In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers set out a plan to create the largest universal preschool program in the country for 4-year-olds, through a massive ramp-up of an elementary grade known as transitional kindergarten, or TK.

At a , Newsom  â€œa commitment that all 4-year-olds will get high quality instructional education,” and said that the investment could close learning gaps. “People aren’t left behind, as often as they start behind,” he added.

The state set a deadline that every district offer transitional kindergarten to all eligible 4-year-olds by fall 2025, and in the intervening years, schools have enrolled more than 175,000 children in TK. They’ve also had  and  so that kids have enough space and quick access to .

LAist spoke to more than a half dozen early childhood researchers who say a key piece has been missing in the state’s implementation: California itself hasn’t evaluated the program as it’s expanded, nor does it have plans to going forward. This, despite studies showing how critical the early years are for a child’s learning, and research from another state’s public preschool program that found students tested lower on state assessments and had more behavioral problems compared to those who weren’t in that program..

“ It is a huge mistake to not evaluate the implementation of TK and whether or not the classrooms are providing developmentally appropriate practice,” said Jade Jenkins, associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine.

The criticism comes as California has invested , and is paying about  to administer the new grade level.

“ We need to know whether this investment is actually lifting kids. We know it’s a huge economic windfall for parents, and that’s a great boost for families. But is it lifting kids without government research?” said Bruce Fuller, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.

A spokesperson for the California Department of Education said money for research has not been allocated in the state budget, and the department would “welcome a legislative appropriation” to “study the impacts of TK on students and families.”

“At this time, the Legislature and Governor have not appropriated funding for the CDE to conduct evaluations,” the agency said.

It’s not the first time the agency has brought up the need for a study — especially as the program was rolling out statewide. A state official told LAist in 2022 , but they opted not to suggest how it should be funded.

“You could launch a very high quality study at a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the total funding for that program, and that would help people figure out what we are actually offering our families and how to improve it — and that seems really important,” said Alix Gallagher,  director of  for the research organization Policy Analysis for California Education. “As a taxpayer, I don’t find it acceptable that billions of dollars are being spent with no attention to how our systems can learn to use that in ways that are most beneficial for kids.”

TK experiences can look different school to school

The state sets , which can have a max of 24 kids and need a 10:1 student to adult ratio. Teachers must be credentialed with early childhood educational experience or units. And while the state  should learn in TK, it has â€” meaning  to more academic.

Lyse Messmer, a parent of a TK child in northeast L.A., has seen even variation between two schools her son has attended in the same area. His first program relied more on screen time and worksheets; Messmer transferred him to another program with more outdoor play. And the teacher at the former school had not previously taught TK, she said, which made for a harder transition into school.

But she said the overall experience has been beneficial for her child, and a welcome financial relief. “I think the benefits of him getting used to a bigger classroom and like a bigger elementary school and navigating all that stuff for him has been really positive,” she said.

Adding a new grade is a massive endeavor for districts. As in Messmer’s case, it can be especially hard to find teachers with experience teaching kids this age, said Austin Land, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood.

“ You can’t require that every kid that wants a TK spot gets a TK spot and then also require this workforce to exist that has all this preexisting training,” Land said.

Land, who has been studying TK before the expansion, said he would like to know basic characteristics of TK classrooms today.

“Do you have a sixth grade teacher that got reassigned leading your classroom or is it somebody who’s been working with little kids for a while?” Land said. “ Is the teacher having a one-on-one interaction with a child or a one-on-two interaction with some children? Or are they spending most of their time up at the front?”

Lack of data on quality

Without data, it’s hard to know what children are learning, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an associate research professor at the  at Rutgers University.

“We want to make sure we’re investing in quality for kids. And one way to know that we’re doing it is to be able to monitor it
 we want to make sure that the state can sort of have a pulse on what’s going on in the classroom,” she said.

The institute  across the country on a number of benchmarks of quality. According to the institute’s tracking, about two-thirds of public preschool programs in the country have a classroom observation system in place, she said. California’s TK program does not.

Researchers said it’s especially important to know what these youngest students are doing because early experiences can affect their learning later on.

“At the very least, we want to make sure it’s not doing harm,” Jenkins said.

Tennessee: A cautionary tale

Researchers point to  as an example of where good intentions were not enough to benefit kids. The state has similar standards to what California put in place: max class sizes, low ratios, specialized teachers.

Dale Farran, a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, found in her research that children who attended the pre-K program ended up faring worse academically and behaviorally than their peers who didn’t attend. Farran said standards don’t guarantee quality, much less equity between students from different social, economic and racial backgrounds.

“Those structural elements  are the easiest things for states to make rules about, but are they having the kind of interactions in the classrooms that will be positive for children? That’s much harder to put into place,” she said.

Farran has said that one possible reason for this was the overly academic nature of the program and structured settings: kids sitting at desks and listening to a teacher up front, when kids this age need to move around and play.

Katie Flynn, a mom of a TK student in Pasadena, said while she’s had an overall positive experience with her son in TK this year, it still feels more like elementary school than preschool.

At the beginning of the year, her son wouldn’t drink his water all day, or avoided going to the bathroom until he got home, because teachers didn’t remind or prompt him like they did in private preschool.

“ I know it’s also his responsibility, right? Like he needs to listen to his body. So it’s a mutual, collaborative enterprise, but it just shows how limited this age group is in ensuring that that happens,” she said.

What can the state do?

The California Department of Education said absent funding from the state Legislature for the department to evaluate the program, it convenes a regular group of early childhood researchers in the state to share their work into TK. But researchers LAist talked to from that group said that approach can only go so far.

Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said he wasn’t familiar with the Tennessee study, but funding for evaluation is something he will look into.

“We definitely need to make sure that we’re again evaluating our most effective programs so that we can focus on best practices to continue to support those statewide,” he said.

When LAist asked how the state will assess the current program, Muratsuchi and a State Board of Education spokesperson pointed to one large-scale study of TK done by the , in 2017. (The governor’s office also directed LAist to the state board.)

That AIR study found that kids who went to TK when it first started in California had stronger literacy and math skills when entering kindergarten compared to similar-age peers who didn’t go to TK at the beginning of the year. (Those differences mostly faded by the end of the year).

Land, the UC Berkeley researcher, and Gallagher, of PACE, said the AIR study was done nearly a decade ago, and on a TK program that looks different from TK today.

That’s because when TK started in 2012, they said, it was intended for kids who were nearly 5 years old, but had just missed the cutoff for kindergarten. Today, kids as young as 3 are entering TK in California.

LAist also reached out to Karen Manship, principal researcher of the AIR study. She said they’re still investigating topics related to transitional kindergarten, “but we do not have any funding or current plans to evaluate the program overall now that it is fully rolled out.”

The state education board spokesperson also cited research by economist Rucker Johnson, who looked at TK between 2013 and 2019, which found low-income children had greater reading and math gains by third grade than students who did not attend TK.

“These points tell us that an early start has proven to be beneficial for California students,” said a spokesperson for the board, which sets state policy.

LAist reached out to Johnson, who said that while his study of TK in the early years is promising, it’s “not a sufficient condition.”

“For improvements to be sustained, meaning even if they were good in the past, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to be monitoring the success as they’re expanded and expanded that scale to universal,” he said.

Kevin McCarty, Sacramento’s mayor and a former state assemblymember who championed the legislation to expand TK, told LAist funding is a challenge — given  â€” but that he welcomes evaluation.

“We want to make sure that it’s effective, that it works, and if there are any issues that we need to address and improve going forward,” he said. 

In the meantime, he said the program has given many parents a huge economic relief — and parents have a choice on whether to send their kids.

“This is free, this is — California paid for free universal pre-K,” he added, “which is a big deal because, we reminded people, paying for  than sending a kid to UCLA.”

This was originally published on .

New York City received more than 50,000 applications for its free preschool programs in just two weeks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Friday.

That number is about half of the total applications the city received last year for its 3-K and prekindergarten programs — some 94,840. But families of 3- and 4-year-olds still have nearly a month to apply, and many families often wait until the end of the application window since applications are not accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Applications remain open through Feb. 27.

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“Every child deserves access to free, high quality childcare – and we’re making sure families across the city know that now is the time to enroll in 3-k and pre-K,” Mamdani said in a statement.

Mamdani seems to be taking a page from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s playbook, when the former mayor launched the city’s massive free pre-K program a decade ago and made outreach a major focal point. De Blasio’s administration to get the word out, particularly in low-income neighborhoods where families were less familiar with the city’s new offerings, and staffers called families of 4-year-olds across the city to encourage them to apply.

Former Mayor Eric Adams, however, did not focus as much on outreach, complained City Council members, who fought for more funding to to families. Last year, about 1 in every 5 seats for the city’s free child care programs for children ages 4 and under, or more than 27,000 of roughly 136,000 seats, went unfilled,

The new mayor has a vested interest in making sure : Not only did he vow to strengthen the city’s 3-K program and ensure that it’s truly universal, showing the demand for the city’s existing programs will help shore up support for his 2-Care program for the city’s 2-year-olds.

In her recent executive budget proposal, Gov. Kathy Hochul to help New York City roll out its 2-Care program and committed to invest $500 million over two years in the program. The city is aiming to create 2,000 new child care seats for 2-year-olds in high-need areas of the city in the fall, then grow to 8,000 seats the following year, and reach all of the city’s 2-year-olds by the end of Mamdani’s first term.

On Friday, Mamdani visited a home-based child care provider in Manhattan’s Chinatown as a way to show his commitment to the providers who operate out of home and often offer care that is culturally and linguistically responsive to families in their communities.

The administration will likely have to rely heavily on home-based providers to scale up its 2-Care program, which will pose many logistical hurdles. That from losing kids to 3-K and pre-K programs and the COVID pandemic. More recently, the Trump administration’s have affected the immigrant-heavy workforce, advocates and providers have said.

Emmy Liss, a former de Blasio administration staffer who is heading the mayor’s Office of Child Care, acknowledged that not all home-based providers fared well in the rollout of the city’s 3-K and pre-K programs.

“We want to work closely in partnership with them in this next phase of work, because we cannot do this work without them,”

Families can apply to 3-K and pre-K online through or by calling 718-935-2009. City officials said any family that applies by the deadline will receive an offer.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Every 4-year-old in California can now go to school for free in their local districts. The new grade is called  â€” or TK — and it’s part of the state’s effort to expand universal preschool.

In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state legislature  in a $2.7 billion plan so that all 4-year-olds could attend by the 2025-26 school year. (Prior to this, TK was only available for kids who missed the kindergarten age cutoff by a few months). While it’s not mandatory for students to attend, districts must offer them as an alternative to private preschool.

As a free option, it can save parents a lot of money. Parents  how sending their kids into a school-based environment compares to a preschool they might already know and like, as well as other needs like all-day care, and .

One big question we’ve heard: What do kids actually do and learn in a TK classroom? Educators say it’s intended to emphasize play, but what does that mean?

To help parents get a better sense of this new grade as they make their decisions, LAist reporters spent the day in three different classrooms across the Southland. Here are five things we saw children do.

Get used to the structure and routines of school

For many students, transitional kindergarten is their first introduction to a formal school preschool setting. Crystal Ramirez sent her 4-year-old to TK at Marguerita Elementary School in Alhambra, so he could get used to the rhythm and rigors of school.

“I didn’t wanna put him straight into kindergarten when he was five, six, so he at least knows a routine, already,” she said. “Now, as soon as he sees that we’re in school, he loves it.”

TK students, like other elementary school students, follow a schedule: morning bell, recess, lunch, second recess and dismissal. They’re also learning how to listen to instructions or stand in a line. Some are learning to go to the cafeteria for lunch.

“ I wanna make sure that their first experience in a public school setting is one that is joyful, where they feel loved, where they feel welcomed, where they get to really transition nicely into like the rigor of the school,” said Lauren Bush, a TK teacher at Lucille Smith Elementary in Lawndale.

Claudia Ralston, a TK teacher at Marguerita Elementary, said it can be hard for young kids to get up early and leave their moms and dads. But seven weeks in, many of her students have learned their routines already. She helps with the morning transitions by turning on soft instrumental music in the classroom, and allowing them free play until they regroup on the mat to discuss the day.

“They’re four years old. I want them to feel safe at school, know that this is a special place for learning and that they play,” she said.

Learn how to socialize and communicate

In TK,  learning is a big part of the curriculum. That’s a fancy word, but it just means they’re learning how to be in touch with their emotions

At Price Elementary in Downey, the teacher has her kids give an affirmation: “I am safe. I am kind. I matter. I make good choices. I can do hard things. All of my problems have solutions!” (They also have these sentences on classroom wall signs.)

The children also learn how to interact with their peers. In some schools, there are no assigned desks so the kids can learn how to share the space.

“ They’re able to problem solve. They’re able to use communication to get their needs, regulating their emotions. They do better than students who come in without this experience,” said Cristal Moore, principal at Lucille Smith Elementary.

On the playground, a student named Ava told teacher assistant Lizbeth Orozco that another student pushed her.

“How did that make you feel?” Orozco asked.

“MČč»ć!”

Orozco encouraged Ava to express her feelings to her classmate.

“ We give them options of how to solve a problem and then they go in and solve it themselves,” Orozco said. “If they need extra help, they always come back and we can help them.”

Arguing over toys can be a common occurrence in a TK classroom. At Price Elementary in Downey, educators help kids work through a solution. On a recent morning, one 4-year-old used two tongs to pick up paper shapes in a sensory bin, leaving another kid upset.

“What’s the rule about sharing?” asked Alexandria Pellegrino, a teacher who gives extra support for one TK classroom.

The boy handed over a tong to his peer. “Thank you so much for being a good friend,” Pellegrino said.

“[It’s]  about being kind friends and making friends and using our manners. So we do build that foundation at the beginning of the year,” said Samantha Elliot, the classroom’s lead instructor.

At the end of the day in Alvarez’s Lawndale TK class, she counts up the stars next to each student’s name earned throughout the day — earned for positive behavior like being kind, solving problems, trying something challenging, or showing effort in other ways. Ten stars earns a small prize from the treasure chest.

“If we don’t get something today are we going to get mad?” Alvarez asked the class.

“No!” they responded.

“I’m not going to cry!” one boy piped up, followed by his classmate and a “Me too!” from another student.

“That’s [a] positive attitude,” Alvarez said. “Because tomorrow you can get more stars!”

Get exposed to numbers, shapes, letters

In Elliot’s TK class, students use their own little lightsabers to trace letters in the air.

“They’re learning the letter, the sound, and then a little action to go with it. They’re wiggling and moving and they’re also learning those letter sounds and they don’t really realize, so it’s incorporating instruction,” she said.

There’s no mandated curriculum in TK, but instruction is supposed to align with the state’s . “Kindergarten is basically where the state standards go and kick in. There are standards in TK, but it’s a little bit different,” said Tom Kohout, principal at Marguerita Elementary.

