Three Golden Rules for Improving Early Childhood Systems

To improve early childhood systems, state and federal policymakers need models of success. And too often, the places where policymakers should look to find this knowledge—in local communities and with local practitioners—have been inadequately funded and had their expertise overlooked.

In 2014, New America began reporting on how communities in California were reforming the way their early childhood systems work and the way teachers were trained. This was part of its effort to understand how to give young children a solid foundation for growth and development. We focused on three communities that received significant investment and support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation over the past decade: Oakland, Fresno, and East San Jose. This multi-year investigation examined what can be achieved at the local level with the right investment and dug into how programs that are working well can be expanded to reach more children.

When we began our investigation, New America found that early care and education in California was in a pretty dire situation, as in other states. Our 2015 report, Not Golden Yet, found that the state was not doing nearly enough to prepare early childhood educators. California had serious challenges coordinating and aligning its early childhood workforce and needed support. There had not been a comprehensive early childhood workforce study in the state since 2006. Drastically low wages were and are a serious problem for attracting and retaining qualified early educators. There was a gulf between the public school system and the early care and education system in terms of required preparation, compensation, and professional development.

New America has been following this work closely, interviewing practitioners and leaders, reporting on what is happening in schools and child care centers, and publishing analyses of state-level reform. As we wrote in 2021, the state’s early childhood system is “notorious for being very complex and disjointed, leading to inequitable access to quality services for families.” We have reported on growth in local leadership, described how a school district worked to disrupt patterns of racism in its early childhood programs, written about union organizing by child care workers, and explained how multilingual approaches to learning early literacy skills can serve California’s families.

Our reporting and analysis have found important markers of progress over the past 10 years. During this period, Californians elected Governor Gavin Newsom, who ran on a platform of supporting early childhood development. The state published the Master Plan for Early Learning and Care: Making California for All Kids; is building an integrated statewide longitudinal data system that will include early childhood; has instituted a new PK–3 Early Childhood Education Specialist Instruction Credential; and has boosted funding for pay in publicly funded child care programs. It has made progress in policies for bilingual and dual language students and reframed policy goals to view multilingualism as an asset instead of a deficit, with some investments in training for adults in best practices. The state has created a new grade level for four-year-olds in the public schools and is working toward a unified system of state-funded pre-K, with universal pre-K for four-year-olds and targeted pre-K for three-year-olds who are income-eligible or have a disability.

This decade of reform in the Golden State offers lessons for policymaking in other states. In almost every case, the push for these changes, and often models for how they could be enacted, came from local practitioners and leaders, some of whom have gone on to lead statewide policy efforts.

Three policy principles emerged from our observation of three communities that received significant investment and support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation over the past decade. We’re calling these principles “golden rules” to guide grant-making for systems change in early care and education:

1. Design initiatives with educators so they guide their own professional development;
2. Use community-led strategies that center Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and multilingual families; and
3. Invest time and resources to build trust among siloed groups.

These three California communities tried out new models for collaboration, co-design, and participatory policymaking. They understood that reform must center the experience and expertise of those most impacted by the system: families with young children and early childhood educators. These communities created new collaborative structures for goal setting and decision-making, trained teachers and home child care providers as leaders who co-designed professional development, and devoted time and resources to allow community members to take leadership roles. Their experiences offer important lessons about implementation, local context, and how to expand and strengthen the early childhood workforce and support more children and families.

In order to effectively support children, communities need significant funds to tap into over many years. But investments often come, if they do come, with strings attached and limitations on how communities can use them. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation took a different approach. The foundation provided $500,000 each year over a decade to three communities, Oakland, Fresno, and East San Jose, with enough flexibility and support to spur locally developed reform that could be expanded. The Starting Smart and Strong initiative invested in improving the quality of adult-child interactions across all settings where young children learn and grow. It aimed to ensure that these children would be healthy and ready for kindergarten.

The foundation awarded grants to the Franklin-McKinley School District in East San Jose, the Fresno Unified School District, and the Oakland Public Education Fund. It supported long-term initiatives rooted in place that could be community-led. The grants helped pay for professional development and training for early childhood educators, provided financial resources for informal care providers (family, friends, and neighbors who are not licensed), paid for developmental screenings, and enabled collaborations between public and private systems to support young children. The three communities blended this funding with school district dollars, as well as with public and philanthropic funding streams.

