OSLO — It was a July afternoon in 2011 when a car bomb exploded just a few blocks from Robert Ullmann’s office. Because it was the summer, only two employees from Kanvas, his nonprofit that manages 64 child care programs around Norway, were at their desks on the third floor of a narrow, nondescript building in central Oslo. Although the floor-to-ceiling glass windows shattered when the bomb exploded at 3:25 in the afternoon, both members of his team were unhurt.

When I arrived at Ullmann’s office a few months ago to interview him about Kanvas, he led me to one of the windows that looks out over Møllergata street. Just past the rusty roof of the building across the road, we could see the top of Regjeringskvartalet, a cluster of government offices, the target of that car bomb. “That’s our ‘Capitol Hill,’” Ullmann explained. The complex never reopened after the blast, which killed eight and injured more than 200. A few hours later, the far-right extremist behind the bombing opened fire at a youth summer camp on an island 24 miles from central Oslo, killing 69 people, most of them teenagers and young adults affiliated with the youth wing of the country’s Labor Party. 

The violent attack, extraordinarily rare for Norway, affected Ullmann deeply.

“I started some reflection,” he said as we stood by the window. “How can a young guy come up here and become a terrorist?” In the context of his work with young children, the goal became very clear. “What’s important is that everyone feel they’re included,” he said.

Ullmann’s conclusion embodies one of Norway’s goals for its citizens: to build a nation of thriving adults by providing childhoods that are joyful, secure and inclusive. Perhaps nowhere is this belief manifested more clearly than in the nation’s approach to early child care. (In Norway, all education for children 5 and under is referred to as “barnehagen,” the local translation of “kindergarten.”) To an American, the Norwegian philosophy, both in policy and in practice, could feel alien. The government’s view isn’t that child care is a place to put children so parents can work, or even to prepare children for the rigors of elementary school. It’s about protecting childhood.

“A really important pillar of Norway’s early ed philosophy is the value of childhood in itself,” said Henrik D. Zachrisson, a professor at the Centre for Research on Equality in Education at the University of Oslo. “Early ed is supposed to be a place where children can be children and have the best childhood possible.”

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On a drizzly Thursday morning this spring in south Oslo, at Preståsen Kanvas-barnehage, one of Kanvas’ child care programs, children roamed around an expansive play yard, building sandcastles under a large evergreen tree and zooming down a hill on bikes. On an adjacent playground, children shrieked as they splashed through a large puddle. As more children were drawn to the water, rather than caution them about getting wet, a teacher handed them buckets to have at it.

There was a clear focus on inclusion: Children with disabilities, who would often be segregated in American child care programs, were included in activities, at times with the help of a city-funded aide. Posters on some kindergarten walls showed pictures of common items or requests so children who were still learning to speak Norwegian could point to what they needed. Children were learning about the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr. A rack of free clothes and boots was parked inside the front lobby, with instructions for parents to take what they needed.

“Kindergarten is so important to level out social inequities,” said Ullmann as we drove to a second site run by Kanvas. “In Norway, we think it’s democratic that everyone can have the same opportunities and move out of being poor. Social differences are something Norway does not accept.”

I traveled to Norway in April, disillusioned after nine years of reporting on child care in the U.S., where parents often pay exorbitant sums for care that comes with no guarantee of quality and relies on underpaid workers. I was eager to see a country that prioritizes child care and generously subsidizes that system, two things that feel wholly out of reach in the United States. 

Norway’s model comes from a deep-seated belief that creating productive, contributing members of society starts at birth. The country offers robust social support for residents, making occurrences like the 2011 attacks that much more shocking. Investing in early childhood is seen “both as an investment for the society and an investment for the child,” said Kristin Aasta Morken, program leader of the city of Oslo’s initiative for upbringing and education. Unlike in America, no attempts have been made to lower age requirements for kindergarten teachers or increase student-teacher ratios and group sizes, and there have been few debates over whether child care is ruining children or families. Ironically, Norway’s policies have been inspired in part by American studies that found language gaps between higher- and lower-income children, as well as a high return on investment for early childhood programs.

