also often the ones that have the lowest wages amongst educators.

MS: What are the core challenges that have emerged so far?

JR: More than 300,000 infants and toddlers in New York City live in poverty. There is one child care slot for every five infants. Over half of families in New York can’t afford child care. And the pandemic has exacerbated compensation challenges. There are families every day that have to choose between going back to work, going back to school, going for training and job training, paying bills and child care. This disproportionately impacts women.

MS: This is an issue that affects the whole city.

JR: Absolutely. If people can’t find or afford a safe, nurturing place to send their children while they work, then they can’t live in this city. And without quality child care, New York City cannot stay vibrant. It cannot function.

MS: How are you tackling these problems?

JR: The city has identified 17 priority community districts in their blueprint for child care. One exciting grant Robin Hood is partnering with city government on is piloting voucher determination and eligibility in three community-based organizations serving northern Manhattan and the Bronx. Families will be able to go to their local trusted organizations to help them from start to finish with child care access and enrollment.

MS: How does the initiative define “quality”?

JR: We are always wrestling to balance quality and access and affordability without treating them as mutually exclusive choices. I think the most basic definition of high-quality child care is care that’s advancing the cognitive, social-emotional and the overall well-being of young children — which assumes physical health and safety.

MS: What do you look for in a child care setting?

JR: We need children to have consistent, secure and healthy relationships with caring adults. We want language-rich environments. We want developmentally appropriate and culturally appropriate language-sustaining practices. We want literacy-rich environments. We want appropriate curriculum, and supportive and innovative professional development for the caregivers on how to do that with fidelity.

Swartz: How is the partnership with New York City taking shape?

Rodriguez: We are taking important steps to drive collective impact on a collective issue. That means making sure that the folks responsible for implementing, driving, regulating and administering this work in New York City are on the same page when it comes to supporting communities and New Yorkers living with low income. This initiative also partners with shelters, academia and direct service providers to catalyze improvements in how our public dollars are spent every year with regards to child care.

MS: How will the initiative impact policy on the state and federal levels?

JR: Robin Hood’s policy team plays a crucial role in field-building and shaping policy developments for the child care sector. The FY25 state budget process presents a significant opportunity to build upon New York State’s previous historic $7 billion child care investment by prioritizing raising wages for child care workers. We encourage lawmakers in Albany to explore solutions that pay these critical workers a living wage. It’s our best shot at stabilizing the sector in the long-term, and creating a functioning system that works for parents and caretakers alike.

Black women experience in maternal care, including . The medical racism that Black women experience contributes to disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality. Just look at the stats: Black women are -related causes than white women according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Shockingly, the CDC also reports that of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.

Numerous studies show that . While their roles are different, both doulas and midwives offer vital support before, during and after birth that can combat the Black maternal health crisis. Midwives are trained medical professionals who provide prenatal care, monitor physical and emotional health, and perform labor and delivery in a variety of settings including hospitals, homes and birthing centers. The midwifery model of care is holistic and client-centered, and . Doulas are advocates that ensure clients’ needs are respected, and they make active, informed decisions about care. Doulas can create birthing plans, offer techniques for pain management during labor, and provide continuous physical and emotional support. Their presence is proven to improve maternal health outcomes and .

Being paired with a birth team that is reflective of background, values and culture is important, and helps to build trust and contribute to more equitable care. For Black women, that connection can be lifesaving. Yet, and according to some estimates .

Niambi Bloom (LSW) is one of only two Black birth doulas in Colorado Springs. She first discovered this maternal care desert while searching for her own doula during her first pregnancy. She found only one Black doula based in Denver, more than an hour away. Ultimately, she chose a local doula and had what she describes as a “textbook home birth” where she was surrounded by a midwife and a doula who she felt genuinely cared about her. Bloom chose to become a birth doula to help positive birthing experiences like her own become the norm. She also wanted to give other Black women what she did not have, care from a Black doula. Bloom now helps to lead training sessions about maternal health disparities to new groups of prospective doulas. It was during one of these sessions that Bloom met a Black woman who was training to become a doula in Colorado Springs. Now, the two work together but still have not found other Black birth doulas in the area. According to Bloom, “It’s just us.”

Building a more diverse maternal care workforce is essential to providing more equitable care, and it’s a necessary component to combating Black maternal health disparities, but there are barriers that prevent both recruitment and retention of Black birth workers. Tyla Leach, a labor and delivery nurse and childbirth educator, believes a major barrier is the sheer amount of money, time and energy it costs to become trained and remain in practice. A found that almost all doulas find their work to be emotionally fulfilling, but few consider it to be financially rewarding. According to Jazmin Williams, a full spectrum doula and the Founder of , “Birth work is not a revenue-based service. It is not a revenue-based profession. We aren’t getting rich off supporting our community
But we know the necessity of having a doula that is reflective of your background, reflective of your culture that knows how to become an advocate with you
 to amplify your voice rather than talk over for you.” She added, “We do provide a lot of sliding scale assistance and I’m pro bono, but we also have families of our own and that’s how we came into practice, so we really have to look at our care pricing that is also sustainable for us.”

The for their work. Most private insurance providers and Medicaid programs do not cover doula care, which often means clients can pay up to thousands of dollars out of pocket for these services. The CDC, estimates that over . Failure to include Medicaid coverage for doula care makes a vital resource to combat maternal mortality largely inaccessible for those who are most at risk. A growing number of states are pushing for Medicaid reimbursement for birth doulas to address the problem. According to , “the goal of Medicaid coverage of doula care [was] threefold, according to advocates: support people who are giving birth, provide culturally congruent care and compensate doulas fairly for their work.”

Necessary Policy Change: How They Did It

In 2022, Washington lawmakers passed to establish birth doulas as a health profession in Washington state, creating a process for state certification and thus a pathway for Medicaid reimbursement. The success of HB 1881 is as a national model for how legislators should directly involve and advocate with birth workers.

• The , a Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous and People of Color-led (QTBIPOC) organizing group bolstered by , was instrumental in the creation of the bill and worked in lockstep with legislators to lobby for its passage. Members of the Coalition shared their perspectives to ensure the bill combats harm, addresses community concerns, and that the certification process does not shut out doulas who are already practicing.
• They were instrumental in creating a certification process that is voluntary, meaning doulas who choose not to become certified are still able to practice and support their communities.
• They also advocated for a competency-based model for certification and training that values ancestral knowledge, and differs from courses offered at large certification organizations that have historically .

Sage Maenad Kissiah-Grove, a member of the Coalition, and a birth and postpartum doula, credits HB 1881 with establishing and opening up the certification process “for people who come from all kinds of backgrounds in birth work, people who have been trained ancestrally, people who have self-trained and people who have not trained through these big organizations.” She added, â€œFor their training to be from people who look like them and who have their same experiences is huge.”

Washington State Senator T’wina Nobles, a Black woman and mother of four, worked alongside the Doulas for All Coalition to rally support for the legislation and to create a clear pathway for its passage in the State Senate. She believes that doulas “really are the leaders” in this work, and that people who are most impacted and most connected to birth work deserve their voices to be heard. Nobles sees herself as an amplifier who focuses on “allowing the experts, the doulas and midwives and folks who do the birthing work, to lead and let me know what they need.”

This year, Nobles plans to introduce legislation that builds on the success of HB 1881 with Senate Bill 6172, which will allow birth doulas up to $4500 in Medicaid reimbursement rate, the highest in the country.

What’s Next?