Students might put playdough into letter molds, or the teacher might pull out toys from a bag that all start with a letter “E.” Kids will play with little plastic toys that connect — or “manipulatives” — that can help them recognize numbers and patterns.

“It’s play with a purpose,” Ralston said. “They’re just being introduced to the numbers, the colors, writing. But again, we’re not doing worksheets.”

Build fine motor skills

Molding pretend cakes with kinetic sand. Connecting small LEGO bricks. Cutting playdough. It might not seem like much, but children this age are still learning how to use their bodies.

“Tearing paper is really hard and it’s a really amazing fine motor skill for them because the same muscles you use to tear paper are the same muscles that you use to hold a pen or a pencil,” said Lauren Bush, a TK teacher at Lucille Smith Elementary in Lawndale.

“You see kids playing with dinosaurs. I see kids sorting by color, doing visual, you know, eye hand coordination and visual discrimination. I see them using their fine motor skills,” she said.

At lunch, kids learn how to open up a milk carton or open a packaged muffin. At PE, they learn to balance on a block or walk in a straight line — learning spatial awareness.

“They’re learning how to run, stop, things like that and playing because their bodies are so young,” said Principal Kohout.

Learn independence

For some kids, it might be the first time where mom and dad aren’t there to help carry their backpacks or . TK is meant to help focus on their independence, though aides can help.

TK classrooms are also usually set up with play centers, so kids can have the choice to explore on their own.

“ I want them to be independent, to be able to solve their problems, you know, with assistance,” Ralston said.

Samantha Elliot, the TK teacher in Downey, says she encourages kids to talk to their teammates first to figure out an activity before going to a teacher.

“It’s just gaining the confidence and building that independence from basically the start of the school year,” she said.

Parent Crystal Ramirez has already noticed a change in her 4-year-old this year since starting school. “ [He’s] socializing a little bit more, talking a little bit more, trying to express himself as well.”

A record number of children are enrolled in Michigan’s free preschool program this year, the second in which the state has invested in making it available for all children regardless of income.

But programs across the state still have plenty of openings, a sign that many families don’t know the program is available.

During a press conference Tuesday morning, officials from the Michigan Department of Lifelong Education Advancement and Potential announced that 51,000 children are enrolled in the Great Start Readiness Program. That’s an increase of 8,900 over last year.

During the 2023-24 school year, the last before the state launched its PreK for All initiative, 36,466 children were enrolled. A bipartisan effort in the Michigan legislature has invested additional money in the state budget to fund the expansion, which began with the 2024-25 school year.

The PreK for All initiative has been aimed at removing income and other restrictions on the Great Start Readiness Program, essentially allowing any child to enroll whether they are from a low-income home or not. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her 2023 proposal to gradually expand to a universal preschool program in Michigan, said it would “ensure children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn.”

The expansion comes as Michigan’s K-12 system has faced criticism because students have struggled on state and national exams at a time when many other states are showing more impressive gains.

The Great Start Readiness Program is one of four preschool programs in which the state is expanding access by eliminating income restrictions. The others include the federal Head Start program, developmental kindergarten, and early childhood special education.

Beverly Walker-Griffea, director of MiLEAP, said families who enroll their children in PreK for All programs save an estimated $14,000 each year. That’s crucial, she said, “at a time like this, when the cost of just about everything is going up.”

Blake Kish is a parent of six children under the age of 8. Two have been enrolled in the Great Start Readiness Program at St. George School in Flint Township.

“The PreK For All has been a blessing, of course, for the household, but mostly for the kids,” Kish said.

“I recommend any parent that has a child that is 4 years old, get your child in this program. Get your kid in the classroom, give them that head start, give them the winning edge,” Kish said. “We are shaping the future of Michigan.”

Emily Laidlaw, deputy director for early education at MiLEAP, noted that “children who attend a high quality pre-K program are more likely to graduate from high school, go on to college or career training and start their career strong.”

“Pre-K teaches critical social skills, including how to share, work and play together, and get along with others,” Laidlaw said.

Laidlaw said the state will continue to get the word out about the program to families across the state who have not yet enrolled.

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“The bigger, the better, because the children depend on one another,” said Principal Susan Engdall. In a Montessori classroom, “the teacher is sparse, so children have got to be creative and figure things out.” 

It’s a philosophy that not only teaches kids to solve problems, but fosters stronger reading and memory skills by the end of kindergarten than other models of early education, according to from the University of Virginia and the American Institutes for Research. The first nationwide study of public Montessori programs shows that they also achieve more positive outcomes at a lower price tag, mostly due to those larger class sizes. Over the three-year span, public Montessori programs cost $13,127 less than traditional preschool and kindergarten programs, the study found.

Angeline Lillard, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and lead author of the report, attributed the findings to Dr. Maria Montessori’s theory on how children naturally learn through imitation, choice and the use of that teach practical skills and academic concepts.

“This is a method that a really brilliant Italian physician made up by watching children,” she said. “She studied them in free environments and said, ‘What are they like and how can we help them?’ ” 

The findings add more complexity to a long-running debate over whether the benefits of early childhood education fade out over time. Some studies show that children who don’t attend preschool often catch up to those who did, leading whether such programs are wise public investments. A found that students who attended Tennessee’s pre-K even had lower test scores in elementary school than those who didn’t participate.

In the new study, the results were particularly strong among children from lower-income families, but Lillard stressed that only programs that stay true to Montessori principles are likely to see such positive results. 

“I see all these schools that claim to have Montessori when what they offer is just a shadow of it or ‘Montessori toys’ sold on the web,” she said. “I expect most of the folks implementing ‘Montessomething’ are also trying to help children, but without [taking] time to understand the model.”

‘For all children’

Publicly funded programs make Montessori education, long preferred by wealthy families who can afford , more accessible to low-income and working class parents. They include charter schools in a network of Montessori microschools called Wildflower, and district programs like Milwaukee’s seven Montessori schools. The district was among the first, over 50 years ago, to offer Montessori in the public sector.

One of the district’s “passion points” is ensuring that Montessori is not “only for certain kinds of people, but for all children,” said Abigail Rausch, the district’s Montessori coordinator. 

Rae Johnson, whose son is now 16, said she could never have afforded a private program in Milwaukee as a single parent working at Starbucks and picking up freelance writing assignments. But Montessori seemed like a good fit for Elijah.

“He always marched to his own beat,” she said. “I knew that traditional school just was not going to work for how he operated.” 

At first, Johnson didn’t understand Montessori’s emphasis on “practical life” skills, like pouring water without spilling or cutting with a knife. At 5, he would come home with a loaf of bread he baked at school.

“I’m like ‘This is what you did all day?’ But then he would be like ‘Oh mom, can we bake?’”she said. “That turned into a math lesson, like ‘OK, if you want to make a cake, let’s do some fractions.’ ”

The Montessori model is among the curricula used in 11 state-funded pre-K programs, according to the . Students traditionally enter Montessori at age 3, but most state-funded pre-K programs begin at age 4. That means districts often face the challenge of paying for the extra year.

The Phoenix Elementary district, which recently because of , began charging $500 per month this year for 3-year-olds entering Shaw Montessori because funds supporting the program were “needed elsewhere,” said Engdall, the principal. The waitlist to get in dropped to zero, but at town hall meetings, she heard requests from parents for things like more field trips and hands-on learning that “already encompass” what Montessori offers, she said. She expects demand to bounce back.

In addition to allowing children more freedom in the classroom, the Montessori method is in sync with the , Lillard said. Classrooms emphasize phonics, and their materials, like , make learning letter sounds and sight words a more concrete activity. In the study, students who won a spot in a public Montessori program through a lottery had “significantly higher scores” on a standardized reading test than those who didn’t get in. 

Montessori students also performed better on an that asked them to do the opposite of what the researcher said. If the adult told them to touch their head, they were supposed to touch their toes. 

Lillard speculated that the results for Montessori students might have been even stronger if the researchers hadn’t started the study the year after the pandemic, an unprecedented disruption that led to in children’s development. Because students were at home in 2020, they didn’t have an opportunity to interact in person and learn from older peers. 

“COVID impacted all classrooms, but it might have had especially strong impacts for multi-aged, peer-learning models,” she said. 

Classrooms don’t have duplicate copies of the same materials, so children, Rausch said, have to practice patience and negotiation if another child is already busy with something they want to use. “How do you plan your day? How do you communicate with someone else? You don’t just grab it out of their hand,” she said. “We’re teaching these really complex skills to 3-year-olds.”

In the study, Montessori students scored higher on a test of understanding other children’s perspectives than those who didn’t attend. But kids who went to more traditional preschools, or stayed home, were a little better at getting classmates to share. 

The fact that social-emotional learning programs are common in public schools, and likely teach topics like sharing, could account for the slight difference between the two groups, Lillard said.

On another test, non-Montessori kids were more likely to keep working on a difficult puzzle when Montessori children gave up — a finding that surprised the researchers. Montessori teachers encourage students to stick with a challenging task until they master it. 

‘A high payoff’

Overall, the results back up earlier research on public Montessori, like in South Carolina that found higher growth in math and reading among Montessori students than among those in traditional schools.

But like all studies, this one has limitations. Comparing kids who did and did not win a seat through a lottery isn’t the strongest research design. Families who apply don’t necessarily represent all families; more tend to be white and financially better off.

“It may be that there were other features of the schools that parents found desirable,” said Steve Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research. He also questioned whether high absenteeism following the pandemic could have affected the results for either Montessori students or kids in the control group. 

He still thinks the results are promising, and said even non-Montessori programs could adopt multi-age classrooms that include 5-year-olds. But what the field needs is more evidence that the benefits last beyond kindergarten, he said. 

“None of this is to suggest we should ignore or discount the results, only to be cautious,”​​ he said. “Certainly, Montessori deserves more attention. There would be a high payoff to additional rigorous research.”

After the federal government failed to renew a $1.5 million federal grant by Saturday, officials at the Gogebic-Ontonagon Community Action Agency say they had little choice: They closed a free preschool program that has served two counties in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula since 1965.

The program was among that missed expected weekend payments because of the ongoing federal government shutdown. Unlike others, the UP program could not secure alternative resources in time to continue operations.

That means 85 students — along with 30 other families with children in Early Head Start — won’t be getting the education, meals and other services they rely on until funding is restored. And employees are currently out of work, program director Renee Pertile told Bridge Michigan.

“We’re kind of one big family, and now it seems like a piece is missing,” she said. “It’s awfully quiet here today.”

Funded primarily by the federal government to serve low-income preschoolers and their families, Head Start programs in Michigan and around the country are among the latest to feel direct impacts from the government shutdown that’s dragged on for more than a month.

Coupled with the recent impacting 1.4 million Michigan residents, advocates warn the ongoing turmoil surrounding federal funding is putting vulnerable kids at risk.

While local schools and community groups can in some cases step in to help keep Head Start programs going, those resources are “not going to be universal, and it’s not going to be a one-to-one replacement,” said Bob McCann, executive director of the K-12 Alliance of Michigan.

“The longer this goes on, the more damage it’s going to do,” McCann continued. “This is a crisis of choice by (politicians), and it’s kids that are paying the price for it.” 

As of Tuesday, the Gogebic-Ontonagon program was the only confirmed closure in Michigan since Nov. 1, , which has so far reported 25 closures nationwide. 

Education advocates warned other programs around the state that have missed grant payments are at imminent risk of running out of money, too. 

Statewide, Michigan has 48 Head Start and Early Head Start programs that serve nearly 30,000 children, bringing in $423 million in federal funds annually, said Robin J. Bozek, executive director of the Michigan Head Start Association. 

Nine of those programs serving 2,944 children, many of them in the Upper Peninsula and northern lower Michigan, saw their funding grants expire Nov. 1, Bozek said. 

Though some of those programs have been able to piece together enough funds from local schools or community groups to temporarily keep them afloat, the lack of new federal funding means money is tight and the future is uncertain, Bozek said. 

“Anytime there’s a pause or a stop
it totally disrupts the system for this type of grant,” she said. 

For the Gogebic-Ontonagon Community Action Agency, there was no money to fall back on. When the grant didn’t come through, the Head Start program had to wind down. 

“We started looking at this in mid-October, thinking, we’d better prepare just in case this was going to happen,” Pertile said. “As it got closer to the deadline, we knew that it was highly unlikely we would get our grant.”

In the short term, program employees are able to collect unemployment, and a local daycare offered to open up temporary slots to help care for kids who’d previously been attending the Head Start program, Pertile said. 

The agency is also looking at the possibility of setting up a mobile food drive for local families in need, and Pertile is planning to provide weekly updates to staff and parents as they learn more.

Even if the shutdown ends tomorrow, it will still take some time to get operations back up and running, she added, noting that many Head Start participants in their rural community don’t have other options readily available for early learning programs, health checks and meals. 

“The longer this goes on, the more concerned we get,” Pertile said. “Because we’re such a rural program, there are limited resources
they might be able to do it for a couple weeks, but then they might have to look for something more permanent.”

Looking ahead to next month, grants for another four Michigan Head Start programs will come up for renewal Dec. 1, Bozek said, meaning the financial pressures felt by Gogebic-Ontonagon and eight other programs could soon extend to others across Michigan. 

Losing Head Start options would be “a huge hardship” to families whose parents need a safe place for their young children while at work, Bozek said. 

But beyond that, she said, it would put early educators out of work and cut needy families off from a connector for additional resources, including food assistance, health care, and even warm coats for kids as the cold weather creeps in. 

“When a Head Start program closes, it impacts the entire community,” Bozek said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

CHINA, Maine – When Saige Bird moved to Maine, her first order of business was to get support for her then 3-year-old son, who is autistic and has a speech impediment that renders him unintelligible to most people.

Over the past year and a half, she has struggled to get him the speech or other support he needs and is legally entitled to.

While Child Development Services — a quasi-state agency responsible for providing disability services to Maine children under the age of 5 — to a new model for serving 3- and 4-year-olds, a significant number of preschoolers who remain in the existing system are being left behind.

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Over the 2024-2025 fiscal year, 875 3- and 4-year-olds, or 15% of preschool-aged children served by Child Development Services, were on waitlists for 1,690 services including speech, occupational and physical therapy, according to data provided by the Maine Department of Education. Historically, Child Development Services has not kept track of waitlist data, but this is an increase from 2019, when a report requested by the Maine Legislature’s Education and Cultural Affairs Committee found that 10% of children requiring services were on waitlists.

When Bird’s son, whose name she asked be omitted for privacy reasons, was first referred to Child Development Services for evaluation, Bird was thrilled.

“I thought I was gonna get the help I need for my son,” she said.

But that excitement soon turned to disappointment.

Four months after her initial appointment, she received an email from a speech therapist, only to discover she was based in Texas and the sessions would be remote, which she didn’t think was a good fit for her son, then 4 years old, who is hyperactive and has a low attention span.

