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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . . . 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That clarity has reduced uncertainty and increased instructional precision.

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

A first-year teacher finds support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From classroom change to district strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That afternoon, agents appeared in front of at least two nearby elementary schools, reportedly waiting for parents to pick up their children, “and at one point they were looking into kindergarten classroom windows and just scaring the living daylights out of the children,” said the director, who asked not to be identified to protect the children she serves. “They have guns, they have rifles. They look scary.”

Helicopters also flew overhead at a circling as kids paraded through the streets in their costumes, according to stories collected from Illinois Head Start families on how the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in their state last fall affected them.

Earlier on the 31st, the Illinois director said she had gotten word through phone calls and Signal channels that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had flooded the area, she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. A family on their way to enroll their young daughter in an early learning center that shares space with her Head Start program was stopped a block or so away at a major intersection. The father was detained in front of his wife and child, she said.

A dozen Head Start associations representing more than 100,000 children across the country, including the one in Illinois, sent a letter to Congress Tuesday demanding that immigration agents be barred from entering Head Start, child care and pre-K classrooms and premises, including parking lots. 

For nearly three decades, that was a largely accepted practice: Immigration enforcement was prohibited in and around schools, hospitals, places of worship and other so-called sensitive locations. 

One of the first things President Donald Trump did at the start of his second term in January 2025 was . Reinstating those constraints is now one of at least meant to rein in ICE enforcement that congressional Democrats say they need in order to support long-term Department of Homeland Security funding and end the partial government shutdown that is

Their conditions were outlined in a signed by the House and Senate Democratic minority leaders, U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer, and include more widely publicized rules, such as prohibiting agents from covering their faces with masks and mandating visible displays of identification. 

This week’s entreaty from the Head Start associations echoes those congressional demands. The early learning groups also urged federal lawmakers to ban DHS agents from interfering with school drop-off or pickup at their programs, including at bus stops, citing another incident in Chicago where a father was his two young kids to school. They were left in the back of the car alone.

“Across the country, children are being harmed by immigration enforcement actions,” the letter reads. “Head Start programs report that children are experiencing changes in behavior and exhibiting signs of fear and anxiety. Families are missing work, keeping their children home, and facing housing and food insecurity.”

Last Thursday, Senate Democrats blocked a spending bill , extending the shutdown and demonstrating they remained firm in their demands.

That same day marked a major change in the department’s increasingly unpopular leadership, with Trump Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. The move followed questions about her handling of department spending as well as mounting criticism around her response to the deadly ICE shootings of two American citizens at protests in Minneapolis earlier this year. 

Trump announced his plan to nominate Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin as her replacement, though his new pick does not seem to signal any planned shift in enforcing the president’s mass deportation agenda. 

‘Safer but not safe’

Policy limiting immigration enforcement near schools, hospitals and churches was formally introduced in the early days of the Clinton administration through a

In the decades since, similar policies have been modified, clarified or codified by presidents from both parties. In 2011, near the end of President Barack Obama’s first term, his administration formally expanded the policy, which was then further clarified under President Joe Biden in 2021.

Trump’s January directive marked a significant departure from these largely bipartisan, long-standing rules, including during his own first term, when DHS issued a saying they would continue to follow sensitive location protocol. 

According to a DHS the policy Trump put forth in his second term was instituted to prevent “criminal aliens — including murders [sic] and rapists” from being “able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.” Some more stringent guardrails have since been reinstated for places of worship, but not for schools or early learning centers.

Providers in Illinois — and across the country — argue this scenario only serves to traumatize children and make their educational spaces less safe.

“We’ve had kids that aren’t coming anymore because they’re too afraid to come to school,” said Kelly Neidel, the executive director of a different Head Start agency in Illinois, which also provides wraparound services to families. “Our food pantry [has] declined. So these people are making a choice … to eat or potentially get picked up.”

In April 2025, a number of organizations filed a lawsuit in Oregon, challenging Trump’s new edict and in September, they were joined by , including staff and parents from a preschool.

In February, the country’s two largest teachers unions filed an , citing an incident in Oregon in which agents smashed in the car window of a father dropping his child off at a day care, as well as students and teachers at Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School being assaulted with tear gas in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Renee Good.

While advocates and providers are hopeful that a forthcoming DHS bill will include a reinstatement of sensitive location protections, some argue it wouldn’t go far enough. 

The Illinois Head Start director, who went out patrolling on Halloween to protect families and kids, said now that she’s seen what federal immigration agents are capable of, it would make her feel “safer but not safe.”

“It might deter them from coming, but would it deter all of them?” she asked. “I don’t know. I honestly cannot answer that question. I cannot answer confidently that they would not enter even if that order was in place.”

Wendy Cervantes, a director at The Center for Law and Social Policy, is helping to lead the charge on federal legislation, which would codify sensitive location policies into law, significantly strengthening their power.

, introduced in the House in February 2025, would prohibit immigration enforcement actions within 1,000 feet of such places, except in certain extreme circumstances. If an officer violated these rules, any resulting information wouldn’t be admissible in court and the targeted person could move to terminate any resulting removal proceedings. 

Since early January, the bill has gained 33 co-sponsors in the House and four in the Senate, meaning over two-thirds of the Democratic caucus is officially in support. It has also been endorsed by over across the country. No Republicans have signed on. 

Some states, including Illinois, have passed their own bills over the past year, but because they have to align with federal policy, they’re largely aimed at providing guidance and setting protocols for how local entities should address ICE. 

“It would make a huge difference to have this done at the federal level,” Cervantes said.

‘A horrendous day’

The Illinois director of programs, who funds centers across a metropolitan area in the state, said that from day one of the second Trump administration she felt a significant shift in the federal approach to early childhood learning. In addition to increased ICE enforcement, her Head Start classrooms — along with thousands of others across the nation — experienced delays in funding that threatened to shutter them. 

Once their grant came through, she and her colleagues had to wade through the realities of operating under the administration’s diversity, equity and inclusion ban, which threatened the core of their work, she said.

Things escalated in September after a father of two, was shot and killed during a highly publicized ICE traffic stop in nearby Franklin Park, Illinois. He had just dropped off one of his children at a Head Start classroom.

“We knew they would eventually be coming our way,” she said, and early learning centers across the region began to prepare. 

That reality hit the morning of Oct. 31 — â€œa horrendous day” she said, which filled her with fear and made her cry tears of anger. 

And the fear has not subsided, she said, for the families she serves, the staff she employs or for herself. As the child of immigrants and a woman of color, she’s started carrying her passport.

Mirroring steps taken by other early childhood providers in Illinois, images of fake and real warrants have now been posted at the front doors of her centers so staff can differentiate, along with a script of what to say should an ICE agent approach. Head Start Parent Council meetings have moved to Zoom so parents who fear leaving their homes can still remain involved, and centers have organized food drop-offs. 

Programs have installed incident commanders and some have hired security details. Others have their own staff standing guard, but directors fear for their safety too, since many are immigrants themselves.

In November, ICE agents chased one day care worker into the center where she worked in Chicago’s North Side neighborhood. She was in front of children, and subsequently arrested. She was a week later after a federal judge ruled her arrest was illegal because she wasn’t given a preliminary bond hearing.

Volunteer rapid response teams have formed across Illinois to alert providers of nearby ICE activity. In one incident, they were called to stand guard during a field trip to a children’s museum where ICE was “hot and heavy,” according to Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, the executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, which advocates for all state providers.

“Last fall was terrible,” she said. “I cried every day.” 

“Our ask is keep ICE out of Head Start [and] early Head Start classrooms, facilities, our playgrounds, our parking lots and not interfere in our work or our day-to-day,” she added. “Families need safe spaces to send children … making our facilities safe when ICE is surrounding them is really hard.”

At the Firefly Gardens in suburban Pittsburgh, children and caregivers can explore a sensory playground filled with wind chimes, grassy tunnels and a mud box. Their playtime doesn’t end at the park though; each activity is paired with caregiver-focused messages and QR codes that encourage at-home activities.

The Washington County Park system, WashPA Outdoors and Pittsburgh’s PBS station, WQED, created the sensory playground using a pilot grant from Let’s Play PGH!, a Pennsylvania initiative that provides funding to local organizations to create playful learning experiences for people of all ages in public spaces, and Remake Learning, a peer network for educators in Pittsburgh.

The activities at the sensory playground, which is located in a community , were designed to foster intergenerational play and joint exploration, helping caregivers see play as “the work of kids” and understand how to actively support learning through shared activities, according to Gina Masciola, a program director for learning neighborhoods at WQED who sits on the Remake Learning Council. 

“So the messaging really is for adults,” said Masciola. “It’s really about modeling and helping parents connect to their kids.”

launched in summer 2023, when Remake Learning brought together organizations to work on prototypes for play installations. The initiative has to distribute, and has already doled out a majority of the money to organizations that are redeveloping spaces in the region, incorporating child development research, urban design and the science of play, said Tyler Samstag, executive director of Remake Learning.

Pittsburgh isn’t the first city in the U.S., or even in Pennsylvania to create public works that foster intergenerational play and learning. Samstag pointed to a simple and effective project in Philadelphia that put playful signage up in grocery stores encouraging parents to talk to their kids. Those relatively inexpensive installations can provide a boost for children’s literacy and language development, according to Samstag. 

Let’s Play PGH! was inspired by research from Playful Learning Landscapes, a joint project from Temple University’s Infant and Child Laboratory and the Brookings Institution, Samstag noted. Researchers examined how children spend their time outside of school — which for many, they said, was about 80% of their waking hours — and . The initial Learning Landscapes found that communities must buy into the project at the outset, create simple science-based activities and build on existing city infrastructure as much as possible.

“We put up this question, ‘What would playful learning installations prioritize? What would they look like?’” Samstag said. “What might it look like if a bus stop turned into a site of learning, or a laundromat turned into a site of learning?”

After brainstorming, participants tested out ideas in their communities by building prototypes, placing them in public spaces where children and caregivers could interact with them, and sought feedback from residents on what could make the designs more accessible, engaging and fun. WQED, for example, collaborated closely with Pam Kilgore from WashPA Outdoors and Washington City Parks to install the sensory playground and worked closely with Kilgore, who surveyed community members visiting the garden and asked them what they would like to see, Masciola said. She added: “When we are building anything, we know that the community is going to end up being the user. Those are the experts.”

When WQED partnered with Washington City Parks and WashPA Outdoors to create the sensory playground, Masciola said, the team used the grant to buy materials for the prototype of the playground, scouring thrift stores for supplies to create homemade wind chimes. They also created a sensory tunnel with sticks, long grasses and bark woven throughout. The PBS Kids show, Elinor Wonders Why, inspired the signs and play prompts dotting the garden. Those signs were written for caregivers, not just children, with the intention of sparking curiosity.

A lot of PBS shows, like Daniel Tiger and Carl the Collector, really are “about modeling and helping caregivers interact with very young children,” Masciola said. “Making sure that families understand what it means to observe, encouraging them to maybe have a data collection notebook that they can record things in together with their children.”

Another grantee, the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, was invited by Let’s Play PGH! to join the initial cohort to transform the Frick Environmental Center, a public facility inside Pittsburgh’s largest park. The vision was to revamp the center, which serves as a nature and education hub for the city’s dwellers, into an area that would encourage caregivers to interact with their children, rather than just watch them. 

“One of the deeper goals of this is promoting play between caregivers and children,” said James Brown, director of education at the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy and the Frick Environmental Center. “This is not the place to let your kids go loose and then you’re just on your phone.”

When Brown received feedback from caregivers after the first round of play testing, he said he noticed that the adults were taking on more of an observational role while their children were playing.

Then, when Brown’s team introduced play prompts, such as a hide and seek game or a cleanup song, and posted them around the space, the feedback from caregivers changed, he said.

“We found there was much more ‘we’ statements, like ‘we did this,’ and ‘we built the habitat,’ and ‘we were exploring,’” he said. “Just that invitation was the game changer.”

Frick has plans to continue with a larger scale redesign with more play installations, and has been translating caregivers’ feedback into plans for the next phase of the environmental center, Brown said. Last summer, he contracted a narrative muralist who read through the data from parents and kids, then drafted an artistic rendering for the space. Brown expects the artists working on the project to have installations ready by this spring.

With feedback in hand from people in the community who have experienced their installations, the Pittsburgh Park Conservancy and other grantees that have projects underway with Let’s Play PGH! are continuing to iterate on their prototypes. 

As of last month, the initiative has funded 16 projects — including the sensory playground in the Firefly Gardens and the Frick Environmental Center — with prototypes in motion, and intergenerational play is key to a number of them, Samstag said. One project he highlighted, “Clayground,” by the Manchester Craftsman’s Guild, made a bicycle-powered potter’s wheel as a way to improve access to the art of ceramics. Guild members retrofitted an old bicycle from the 1970s with a pottery wheel and took it around to local festivals throughout the summer where parents and grandparents pedaled with their kids. With the help of a new grant, the guild plans on building a suite of bicycle installations that can travel to various public spaces around Pittsburgh, Samstag said.

Joyful learning is so important, Samstag explained, adding that when he brings people together across all types of organizations and asks adults to reflect on their own experiences of play, the question sparks vivid memories. 

“Everyone knows how important this is,” he said. “But it’s often overlooked because of all of the other things that you’ve got to do day in and day out.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story failed to include the pivotal role WashPa Outdoors played in the creation of the Firefly Gardens’ sensory playground. In addition, copy edits have been made throughout the story.

Everyone’s shoes are off. Each family has found a spot on the rug, forming a circle. An 8-month-old girl squeals and claps her hands — a skill she’d picked up just a few days earlier — as she bounces up and down. All eyes are on the teacher, Alyson Hayes-Myers, awaiting her notes on the piano, which will signal that class has begun.

Over the next 45 minutes, an otherwise bare room comes alive with sound and feeling. All seven babies are engrossed in Hayes-Myers’ direction and movement, in the songs, in the close interactions the program encourages between them and the adult who brought them. 

Research is clear about the myriad benefits of music in early childhood. It can support , , and . It and . It can strengthen relationships and expose students to languages and customs from other parts of the world. 

In Hayes-Myers’ class, the evidence of the links between music and early development that are found in scientific studies come to life. In the presence of children who are singing or being sung to, who are listening to instruments or playing the instruments themselves, the brain development is obvious — and the joy is infectious.