Federal Way Birth Center celebrated its grand opening in November. For Faisa Farole, it is just the beginning. She envisions a future in which FWBC will serve as a community hub and provide support beyond childbirth. â€œI want the center to be not just a place where we are providing mentorship to aspiring Black midwives, but also a place where the community can come and get lactation education and childbirth education,” said Farole.

She added, “I want it to be something that the community is using, and not a place where the doors are closed.” She also sees the center working in collaboration with nonprofit organizations who support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) communities, and she already has spoken with the about teaching in the space.

Farole is also the founder and executive director of (GPS), a nonprofit that provides free community-based doula services for Black, immigrant and refugee families. She also has trained more than 100 doulas who combined speak more than 17 different languages. She sees her own nonprofit working closely with the center, and offering GPS clients the option to give birth at the center if they choose. Farole is optimistic about the future of her center, as well as other initiatives that will help more Black women “answer the call” and provide vital support for their communities.

Jazmin Williams was fortunate to be on a Black birth team with a Black birthing person, Black midwife, Black doula and a Black pediatrician. “It’s rare to have an entirely Black birth team
It’s an incredible experience and one that I’m thankful for,” said Williams. “It fills my heart to know that is possible, and that we can do that.”

All Black women deserve a birthing experience where they feel respected, their choices are honored, and their lives are protected. There is beauty, joy and strength in birth, and those experiences should be the norm. What is happening in Washington is cause for celebration and hope. We can support Black birth workers and center them in legislative advocacy. We can build a more diverse maternal care workforce and ensure doulas and midwives are paid living wages. We can save the lives of Black women and create safe, healthy birthing experiences that are rooted in empowerment instead of trauma.

The Federal Way Birth Center is the first Black owned freestanding birth center in Washington state. It is the first of its kind, but hopefully it will not be the last.

To infuse the landscape with greater equity, funds innovations in financial systems that support long-term increases of compensation for the early care workforce. A recent round of grants supports systemic change in Colorado, D.C. and Louisiana.

“Focusing on compensation requires innovating on financing systems,” said Ola J. Friday, director of the Collaborative. “You need someone from the fiscal and budget office at the table.” The Collaborative designed the request for proposals to incentivize these partnerships, and many applicants, even those that didn’t receive funding, noted that the process of applying spurred collaborations that needed to happen anyway.

Friday introduced leaders from the three new grantees to Early Learning Nation magazine.

Colorado

An educator quoted in the reflected, “When I think about the vulnerability of young children under six years old . . . how impressionable they are . . . how important a caring relationship with an adult provider is . . . and how much time providers spend with young children, I can’t get over the fact that the compensation is not equitable. It’s not even a living wage. I would love to see greater compensation.”

The Collaborative’s $3.8 million investment will advance this vision through an expansion of the Teacher and Family Child Care Home Salary Increase and Compensation Pilot, among other initiatives. According to Rebecca Vlasin, Early Childhood Workforce division director of the state’s recently formed Department of Early Childhood, early findings from the pilot’s randomized control trial have shown a 92% retention rate for the providers receiving hourly increases of $3-8, compared to a rate of around 82% for those not receiving the boost.

Friday hopes that the Collaborative’s investment helps them demonstrate the effectiveness. “We’re playing a part in supporting their advocacy so they can get the funding they need to sustain the pilot,” she says.

“As we designed the pilot, we wanted to be sure that we were considering any unintended consequences of salary increases for teachers as well as for providers across Colorado communities,” Vlasin Said. “For example, we know that one-third of our workforce qualifies for public benefits due to the compressed wages, and we want to understand how a wage increase might make them ineligible — essentially, pushing them off a benefits cliff without a systemwide commitment toward a sustainable, livable wage.”

The Collaborative previously to help University of Colorado at  Denver facilitate a consortium of institutions of higher education to explore credentialing and access to postsecondary degrees — efforts that relate directly to the continued quest for equitable compensation. The recent grant will build upon this work by helping the various agencies to create the structures needed to facilitate greater inter-agency coordination, capacity-building and action.

According to Vlasin, Colorado’s long and unwavering commitment to supporting children and families results from collaboration between state and local entities across private and public domains. “Families, professionals, advocates and policymakers have worked together to build coordinated systems that support local areas to be responsive to the needs of their communities,” she says. This spirit of collaboration permeates the state’s .

The District of Columbia

Comparable to a state department of education in any other state, functions as D.C.’s education agency as well as its lead agency for the federal . Since 2021, the has increased compensation for early childhood educators, bringing it within range of what K-12 teachers earn.

Initially, OSSE partnered with an intermediary to issue payments directly to educators, but according to Sara Mead, OSSE’s deputy superintendent for Early Learning, the long-term vision was always that providers would see an increase in the paychecks they receive from their employers, and this shift is currently under way. “This is the first time any jurisdiction has tried to do what we’re doing at this scale,” she said.

A new mom herself, Mead said, “Parents just cannot afford to pay what it costs to really compensate our early childhood educators at the level they deserve. So, the only way to untangle that situation and really address the pay they deserve is by having a revenue source that comes from someplace other than the traditional early learning revenue sources. In our case, we are blessed with a rich ecosystem with so many supportive elected officials. The resulting tax measure enables us to do some of the most exciting work in the country.”

, a partnership with the District’s health benefits exchange, is making health care coverage affordable for child care employees. About a thousand individuals have enrolled so far, 40% of whom were previously uninsured. And deductibles are lower this year, thanks to an upgrade from the silver plan to the gold plan.

The Collaborative’s $2.4 million grant will also support an initiative called the D.C. Business Collaboratory, an OSSE collaboration with:

• Hurley & Associates

The Collaboratory will support child care programs with business administration, operational and management issues.

“We are excited to support D.C.’s success,” Friday said. “And to help OSSE bolster its data and information technology systems to more effectively implement the Pay Equity Fund and health care benefits.”

 “One of the challenges when you are standing up programs really quickly is that you are doing a lot of innovation really fast and don’t have as much time to reflect on what you’re learning and really document it,” Mead said. “That’s why this investment is so important.”

Louisiana

For Friday, one of the things that stood out about Louisiana’s plans for increasing provider compensation was the local-to-state implementation approach. “Orleans Parish has an existing compensation pilot,” she says, “We’re looking to support Louisiana to scale up that model to additional parishes around the state.”

Another distinguishing feature of this investment is that the grantee, the , is a nonprofit and not a governmental agency. Executive director Libbie Sonnier recalls, “We took this opportunity to the state department of education and asked if we could apply for the grant, since it aligned with our work, which is about systems improvement. And they were like, ‘Absolutely,’ since we are all working together so closely anyway.”

Candace Weber, partnerships director at the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children, notes that the timing of the project was perfect for their organization because it followed on the heels of their cross-sectional “Tiger Team” project (a term popularized by NASA) that resulted in their report. The team, which comprised experts from academia as well as educators with lived experience, found, “Competitive pay can boost employee retention and recruitment, which will encourage long-term quality improvements and directly benefit the young children in their care.”

“Louisiana isn’t the only state that’s grappling with compensation,” Weber said. “We know the economic benefits associated with child care and understand what’s at risk if we don’t address workforce compensation.  We get contacted by other states to learn what we’re doing, especially around our , which tracks the cost of child care breakdowns.”  ( found that parental absences cost Louisiana businesses $762 million annually from missed work, turnover and other related costs.)

Louisiana just inaugurated Jeff Landry as governor, and Sonnier anticipates continued growth in state investments in early childhood, building upon $87 million of recurring state funding over the last four years. “We have buy-in from the business community and the legislature,” she says.