Another four months later, Child Development Services offered a preschool placement for her son at Augusta Children’s Center. She ultimately declined it due to, among other reasons, trouble scheduling around her son’s outside occupational and speech therapy.

“I know some people love the Children’s Center,” she said. “But it wasn’t right for my son and our family.”

Under federal law, children are supposed to receive all services they’re found eligible for within 30 days of being evaluated.

But that deadline is not always met.

“We are frequently hearing about waitlists and hearing that these waitlists are persisting,” said Jeanette Plourde, an attorney for Disability Rights Maine. “We continue to see parents being told in (Individualized Education Plan, known as IEP) meetings that (Child Development Services) doesn’t have the staffing, that there are no placements, that it’s just not possible to fulfill their child’s IEP.”

This, says Plourde, is simply not okay.

“Our state has an obligation to provide these services under federal and state law,” she said. “Full stop.”

Bird is one of many parents who gave up completely and opted to find her child the services he needs in a different way. Three to five days a week, Bird drives an hour and a half round-trip to and from Belfast for in-person speech, which Child Development Services determined her son needed, and occupational therapy, which she sought separately. Since January, she has spent at least $550 on co-payments for both services.

The Maine Department of Education, which oversees Child Development Services, is well aware of the agency’s challenges, , and is working to turn the tide by of providing preschool special education from Child Development Services to the state’s public schools, a mammoth task it says will better serve preschoolers by utilizing the state’s resources more efficiently.

But while Child Development Services works to implement this systemic change, there’s not much that can be done for the children who aren’t getting their needs met, said Child Development Services State Director Dan Hemdal.

“It’s an unfortunate reality of early childhood special education in the state,” said Hemdal of children ending up on waitlists.

Hemdal and others say that a lack of preschool placements and providers — including speech, occupational and physical therapists — can make it difficult, if not impossible, to match preschoolers with the resources they need.

But while the state works to create a system that better serves preschoolers with disabilities, children across the state lose valuable time.

The first five years of life are crucial for development and can shape the trajectory of a child’s life.

“You only have a certain amount of time while the brain is this plastic,” said Nancy Cronin, the executive director of the Maine Developmental Disabilities Council. “This is a magic time for development that no child can afford to lose.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: info@mainemorningstar.com.

Almost 20 years ago a San Diego nonprofit created a preschool to focus on the “little guys” — children who experience domestic violence and other  before kindergarten. 

Today,  and it’s something of a model in showing other schools how to address childhood trauma.

Mi Escuelita provides services for kids in a single location that for most other families would require intricate coordination among multiple health care providers, educators and social programs. 

The children learn in a classroom that is always staffed with at least one therapist, they participate in one-on-one therapy, and join group therapy sessions. Their parents take part in special classes, too, where they learn ways to support their children.

Researchers from UC San Diego have paid close attention to Mi Escuelita and followed how its graduates fared after leaving the preschool. The university also works with the school to evaluate outcomes from each cohort of students. Here are four takeaways from those reports.

The kids leave ready for kindergarten

Students who graduate from Mi Escuelia outperform or do at least well as their peers in kindergarten, according to a UC San Diego analysis of their scores in reading and math tests.

It looked at kindergarten students in the Chula Vista Elementary School District from 2007 to 2013 and found a higher percentage of Mi Escuelita met math, reading and writing standards than the district’s general population.

That’s not a given because research shows that children exposed to domestic violence have  than their peers, which can set them back in school. 

And they do well for years

The length of UC San Diego’s study allowed its team to follow Mi Escuelita graduates through fifth grade. The results suggested that their preschool experience helped the kids throughout their childhoods. 

Their average scores on several standardized tests exceeded those of the general population at Chula Vista Elementary School District, especially in math.

“Taken together, the Mi Escuelita program demonstrates clear benefits to children who may otherwise fall quickly and unsparingly behind with regard to school readiness,” the UC San Diego researchers wrote. 

Better relationships at home

Some families turn to Mi Escuelita in moments of distress, such as after experiencing domestic violence. The preschool provides counseling for parents and students alike, which may contribute to behavioral improvements at home.

Over the past five years, 64% of the families in the program reported sensing fewer conflicts and 83% of them noticed an increase in closeness. 

“Families reported that children’s communication, behavior, and listening skills improved both at home and at school,” a UC San Diego team wrote in an evaluation of student and parent surveys that spanned 2020 to 2024. 

It takes a village

Running Mi Escuelita costs about $1.3 million a year, a sum that nonprofit South Bay Community Services raises through a mix of donations and government funding. That cost — along with the challenge of hiring trained educators and therapists — makes the program difficult to replicate. 

But, other schools and government agencies are watching Mi Escuelita to see what kind of services they can carry over to other venues. 

“We can spend less later on intervention programs and alternative facilities,” said Hilaria Bauer, chief early learning services officer at , a Bay Area nonprofit childcare provider. “There will be less truancy, less big behaviors or expulsions or alternative programs, and all of those ‘fix’ initiatives if we really focus on the time in the life of a child that really makes a change.”

Kristine Kaneichi enrolled her oldest son in WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Preschool eight years ago, drawn to the center’s low cost, safe facilities and flexible hours that accommodated her schedule as a college student. 

She went on to send her two younger kids to the center. The youngest, now 3, is still a student there but, for the first time in years, Kaneichi doesn’t have to worry about paying tuition or applying for state tuition subsidies. 

Last month, WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Preschool became the first program to make the transition from a private to charter school in HawaiÊ»i. As a result, the school reports to the State Public Charter School Commission, receives state funding — and is tuition-free.  

“This helps a lot,” Kaneichi said. 

WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Preschool is part of the state’s ongoing strategy to involve more charter schools in its ambitious goals to provide all 3- and 4-year-olds access to preschool by 2032. Charter schools currently operate 33 preschool classrooms in the state, including six at WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Preschool, said Deanne Goya, who oversees early learning programs at the charter commission. 

The state opened an additional 26 preschool classrooms this fall on Department of Education campuses and plans to add around 25 more next year. Roughly 6,700 children don’t have access to preschool, meaning that HawaiÊ»i needs to open around 330 classrooms over the next seven years, according to . 

Preschool directors and advocates say charter preschools can help solve the state’s long-time shortage of early educators. Private preschools typically struggle to hire staff and increase teacher wages because they’re reliant on tuition payments and don’t want to raise the prices for parents, said Malia Tsuchiya, early childhood policy and advocacy coordinator at HawaiÊ»i Children’s Action Network. 

Converting private preschools to charters creates a steady source of state funding for providers and often ensures higher wages for teachers, making hard-to-fill jobs more attractive, Tsuchiya said. Teachers working for charter preschools are state employees and receive the same benefits and salaries of educators working in K-12 public schools. 

The current funding model makes it difficult for other programs to follow Waikīkī Community Preschool’s lead, however. Charter preschools receive $171,000 in state funding per classroom, which Tsuchiya said falls short of what schools need to cover staff, rent, facilities and other expenses. Most charters run small preschool programs, she said, so it’s harder to spread the costs across multiple classrooms.

The Waikīkī preschool is counting on its nonprofit partner, Waikīkī Community Center, to help fundraise thousands of dollars to make up the shortfall of state funds this year.

A New Type of School

WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Preschool always focused on serving low-income families, drawing parents who worked in the tourism industry and sometimes held multiple jobs, said Caroline Hayashi, president of the WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Center. In recent years, the preschool charged low-income families around $500 a month but only after extensively fundraising to lower the costs. Families covering the full tuition paid around $990 a month. 

“We’ve been really trying to do what we can as a nonprofit to help make quality early education affordable,” Hayashi said. “We have been successful, but always kind of struggling to subsidize.” 

When the state started looking for private preschools interested in becoming charters, the center jumped at the opportunity, Hayashi said. The school wanted to be tuition-free, she said, and receiving state funding would alleviate some of the pressure of fundraising. 

In addition to eliminating tuition costs, becoming a charter school also allowed the center to operate at full capacity for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic, Hayashi said. 

When it reopened after Covid, the school wasn’t able to staff one of its classrooms and could only serve 85 students. More educators seem willing to work for a charter preschool, Hayashi said, likely because they can receive the same pay as K-12 public school teachers with more flexible work schedules. 

Now, the school operates at its maximum capacity and is serving 98 kids this year, with a waitlist typically of between 10 and 30 students. 

Private preschools often struggle with staffing and increasing teacher pay because they don’t want to raise tuition for families. In 2021, preschool teachers in HawaiÊ»i earned an  of roughly $37,000. In comparison, licensed public school teachers – including those working in charter preschools – have a  of $53,390 this year. 

Charter preschools can offer more stability and state benefits for staff members, Hayashi said, but it also raises the bar for teacher qualifications. Teachers working in private, licensed preschools must hold an associate degree or credential in early childhood education. But charter schools require educators to be licensed, meaning that they must have completed both a bachelor’s degree and a teacher preparation program. 

It’s a hard requirement to fill amid a statewide shortage of early educators, Hayashi said. Five of her six lead teachers are emergency hires, meaning that they have three years to complete their licensing requirements. Once they meet those requirements, they’ll be eligible for higher salaries. 

Complicating staffing challenges, Hayashi said, several preschool teachers also work as after-school care staff. The after-school program runs separately from the charter school and is offered through WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Center for $200 a month. 

It’s sometimes difficult to offer after-school care when teachers have afternoon staff meetings for the charter school, Hayashi said, but it’s the best solution she’s found to meet the needs of working families. 

“It’s just been an adjustment,” she said. “The only way that it works so far is that we have a lot of our staff that have been willing to have basically a second job.” 

Short On Funding

Like K-12 public schools, charter preschools rely on state dollars — but the current funding levels aren’t enough to sustain these programs, Goya said. 

The state provides  up to $1,500 for low-income families attending private preschools, Goya said, meaning that these programs could receive up to $300,000 annually in state funds for a classroom of 20 students, compared to the $171,000 for a charter classroom. 

DOE schools receive less money — around $146,000 for every preschool classroom they open on their campus — but they also need to cover fewer costs than charters. For example, Tsuchiya said, DOE schools already have money set aside in their budgets for principals and janitors, regardless of whether they add a preschool classroom to their campus. 

On the other hand, she said, set costs for administrators’ salaries and facility maintenance are spread across just a few classrooms in charter preschools, which typically have smaller programs and fewer kids. Most charters face the additional expenses of rent and facilities since they aren’t located on state land. 

Hayashi estimates WaikÄ«kÄ« Community Preschool will face a budget shortfall of around $150,000 to $200,000 this year, although she’s confident the school can raise enough money with the support of the community center, which has raised similar amounts of money for the preschool in the past.   

Another charter, Parkway Village Preschool in Kapolei, is also facing budget shortfalls after  earlier this year. While Parkway originally projected it would have an annual deficit of $34,000 per classroom, it’s now up against shortfalls of closer to $50,000 to $60,000 per class as it grows its staff, said Ben Naki, who oversees early learning programs at Parents And Children Together, the nonprofit associated with the preschool. 

The school is prepared to make up the difference through fundraising and support from foundations, Naki said, and hopes to participate in a federal meals program that can help reduce the costs of producing lunches. But the current levels of funding make it difficult for small programs to become charter schools, especially if they’re not partnering with outside organizations that can provide administrative support or help with major fundraising efforts. 

“We’re committed to it with the notion, or, I guess, hope, that funding will increase on the charter side, because that would be huge,” Naki said. 

Earlier this year, the state received only two applications from prospective charter preschools — Waikīkī Community Preschool and Mana ‘Ulu Montessori Charter Lab School. Mana ‘Ulu planned to build on existing partnerships with Chaminade University’s lab school, which has its own private preschool, but its application was not approved.

Turning privately owned programs into charters won’t necessarily add new preschool seats for the state, Tsuchiya said. But, with enough funding, the charter model can stabilize existing programs at risk of closing by providing them a steady stream of state funding and incentivizing educators to earn their teacher licenses and qualify for higher pay. 

At the same time, Goya said, the commission is working with K-12 charter schools to add preschool programs to campuses with available space. Currently, she said, the commission is planning to add 15 more preschool classrooms by fall 2028. 

The School Facilities Authority, the state agency in charge of preschool construction, recently received $20 million to build more preschool classrooms over the next three years, but the funding can only go toward adding classrooms to schools on government-owned land.

Since many charters are on private property, not all schools qualify for the money, authority director Riki Fujitani said. But the agency was still able to renovate three preschool classrooms at WaiÊ»alae School this summer and is working on preschool projects at an additional four charter campuses. 

“Charters,” he said, “have really been quick to embrace pre-k.”

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

The little boy clung to his mother as she carried him through the wooden half-door of the preschool classroom on Tuesday morning. Tears streamed down his face. It was going to be a tough drop-off.

While other children finished bananas, raisin bagels, and milk, Vraja Johnson, the lead teacher, ushered the mother and son toward a cozy corner in the back of the classroom. She spoke softly in English and Spanish to the nervous preschooler. Several minutes later, when his mother had slipped away, the boy nestled into a large blue beanbag clutching Tucker the Turtle, a stuffed animal that helps preschoolers understand that it’s OK to retreat into your shell — and to come back out when you’re ready.

It was the first day of preschool in the Otters classroom at El Nidito, a bilingual child care program at The Family Center in Fort Collins. The little boy and his 11 classmates are among 40,000 children enrolled in Colorado’s universal preschool program this year. The $349 million program offers tuition-free preschool — typically a half day — to all children in the year before kindergarten.

Now entering its third year, Colorado’s preschool for all program has smoothed out since its . At the time, application system errors, glitches in the , and last-minute reductions in preschool hours for some children caused widespread confusion and frustration.

A national early childhood group in the country for the share of children served by state-funded preschool. Around 70% of the state’s 4-year-olds are enrolled in the program, which generally covers about $6,000 a year in preschool costs per child.

But wrinkles remain. The state is still brought by religious preschools that objected to non-discrimination rules protecting LGBTQ children, families, and employees. Both suits are pending in federal appeals court. And the national early childhood group found that Colorado meets only two of 10 benchmarks meant to ensure that preschool classrooms are high quality.

Currently, the “universal preschool” label doesn’t indicate anything about the caliber of classroom a child will join. Rather, it simply indicates the state is paying for 10 to 30 hours of class time. Of about 2,000 preschools participating in the program, some have the state’s lowest rating and meet only basic health and safety standards.

Others, including El Nidito, which has been around for 25 years, have the state’s highest rating.

A morning in Johnson’s classroom makes it easy to see why. She and her co-teacher, an experienced sub named Maria Chavira, are warm, cheerful, and organized. Their young charges are curious, silly, and always in motion.

During breakfast, two boys held bananas up to their ears like phones.

“Ring, ring, ring. Hi, Henry,” one said as the other burst out laughing.