“The argument I’ve heard is that if you don’t send your children to kindergarten, then you steal some possible experiences from them,” said Adrian Kristinsønn Jacobsen, a doctoral candidate at Norway’s University of Stavanger who studies nature-based early childhood science education and is a parent of two young children. “You sort of don’t give them the chance to play with other children so much, for instance, or get to know other adults.”

At a time when the U.S. has yet to meaningfully invest in widespread, high-quality child care for all, especially for infants and toddlers — and federal child care spending, provided to states through block grants, reaches only 13 percent of eligible American children — Norway provides an example of what affordable, universal, child-centric early care can look like.

To be sure, there are important contexts behind each country’s approach. Norway, a democracy with a figurehead monarchy, is home to about 5.5 million people, about 82 percent of whom are of Norwegian ancestry, across a space roughly the size of Montana. The U.S. has 62 times the number of residents and a far more diverse population. Norway is a top producer of oil which helped generate a per capita household income that was over $104,000 in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund. In 2022, per capita household income in the U.S. was about $77,000.

The countries’ priorities are different as well. Each year, nearly 1.4 percent of Norway’s GDP is spent on early childhood programs, compared with less than 0.4 percent in America. Public funding covers 85 percent of operating costs for child care programs. The tuition parents pay has been capped at 2,000 kroner (about $190) a month for the first child, with a 30 percent discount for the second. Tuition for a third child is free. This applies to both public and private programs, including in-home centers, giving parents some choice. Programs receive funding based on the number of children served, with sites drawing double the amount of money for each child under 3 to account for lower student-teacher ratios. 

Norwegian children are guaranteed a spot in a kindergarten after they turn 1, around the time many parents’ paid leave ends. All kindergartens are governed by the same framework and requirements, designed to protect the sanctity of the early years. If parents don’t send their children to child care, they receive financial assistance to keep them at home.

Norwegians are so serious about the right to child-centric early care, they wrote it into law. The country’s Kindergarten Act, which took effect in 2006, states that child care programs must acknowledge “the intrinsic value” of childhood. Programs must be rooted in values including forgiveness, equality, solidarity and respect for human worth. Through kindergartens, children are meant to learn to take care of each other and develop friendships. Programs are ordered to respect children, “counteract all forms of discrimination” and contribute to a child’s well-being and joy. They must be designed around the interests of children and provide activities that allow children to develop their “creative zest, sense of wonder and need to investigate.”

That doesn’t mean kids run free all day, though at times it can look like that. “If you’re standing outside a Norwegian kindergarten or just passing through, I would think you are looking at chaos,” said Anne Karin Frivik, head of kindergartens in the Bjerke borough of north Oslo. “But for us on the inside, it’s organized chaos. The autonomy of the child, the child’s own ability to choose and to learn and to interact, it’s very, very highly appreciated.”

About 7 miles north of Oslo, Sylvia Lorentzen’s two child care programs straddle a narrow, winding road amid the lush forests that encircle part of the city, offering limitless opportunities for children to immerse themselves in nature. Throughout the year, those in Lorentzen’s care ski, sled, swim, canoe, climb rocks and rest in hammocks. Around age 4, they learn how to safely use a knife. Then they huddle together outside, whittling wooden figures out of sticks to practice. At 5, they are cutting logs with a saw and building fires. 

By 11 on a Tuesday morning this spring, it was barely above freezing, but toddlers at one of Lorentzen’s programs, Turi Sletners Barnehave, had yet to set foot inside. Bundled up in colorful snowsuits and boots, they crunched through several inches of snow blanketing their picturesque play yard, splashed through muddy puddles and giggled as they chased Lorentzen’s petite, playful dog around the yard.

“Children should feel more like it’s a second home,” said Lorentzen. “We take the kids into our heart and we take good care of them.”

As the morning wore on, the five toddlers made their way up a gentle slope and stepped inside a large tent, modeled after one commonly used by the Indigenous Sami people of Northern Europe. There, the children crowded around a metal firepit and peered at the remnants of their last bonfire.