The Packard Foundation funded early childhood administrative positions in each district, with the understanding that in order for district leaders to understand the value of investing in early childhood education, early childhood needed a literal seat at the administrative table. The foundation also supported technical assistance partnerships with organizations like the New Teacher Center, which received $3.5 million over four years to provide intensive teacher coaching and build the capacity of these school districts to support this coaching over time. The New Teacher Center also received an additional $4 million over three years in the early part of Starting Smart and Strong to build out a statewide platform for technical assistance for work in transitional kindergarten and to strengthen the organization’s capacity to support early learning educators.

The Packard Foundation also separately funded a technical assistance provider in each community. These individuals brought community expertise, connections, and experience building cross-sector partnerships.

Communities built infrastructure to sustain early childhood systems in the years to come. This infrastructure includes local leadership trained in early childhood development; diverse and sustained funding commitments from district general funds and private foundations; and professional development models in language learning, literacy, social-emotional development, and trauma-responsive care. Franklin-McKinley School District is funding its pre-K and transitional kindergarten spots beyond what is required by the state, and Oakland received a $1 million one-time gift from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, along with two new significant public funding streams.

In all of these communities, child care providers, teachers, advocates, school administrators, parents, and leaders said they wanted to find new ways to build systems and structures to support the adults working with young children. Communities used unique approaches, including practitioner leadership, rapid cycle learning, and co-design to spread skills and practices.

In some cases, legislators and administrators in Sacramento took notice, became inspired, and even dipped into state coffers to expand this work. In other cases, it was fellow teachers and child care center directors who joined together to spread new ideas that they saw as effective and wanted to make work with the children in their neighborhoods. They even forged ahead during the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted school-based education for much of 2020 right in the middle of this 10-year push.

When three communities in California received sustained funding support and held the reins to innovate, they improved the ways early childhood programs work and how teachers are trained. These three communities have created conditions, infrastructure, and networks of support that helped children and families ride out the storms of the past decade and respond to opportunities. Three principles undergird this success.

Golden Rule #1: Involve Early Childhood Educators in the Design of Their Own Professional Development.

Teachers and caregivers often don’t hear about educational reforms or new professional development efforts until they are being required by their administrators to attend a meeting. Too often, teachers have little input into content or program structure for training and no input on data collection or understanding of its value. Professional development often is given in only one session, with limited or no follow-up or support. San Jose offers an example of giving teachers more input on both.

Training Co-Designed by Teachers

Before the pandemic, educators in the Franklin-McKinley School District identified support for children’s social-emotional development as a skill they wanted to improve. Since 2015, the district has been working to shift practice and attitudes so that every educator understands that the ability to interact with peers, identify their emotions, and regulate their own behavior are just as fundamental to children’s school success as reading and math.

The district adopted a strategic plan that recognized that learning begins at birth and called for additional investments in early education. Through a partnership with Educare California at Silicon Valley, the professional development model trains teachers and paraprofessionals alongside Head Start teachers, using a version of the teaching pyramid model from the Center on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning. Teachers can attend a series of all-day workshops led by experts. The district also made some scheduling changes to make sure there was time in the school day for collaboration.

Educators are making decisions about the professional development model’s design and evolution. Teachers, for example, can choose whether they want follow-up, site-based coaching (led initially by the New Teacher Center). In some cases, teachers also can receive monthly check-ins from coaches or attend group professional learning communities. They can also choose what they want to focus on in their professional learning communities.

A teacher-leader program enables those who have become proficient in new models of teaching to attend national conferences on early learning and to help train and assess other district teachers. Teachers also learned how to coach and lead professional learning communities, building the capacity of the district’s expert teaching force over time.

Teachers Using Data on Their Children’s Progress

Training focused on teachers’ classroom practices is ongoing, and it uses data to help teachers make decisions about what is working in their classrooms.

“In the school district context and the early learning context more broadly, data isn't always viewed very positively,” said Clare Nolan, co-founder of Engage R+D, which has led the evaluation of the Starting Smart and Strong project for many years. “There can be trauma associated with how data has been used in ways that harm communities or fail to support upward accountability systems. It takes time to help people see how data can be a tool for the changes they want to see in programs and classrooms.”