Nearby at the sensory table, as one little boy poured dried pinto beans through a cardboard tube, he said, “Did you ever watch ‘Boss Baby?’ The baby is a bossssss. Babies can’t be bosses!”

Meanwhile, the little boy who’d struggled to leave his mother was getting braver, slowly testing the waters of group play. One minute he crouched next to a little girl in front of a tree house play set. Later, he tried out bear and leopard hand puppets as the Boss Baby skeptic threw Tucker the Turtle up in the air next to him.

Johnson, who switched from a sales and marketing career to early childhood education in 2007, seems to have a sixth sense for detecting imminent meltdowns, skirmishes, and rule-bending.

She quickly peeled away from a conversation with a visitor when a little girl dressed in head-to-toe pink accidentally got a squiggle of red marker on her new cowboy boots.

“Your mom can get that out. The markers are washable,” Johnson said as tears welled in the preschooler’s eyes.

Then she averted the crisis with five words: “Do you want a hug?”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

In a who work in public schools across the country, conducted in March and April 2024, respondents reported experiencing work-based stress at nearly twice the rate of comparable working adults in other kinds of jobs — those of prime working age with bachelor’s degrees who put in at least 35 hours a week. “Teachers of public school-based pre-K were generally more stressed,” noted Elizabeth Steiner, senior policy researcher at RAND and a lead author on the report. Two top stressors the teachers mentioned were dealing with student behavior and addressing students’ mental health.

Another top stressor they named was low compensation. And indeed, the survey found that pre-K teachers earned nearly $7,000 less, on average, than teachers in K-12 positions and $24,000 less than similar adults in other kinds of jobs. Steiner said that finding was “a little more surprising” given that the school-based pre-K teachers in their sample had similar educational backgrounds as K-12 teachers. But teachers overall face long-standing wage gaps with other fields. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the difference in pay, adjusted for factors like education and work history, hit a record in 2023.

Pre-K teachers also reported working eight more hours, on average, each week than they were contracted for. Perhaps it’s little surprise, then, that another top challenge they named was administrative work that fell outside of teaching.

All of that stress while working for low pay seems to have pushed a lot of teachers to question their jobs. Nearly one in five survey respondents said that they intended to leave their jobs by the end of the 2023-24 school year. That’s “commensurate,” Steiner said, with rates of other workers, but it could still signal trouble. While Steiner noted that not all teachers who say they’re going to quit actually follow through, she said “it’s a measure of teachers’ job satisfaction” and “an early marker of attrition.” Other data has found high actual turnover rates among early childhood teachers. In Virginia, of teachers serving children from birth through 5 years old left between fall 2023 and fall 2024. In Louisiana, of early childhood educators working one school year are gone by the following one, according to a working paper published by Annenberg Institute. 

And while the turnover rate for pre-K teachers may look similar to other occupations, it has a greater impact when they leave their jobs. “Teachers gain a lot of experience and skill the longer they’re in a position,” said Anna Shapiro, associate policy researcher at RAND and co-author of the survey, and there has been “a lot of research on the importance of having stable environments for children in particular.” Losing experienced teachers who have connected with children is highly disruptive. It “can have knock on effects on quality,” Shapiro said. 

These troubling findings about how pre-K teachers feel about their work come at the same time that states are heavily investing in preschool. The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER)’s reported that the share of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool for the 2022-23 school year reached an all-time high of more than 1.6 million, and 35% of 4-year-olds now attend a program. States that have enacted new universal preschool programs helped to “push the nation to these record high percentages,” the report says. The enrollment highs came on the back of record funding: States spent $11.73 billion on preschool in 2022-23, an all-time high. 

There are plenty of challenges to continuing to expand preschool enrollment if states want to make further progress. One is finding physical space for new students; another is developing quality curriculum and standards. But “the biggest expense is teachers,” Shapiro said, and “one of the biggest barriers. You can only have so many children enrolled if you have a limited number of teachers.”

A particularly troubling trend that emerged in the RAND survey, then, is that teachers with five or fewer years of experience were more likely to say they intended to leave their jobs than those with more years under their belts. States that want to expand are going to need to recruit more new teachers and hold onto them. “Those numbers feel cautionary,” Steiner said. “States considering expanding pre-K might wish to think carefully about how they’re supporting and thinking about retaining their newest teachers so that the negative impacts on students in the classroom environment can be mitigated.”

“If you want to have a big staff pool, you need to have people who want to stay,” Shapiro added. “Well-being is really important in that retention.”

Shapiro noted that states will also have to contend with teacher pay gaps. The survey data suggests that “potentially for a teacher who has a similar level of experience and education that being a pre-K teacher is maybe less attractive than being a K-5 teacher,” she said. “It’s a very similar job but you’re getting paid less to do it.” That won’t just make it more difficult to recruit qualified and talented teachers, but to hold onto them once they gain more experience and keep them from seeking a better paying job in the K-12 setting. Tackling pay parity, then, is “an important policy step” to take to recruit more teachers, Shapiro said. 

There may also be a temptation for states to expand part-day preschool programs, serving twice as many students with the same pot of money, given limited resources. But the survey data shows that could be a poor direction to take. Part-day pre-K teachers, who report the same number of work hours so are therefore likely saddled with teaching two different groups of children every day, reported higher levels of stress and intentions to leave in the survey than full-day teachers. “Our data does caution against attempting to do more with less,” Shapiro said.

The RAND findings are all the more troubling because, as Steiner noted, “public school-based pre-K teachers are just one piece of the overall pre-K landscape.” Teachers in other settings, such as center- or home-based child care programs, which cities and states sometimes include in their preschool systems, are likely to be faring even more poorly. “This sample of teachers is probably the ceiling,” Shapiro said. “We’re probably talking to the teachers that have the most resources in terms of pay and benefits.” 

If states want to expand preschool enrollment, “part of a successful expansion would be supporting staff and ensuring that they are retained in their jobs to get the best benefits for students,” Steiner said.

Even with her expertise, she still appreciates the support she gets through a University of Arkansas-run network. With funding from a federal grant, 250 participants from across the state work on increasing and for delays in speech, motor or social skills. 

“We try to catch those things early,” said Eichler. The network helped her become nationally accredited and now she’s one of the top-ranked providers in Arkansas. “The better we get, the better our kids get. It’s a win-win for our state.”

But President Donald Trump now wants to eliminate the funding that paid for that network and similar projects nationwide. Launched in 2014 during the Obama administration, were intended to expand pre-K for 4-year-olds from low-income families. During his first term, Trump significantly the grants into what Katharine Stevens, an early-childhood policy expert, described as a “conservative-friendly” effort to promote parent choice and put decisions about improving early learning in the hands of states.

The funds benefit kids from birth to age 5, not just pre-K students. That’s why it’s hard for her to understand Trump’s reason for eliminating them. 

“I sympathize with people who are feeling like the federal government has just grown way out of control,” said Stevens, founder and president of the Center on Child and Family Policy, a right-leaning early childhood think tank. But the grants, she said, have delivered “a lot of bang for the buck” by making it easier for parents to find high-quality programs. “Just doesn’t make sense to end it.” 

Despite his first-term goal of allowing states to take the lead, Trump wants to cut the program because it doesn’t increase the supply of preschool slots. The would save $539 million. Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, whose has guided much of the president’s second term, said the funding falls short because child care and early education programs don’t meet the demand. 

“These taxpayer dollars have primarily gone towards the planning and administrative side of preschool — things like ‘identifying needs’ and ‘engaging stakeholders,’ ” she said. “What’s needed most is more child care providers and more slots for children.”

The grant program might result in or incentive payments for providers, but doesn’t necessarily bring new teachers into the field, she said.  

In an earlier , the Trump administration pinned its objections on former President Joe Biden’s use of the “unproductive funds” to “push [diversity, equity and inclusion] on to toddlers.” As an example, a brief paragraph points to Minnesota, which listed DEI buzzwords like “racial equity” and “intersectionality” as for the grant in 2021. 

But many of the grants have gone to red states like Alabama, Florida and Idaho that have used the money to keep parents in the workforce and of early care and education programs, including Head Start.

Last October, 10 states and the District of Columbia received a , totaling $87 million over three years. One grantee, Kansas, is set to receive $21 million. In keeping with the to reduce regulations, the to speed up the fingerprinting process for staff and streamline applications for extra funding.

Minnesota intends to use its $24 million to support , family engagement efforts and salaries for early-childhood mental health professionals. The goals that the administration labeled DEI are not for classroom activities, said Anna Kurth, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Education, but to help children from low-income families gain access to services. 

As Congress debates next year’s budget, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, ranking Democrat on the and a former preschool teacher, said she hopes the grants continue. 

“President Trump talks a lot about parental choice, and here he is pushing to ax investments to expand families’ child care and pre-K options,” she said in a statement to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “Congress has got to reject these cuts, and I’ll be doing everything I can to ensure we do.”

It’s unclear whether Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who chairs the committee, agrees with the president’s budget plan. But in announcing a Preschool Development Grant in 2023, she said it would “build an educational foundation for Maine children that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.”

‘Shore it up’

Parents have before their children become old enough for school, including long waitlists for good programs and costs that are often out of reach. Providers face their own financial obstacles. They’re compared to those in professions requiring similar training, and over 40% depend on and other public assistance programs to get by.

Stanford University’s , which has captured the impact of the pandemic on families and the workforce, shows that the percentage of early education providers struggling to afford at least one basic need increased in 2022 and was still high in 2024. 

Eliminating the grants won’t solve those problems, said Philip Fisher, who directs the Stanford Center on Early Childhood and founded the survey.

“If you think about a market that’s teetering on the edge of collapse, resources that go into that market are going to help shore it up,” he said. “This may not directly put money into the pockets of providers or parents to pay for care, but it creates a more efficient system and enhances quality — a huge issue for a lot of parents.”

States have used the funds to address some of those challenges and to encourage early education leaders from school districts, child care centers and faith-based programs to tackle them together.

With a for 4-year-olds already in place, used its roughly $48 million in federal grants to coach child care providers, help teachers get bachelor’s degrees and improve transitions for kids into kindergarten.

The University of Arkansas spent the it received in 2023 to improve quality in rural areas, like Eichler’s town of Romance, about 45 miles north of Little Rock. 

“Large centers just aren’t viable in some of our communities,” said Kathy Pillow-Price, director of Early Care and Education Projects at the university. “Family child care providers really support us and our workforce.” 

‘Private and faith-based’

With advocates concerned about the future of Head Start, which the administration initially proposed to eliminate, the fate of the Preschool Development Grants has received less attention. 

Trump’s budget, released May 30, preserves Head Start — rejecting, for now, a Project 2025 to end it. The document didn’t specifically cite Preschool Development Grants, but it called for shifting more child care funding toward . Trump’s Jan. 29 on school choice echoed that theme by calling for families to use their child care subsidies for“private and faith-based options.”

But experts say the grants have already met those expectations. As in Arkansas, Idaho used its funds to support the growth of licensed in “child care deserts,” like rural areas. Leaders also offered providers training in business practices. 

Christian and other religious early-childhood programs have been among those benefiting from the federal money. According to a , “faith-based entities” were among the new partners in 2019 participating in state and local efforts to improve services. 

The grant program has been a boon to member schools by supporting quality improvements and training opportunities for staff, said Althea Penn, director of early education for the Association of Christian Schools International. 

Stevens, with the Center on Child and Family Policy, remembers how the goals of the program from primarily expanding pre-K during the Obama years to encouraging states to identify their own priorities under Trump. 

“We need state-level innovation,” she said. “That is the entire purpose of these grants.”

Screen time permeates the lives of toddlers and preschoolers. For many young children, their exposure includes both direct viewing, such as watching a TV show, and indirect viewing, such as when media is on in the background during other daily activities.

As many parents will know, . As scholars who specialize in and , we are particularly interested in the recent finding that too much screen time is associated with less parent-child talk, such as .

As a result, the and suggest limiting screen time for children.

Beyond quantity, they also emphasize the quality of a child’s engagement with digital media. Used in moderation, certain kinds of media can – and even contribute to language development.

These tips may help parents structure and manage screen time more effectively.

No. 1: Choose high-quality content

Parents can enhance their children’s screen-time value by choosing high-quality media – that is, content with educational benefit. , from “Nature Cat” to “Sid the Science Kid,” that would qualify as educational.

Two other elements contribute to the quality of screen time.

First, screen content should be age-appropriate – that is, parents should choose shows, apps and games that are specifically designed for young children. Using a resource such as allows parents to check recommended ages for television shows, movies and apps.

Second, parents can look for shows that use evidence-based educational techniques, such as participatory cues. That’s when characters in shows break the “fourth wall” by directly talking to their young audience to prompt reflection, action or response. that children learn new words better when a show has participatory cues – perhaps because it encourages active engagement rather than passive viewing.

Many classic, high-quality television shows for young children feature participatory cues, including “,” “,” “” and “.”

No. 2: Join in on screen time

The that whenever possible.

This recommendation is based on the evidence that increased screen media use can reduce parent-child conversation. This, in turn, can affect . Intentionally discussing media content with children increases language exposure during screen time.

Parents may find the following joint media engagement strategies useful:

• Press pause and ask questions.
• Point out basic concepts, such as letters and colors.
• Model more advanced language using a “think aloud” approach, such as, “That surprised me! I wonder what will happen next?”

No. 3: Connect what’s on screen to real life

because their brains struggle to transfer information and ideas from screens to the real world. Children learn more from screen media, research shows, when the content connects to their real-life experiences.

To maximize the benefits of screen time, parents can help children connect what they are viewing with experiences they’ve had. For example, while watching content together, a parent might say, “They’re going to the zoo. Do you remember what we saw when we went to the zoo?”

This approach promotes language development and cognitive skills, including . Children learn better with repeated exposure to words, so selecting media that relates to a child’s real-life experiences can help reinforce new vocabulary.

No. 4: Enjoy screen-free times

Ensuring that a child’s day is filled with varied experiences, including periods that don’t involve screens, increases language exposure in children’s daily routines.

Two ideal screen-free times are mealtimes and bedtime. Mealtimes present opportunities for back-and-forth conversation with children, exposing them to a lot of language. Additionally, bedtime should be screen-free, as using screens near bedtime or having a TV in children’s bedrooms .

Alternatively, devoting bedtime to reading children’s books accomplishes the dual goals of helping children wind down and creating a .

Having additional screen-free, one-on-one, parent-child play for at least 10 minutes at some other point in the day is good for young children. Parents can maximize the benefits of one-on-one play by letting .

A parent’s role here is to follow their child’s lead, play along, give their child their full attention – so no phones for mom or dad, either – and provide language enrichment. They can do this by labeling toys, pointing out shapes, colors and sizes. It can also be done by describing activities – “You’re rolling the car across the floor” – and responding when their child speaks.