“What did you find?” their teacher, Paula García Tadeo, asked in Norwegian as a child held up some charcoal remnants. García looked closely and nodded, before instructing the child to put it back.

Another child reached into the remnants and started to taste an ashy piece of wood.

“Don’t eat it,” Garcia said calmly.

“In the kindergarten in Norway, the children find their own food!” Lorentzen joked to me, laughing. “Don’t write that!”

After a bit more exploring and singing some nursery rhymes, the toddlers set off across the play yard. Some wandered over to watch a rushing stream a few feet away, and others stumbled through the snow before sitting down to rest. The more confident walkers among them marched ahead, toward the warm meal that awaited them inside.

For Lorentzen and many other early educators here, this sort of laid-back morning, marked by child-led outdoor exploration, signifies how childhood and child care should look. Nature and outdoor play are staples of Norwegian culture. There’s even a word for it: “friluftsliv,” which translates to “outdoor life.” Norwegians are so protective of this outdoor time, they have a saying, “There is no bad weather, just bad clothes.” It’s standard for Norwegian kindergartens to have rows of cubbies just inside the door to the play area to store layers of spare clothes, rain and snow gear, boots and mittens.

Some of this outdoor focus is baked into the country’s 63-page kindergarten framework, based on the national law, which dictates the content that must be covered, staff responsibilities and kindergartens’ general goals. The framework focuses heavily on play, a word that is repeated 56 times in the English version of the document. Programs are required to facilitate a good childhood, with “well-being, friendships and play.” Learning about nature and the environment is one of the framework’s seven learning goals for children, and programs are instructed to “use nature as an arena for play.” Much of the other content, like health and movement, communication and art, is taught while children are playing, either inside chaotic-looking classrooms or while traipsing through forests.

In rain, snow or wind, children at Turi Sletners, and in programs across the country, spend their days climbing trees and getting muddy. Toddlers nap outside, bundled inside puffy, miniature sleeping bags affixed to their strollers. During the summer, Norwegian children in kindergartens spend, on average, 70 percent of their time outside. In winter about a third of the time is outside. The country’s embrace of nature is likely a factor in its high international happiness ratings, given that research has found spending time in nature can decrease anxiety and improve cognition.

Researchers have found that Norway’s kindergartens have positive effects on academic success and the adult labor force. “Putting all the pieces together, it’s a pretty consistent set of evidence that there are fairly long-term effects” of Norway’s early childhood programs, said the University of Oslo’s Zachrisson. “Which is funny, because what they do the first year is walking around in the woods eating sand and hugging trees, and [it] is super interesting to try to think of what causes them to do much better on the math test in fifth grade.”

It may be because play is the main way children learn, and Norwegian kindergarten days are overflowing with just that.

Related: What America can learn from Canada’s new ‘$10 a Day’ child care system

At Blindern Barnestuer, a child care program run out of four wooden houses across the street from the University of Oslo, children roam for hours, playing in a magical, expansive play yard while their parents research and teach at the university. On an April afternoon, a group of children crowded around a teacher sitting at a bench outside as he painted various insects on their faces on request.

Other kids chased each other up gentle hills as a nearby pirate flag, suspended from the branches of a knobby tree, waved. A group of preschoolers traversed an obstacle course constructed of wooden pallets and boards, clutching each other’s coats for stability. Some climbed trees and dangled from branches.

As Anne Gro Stumberg, one of the kindergarten’s lead teachers, known as a “pedagogical leader” in Norway, showed me around the outdoor play space, I commented on how Norwegians seemed to have a much higher risk tolerance for children’s play. In addition to the fire and knives that I had seen at other programs, preschoolers chased each other with brooms, fell several feet from tree limbs and stood on swings, things that gave me, a cautious American, pause. Nary a Norwegian looking on, however, batted an eye.

“We allow them to experience, and if they fall down, so what?” Stumberg said. 

I asked if she’s had many injuries among the children. 

She thought for a moment. “I can’t remember having one injury, not a serious injury,” she said. 