Her class is in week four of a 10-week session that invites children from birth to age 4 to participate with a caregiver — often a parent, but sometimes a grandparent or nanny. It’s located in Denver, Colorado, at Twinkle Together, a licensed center of Music Together, which is an early childhood music and movement program with locations in over 2,000 communities across 35 countries. 

The program is designed for children, but the target audience may actually be their caregivers, explained Karee Justice-Bondy, director of Denver’s five Music Together locations. “Parents are key,” she said. “They are really our students, not the children. We know children love music.”

So many parents today, Justice-Bondy added, are inundated with information about how best to raise their children, and they end up ignoring their own intuition about how to parent, love and play with their little ones. 

“This can help remind you,” she said of music. 

It can be empowering for families to engage with music, creating opportunities for them to bond and grow together. Many initiatives around the country, including Music Together, are trying to help parents and caregivers tap into that. 

Carnegie Hall’s is another program designed to leverage the power of music in early childhood. The Lullaby Project pairs new and expecting parents with professional artists to write personal lullabies for their babies. The project began almost 15 years ago in partnership with a New York hospital — music was identified as a tool to improve maternal mental health and well-being while strengthening bonds between parent and child — but has since reached families across the globe, in spaces such as refugee camps, opioid recovery centers and neonatal intensive care units, according to Tiffany Ortiz, director of early childhood programs at the Weill Music Institute, an education arm of Carnegie Hall. 

The Lullaby Project worked so well, Ortiz said, that families began asking, “What’s next?” In response, staff at Carnegie designed and built out additional for young children and their caregivers, including , a free 10-week music class for infants and toddlers up to 18 months old. 

“People think of Carnegie Hall and these very polished performances, big stages,” Ortiz said. “It’s really these micromoments and the way music can be used every day. … We really are trying to empower families to feel really confident in their music-making, to bolster that bond.”

It’s working, she said. Parents and caregivers have shared with Ortiz that, after participating in a music program, they find themselves singing and making music throughout the day with their child — often during times of transition that can be challenging, such as brushing teeth, mealtime and bedtime. Music takes those tough moments and turns them into something fun and playful, Ortiz recalled families saying. 

“Often, music and music experiences are put on a shelf as a nice-to-have,” Ortiz noted. “It can be a really powerful tool in early development, but it can also help parents and families navigate the more stressful parts of early childhood. I’ve seen it transform so many people’s lives and create a sense of meaning and connection with a child.”

Dennie Palmer Wolf, principal researcher at WolfBrown, an arts research firm that has collaborated with the Weill Music Institute to its early childhood music programs, thinks of music as one of a few “natural resources” every family has (laughing and physical closeness are among the others, she said).

“It can potentially give parents a sense of being effective or capable,” she said. “It’s a source of strength and resilience, in a world that takes that away, grinds it down.”

Of course, this only works if parents are comfortable singing, and many are not. 

Ann C. Kay, co-founder of The Rock ‘n’ Read Project, which leverages music for early literacy, believes that shows like American Idol and The Voice have convinced adults that if they can’t sing well, they should not bother to sing at all. 

“There’s all these messages in our culture now that you’re going to be embarrassed if you open your mouth and sing,” Kay said. 

Susan Darrow, CEO of Music Together Worldwide, made a similar point. Many people now feel that unless they “sound like Lady Gaga, they should sit in the audience and listen.” 

“That might be fine for our culture, but it’s a disaster for early childhood,” Darrow said. “I would love to be able to return music-making to the amateurs. … We want to raise children who are not afraid to sing.”

That starts at home, where the only judge is a benevolent one: To a baby, the most beautiful singing voice is that of their parent or caregiver, regardless of that adult’s ability to carry a tune. 

“We’re not trying to raise the next Yo-Yo Ma,” Darrow added. “We’re trying to raise children who love and participate in music.”

Beyond the benefits to parents, Palmer Wolf expounded on the way that music helps with children’s social-emotional development. When young children are singing and dancing together, they have an awareness of music stopping and starting, of taking turns, of getting quieter and louder, of imitating sound and movement, of self-regulation. 

“It’s an opportunity for kids to learn that your face, your hands, your eyes, your whole body says something to others,” Palmer Wolf said. 

And music can communicate messages far beyond the lyrics of a song, she added. Palmer Wolf has been studying the role of music in some preschools in Boston that have a growing immigrant population, she said, and she’s found that culturally-relevant songs can signal to families that they are welcome in the community. When preschools use music in that way, it helps to build a sense of trust among families who might otherwise be wary, she added. 

“We can’t underplay the signaling power of music,” she said. 

It was January 2022, and Rhian Allvin was in search of a space that could bring her vision to life. 

The early childhood leader had just finished up her nearly decade-long tenure as CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a large, national nonprofit that promotes high-quality early learning. She’d been steeped in early childhood policy, advocacy and research for years. She was ready for something new, something hands-on. She wanted to start her own early care and education program. 

That’s how she found herself, on that winter day, driving alongside a red-brick prison wall, past imposing watch towers, and onto the sprawling grounds that were once home to a notorious maximum-security prison at the Lorton Reformatory, a correctional complex in Lorton, Virginia. 

A pair of the former penitentiary’s buildings were among the first Allvin toured in her pursuit of a property that would become her flagship location. The site intrigued her — how could it not? But she walked away — at least at first.

“I said, ‘I’m already out over my skis. This isn’t a great idea,’’ Allvin recalled. “I must’ve looked at 40 or 50 other spaces in Virginia. They were all so vanilla. Office buildings. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I took friends to see it.”

Allvin saw, in the former prison, a possibility for a second life, a rebirth. Eventually, she decided she would turn this historic site, awash in , “into a place of light and joy.”

It took over a year to prepare the space, but Allvin opened the doors to Brynmor Early Education & Preschool in October 2023, with capacity to serve up to 152 children. Today, the shuttered correctional facility is home to a thriving, high-quality early learning program. 

Inside the 15-foot-tall walls, where , babies now sleep soundly, practice newfound motor skills, learn to communicate with gestures and words, and explore the boundaries of their bodies. 

Under a roof that has overseen riots, escapes and assaults, toddlers now sit at tiny tables for mealtime, learn to wash their hands at little sinks, and attempt to regulate their big emotions under the tutelage of patient caregivers.  

On the same grounds where prisoners were once on lockdown for 23 hours a day, children now move about the courtyard freely, riding bicycles and scooters around a racetrack, letting their imaginations guide them in a mud kitchen. 

To get to this point, Allvin and many others had their work cut out for them. But the program is named Brynmor — Welsh for “great hill” — for a reason. Though Allvin saw a “steep hill to climb” in transforming this site, and in creating a high-quality, profitable early care and education business, she decided to take that first step anyway.

The Lorton Reformatory comprised eight prison facilities across three campuses in the relatively small Northern Virginia community, located about 20 miles outside of Washington, D.C.

The complex, which operated from 1910 to 2001 and was primarily used to incarcerate D.C. inmates, began as a progressive work camp and evolved to include distinct buildings for women, youth and eventually a maximum-security penitentiary. 

By the late 20th century, the Lorton Reformatory, like so many other maximum-security prisons in the United States, had become . Violence became an everyday occurrence, according to former guards and inmates featured in , a documentary produced by former inmates and released in 2022. The facility was described as “unfit for humans” and “dusty, dirty and dangerous.” 

After it closed, the site was to the National Register of Historic Places. Over subsequent years, much of the old prison complex was gutted, redeveloped, and converted into art studios, gyms and luxury apartments. 

There have been several comparable efforts to closed prison facilities across the United States over the last couple of decades, said Nicole D. Porter, senior director of advocacy at The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that studies policies impacting the criminal legal system. 

Though a common outcome is mixed-use developments, she has noticed a trend of these spaces being converted into education centers to serve youth — typically teenagers already involved in the criminal justice system or viewed as “at risk.” 

But Porter believes Brynmor is unique; she’s not aware of any other former prison facility that hosts young children. And she pointed out the irony of a program serving early learners in a building that once housed incarcerated people, since early childhood investment has been with lower rates of crime in adulthood. 

“The idea that a site that caused so much harm … is converted into a site of learning, of teaching young people in a healthy way and a holistic way, is very encouraging,” Porter said of Brynmor. “I would hope it serves as a point of inspiration in what could be possible at closed prisons going forward.”

By the time Allvin was touring the maximum-security unit in 2022, only a small portion of the original prison cells were intact, preserved in a separate, undeveloped building on the grounds. 

The two buildings she visited — 9050 and 9060 Power House Road — had already been hollowed out. The two-story-high cell blocks had been removed. There was no HVAC or plumbing. Just two vast rectangular buildings.

“I got a cold, dark shell,” said Allvin, who signed a long-term lease for the buildings. 

But the high ceilings and large, striking glass windows, which Allvin described as “cathedral-like,” drew her in.  

“The buildings were completely empty. We had a blank slate here,” said Theresa del Ninno, principal at Maginniss + del Ninno Architects, a small, women-owned architectural firm that has done a number of adaptive reuse for early childhood, including Brynmor. “You don’t really think, ‘This was a maximum-security prison.’”

One might imagine a former prison as gray and drab, an eyesore. That is not the reality of the Lorton site. 

“There was always talk about what’s going to happen with these beautiful, historic brick buildings,” said del Ninno. “For years we’ve seen them there, so it was exciting to get a chance to work in two of them.”

The symmetrical Brynmor buildings, at about 6,700 square feet apiece, are connected by a brick colonnade portico, with ample green space in between. Inside each two-story building, the ceilings are nearly 20 feet tall. Great big windows — 100 in all — allow natural light to pour in. 

These elements created design challenges and opportunities. 

Natural light is an obvious advantage, the architects shared. “It’s so bright and light-filled and open,” del Ninno noted. 

“I could picture a child care center being there,” said Kim Jesada, project architect, about her first impressions upon seeing the space. 

But the same tall, rectangular windows that allow all that light in also created challenges. “We like to have windows down at a child’s eye level,” del Ninno explained. The bottom sills of these windows, however, sit nearly eight feet off the ground.

The architects made cutouts in interior classroom walls and added internal windows along the corridors to allow light from outside to penetrate the innermost parts of each building. 

They also had to do something about those two-story ceilings, which are more than twice as high as a standard room. 

“Because the ceiling is so tall, and the kids are so small, we wanted to bring the scale down,” del Ninno said. 

They added acoustic baffles — sound-absorbing panels that hang from the ceiling — to create the feeling of a lower ceiling and smaller space without obstructing natural light. 

The buildings’ shape is “very unusual,” Allvin said. That, too, was a problem to solve. 

“Because the buildings are so long,” Jesada said, “we didn’t want to have one single corridor running down that feels like one endless shaft.”

Instead, the corridor charts a diagonal path through each building. That design choice resulted in what del Ninno called “non-rectilinear” classrooms — or what Allvin described as “funky-shaped.”

They landed on a design that had infant and toddler classrooms in one building, and Pre-K in another. The buildings are connected by an open, covered walkway that overlooks a shared play area that’s almost as big as each of the buildings. It includes an outdoor storytime space, a concrete racetrack, an infant play area and natural climbing structures with timber. 

The process of transforming the buildings into the welcoming, child-friendly haven they are today was long and arduous.

“I had moments where I was like, ‘Was this really a good idea?’” Allvin recalled. “There were days where it felt like too much work.”

It was an expensive undertaking, she said. “I was building a 14,000 square-foot child care center on a family child care home budget mentality.” 

She paid for the multimillion-dollar project with a combination of “socially conscious” investors, a loan from a community development financial institution and private foundation support, she said. And fortunately, there was no shortage of help. 

Allvin’s own children, now grown, assembled cribs. A network she built throughout her career, including leaders of other early care and education organizations, such as ZERO TO THREE and Child Care Aware of America, pitched in too, putting together furniture. But it wasn’t just friends and family who stepped up. Members of the community were moved by the transformation and wanted to be a part of it. 

Shortly before the center opened, Allvin realized she needed more hands on deck, so she hired a few workers through a local company to help. One of the workers shared with Allvin that he’d grown up in D.C. with a very clear idea about what Lorton Reformatory represented. “He said, ‘Anytime you need help, let me know. All I knew this place to be was where people came to die. Now it’s a place where babies are born, where light happens,’” Allvin recalled. “So many people have had that reaction.”

Around two weeks before opening day, a local couple who had heard about the preschool showed up to see it for themselves, Allvin said. Both of them were former prison guards at Lorton. Allvin took them inside to see the progress, and standing in the infant classroom, the man commented that he wished society designed spaces as intentionally for incarcerated people as it does for kids, she recalled. The woman, Allvin said, returned every day for two weeks to help get the space ready to serve children and families.

When the ribbon cutting ceremony came, Jesada, one of the architects, brought her young daughter with her. She got to see the space anew through her daughter’s eyes. The girl was not privy to the buildings’ history. Her face lit up as she walked in, Jesada remembered. 

“The kids aren’t coming into this space thinking, ‘I’m going to preschool in what used to be a prison,’” Jesada said. “[My daughter] saw a warm and inviting space filled with light.”

She added: “I think that with any project, seeing any of the users walk in and their reaction to the space, is what makes me want to keep designing. You see how people get to enjoy the space. Seeing this space filled with kids was my favorite part of it. They feel comfortable and safe learning.”

Tiara Smith, an infant teacher at Brynmor who joined a few months after the center opened, didn’t realize the program was housed in a former prison until she started the job. After seeing the still-intact cells on campus, though, she said the significance of the turnaround is not lost on her. 

“We’re the change,” she said. “We’re making a difference to new lives — infants, toddlers and preschoolers. We can give them that foundation to learn to love school and love life and enjoy life. We can be that partnership with families. It’s definitely a powerful thing.”

Brynmor has been open for just over two years, and already, it has demonstrated what so many in early care and education believe to be impossible.  

From the start, Allvin was committed to serving children from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing from her experience as a national early childhood leader, Allvin has been able to build a thoughtful revenue and fee structure that makes that possible. About 60% of Brynmor families receive some form of financial assistance — either through government subsidies, child care scholarships with the of a private foundation, or . The rest pay the full price out of pocket. 

The center recently earned NAEYC accreditation — the gold standard for quality in the field, yet a designation that only a fraction of programs can claim. And it invests in its staff. In a field where the average wage is $13 per hour nearly half of early childhood educators use at least one form of public assistance, Brynmor pays its teachers on par with public school employees, and provides them with health insurance, retirement matching, paid leave and other benefits. 