Teacher leaders worked with directors to develop questions for a 10-minute survey that they could fill out on their smartphones each day to help them keep track of the impact of their work. The survey helps them reflect on how they are integrating practices and tracking positive and challenging behaviors in the classroom.

High-Quality Early Childhood Education Everywhere

All of the district’s early childhood reform work has been done in partnership with Educare, the Franklin-McKinley Children’s Initiative, and the Santa Clara County of Education, which run child care programs and family resources centers in the community. They hold multilingual workshops for parents and caregivers on everything from computer basics to how to support children in school. Leaders say that while it’s not possible to have model training centers for teachers and providers on every corner of San Jose, it is possible to saturate a community with professional development to ensure there are components of high-quality early childhood education in place throughout the community.

Golden Rule #2: Use Community-Led Strategies that Center BIPOC and Multilingual Families.

When program approaches do not consider cultural competence, language access, or community context, they often fail the children and families they intend to serve. The two models highlighted below address institutional racism by approaching work with children and families of color from a strength-based perspective.

Insights from the Language Learning Project

The school district in Fresno serves a rich population of immigrant students: diverse Asian communities, including a large Hmong population, and a diverse Latino community. In Fresno, the school district, along with Head Start, Early Head Start, the Fresno County Superintendent of Schools, and the Central Valley Children’s Services Network, developed the Language Learning Project. This training model focused on recognizing the value of a child’s home language and supporting it, getting to know the child and family, and implementing concrete strategies to support linguistic growth.

The Language Learning Project has published a toolkit for use by educators anywhere and received investment from the state to expand. More than 1,000 professionals have been trained on the concepts in the toolkit across the Fresno region, including child care workers, teachers, and administrators. Train-the-trainer institutes are held over Zoom, which have been attended by early childhood practitioners from 24 counties in California.

Their practices have also been codified in state policy, such as guidance the California Department of Education issues to educators working with dual-language learners in the California State Preschool Program. This guidance recommends that preschool providers use “a family language and interest interview” to better understand the language and developmental needs of children and help plan rich classroom learning experiences, a practice included in the Language Learning Project curriculum. This guidance has been extended to child care providers too. Resources are available to educators in multiple languages.

The model also showed up in legislation and policy about how to assess and identify children who are dual-language learners. With additional support from the California Department of Social Services, local leaders are working to expand and adapt the training to family child care and family, friend, and neighbor child care providers.

Training on Trauma-Responsive Care

Because teachers need support with students with challenging behaviors, Oakland Starting Smart and Strong developed a training program in trauma-responsive classroom practices. It was developed by local educators and experts, from coaches, school district administrators, and Head Start and preschool teachers to yoga instructors and mental health consultants.

The pilot project for preschool teachers, called Resilient Oakland Communities and Kids (ROCK), began in 2017 and has grown to include a teacher-coaching framework, in-person and group workshops, professional learning communities, and yoga and self-care resources for educators. ROCK’s goal was to strengthen the ability of educators to both understand the traumatic experiences of the young children in their care and better support affected children.

Educators say it has helped them understand their own responses to working with children with challenging behaviors and to engage with families in a deeper way. “Sometimes when you’re in high-need areas, you want to keep everything else out,” Caroline Jones, an Oakland early learning principal, said in a recent interview. “And that can include the families. Instead of feeling like, ‘that feels chaotic, keep it away from me,’ ROCK has helped us to go deeper in our relationships with families experiencing high levels of stress.”

Evaluations show that children in Oakland Unified School District have performed better on assessments of development since 2016. By the 2018–19 school year, 78 percent of children in the district’s early learning program were in classrooms where teachers were getting support from ROCK. A 2020 evaluation showed improvements in teachers’ belief in their own capacity to make a difference in the lives of even the most challenging children.

Golden Rule #3: Invest Time and Resources in Building Trust Between Siloed Institutions.

Successful collaboration in early learning reform must be inclusive and have clear structures for envisioning successes, sharing resources, and overcoming division. New structures in California that enable the school district to collaborate and share decision-making with community groups and early childhood professionals show one way forward.

Sharing Power and Resources

In 2014, the Oakland Unified School District decided to deposit its new Packard Foundation grants into its philanthropic arm, the Oakland Public Education Fund, to signal that this was a community-wide effort. School leaders were not the only ones making the decisions; power was shared between the district and community partners from local nonprofits, philanthropy, and government. The inclusive structure, leaders say, has been a key part of the initiative’s success.