The system building funded by the Collaborative will help early childhood educators by reflecting the true value of their professional work. Friday adds that the Collaborative is actively seeking aligned funding to support additional states.

You have to go there.

goes there.

Founded in New York City by Laurie Brotman, Bezos family professor of early childhood development, in NYU Grossman’s School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, ParentCorps offers professional development for educators, a social-emotional learning curriculum for pre-K students and a parenting program. Prioritizing racial equity, the team honors families’ culture and their lived experience and expertise, and supports teachers in establishing authentic relationships.

“You can’t just tell people to change,” explained Kai-ama Hamer, who has been with the organization since 2018, serving as director since last May. “You have to know their values, what they’re doing, why they do this work, what moves them? And then once you unearth that, then they feel open.”

It starts the moment a parent or educator comes in the door.

“We want them to understand that even if our values are different,” Hamer said. “Even if we don’t speak the same language, ‘I see you and I care for you.’ And that is the basis for everything else.”

Beyond the Five Boroughs

Randomized control trials of the ParentCorps model have demonstrated improvements in home and school environments, as well as the health and development of children and parents.

In light of the evidence, it’s no wonder that the model is expanding. Detroit was the first pilot beyond New York City. Since 2015, when then-CEO Ann Kalass met Brotman as fellows, ParentCorps and Starfish have teamed up to build relationships with the early childhood workforce, social workers, facilitators and teachers, and to embed ParentCorps programming for children and families in Starfish sites. “We want Starfish to own the model in ways that work in their setting,” Hamer said.

In its 19 early care and education centers, Starfish provides integrated, high-quality care and support services that build on the strengths and assets of families in and around Detroit. Lindsay LaBoda, a social worker and a clinical therapist with Starfish, points to widespread trauma among the families they serve. “Trauma-informed care,” she said, “means fully supporting our children by identifying the signs of stress and responding with respect, care, and kindness. We don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with this child?’ but ‘What’s strong about this child?’”

Kecia Rorie, operations director at Starfish, acknowledges that when people think of Detroit, they picture “blight, unemployment and an educational system that has failed a lot of children.” At the same time, she points to resiliency and a strong sense of community. “When parents walk through our doors,” she says, “you can tell right away, they’re very protective of their children, and we are honored that they allow us to come in their homes to take care of their most priceless, precious possessions, to just help guide them along the way.”

Ironically, for a city built on the automobile industry, Family Engagement Specialist Mary Woods-Miles notes that viable transportation is one of the biggest challenges for many Detroit families. Starfish provides $500 or more in Family Stability Funds for car repairs, insurance, down payments and other expenses, which helps parents get to and from work, and to drop off and pick up their children.

A New Twist on an Old Adage

ParentCorps reboots the adage, “build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door” by building better training, using old-fashioned mousetraps. The trainers have asked me not to reveal the specifics of how the devices are used, but I can say that the activity also involves balloons. This is a distinctly low-tech approach.

Rorie recalls her first exposure to ParentCorps: “A colleague and I flew out to New York City just to observe. But by the time we got to lunchtime on day one, we looked at each other and said, ‘This is amazing.’ And by day two, we were like, ‘We have to take this back.’” At the time, Rorie said, “We were having trouble engaging with families. Our network of six Head Start grantees had just come together, but it was still new, and people weren’t used to it.”

One of the people she took it back to was Woods-Miles.

“Tłó±đ mousetrap game did it for me, too,” Woods-Miles said. “I knew that ParentCorps would be effective, but I didn’t anticipate it being as effective as it is.”

The experience made Woods-Miles reflect on her time as a single parent of a young child and all the multitasking involved. About 30 years ago, she tells me, the Head Start class misplaced her son. “I was going to community college, and it was finals time. When I went to get him, he wasn’t there. So I literally kicked in every locked door, broke some doors and went in the men’s bathroom until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And I went outside, and there was my slippery kid saying, ‘Ma, what took you so long?’ He had gotten out with another family.”

Three Little Words

The ParentCorps approach boils down to three words: safe, nurturing and predictable. Woods-Miles acknowledges that not all the parents at Starfish go for it right away. One mom told her it wasn’t going to work for her children, but Woods-Miles persuaded her to try it. The mom came back the next week and admitted that letting the kids know what was going to happen in the evening helped her to be more organized, and as a result she had a few hours to unwind.

LaBoda appreciates the fact that ParentCorps doesn’t tell parents how to parent. “You’re the expert on your child,” she said. “Your know your child better than anyone else.” The point of the programming for pre-K caregivers is to get them to realize they already have everything they need to be a parent.

Recently, a grandmother in LaBoda’s parenting group announced, “Y’all can’t tell me nothing. Ain’t nothing new under the sun and y’all can’t tell me a thing.” Just a few hours later, she reported, “I actually learned a lot. I have to admit that I was wrong.”

For Hamer, the parents, grandparents, Head Start professionals and other educators contribute immense value to our communities that often goes unrecognized. “Once you understand the value of early education,” she said. “You see the value of those people who stay, who choose to stay because they really care.”

, a new tool from the at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, makes the search easier and more productive. For example:

• Contemplating an apprenticeship program? The Navigator will show you the first such program in the United States—West Virginia’s —as well as a resource on apprenticeships from the . A little more digging will take you to Philadelphia for a created by the (a program of the ) and a created by of the National Union of Hospital & Health Care Employees and 11 Philadelphia hospitals.
• Exploring revenue streams for your city? The Navigator highlights social impact bonds in Chicago; soda taxes in Philadelphia () and Seattle; and property taxes in San Francisco and Seattle.
• Are you a policymaker or advocate in Virginia? (Or maybe you live in a state with political or demographic qualities comparable to Virginia.) The Navigator offers resources and information on the scholarships for early childhood educators, the state’s Longitudinal Data System and more.

Early Learning Nation magazine interviewed the Zaentz Institute Co-Director Nonie K. Lesaux and Research and Policy Analyst Jackie Ramos-Draper to discover how the tool came about and what the plans are for improving it.

When you go to the Navigator, your search is organized into what Ramos-Draper calls the five pillars that support an equitable, high-quality early education and care system: Infrastructure and Systems, Dedicated Funding Streams, Cost Estimation for Subsidies, Expansion of Child Care and Early Childhood Education Services, and Workforce. Lesaux notes that they are discussing adding a sixth pillar for infant and toddler programs, but the plan is to keep the number limited to preserve simplicity. Search results often lead users to , a longitudinal study following 4,000 Massachusetts children.

“We’re researchers at our core,” Lesaux said. “We’re also deeply committed to trying to be really helpful to the field. Our mission is to broker knowledge.” She says the Navigator arose in response to the need for resources on how states and cities were making policy. “Professionals from around the country were consistently asking, ‘What are other places doing?’ Tools like this exist for K-12 education and in public health, but not in early childhood.”

Lesaux keeps these users in mind at every step of the design process. “Tłó±đy have no time and not a lot of bandwidth to ideate. The more we can help them get to the information they need, the better they will ideate.”

Ramos-Draper says she imagines staff at a city or state government office or an advocacy organization “digging through press releases, PDFs of community presentations from 10 years ago, budgets or bills and executive orders. If their goal is replication and customization, it would be really difficult to find all the information they need. That frustration might deter them from bringing about meaningful policy change. With the Navigator, they have an organized place for discovering the processes by which these strategies were implemented or passed.”

Lesaux and Draper describe the present moment as one of both opportunity and risk. On one hand, the American public cares more than ever before about disparities in access to quality care. On the other, as American Rescue Plan funding fades, cities and states need to identify revenue streams to sustain systems.