Parent-child playtime is also a great opportunity to extend interests from screen time. Including toys of your child’s favorite characters from the shows or movies they love in playtime transforms that enjoyment from screen time into learning.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

But those increases are skewed by a small number of states making progress; others are not doing as well. Quality remains uneven from state to state and even within states, quality and availability often are a matter of ZIP code. While some states have increased funding, enrolled more students, and worked to meet national quality benchmarks, others have lagged, offering programs that meet fewer national quality benchmarks — or none at all.

Shifting sands at the federal level have left much of the sector uncertain about what the future might hold and how the Trump administration’s  to the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies might affect  and other early childhood programs. NIEER reports that eliminating Head Start funding would mean a decline of more than 10 percentage points in access to public preschool in several states and more than 20 percentage points in some. 

The 2024 State of Preschool Yearbook underscores how essential it is for states to proactively prioritize and expand investments in early childhood, and a special section highlights four states — Alabama, Michigan, New Mexico and Oklahoma — a bipartisan mix that NIEER identifies as pre-K leaders and strong examples others can emulate.  

Though this might seem like a clarion call for states to step up, W. Steven Barnett, NIEER’s senior director and founder, says it is not that simple. For many states, Head Start is the  foundation their preschool programs are built on and it is on the . 

“Federal Head Start money is about the same magnitude of all state pre-K spending,” he says. “The notion that states could replace that funding, especially overnight, is not realistic. If you had said, ‘Over 10 years, this is going to go away,’ maybe. But overnight? It would be a disaster.” In some states, like Mississippi and West Virginia, 23% of 3- and 4-year-olds are in a Head Start program. 

“We don’t know if they’re going to zero out the program, but if they do, the money to serve a half a million 3- and 4-year-olds disappears. In some states that’s almost a quarter of the kids who benefit the most,” Barnett adds. “They say, ‘You need to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps,’ but also, ‘I’m taking your boots away.’ Where are these states going to find the money to replace that?”

Setting New Records

The 2023-24 school year saw new records set for funding and enrollment for state-funded preschool programs. Across the country, enrollment increased by more than 111,000 children nationally to reach 1,750,995 children, an increase of 7% from the previous year. This marked an all-time enrollment high with 37% of 4-year-olds and 8% of 3-year-olds enrolled. Despite the increase for 3-year-olds though, most state pre-K programs continued to serve primarily (or only) 4-year-olds.

States spent more than $13.6 billion on preschool in the 2023-24 school year, which included $257 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds, an increase of nearly $2 billion over the prior year. State spending on preschool increased in all but five states that have a public preschool program. California, New Jersey, New York and Texas led funding, spending $1 billion or more on preschool. Together, these four states accounted for 51% of all state spending on preschool. 

State spending per child increased in all but eight states with preschool programs. Including state, local and federal sources, spending per child was $8,856, an inflation-adjusted increase of $635 per child that reflects a strong growth in state funding as federal recovery dollars decreased. 

Room for Improvement

Over the past two decades, NIEER’s research has consistently found that higher quality preschool programs yield increased and enduring benefits for children’s learning and development. Based on classroom data, monitoring, surveys and assessments, the institute’s research has developed 10 benchmarks that measure the quality standards for preschool programs that support that growth. 

The 2024 Yearbook finds that 2 1/2 times more children in the U.S. attended lower-quality programs that met five or fewer of those benchmarks than children attending programs that met nine or 10, underscoring again the tremendous variation across states and zip codes. 

According to the report, many states aren’t hitting the quality standards that would set their programs up to provide  that give pre-K its greatest value for children and taxpayers. Five states, for example, have no state-funded program in 2023-24; eight states spent less than half the cost needed to meet minimum quality standards. Others just aren’t serving enough young learners.

“If you do pre-K right, you put in place a foundation for future success in school and in life,” Barnett says. “We have strong causal evidence linking quality pre-K to educational attainment, whether you graduate from high school or go to college, and strong causal evidence that links educational attainment to other positive life outcomes. Not just how much money you make, but good pre-K sets in motion this chain where people will live longer, healthier lives. Taxpayers make out great when that happens.” 

Barnett adds: “If that [foundation] is not there, then we’re focusing much more on remediation, special education, dropout prevention, incarceration — all these negative expenditures rather than positive outcomes. If you’re meeting five or less benchmarks and you’re not spending enough money to pay for a quality program, it may look like you’re saving money, but you’re throwing it away.”

Alabama, Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Rhode Island are the only states nationwide to meet all 10 benchmarks. Other states come close, meeting nine benchmarks. On the other hand, 21 state-funded preschool programs meet five or fewer of these quality standards. 

Information Gathering

Over the years, the NIEER State of Preschool Yearbook has become a sort of Bible for legislators, school officials, researchers and other early learning stakeholders to understand what’s going on in the sector. Barnett points out that people might hear “survey” and think the reporting is based on sampling. In reality, he says, it’s more like a census because it consists of 300 questions sent to state school administrators. By the time all the appendices are organized, the final report is inches thick. 

“There have been changes in state governments where no one with institutional memory was left,” Barnett says. “They used the Yearbook to figure out what their own policies were — which is fair because they’re the ones that filled it out in the first place. The Yearbooks have been a long-standing partnership with administrators. It’s as much their product as it is ours. We write up the narrative up front, but all the state page narratives are constructed with state administrators to make sure we represent their programs correctly.” 

Going Forward

Preschool spending has reached an all-time high, but fiscal uncertainty could reverse the trend, the report warns. Several top economists  weak growth in the U.S. economy, or even a recession, which, combined with federal cutbacks could create powerful headwinds for state pre-K programs. It wouldn’t be the first time: According to the report, the 2008 recession led to lower pre-K funding for more than half a decade. Barnett says it’s a critical time for states to learn from each other and take proactive steps with policies and programs that prepare their youngest learners for their best possible future. 

In my own history classes in high school and college, I learned about many remarkable individuals whose actions, for better or worse, plotted our course forward. Although there are no state or federal requirements to teach history to very young children, it is integral to my preschool classroom.

I teach history because I want my students to understand how change really happens, a lesson that is becoming more critical with each passing day. I don’t teach history so that some 4-year-olds can rattle off important names and dates before they head to kindergarten. They would likely forget those names in a few months anyway. 

Nothing is as compelling to a child as another child’s story, so we explore history by learning about young people who helped create change. We focus on wonderful picture books about ,Ìę,Ìę, and , all children facing a society that did not recognize their value. Young children inherently understand this experience because not only do they identify with someone having less power than the adults around them, they are also keenly tuned in to issues of fairness.  

As we thumb through the book , the children always want to examine the illustration of 6-year-old Ruby  past a crowd of screaming white grown-ups holding pro-segregation signs. They ask about why the adults are so angry. They want to know how Ruby felt being the only kid there at that moment. And I ask them, “What would you do if you were there with her?”  

Their answers are thoughtful, powerful, and sometimes a little wild. Among my favorites is the child who said, “I’d give all the kids hammers, even the babies, and we’d hammer down that school and build a new one for everybody.” I love that even the babies are empowered in this re-imagining.  And this young child perfectly demonstrated the real key takeaway from all of my history lessons: there are no lone heroes.  It takes an organized community and some powerful leaders to make change.

The need to organize real people to work together and support one another through a difficult struggle is one that often gets lost in children’s media. Put a 4-year-old in a Batman t-shirt and they feel like they can do anything by themselves. And many history lessons inadvertently recreate those superhero narratives. 

There are extraordinary historical figures like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but when we lionize one person too much we turn them into superheroes, and superheroes aren’t real. Nobody has that much power all by themselves.  If history is just a series of superheroes, how can any of us regular folks hope to make any kind of difference?  

So we focus on the ways people help one another. We notice, together, that  in order to support the Montgomery bus boycott sparked in part by Claudette Colvin’s unwillingness to give up her seat months before Rosa Parks, and that MLK helped organize many other people to make that boycott happen. We notice that Judy Heumann organized many disabled people to protest effectively for equal rights, and that 9-year-old Sylvia Mendez was the central figure in the first court case to desegregate California schools, a ruling that paved the way for Ruby Bridges to bravely walk into an integrated school. 

We notice, our little classroom of very young people, that we all need help sometimes and that helping one another is one of the most powerful things we can do together. It takes the collective effort of many people, even the babies, to create change. As pressure increases in schools across the nation to erase these stories, I am more committed than ever to teaching the kind of history that ensures that these kids will make history of their own.

Now, he’s targeting preschools and younger children, this time with a carrot and no stick.

DeWine and the state Department of Children and Youth have been offering free, voluntary online classes in the science of reading to preschool teachers and administrators for nearly a year. 

Last month, DeWine and state officials set aside $5 million in federal grants to offer $750 bonuses to preschool teachers and administrators who complete at least 10 hours of the training by next summer.

“By providing Science of Reading training for those who teach and care for our young children, we will be empowering these educators to lay the groundwork for more of our kids to reach their full potential,” DeWine said in a press release announcing the grants.

Within a week, more than 500 teachers had already applied for the $750.

Early childhood experts say that though preschools don’t offer the same intensity of reading lessons that kindergarten and first grade teachers do, there are ways to subtly improve young children’s understanding of letters and their sounds with play, songs and games that fit their age.

Preschool is a “golden opportunity to capitalize on the unique energy, curiosity, and explosive growth in oral language that children experience during the preschool years,” University of California, Berkely Emerita professor Lily Wong Fillmore and New York University professor Susan Neumann wrote for ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ earlier this year. 

“Early-learning experiences have exponential power: they can shape lifelong learning habits and accelerate literacy, particularly for English-language learners,” they wrote.

How many states have made science of reading a focus for preschool isn’t clear, largely because states don’t require preschool and few pay for it. Only 35 percent of four year olds nationally attend preschool, according to the National Institutes for Early Childhood Research at Rutgers University.

But NIEER researcher Lori Connors-Tadros said requiring, or encouraging science of reading methods in preschools, like Ohio is doing, is “a growing trend.”

“Legislators are adding requirements if they have a state funded Pre-K program around training for preschool teachers, and in some states, they’re actually requiring some training for administrators,” she said.

DeWine and the Ohio legislature joined a national movement to the science of reading in 2023, ordering schools in to stop using other methods and to implement the curriculum by the 2024-25 school year.

They budgeted $64 million to help school districts using other approaches buy new teaching materials and required teachers from kindergarten and up to be trained in science of reading concepts.

The state then created a series of online lessons that take eight hours for some high school teachers and administrators and 22 hours for most elementary school teachers.

More than 85,000 K-12 teachers completed that training by the end of October, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The state also started offering two tracks of free online training for preschool staff — one for three and four-year-olds and one for younger infants and toddlers — through the Rollins Center for Language & Literacy, based in Atlanta last December.

Jane Pernicone, director of the First Baptist Church Children’s Center in Shaker Heights, Ohio, said she took some of the classes and planned to have teachers at her child center take them over the next few years.

With grants now available, Pernicone said she’s encouraging her eight lead teachers to take the classes right away to earn the bonus. The state limits grants to $3,000 per preschool, or four staff, so Pernicone said she’ll skip her bonus and share the total grants between the eight teachers.

Though her center was mostly using science of reading through its Creative Curriculum materials, Pernicone said the lessons are good reinforcement and reminders to focus on using varied vocabulary, constantly interact with children in conversations and to show them how each letter sounds and not just teach them what the letters are.

“It’s good awareness for staff to realize
’oh, I should focus on building vocabulary’
as opposed to just making sure children know their ABCs,” she said. “There’s a lot of good content, just kind of a reframing of good practices.”

The $5 million for the grants comes from the federal and the . DeWine’s office did not respond to questions about whether his new two-year state budget proposal due early next year would include any money for preschool reading training.

“If we had to pay for a tuition-based program, she wouldn’t be going,” Gurgul said, who lives in Allen Park with her family. “It’s a big extra cost. Do you pay however many hundreds of dollars a month for preschool? Or do you pay for your car insurance?“

Timing worked in Gurgul’s favor: This summer, Michigan joined a handful of  states in moving closer to offering “Universal Pre-K,” for four-year-olds. It’s an elusive and much-debated goal of advocates nationally, in which state-funded preschool is available and free for all families.

Michigan’s Democrat-majority state legislature this year passed an $85 million increase in preschool funding as a step toward Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s goal of free preschool for all by 2027. The increase covers the cost of 6,800 more preschool seats, both in schools and in private child care centers — meaning the state is now offering preschool to about half of its 118,000 four-year-olds.

The increase immediately allowed Gurgul’s daughter, 4, to attend one of two new classrooms the Allen Park Early Childhood Center opened this fall using the new state money. For Gurgul it’s a big win, even if Michigan still falls short of the 70% preschool enrollment experts define as true “universal” preschool.

“She’s excited every morning,” Gurgul said. “She wakes up and she jumps out of bed and asks, ‘Is it a school day?’ She’s excited to get up and go.”

For many, including Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden who pushed, but failed, to create preschool for every child, the early education programs are as vital to children’s academic and emotional development as kindergarten through high school. 

But there’s no national consensus on what age school should start for children. Even kindergarten isn’t universal, with only .

And , often , about preschool’s impact and whether it is worth the money.

An all-time high of 35% of four-year-olds nationally attended preschool in the 2022-23 school year. But only six states — Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin — and Washington, D.C, have full, free preschool, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. 

Several other states’ governors, including Illinois Gov. Elliot Pritzker, are , with a goal of full, free preschool. 

Massachusetts Gov. Maureen Healey and the state’s legislature have that were once prosperous but have declined as industry moved away.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is trying to offer preschool to all four-year-olds, starting with those from low-income families and facing other challenges, such as homelessness. But at the start and have made progress a challenge. 

And California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been inching toward

NIEER reported this spring that 10 states are committed to adding universal preschool, but warned, “Most of those states are far from reaching that goal.”

“A key question for the future is whether states will increase investments enough to keep promises regarding program expansion and quality, including adequate pay for the workforce,” NIEER officials said this spring. 

In Michigan, Gov. Whitmer, a Democrat, used her 2023 State of the State Address to call for expanding the state’s preschool program and making it free for all four-year olds by 2027. 

“This investment will ensure children arrive at kindergarten ready to learn and saves their families upwards of $10,000 a year,” she said. “It helps parents, especially moms, go back to work. And it will launch hundreds more preschool classrooms across Michigan, supporting thousands of jobs.”

Last year, the state agreed to spend $72.4 million more to pay for five-day preschool instead of just four, and increased the family income limit for free preschool from 250% of the federal poverty level to 300%, or $93,000 for a family of four.

This year, Whitmer and the state legislature increased preschool funding by $85 million to add 6,800 new preschool seats. The state also made more middle-class families eligible by again relaxing state income limits to 400% of poverty level, or $124,800 for a family of four.

The increases passed over strong Republican opposition, as is common in state debates. 

Republican State Rep. Nancy DeBoer said the bill, which also covered other school funding issues, diverts money from more important priorities, such as school safety or increasing funding for schools.

