Meet the Early Care and Education Implementation Working Group

The Early Care and Education Implementation Working Group has officially reconvened to continue the work of the first cohort: a group of municipal, county, and state leaders who are dedicated to effective implementation in early childhood programs. As staunch advocates for the importance of considering delivery when making policy, the New Practice Lab has partnered with the working group to amplify its lessons to a broader audience. We cannot say it enough: implementation is everything, and early care and education is no exception.

We’ve written previously about how and why the group came together: to collectively surface and address the common challenges organizations face when administering early childhood programs. With over a year of work under its belt, the group has reorganized: 15 locations are now represented, and the group has sharpened its focus to better address the needs of systems that are standing up or expanding early childhood programs. Members’ operating environments, governance structures, and funding streams vary across contexts, but they share common challenges – along with a passion for delivery of high quality, equitable early care programs.

The group is committed to building and expanding ECE systems with equity and sharing those lessons broadly, because they believe this will lead to better access and outcomes in their respective communities and ultimately, to stronger ECE policies across the country. As the group launched its new workstream at a kickoff meeting in late September, we thought it would be useful to share a little more about who and where they are, what matters to them, and what we are hoping to learn by bringing this group of early childhood champions together.

The participants represent 11 states, with at least one participant in eight out of nine U.S. Census regions. The differences in participants’ levels of government- city, county, or state- make it difficult to compare populations served in a strictly apples-to-apples manner, but rough estimates show the cohort locations are home to 3.6 million children younger than six. More than one-third of these children (1.3 million) live in families with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level; 17 percent (613,000) of the children in the communities represented live in poverty. Across the cohort member localities, poverty rates for children younger than 6 range from 9 to 34 percent, and anywhere from 20 to 47 percent live in low-income families (below 200% of FPL).

The group is organizationally diverse, representing nine municipal, five county, and one state early care and education systems across the U.S. The working group represents multiple types of organizations, reflecting the complexity of early care and education systems and service delivery. Even participants representing similar entities like counties may still have enormous operational differences- one county, for example, is made of 14 cities and six unincorporated areas, while another includes 130 self governing municipalities. We are curious to learn more about how strategies vary across organization types, and what lessons translate across contexts.

Participants come to the group from 11 states, with a near even split between state level early care and education governance types: consolidated, coordinated, or created. What are these governance types, and why does it matter? Since federal early care programs can be administered by state agencies focusing on health and human services, education, or workforce development and labor, and operate with varying levels of contact and cooperation. Most states have a “coordinated” governance system, where the agencies work separately but in coordination with one another. Some have consolidated multiple agencies or programs under one authority, while others have created entirely new agencies to manage and deliver early childhood services. These governance models may have implications for implementation. We are curious to hear the group’s perspective on governance models, and what lessons can be learned about how governance can help or hinder local delivery of early learning services.

Funding for early learning can be very complicated, as dollars can come from federal, state, and local sources, block grants, private grants, and more. Our participants report a range of funding streams too diverse to completely capture, but about half reported that their programs were primarily tax funded (sales, property, or income) while the other half rely on a mix of local, state, and federal funds from source like American Rescue Plan dollars, the Child Care and Development block grant, state school systems, state funding with local match, a lawsuit settlement, mayor’s office, workforce development agencies, and private grants. Some funding sources are dedicated permanently, and some will need to be renewed or replaced over time.

Funding is deployed in these 15 communities in a variety of ways. Some participants operate universal preschool programs that guarantee access to all four-year-olds (or will at the end of their planned expansion); some of those same participants are also working to expand access for three-year-olds. Some are focused on building out care for infants and toddlers to bolster existing preschool offerings. Others serve as conveners, bringing together different early care and education service providers within the community (school districts, community providers) and offering services and support to bolster access and quality. We’d like to know more about how different locations map and measure program milestones and progress over time.

Group members have a variety of priorities this year; some are in the midst of expansions, some are working toward program sustainability, and some are actively planning to raise new revenue to enable growth. In a recent blog post, we reflected on the themes that are top of mind for participants as they enter a new school year. At the group’s September meeting, several common themes emerged:

• Moving beyond advocacy to implementation Many group members are pressured to split their attention between implementation and justifying their every move to voters, elected officials, and other stakeholders with influence. As one member said, we would all like to be in a place where we are just having conversations about how to do ECE well – not if we should do ECE.
• Securing and maintaining long term funding Many members of this group are looking for sustainability following ARPA-funded initiatives and are in various stages of planning to go to the ballot for funding. As one group member shared, there is a been-there, done-that sentiment about early care and education from some legislators; ‘we invested in you; now we are done.’ As this group would say – no, we are just getting started. On a more optimistic note, many members of this group have secured new funding or renewed their existing fund sources somewhat recently, and are now actively planning with those resources in hand
• Influencing state level policy Many members of this group are already involved in conversations at the state level to try and influence policy making and budgeting. With some overlap in the home states of group members, some are even doing this together.
• Sustaining the workforce Workforce continues to be a top focus area for many leaders; this is consistent with the much-reported-on challenges in recruiting and retaining high-quality early childhood teachers, in large part because of low wages in the sector. Some group members are piloting new approaches to address these challenges; others are eager to take lessons from their peers they can bring back to their communities.

The working group is slated to meet monthly this fall. The primary goal of this first meeting was to build a trusting foundation as a group and establish the shared context for the group’s work, individually and collectively. In the next few meetings, the group will ground itself in the political context that enables this work and the potential strategies to shape the political landscape at a local, state, and federal level. With that scaffolding in place, the group will then take on thorny implementation questions, examining how different teams have approached them, what challenges they have faced, and how they have navigated. These conversations are candid, open spaces for participants to share frankly about their challenges. To this end, confidentiality is critical. However, where possible, the lessons from these conversations will be distilled into research briefs published by the New Practice Lab – like this earlier piece about family outreach, and more recent work on centralized enrollment – so that the learnings can radiate out from the members of this group to the wider early childhood ecosystem. You can check out the group's latest work on our site, and reach out with any questions or comments at npl_work@newamerica.org.