Designed for constant improvement, the Navigator initially went out to a testing group of 19 people representing a cross section in the field. “Tłó±đy told us they’ve never had anything like this before,” says Lesaux. “Tłó±đy said they would be using it all the time, and, of course, they asked for even more features — such as information from more cities.”

Minnesota Rep. Dave Pinto reported, “I’ve been considering how our state might dedicate a funding source for early care and education. I’ve known that other states, and cities,  have done this, but researching exactly what they’ve done would be a major project. Having this information in one place is an enormous help. In fact, within five minutes of being on the site, I had come across a promising approach that I had not heard of before.”

Since the tool’s initial launch, the team has added several new features, including additional search filtration options, downloadable tables and data visualizations, and more options for sharing content.

While the Navigator continues to expand and improve, plans are also developing to demonstrate its usefulness at conferences and roundtables around the country, where Lesaux, Ramos-Draper and others will present patterns and trends that the tool reveals. Peer-support tools will facilitate city-to-city and state-to-state collaboration. An in-person Navigator Institute kicked off in December, with teams from Georgia, Vermont, California and other states coming to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to explore a policy challenge alongside the Zaentz Initiative experts.

Arguably no field is better positioned to help identify exactly what’s wrong and how to chart a better path forward than economics. As Jessica Brown, an economist at the University of South Carolina, explained, “We have a useful lens to look at the market, and we have the lexicon to talk about market failures and identify possible ways to fix them.”

Brown is one of a growing number of economists who are doing exactly that for early education. While previously it was somewhat unusual when a child care study surfaced at an economics conference, today it has become routine. That’s a development that many in the field expect to endure; now that the connection between child care and the overall economy is widely recognized, there’s no walking it back.

To recognize and celebrate the contributions economists are making to the child care field, Early Learning Nation magazine asked 11 economic researchers to identify which studies of the last three years are especially surprising or helpful in deepening our understanding of the early education field and the child care market at this moment in time. The following three studies stood out.

1. Study:
Authors: Guthrie Gray-Lobe, the University of Chicago; Parag Pathak, MIT and the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research; and Christopher Walters, the University of California at Berkeley and the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research
Key takeaway: Public preschool can have long-lasting positive effects for children.

The Perry Preschool Project and the Abecedarian Project are famous throughout the early education field for demonstrating how carefully designed early education programs can have long-lasting positive impacts on children, and in some cases even their children. But what about a public preschool program serving tens of thousands of children? Can enduring positive effects of early education emerge outside of relatively small pilot projects? This study published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics answers that question with a resounding “yes.”

Using admissions lotteries to compare similar children who were randomly awarded preschool seats with those who were not, researchers were able to estimate the effects of Boston’s large-scale, well-funded public preschool program. The study found that preschool enrollment boosts high school graduation and college attendance, and that it also decreases high school disciplinary measures, including juvenile incarceration. Effects on college enrollment and disciplinary outcomes were larger for boys than for girls, the study found.

“Prior to this research, we didn’t have this type of lottery-based evidence in a relatively recent period, looking at long-term educational attainment outcomes,” Chloe Gibbs, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame wrote in an email. Some researchers point out that it’s important to note that Boston did not skimp on funding its program; this research suggests that investment paid off.

2. Study:
Authors: Daphna Bassok, Justin Doromal, Molly Michie and Vivian Wong of EdPolicyWorks at the University of Virginia
Key takeaway: Even small boosts in child care teacher pay can make a big difference.

When Fairfax County in Virginia piloted a teacher recognition program, they lacked ample funding to give retention bonuses to all teachers in the county. So they partnered with a team of researchers at the University of Virginia to randomize which child care centers could participate in the program and then study the outcome.

Researchers discovered that even modest retention bonuses had a big impact on teacher retention. Teachers at child care centers who were offered up to $1,500 if they remained teaching at their sites over an 8-month period were half as likely to leave their jobs as were teachers who were not offered the incentives. At child care centers that offered the bonus, 15 percent of teachers left compared to 30 percent at centers that did not receive bonuses.

“Given what we know about the importance of stable bonds with caregivers for child development, this is a very important finding – a relatively small increase in pay can increase retention of child care teachers substantially,” said Brown of the University of South Carolina.

She added that the finding is particularly relevant to the discussion of spending under the American Rescue Plan that allowed many child care providers to increase teacher wages. Now that the funding has ended, some programs face tough choices about whether to increase tuition rates for parents or reduce wages for child care staff. If programs want to retain teachers, this study suggests they should in fact be increasing pay, not reducing it, said Brown.

3. Study:
Authors: Jessica Brown, University of South Carolina and Chris Herbst, Arizona State University and IZA
Key takeaways: Increasing the minimum wage improves child care quality. But also, as child care costs go up, fewer lower-income families receive care, and parents express less satisfaction with the care they receive.

Some studies have one clear takeaway. This one shows that raising a state’s minimum wage has a myriad of effects on the child care sector, many of which are beneficial to families and children, but not all.

Child care teachers are among the lowest paid workers in the economy and the authors of this study found, not surprisingly, that state minimum wage increases led to increases in teacher pay. Such increases did not cause child care providers to lay off teachers in an attempt to balance their budgets. Rather, to offset the increase in labor costs, child care businesses took other tactics, including enrolling more children, raising tuition and serving fewer low-income children receiving child care subsidies, possibly because the subsidy rates are lower than tuition paid by privately-paying parents and also because there are administrative costs involved in processing subsidies.

With teachers making more money due to the increased minimum wage, staff turnover declined and teachers were more likely to invest in their own education and skills, engage in educational activities with children and to generally have higher-quality interactions with kids, the study found. This led to overall quality improvements in the programs. Despite this, parents became less satisfied with their child care providers, and the researchers found evidence in Yelp reviews that the higher cost of tuition was to blame.

What to make of all of this? Aaron Sojourner, senior researcher at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, pointed to one clear conclusion: “This is important evidence in support of [early childhood education] worker wages as a lever for quality.”

Back Where We Started

After earning her master’s degree in psychology and working with teens for 15 years, Shanette Linton of the Bronx decided to move into child care. “I saw so many things as those 18- and 19-year-olds were hitting different barriers,” she says. “I realized there was something lacking in their educational foundation and experiences. Change needs to happen earlier in development. That’s when they start liking books, liking to learn.”

Remembering the difficulty she had had finding care for her own son, Linton opened Little Leaders Group Family Daycare in her apartment five years ago. Five days a week, from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., she and an assistant care for six children, including two infants and two 3-year-olds with developmental delays, one diagnosed and one suspected. In so-called off hours, she’s preparing lesson plans, washing sheets and hunting for bargains on food and supplies.

Combining fees from parents and vouchers from the State of New York, Linton makes around $6,000 per month, but after paying her assistant’s wages ($15 per hour, up from $12 pre-COVID) and rent, as well as taxes and liability insurance, there’s often nothing left for her. “At this point,” she told me. “I’m pretty much breaking even, but only because I’m not paying myself the amount I should be.”

The only bright spot in this bleak financial picture was COVID-era stabilization grants — federal money — $65,000 between 2021 and 2022. “It was a great Band-Aid,” Linton says, “but now we’re back where we started. Struggling.”

Acumen and Confidence

Home-based child care is the most common type of care for U.S. infants and toddlers, offering a caring environment that parents trust and that is often more flexible than other forms. Before, during and since the start of the pandemic, however, the economics often don’t add up.