“Making our future generations a priority is common sense,” she told the House just before the bill passed. “Neglecting them is a new idea – one that will first hurt our kids and later the entire state. It doesn’t have to be this way.”

And Molly Macec, director of education policy for the right-leaning Mackinac Institute, blasted Whitmer’s plan as “wasteful, unnecessary, unfair” for adding higher-income students. Studies of preschool impact typically show greater effects for low-income students.

“Her PreK for All plan will do nothing more than subsidize preschool for wealthier families,” . “It’s a waste of time and money for the state to pay the bills of people who don’t need help.”

Though Whitmer and staff , the state’s not there yet. By most definitions, universal preschool requires about 70% of the state’s four-year-olds to attend to count. That percentage below 100% allows for families who choose not to enroll their children.

Even if all 59,000 funded seats in Michigan are filled this year — a long shot because thousands of seats sit open each year — the state program would only serve about half of Michigan’s 118,000 four-year-olds.

Use of available seats has lagged, advocates believe, because of transportation issues, parents not knowing their children are eligible, and because preschool schedules don’t always line up with family work hours.

Jefftrey Cappizano, president of The Policy Equity Group, a non-profit that joined several others in creating a , called the increases “a decent step” toward that goal. He and the report noted that, like many states, Michigan needs to add many more preschool seats as well as train more teachers to support such explosive  growth. 

Preschool and child care staffing is a challenge everywhere. After employees left, staffing levels nationally have only

“You have to make sure that the infrastructure is there,” Cappizano said.

He and other preschool advocates also dismissed claims only affluent families benefit from the new income limits. Low-income students have priority under state law, as do those with other challenges such as having parents with low education levels or families that primarily speak another language.

And preschools that may serve the neediest students don’t always fill, so enrolling other students for those spots helps pay for the school and teachers.

Adding new seats also allows preschools to expand or new ones to open in areas that are low income.

“The expansion
 isn’t just going to expand to the middle class,” said Eileen Storer-Smith, a program officer of the William K. Kellogg Foundation, which has made advancing preschool in Detroit a priority. “It’s going to expand to children who are eligible, where there just wasn’t a seat for them.”

Zina Davis, founder of the Children of the Rising Sun Empowerment Center, a child care and preschool center in Detroit, said the increases haven’t allowed her to expand yet, but will soon. She is planning a second center in the city and also looks forward to some three-year-olds at her center with higher-income families becoming eligible for state funding when they turn four.

The state funding changes also let her increase pay for her staff.

“It benefits everybody,” Davis said. “It benefits the programs for sustainability. It benefits the families, because now we have more slots available. And it also benefits the staff that are able to get livable wages.”

“How many do you have? One
two..three
four,” Johnson says, before they place another bear in the row. “What if we add more? What comes after four?”

Johnson smiles when Mayeda replies with “five.” The stealth math lesson is working. Mayeda “added” a bear and is starting to understand, in subtle ways, the very early basics of addition.

“They think it’s play,” Johnson said, stepping away to let Mayeda line up bears on her own.. “They don’t always understand that they’re actually learning things.”

Math lessons like this, disguised as a fun activity playing with colorful bears, should be a regular part of preschool, math experts say, especially as older students across the U.S. struggle with math after the pandemic.

But such lessons are a rarity. Preschools devote just five percent of time to math skills, after observing 77 preschool classrooms in seven states —  Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. 

The researchers from four universities also found math instruction between 2018 and 2020 rarely went beyond the most basic math skills, like learning numbers, counting and identifying shapes, which are important for students to learn, but stop short of what most four-year-olds can do. 

“They’re getting hardly any math,” said Michelle Mazzocco, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development and co-author of the study. 

While some may see doing basic counting for a few minutes a day as the right thing for most preschoolers, Mazzocco and other national math advocates say it’s a lost opportunity.

With falling scores on math tests such as the international Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests – which dropped between 2018 and 2022 by two-thirds of a year’s worth of learning – teaching basic math in preschool, if done well, can make it easier to understand advanced lessons later, Mazzoco said. When presented as games or play, even four-year-olds can learn basic concepts behind math tasks like measurement, geometry,  addition and subtraction.

“Some of those children who struggle with math are struggling because they got off to a slow start,” Mazzocco said. “That can be diminished.”

“We need to make sure that preschoolers have more opportunities to engage their natural inquisitive interest in math, to do so regularly and frequently in developmentally appropriate ways,” she said.

Latrenda Knighten, the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, agreed students can learn math concepts at a young age and preschools should teach much more of it. She doesn’t expect a math learning revolution similar to the “science of reading” across the country, but wants math to be a priority, even in preschool.

Though there are vigorous debates over how preschool gains in all subjects fade over time, Knighten said. But if students learn more math early on, and kindergarten and later grades build on that knowledge, not just re-teach it, scores should go up, she said. Preschool math also provides an early start on learning critical thinking, problem-solving and recognizing patterns that pays off later, she said.

“You hear a lot about literacy, literacy, literacy,” said Knighten, a former elementary school math coach. “In an ideal world, you maybe turn those wheels and give math the focus that we’ve had on reading for so long.” 

Historically, preschool math has been a low priority, both because of the traditional focus on reading but also because preschool is often viewed as child care or play-based more than an academic program. States don’t require preschool and few pay for it, so just 35 percent of four year olds nationally attend preschool, according to the National Institutes for Early Childhood Research at Rutgers University.

There’s also no national consensus on what students at that age should be taught. The nation’s last attempt at setting national education standards, the Common Core movement, faced opposition to its kindergarten through 12th grade standards and skipped preschool altogether.

Even the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics promoted math skills starting in kindergarten from 1980 to 2000, before adding preschool in 2000.

The council and many states now have specific recommendations about what preschoolers should learn about numbers and shapes and measurement.

Consider counting, for example. Counting can be just memorizing and reciting a list of names assigned to each number. But the council and states also want preschoolers to learn that each number stands for a real quantity of items. They can be taught that each item should be counted once — not a few times or counting several items as one — which is a common mistake four-year-olds can make.

They can also be taught that the count of one group can be more than or less than the count of another. 

Doug Clements, a professor at the University of Denver and co-author of the highly-regarded Building Blocks preschool math curriculum, said it is easy to underestimate what preschoolers can learn.

“There’s a common misunderstanding that in preschool you learn to count, then in kindergarten you count higher, and then in first grade you can learn arithmetic,” he said. If you give students a narrative, a story behind a problem, he said, and let them use objects to see things physically, they can understand math concepts well.

“People think that arithmetic is a vertical – a three, then a plus sign, two, bar under it, then fill in the numeral — which is not what I’m talking about,” he said.

Teachers can ask four-year-olds, for example, if they have five toys and give a friend two, how many they have left.

The colored bears in Johnson’s class, a common tool for preschools,  offer a chance to show, without any lecture or worksheets, that objects can be sorted by color or size, that a row of six bears, for example, is larger than a row of four bears and that “adding” another bear to a row changes the number to a higher one.

It sounds simple, but teachers need to be intentional about how they handle “play” like this, Knighten said.

“It takes the teacher understanding what’s happening and knowing the right questions to pose to student,” she said. “Maybe ask them, ‘What can you tell me about how you’ve arranged these bears or these cars or whatever they’re playing with? Do you have more of one than you have the other? How do you know you have more?  How can you show me?’ And that’s not even bringing out paper or pencil, it’s just understanding the math that a child at ages two, three or four is capable of understanding and how to provide opportunities for them to explore those things.” 

The counting bears are one of dozens of toys and games packed into the math closet at the Fairmount Early Childhood Center in Beachwood, Ohio, just a few miles from Johnson’s Head Start class.

There, students count off jumping jacks and toe touches to reinforce quantity. Children at one table glue decorations to printouts of the number one to reinforce how the number looks. In another classroom, three-year-olds pick through a box of different-colored blocks of different shapes and line them up in rows by shape and color, counting how many they have placed in each row as they go. 

Teacher Rosanne Stark guides students nearby in the earliest stages of another math skill — measurement. Today, three-year-olds pick between shorter and longer rectangles of colored paper and glue them to a sheet under columns labeled “shorter” or “longer.”

“Would you say that’s on a long strip or a short strip?” Stark asks a student. “Long. Good job. So we’re going to glue it on.”

Clements said comparing lengths with activities like this is a good start.

“Then we move on to actual measurement, which is assigning a number to the length of something,” he said. That can happen first by attaching several, say five, blocks together to see if something is longer or shorter than five blocks, then “adding” or subtracting blocks to the right size.

“They can show you in the count of cubes,” he said. “It’s a very concrete measurement. It’s very easy to understand conceptually for kids, because it makes sense to them.”

How much impact preschool math has, though, is unclear. Researchers can point to multiple studies showing preschool math leads to better math performance in kindergarten and in elementary school, sometimes as late as eighth grade. But as with preschool overall, other studies show students taking preschool math don’t end up further ahead than other students in later grades. This so-called “fade” plagues most debates over whether preschool is worth the effort or cost.

Tyler Watts, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who is researching the effects of early math, said advantages sometimes nearly vanish by fifth grade. He and others are trying to figure out why.

“I don’t think it’s totally clear, to be honest with you,” he said. “I think it’s a hard problem to figure out.”

While he’s still a supporter of preschool and preschool math, Watts believes — like Mazzocco and Knighten suggested – that it can be the first of many steps in improving math lessons over several years.

“If the goal is improving, say, math achievement in grade eight, I think you’re going to need to work on that all the way from PreK through grade eight,” he said. “I don’t think PreK is going to work as kind of like a low-cost silver bullet for that problem.”

There’s another challenge to making preschool math better and more common — preparing teachers. Knighten said that in her time as a math coach in Louisiana, she found many gravitate toward teaching reading because they thought they were “bad at math” when they were in school and view it as an ordeal, Knighten said.

That’s why the council partnered with the National Association for the Education of Young Children this year to offer for teachers on topics like and .

“If we actually provide teachers with more confidence in their ability to teach mathematics to students,” Knighten said. “Then, of course, that means that they’ll spend more time on those activities with students, and students will actually get more of those beginning, foundational experiences.”

How could a system millions rely on simply not exist?

Wuori’s answer: That a “crisis of misunderstanding” has turned early childhood centers into an exceedingly expensive and “industrialized form of babysitting” based on the false idea that child care is somehow separate and distinct from education. Instead, Wuori says babies learn from birth — and some research suggests even before that — and their time outside the home should be treated as schooling, not as a place for them to be watched over while their parents work. 

In not embracing learning as an essential purpose, the current child care system, Wuori says, is harmful both educationally and economically for children, their parents, child care workers and society at large.

“All environments for young children are learning environments,” he said. “The question ultimately comes down to, “Is your child in a good one?”

Wuori, who espouses a “transformative” investment of public funding in early child care, began his own career in the field over three decades ago in the classroom. Teaching in an afterschool program “lit the fire” in his interest in child development and inspired him to return to graduate school.

After teaching kindergarten in South Carolina public schools for five years, he moved into school district leadership before spending 14 years as the deputy director of South Carolina’s Early Childhood Education Agency, . 

He eventually founded a public policy consultancy practice, , focused on the needs of America’s young children and their families. Through his work, he partners with state elected leaders and advises them on early childhood policy topics. 

But Wuori is perhaps best known for his social media presence on where he posts delightful videos of babies, using them to explain key child development concepts. His feed, which has amassed a prominent following, was recently described in a New York Times as “educational, but also, simply put — ‘awwwww.’”

Your baby learns to speak – not just from listening – but from watching.

I’ve written many times about the keen observational powers of babies. Infants are expert observers of their parents’ faces, which (among other lessons) provide important clues as to how mom and dad


— Dan Wuori (@DanWuori)

Days before the official release of his book, The Daycare Myth: What We Get Wrong about Early Care and Education (and What We Should Do about It), Wuori spoke with ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ’s Amanda Geduld.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ: Your book makes the argument that day care doesn’t exist. I think readers will hear that and say, “Well, my kid is in day care. So what do you mean that it doesn’t exist?” Can you explain what you mean?

Dan Wuori: What I mean by that is that for the better part of 100 years, we have had a policy in place — one that has really created services that are designed to support parental employment more than they are designed to support the optimal development of young children. The central thesis of the book is that we have fooled ourselves into thinking that there is this thing called day care, or child care, that is separate and distinct from education
 

What we know from decades of science at this point is that that’s simply not the case. We know that young children are learning, not only from day one, but increasingly, we have this understanding that some very powerful early forms of learning actually may begin in utero. And so that’s a very different proposition, right? 


 This artificial distinction between care and education is really what I’m talking about 
 We have conceptualized child care as almost like a holding facility, right? We’re thinking about very custodial forms of care, and that translates, in many cases, into policy. We have states that are proposing, for example, as a solution to the financial crisis that the child care industry finds itself in, deregulating in ways that sort of strip away any requirement other than those that just entail the very basic health and safety of those kids. And that is a very low bar, and, frankly, a dangerous bar, and one that frankly, we end up paying for in the long term.

You also note that the vocabulary we use matters. If we’re getting rid of the term day care, what should we be using instead?

The truth is the term day care has fallen very much out of fashion even in the field in recent years and been replaced with child care. What I would love to see is an acknowledgement that this is all either early childhood education or early care and learning. Because some acknowledgement that ultimately these are not simply holding facilities for children, [but[ that these are powerful learning laboratories, and developmental spaces, and that’s true regardless of what the sign out front says. 

All environments for young children are learning environments. The question ultimately comes down to “Is your child in a good one?”

You talk also about how our current model, “Simply doesn’t work, and it doesn’t because it can’t work.” Can you explain a little bit of what you mean by that? 

What I’m talking about in that section is our current economic model for child care. What we know about child care is that it is sort of like a broken, three-legged stool. We know, for example, that parents are paying more for child care in most every state at this point than they pay for in-state college tuition or for their housing costs. And so that it is unaffordable to parents in really significant ways. 

We know concurrently that for the business owners themselves, this is not a profit-making venture 
 Providers are scarcely keeping their doors open, and the whole sad thing is sort of cobbled together on the backs of a low-income workforce that is almost exclusively female, and in many states, majority women of color, who are literally subsidizing the cost of care to families in the form of their low wages. 

They are highly dependent on public assistance programs themselves, making at or near minimum wage in most states. And in fact, according to some recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, making roughly 60 cents an hour less than we pay dog walkers in this country.

The whole thing gets down to: we talk about all of those different forms of crisis that the field is in. There’s a compensation crisis, and there’s an access crisis, and there’s an affordability crisis. But the book makes the case that all of those crises are really a side effect of the fundamental crisis in the field, which is a crisis of understanding. 

That we are failing to acknowledge these settings for what they truly are, and that as a result not only are we sub-optimizing this incredibly powerful window of human development, but we are saddling taxpayers 
 for decades to come for the result of our inaction and our failure to get things right in the early years in ways that are ultimately far more costly than doing things right in the first place.