Today, the collaborative Oakland Starting Smart and Strong works to fight for racial justice and policy change and to strengthen the city’s early care and education ecosystem. The structure centers community and practitioner voices in policy discussions and emphasizes addressing institutional racism in early learning settings. Decisions about the direction of the work are made by a lead planning team made up of representatives of community groups, early childhood educators, and school district and city and county leaders in consultation with committees and task forces. This lead planning team makes decisions about the priorities of the collaborative and how to allocate its budget. They also review evaluation data and take part in regular feedback sessions. All of the group’s initiatives are co-designed with local stakeholders, including groups for whom the programs are designed.

“We are all in deep relationship with each other and really believe in serving the whole family—birth to five. We worked together to see how we can help families,” said Christie Herrera in an interview, who until 2023 was the executive director of Early Childhood for Oakland Unified. Herrera said these relationships were critical to helping the community get through the pandemic. Members relied on these relationships to deliver supplies, reach families, and get key support and training out to educators and practitioners online.

The collaborative continues to build out its equity work and has attracted significant new philanthropic and government funding. Its Boys of Color Community of Practice is a facilitated group of teachers and administrators from Oakland Unified School District preschools, along with City of Oakland Head Start and family child care centers who commit to using anti-racist strategies in their programs and classrooms to improve educational outcomes for young boys of color. They also created an action toolkit, 10 Promising Practices in Early Learning for Black Boys. Over the past two years, more than 50 early learning educators in Oakland have participated in the communities of practice, with more being planned for the current school year.

A group of local family child care providers and parents also came together to create the Family Child Care Policy Program, hosting regular community conversations to assess needs and plan legislative visits. Some of the issues the group has advocated include the unintended consequences of transitional kindergarten on family child care providers, as more slots for four-year-olds in the schools mean fewer four-year-olds in child care, which hurts providers who count on that revenue. The group has also met with school board members about their role in preparing children in Oakland for school.

These coalitions and others, leaders in Oakland say, led to effective collective action on behalf of young children in other parts of Alameda County as well.

Clare Nolan, the evaluator for the Starting Smart and Strong initiative, said she has watched the three communities become more influential over time as they build capacity and coalitions. “When there’s a policy window to get something passed at the local or state level,” Nolan said in an interview, “folks are much more nimble and have the data they need to make the case for increased investment.”

Local educators and parents helped pass two ballot initiatives that expand access to programs that serve young children and improve the quality of those programs, including workforce provisions that require providers to be paid at least $15 per hour. The Oakland Children’s Initiative collects an annual parcel tax to support child care and preschool programs, as well as to provide some money for college access. The money will go toward expanding access to high-quality preschool, initially prioritizing programs for young children in Oakland Unified School District and the City of Oakland Head Start. In Alameda County, where Oakland is located, a half-percent sales tax will raise an estimated $150 million a year through the Children’s Health and Child Care Initiative for Alameda County to support increased access to quality care as well as to fund pediatric health care. Leaders say this measure is the result of years of work to overcome division in the early care and education community and to build trust between the different providers who serve young children in Oakland.

Fresno and San Jose also had success with collaborative decision-making and sharing funds. For example, years of work went into bringing Educare California at Silicon Valley to San Jose. The model combines federal, state, and local public funding, as well as significant philanthropic and local business investment. The school district has to work closely with community partners like Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, which runs support programs for families at Educare, as well as with programs like Head Start. These collaborations have allowed the community to expand early care and education programs so more children have access, aiming to help ensure that children are ready for early school experiences and that schools are ready for them.

In Fresno, leaders say the collaborative structure that the Language Learning Project established when it began in 2015 was one of the keys to its success and growth. At the beginning of this initiative, the school district decided to partner with outside groups in order to improve practices in teaching young dual-language learners. The collaboration that developed trains teachers from the school district alongside family child care providers and preschool teachers.

Understanding What Works

Starting Smart and Strong funding from the Packard Foundation will conclude next year, but evaluations are ongoing. Evaluators are working with the Packard Foundation and with community members to understand best practices for implementation and expansion. So far, results show that these investments have had a positive impact on classrooms and children.

