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Colleague,
If you're receiving this newsletter, you're likely familiar with Bellwether's analysis, commentary, and advising work in K-12 education — and you might be interested in learning how we pair our policy and evaluation work with our strategic advising capabilities to distill new trends and overlooked opportunities in early childhood. If you aren't familiar with Bellwether, someone may have forwarded this along, knowing that we generally have smart things to say and that we have a diverse, growing body of work supporting early childhood organizations, advocates,
and decision-makers in answering thorny questions about policy and practice.
Either way, there are a lot of newsletters out there (including our own that covers insights across early childhood, K-12, and post-secondary), and a lot of smart research and opinions about what works for young children. As deeply committed policy wonks and consultants, we read most of it. So we decided to combine insights from Bellwether and others into a short, quarterly email and highlight what we do best: infuse data-driven, practice-informed nuance into debates about education. We hope to
use this new quarterly email as a way to bring K-12 education and early childhood education leaders together to build a more sustainable and broadly accessible learning and development pipeline supporting all children to achieve their potential, from early childhood through post-secondary.
As Bellwether's early childhood practice leads, we're excited to merge our pattern recognition in K-12 and content expertise in early childhood to deliver durable solutions, ideas, and commentary about how to support high-quality teaching, learning, and development for our youngest learners. We hope you enjoy this newsletter, subscribe, and share with your friends and colleagues.
Sara Mead, Policy & Evaluation, Partner
Jeff Schulz, Strategic Advising, Partner
Commentary on early childhood education news and trends.
There's a lot of smart research about what works and what doesn't in the early childhood field. We roll that up to provide insights on systems-level issues that impact policy and practice.
The huge early childhood program you've probably never heard of.
In December we celebrated National Special Education Day and highlighted the outsized influence that special education preschool has had on our national early childhood care and education
systems.
Today, special education serves more children than any single state preschool program, roughly half as many preschoolers as Head Start, and nearly 1/3 as many children as all state-funded pre-K programs combined.
However, special education preschool programs face a number of barriers, including getting access to the services they need from school districts. We share examples from our research on Head Start exemplars to show how even the best early childhood programs struggle to serve their students with disabilities well.
The number of family child care providers is declining. Why you should care.
Family child care providers are licensed individuals who run child care businesses out of their home. They play a crucial role in supporting young children’s development and enabling parents to work. But their numbers are rapidly declining, leaving fewer affordable child care options for families.
Cue All Our Kin, a national nonprofit that builds and supports family child care programs. They have developed a number of strategies for policymakers, advocates, and others to help create conditions for family child care to thrive.
In this blog post, we detail why family child care is on the decline and what it means for K-12 education leaders.
The pathway to become an early childhood teacher is far more complicated than for K-12 educators.
In the last 10 years, early childhood care and education has enjoyed a significant boost in funding and attention at the local and national level. But barriers still exist to recruiting high-quality early learning professionals.
Currently, compensation and prestige of early childhood workers is low. In some places, early childhood educators could earn the same or more working at a McDonald’s or Target.
There’s also a hugely complex pathway to the classroom. From district pre-K to community child care, each setting has its own credential requirements. In a new post, we describe the typical pathways that exist in many states and communities.
Meet a Bellwether expert: Nisha Smales
Why are you interested in early childhood education?
The challenges in the sector are huge: less than half of children born into low-income families are ready for kindergarten at age five. And yet myriad studies indicate the importance of high-quality early learning. As a middle school teacher in low-income communities, I experienced how difficult it is to catch students up to grade level, and I see early childhood education as a way to prevent academic gaps.
Describe some of your early childhood work.
I’ve supported a regional nonprofit and its partners to build a strategy to cultivate the city’s early childhood teacher workforce. I’ve also supported a large national organization on its five-year strategic plan, which included direct impact, workforce, and policy/advocacy components.
Learn more about Nisha's work here.