Throughout the book, you make arguments for why we need to shift this system — for economic reasons, for educational reasons and just because it’s the right thing to do. What would a shift in this system look like, both practically on the ground and in terms of outcomes?

Yeah, I think about that question in two categories, really. The big picture message of the book is that we need transformative public investment in young children and families. I have also worked in the public policy space and with policymakers long enough to know that transformative system change very rarely happens in one fell swoop. So while making the case, for example, that early childhood development needs to be seen as a public good instead of a private market service, the book 
 also suggests then both some low-hanging fruit in terms of things that we could do proactively right now in ways to help improve compensation, for example, but also there’s an entire chapter that is dedicated to what I have labeled sort of forms of public policy malpractice — examples of federal and state policy where maybe with all the right intentions, the execution of our policy is actually exacerbating some of the financial crisis in the field. 


 I see policymakers increasingly saying to me, “You know what I get the brain development pieces of this. I know this is important. I know we need to do better. What I don’t know is, how do we pay for it?” 

And one of the major messages in the book is we are already paying for it. We’re just doing it in the dumbest possible ways. We are very much taking out, at scale, a payday loan that we are meeting our very basic immediate financial needs at the highest possible long-term cost to taxpayers 
 We’re paying more in terms of remediation and retention and special education throughout our K–12 system. We are paying for worse health outcomes 
 that could be mitigated against by doing right in the early years 


There’s an anecdote later on in the book that was recounted to you about how much some of these early child care and education teachers are struggling financially. Can you share that?

I had the good fortune two summers ago to partner with the state of Kansas on a listening tour as they were assessing the strength of their early childhood system. I traveled across the state, talking with business leaders and early childhood providers and parents, and got into a conversation with a child care provider. 

We’re there, and I was asking her, “What do you need most? How could state policymakers help support you?” And she said, “Oh, well, you know, the thing that I really need the most is a floating substitute who could sort of go from classroom to classroom.”

And I said, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Like, somebody to help give teachers a break or use the restroom or have lunch to themselves?” And she said, “Oh no, we mostly have that covered. I’m worried that I need to give them time to get to the bank.”


 And so I said, “Oh, you know, to deposit their checks?” And she said, “Oh, no. Not that kind of bank. I can’t pay them enough to feed their families, and so I try to make time for them each week to be able to visit the local food bank.”

And boy, that just — I mean, to this day, that’s one of the most upsetting stories that has been conveyed to me in this field in my career. These women, who are literally being entrusted to help co-construct the brains of young children, are making so little that we would have to be sending them to a food bank despite their full-time employment in what I could argue is the world’s most critical profession.

One framing motif that you use throughout the book is the food pyramid (released in 1992 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture based on what turned out to be of healthy eating). Can you explain why you chose that motif and how it reflects what’s happening in this day care myth?

I use that food pyramid example as sort of a framing around an area of public policy that we got boldly and catastrophically wrong and raise the question for readers: Where might we be doing that currently? What’s happening in our public policy that 20 years from now, we might look back at and say, “Wow. We can hardly believe we ever got something so wrong.” 

And the book really makes the case that right now in our approach to young children and families we have created 
 this bizarro world for children that — in so many ways unexamined — is precisely the opposite of what we know from the science of early development 


One good example of that is that we know that the earliest weeks and months of life in particular play an absolutely critical role in attachment 
 And so then we juxtapose that against knowing that this is a country where 1-in-4 American mothers have to return to the workforce within two weeks of giving birth. And you know that in our early childhood settings we are seeing data that suggests that the teachers in those programs turn over to the tune of about 40% a year 
 And so during precisely the weeks and months of life that young children most need continuous, stable, nurturing relationships, we are seeing those relationships interrupted — both by a lack of paid family leave provisions and through our terrible misunderstanding of the importance of out-of-home, early childhood settings, in ways that are bound to fail us later on. 


 My hope is that the book is an opportunity for us to press pause and to really rethink some of the underlying assumptions around how we have structured provisions for young children and families in this country and to come together on a bipartisan basis. One thing that I feel very strongly about — and I’m very proud of in the book — is this idea that 
 if ever there was an issue that really should bring us together across the partisan continuum, this ought to be it, because it makes sense for children, it makes sense for the strength of nuclear families, it makes sense in terms of our economy, it it makes sense for taxpayers 
 There really is something for everyone — hopefully in this conversation and hopefully in the book.

A lead researcher on the study said when preschoolers spend time on tablets at 3 Âœ years of age, they show increased outbursts of anger by age 4 Âœ, which then leads to increased time on computer tablets at age 5 Âœ.  

Researchers described the trend as a “vicious cycle,” where excessive tablet use delays children’s ability to deal with their emotions, leading them to use screen time to soothe themselves when they’re upset. 

“The preschool years are a very important time for learning how to cope with negative emotions [like frustration and anger],” said Gabrielle Garon-Carrier, an assistant professor of psychoeducation at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. “Learning to recognize emotions and adopt behaviors that are acceptable to society cannot be done in front of tablets.”

The study was published this month in JAMA Pediatrics.  

Previous research has linked the use of mobile devices to emotional dysregulation in children, Garon-Carrier said, but few studies have been able to show a direct link between tablet use and a cycle that could interfere with the development of self-regulation skills. 

Preschoolers learn to use time in front of a screen to cope with frustration or other challenging emotions, Garon-Carrier said, rather than how to manage those feelings. 

Student researchers visited the homes of 315 families with preschool-aged children in Nova Scotia, Canada three times — when children were 3 Âœ in 2020 and again in 2021 and 2022. 

Parents were asked how much time children spent using a tablet and also about emotional behaviors; along with how the child handled transitions at bath or bedtime.  

Researchers found that children whose tablet use increased by 75 minutes when they were 3 œ were 22 percent more angry or frustrated at other points of the day by the age of 4 œ, according to the study. A year later, the same children were using the tablet about 17 minutes more per day.

The study followed the same children over three years, from 2020 to 2022, as part of a bigger research project into other aspects of family life such as sleep and physical activity, Garon-Carrier said.

A parent can’t be blamed, she said, for letting a child who has frequent tantrums spend more time in front of a screen.

“It’s probably challenging for parents who have kids with destructive behaviors,” she said. “That could explain the cycle. The child spends time on the tablet and doesn’t learn to regulate his emotions. He has more outbursts and the parent is exhausted.”

She acknowledged that the research took place during the pandemic, when both children and adults spent more time in front of screens. But the findings hold, she said, because children continue to spend time in front of tablets.

The findings led Garon-Carrier and her co-investigators to believe parents should delay introducing young children to screen technology. This aligns with , which stress the importance of physical activity, interactive play and quality sleep over sedentary screen time.

While the study did not account for what type of content children were watching, Garon-Carrier said many preschoolers watch videos on Youtube, which allows parents to adjust settings on their accounts so that once one video is over, another doesn’t automatically begin. This approach helps limit screen time to just one video at a time.

It’s especially important to remove screens from important moments in the day, she said, including mealtimes and before bed. Also, parents can model good screen habits for their children. It can be helpful to make a family plan about screen use, which might include a rule that bans phones at the dinner table.

“This can be challenging for adults,” Garon-Carrier said. “Imagine how challenging it is for preschoolers. They need external people to say, ‘That’s enough.’ They can’t say that for themselves.”

And the pay? It  doesn’t compare, she said.

“We’re underpaid, overworked and we’re not appreciated. We’re seen as, ‘Oh you’re just a day care. No, I’m not a day-care person. I’m a teacher.’ ” 

Muñeton started off as an aide and worked her way up to full-time teacher and president of the , an American Federation of Teachers local union in California.

Muñeton said when she was an assistant teacher, more than half of her paycheck went to health insurance, and her husband was forced to work a second job to help support their two kids, who are both Head Start students. This year, Muñeton said she reached a breaking point and considered leaving her decade-and-a-half -long career in early childhood education to apply for a job at Target.

Muñeton is far from alone: child care workers nationally have one of the lowest-paid occupations, with 11% to 34% living in While the average salary of a public preschool teacher and a kindergarten teacher is about $49,000 and $60,000, respectively, the average annual salary for Head Start and other preschool teachers is about

But this could all change over the next several years according to a recently released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start and aims to raise annual wages for teachers in the program by about $10,000 and increase access to benefits such as high-quality, affordable health care coverage and paid leave. The rule is largely in response to the struggle to hire and retain qualified staff, which has ultimately led to classrooms closing.

Head Start organizations must comply with some elements of the ruling by October but have until August 2031 to begin providing increased pay. There is an emergency exemption for the 35% of agencies with fewer than 200 funded slots, but they must still make “measurable improvements in wages for staff over time.”

Some agencies may also be eligible for waivers for wage requirements in 2028, if the funding does not increase at a sufficient pace, which could be the rule’s greatest challenge. In order to qualify, they would need to demonstrate that implementing the pay raises would force them to cut occupied seats and show that they’re meeting certain quality requirements.

a nonprofit organization that represents Head Start families, providers and educators, welcomed the federal announcement in an Aug. 16 press release, but expressed disappointment that the edict does not address the need for significant additional funding to fully achieve its goals and could end up forcing operators to slash staff to meet the salary mandates.

“The organization remains concerned that, if Congress and future administrations do not agree to such increases, the impact of the final rule could prove devastating, by significantly reducing the number of children and families served by Head Start programs,” the organization wrote.

While the rule is an important step forward from a policy perspective, it is a “double-edged sword” in terms of funding, according to Dan Wuori, the founder and president of and a former kindergarten teacher and South Carolina school district administrator. 

“They’re sort of stuck either way,” he said. “If they can’t attract teachers then they can’t serve kids. But if they have to compensate at a higher level to draw qualified staff then that — in the absence of new funding — could mean serving a much smaller number of children.”

Katie Hamm, deputy assistant secretary for Early Childhood Development at the which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an Aug. 30 interview that she believes the administration can partner with Congress to increase Head Start appropriations over time while simultaneously restructuring the current budget to put more money toward wages.

Khari Garvin, the director of the office of Head Start, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ the hope is that the changes will position the program to recruit, attract and retain the “best and brightest talent in this field,” which “translates into better developmental outcomes for children and families.” 

“The great irony 
 is that for too long we’ve had individuals — committed staff — working in what is an anti-poverty program, many of whom have made either poverty-level wages, or close to poverty-level wages,” he said. “And so now we’re correcting that.”

Muñeton doesn’t think Head Start teachers should have to wait so many years for this potential shift in pay, benefits and working conditions. But when — and if — it does happen, it’ll be life changing, she said. 

“I’ll be able to afford maybe purchasing a house rather than renting out of my parents’. I’ll be able to tell my husband, ‘Hey, quit the other job so we can see you more often.’ I’ll be able to pay off the debt that I’m still trying to pay off monthly,” she said.

‘A really important stake in the ground’

Head Start began as an eight-week demonstration project in the 1960s, as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s . Since then, the programs have reached more than 38 million children and their families, the majority of whom meet federal low-income guidelines. Currently, it serves about 650,000 children from birth to age 5 and their families, in urban, suburban and rural areas in all 50 states.

They also connect families to community and federal assistance and can help provide a career pathway for parents into early care and education: As of almost a quarter of Head Start’s 260,000 staff were parents of current or former Head Start children. The vast majority of Head Start center-based preschool teachers nationally had a bachelor’s degree or higher in early childhood education or a related field with experience. About of education staff members are Black, 30% are Latino and the vast majority are women. 

The 1,600 local agencies are funded by the federal government, though many also tap into state and local revenue sources. For years, these agencies have struggled to hire and retain highly qualified educators, with turnover hitting 17% in

“We really have a crisis on our hands,” Hamm said.

For a single adult with one child, median child care worker pay does not meet a living wage . Salary and benefits were cited as the top reason why almost 1 in 5 staff positions were vacant nationwide in a 2023 National Head Start Association . Of the 20% of Head Start and Early Head Start classrooms that were reported closed in the survey, 81% attributed the shutdowns to staffing vacancies. 

These persistently low wages come from a century-long history of falsely dichotomizing care and education, according to Wuori, the policy expert and former kindergarten teacher.

“We think of early care as being almost an industrialized form of babysitting,” he said, “whereas education kicks in — from a policy level — maybe a few years later. And one of the side effects of that then is that the people who work with the youngest children are not respected as the professionals that they are. And a primary way that that is the case is through their compensation, which 
 lags well behind that of fast food workers and employees at big box stores.”

This new federal rule, he said, serves as a “really important stake in the ground” to rectify that mindset.

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

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

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

Transforming from Student to Teacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Rich Resource

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

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

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

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

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

If the first child comes from a home in which there are high levels of anger or hostility and poor communication about feelings, they are likely to view the question as hostile and react accordingly. A child with greater awareness of emotions and an ability to empathize might simply respond with a shrug or a request for next.

Though emotional intelligence is often considered a “soft skill,” it forms the bedrock of learning and can help set up a child for success in school, their relationships, and their future work and earnings. Knowledge of emotions is the ability to recognize, label and understand emotions in yourself and others. It’s a prerequisite for emotional regulation: the foundation for effective communication, the ability to listen, the capacity to change one’s emotional state to meet immediate goals, and even the ability to manage stress.

The child’s ability to regulate their emotions predicts these attributes across socioeconomic strata, and various racial and ethnic groups, but can be especially valuable for children facing the twin stressors of poverty and racism.

Various studies have shown that emotional intelligence in adults and adolescents can be a significant moderator of stress responses, but no published studies to date have examined the association in any demographic for basic emotion knowledge and stress.

A recent study published in the journal examined for the first time the association between emotion knowledge and levels of cortisol, a major marker for stress, in young children. The 307 children in the study attended Head Start preschool; all their families faced economic hardship, and 80% were Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), positioned to experience systemic racism. The children’s median age was 4 years.

“I’ve been studying the physiological toll of poverty-related stress, and stress and trauma related to racism and systemic oppression,” says Dr. Eleanor Brown, professor of psychology at West Chester University and the study’s lead author. “We know that poverty gets under the skin, and when you’re exposed to stress or trauma related to poverty, your whole body responds.

“If you are exposed to a particular stressor, as in an incident of neighborhood violence, your cortisol levels are going to increase, which helps you marshal the physiological resources to respond. But chronic or repeated elevations in cortisol take a toll on physiological functioning in ways that are detrimental to social-emotional, cognitive and physical health. So, I’ve been interested in what might help children facing high levels of poverty-related stress modulate their physiological response, and a student working with me — Sara King — was especially interested in emotion knowledge.” King is co-first author on the current study.

According to the , nearly 40% of children in the U.S. grow up in homes classified as poor ($25,926 for a family of four) or low-income ($51,852 for a family of four). That’s a lot of stress and a lot of cortisol in some very young kids.

