Child care and early education programs

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality programs. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Access to preschool: Share of children enrolled in nursery school or preschool. These data are available through the Census Bureau’s Public Use Microdata Sample.

• Effectiveness of public education: Average per-grade change in English Language Arts achievement between the third and eighth grades. These data are available from Stanford University’s Education Data Archive.

• School economic diversity: Share of students attending high-poverty schools by student race or ethnicity. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal.

• Preparation for college: Percent of 19- and 20-year-olds with a high school degree. This is available from the American Community Survey.

Mathematica's Education-to-Workforce (E-W) Indicator Framework helps local leaders identify the data that matter most in helping students and young adults succeed. Local leaders can use the E-W framework to better understand education and workforce conditions in their communities and to identify strategies that can improve outcomes in these areas.

Several indicators in the E-W Framework may be improved with investments in high-quality programs. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

• Access to child care subsidies: Percentage of eligible families receiving assistance to pay for child care through subsidies.

• Access to early intervention screening: Percentage of children with identified concerns who are connected to services or percentage of children needing selected special education services in kindergarten who were not identified and connected to services before kindergarten.
• Access to quality public pre-K: Percentage of public pre-K programs that meet Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) state benchmarks of quality.
• Access to full-day pre-K: Percentage of public pre-K programs that are six hours per day for five days per week.
  
• Kindergarten readiness in terms of approaches to learning, cognition, language and literacy, physical development, and social-emotional development: Percentage of children meeting benchmarks on teacher-reported kindergarten readiness assessment.

• Cultivate vocal government champions: Local government leaders play a critical role in securing funding, implementing quality standards, and supporting family engagement and enrollment efforts. Leaders should also facilitate frequent communication and coordination between key stakeholders, including school districts, state and local early childhood agencies, and community groups.
• Invest in educators: The foundation of strong child care and early education programs is a strong staff. Local leaders should be prepared to make significant investments in child caregivers and early education teachers, including competitive compensation, ongoing coaching and mentoring opportunities, and relatively small classes. Such investments should extend to building recruiting pipelines in the community in which the program operates.
• Position teachers to succeed: Early education programs have several system-wide levers available to ensure teachers can effectively run classrooms. This should include dedicating a major portion of each day to focused learning, allocating additional time for teachers to prepare for the next day, and providing compensation and focused time for teachers to learn and train for delivering evidence-based curricula. Early education programs should also provide regular assessments for teachers with actionable feedback for improvement.
• Prepare children for the transition to kindergarten: Significant gains can be diminished without adequate alignment between prekindergarten and kindergarten programs. Program leaders should prepare to facilitate this transition, such as by convening preschool and elementary school teachers for joint-planning sessions and setting up kindergarten classroom visits.
• Screen and assess children to provide individualized support: Children vary in their cognitive, social-emotional, language, and physical development. To properly support each child, child care and preschool programs should conduct initial screenings and perform ongoing assessments of each child’s development and learning. This information can inform curriculum planning, the pedagogical strategies used, and more.
• Offering support services: Broader environmental factors may impact children's development. As such, child care and preschool programs may provide or connect children and their families to supplemental support services. Common support services include parental education programs, health services, case management, transportation assistance, and more. While some services may be provided by the educational program directly (e.g., meals), others are often provided by outside agencies with which the program has a relationship (e.g., health care).