In the , Betsy Biemann and Keith Bisson describe the efforts of the , which serves Maine residents with “a passion for early childhood education who would like to start a child care business but lack the acumen and confidence to get started.” Helping these entrepreneurs to meet market demand, they contend, not only addresses shortages in care options; it revitalizes communities.

is another model. Launched in New Haven, Connecticut in the early 2000s, it offers training and technical assistance and now operates in 23 states and Washington, D.C. This is Linton’s support network.

South Bronx office coordinator Fendi Munoz-O’Shea met Linton in early 2018. “I was the first one to talk to Shanette,” she recalls. “She came with such enthusiasm, but what really stands out is her tenacity. When she says she’s going to do something, she does it.”

When North Bronx site director Erica “EB” Buchanan encountered the newly licensed Linton, she immediately realized that this was a person who “would do what it takes to improve her practice as an educator. She really is a lifelong learner.”

Learning and development specialist Rosemary Goyzueta started working with Linton as she went through All Our Kin’s business series and coaching program. “She worked so hard,” Goyzueta recalls, “developing the communication tools with the families, her contracts, the policy handbook. I would visit her during lunchtime, and even though it was her break, she was always there working. Since then, we have been in continuous communication because she’s always reaching out. She really has a passion for constant improvement for her business.”

Sandra Massey has been providing another type of coaching to Linton for two years — educational coaching — and on top of the entrepreneurial growth she notices, she praises her powers of observation. “This is essential for making sure that the children’s developmental needs are met,” Massey says. “We can’t diagnose a developmental delay, but we can make notes and recommendations, asking the pediatrician to schedule an evaluation.” Making these observations early makes a big difference for children with delays.

(Still) in Search of Stabilization

A master’s degree. Tenacious. Observant. A lifelong learner with a passion for constant improvement and a robust support network. And of course, she loves the children. Isn’t this someone we want to keep on the job? Doesn’t her financial struggle suggest that there’s something wrong with the system?

“We all know that we need permanent investment in child care,” says Buchanan. “When the [federal] stabilization money runs out, is it really, truly stabilized? Our providers are pulling from their own pockets to make sure their assistants are paid. It can’t be ‘one and done.’ It needs to be consistent.”

Linton notes that her financial challenges are all too common in the Bronx and beyond. “If there’s no federal funding or any type of money being put into child care,” she says, “there’s not going to be any child care left.”

She continues: “You have to love what you do, but then, at some point, you have to think about, ‘Does this make sense?’”

When it comes to taking a paid leave to care for oneself or a family member, our country and our workplaces are missing the proverbial boat. Nationally, the United States is one of the only developed countries to not mandate paid time off for medical needs or having a child. People who do take paid time off either do so through that have a paid family leave program, or they use what their employer has to offer.

And many employers don’t realize what an opportunity this is for them. There are so few major “inflection points” in our careers: moments when an employee can decide to double down on a job they love or start walking out the door, looking for other options.  None are quite as significant as when an employee takes leave from their job to have a baby.

“It is a true love ’em or leave ’em moment,” said Sarah Olin, co-founder and CEO of LUMO, a company dedicated to supporting working professionals’ transition to working parenthood. “Employees either have a manager who is empathetic and supports their leave journey or they have a manager who relates to parental leave as a burden. So much is riding on how managers show up and respond to that moment.”

So, what differentiates the two experiences between wanting to quit a job or stay forever after taking caregiving leave? Some of this comes down to what the company offers, or the culture, or the transparency and visibility of the policy, along with an on-ramp to bring employees back at a speed that matches their readiness. Other aspects might include how accessible child care is for an employee — if they are in a position to access affordable, quality child care that works with their schedule—or if they are part of the half of the country considered “” where few quality options exist.

Creating a meaningful caregiving leave at work was the focus at the MH WorkLife “Care At Work Summit NYC,” when 200 people met in October in Industry City in Brooklyn for that conversation. It was a shifting of narratives, and conventional wisdom about caregiving and work was turned on its head. For example, rather than shun workers who are anything less than the “ideal worker” (young, overworked and without any responsibilities at home), consider that people with caregiving responsibilities at home make for better employees. Taking time off work makes for a more productive team, and benefits around leave and flexibility can be worth more to employees than compensation.

“Eighty percent of my team are women and 60% of my team are mothers,” said Jeanelle Teves, the general manager for Bugaboo in North America. Teves has prioritized her team’s caregiving responsibilities, including extended parental leave benefits, flexible return-to-work plans and wellness Fridays. The result is that she has one of the happiest teams in the company with the lowest turnover on their internal workplace surveys.

Teves, a mother of two young children herself, knows that before her fully remote team logs on for their first call of the day, they’ve been up for hours, prepping lunches and snacks and shuttling kids out the door. “Tłó±đy come in ready to work,” she explained. “And they value having that flexibility and support, and it’s an equal or higher priority than compensation.”

Progress at the state level has helped fuel changing expectations around paid leave, but so do generational shifts. More men and women expect leave to be part of a good company’s standard package. Cocoon, a company that provides employee leave software, shared that the companies who used their service and offered paid parental leave , though Lauren Dai, the co-founder and COO, acknowledged they were a niche slice of the economy.

Dai also noticed the rise in “compassionate leave” as a type of paid leave an employee can take without specifying their specific need. This has been of particular concern since the Supreme Court Dobbs decision further limited a woman’s reproductive rights and forces many women to travel for basic health care needs. “A lot of these big moments that people take leave for are happening in a private space, and the employer doesn’t need to know about it,” Dai said.

MHWorkLife, too, has undergone a shift in the way they communicate and present caregiving leave. Formerly called Mother Honestly, the founder Blessing Adesiyan, explained that the decision to change the name was to be less specific to mothers and have a wider audience appeal.

“Tłó±đ minute you mention something that is gender-based, business leaders immediately tune you out,” she said. “It is hard to get to the business case if people cannot get past something that they consider to be a lobby for a minority group of folks, even though companies too often underestimate the economic power of women.”

While more paid leave plans are taking into account how and why men need to be included, it’s often the mothers who have built many of these programs and remain the driving force behind it. “We are a company built by mothers, but we are not presenting ourselves as another mom solution,” she said.

But employer-based solutions still fall short of covering the wide share of the working population that does not qualify for paid caregiving leave, either through their work or through their state.

“Use your power as a business leader to advocate for universal policies,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director, CEO and co-founder of MomsRising who spoke at the Summit.

“Of course, we want policies in your workplace to be spectacular. But we can’t do it one business at a time. Businesses should be advocating for stabilizing the child care industry and creating a federal paid family leave plan.”

She urged audience members to call their members of Congress and speak in favor of these policies, and to be persistent in their efforts. “You have no idea how powerful your voices are and they are very needed.”

Those of us who write about work, family, and care have long referenced Claudia Goldin’s work and texts in our reporting. Goldin, 77, built her career on understanding and addressing the systemic obstacles women face at work — and only by systematically understanding what holds back women, can we move forward. (Hint: it’s not just gender bias, though Goldin admits our problems might be easier to solve if they were as simple as human perception.)

Her research on women and our evolving relationship with work has proven that policies and workplace structures, not just new ideas, have helped women to succeed and closed the education gap.

Perhaps most importantly, Goldin’s research shows, , comes at a cost: By eschewing the “greedy jobs,” which demand more hours and less control over one’s schedule, women are stepping away from the positions that pay far more.

And the primary reason driving women away from such on-call, drop-everything-at-a-moment’s-notice work? The caregiving responsibilities they’re shouldering at home.