Brown’s research focused on the Head Start preschool program because it represents the nation’s largest investment in early childhood education and was designed to support the development of children placed at risk by economic hardship. Head Start enrollment has been associated with improved language and literary skills in preschool children as well as fewer behavioral problems and increased social-emotional competencies. Most Head Start schools have implemented emotions-based prevention programs and curriculum support to increase students’ ability to identify, regulate and constructively use appropriate emotions.

A suggested that having strong emotional regulation skills helped mitigate some of the negative impact from repeated exposure to poverty-related stressors. Brown’s study looks at whether younger children who developed greater understanding of emotions would show fewer stress effects, as measured by their bodies’ cortisol levels.

Implementing renowned theorist Carroll Izard’s coding system that measures children’s ability to recognize and label expressions of emotion, the researchers found a statistically relevant association of greater emotion knowledge with lower amounts of cortisol. The study highlights the importance of addressing emotional competence in early childhood, Brown says.

When children can identify their emotions, they can exercise a level of cognitive control over their emotional arousal, which enables them to react appropriately to the situations and people they encounter. Emotion knowledge is also linked to the emergence of theory of mind between the ages of 3 and 5, when children become aware that other’s beliefs, desires and feelings may be different from one’s own — a foundational mechanism for navigating social interactions.

This age is the birthplace of empathy — also narcissism, the inability to imagine the needs or feelings of another. As children’s ability to understand emotions grows, their ability to negotiate social situations develops, which can set them on a positive course for elementary school and beyond. On the other hand, children who are unable to identify emotions in preschool may face behavioral and social problems as well as internalizing symptoms such as depression and anxiety.

Across cultures, humans (and some species) have evolved to recognize certain emotions like anger and fear as important knowledge for survival. Understanding potential causes and appropriate responses to these emotions is not so automatic. Much of the teaching of emotions happens naturally as parents and caregivers talk with children about emotion-provoking events they experience in their day-to-day. However, for households facing economic hardship and systemic racism, the picture may be somewhat different.

“A parent who is stressed about poverty or related hardship may be frustrated, anxious, sad, and exhausted,” Brown says. “Despite good intentions, they may treat the child harshly or withdraw emotionally and be less nurturing, less able to have the conversations with them about labeling shapes, learning the alphabet or asking, ‘How did that make you feel?’ A parent working multiple shifts or juggling too many responsibilities simply may not have the time or emotional energy for those conversations.”

Children growing up in chronic poverty also may have issues properly identifying their emotions simply because their stress levels are such that they don’t have the mental and physical bandwidth to do so.

One unfortunate finding of multiple studies is that parents across all socioeconomic strata are more likely to engage in emotion conversations with girls, more likely to offer space for emotional processing, and to support their taking time to work through emotions, Brown says. Parents are more likely to scaffold girls’ emotional processing with emotion coaching, talking about it, giving their emotions labels and helping them understand. Practically universally in American culture, parents of boys have less tolerance of them showing emotion — especially sadness and fear — and taking space to process it, which possibly explains lower levels of emotion knowledge among boys.

Children during this crucial period of development are not only building their knowledge of emotions, but they are also developing the neurocircuitry that will later support their ability to regulate their emotions, driving home the idea, Brown says, that early intervention with preschoolers may be critical for mitigating the impact of early stress exposure on brain development and functioning.

“This isn’t so much that someone who misses this window can never learn that someone who’s smiling is probably feeling happy,” she says. “They can learn to label emotions earlier or later. But this is a critical period for equipping children with the emotion understanding that will allow them to modulate their responses to meet social and learning goals. It’s also a critical period for the development of a key stress response system — the hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis (HPA) — which influences learning and memory as well as emotional and physical well-being.”

Brown adds, “There is a critical period of calibration of that system in early childhood that will influence the child’s development. You can’t necessarily reverse the impact of high stress in childhood, and these findings don’t definitively show that emotion knowledge is lowering the children’s cortisol, but the existence of the link we’ve shown suggests that there’s a good chance that by boosting children’s emotion knowledge, we can help them to regulate at a physiological level.

“This is hopeful because we may be able to use these opportunities with children in early childhood educational contexts to target emotion knowledge and skill development in ways that promote lower levels of stress.”

When Tanya Gillespie-Lambert goes to an event in a local park in Camden, New Jersey, she takes a handful of brochures about free preschool with her. She has no hesitation about approaching strangers — moms with kids especially — to plug the service in the local public school district, where she’s director of community and parent involvement.

Gillespie-Lambert and her team also hold door-knocking events several times a year to put the word out on free pre-K, dressing up in matching blue T-shirts and hats. That’s in addition to billboards, public service announcements and posters all over town.

“I still get a little shocked when they don’t know about it,” she said in an interview. “They always say, ‘I didn’t know they could start when they were 3 years old, and they don’t have to be potty trained. And it’s free?’”

Forty-four states offer some free preschool, and states from Colorado to Mississippi are expanding their programs. But even when states claim to have “universal” pre-K for 4-year-olds and sometimes 3-year-olds, some of the most comprehensive programs only serve a slice of the kids who are eligible.

There’s a host of reasons for that, beyond a lack of awareness. Some states only provide funding for 10 or 15 hours of preschool per week. Some parents can’t afford the cost of before- and after-care, or have transportation problems if there’s no bus. In some states, private pre-K providers, who often get state money for their pre-K programs, oppose shifting more state funds to public schools. And many states have a shortage of early education teachers and assistants, limiting the number of slots they can provide.

Studies show preschool is highly beneficial for young children, giving them a jump on reading and math skills and the socialization that are key to later school success. Preschool differs from child care, which has less emphasis on academics and often doesn’t employ certified teachers. But private preschool is costly, making it difficult for parents with lower incomes to afford pre-K unless it’s state-funded.

“Everybody doesn’t define ‘universal’ the same way,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “You can’t just wave a magic wand.”

Barnett said a state pre-K program should not be considered universal if there’s a cap on funding or a waitlist for slots. He advocates for states to treat pre-K like first grade — automatically available. But providing universal preschool is expensive for states.

Participation varies

More than 1.6 million 3- and 4-year-olds attended state-funded preschools in the 2022-2023 school year, with states serving 7% of 3-year-olds and 35% of 4-year-olds, according to Barnett’s institute.

But participation varies widely from state to state. The number of 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded pre-K programs in the 2022-2023 school year ranged from a high of 67% in Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma and West Virginia to single digits in Alaska, Missouri, Nevada, Delaware, North Dakota, Arizona, Hawaii and Utah, according to the institute.

Six states have no state-funded preschool: Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Some states are starting pre-K programs or expanding them. Mississippi doubled the number of kids in preschool in 2022-23 from the previous year to more than 5,300, added another 3,000 seats in 2023-24 and committed to future expansion, .

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, signed a universal preschool bill in April 2022, and classes started in the 2023-24 school year. But Colorado’s program provides only 15 hours of free preschool per week in the year before kindergarten.

Similarly, Vermont’s universal pre-K program, enacted in 2014, provides only 10 hours a week of free school.

In addition to being problematic for parents who work 40 hours a week, 10 hours a week of preschool is not enough to provide quality learning, Barnett said. “It has to be a big enough dosage 
 of truly high-quality education.”

Vermont state Sen. Ruth Hardy, a Democrat, called the program “technically universal” because all 4-year-olds are allowed to participate but acknowledged there are gaps. She filed a last year that would have expanded the pre-K program to include full school days but it died, amid other expansions to child care and educational priorities.

Hardy, a former educator and school board member, said in an interview that the legislature did enact a measure to study expanding pre-K to all 3- and 4-year-olds and report back by July 2026.

It was part of a larger that focused on providing more child care subsidies, including for families with incomes up to “middle-class or close to upper-middle-class levels,” she said. To pay for it, the state instituted a new payroll tax of 0.44%. Employers may choose to pay all of it or deduct up to 0.11% of it from employees' wages.

Concerns about access

Hardy said that in Vermont, as well as other states, a roadblock to expanding public pre-K programs is the “tension” between public and private schools. Many states take a “mixed delivery” approach to public preschool, under which pre-K is offered in settings ranging from public schools to community-based centers to private schools. But private providers sometimes see expanding the public preschools as competition.

Aly Richards, CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, a Vermont child care advocacy organization, said the group’s concern is equitable access to pre-K programs, especially when parents need kids in all-day instruction and public programs only operate on school-day hours, while private programs often last all workday.

“Working-class families can’t leave their job in the middle of the day if they have to move their kid,” she said.

She also said there is often not enough room in nearby public schools to accommodate all the children who want pre-K programs.

Similar tension is roiling efforts to expand public pre-K in Michigan. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Democratic lawmakers want to make more children eligible, but private schools worry that legislative proposals would eliminate requirements that a percentage of slots go to private providers and thereby cut their state funding.

In Hawaii — which has one of the highest-quality public preschool programs, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research — the problem is getting enough educators into the classrooms.

Hawaii plans to open 44 more classrooms for 3- and 4-year-olds in the fall, bringing the state’s total to about 90, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, a Democrat, said in a statement. But more staffing is needed if the state is going to reach its goal of getting all 3- and 4-year-olds in preschool by 2032, The Associated Press .

California is in the third year of a four-year phase-in of a universal pre-K program launched in the 2021-22 state budget. A draft report from the Learning Policy Institute, a California educational research group, found that while most school districts in the state are on track toward getting all 4-year-olds and income-eligible 3-year-olds in pre-K, staffing is a problem and is expected to get worse as new teacher requirements go into effect.

Hanna Melnick, a senior policy adviser at the Learning Policy Institute and one of the co-authors of the report, said it’s unclear how many of the eligible kids are actually taking advantage of the pre-K program.

Some families can’t afford before- and after-care, she said. “Extended care is a really critical barrier. And some families want more of a familylike environment [for their preschoolers]. They might not feel comfortable using out-of-home care or care in a school setting.”

Back in New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy announced in March that an additional $11 million in state funding had been secured to bring preschool to 16 more school districts in the state.

But despite the effort, workers such as Gillespie-Lambert need to keep walking neighborhoods.

“People don’t read,” she said. “We found canvassing — not just flyers, but having a conversation with them — seems to work a lot better.”

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And some leave for kindergarten knowing how to read. 

“But it’s not because we’re hounding them,” said Heather Lyons, the program’s coordinator. “It’s because we’re constantly trying to help them pursue this love of learning.”

That careful mix of academics and social skills is one reason demand for the program is strong. Parents start calling in January to ask about registering their kids for the fall, Lyons said. Lamar’s program is part a statewide pre-K initiative now serving a quarter of the state’s 4-year-olds — up from about 3% six years ago.

The state helped drive pre-K enrollment nationwide to record levels in 2022-23, according to the recent from the National Institute for Early Education Research. Following sharp declines during the pandemic, participation in preschool is back on the upswing. Over 1.6 million children attended public pre-K last school year, with the percentage of 3-and 4-year-olds hitting new highs. 

Expanding access, however, doesn’t mean states have to cut back on quality by lowering training requirements for teachers or increasing class sizes, the report’s authors note.

They point to Mississippi as an example of a state that’s managed to boost enrollment while maintaining high standards.

In fact, the state is among the few that have written the institute’s “quality benchmarks” . Those include having teachers with a bachelor’s degree, assistants with early-childhood training, and screenings for vision, hearing and health problems.

“We’re keeping an eye on them,” said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor at the institute. “They started small with a focus on quality. They are also working hard to fund more coaches to support teachers, so they’re committed to quality in that way.”

There are now 36 early learning collaboratives — local partnerships that include school districts, Head Start providers and child care centers — that offer the pre-K program.

“We’re moving out of the baby stage and into the teen stage of the law,” said Rachel Canter, executive director Mississippi First, an advocacy group. She added that including Head Start, the federal preschool program serving children in poverty, is one reason the program receives bipartisan support. “People across the political spectrum see how it can benefit their own community. That has allowed us to expand it statewide while also making sure kids who need it most are getting access.”

Due partly to her advocacy, the legislature has increased annual spending on the program five times since 2016.

Now the challenge is to increase the number of child care providers that participate and continue to expand, she said. 

In communities without a program, parents are often left with lower-quality options or end up juggling their child between multiple caregivers during the day. Other parents, Canter said, might take fewer hours at work to stay home with their children. “That’s a terrible situation for a working family.”

Supporting the workforce

Advocates and policymakers are often the forces behind efforts to expand early-childhood education. But in — another state making major moves in pre-K — it was the voters who demanded more access when they passed a by an overwhelming 73%. 

The law creates permanent funding for early learning, resulting in the legislature appropriating last year. School districts, child care providers and tribal governments are now using some of those funds to by boosting teacher pay to match what K-12 teachers receive, using high-quality curriculum and giving preschoolers an extended school day.

The state also provides for teachers still earning their degree and pays for substitutes so teachers can take time off to attend courses.  

“The early childhood workforce has just been historically undervalued,” said Sara Mickelson, deputy secretary of the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department. “We’re really a state that is supporting access to degrees.”

Meanwhile, 70% of New Mexico 4-year-olds now attend public preschool, making the state one of just a handful that serves at least two-thirds of eligible students.

But states serving the most preschoolers — like California, Florida and Texas —  are not always examples of high quality.

California spent over $830 million in 2022-23 on preschool and is moving toward making all 4-year-olds eligible for its transitional kindergarten program by the fall of 2025. That figure accounted for over 70% of the total $1.17 billion increase in spending for the whole country, said Steve Barnett, the institute’s senior co-director.

But since it began a decade ago, the transitional program has met only a few of the institute’s 10 quality indicators. Teachers weren’t required to have special training in educating young children and class sizes were far larger than recommended — , compared with the institute’s benchmark of 20.

“There were no guidelines from the state,” said Rahele Arakabi, director of educational services for the Washington Unified School District in West Sacramento. Classrooms, she said, looked more like first grade than pre-K, with students sitting in rows facing the whiteboard. “Teachers really were in that mode of drill and kill.” 

But the outlook for the program has improved. Statewide, class sizes are now capped at 24 students with two teachers; and charters that don’t comply face fines. By the 2025-26 school year, ratios will be set at the institute’s standard of 10-to-1. The state also offers a new credential for educators teaching preschool through third grade, and by next year, teachers will be required to have or experience in early-childhood education. 

In Washington Unified, which serves 130 transitional kindergarten students in six classes, ratios are even lower, 8-to-1. Some teachers who worked in the district’s separate preschool program have already earned a credential to teach in transitional kindergarten.

Arakabi used a $400,000 to make classrooms more child-friendly, with age-appropriate furniture and play areas. She implemented a new curriculum specifically for pre-K and provided a year of coaching and support on child development. The investment, she said, is making a difference.

“My worry was always buying curriculum and then it just sits there in the shrink wrap,” she said. “This group of teachers is not easy to please,  but they’re actually using it.”