Additionally, in all three of these California communities, leaders spent significant time and resources developing practitioners’ capacity to use data to assess needs, try out new approaches, and evaluate and make needed changes to programs and policies. The Packard Foundation supported a developmental evaluation approach that provided technical assistance so communities could understand the change that was happening in real time and adapt as needed.

Each community used the Early Developmental Instrument (EDI), a tool that measures key areas of children’s development. The EDI is reported at a neighborhood level to help communities understand geographic inequities in children’s well-being. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) consulted with community and education leaders about how to use results to monitor progress and inform program and planning decisions. In Fresno, for example, leaders used the results to help make decisions about where to expand Head Start or to build new Play and Learn Centers. In Franklin-McKinley, leaders brought the results to coalition meetings to help identify pockets of need and determine where to locate new family resource centers. Oakland created a data portal to make data more accessible and actionable.

Communities understood that to make impactful reforms they needed to lean on the expertise of those most impacted: families with young children, educators, and caregivers of young children. To do this, they needed to build the capacity of these constituents to use data to make decisions, ask questions, and assess how data were being collected, analyzed, and reported. Community leaders say this took time, but the investment was worth it.

Oakland Starting Smart and Strong worked with Parent Voices Oakland to do a study in East Oakland on families’ use of informal caregivers. Parent advocates led the study with assistance from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. “The assumption,” Oakland Starting Smart and Strong’s Director Priya Jagannathan said in a recent interview, “was that people didn’t know that formal early childhood slots were available, but that’s not what we found in the evaluation.” In fact, she said, “We found that folks were deeply distrustful based on bad experiences and were choosing not to utilize those spaces. Families were experiencing the systems as being racist, which was hard to hear, but was super valuable information in terms of revisiting enrollment procedures and how folks are made to feel when they come into a space.”

In California, as in most communities, those caring for the youngest children work behind the scenes. Their work often goes, at best, unnoticed and, at worst, ignored by policymakers. But our reporting over the past 10 years in Oakland, Fresno, and East San Jose shows that when initiatives are community-led and funded over a sustained period of time, early childhood spaces can be sites of innovation that can help lead to large-scale change. With resources and trust in their own expertise, people in these communities were able to develop solutions to problems their children, families, and workforces faced; cultivate leadership; and improve their capacity to understand what was working and how to make change where needed.

“When you let communities decide what they want to focus on and give them the resources to do that well, innovate, and understand how it’s working, they will take that and do incredible things,” Nolan said.

As states try for big, bold transformations, these local examples show how to create change that can be sustained. There are also lessons for federal and state policymakers who aim to create or improve federal-to-state or state-to-local grant programs. Given the successes seen in California, we offer five recommendations.

1. Ensure that place-based grants include community-led components. Instead of relying on top-down assumptions about what a community needs, federal and state policymakers should develop funding streams that build capacity for professional development that is teacher-designed and for family engagement programs that are centered on families’ assets and the support they identify as needing.
2. Invest in long-term, cross-sector collaboration to build trust. Give local community members and leaders neutral spaces to make shared decisions, define success, and decide how resources will be used across age spans, recognizing the continuum of development from infancy through the school years. These initiatives need long time horizons to build relationships and get used to new ways of working together.
3. Center the needs and assets of BIPOC and multilingual families in early learning reform. Making reform efforts based on communities’ experiences leads to effective programs that meet needs and develop local leadership toward more racially just early childhood systems. As our communities continue to diversify, state and federal leaders must look to models led by multilingual communities of color to ensure that programs are culturally responsive and anti-racist. Reforms must lean on the expertise of those most impacted: families with young children, educators, and caregivers of young children.
4. Develop local capacity to assess and define impact. Programs must allow time and resources for communities to build their own capacity for research, data collection, and data sharing. Allow communities to tell their own stories of impact in order to document how moments of change are happening over time so others can learn from these reform efforts.
5. Enact trust-based philanthropy. Money is better spent when communities take the reins and put their energies into needs they identify as the most critical, instead of spending precious time on reporting to donors. Enacting a trust-based philanthropic approach means limiting funding restrictions, simplifying applications and reporting practices, and placing value on local knowledge, expertise, and shared learning.

We would like to thank the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for its generous support of this work. The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the view of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, its officers, or its employees. We would also like to thank the educators, families, community members, and initiative partners in California who were so generous with their time in support of our reporting and analysis over 10 years.