Stumberg sees endless lessons for children through play. At Blindern, teachers purposefully avoid teaching formal academics, like letters and numbers, unless a child is expressly interested in them. “We think that’s what they’re going to learn in school,” she said. “I don’t think it’s necessary to try to learn [reading] before school. There are so many other things that are very important, like all of the social skills, and how to move and do things on your own and to be able to have your own limits.”

This can only happen, Norway believes, with trained, qualified staff. The national framework instructs staff to behave as “role models,” and Norway’s law is strict about student-teacher ratios and qualifications. Programs are required to have one pedagogical leader, someone with a multiyear college degree or comparable education, per seven children under the age of 3, and one per 14 children older than that. Each leader is supported by two other teachers, who often have less education. For children under age 3, there may be no more than three children for each staff member, and there is a maximum of six children per staff for older children. In America, by contrast, no state has a ratio that low for toddlers. In some states, as many as 12 2-year-olds are assigned to one teacher, who is subject to far fewer training requirements than a peer in Norway.

At Jarbakken Barnehage, in northwest Oslo, director Mailinn Daljord said qualified teachers are vital, as they have a challenging job. One of the most critical lessons is teaching children emotional regulation, a skill that is imperative as children grow. “I want [children] to like being in kindergarten,” she said, as we sat in her office, surrounded by rows of early childhood pedagogy books and a pile of donated, toddler-sized skis. “But I also want them to feel disappointment, sadness and disagreement with others, because here we have grownups that will help them with their emotions, so they will learn to handle those situations on their own when they get older.”

Like Ullmann, one thing Daljord does not want children to experience is bullying or exclusion. As we spoke, she went on her computer to pull up Jarbakken’s annual plan, something every kindergarten must create to explain how it will meet the requirements of the law. This year, Daljord is especially focused on interactions and inclusion. Teachers gather small groups of children during play to provide support with interactions and give them ample opportunity to form connections with peers. During the year, Daljord’s teachers meet to evaluate how much they interact with individual children, a practice Ullmann spoke of as well. Daljord uses a scale: Green means frequent interaction with a child, yellow occasional, red infrequent. Then the kindergarten zeroes in on those getting less interaction. Often, those are the most challenging children, Daljord said.

“You need to do something to make sure all the kids are getting the same, and that they are seen and acknowledged for the person they are,” she said.

Later in our visit, as Daljord walked me through the bright kindergarten, housed in a boxy, modern building surrounded by outdoor play spaces, I was struck by the freedom children had. They could move from room to room and play with other groups of children, as long as they stayed in the area designated for their age group. As we toured, Daljord pointed out what children were learning about: dinosaurs, insects and the life cycle of plants. All around us, children scurried in and out of play areas — the word “classroom” is not used in Norwegian child care settings — laughing and chasing friends. While teachers engaged small groups of children in spontaneous activity at times, for the most part, the emphasis was on child-led play.

Daljord agreed that children in Norway have “way more” freedom — and responsibility — than in America. She told me a story that, to her, demonstrated the former. Nearly a decade ago, while visiting a park in the United States with her then almost 3-year-old daughter, she was approached by an American parent who chastised her for sitting on a bench while her daughter ran free. “Child abuse,” Daljord recalled the woman telling her. She said Daljord “needed to watch her, and stay close.”

Daljord seemed amused by the whole interaction. “Different culture,” she said, as she recalled the story.

Related: Free child care exists in America — if you cross paths with the right philanthropist

Norway’s early childhood policies are indeed part of a distinctly different culture. In 2020, UNICEF ranked Norway No. 1 among 41 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and European Union countries for conditions that support child well-being. Norway spends 3.3 percent of its GDP on family benefits, one of the highest rates among OECD nations, and about three times what the United States spends. In 2020, the medical journal The Lancet ranked Norway first out of 180 countries in a “child flourishing index.” That same year, UNICEF ranked Norway third among 41 wealthy countries in child well-being, as measured by mental well-being, physical health and academic and social skills. The United States, by comparison, ranked 36th. Norway also ranks highly in work-life balance, meaning even if children attend kindergarten, parents still spend hours with them each day, parents and educators told me.