“That’s why we exist,” Allvin said. “That’s our North Star.”

The model is working so well that Allvin is busy the business. Brynmor now has two more locations, one in the heart of D.C. and another inside a 250-year-old Baptist church in Virginia. Next up, she said, is an effort to into an early learning program.

In a field where scarcity is the default, each of these realities is rare. Together, they’re remarkable. 

Yet it tracks with the narrative surrounding this project. Light chases out darkness. Hope overcomes despair. 

And bit by bit, the promise and potential of our nation’s youngest children rewrites the story of a space that, for decades, represented pain and despair.

A focused on computer science and artificial intelligence aims to teach young kids to build, program and prototype together. In essence, students build their own machine learning models, solving problems, inventing characters and telling stories connected to their interests. The program, designed by Lego Education to be used in K-8 classrooms, offers project-based experiences for kids to work on in small groups. The lessons use Lego bricks, and some are screen free, while others require access to a device, such as a laptop or tablet, so kids can access an app which has a “coding canvas,” with icon-based coding.

Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of psychology at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, commends Lego for using the science of playful learning to teach computer science. “When children learn to solve problems with hands-on materials,” she states, “they are more likely to not only learn material but to be able to transfer what they have learned. In my experience, the Lego team has always worked with scientists to develop teaching tools that are aligned with the very best science on how children learn. It is one of the few companies committed to this way of doing business.” (Hirsh-Pasek has collaborated with the Lego Foundation on other projects but did not take part in this initiative.)

In a significant departure from many other AI products, data from the children never leaves the computer. “A really strong perspective that we had was that we don’t want anybody else to have the data — we don’t even want the data. We want that to stay in the classroom and on the computer, said Andrew Sliwinski, head of product experience for Lego Education. From a technical and design perspective, Sliwinski said, “It’s much easier to just send data to the cloud or use one of the big APIs [Application Program Interfaces], or one of the big companies that are out there. But when you do that, you sort of betray that principle of being able to guarantee privacy and safety to the child, and to the parent and to the teacher.”

Maybe Big Tech could learn a thing or two from Big Toy.

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Sliwinski explains his role, the evolution of the curriculum and his hopes for AI more broadly. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you do at Lego Education?

My team is responsible for product strategy, design, engineering and, most importantly, the educational impact of our product. So really the development of our learning experiences from end to end. Lego stole me from the , where I worked on creative tools for children for many years, including, most notably, , which is a programming language for kids. 

Were you in the classroom before that?

I started working in education in 2002. I was living in Detroit, working as a tutor, and I was invited to support students in Detroit public schools with the Michigan Educational Assessment Program, the state’s big standardized test [at the time]. I’ve basically been working in some way, shape or form in education ever since. 

What do you see as the through line between that work, and what you’re doing now?

When I showed up in Detroit all those years ago, my biggest reflection was: These are kids that don’t see the purpose in mathematics. They don’t feel connected to it. They don’t understand how it connects to their lives. And so for me, it was like, “Well, let’s solve that problem.” And yeah, the rest is history. 

Were you a Lego kid yourself? 

We didn’t have Legos, but we had all manner of other building materials at our disposal, like cardboard boxes and wooden blocks and access to hammers and screwdrivers and all of that fun stuff. So I grew up building things and learning through making. 

Why is it important for children to understand what’s behind AI?

The phrase AI literacy is being used a lot, and I think it’s being used in a very general way that is sometimes unhelpful. AI literacy is about more than how children use AI. It’s about those foundational literacies that help children understand what AI is, because I’m not just interested in children developing an understanding of how to use ChatGPT to do a specific project or a specific location. I want children to understand what probability is. I want children to understand that machines reason differently than humans do — and why that is. I want children to understand that AI learns from data, and that data can have biases, and that data can have ethical considerations, and that data output is only as good as the input, right? Garbage in, garbage out. 

What does responsible AI education look like for young kids?

What we’re moving forward with with Lego education is really focused on … those foundations. The way that I sometimes like to talk about it with the team is: So much of what is being put in front of kids today is like learning how to use the black box of an AI model or an AI tool — I’m much more interested in giving the kids a screwdriver and letting them take the box apart. 

But that last analogy is figurative. 

Yes. There are no screwdrivers that come in the box, but not as figurative as you might think. In the tool, the kids actually get to train their own machine learning models … So a bunch of kids will work together in a group of four. That’s something that’s different. It is collaborative. 

What lessons can we draw from the use of earlier technological developments, such as TV and the internet, in building products for young kids?

These technologies are most effective when they serve as a catalyst for joint engagement between children and adults together, rather than sort of acting as a digital babysitter, whether that’s cartoons or whether that’s Club Penguin [a Disney game that ran from 2005 to 2017]. … 

One of the most powerful things that you can say to a child is, “I don’t know. Let’s go figure it out together.” And I think that there’s so much that parents and teachers and kids don’t know about AI, but that kids are curious about. And us expressing our own curiosity, and supporting that curiosity and engaging together is a really powerful thing. 

What guardrails has your team put in place for young children? 

When we started working on this, one of the things that was really important was to have a set of principles and a set of lines — we call them red lines, lines that we will not cross — because I think it’s so easy when you’re working in technology development to sort of lose track of some of those principles. We established that way, way early in the project. 

Some of the ones that are maybe less apparent are things like [how] no data from the children will ever leave the computer. It is never transmitted over the internet. It is never saved to disk. It is never sent to Lego. It is never sent to any third party. And if you look at the predominant paradigm and a lot of the tools that are out there, that is not the case. …

…We’re the Lego Group. If we don’t care about child safety and well-being, who does? And so I think it’s been this huge responsibility, but also like this really great opportunity for us to put forward something that we feel lives up to our values. … People are always surprised by how much my team goes around the world testing in classrooms, testing with children and talking with educators and experts. We even have child developmental psychologists that are on staff. And so much of what we do is about developing the right things in collaboration with young people and educators. 

How did you test the experience with young children?

One of the most recent tests that I [did] was testing some of the AI features for the very young kids — the kindergarten to second grade group [in Chicago public schools.] One of the things that we do as the product matures is we stop being the teachers in the classroom and we actually just give the box to a … teacher in their normal day-to-day classroom and we say, “Good luck.” And then we watch, because it’s not enough for the kids to have a great experience when we show up knowing the product and we teach it. … It has to work for the teachers, otherwise it doesn’t matter. 

One of the most interesting, but also humbling things that you do as a designer for children and teachers is taking it into the field, right? Because all of the assumptions and ideas and intentions that you have, they go out the window when you put it in front of a 5-year-old. That process is just so rewarding.

Did anything surprise you about how they put it to use? 

I was observing a group of 4- or 5-year-olds, and they were working on this lesson where they had to build a toothbrush for a dinosaur. Part of that was figuring out how motors work and how sensors interact, but it was kind of a funny setup — the dinosaur mouth that we had built had these big teeth in it. 

The 5-year-olds didn’t see a dinosaur. They saw a swimming pool, because the bottom of the dinosaur’s jaw had these big teeth around it, and they were like, “Oh, it’s a swimming pool.” So then they designed dinosaurs that went into the swimming pool. 

You kind of come in with these stories and intentions of what you think kids are going to connect to. … And then you get there and it’s just one little detail of how the model was designed just throws the whole lesson out the window.

How are educators responding?

We’re doing this in a way where the teacher is able to come along for the journey, where we’ve prepared all of the materials that are necessary for a teacher, who often feels less confident about computer science and AI than their students do, giving them everything that they need to feel not just prepared, but to feel confident. 

There’s this kind of power dynamic that’s happening with AI today, where we’re more focused on what computers can do than we are on what children can do right now. And I think that’s really fundamental to our approach … When you get a bunch of kids together to train a Lego robot how to dance, this kind of fear dissipates. They see the cause and effect between the model that they trained and what’s happening in the world, and they realize that the machine only knows what they taught it. 

The AI is no longer the smartest thing in the room. They’re the smartest thing in the room, and the AI is a tool. 

“It’s pretty grim,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, about the outlook for the sector.

“I don’t think anyone is particularly optimistic about child care” in the new year, added Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). 

A handful of early care and education experts noted that 2025 did herald in a number of key victories in the field. 

Some states in policies shaping child care and early childhood education. In 2025, , and were among those that made new investments in the field. New Mexico took its gains in recent years a step further by free universal child care for all families, regardless of income, beginning last November. 

Alongside those wins for early learners and their caregivers came some challenges. Head Start was caught in political crosshairs more than once throughout the year — first when it was for elimination, then when many of its regional offices across the country were , and later when programs serving thousands of children nearly lost access to services during the prolonged government shutdown. And some states, such as Indiana, by the end of federal pandemic relief dollars, began to for families and programs, slashing provider reimbursement rates, instituting co-pays for families who use subsidies, and changing subsidy eligibility, among other actions. 

Now, those experts say, the that many states have experienced as historic pandemic-era investments expired is going to run headlong into another kind of budget shortfall in 2026. That’s one of four main issues they said they’ll be watching in early care and education in the new year. 

1. Child Care Spending: States Begin Tightening the Belt

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed into law in July 2025 includes significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The cuts effectively shift the costs of those programs from the federal government to states. If states decide to pick up the tab, they’ll likely have to pull back on other services.

Most of the cuts won’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterm elections, but states will start planning ahead. 

“It’s less painful to do it slowly than all at once,” explained Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at ZERO TO THREE. 

Unlike the federal government, states can’t spend more than they earn; they have to balance their budgets. So they’ll be looking for ways to increase revenue, such as through new taxes, or cut costs by eliminating or scaling back programs and services. 

“Uncertainty is the word,” said Aaron Loewenberg, senior policy analyst at New America. “There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty at this point about what the next year or two could look like.”

As states look to reduce costs, they will have fewer dollars to invest in early care and education. Certainly the prospect of bold new projects and initiatives seems less likely, experts said, but it’s also possible that existing programs could be scaled back. 

What will emerge, said Hains of NAEYC, is a divide between states that have the will and resources to fund ECE, and states that don’t. 

“We’re going to be looking at two very different countries: States that have revenue to invest in child care and early learning — [like] Vermont, New Mexico, Connecticut, Montana — while other states are going to be in more constrained and challenging situations.”

Ultimately, funding cuts will be felt by children, families and early educators. 

“There’s no way to nickel and dime investing in children,” Boteach said. “At the end of the day, if we’re going to really transform outcomes for children and families, it requires resources. … Children in this country are going to suffer because we are disinvesting rather than investing in their future.”

2. Expanding Access: Can Promises of Universal Child Care Be Fulfilled? 

New Mexico’s pledge of free, universal child care has buoyed the spirits of many early childhood educators and advocates. 

“It’s an enormous bright spot in an otherwise very difficult year,” Boteach said.

The initiative is in its early days — the income limitation was lifted on Nov. 1, 2025 — so this year will offer state leaders a chance to make good on their promise. Early childhood policy experts will be watching closely. 

Loewenberg of New America said he’ll be looking at how leaders navigate in the system, whether families feel it’s successful, and how such a policy could be replicated in states that don’t have the oil and gas revenues that New Mexico uses to fund universal child care. 

Meanwhile, all eyes will be on New York City as Mayor Zohran Mamdani settles into his new role and pursues his own for universal child care. 

“I’m holding out excitement or negativity to wait and see what happens,” said Loewenberg. “I think we’re past the point of saying, ‘This is great because people are talking about it.’ The difficult work is being able to make it work. That remains to be seen.”

One critical step is working out the funding mechanism for universal child care, which will likely require from the state government. 

Hains does find the policy pledge in itself encouraging. 

“Reflecting back on the last decade or two in this work, how amazing is it that we are at a place where mayors and governors are putting forward real, meaningful proposals of child care as a public good that’s available to everybody?” Hains said. “As a whole, looking at the big picture, it’s exciting that child care feels like something that elected officials can deliver on.”

3. Workforce Instability: Immigration Enforcement Creates Chilling Effect

In 2025, the Trump administration intensified immigration enforcement, which has had deleterious consequences for early childhood educators and, in turn, the families who rely on them.

An estimated early childhood educators are immigrants. In large urban areas, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, immigrants make up of the child care workforce, Boteach pointed out. 

New America, a left-leaning think tank, released a in December that found a strong association between the increase in ICE activity and the number of foreign-born child care workers: Between February and July 2025, as ICE arrests increased after President Trump took office, there were 39,000 fewer foreign-born child care workers than the same period in 2024. 

With more funding for immigration enforcement, detention and deportation included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the trend is expected to continue in 2026. 

“Immigration enforcement, to me, right now, is the number one disruptor both to parent behavior and provider behavior,” said Renew of Home Grown. “It is hugely disruptive.” 

Because arrests have been , they have created a culture of fear among immigrants, even those with legal status in the country, New America found. And now that are fair game for ICE activity — prior to Trump’s second term, they were protected under a “sensitive locations” exception — many educators and parents worry about what may unfold before children’s eyes. 

“The amount of stress, the amount of worry about targeting in your community, can affect providers’ mental health and then the health of those kids in their care,” Boteach said. 

In effect, the escalation in immigration enforcement may impact both the availability and the quality of early care and education, she added.

4. Bright Spots: Solutions Emerge Amid Challenges

Even in a challenging political and budgetary environment, there are bright spots to keep an eye on in 2026. 

For one, Loewenberg pointed out, Head Start is still a viable, funded federal program. A year ago, that was not a sure thing.

A second is that a number of states with protected revenue streams for early care and education, including New Mexico and Vermont, will continue to invest in the field. Others are jumping in to commit more dollars to the sector — , and among them.  

Finally, early care and education is proving to be a viable campaign issue. In addition to Mamdani’s victory in New York, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia both won their gubernatorial races by talking about child care. 

“You’re seeing in the elections that candidates that ran on child care, ran on helping families and children, won,” Boteach said. “These are winning political issues, which means both parties should be vying to talk about these issues and govern on these issues.”

Indeed, Hains feels that the country is moving from a place of “whether” child care is a government responsibility to “how” and how much the government should be involved.

Amid these developments — some amazing research and resources have emerged for the field. As the year comes to a close, zero2eight asked early care and education experts to share what they consider to be the sector’s must-read research of 2025. What emerged from their responses were a collection of reports, studies and data tools relevant to a number of urgent themes. These include the sector’s ability to respond to current events, new ways of thinking about preschool gains and economic analysis of some of the ongoing challenges facing the early care and education workforce. 