The pivotal role of caregiving in our economy in recent years, spotlighted by a pandemic that showed what many people have been saying all along: we need child care for our economy to function—particularly if we consider the obstacles to women’s participation.

This focus on women and work has the potential to grow further now that Goldin, a professor of Economics at Harvard University, has a new accolade to her name: the first solo woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Why Access to Contraception Meant Access to Careers and Education

Birth control existed long before women could easily access it. When the FDA approved the birth control pill in 1960, it was for married women only. Goldin talks about as a college student at Cornell University, where women would put fake rings on their fingers and convince medical providers that they were married in order to get a birth control prescription.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s, when state laws changed, that younger, unmarried women had the same access to contraceptives. No longer did women need a fake ring or marital alias to have the same reproductive rights as their married counterparts.

A major shift was taking place. By giving a woman wide , she could have more autonomy in her life choices. She could stay in school longer and pursue a graduate degree, marry later after her education was completed or her career already started, and she could plan her family accordingly, choosing when to have kids and how many.

Goldin’s research, which she conducted along with her husband, Harvard economist , found that by 1970, there were substantial changes in women’s long-term professional education attainment and the age in which they married, thanks to contraception.

But even with higher education, prominent careers and heady ambition, the gender wage gap persisted, and Goldin wanted to know why. three primary causes to the earning chasm: the motherhood penalty, the price of being female and the fatherhood premium. (Taken together, this is called the “parental gender gap.”)

As children grew up—or, more bluntly, as child care needs decreased—and women were able to log more hours at work, the motherhood penalty reduced (though more so for those with less education while the gap stayed wider for people who could stomach the churn of the “greedy jobs”).

Safe, Reliable and Legal Birth Control Changed Lives. Can Child Care be Next?

Goldin’s findings show the stark barriers to women’s work success and how caregiving plays an outsized role. And this is why the next watershed moment for women and work could be the wide availability, in some states, of high-quality child care.

Two states, and , are making historic investments to provide near-universal care from birth to age 5 for the families in their states. The structure of these child care supports differ, but they share a common theme: more families will have more access to quality child care, and they will pay less out of pocket for it. While these programs may take several years to get off the ground, data will start to emerge much sooner.

We are likely to find that access to child care — similar to access to contraceptives — will have an outsize positive impact on women’s access to work opportunities and aid in closing the gender wage gap. Data already exists to support this. The women leave or change jobs is due to inaccessible and unaffordable child care, and who remain unemployed left the workforce due to child care issues.

The United States provides no federal child care infrastructure, including no paid family leave to take care of a new baby, and this disproportionately affects women. The gender quit gap—which looks at the rates of men and women quitting work—is the widest in the states with the most child care disruptions during the pandemic. States with some of the lowest rates of child care disruptions between men and women.

Studies have found that reliable can generate an additional $79,000 in lifetime earnings for mothers, and even more for families with high-earning professional jobs. conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services found that if child care spending was increased by just ten percent, over half a million women with young children would be newly employed. that access to universal child care increased the number of women who were able to work, which increased Canada’s GDP.

Curating state-specific data on such programs makes a difference and allows other states to adopt similar initiatives. More than 20 years ago, California created the first paid family leave program, for other states to find the political wills to create their own. Today, have paid family leave in place.

Our country now faces a pivotal moment with child care. Evidence exists that high quality child care benefits children and families alike, and that improving a woman’s earning potential as well. We finally have trailblazing states who are just beginning to build out the necessary child care infrastructure, and the same lessons that Goldin applied about birth control and greedy jobs can be extrapolated onto our country’s decision about when and how to invest in care.

The failure of Build Back Better’s proposed investments was a significant blow, but it also showed us what could be possible. Perhaps there is a future Nobel Prize winner who can use such longitudinal data and econometrics to make this case. And maybe then will there be enough evidence to persuade the decision-makers in our country that federal investment in child care is needed, across the board.

When the fellowship was announced, Marcelo Juica, director of programs of the Early Ed Leadership Institute and co-director of the Early Childhood Fellowship, said it would “create a powerful pipeline of trained educators to grow the early childhood education workforce in the city.”

“Tłó±đ fellowship tackles many of the obstacles faced by early educators seeking their bachelor’s degree,” said Anne Douglass, founder and executive director of the Early Ed Leadership Institute and a professor of early education at UMass Boston.

The initiative fits squarely into Boston’s overall early education strategy. “Tłó±đ greatest investment we can make in our future is to support and center our young people,” said Mayor Michelle Wu .

Debra Johnston-Malden, director of the Early Childhood Fellowship program, added that it would “increase the professionalization of the early education workforce in the city of Boston and have a positive, multigenerational impact on the lives of children and their families.”

Early Learning Nation magazine spoke to two fellows who reflect UMass Boston’s commitment to welcoming educators from populations that have historically faced barriers to higher education.

‘Anything in My Power’

Amal Salah, 21, didn’t initially set out to become an early childhood educator. She was studying Health and Society at UMass Dartmouth when she came to a realization: the last time she felt fulfilled had been caring for children at Boston Children’s Hospital. Transferring to UMass Boston enabled her to follow a pathway that excited her.

“As a first-generation student who really didn’t know much about college, I had to find my own pathway,” she says. “I’m the first out of all of my cousins, so I’m the setting example for everyone.”

Salah was born in Somalia. Her parents fled civil war and moved to Italy before relocating to Boston. Her father drives for Uber and her mother stays at home. “I don’t want to be a financial burden on them,” she says. The UMass fellowship relieves that burden, though she still had to convince her parents that early education was a viable career option. “Growing up in an immigrant family,” she says, “You’re basically given three choices: lawyer, engineer or doctor. There’s a stigma around teaching, but as an early educator, I can advocate for those kids that want to pursue different careers.”

Salah, who is Black and Muslim, is determined to break other stigmas, too. “I’m excited about parents and students seeing someone like me in a classroom, which isn’t a common occurrence.” She has also struggled with ADHD — diagnosed only recently — and has learned that it’s okay to ask for help with assignments.

“I tell my brothers, ‘Please ask for help. Don’t be scared to reach out. Look at me, I’ve been through everything, so I definitely know the resources and the people to contact.’”

Salah plans on getting her master’s degree next, perhaps in social work. Whatever course she follows, she promises “to be an advocate to those kids who are not ready to speak up yet and to show them that I will do anything in my power to help.”

Persevering Against the Odds

Danielle Grant grew up in a beautiful area in St. Ann Parish, Jamaica. Her passion to become an educator showed at a young age when she noticed children in her neighborhood not attending school because of their socioeconomic background. “I made a makeshift blackboard and dug white stone to make chalk,” she recalls, “and I would dress up in my mother’s heels and congregate all the children on a Sunday afternoon to teach them their ABC’s and 123’s.”

In Grant’s family, education was a priority. Her mother earned a high school diploma, and her father attended Bunker Hill Community College when he immigrated to America.  Like her father, she also attended Bunker Hill and obtained an associate’s degree in Early Childhood Education. As she recalls, “I just did not have the financial support and other resources, which delayed and derailed my dream of getting a higher education to further pursue my goal of becoming a teacher.”

For the past six years, Grant has worked at the Joseph Lee Elementary School. Previously, she taught after-school programs and was employed at Perkins Schools for the Blind, where she worked alongside students who were blind, DeafBlind (refers to individuals with both hearing and vision loss), autistic and with other disabilities. After a number of personal setbacks, including a major health scare during the birth of her fourth child, the UMass Boston fellowship is helping her to realize her long-term ambition of getting a bachelor’s degree.