Perhaps in part thanks to these circumstances, children and their families fare well in Norway. Child mortality and poverty rates in Norway are low, and most children report good family relationships. International test scores from before the pandemic showed Norwegian teenagers performing at or above international averages in science, math and reading, though scores have fluctuated over recent years, with the arrival of more immigrants, who tend to score lower on such tests. Nearly 86 percent of Norwegians graduate from high school, and 55 percent earn a college degree. College tuition is free for Norwegian and European Union residents at the country’s public universities. 

Many of the Norwegians I interviewed spoke of a strong cultural expectation that adults contribute to Norway’s economy. More than 72 percent of the country’s labor force works, 10 percentage points higher than in America. Norway’s child care policy has supported this.

Many of Norway’s values are uniquely Scandinavian and deep-rooted. But as my visit went on, I began to wonder if part of Norway’s no-nonsense, easy-breezy approach was because many of the things that keep American parents up at night, like school shootings, mass shootings — pretty much shootings of any kind — aren’t things Norwegian parents told me they regularly, if ever, think about. Norway has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Maybe in America, the strict, highly regulated approach we continue to take when it comes to child care is an attempt to control what we can for our children in a life where so many things feel very much out of our control.

I ran this theory by Ullmann as we drove to one of his kindergartens. I told him some of the things I worry about with my own children: If I hear sirens near my child’s school, is it America’s next school shooting? If I’m at a concert or mall, where will I hide my child if someone opens fire? Do Norwegians ever worry about those things?

Ullmann was so horrified, he missed the exit on the freeway. “That’s really very sad,” he said sympathetically, glancing at me as he took the next exit, crossed over the highway and headed back in the opposite direction.

To be sure, aspects of Norway’s kindergarten system are still being developed, and the country must adapt as its population becomes more diverse. Its first step was expanding access, experts told me. Between 2003 and 2018, the percentage of children ages 1 to 5 attending kindergarten increased from 69 percent to 92 percent. Now, the country is focusing on improving quality and targeting children who are behind in language development.

When it comes to kindergartens, “we’ve known for some time that the quality varies,” said Veslemøy Rydland, a professor at the University of Oslo and one of the lead researchers for the Oslo Early Education Study, a research project into multiethnic early childhood programs that was launched in 2021. Despite standardized requirements, finding staff for lower-income kindergartens, where turnover rates are higher, can be difficult.

As kindergartens have developed a stronger footing, the country is contending with a changing demographic and growing social inequality, testing its devotion to equity and progressive social values. Kindergartens are seeing this firsthand. Over the past decade, the number of “minority-language” children, kids with two parents who speak a language that is not native to the Scandinavian countries or English, has nearly doubled. Almost 20 percent of children in kindergarten primarily speak a language other than Norwegian, and in some cities as many as 35 percent of children are minority-language speakers. During the past decade, child poverty rates rose.  

Part of my goal in visiting Norway was to see how, and if, the country’s system and approach to child care has been able to meet the growing needs of more diverse children. Not all of Norway’s early childhood researchers are convinced that the country’s informal approach to learning works as its demographics evolve.

“This pedagogy has been doing a great job in protecting childhoods … and giving children the opportunity to explore,” said Rydland, At the same time, Rydland said when children have that much freedom, they may not be exposed to activities that could be beneficial, like whole-group reading, simply because they aren’t interested in them. “That might be the same children that are not exposed to shared reading at home,” Rydland said. “That’s the challenge with this pedagogy … I think it works better in a more homogenous society than what we have now, with much more social differences.”

Related: For preschoolers after the pandemic, more states say: Learn outdoors

There have been efforts to find a middle ground between the playful freedom inherent to Norwegian kindergartens and a more structured setting.