Here are some of the themes, studies and resources identified by the field’s insiders as essential to moving the sector forward.

1. Timely Research and Resources for Challenging Times

Steeply rising costs, and have all contributed to a challenging, fast-changing landscape for families and early educators, and reliant on public benefits. The following new research and tools offer timely insights into how such pressures are reshaping families’ lives and the early care and education sector, with some offering inspiration for how to respond. 

Working Paper: 

Authors: Thomas S. Dee, economist and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: Immigration raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with especially large increases among the youngest students. 

This study highlights the field’s “ability to innovate and be nimble to understand impacts of policy and policy enforcement,” said nominator Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood who studies family well-being. It examines the collateral damage of unexpected immigration raids in California’s Central Valley, documenting a clear pattern in children’s school attendance, said second nominator Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, adding that “ICE raids are associated with increased school absenteeism.” According to the working paper, young children are expected to be the most likely to miss school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade estimated to be far more likely to miss school as a result of immigration raids than high school students. 

Report:

Authors: Children’s Funding Project staff, including Bruno Showers, state policy manager; Lisa Christensen Gee, director of tax policy; Olivia Allen, vice president of strategy and advocacy; Josh Weinstock, policy analyst (former); and Marina Mendoza, senior manager of early childhood impact

Key Takeaway: Facing dwindling federal funds, several states have innovated ways to provide dedicated funding for early care and education and youth programs.

With pandemic-era relief funds running out, states are in desperate need of models for how to continue supporting early care and education, said Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), who nominated this recent report. The report — from Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that helps secure sustainable public funding for children’s services — offers exactly that by providing a crucial, “very comprehensive overview” of how some states are building long-term, dedicated revenue streams for child care, early education and youth programs as federal money runs dry. As the report’s authors explain, stable, dedicated funding is critical to thriving programs, letting states and providers to “budget more than one year at a time, allowing them to make longer-term investments in quality improvement, facilities, staff education, and other key elements of evidence-based programs and services.” 

Data Tools: and

Authors: The diaper need mapping tool was published as part of a research collaboration between the Urban Institute and the National Diaper Bank Network. The affordability tracker was published by the Urban Institute. 

Key takeaway: Families are facing mounting economic insecurity 

The Urban Institute recently released two innovative data tools for policymakers, advocates and researchers that illuminate the increasing economic precariousness facing too many families, said Carman of the RAPID Survey Project. The interactive, produced in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Initiative, shows how many diapers each county across the nation needs to address diaper shortages facing homes with young children that are below 300% of the federal poverty level. illustrates the rising cost pressures facing families across various indicators, including how the price of groceries has changed in counties and congressional districts in recent years. “Being able to see and understand scale and drivers of economic insecurity nationally is very powerful,” wrote Carman. 

2. New Research Reveals Preschool’s Overlooked Impacts

The body of early education research about how preschool affects children often measures child outcomes such as kindergarten readiness, standardized test scores or later graduation rates. While those are all important, Christina Weiland, professor at the Marsal School of Education at the University of Michigan and the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in an email, “we’ve long suspected they aren’t the full picture of preschool’s effects.” Weiland nominated the following working paper as part of what she considers to be a new wave of research that explores a broader set of outcomes than the field has typically examined, such as parent earnings, and subsequent schooling environments. “Together, these studies suggest benefits of preschool programs that have been largely overlooked,” but that are key to fully understanding the potential benefits of early learning investments for children and families, noted Weiland.

Working Paper:

Authors: John Eric Humphries, faculty research fellow at Yale University’s Department of Economics; Christopher Neilson, research associate at Yale University; Xiaoyang Ye, Brown University; and Seth D. Zimmerman, research associate at Yale School of Management 

Key Takeaway: New Haven’s universal pre-K (UPK) program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years.

Weiland said that this notable study, published in 2024 and updated in 2025, expands the preschool picture by looking at how UPK might impact parents’ earnings,” and uses that to estimate the program’s returns on investment. It found that New Haven’s UPK program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years, concluding that the returns to UPK investment are “high.” As one of the first studies looking at “earnings data in modern-day pre-K studies,” noted Weiland, it offers more evidence that the field is “likely underestimating the return on investment early education programs have.” 

3. Spotlight on the Early Child Care Workforce

Back in the spring, child care economist Chris Herbst spoke with zero2eight about how the COVID pandemic demonstrated how the child care workforce is “like a leaf blowing in the wind” — “sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.” Because of this, a new surge of recent research by economists has focused on the workforce, with researchers seeking to understand how early care providers respond to policy and market changes. Nominators pointed toward two such studies. 

Working Paper:

Authors: Katharine C. Sadowski, assistant professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: An increase in minimum wage changes who provides child care

Combining “rich data with sensible research designs,” this study examines how an increase in the minimum wage could impact child care quality and access, noted nominator Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 

Author Katharine C. Sadowski’s findings suggest that an increase to the minimum wage doesn’t lead to a decrease in the number of child care programs or the number of people working in the sector. However, minimum wage policies can influence who provides child care: larger enterprises, such as child care centers, are more likely to open and remain in operation, while smaller, self-employed providers, such as home-based child care programs, are less likely to open or remain in business. Among the smaller establishments that do stay open, the owners are less likely to have advanced degrees, the study found, potentially impacting the quality of child care provided, according to the author. “Unfortunately, minimum wage policy is binding and too important for a lot of child care employers and employees due to chronic underinvestment in the sector,” wrote Sojourner, adding that this is the first paper he’s seen to leverage “restricted-use data available through the U.S. Census Research Data Center system to generate insights on the sector.”

Study:

Authors: Chris M. Herbst, foundation professor in Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs 

Key Takeaway: The education of the early education workforce has dropped over time, possibly due to the sector’s low wages 

This study found that the education levels and cognitive test scores of the early education workforce have been declining over time, suggesting lower teacher quality, which could have implications for children’s development. The study links this dip in teacher skills to the proliferation of early education programs which might divert future child care workers away from four-year colleges. It also looks at how low wages — which have remained low even as wages for other jobs for similarly-skilled workers have increased — might lead highly qualified individuals to choose other occupations. 

“This is analogous to what,” wrote Jessica Brown, assistant professor of economics at University of South Carolina, who nominated the study. It “underscores the importance of the discussion of compensation in early childhood education.” Brown notes that it’s a difficult topic for the field to discuss, because “no one wants to imply that the current workforce is not high quality. But the reality is that compensation challenges mean that child care is not a very attractive job, and that has implications for the quality of the workforce.”

This accounts for close to 10% of all of those served by the early learning programs for lower-income families. 

Due to the timing of federal grants, six Head Start programs serving 6,525 children in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama are already operating without federal funding, the association said. So far, they’ve been able to keep their doors open by drawing on emergency local resources, but that money could soon dry up.  

By Nov. 1, an additional 134 programs across 41 states and Puerto Rico, serving 58,627 children, will face the same fate. In Florida alone, 9,711 Head Start and Early Head Start seats are threatened.

“Programs are scrambling,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “We don’t want to see our children become the victims or [get] caught in the crosshairs of these types of political fights.”

Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden, called it a significant threat and “the latest attack in a series of attacks on Head Start” since President Donald Trump took office for a second time in January.

“What we don’t know is who’s going to have to close immediately, but some will,” Hamm told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Friday, noting the damaging impact closures would have on some of the nation’s most vulnerable children and their families.

Sheridan expressed similar fears: “losing that type of routine, which is so critical for young children — especially young children who have so much going on in their lives — is really problematic for their development.“

“Beyond that,” he said, “it’s going to force parents into making some really tough decisions.”

Head Start parents often work multiple jobs, yet still live under the federal poverty line and so are unable to afford other sources of child care and early learning. If the shutdown continues, Sheridan said, some may have to leave the workforce to care for their kids themselves.

The government shutdown has now dragged into its third week, after Senate Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly failed to come to an agreement on a funding bill. Democrats are that have allowed millions of people to access health care since the pandemic, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Congress passes a bill to reopen the government. 

President Donald Trump has with cuts so far, though interruptions to Head Start funding would impact thousands of families across the political spectrum. For example, in alone, just over 3,700 children are in jeopardy of losing services as of Nov. 1.

This has all compounded existing financial strain on local programs, many of which have struggled to hire and retain teachers, according to the national association. It also follows multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration that have plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty this year. 

The administration froze — then quickly unfroze, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. They also grant recipients that funding would be denied for any programming that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, without defining what that might include — leading to confusion and a lawsuit. 

Then, in July, the administration announced a drastic federal policy shift that would bar many immigrant families from the early education centers. In September, a Seattle judge ruled that these kids can remain in Head Start programs throughout the country, while a case challenging Trump’s order makes its way through the courts.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Office of Head Start, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hamm emphasized that cuts to Head Start services would have a ripple effect across communities, especially rural ones for whom the program may be the only early learning program available as well as a relied-upon contributor to the local economy.

And once a program closes, it can’t always quickly re-open, as laid off staff may be forced to find employment elsewhere.

“Head Start is not a light switch,” she said. “You can’t just turn it off and then two weeks later open it back up.”

Since its inception in the 1960s, Head Start programs have reached and their families, the majority of whom meet federal low-income guidelines. the $12.1 billion program served about 754,800 children from birth to age 5, as well as pregnant mothers and their families in urban, suburban and rural areas in all 50 states and six territories.

They also connect families to community and federal assistance and can help provide a career pathway for parents into early child care and education. The 1,600 local agencies are funded by the federal government, though many also tap into state and local revenue sources.

Historically during shutdowns, Head Start agencies were able to take out loans or dip into reserve funding with confidence that they’d be reimbursed once the government re-opened. While Hamm said she doesn’t have any reason to believe this administration will change that policy, “the way that they have been targeting certain programs and federal staff is leading people to worry,” including banks that have in the past acted as lenders. 

Compounding this anxiety is a concern around other programs that Head Start families often rely on, such as Medicaid; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC; and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

Despite these hurdles, Sheridan said the Head Start community has really rallied to try and protect and support kids. That being said, the coming challenges are “really disheartening, because children and families should never be put at risk because of political gridlock.”

Last week, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department announced that New Mexico will become the to offer universal child care to families as of Nov. 1. 

Over the past six years, New Mexico has become a trailblazer in child care infrastructure. In 2019, the state created its first Early Childhood Education and Care Department with a Cabinet-level secretary, showing a commitment to improving care and support for young children. In 2022, New Mexico became the first state to enshrine a right to early education for children 0 to 5 years old, by passing a constitutional amendment and directing dedicated funding to child care and early childhood education. The state pulled dollars from its Land, which collects and invests profits from oil and gas revenues, and created a steady stream of money for early childhood programs. This has led to increased pay for teachers, higher reimbursements for providers that accept subsidies, more families qualifying for free or reduced price child care, and more child care slots.

Since 2019, the state has made progress on improving access and affordability of child care, expanding free child care to families with an income at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, which for a family of four is an annual household income of $128,600. But without a sliding scale model, families with an income over that threshold were left responsible for covering the cost of care. Starting in November, all residents of New Mexico will be able access child care for free, regardless of income. 

In a touting the change, the state estimates that families will save an average of $12,000 per year. The state is also implementing an incentive rate for child care providers that commit to paying entry-level staff a minimum of $18 per hour and offer 10 hours of care per day, five days a week, with the goal of creating an additional 5,000 early childhood professionals to staff a universal system.

Here’s a look back at some of the key actions and policy changes that have led New Mexico to arrive at universal free child care.

2019

New Mexico creates the Early Childhood Education and Care Department

In 2019, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law Senate Bill 22, creating the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department — an agency that would coordinate the work of three previous departments under a single entity to administer all state programs for children from prenatal to 5 years old. Though several states had Cabinets devoted to the interests of children, this move led New Mexico to become one of four with a department entirely dedicated to early childhood.

2021

Grassroots advocates in New Mexico target money from the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund to pay for early childhood education

After a decade of organizing, early childhood education advocates in New Mexico home in on creating a change to their state constitution to guarantee a right to early education, eyeing the Land Grant Permanent Fund as a path toward developing a funding stream to support the vision.

2022

A Win for Early Childhood Education with a Ballot Initiative

On Nov. 8, 2022, New Mexico voters a constitutional amendment making their state the first to guarantee a right to early childhood education with funding to support it. 

Grassroots activists mobilized to bring a change in early childhood education to New Mexico, and after a ten year battle they found success through a constitutional amendment which received more than 70% of the vote. 

Hailey Heiz, deputy director of the University of New Mexico Cradle to Career Policy Institute, explores how New Mexico’s child care landscape has changed and what advocates across the country should keep their eyes on in this Q&A.

2024

After COVID disruptions, report shows New Mexico among states making top gains in pre-K enrollment

Two years after voters in New Mexico demanded more access to early childhood education by , the state’s investment has begun to show success. According to the From the National Institute for Early Education Research, it’s one of the top states to make gains in preschool enrollment, with 70% of 4-year-olds now attending public preschool, making the state one of just a handful that serves at least two-thirds of eligible students.

2025

A glimpse into New Mexico’s progress over the years

New Mexico’s early care and education system has undergone dramatic changes over the past five years as a result of a significant investment the state made in 2019. Increased wages for early educators, higher reimbursement rates for providers who accept subsidies, increased capacity and an increase in the number of families eligible for free or reduced price child care are among the advancements

There are tribes living on in New Mexico, a state where Native American citizens represent about of the population. Half of the Head Start and Early Head Start programs in New Mexico are on tribal lands. 

In addition to investing in early care and education by expanding funding, creating a dedicated department for early childhood and becoming the first state to guarantee a right to early childhood education, New Mexico has also explored ways to support its tribal communities. This includes supporting programs that preserve tribal languages and culture. 

With federal funds from the American Rescue Plan gone, some states have established trust funds dedicated to early care and education — and some say they’ve drawn inspiration from New Mexico, which was ahead of the curve. From voters approving the ballot measure to devote funding to early care and education in 2022, to efforts to decrease costs for families and increase pay for providers, and more recently, doubling the minimum amount the fund will spend on early education each year — the state has been a leader.

New Mexico becomes the first state to offer universal child care

On Monday, Sept. 8, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and the New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department that New Mexico will become the first state in the nation to guarantee no-cost universal child care to families starting on Nov. 1, making child care free for families, regardless of income. 