“I had to push ahead,” she declares. “Tłó±đ message I was teaching others was the same thing I had to embody in my own personal life, which is persevering against the odds. I kept telling myself: ‘You can do hard things, Danielle. You are capable of achieving your goals. You can defy the odds.’ I repeatedly admonished myself until it sank in and I began to believe it.”

With the emotional support of her husband (Conroy), mother (Rosalyn) and four children (Hannah, Micah, Abigail-Rose and Elizabeth), Grant just passed her first Massachusetts Teachers Educational Licensure exam. In addition to the financial support she is receiving from the fellowship, she is immensely appreciative of the way the UMass Fellowship mentors encouraged her, and of the camaraderie with the other fellows.

At a recent fellowship meeting, she stood up and expressed gratitude to those who made the fellowship possible: “Thank you for tilling the soil and planting the seed of hope. I am going to be a fruit of that seed. I will give back to every child that I encounter.”

Grant’s plans on paying it forward. Recently she wrote a children’s book titled that empowers children, through affirmation, to overcome challenges in order to realize their dreams. Since its publication she has generously distributed many copies to young children — for free.

A notable exception comes from New York City, where a supportive policy context has made a notable difference in mothers’ ability to participate in the labor force — and findings from the latest Early Childhood Poverty Tracker document that reality.

In 2017, New York City introduced its free 3-K for All program to a few districts, prioritizing districts with the highest need for pre-kindergarten. The city gradually unrolled the full-time 3-K program to other districts until it was available to all by 2021. Although it wasn’t part of the program’s design, the rollout created an excellent opportunity to measure the difference this policy move made for mothers’ workforce participation.

The , launched in 2012 as a collaboration between the foundation and , provides a dynamic snapshot of poverty in New York City. Building off that work, the (ECPT) launched in 2017 to study 1,500 families with children from birth to 3, using repeated surveys to look at the challenges and resources for these same families during their children’s critical early years.

“New York is a laboratory of policy change, whether it’s paid sick leave, paid family leave, universal pre-K or universal 3-K,” says Dr. Jane Waldfogel, co-director of Columbia University’s Population Research Center and a co-author of the latest Poverty Tracker report on the city’s 3-K for All program. “Because we’re following the same families over time and our sample is representative of the population of New York City, it’s ideally suited for measuring the impact of policies as they roll out. In the Early Childhood Poverty Tracker, we had a sample of families with young children as universal pre-K and then 3-K were rolling out.”

Eunho Cha, a Columbia School of Social Work doctoral student working with the Robin Hood/Columbia team on the ECPT, wondered aloud if the 3-K program would have an impact on mothers’ labor force participation. That question and subsequent analysis grew into the recently released September 2023 report, “Spotlight on 3-K for All: New York City’s 3-K for All Supports Mothers’ Labor Force Participation.”

Among the report’s key findings:

• Once children became age-eligible for the program, mothers living in districts with higher 3-K availability were more likely to be in the workforce than those who lived in districts with lower availability.
• Mothers with greater 3-K availability had higher rates of full-time employment.
• Even after the 3-K years, mothers who had more access to 3-K continued with higher rates of labor force participation and full-time employment.

The report used information from 12 ECPT surveys collected between late 2017 and early 2021, focusing on 438 families whose focal child was age-eligible for 3-K in the 2019–2020 academic year. Of these families, 43 percent lived in one of the 12 school districts where 3-K was rolled out and 57 percent lived in districts where it was not yet available.

The surveys looked at mothers’ labor force participation — whether they were working full time, part time, freelance or self-employed, or looking for work — and tracked mothers who were earning income from their employment. One measure included only mothers who were working full time, an indicator of stable employment that was of particular interest because it is often associated with higher wages and benefits.

When children in the 3-K districts became age-eligible for the program, their mothers’ labor force participation increased by seven percentage points compared with only two percentage points among those in non-3-K districts with children of the same age. Mothers’ participation in the workforce dropped when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, but throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021, participation remained higher among mothers in 3-K districts.

“It’s great to see that it was not just a temporary effect, but that the effect persists past the 3-K years,” says Waldfogel. “It could be because mothers having been employed in the labor market puts them in a better position to be employed subsequently. Also, the availability of 3-K sets up family routines and arrangements around mothers’ employment.

“We were really happy to see that it was a lasting effect.”

Researchers also found that families in the 3-K districts spent an average of $450 less per child per month on child care.

“Tłó±đ ability to spend those dollars on food, rent, books or household expenses, especially as inflation is putting such pressure on families, really underscores the benefits of these programs,” says Sarah Oltmans, Robin Hood’s chief of grant strategy, who works with the Columbia team on the ECPT.

Tracking Poverty, Promoting Change

Since its inception, the Poverty Tracker has deeply scrutinized what it means to be poor in New York City, providing many more layers than the official poverty measures of the U.S. government, which capture only income poverty. Oltmans points out that income poverty doesn’t tap into measures of financial or material hardship. A family might have a certain income on paper but run out of food at the end of the month, have their utilities shut off or be unable to afford child care so they can go to work. These measures provide a dynamic, nuanced picture of poverty and, as the 3-K report demonstrates, can also show where changes in policy result in big changes in individuals’ lives, even for the city’s smallest residents.

The Poverty Tracker surveys have provided an evidence-based, data-driven resource for Robin Hood and other advocates to be able to talk to policy makers and community leaders about what works, Oltmans says. The reports are published in academic journals and presented at conferences, but they are especially tailored for rapid release, so they reach decision makers, whether in New York City or beyond.

That rapid deployment may be especially needed now. Funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package the U.S. Congress passed in March 2021, ended in September. The funding has been widely used to support child care and early education programs throughout the country, including New York City’s 3-K program. Robin Hood and other advocates are working to make sure sustained support continues for these types of programs and the 3-K report is a prime way to show such programs’ benefits, Oltmans says.

Still More to Learn

The researchers warn that the findings of the 3-K study can’t be considered a stand-in for the rest of the country because of wide variations in individual circumstances.

“Some studies of the impact of free preschool on mothers’ employment report findings similar to ours,” says doctoral student Cha. “Others show that there is little effect and find that mothers are not as responsive to free child care. But in the context of New York, we did find that lowering child care costs makes meaningful changes in mothers’ decision to work.”

In less urban or in rural areas, the researchers say, the costs of getting the child to and from child care may be so expensive as to make even free child care unaffordable. In some states, free 3-K or pre-K means part-time or half-day programs, which can do little to give the mother sufficient time to get the child to care, go to work, then turn around and pick them up again.

Though New York City’s free 3-K program is an ambitious and important beginning, the researchers stress that there’s more demand for child care throughout the city and more work to be done in aligning child care programs with parents’ work schedules.

Even though New York City’s program has helped lighten the load for some mothers in the workforce, Waldfogel stresses that the issue isn’t limited to families in poverty or even those with lower incomes.

“Every parent in the country goes through this worry,” she says, “because child care is a private issue in the U.S. You talk to any politician about any family issue and the first question they raise is child care because that’s what they’re hearing from their constituents — from middle-income constituents and even high-income constituents.

“Everybody is aware of it and complains about it, but somehow we still haven’t gotten over the hurdle of doing something about it.” 

To be clear, the music legend, business executive and philanthropist doesn’t bring 2.4 million children’s books to the post office every month and drop them in the mailbox herself, but she is far more than just the face of . Every chance she gets, Dolly Parton reads bedtime stories on video and shares her inspiration behind the gift-booking program and The Dollywood Foundation. Best of all, as soon as every ZIP code in a state is covered, she shows up in person to celebrate.

