Back to School with America’s Local Early Care and Education Leaders

While many early childhood education programs operate year round, there is still a natural rhythm that comes from the school year calendar. All around the country, preschoolers are posing for their first-ever first-day-of-school photos, including over 1.6 million children in publicly-funded pre-K programs. Parents are applying endless labels to their toddlers’ spare clothes and nap mats, and teachers are putting finishing touches on their classrooms.

Early childhood leaders, too, are readying themselves for the new school year. As we relaunch the ECE Implementation Working Group — a community of local early care and education (ECE) leaders from a diverse set of communities across the country — we have been having in-depth conversations to understand their priorities for the year ahead. Some programs are in the midst of major expansion efforts, like Multnomah County, OR, which is adding hundreds of seats to its Preschool for All program this year. Others are focusing on strengthening core infrastructure, like Philadelphia, which launched a new centralized enrollment platform this summer. Some are celebrating recent successes at the ballot and planning next steps, like Denver, which now has a permanently authorized and dedicated revenue source, and Kent County, MI, where voters just supported a six-year renewal of their local property tax contribution to support early childhood programs. Across all 16 cities and counties in the group, deepening equity work remains a focus.

Beyond their proximate to-do lists, we asked leaders what issues keep them up at night as they anticipate a new school year. These are the big thorny issues that are often outside their immediate control but directly impact their day-to-day work – topics like shifts in federal funding, the ever-present challenges of recruiting and retaining a quality workforce, and evolving approaches to research and impact. These conversations are not just polite chit chat – they are fundamental to understanding service delivery challenges on the ground. There is a growing movement to include the voices of people – in this case, families with young children – into the policy making processes that will impact them the most. Equally important is listening to people in the work, to understand what they need to get things done. Too often, program leaders and implementation teams find themselves working in what feels like a vacuum, with no playbook for designing or scaling a new service or benefit. By bringing these leaders together, we can begin to build a knowledge base for future early care and education teams.

To this end, we have distilled eight overarching themes from our recent conversations with the leaders in our working group. We share it here for a few reasons:

• For other local early care and education leaders, this list may resonate — we hope it instills a sense of camaraderie and trust in the group’s ongoing work, and we would love to hear your experience!
• For state and federal policymakers, this list may illuminate how current policy frameworks support — or hinder — local ECE efforts, and could give some clues as to where state and federal action could make a difference;
• For funders, researchers, and others in the ECE ecosystem, this list may give insight into what resources or support local leaders may need to be most successful

Top issues on the minds of local early care and education leaders for the 2024-25 school year

1. Mounting pressure on family affordability. All across the country, there is growing consensus that affordable child care is a pressing priority. In Allegheny County, for example, more than half of nearly 19,000 county residents ranked affordable child care as a top priority among all local issues in a recent survey. There are many reasons for local leaders to be troubled by gaps in child care infrastructure – it limits families’ economic mobility and keeps parents (most often women) out of the workforce, which negatively impacts local economic activity. In many communities, a lack of affordable care is a major driver of outward migration – people moving out of cities - a pressing concern as many cities remain focused on post-pandemic economic recovery.
   
2. Workforce, workforce, and… workforce. Recruiting, retaining, and sustaining a robust early childhood workforce is the number one challenge and priority cited by almost every program leader. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were widespread early educator shortages across the country; the pandemic subsequently wreaked havoc, driving as many as a third of child care workers out of the sector. Job recovery in the child care sector over the last few years has been much slower than other parts of the economy, largely the result of low wages and poor benefits in the sector. Child care occupations are among the lowest paid in the U.S., and higher education does little to close the gap. Full-time early childhood teachers with four year degrees still make only 57% of their counterparts in kindergarten settings.
   
   Without the budgetary authority to simply raise wages, municipal early care and education leaders are looking for other creative solutions to recruit and retain educators, create professional development and advancement opportunities, and reduce turnover in critical positions. Many communities are focused on building the educator pipeline – though some leaders have expressed concern about continuing to recruit a largely women-of-color workforce into a profession that currently has limited upward mobility.
   
3. Curriculum and alignment with early elementary grades. We continue to see research about the long-lasting benefits of early care and education when it is high quality. A recent review of the evidence from the federal Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation showed that all children benefit from high quality early education, and that services have larger-than-average effects for children from families with lower incomes, dual language learners, and children with disabilities. In a growing number of school districts, district leaders are paying closer attention to the alignment of curriculum from pre-K through second grade to ensure these gains are sustained. Some working group members see this as an opportunity to approach the early elementary grades differently by applying research-backed approaches to developmentally appropriate play-based learning. Others worry about how the focus on alignment could push more structured pedagogy approaches from elementary school into ECE, potentially interfering with research-backed play-based approaches, and crowding smaller nonprofit child care providers out of preschool initiatives in favor of “rigorous,” school-run programs. Particularly in states that have passed legislation about the science of reading, there are questions about what this might mean for early literacy instruction.
   