In Oslo, Rydland leads Språksterk, an initiative run by the University of Oslo, kindergartens in five Oslo districts and officials with the city of Oslo. The project, which roughly translates to “strong language skills” in English, is funded by the city and the Research Council of Norway and is aimed at improving adult interactions with children and ultimately enhancing language development. It’s one of several special projects and interventions in Oslo targeting children and families who are the most in need.

Like many Norwegian initiatives, Språksterk aims to “try to make the social inequalities less,” said Helene Holbæk, who develops projects for children in the Bjerke borough.

Grønland Torg is one of 80 kindergartens participating in Språksterk to help a growing number of immigrant children master the Norwegian language. Fifty-nine children attend Grønland Torg, and they altogether speak 40 different languages.

On a spring afternoon, teacher Hilde Sandnes sat on the floor of her room for 1-year-olds, next to a small cardboard box shaped like a birdhouse, as 11 children lumbered around the room, some playing alone while others interacted with the room’s two other teachers. Sandnes invited a toddler near her to come look at a collection of small, felt stuffed animals shaped like birds stacked inside the cardboard birdhouse, which had been sewn by her mother for the bird unit the children were embarking on. A child reached inside and pulled out a duck, proudly naming it in Norwegian.

Sandes repeated it and pulled out another bird, waiting to see if the child could identify it.

“Stork!” he proclaimed, a word that is the same in both English and Norwegian.

The child looked back over at the duck and excitedly proclaimed something in Norwegian.

“He told me the duck is taking a bath,” Sandnes said.

While kindergartens like Grønland Torg are attempting to adapt for immigrants, educators say not all newcomers are sold on the Norwegian model. Children who have immigrated to Norway are eligible to attend kindergarten soon after arriving, and their parents pay the same low rate, or lower, based on income. Educators said families new to Norway who enroll their children often struggle to accept the Norwegian approach to child care, expecting more academics or structure.

Many families choose not to enroll their children at all, an unintended consequence of a generous but divisive social policy in Norway: cash-for-care, which pays parents who stay home with their children. The idea is to support parents who wish to keep their children home longer — toddler enrollment in Norway’s kindergartens is lower than for older age groups — or sustain families if a child can’t get a spot in a kindergarten. Norwegian educators say children new to Norway are the ones who could benefit the most from child care and exposure to Norwegian language, yet are less likely to enroll before the subsidy expires when children turn 3.

At the same time, kindergartens are reckoning with how to support a steady rise in children with disabilities. Seventy percent of the country’s programs enroll children who qualify for special education support.

As these needs have grown, Oslo has responded with sufficient funding, educators told me. For students with disabilities, the city pays for and sends in specialists for added support. While these services are required for children under Norwegian law, national experts said the quality and extent of services can vary by city.

In America, the quality of publicly funded early learning programs is often scrutinized, especially in the pre-K years. I wondered how the Norwegian government makes sure all this public money is in fact leading to high-quality kindergartens that are adequately serving children.

While there is copious federal tracking of staffing numbers as well as quality and parent satisfaction metrics, Norwegians are skeptical of monitoring and measuring children’s development and do not focus much on the cost-benefit argument around early education. Norwegians largely see early childhood programs as a good that “leads to more equal and happy childhoods,” said Zachrisson from the University of Oslo. “This is what the public discourse is about,” he added. The value of Norway’s early childhood services is not contingent on long-term effects.

Elise Kristin Hagen Steffensen, director of Barnebo Barnehage in north Oslo, described a system based on trust. Programs report issues to their municipality as small as forgetting to lock a window or as big as teacher mistreatment of children. Hagen Steffensen regularly writes reports for the city to explain how her school is meeting various parts of the law’s requirements, and officials may visit, especially if they’ve heard a kindergarten is struggling. There is also copious federal tracking of staffing numbers as well as quality and parent satisfaction metrics. Programs failing to meet regulations face no fines, however; educators were somewhat confused when I asked about penalties for failing to meet regulations, as can be the norm in America. Instead, they told me, local kindergarten officials help programs improve.

“That approach is just the Norwegian model,” said Hagen Steffensen. “I like that very much.”