Launched in 1995, the Imagination Library sends free books to 1 in 10 U.S. children under 5 years old. The program operates in all 50 states. Here’s a look at how Dolly’s delivering early literacy in three of them.

Arkansas

“Tłó±đ children don’t know her as a famous singer,” laughs Charlotte Rainey Parham, executive director of the . “To them, Dolly is the book lady.”

To help pay for the books and distribution, the Arkansas Imagination Library receives funds that originated as the largest federal grant ever received by the Arkansas Department of Education. Thanks to this investment, 43% of all the eligible children in Arkansas are enrolled, says Brooke Ivy Bridges, affiliate resource director of the Arkansas Imagination Library.

“And we’re working hard to increase that number,” Bridges says, describing efforts to develop partnerships with birthing hospitals. “That way, before a family even leaves the hospital with its new baby, the newborn is registered. By the time the child starts kindergarten, he or she will have a home library of 60 books.”

Before coming to work at the Arkansas Imaginary Library, Bridges was involved as president of one of the Rotary clubs in Little Rock—and as a mom. “My daughter loves Dolly,” she says. “She has grown up seeing a life-size Dolly Parton cutout here in my home office. She loved her books from the Imagination Library.”

In many rural communities, Bridges notes, public libraries are less accessible, so home libraries become even more important. She adds that, in multigenerational households, grandparents, aunts, or uncles also get involved in reading to children. “Tłó±đ ultimate goal is to create a family conversation around the love of reading,” she says.

Colorado

Laura Douglas, ’s director of operations, says there have been Imagination Library programs in communities throughout Colorado for about 15 years. But it really took off in November 2021 when Governor Jared Polis signed legislation to make it part of the state budget. “Half of our book bill is paid by the state of Colorado,” she explains, “and the other half is paid by the local affiliates.”

Douglas, who previously worked for the , travels across the state, meeting with local affiliates and training them how to implement the program. She and her team are working to improve access where early literacy resources can make the most difference, including Spanish-speaking migrant communities.

Douglas notes that these families especially appreciate dual-language books. Partnering with the state’s is vital to the mission but presents challenges. “Those children don’t necessarily have a permanent home location or a permanent address,” she says, “So those books are mailed to a local preschool, rec center or other central location.”

Douglas appreciates the cultural diversity of the books in the program and singles out Emily Kate Moon’s as a personal favorite.

Jack Tate, president and CEO of Imagination Library of Colorado, captures the sentiment of many of the state programs when he emphasizes the importance of partnerships to drive expansion. Rotary Clubs, libraries, early childhood councils and United Ways have been especially enthusiastic. “One of our United Way affiliates told me why they liked the program,” he says. “Tłó±đy see it as a tangible way to bring the whole community together, because all the children get books, and that has a really great way of unifying a community.”

California

runs . State Librarian Greg Lucas credits Governor Gavin Newsom and bipartisan support from Senators Shannon Grove and Toni G. Atkins for a $68.2 million one-time funding commitment in October 2022 to promote early literacy through free books.

A self-described “broken-down old newspaperman,” Lucas is preparing to fill leadership roles to conduct this massive undertaking. “We have 2.4 million kids under five. Los Angeles alone has 500,000,” he says. “That’s not what the program looks like in Delaware. California is the most diverse group of people that have ever been brought together as equals in the history of human civilization.” Chaired by Jackie Wong of , the Imagination Library board in California is actively shoring up existing local partnerships.

Lucas says the San Diego Literacy Council is jumping in feet first, prioritizing the ZIP codes with the lowest literacy rate. He also mentions Long Beach, which has the largest population of Cambodian Americans in the country. Other communities speak Mandarin, Vietnamese, Russian and Farsi, among other languages.

Lucas is optimistic that those 2.4 million young children in California will get their books, thanks to the simple power of its model: “A package arrives, addressed to you, with a cool book inside that’s going to make you think and make you eager to get the next one.”

“Tłó±đ pandemic created this opportunity for us to pause and think about how we can gather information in a different way,” says Fearn. “And that includes changing the way the state handles the transition to kindergarten. We are intentionally designing a process to learn about students’, children’s and families’ assets and what they bring to school in a culturally responsive way.”

Tyson Barker, of and member of the kindergarten transition advisory panel, says, “In our experience, many states collect a wealth of student data related to the transition to kindergarten without a clear understanding of how this information will be used to improve educational experiences. Additionally, it is extremely rare for educators and families to be part of the co-creation process. This is a model that can be replicated in many states that are currently reconceptualizing the kindergarten transition.”

Here’s what the new system promises:

A better fit for a different kind of early education system. Oregon’s new way of stewarding the kindergarten transition builds upon , the state’s free, high-quality preschool program available to families living at or below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level; as well as the 2019 Student Success Act, which includes innovative that support mixed delivery.

Oregon supports all children, whether they are enrolled in a school, a Head Start program, a child care center or a family child care setting. Home visiting and parent education are also part of the equation.

Turning the “family interview” into a “family conversation.” Instead of relying exclusively on skill testing, Oregon is asking families directly about what is important to them.

As Fearn says, the shift intentionally advances equity by taking a holistic view of children by giving families the opportunity to share contextual information about themselves. “Instead of talking about whether the children are ready for kindergarten,” she says. “It’s about how systems can get ready for them.”

A key question they ask is, “What brings your child joy?” (Answers include unicorns, books, play and friends.)

Community partners evaluate (and enrich) the dialogue. In order to ensure that the kindergarten transition conversations are respectful as well as productive, the state engaged , a nonprofit dedicated to helping Oregonians share their ideas, opinions, beliefs and resources in policy decisions.

indicate that the pilot is working. Family comments included:

“I know the teacher, but I’ve never been in relationship like this with her.”

“My son can’t always advocate for himself. This felt like an opportunity to advocate for him.”

“We’ve moved around a lot and this is the first time we’ve seen something like this.”

While educators said:

“Engagement with parents or caregivers is a better avenue to gain trust and a collaborating spirit about bringing up this child in the best environment possible for learning.”

“I think you learn so much about your families when you do something as simple as this. What parent doesn’t want to tell you about their child?”

The state is using the Oregon Kitchen Table feedback to develop the next stage of the pilot, which will strengthen culture-specific outreach to families, to name one of the recommendations.

Each conversation makes the whole system better. The data collected helps regional and local partners to develop better programs. The act of listening itself, explains Mandell, “sets the tone about this partnership. It says we value the parents and we want to hear from them directly.”

He acknowledges that the system is still evolving. Data from the family conversations is far more robust than what the state previously used. “How do you aggregate that and not lose that richness?” he asks.

Learning from (and teaching) other states. Fearn says Oregon completed state scans and drew inspiration from the (WaKIDS). “We asked about their family collaboration meetings that take place at the beginning of kindergarten between families and educators,” says Fearn, “and found that while their questions focus mainly on building relationships, we also wanted to explore children’s experience prior to kindergarten.”

Advocates in other states are watching to see how these programs develop. Jenna Nelson of the says her state relies almost exclusively on a tool called the . “Even though we know there are so many experiences that help a child to be successful in kindergarten, the idea here seems to be that the four-year-old teachers just hand the data over to the kindergarten teachers, who report this transfer as being unhelpful at best.” Nelson says the Oregon model sounds promising.

The stand-alone department, Mandell said, is “testament to the focus and emphasis on early learning and care that the legislature and the governor have at this moment. We’re a single place where families, child care providers and early learning professionals can go, that they know will be supporting them.”