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Taking Action for Children and Families: Learning from the First 40 Communities (Post #1)

“The ultimate goal of a stronger, more seamless care and education continuum is to initiate and sustain a strong foundation for future success by providing effective learning opportunities across the infant-toddler years, preschool ages, and early grades in all settings.” (National Research Council, Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation).[1]

“The broader lesson of our analysis is that social mobility should be tackled at a local level by improving childhood environments.” (Chetty and Hendron, The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility)[2]

The United States is on the cusp of making a historic investment in early care and education (ECE).[3] This investment comes at a moment in time when the pandemic has exposed the fragmented and siloed nature of our early childhood systems in both urban and rural communities. Widespread racial protests have launched a national reckoning with pervasive racial inequities. Also, during the past two years, an important development has been taking place in the ECE world that can help inform our response to these challenges. Twenty-eight states across the United States have been hard at work improving state and local ECE systems, supported by $275 million of Preschool Development Grant Birth through Five (PDG B–5) funds. The aim of these efforts is to improve the quality of early childhood programs and services, including how programs and services work together in a coordinated fashion to best meet the needs of children and families. I suggest that state and local system-building efforts like those supported by PDG B–5 are essential to how we address learning loss in the aftermath of the pandemic, and how, as we expand access to ECE programs, we rebuild better, more equitable systems of care and education.

A Game-Changing Opportunity for Early Childhood (Yale School of Medicine)

As we rebuild after the pandemic, we have an enormous opportunity to reinvent early education and care in the United States in ways that dramatically improve outcomes for children and families, strengthen communities, and advance equity for all.

In this post, I share three core principles for rethinking how communities serve children and families and make the most of this opportunity. Thanks to the Partnership for Early Education Research at the Yale University School of Medicine for inviting me to blog.

Policymakers Used to Ignore Child Care. Then Came the Pandemic.

“It explained how the care sector — defined as economic activity in the home and the market — was a crucial part of the economy but operated differently than other types of businesses.

You can’t measure the productivity of a child-care center the way you would, say, a car factory, she explained. The incentives are nothing alike. The profits don’t go only to the center’s owner. Instead, benefits are shared by children and their parents, and society as a whole. The country benefits from a more educated and productive work force.”

Rosie Could Be a Riveter Only Because of a Care Economy. Where Is Ours?

School: It’s Not Just for Kids Anymore

While I disagree with the suggestion that public schools can’t do this work, I appreciate the dual generation/comprehensive services thrust of Conor’s article. See this recent webinar series for more examples of school-community partnerships for the whole child.

A few excerpts:

“This juxtaposition — family members decades apart, but attending classes down the hall from one another — is central to a ‘dual-generation’ educational approach ….

These programs have a straightforward theory of education: If children’s success is tightly intertwined with their families’ stability (and we know it is), and families do better when they have access to nutrition, health care and economic opportunity, why not address all of these needs together? …

Now, more than ever, American schools are realizing that they cannot ignore these challenges as they try to reconnect students with learning opportunities. ‘Education is one arm in somebody’s success,’ said Reena Gadhia, the former manager of one of Briya’s work force training programs. ‘You really cannot disregard access to mental health services, access to social services, access to child care, transportation, all of it.'”

In Her Words–Child Care in Crisis: Can Biden’s Plan Save It?

“At the root of this crisis is America’s relationship with child care itself. Unlike every other developed country, the United States has never, with the exception of a few years during World War II, treated child care as an essential service. Since at least the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon vetoed a bipartisan effort to implement a universal child-care system because it had what he called ‘family-weakening implications,’ the industry has been cast as a personal choice — more specifically, a mother’s choice.

‘We have never valued the work that goes into caring for our families — we’ve never accounted for it, we have made it invisible and have always taken for granted that women will shoulder the responsibility,’ said Ai-jen Poo, senior adviser for the nonprofit Care in Action and an expert on the care economy.”

The Top 10 Takeaways from the ‘School-Community Partnerships for the Whole Child’ Webinar Series

New America’s Elise Franchino has summarized our recent webinar series in 10 takeaways. Check out her post here. She includes great insights from the presenters. Many thanks to all the panelists, moderators, and partner organizations! You can find the webinars and associated resources at these links:

Spotlight on Closing the Achievement Gap for Young Students: Social Justice, Virtual Learning, COVID, and Beyond

Was recently surprised and honored to be included in the Education Week Spotlight. See articles on COVID-related learning loss, advice from Nell Duke, the impact of phonics on math, our national racial reckoning, and First 10.

Spotlight on Closing the Achievement Gap for Young Students

How to Fix America: Think of Education as More Than Just School

The New York Times business reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, asked experts and industry leaders to name one thing we should do right now to “fix America.” Harlem Children Zone leaders Kwame Owusu-Kesse and Geoffrey Canada argue that we must, “We must broaden the focus of education to encompass the communities around the school building.” An excerpt:

“How do we make schools actually work for all children?

The nation has been pondering this question for decades, with answers that have fallen woefully short for poor students. But we think this is the wrong question. What the country should be asking is, how do we change the neighborhoods around schools to make them places where young people can find success — in school and beyond?

If we are going to break the cycle of poverty, we must reimagine education in America. We can no longer view education as simply the things that go on inside that building we call “school.” Such a narrow-minded focus has proved inadequate to the task of moving large populations out of poverty. We must broaden the focus of education to encompass the communities around the school building…

An emerging field of practice centered on “place” (i.e., where a child grows up) has championed the providing of comprehensive services to neighborhoods to effectively combat poverty. These services include high quality education and cradle-to-career youth programming, physical and mental health support, work force development, affordable housing and community leadership development.”

See: Think of Education as More Than Just School

COVID and Beyond: A Consensus on Systems-Change in Early Childhood Education and Care

In response to last week’s post on rethinking early education and care in the aftermath of the pandemic, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of the Brookings Institution and Temple University pointed me to a different take on the same topic, An Unprecedented Time in Education Demands Unprecedented Change. Hirsh-Pasek and her colleagues issue a call for a “playful learning and a breadth of skills approach to education” that focuses on the six C’s: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence.

Likewise, in The 74 Paul Reville makes the case for a Whole Child Paradigm Shift in which community children’s cabinets oversee cradle-to-career systems of opportunity and support. Laura Bornfreund and Lisa Guernsey emphasize the need to design systems that are responsive to trauma, economic distress, and physical and mental health issues in the Hechinger Report. And writing in the New York Times Shantell and Conor P. Williams argue that the pandemic demonstrates the need to build a better child care system, one that prioritizes both children’s and caregivers’ mental health.

Connecting all of these perspectives is a clear throughline: the need to design comprehensive community-wide approaches that address the needs of the whole child. For a practical action guide on comprehensive systems produced by Boston College’s Center for Optimized Student Support, see The Whole Child: Building Systems of Integrated Student Support During and After Covid-19.

And don’t miss the remaining two webinars in our series on School-Community Partnerships for the Whole Child: Partner with Families on December 3 and Lead Strategically and Continuously Improve on December 10.