The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics in June, involved a meta-analysis of 84 studies and found that paternal mental distress around the time of birth was associated with poorer global, social-emotional, cognitive, language and physical development in their children. 

While research on the intersection of mental health and parenthood has long focused on mothers, this analysis sought to examine whether the mental health of fathers influences child development, said Delyse Hutchinson, an associate professor in the school of psychology at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia and the study’s senior author.

The results didn’t surprise Hutchinson, she said. “It’s still a stigma for a lot of dads, mental health, and they tend not to talk about it openly and that kind of leads maybe to a lot of men not even necessarily recognizing that they’re experiencing mental health symptoms.” 

“It matters for families. It matters for supporting mums and babies. So it’s not a surprise. It’s just the affirmation and having the evidence to take to policy makers, healthcare, and say, look, this does matter. We’re gonna do more about this,” she added.

The studies included in the analysis followed the development of children ages 0 to 18, though the majority of research examined development before adolescence. Hutchinson emphasized that the postpartum period, when fathers typically have more direct contact with their baby, has the greatest impact on a child’s development. 

Part of the study’s goal was to build awareness around what depression looks like for dads, since they often than women. Men might withdraw socially or feel unable to emotionally regulate themselves. They could also erupt in outbursts or anger, Hutchinson said.

While conducting the analysis, researchers found that a father’s mental state affects children in a number of ways, most notably a child’s social-emotional development, including emotional regulation and social skills. Children who grow up in a household with a father navigating mental health issues such as depression, may themselves have difficulty regulating their emotions, Hutchinson said. 

“Say you’re feeling a little bit sad and down, you tend to be less sensitive towards others, or if you’re getting agitated and frustrated … that’s a less sensitive response to an infant or a young child,” Hutchinson added.

Children pick up on emotional cues. When a child experiences their father expressing anger or distress, it can lead them to develop an insecure bond with him, according to Hutchinson. This can bring a child to feel unsure that their dad can provide for their emotional needs.

Most of the existing research on how a parent’s mental health influences child development focuses either on both parents or just the mother, Hutchinson explained. That means moms and dads are grouped together when researchers look at development outcomes for children. While conducting the meta-analysis, lead researcher Genevieve Le Bas reached out to many authors of the published studies to ask if they could retrieve unpublished data on the mental health of fathers.

“Whilst a very significant proportion of the data in this review is from published studies, we often had to contact authors to obtain data on fathers that wasn’t specifically recorded in those studies,” said Hutchinson.

The fact that fathers were either initially left out or mixed into data about mothers is reflective of larger issues in the research field, as well as the culture of parenting, Hutchinson explained. That culture tends to push fathers to the side and neglect health services which could support them throughout parenthood.

But the role of fathers in parenting and the awareness around their mental health is changing. Dr. Craig Garfield, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University and a practicing pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, has experienced that change firsthand as both a father and a researcher. When Garfield took a year off to take care of his 18-month-old son, he felt very lonely. He recalled being the sole father on the playground and in the local “mom and tot” classes. Soon after, he shifted his research focus from injury prevention in childhood to the role of fathers in families.

Medical journal reviewers have long been skeptical that fathers can experience post-natal depression, Garfield said. When he worked on a with his colleagues in 2002 about how pediatricians can support fathers and recommended screening fathers for depression after their partner gave birth, he got pushback during the peer review process.

“It came back from the reviewer saying, ‘There’s no such thing as this. You can’t kind of make it up and start suggesting screening dads,’” he said. “And to a certain extent, that is true. There was not much in the literature, but we all knew from clinical experience that there were dads that were depressed.”It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that Garfield was able to include peer-reviewed studies on paternal mental health in his published research papers, he said. 

There are cultural norms and stereotypes working against dads, Garfield said, but it’s necessary to recognize that paternal mental health affects families every day — and to address the issue. 

Addressing Mental Health for Fathers

There are a number of efforts underway to address some of the findings surfaced by the emerging body of research on fathers’ mental health. Kevin Seldon, who runs Dads Supporting Dads, a network of organizations supporting fathers under the nonprofit All Parents Welcome, said the dads he works with are often met with skepticism when they express their struggles with postpartum depression. Seldon and his wife spent years trying to have a baby. During the birth of their son, his wife needed an oxygen mask and their baby emerged blue. (Seldon’s wife and now 6-year-old son are healthy.) 

“It’s very stressful and anytime I tried to address it, people would be like, ‘You didn’t give birth.’ But trauma is not mutually exclusive,” Seldon said.“[After] five years of struggling and the very traumatic birth — by the time we got home, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror.”

Dads Supporting Dads grew out of a podcast Seldon launched when he found himself feeling isolated after the birth of his son. Through his show Dad I’d Like to Friend, Seldon and other fathers were able to talk about their feelings after the birth of their children. 

“My wife had all these moms groups, right? But I couldn’t find any support,” Seldon said. “I realized that I was so far from alone, so many people were struggling.” He also sought help through talk therapy, which helped him understand that his depression wasn’t uncommon, that what he experienced wasn’t a depressive episode, and that his emotions wouldn’’t necessarily disappear a few years after birth. 

As the podcast took off and Seldon saw demand for that connection, he started facilitating in-person gatherings for local dads and a WhatsApp community where dads could connect across the country. 

As nonprofit organizations and community groups look to connect fathers, researchers are urging policymakers to enact more and physical and mental health for fathers. Though society has traditionally pushed dads to return to work as quickly as possible to get a paycheck, Garfield believes paternity leave could help fathers better support their children.

“I took care of a family in the NICU this weekend where the baby was two days old in the NICU and dad’s back at work,” Garfield said. “One of the most important things that we can do is really work toward paid leave for moms and for dads.”

The initiative addresses these early learning gaps by supporting municipalities in prioritizing early childhood development across various sectors like education, health and housing. 

La Habra, California was the first municipality to join the initiative, which was launched in March by (First 5 OC), a public agency focused on enabling children to reach their full potential. The city signaling its commitment to prioritize early childhood development. “We’re going to see a whole different La Habra as far as education and success,” declared Mayor Rose Espinoza. â€œWe believe in what you’re doing, we believe in our children, and we believe in our community.”

Erwin Cox, who leads family and community engagement at First 5 OC, says La Habra, which has a population just over 60,000, fits the initiative because of its size and character. “It’s a very small city, and everybody knows each other, and people tend to stay there.”

But what does it actually mean for a city to be early childhood friendly? “For us, it means community partnerships, learning each other’s systems,” said Joanna Perez, executive director for early childhood development in La Habra. 

The early childhood city designation represents a fundamental shift in how municipalities think about their youngest residents, she added. Rather than viewing early childhood services as separate from traditional city functions like infrastructure, public safety and economic development, La Habra has recognized that investing in children from birth through age 5 is essential for community prosperity.

“We’re intentional about where we’re placing things, how we’re doing it, with the ultimate goal of exposing kids to lifelong learning,” said Perez.  “We want them to be able to love learning and be confident.” Early childhood perspectives permeate all aspects of city planning and development. “Always having that early childhood or education person in the room, along with engineers and city council,” said Perez, “means that everybody relates to what we’re doing. It’s also their story.”

It’s Perez’s own story too. The mother of 6-year-old triplets was born in La Habra and benefited from the types of programs she now oversees. Perez explained that she helped design her role leading the city’s , which she said is funded by grants from the California Department of Education, the California State Preschool Program and California Department of Social Services, along with federal funding for food programs.

The city’s early childhood journey didn’t start with the resolution. Tiffany Alva, First 5 OC’s director of partnerships and government affairs, described it as the public manifestation of a long process of engaging government, health care, real estate development and other business interests in the well-being of children. “La Habra already had a strong early childhood foundation,” she said. “The initiative isn’t about starting from scratch — it’s about connecting the dots, aligning what’s already there and expanding access so more families can benefit.”

, a kindergarten readiness program in La Habra, exemplifies the kind of local program the initiative supports. The program has been serving the community since 2019. It brings together educators and families for activities and learning. 

Irish Domantay, a mother living in La Habra, said Little Learners contributed to her 4-year-old son’s development. As a toddler, he had a speech delay, she said.  “I wanted him to get a little bit more exposure to the community and among his peers.” She said he’s been attending Little Learner for three years, and it helped him grow. “Oh my gosh, he doesn’t stop talking now,” she said. At Little Learners, she said, “he’s with his peers and interacting. They also have the food pantry there, and so it’s just a really great way to not only get parent interaction, but also get extra resources.”

Andrea Granados, another local mom, benefited from the city’s efforts on behalf of families with young kids. When Granados moved to La Habra from nearby Buena Park, she felt overwhelmed. In Buena Park,  she said, “I know the whole school system, I know all the school teachers, I know programs of where to go to. So coming here was like, okay, where are we going?” Granados said the Gary Center, a health clinic serving La Habra and surrounding communities provided her with the guidance she needed. “The community liaison said Little Learners is probably a good place for you to bring your children. And we did.” Granados started taking her kids to Little Learners every Wednesday, which helped them build relationships with other families.

With the resolution, La Habra intends to help more families like Domantay’s and Granados’ gain access to early intervention services, peer interactions and high-quality learning opportunities for their young children. The initiative also aims to help parents find community, access resources and build the relationships that make a neighborhood feel like home. When city leaders make decisions about parks, transportation, housing and services, they will consider how those decisions will affect young children.

It’s too early to measure direct changes in EDI scores from La Habra’s resolution. In fact, Alva explained that a variety of efforts contribute to the kind of long-term impact EDI measures, but she said goals include:

• Strengthening cross-sector collaboration so city departments, schools and community partners are aligning policies and practices with early childhood in mind by 2026.
• Building parent and caregiver engagement in early development initiatives, with the goal of 50% of families participating in at least one city-supported program or event annually by 2027.
• Expanding access to quality early learning opportunities so that 90% of children ages 0-5 are engaged in some form of enriching care or preschool by 2028.

In June, the city of Anaheim and the vision is to continue expanding, explained Cox. “We’re trying to push forward resolutions in Santa Ana and Garden Grove as well, in an effort to bring in government, and bring everybody on board to support this.”

With federal funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting now wiped out, one of the few trusted, equity-driven sources of children’s media is seriously wounded. challenge not only the families and educators who rely on PBS Kids, but also the broader media landscape that risks becoming even more fragmented, commercial and inequitable.

The cuts present a critical juncture and potential pivot point. How educators, media makers and policymakers respond will shape not just children’s school readiness, but the civic health, creativity and curiosity of a generation raised in the shadows of algorithmic platforms. 

To meet the moment, policy leaders and educators must move beyond screen time limits and cell phone bans — and focus instead on a long-term vision rooted in shared public interest values, powered by human connection and guided by standards that prioritize children’s well-being from the start.

Babies and Toddlers Are Using Screens — Now What?

Recent studies and scholars have the growing use of screen media among infants and toddlers. The , a study of media use for children from birth through age 8 conducted in 2024, showed that the average infant and toddler under 2 years old was spending more than an hour a day on screens, with children ages 2 to 4 using screens more than two hours daily. In Fall 2023, while I was head of learning and impact at Noggin, an interactive platform for kids ages 2 to 8, my team led a study of 400 families with children under 3 and found screen use now begins in infancy for more than 95% of families. 

For overworked and under-resourced families, screens aren’t optional — they’re essential tools for navigating daily life. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok and AI bots like are commanding children’s attention, fueled by opaque algorithms and ad-based business models that promote addictive, low-quality content. Early media exposure can no longer be considered peripheral. Reduced federal support for PBS Kids and other public media will make that imbalance more acute unless private and philanthropic sources step up.

Reimagining Early Learning Media in the AI Era

At the same time, a major disruption in media production for kids is underway, powered by fast, cheap video production, artificial intelligence and personalized learning technologies. Legacy organizations like Sesame Workshop and PBS face pressure to keep pace with viral success stories like Ms. Rachel and , which have shown how efficient, engaging content can reach millions.

I currently mentor entrepreneurs experimenting with how new technologies like voice recognition and artificial intelligence can support young kids. I’ve seen promising innovations that build on the foundational equity and inclusion principles popularized by public media pioneers like Fred Rogers and Joan Ganz Cooney. The ones that shine most brightly are those that reflect the original spirit of Sesame Street: equity through innovation.

The founders are prioritizing three key principles: connected learning, personalized choice and family co-viewing. Each principle recognizes that brain development is most rapid in the first five years of life, that intention for little ones can be easily scrambled by powerful algorithms and that busy parents — like it or not — have chosen to make digital and screen media a feature of daily life. 

By designing products that stimulate curiosity and discourage overconsumption, media developers can encourage children to practice their “I can do it” moments ; use and guide language learning; and deliver “just in time” content to drive school readiness. Some pioneers are taking a playbook from research on Sesame Street’s power to scaffold learning via to create new opportunities for intergenerational play, a critical opportunity for parent-child and healthy development.

These new models rely on modern ingredients, such as AI, real-time data and mobile-first, multi-platform design. In the wake of federal cuts, companies and organizations building tools to support young children’s early learning and development have a responsibility to leverage research on the value public media has brought to young children for decades and the opportunity that high-quality, tech-enabled learning can deliver. 

The reality is that child development experts and educators who have been studying how kids learn and grow for decades now must confront a digital revolution powered by generative AI, immersive media and increasingly personal learning companions. This wave could either democratize access to world-class learning or cement a two-tiered system: premium, voice-based tools for the wealthy; and game-heavy, ad-driven distractions for everyone else.

To prevent that outcome, we need clear public standards for AI in early childhood, informed by early learning experts and advocates. “No AI bots for tots” should be an early mantra of concern for all human-centered designs for children under age 8. We also need an industry-wide commitment to ethical and responsible development of any AI-driven product designed for children that young and transparency about how AI tools are trained, and who they are designed to serve.

A National Strategy for Children’s Media

To ensure the next generation of early learning media — now introduced into the crib — are “helpmates” and rather than substitutes for the warm, responsive adult relationships that fuel real learning, the nation needs a clear strategy for children’s media. The strategy must safeguard the development of young children, blend the trusted legacy of public media with today’s most promising tech tools, and embrace a broad cross-sector alliance.

That strategy begins with restoring adequate funding for PBS, but public dollars alone won’t be enough. To move from patchwork to progress, I propose six coordinated actions:

First, we need a new funding stream for children’s media modeled on the that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Backed by a consortium of philanthropies and individuals, the fund could be sustained by state and community-based financing models administered through public agencies and could galvanize public support for inclusive, research-backed media tools built for children’s developmental needs.