   Conversations about curriculum are deeply connected to broader discussions about quality in early childhood, including how to define, measure, and assess what quality looks like. This is a major focus for many program leaders, who want to put research-backed approaches into practice, but are also eager to approach this conversation in a way that avoids needless high-stakes assessment tools. In mixed delivery systems – early childhood initiatives that include public schools, child care centers, and in some cases, home-based care settings – leaders are thinking about how to frame what ‘quality’ looks like across the range of settings in a way that does not bias one type of care over another.
   
4. More nuanced approaches to evaluation and impact. Research and evaluation remain a major focus for many pre-K initiative leaders, though many quietly share frustration that the field remains focused on “proving pre-K works.” To this end, many early care and education leaders have turned their attention to more in-depth research studies looking at efficacy of implementation, impacts on equity, and the value of specific practices. For example, the Denver Preschool Program published a research report this summer, highlighting effects of the program beyond test scores.
   
   Many leaders are focused on research both to make continuous improvement in their own programs, and to influence the broader policy landscape. With limited in-house capacity, some are looking to leverage external partners for additional evaluation capabilities. There are long-standing examples of research-practice partnerships between municipal preschool programs and research universities, like the multi-decade relationships between Tulsa’s pre-K program and Georgetown University and the Boston Early Childhood Research Practice Partnership team. Newer programs are similarly looking to form relationships like these, such as the emerging partnership between Multnomah County’s Preschool for All Program and Boston University.
   
5. Expiration of COVID-era relief funding. The American Rescue Plan allocated $350 billion in flexible funds to states, counties, and cities to assist in pandemic recovery, with child care and early childhood specifically highlighted as allowable spending categories. The New Practice Lab has previously written about ways localities have used ARPA state and local funds to bolster the care economy, and early childhood programs in particular. For example, Harris County, TX made the country’s largest investment of approximately $150M ARPA dollars into ECE, deploying $48M specifically to create new child care slots for families in child care deserts. In communities that have used ARPA funds to enable rapid programmatic expansions, there is an open question about what happens next; local leaders will need to either identify alternative fund sources or scale back what have become critical and popular programs. In other places, such as Atlanta and Maine, ARPA funds have been used to invest in physical infrastructure, allowing new construction and rehabilitation of older child care programs. These can often be slow processes and so there is a push to spend funds down in advance of deadlines.
   
6. Transitions in elected leaders. On a local level, elected officials are critical to the maintenance of dedicated revenue streams for early care and education. In communities that have recently undergone a leadership transition or will see a new executive or new city, county, or state representatives after this fall, local ECE leaders are actively thinking about how to cultivate elected officials as early childhood champions. The first day of school itself provides a picture-perfect moment for local elected officials to stand with a classroom of children as they begin a new year; many savvy program leaders are already thinking about how to leverage that opportunity. In some communities, leaders are thinking about how to sustain their work beyond specific administrations by considering what can be codified into law or allocated permanent or baseline funding in a local budget.
   
7. Anti-DEI legislation. As more states pass anti-DEI legislation and restrict discussions of gender and sexuality in K-12 and higher education, some local leaders are concerned about how the politicization of education will impact early childhood programs. There have been some similar legal efforts in ECE already – for example, a group of church-affiliated preschools in Colorado recently brought a lawsuit against the state’s preschool program to avoid hiring LGBTQ workers. However, leaders in the working group emphasized they are continuing to focus on spreading research-backed practices of equity and inclusion.
   
8. Growing power in community-led movements and collective impact efforts. On a more optimistic note, community-led groups across the country are rising up to fight for the policies they want to see. Whether it’s the Commit Partnership’s work to ensure Dallas residents can earn a living wage or Future Ready Five’s focus on kindergarten readiness in Columbus, movements are building to harness the power of business, philanthropy, and the civic sectors to deliver on what families and children need. Particularly in a moment where many are nervous about election outcomes, there is optimism and hope in these community-powered movements. If these ambitious local efforts lead to impact, they have potential to further catalyze action across the country.
   
   This list is representative, but not comprehensive. As conversations unfold this fall between members of the Implementation Working Group, we hope to unearth common strategies that local leaders can employ to address their biggest challenges and continue to share our learnings.
   
   If you have questions or comments for the Working Group, email them to npl_work@newamerica.org. We would love to hear if any of these eight issues resonated with you, and any other of your team’s experiences that may not have been reflected here.