Second, we must establish shared standards for responsible media and AI design in early childhood. Policymakers should work with trusted early learning and development partners to create guardrails that prioritize equity and authentic learning over clicks and virality.

Third, state leaders — who are poised to wield more discretion as federal dollars devolve — should direct resources toward high-quality digital tools and educator training to better use proven public media offerings across Head Start, family child care, and pre-K settings.

Fourth, edtech leaders and investors must design learning tools and business models that prioritize trust, transparency and impact and engage in longitudinal research that tracks how digital tools close equity gaps and support healthy development.

Fifth, educators and families must recognize that they’re not just users, they are catalysts for change who can push for media that’s feedback-rich, culturally affirming and scaffolded for learning; can demand better integration between home and classroom technologies; and can shape the field by voicing what works, what fails and what’s missing.

Finally, pediatricians and health leaders must help reframe the screen time conversation from guilt to guidance. By lifting up high-quality media as a tool for overstretched families, rather than a threat, they can re-center the conversation around children’s real needs: connection, stimulation, and joy.

We’ve lingered too long in the wet cement of funding debates and in a digital marketplace where profit often outweighs purpose. The recent, and sadly predictable, federal cuts to public media should be treated not only as a wake-up call, but as a catalytic moment to act.

This will take public investment, private ingenuity, and political courage. But most of all, it will take national will: the conviction that every child, regardless of income or ZIP code, deserves access to inspiring, developmentally sound, high-quality media content that sparks curiosity, fuels learning and lifts their full civic potential.

Nearly of first and second graders report being “moderately nervous” or “very, very nervous” about math, according to a . This anxiety disproportionately affects and . If bias in curriculum or instruction makes a child feel like they don’t belong, they might not realize their potential for solving mathematical problems and figuring out the world. 

The Racial Justice in Early Math (RJEM) aims to make math accessible and engaging for all children. The one-year program helps kindergarten teachers better understand the intersection between racial justice and early math. 

The fellowship is part of the project, which launched in 2019 as a partnership between and the . RJEM was built upon a theoretical framework and practical applications developed by , associate research professor and director of the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson Institute and , professor of education and mathematics at UIC. 

The RJEM team examines the ways racial bias seeps into the classroom, organizes dialogue around this issue and develops practices for educators. McCray said she often asks educators to reflect on their earliest math experiences. Did they feel proud of themselves? Were they excited to make connections between ideas? Or did they feel left out, concluding that they simply aren’t so-called “math people?”

“Teachers are math anxious,” McCray explained “Math has been used to sort people.” Labeling children as having or not having math aptitude sets them on a lifelong trajectory, and that pressure creates anxiety, she explained. But McCray and Martin assert that there’s no such thing as a “math person” or a “not-math person.” In a , Martin characterizes the question of “who is defined as ‘smart’ and why?” as an underexplored matter of who holds power in the classroom.

The RJEM Fellowship Is Changing How Early Educators Approach Math

Shae Rounds-Kelley — one of six 2023-24 RJEM fellows — teaches kindergarten at Hernwood Elementary in Randallstown, Maryland, where about . She said this experience helped her identify that part of the issue for her students is a lack of racially and culturally relevant curriculum. Working alongside her cohort and mentors in the program, she developed ideas for redesigning her lessons and strategies to help her kindergarteners make meaningful connections to them.

Rounds-Kelly observed that pedagogical strategies should depend on context. “What works there might not work here,” she said. “The beauty of the fellowship came in moments when we realized we had to stop, calibrate and figure out how to be more culturally relevant and responsive.” 

In addition to her classroom job, Rounds-Kelly is also an adjunct professor at Stevenson University, where she works with future educators. She said the lessons she’s learned from the fellowship are also shaping her work with the next generation of teachers.

Sung Yoon, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in Woodinville, Washington was also part of the 2023-24 cohort. He said the fellowship changed his approach to teaching. Yoon reported that when he told friends and colleagues about the fellowship, a common response was, “So you think math is racist?” He would clarify, “No, that’s not what this is about. It’s about how we teach math and dismantle the white supremacy that has been embedded since the dawn of time.”

Yoon doesn’t always spell out the racial dimension of his approach to teaching. “At our curriculum nights, I don’t explicitly say to parents that we are killing white supremacy in our math education. I do say it’s about thinking critically and coming up with our own ideas,” he explained.

Reflecting on his family’s Korean background, Yoon acknowledged that math is taught differently in the United States. “A lot of people in Korea talk about how American math is easy, but it’s not really easy… There are more story problems, a lot of critical thinking going on, rather than memorization,” he said.

Yoon said that parents of different ethnicities have expressed curiosity and sometimes concern about the way he teaches math. , for example, which focus on concepts like more and less so that children take time to understand context before rushing into arithmetic, have raised eyebrows. “I tell them, ‘In this math workshop, we’re also learning critical thinking skills that are important in the 21st century.’”

A Math Mentorship Model Provides Ongoing Support for Early Educators

A core element of the fellowship is mentorship. The program convenes participants in Chicago and pairs each fellow with a mentor. 

Yoon teamed up with Sisa Pon Renie, an educational coach with Erikson Institute. “We have very similar backgrounds,” he said, “And we bonded so much over that because finding an Asian American teacher is very difficult in the United States.”

For Rounds-Kelly, the experience of working with a mentor was rewarding and beneficial, but it also revealed a lot about the educational support missing at her school, which primarily serves children from low-income families.  “I just love learning from Black women in education, so when I got to work with Donna Johnson, I was like, ‘I want to learn everything from you! Give me all of your knowledge!’” she said.  

According to Rounds-Kelly, Johnson — the assistant director of school support services at Erikson Institute — expressed surprise that Rounds-Kelly didn’t get a stipend from her school to spend on supplies. “I was like, in what world does anyone get money to spend on their class?” she recalled. “My classroom doesn’t have heat! I can’t do all of these great things when my kids are wearing coats and hats.” 

The fellowship and the mentorship has pushed Yoon to think more about representation.“When we think about assumptions about who is good at math, we don’t always see different races,” said Yoon. A lot of the fields considered mathematical are predominantly white, he added. “I love that things have been changing.”

AI is dominating headlines — and rightly so. It’s reshaping industries, redefining work and increasingly influencing homes and childhoods. But as policymakers and technologists rush to prepare K-12 schools for an AI-powered future, they risk overlooking a critical window: the early years, when than at any other point in life.

My own kids, who are 2 and 4 years old, are AI natives. They follow the blue dot on Google Maps, thank the car when it welcomes us across state lines and ask Spotify to play their favorite songs. They recently had a lively conversation about a Roomba they saw vacuuming the office building across the street. They’ve followed a virtual trainer through an “intelligent” home workout. And when my son asked to see a parrot with pigeon wings, DALL-E helped make it real.

Their ease with AI is both fascinating and a little unsettling. To them, machines are as trustworthy as parents or teachers. As a tech-forward parent, I welcome these tools, but I also teach my children a critical distinction: technology is a helper, not a human.

That distinction is already blurring. Voice assistants and recommendation engines sound authoritative, even when they’re wrong. And without early education on how AI works and where its limits lie, the youngest generation is at risk of growing up to trust machines without question. This is especially concerning for children with learning differences, who may be more likely to anthropomorphize technology and treat machines as social beings, according to .

To its credit, the that inspired the pledge recognizes a real need: America’s youth must be prepared to thrive in an AI-driven world. But waiting until kindergarten misses a key window of opportunity. The foundational skills that matter most, especially in a post-AI world — creativity, critical thinking, empathy, resilience — start to take root long before formal schooling begins.

Teaching AI literacy to 3- and 4-year-olds may seem premature, but with companies like Google , it’s more important than ever to start early. Young children are remarkably capable of understanding complex ideas when taught in developmentally appropriate ways. At my children’s preschool in New York City, they’ve learned about skyscrapers and even touched on the events of 9/11. When wildfire smoke from New Jersey recently polluted the air, they discussed climate and health. If I can trust their teachers to guide these complex conversations, I can trust them to begin introducing the concept of AI in ways that are meaningful to my children.

Supporting early AI literacy doesn’t mean more screens for toddlers. It means fostering the human skills that will help young children thrive in a machine-filled world. But who will teach these skills? Parents play an essential role and deserve access to helpful resources, but early childhood educators are especially well-positioned to lead developmentally appropriate conversations on these concepts. And publicly funded early childhood programs, like NYC’s Pre-K for All, can provide the structure and scale needed to ensure all young children are supported, not just those with tech-forward parents. 

The challenge is, most early childhood educators have not been introduced to the concept of AI literacy themselves. As national efforts — such as the new , launched earlier this month by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — prepare to train K-12 teachers, early childhood educators are being left out of the conversation entirely. 

If we want to build the strongest foundation for AI literacy, we need to start earlier. As economist James Heckman has shown, high-quality early learning programs can . Head Start, which reaches from low-income families across the U.S. through a two-generation approach, presents a powerful opportunity to advance AI literacy early and at scale.

One of Head Start’s unique strengths is its , which outlines five key domains of early learning and serves as a foundational guide for state-level early learning standards. Embedding elements of AI literacy within this widely adopted framework could help ensure inclusive access to essential digital skills. By integrating AI concepts into play-based learning, educators, children and caregivers can engage with technology in thoughtful, confident ways.

Imagine an early childhood classroom where teachers and children discuss: What can machines do? What can’t they do? Why do they sometimes make mistakes? These simple questions can grow into the digital discernment our future demands.

AI isn’t coming, it has already arrived and it’s changing how our children learn, play and create. With the right support from our early care and education system, children can be ready to thrive in a world we’re only beginning to imagine.

Recently, Too Small to Fail released a outlining impact and lessons learned over the past decade. According to the report, research demonstrates that parents and caregivers talk, read and sing more frequently with their children after taking part in Too Small to Fail programming in laundromats, grocery stores, waiting rooms and other settings. One of the key takeaways is that trusted messengers, such as pediatricians and librarians, are the “secret sauce” to supporting families with young children in early literacy. 

Too Small to Fail founder Hillary Rodham Clinton was a child advocate before going into politics. , she helped research the 1974 report , which examined the living conditions of American children and surfaced a number of barriers facing them. The findings in that report shaped her views on education and guided her in shaping the mission of Too Small to Fail. 

Clinton is still actively involved in the work, alongside her daughter Chelsea Clinton, who chairs the initiative’s advisory council of advocates and researchers. The council, which includes Dana Suskind, founder and co-director of at the University of Chicago and Joan Lombardi, principal advisor at has helped Too Small to Fail scale its impact and stay abreast of the science behind reading. 

“As a pediatric surgeon and social scientist who believes deeply in the power of parents and caregivers to build children’s brains,” says Suskind, “I am tremendously grateful for their work. Too Small to Fail meets families where they are, recognizing and honoring their inherent wisdom, and supporting that wisdom with the resources every child deserves. It continues to harness one of our most precious and infinite resources: the support of loving grown-ups to unlock every child’s full potential.”

Lombardi adds: “Too Small to Fail has been a persistent voice in supporting parents’ engagement with their young children and pioneering innovations in communities across the country.”

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Chelsea Clinton recollects her experiences over the first decade of Too Small to Fail and sets her sights on the coming years. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Swartz: What stands out to you from visiting laundromats, libraries and other Too Small To Fail sites?

Clinton: I have so many memories. What stands out is just the joy. There’s so much joy on the kids’ faces and also the parents’ or grandparents’ faces when they’re reading to their children in laundromats, whether in Chicago or New Orleans or Philadelphia. And while I’ve been to quite a few of these sites, it’s only a fraction of the hundreds that we helped build. There’s such a warmth and such a sense of welcoming and hospitality. 

Swartz: What do you hear from the parents and grandparents?

Clinton: Real enthusiasm and excitement and gratitude that there now are more books that they’re able to read with their kids and in whatever language they need to be able to read them, to have those bonding moments, those teaching moments with their kids.

Swartz: You’ve talked to producers and writers about embedding Too Small to Fail messages into their shows, and that has had a tremendous reach. How did those partnerships work?

Clinton: I have this vivid memory of my mom and I going to Hollywood and speaking on a panel with lots of writers and showrunners and creative folks. We discussed the importance of reading, singing and talking to kids at every age whenever possible. Whether Orange Is the New Black or Jane the Virgin or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, they found ways to embed the messages in ways that were organic for them. We believe it has been powerful for the audiences.

Swartz: And they didn’t say, “Thanks, but we don’t need your advice on how to create a story”? 

Clinton: We’ve had really wonderful, delightful, productive conversations with folks in Hollywood over many years. We’ve talked about the importance of parents or grandparents and anyone that’s around [young children] — about the understanding that we are effectively their first teachers. We’ve also had really productive conversations in Hollywood about the ways in which climate change affects our most vulnerable [Americans], including infants and toddlers. We always feel that if we’re sharing recent research and evidence, if it’s something that is in the context of how they’re thinking about future episodes of the future arc of a show, maybe it will be incorporated at some point. 

Swartz: Besides your own mother, who have your early childhood heroes or influences been?

Clinton: Certainly my grandmothers. I was very, very close with both of my grandmothers. I was really lucky to spend a lot of time with each of them as a kid and could not imagine my childhood without them. I only wish that I could have known my dad’s mom as an adult. I always had great teachers, and I remember preschool being so fun. I have quite clear memories of my kindergarten and first grade teachers, Mrs. Minor and Mrs. Mitchell. 

Swartz: How has your own motherhood journey influenced your understanding of the early childhood issues that Too Small to Fail addresses?

Clinton: Becoming a parent didn’t shift what I cared about as much as it sharpened everything I cared about. I cared even more intensely about early childhood education and supporting what parents and other caregivers need to be the best teachers. … Candidly, I didn’t know that I could care any more about the things that I already cared about, and then I became a parent and somehow discovered that I could. That was a revelation to me. Everything feels even more intense because it now feels so personal, because now it’s about my kids and their cohort and the world that they’re growing up in.

Swartz: What are you most excited about for the next 10 years of Too Small to Fail?

Clinton: I’m most excited about continuing to build on what’s working. We have a lot of research now that [shows that] what we’re doing is working, so we should do more of it. We should also be open to whatever our remarkable community suggests that we should try next.

After Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan in 2021, states were flush with federal funding to help prop the child care sector up. But that money is now all gone, and as Republicans in Congress threaten to pass that could further shrink state budgets, lawmakers are trying to find solutions to the child care crisis that don’t cost money. 

Many have proposed changing the mandated ratios that require a certain number of early educators to care for young kids. have considered rolling back child care regulations, including those governing staff-to-child ratios.

But while these deregulatory bills are common, it’s not a foregone conclusion that they will pass. Advocates in three states have been able to beat back these efforts in the legislative sessions that just wrapped up by mobilizing a wide variety of people to speak up against these proposals and deploying research-backed arguments about child safety and child care supply.

Eliminating Ratios Entirely 

Idaho advocates faced down the most extreme bill. In its original form, would have eliminated all requirements that limit the number of young children an early educator can care for, leaving it up to individual providers. It would have been the first state in the country to take such a step. 

Advocates had very little time to fight back. The bill got fast tracked; there was less than 24 hours’ notice before the first public hearing on it in the House. “You can’t get child care providers and parents there in that amount of time,” said Christine Tiddens, executive director of Idaho Voices for Children, a nonprofit that advocates for child-focused policies, noting that it requires moving work schedules and getting people to cover shifts. The bill sailed through the House.

Eventually, Tiddens said, they were able to put parents and providers in front of lawmakers to warn of the negative consequences. One of those parents was Idaho resident Kelly Emry. On June 10, 2024, she got a panicked call from the home-based child care provider where she had just started sending her 11-week-old son Logan. She dashed to the provider’s home and was told he was dead. The coroner’s report later confirmed he died from asphyxiation. According to Emry, the coroner said the provider put him down for a nap between a rolled up blanket and a pillow and left him there for hours. The provider was caring for 11 kids by herself that day, putting her with state regulations that, at the time, required at least two staff members. 

“It was completely preventable, and that’s what’s so hard for me to come to terms with,” Emry said in a in January.

Emry wasn’t the only one who spoke up. Once the bill got to the Senate, advocates packed the hearing and overflow rooms with several hundred people. Among the 40 people who signed up to testify, 38 opposed the bill. Baby Logan’s uncle spoke, as did pediatricians, fire marshals, nurses, the state police, child welfare experts, child care providers and parents. Lawmakers were flooded with thousands of calls and emails from the opposition. Tiddens made sure every senator was sent the podcast interview with Emry.

The bill the Senate committee by a single vote. Advocates decided to try to stop the worst elements, knowing that the bill was likely to pass in some form. They asked a senator who opposed it to “throw a Hail Mary,” Tiddens said. When the bill came to the Senate floor, he asked for unanimous support to pull it and move it into the amending process. He got it. The original elimination of staff-to-child ratios was stripped out; instead, the bill preserved ratios, albeit higher ones than before. Under previous law, Idaho ranked at No. 41 among all states for how high its ratios were; now it has dropped even further to No. 45.

The victory is “bittersweet,” Tiddens said. She attributes it almost solely to one thing: putting parents, not just businesses and child care providers, in front of lawmakers, which led to the moving account of Logan’s family, still in the midst of raw grief. “How could you listen and not have your heart changed?” Tiddens asked.

Doubling Family Child Care Ratios

Advocates in Maryland have fought back against legislation to loosen staff-to-child ratios twice now. Last year, lawmakers introduced a bill to raise the ratios in family child care settings, but it died thanks to “a lot of advocacy,” said Beth Morrow, director of public policy at the Maryland Family Network, a nonprofit focused on child care. As in Idaho, the American Academy of Pediatrics and fire marshals warned about what would happen in the case of emergencies. Children under 2 years old are “not capable of self-preservation,” Morrow pointed out; they might hide when a fire alarm goes off and can’t evacuate on their own. “If there is an emergency you have to be able to get these kids out,” she said.

The idea returned this year in , this time coupled with looser ratios for center-based care. Family providers are to care for eight children but no more than two under the age of 2; the legislation would have doubled that, allowing providers to watch as many as four children under the age of 1. That was a “nonstarter,” Morrow said. It would also have been the first time that these rules were dictated by lawmakers rather than by the Maryland State Department of Education, which would have been barred from changing them in the future. 

So advocates marshalled research, with the help of national groups including the National Association for the Education of Young Children and Center for Law and Social Policy. They highlighted that there has been that stricter child care regulations lead to reduced supply. Lawmakers seemed moved by the that lower ratios support better health and safety for children.

During the markup session, the chief sponsor amended the bill by striking the language about higher ratios; instead, the version that passed requires the Department of Education to study child care regulations with an eye toward alleviating barriers for providers.

Ratio Increases by Another Name

In Minnesota, lawmakers took a different approach to proposing changes to the number of staff required to care for young children this session. Their legislation avoided mentioning the term “ratios” at all. Instead, the issue was presented as an exemption for in-home child care providers caring for their own children as well. The legislation originally would have exempted as many as three of the providers’ own children from the number they are licensed to watch. “That’s a direct ratio increase, no way around that,” said Clare Sanford, vice president of government and community relations at New Horizon Academy, a child care and preschool provider. “You still have the same number of adults but you’re increasing the number of children that adult is responsible for.”

In later drafts, the number of children who could be exempted kept being reduced. In the end the legislation didn’t get a standalone vote and the language was left out of the final state budget. The argument that Sanford thinks worked the best was that increasing ratios wouldn’t actually increase child care supply. That’s because, as a by NAEYC argues, they will lead to more burnout among providers, which will push them to leave and, in the end, reduce available child care spots.

The fight is far from over. Advocates in all three states expect lawmakers to try to loosen staff-to-child ratios again next session. Tiddens fears that, although Idaho didn’t eliminate ratios, the idea could spread. “Idaho has often been a frontrunner for harmful legislation,” she said. On the whole, more of these laws have been signed than stopped, said Diane Girouard, state policy senior analyst at ChildCare Aware of America. Ratio deregulation bills pop up “in some states every single year,” she said. “This isn’t just unique to red, conservative states. It has happened in blue states, it has happened in purple states.”

Advocates who oppose raising these ratios are formulating responses to the child care crisis that preserve safety standards without requiring state funding. In Maryland, for example, Morrow’s organization helped pass a bill that removes legal barriers to opening and operating family child care programs. The hope is that with more solutions on the table to increase child care supply, states won’t look to options that erode safety standards, such as increasing ratios. 

Tiddens has vowed to fight back. “We’re not going away, and we’re going to show up next session with our own proposal,” she said. Her coalition plans to formulate a bill for next year that “prioritizes child safety at the same time as dealing with the child care shortage,” she said.

One of the fundamental tasks for early childhood educators is to teach children to cooperate, not just to keep things running smoothly in the classroom, but because it’s a life skill that prepares them for collaboration in their daily lives, in school and in the workforce.  

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Science (I-LABS) have been studying the effects of synchronized movements on social interactions among young children for years and it turns out that synchrony enhances cooperation. published in 2024 by I-LABS in the journal Nature shows that the simple act of moving in time with each other can promote prosocial behaviors, such as helping, sharing and empathizing. 

The study, which analyzed how a group of 4-year-olds cooperated with each other after a synchronous exercise, was authored by Tal-Chen Rabinowitch, a researcher at I-LABS who is now director of the Music & Social Development Lab at Israel’s University of Haifa, and Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of I-LABS. Researchers built a swing set that enabled two children to swing in unison in precisely controlled cycles of time. This study was set up so the children could see each other’s silhouette but not their facial expressions. The purpose was to determine if the synchronized movement itself, rather than facial or emotional cues stimulated prosocial behavior. 

Pairs of children who were strangers to each other were randomly assigned to one of three separate groups: one that swung together in precise time, one that swung together but not in time, and another that didn’t swing at all. After the swinging exercise, the pairs participated in a series of tasks to evaluate their cooperation. One was a “give and take” activity that involved passing objects back and forth to each other through a puzzle-like device. Another was a computer game that required the children to push buttons simultaneously to see a cute cartoon figure pop up. 

The researchers found that the children who swung in unison completed the tasks faster, indicating better cooperation than children who had swung out of sync or hadn’t swung at all. A surprise for Rabinowitch was a strategy the children came up with to synchronize their button-pushing. The strategy was never modeled to them but arose spontaneously in many of the pairs. 

“They raised their hands above the button and signaled each other with these exaggerated motions just before the task, like, ‘OK. Are you watching? I’m going to do it, … now,’” Rabinowitch said. “The kids in the synchronous condition did it much more and came up with it more quickly. It’s interesting because it shows that not only were they better at cooperating, but they were also motivated to do so. The signaling made the task better.”  

The study built upon two on synchrony and peer cooperation for preschoolers conducted by Rabinowitch. The distinct takeaway from the most recent study is the indication that, stripped of all the other elements of music, rhythm alone is sufficient to spark cooperation between children who moved together. 

“It doesn’t even have to take a long time,” said Rabinowitch. “Just a couple of minutes doing an activity in sync with each other signals, ‘We’re together. We’re on the same page.’” Being in sync together enhances social interaction in positive ways.

“They could drum together, swing together, tap or dance together,” Rabinowitch said. “There’s no difference, as long as the children are aware of themselves moving in synchrony with each other. Knowing they are on the same page has a positive effect on their cooperative behavior, and the kids feel closer to each other.”

Rabinowitch, a classically trained flutist, became interested in the connection between music and social behavior as an undergraduate psychology student when she volunteered with children with physical and emotional disabilities and saw how music influenced their emotional communication and social interactions. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on how music interaction enhances empathy in children. 

“When I did that research,” she said, “I noticed that I was always going back to playing rhythm games with them. I felt that there was something in the rhythm, in the synchrony itself that made a difference and that taught them something about how to communicate and listen. So, I continued in my postdoc to study synchrony specifically.” 

Rabinowitch said many studies on the effect of music in creating cooperation among adults have been conducted and the results are the same. In a paper she authored in 2020, about whether , she writes that music has accompanied human civilization since its beginning and likely played an important role in forging human social behavior.  

Music has a lot of potential to foster cooperation, Rabinowitch said. “Music has an ability that’s much more than just synchrony … It’s social glue,” she said. 

“It’s this incredibly simple mechanism. … We’re just doing the same thing at the same time.” This mechanism can support all ages, she said. “It works with adults, it works with kids, it even works with babies. A of 14-month-old toddlers showed that being bounced in synchrony enhanced their helping behavior,” she added. 

Though there is still much to be understood about the mechanisms that link music and social behaviors, Rabinowitch’s studies underscore how uncomplicated, simple and profound it can be to bring people together. She isn’t suggesting a swing in every office, or drum circles in every school. Nor is she saying that synchronous movement is the answer to world peace. But it might be a start. 

“I would love to say something stronger about politics, about how this could be used in very different contexts in the longer term. But I’m not confident enough of the science to say that yet. It is something one can dream about,” she said. 

Since , has helped more than 38 million children build a foundation for learning, health and stability. It pioneered a now widely lauded “two-generation” approach that fosters learning and development for young children by supporting their parents. Yet despite its innovative design and proven track record, Head Start has faced many attacks over the years due to political and economic turmoil: it was singled out for elimination in Project 2025 — and for a few weeks in April, Head Start .

Amid uncertainty about Head Start’s future, the question to ask is whether the government will do what’s needed to help the program — and our youngest generation — thrive.

The immediate threat seems to have passed, but deep challenges to the program remain: chronic underfunding, political headwinds and a national conversation that too often excludes the early educators doing the work. These challenges have been even more acute since COVID-19. With the expiration of supplemental pandemic-era funding, many programs to retain staff, maintain enrollment, or even keep their doors open. In some communities, waitlists for Head Start programs stretched for months. Some programs were forced to cut back services and reduce classroom capacity because of persistent staffing shortages. In 2023, of Head Start classrooms were closed, many due to a scarcity of qualified staff.

Head Start is the closest thing the U.S. has to a national preschool program, yet it reaches of eligible children and families due to capacity challenges and income eligibility requirements. The narrow availability of free, accessible early learning programs makes the U.S. an outlier among peer nations, when it comes to the number of children who receive formal education before kindergarten. In 2022, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that for enrollment of 3- and 4-year olds in early learning programs.

To serve more children and families with important early learning opportunities, states and localities supplement Head Start funding with other investments in early education, building a patchwork system that is delicately woven together from multiple, insufficient revenue sources. This interconnected web of funding leaves local early education systems at risk when any one source is threatened. 

Even in this constrained environment, local programs continue to deliver results. That’s why it’s essential to center the voices of the people who are closest to the work. A has been meeting monthly for the past year to navigate the challenges of implementing programs on the ground and to support each other in scaling high-quality early learning experiences for young children and their families. 

These leaders have shared about how they’re streamlining intake processes to , to support early learning programs, and rooted in their communities. Despite limited resources, they’re building programs that are equitable, culturally responsive and designed around what families actually need, in designing their programs. They’re reaching urban and rural families and children living in poverty everywhere, supporting children with disabilities, and acknowledging linguistic diversity — all while coping with persistent administrative burdens and workforce gaps. 

Head Start has been a for them. As Becky Mercatoris, director of the Department of Children Initiatives in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania described in one of the meetings, “When Head Start leaves, that impacts our childcare programs… if we suddenly pull that piece of the Jenga puzzle out, there’s a lot of unintended consequences.” 

Although the immediate budget threat has eased, Head Start is far from safe, and there have been proposed cuts to that support families with young children. The suggests eliminating the Preschool Development Grants that enable states to build stronger systems and the , which supports student parents through campus-based child care programs. Critical social safety net programs that help families meet basic needs, like the and Medicaid are also threatened in Congress. Parents are already overwhelmed by the cost of , and . Many want to have more children . Why undercut programs that help them?

These threats to early childhood funding aren’t just policy decisions. They’re reflections of national priorities. When budget pressures hit, programs for children and families are often the first to go. That’s not fiscal discipline — it’s shortsightedness. Investments in young children yield some of the highest public returns: better health, and reduced need for later in life.

Head Start remains one of the most rigorously studied, community-rooted, and bipartisan-supported programs in the nation. Its success is evident. The path forward is clear. The federal government should increase investment so Head Start can expand access, especially for infants and toddlers; stabilize and strengthen the childcare workforce with better compensation and career development; and continue to listen to local providers, who are closest to families on the ground and understand what they actually need.

Underinvesting in America’s youngest children weakens families, constrains the workforce and stunts the country’s long-term economic growth. Head Start’s first 60 years proved what’s possible when the U.S. invests early and listens to the people doing the work. The next 60 will depend on whether our country’s leaders are willing to follow the evidence and deliver for America’s children.

Some states in the U.S., and some countries abroad, are starting to test various funding reforms. The stories collected below spotlight different funding models, which collectively point toward the idea that if the status quo isn’t tenable and marginal improvements prove inadequate, there are alternative paths to a stronger, more sustainable system.

Massachusetts is building up a robust and comprehensive early learning system piece by piece, perhaps most notably marked by a $475 million annual fund that sends monthly operational grants to most child care providers in the state. These advances were started during the pandemic and have now been made permanent, heavily fueled by a portion of the state’s “Fair Share” constitutional amendment which raised taxes on millionaires.

For decades, Ireland had a market-based child care system similar to the U.S., and it has been making major reforms since 2019. This article examines the new policy regime including a novel “core funding” model intended to shore up child care operations and increase provider pay.

In 2021, the Canadian government committed to what is called the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system, with the goal of average parent fees falling to $10 a day while increasing the supply and quality of programs. This piece gives a glimpse into the early days of Canada’s rollout of the CWELCC system, which was backed by historic outlays by the federal government. Since it launched, this effort has resulted in ; and 8 provinces and territories have hit the $10 a day target.

In 2020, community organizers in Multnomah County in Oregon campaigned for universal preschool. The campaign, conducted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforced the potential power of local funding measures. Multnomah voters handily passed the measure, which now generates well over $100 million a year from a tax on high net-worth households. 

In 2022, New Mexico passed a constitutional amendment that dedicated a portion of the state’s natural resources trust fund for early childhood education. This permanent funding source has since to extend free child care to many families and had a substantial impact on the state’s poverty rate. Bryce Covert’s story dives into the state’s efforts.

Vermont’s major child care reform bill, Act 76, became law in 2023. Act 76 uses the nation’s first payroll tax dedicated to child care. Like New Mexico, Vermont has used this sustainable funding source to power an expansion of child care aid for families and an increase in the state’s child care supply, including among family child care providers. Rebecca Gale’s story unpacks the details.

“She could talk,” Tribbett explains, “but she had difficulty pronouncing words because of the thickness of her tongue. She came in with a lot of struggles.” Tribbett helped the family seek out speech support, and it turns out she was eligible for services. After receiving speech therapy, the child, now 3 years old, is able to make herself understood.

Tribbett, who received her child development associate (CDA) credential in the spring through Delaware State University, said she was able to recognize signs that the toddler needed a speech evaluation because of her work with a seasoned early educator mentor with the program.

How Delaware’s Early Childhood Innovation Center Supports Early Educators

In 2021, the state of Delaware opened the  (ECIC), a workforce center dedicated to helping early learning professionals attain CDAs or an associate degree or a bachelor’s degree in the field. The ECIC provides career counseling, mentorship and financial support to break down barriers that often inhibit early educators from pursuing advanced credentials. This spring, the ECIC opened a new facility, which is now the state’s hub for career advancement in early learning.

Kimberly Krzanowski leads the center. She previously held roles as a preschool teacher, a child care center director and executive director of the Office of Early Learning at the Delaware Department of Education. In 2021 when then-governor John Carney said there was money in the budget to do something “big and bold” for young children, she recalled responding, “Well, I happen to have a folder over here full of hopes and dreams.”

Krzanowski said it took four years, a ton of planning, and significant investment including $20 million of state funding and $10 million in federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act to open the center.

Though the ECIC building is located at Delaware State University, all of the state’s higher education institutions are participating in the project, as well as University of the Potomac, which offers an .

This is an opportune moment for early learning in Delaware. The new governor, Matt Meyer, the father of a young child and a former public school math teacher, recently and emphasized the importance of workforce pathways in the field; he also attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new site.

To date, almost 700 students, including Tribbett, have taken advantage of various elements of the programs offered by the center, including mentorship to guide them through the requirements for the credential they’re pursuing and financial support to cover related costs. 

Mentorship, one of the center’s signature efforts, has been underway since the program launched four years ago. A high school student, college student or early educator already in the workforce (which ECIC refers to as a “scholar”) can participate to be paired with an experienced educator-coach (known as a “navigator”) who will work with them toward the credential they’re pursuing. The ECIC provides each scholar with a laptop and a $500 stipend and pays their assessment fees. 

The program also offers financial incentives for career advancement. When a scholar completes six months working in a licensed child care program, they receive a $1,000 bonus. The size of the bonus goes up with each step on the degree ladder — $5,000 for an associate degree, $10,000 for a bachelor’s degree.

A Mentorship Model Boosts Educators’ Confidence

Tribbett’s mentor, Phyllis Roland — an educator living in Bear, Delaware — sees the potential for ECIC to increase the number of educators in the state and to boost the quality of education provided. 

Roland has decades of classroom experience and has been an early childhood advocate for years. She has lobbied for child care in Delaware and in Washington, D.C. “The child care trenches are demanding and time-consuming,” she wrote in a . “And those conditions often make it hard to advocate for yourself and for your colleagues.” 

Roland visits Tribbett’s class twice a month, on top of two reflective monthly Zoom meetings. As part of her CDA, Tribbett composed a two-page philosophy statement containing the assertion: “I believe that by observing the children that enter my care I can meet them where they are and develop a plan to be able to help them reach their goals.” 

Roland praises Tribbett for providing a positive example for the children she teaches, who often have issues at home. “You’re preparing them to be successful in a classroom, so your role is very important,” she tells her mentee.

Tribbett said the pairing has boosted her confidence, a factor that might keep her in the field and drive her to tackle higher levels of certification. Tribbett, who is the mother of six children, is currently deciding between applying for her paraprofessional certification at Delaware Technical Community College or working toward an associate degree. 

“As a coach,” Roland said, “all I had to do was help Jazzie articulate everything that she does on a daily basis. I think she never had an opportunity to toot her own horn, and so that’s what she did. She’s very skilled and very capable.”

Krzanowski sees this kind of alchemy as vital to the field — and to Delaware’s economic well-being. “We’re seeing our matriculation numbers really increase,” she said, “because now they’re like, ‘If I did this CDA, now I’m ready to go to the community college or to somewhere else.’ And they have that confidence. It’s life changing.”

Vermont’s landmark bill, Act 76, designed to bring near-universal child care to the state, passed in 2023 — and it’s already offering a notable financial boost for many child care providers. It brought changes to various areas of child care and early childhood education, including significant updates to the , which distributes subsidy payments to providers for children from eligible families. Under CCFAP, providers now get a significantly higher rate per child than what they typically charge. For Chelsea Chase, a family child care provider who is featured in the story, this change nearly doubled the amount of money she brings in weekly for each child. That increase led her to expand her program to serve more children. The additional subsidies have made a substantive difference in the lives of many family child care providers across the state, though only those serving qualified families can access it.

An apprenticeship program for early childhood educators is boosting the number of qualified professionals in the space. Neighborhood Villages, a nonprofit based in Massachusetts, sought ways to increase the pipeline of early child educators in a field that’s notoriously underpaid and struggling to retain staff. In 2024, the first cohort graduated with a in Early Childhood Administrator/Director (ECAD) through the state Department of Labor, as part of the Neighborhood Villages’ Early Childhood Emerging Leaders program. 

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 of these programs are also paid, allowing people from different socioeconomic backgrounds to take part. Upon completion, the certification, license or degree can lead to future earnings opportunities. For a field like child care which is experiencing a — particularly in leadership fields — these programs can boost the pipeline of qualified staff. 

When Neighborhood Villages graduated 68 apprentices in February 2024, this made it the largest early childhood Registered Apprenticeship program in Massachusetts. Over half of the graduates (37 participants) received their Child Development Associate Certificate (CDA)  and the remaining 31 received their Lead Teacher certificate, which qualifies them to be the director of a child care or preschool program. The model has since scaled to other states, with Kentucky and New Hampshire implementing apprenticeship programs in early childhood.  

In Texas, support for child care providers comes from a break in property taxes, though it is up to each locality to decide to implement it. Once Texas spent down the funds from the American Rescue Plan, child care programs were stretched thin without any additional support. Enter Proposition 2: Texas’ plan to help child care providers by waiving property taxes. Though Proposition 2 has a number of hurdles to clear in order to qualify and receive payment, the savings can add up. One provider estimated that she will save $5,000-$7,000 per year when the proposal goes into effect in her locality. Property taxes play an outsized role in Texas as compared to other states, since it does not have a state income tax. As a result, property and sales taxes are higher than in other states to make up for that shortfall.

“We were reading the political tea leaves, and the money was being given back to Texas citizens in the form of property tax relief,” said Kim Kofron, senior director of education at Children at Risk, which advocates on behalf of early childhood education in Texas. “So that’s when we decided to see if property taxes might be a way for child care providers to get a break.”

There has been a construction boom in Oregon,  yet 90% of construction companies say they don’t have enough qualified workers to meet demand. To boost the worker pipeline, the state offers apprenticeship programs, which can help participants land a more lucrative construction job. But without reliable child care options, too many working parents couldn’t find a way to make the apprenticeship work.

Then Oregon found a solution. Since 2011, three state agencies in Oregon have come together to create one of the country’s most generous and comprehensive child care subsidies to support worker training and development through the state program: Apprentice-Related Child Care (ARCC). To support apprentices, Oregon offers robust subsidy reimbursement rates — up to $2,500 per child per month, and in some cases, without any co-pay from the families. Maura Kelly, a Portland State University sociology professor, examined the effectiveness of the ARCC supports and found that the child care subsidies had a positive impact on completion rates for the state’s apprenticeship programs.

In New Mexico, grassroots and advocacy communities have been pushing for significant investments in early childhood education for a decade. Now, they are seeing results. New Mexico has consistently been for school attendance, economic stability, child poverty, education proficiency and . But it does have access to a Land Grant Trust Fund from its oil and gas profits, worth , which grassroots child care activists have been trying to tap into for years. Beginning in 2009, they . Political pressure and local organizing led to a Democratic primary challenge to one of its key opponents, and the state voted to open up the trust fund and allow for more early care and education funding. 

Already, across the state, child care providers who serve children from families receiving state subsidies have seen their reimbursement rates rise. The subsidies are now tax-exempt, saving families and providers even more money. With this new investment, more families are eligible to receive child care subsidies. Other states may not have the robust external funding source to utilize for early childhood funding, but some advocates believe New Mexico’s efforts are replicable elsewhere, especially combined with political might.

Every state has which are outlined in some version of a regulatory handbook. Recently, child care stakeholders on both sides of the political aisle seem to be converging on the idea that focused on streamlining the steps needed to become and stay licensed — while leaving — is one necessary part of a healthy child care ecosystem.

There are two sides of the licensing coin: the number and complexity of requirements that must be met, and the capacity of licensing agencies to process applications and conduct inspections. Take Illinois for example, a state that has been in its child care system. Despite the improvements, ProPublica in January that the state’s licensing requirements present barriers for child care providers:

“Adding to the difficulties in Illinois, prospective [child care] providers say they struggle to navigate a maze of complex requirements largely on their own, leading to delays in opening. They also that are contradictory or outdated. One directs providers to place a blanket in every crib, even though the state prohibits using blankets to reduce the risk of SIDS. The state also directs providers to carry coins on walks so they can use a pay phone in an emergency, a relic [child care program owner] Heather Casner called ‘ridiculous.’

Providers also say their applications can get stuck in limbo for weeks or months, with little explanation for the delays or news about when they’ll be licensed. The supports this claim: For more than a third of applicants, the state misses its 90-day timeline to approve applications.”

The ProPublica story goes on to note that staff shortages at the state level play a role. “In Illinois, offices that oversee child care centers are severely short staffed, with a roughly 20% vacancy rate. On average, each state licensing representative is responsible for about 120 facilities, while .” Similarly, in states where providers may speak multiple languages, a lack of bilingual staff or interpreters can pose a major barrier to the success of regulatory reform.

When it comes to licensing, it is easy to understand how a child care regulation book can get needlessly complex, as they do in many other sectors. At one point, it made sense to have providers carry coins on walks for phone calls; it is likely that there was once an emergency in which that came into play. But regularly updating these regulations is key. To modernize their requirements, some states have been engaged in processes to pull out the regulation book and revisit each line. In a recent published by the Buffett Early Childhood Institute, Iowa state child care administrator Ryan Page explained what this process looked like for her team:

“We reviewed each rule related to its purpose,’ Page said. ‘Was it necessary? Was it clearly understood? We reviewed for duplicative requirements and transparency. … We reviewed all rules for simplicity and common sense. For example, if school-age children used the playground during school hours, was it really necessary for monthly child care inspections of the playground or for us to say that the playground can’t be used by the licensed child care program at the same location?’”

United Women’s Empowerment, a nonprofit focused on women’s economic leadership, to make the case for similar licensing evaluation processes in Kansas and Missouri. It is not only red states leading the way; last month, and provided automatic zoning permissions for child care centers in nearly all neighborhoods, meaning providers interested in opening or expanding child care programs do not need to wait for additional local zoning approvals. There is empirical evidence that thoughtful licensing reforms like these can have a real impact. In Boise, a series of reforms in 2023, including consolidating applications and removing a zoning approval step, helped for a family child care license from about three months to 25 days.

That said, there is a crucial distinction between updating licensing requirements and jettisoning health and safety regulations, such as mandatory child-to-adult ratios. The Center for American Process recently “harmful deregulation” and “helpful reform.” , or , which in Idaho this year, exemplifies the former. Similarly, there is no amount of regulatory reform that will ever obviate the need for major, permanent public investment in child care. And, as proven in Illinois, cleaning up the regulation books is not enough to change the lived reality of regulation if state capacity remains inadequate.

Notably, the idea of rethinking child care regulation has crossed party lines. Over the past decade, in child care have mostly come from . And indeed, some right-wing organizations that overregulation is the only thing holding back a functional system. Liberal groups have tended to see these calls as , substituting regulatory reform for a real investment of public money into a sustainable child care system.

Further Reading: Recent Reports on Regulatory Reform in Child Care

• (Buffett Early Childhood Institute, March 2025)
• (Buffett Early Childhood Institute, 2025) 
• (Center for American Progress and National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2025) 
• (National Association for the Education of Young Children, 2024)
• (Children’s Equity Project, 2024)
• (Home Grown, 2024)
• (Opportunities Exchange, 2024)