This sense of trust seemed so inherent to Norwegians that they were baffled that I was asking questions about it. One afternoon, as Frivik, head of kindergartens in Bjerke borough, walked me to a bus stop, she pointed out how fences are few and far between in Norway. The country’s “right to roam” law allows individuals to freely and responsibly enjoy “uncultivated” areas, regardless of who owns them. I mentioned that fit right in with the level of trust I discovered, both by the government toward residents and residents toward the government.

“Nobody regularly checks or scans my Metro ticket to make sure I paid,” I pointed out.

“Why wouldn’t you pay?” Frivik asked me.

Looking forward, Norway’s early educators and experts aren’t quite ready to declare success in building their system, especially as demographics change. They want to see higher quality across kindergartens and more teachers in the classroom to reduce student-teacher ratios, which are already low by American standards.

Ullmann, too, thinks there is still room for improvement. “If you take the money and the structural quality that we offer in Norway, yeah, compared to every other country in the world, these are more or less the most expensive kindergartens in the world,” Ullmann said. “It’s fantastic when you compare it to every other country.” But, he added, even that may not be enough when it comes to the youngest of children, on whom the future rests.

Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at (212) 678-3562 or mader@hechingerreport.org.

This story about Norwegian children was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, with support from the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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The start of the school year can be stressful, but parents of neurodivergent children are more likely to report feeling overwhelmed, unprepared and scared than other parents, according to a new survey shared with The Hechinger Report.

About 2,100 parents answered the survey this summer from Understood.org, a nonprofit that publishes resources for people with dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and other learning differences. Those with neurodivergent children say they were stressed about their child’s social life, whether the school would meet their child’s needs and whether their child would have access to adequate resources to succeed in school. About 82 percent of those parents said neurodivergent students are often misunderstood by their peers, and 76 percent said they are often misunderstood by teachers.

Elementary-age children who think and learn differently may struggle more with the back-to-school transition because they have a harder time expressing their needs than their older peers, said Andrew Kahn, associate director of behavior change and expertise at Understood.org. “You’re much more likely to see this in behavior, and in avoidance and escape.”

Teachers can help ease the transition to school by looking for those signals and breaking down lessons and tasks early on, Kahn said. Simplifying activities step-by-step early on will benefit all children, he added.

“Some of this is getting teachers and parents to think broadly about how can we provide the smoothest way of instructing kids who are different — and who are neurotypical — in a way that’s going to decrease their sense of feeling different,” Kahn said.

Read more on neurodivergent students:

• Last fall, my colleague Jackie Mader wrote about the experiences of young children with dyscalculia, a learning disability that makes it harder to process numbers, and how a lack of awareness about it results in delayed diagnoses. The earlier a child gets diagnosed, the sooner they can get early interventions to help them succeed, Kahn said.

• But for some parents, the high cost of neuropsych evaluations hinders and delays those special education services, as my colleague Sarah Carr wrote in this story about disability testing.

• For parents of even younger children, finding a child care classroom that can meet their needs can feel almost impossible.

• Understood.org also publishes resources for parents and educators of children who think and learn differently and tips for specific scenarios.

• Earlier this year, Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat wrote about New York City slowly expanding its programs for children with autism, which an estimated 10,000 children in the city could benefit from.

• In 2019, Jackie wrote about preschool programs for children with disabilities and how federal spending on those programs has dropped over the past two decades.

Quick Takes:

Children who spent more time on tablets were more likely to have temper tantrums, according to a study of 315 children from Nova Scotia, Canada, published in JAMA Pediatrics last month. The study also found that children who struggled with anger and frustration at age 4.5 were likely to spend more time on tablets by age 5.5.

Third graders who attended transitional kindergarten programs in Michigan performed better in math and English language arts than children who attended other informal and formal early education programs in the state, researchers found in a study published by the University of Michigan.

This story about neurodivergent students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Young children are happier and healthier when they are well cared for by loving, attentive adults. Sometimes that’s one parent alone, but more often it’s a village.

The child care crisis, however, has made that village much harder to find. The past five years have seen a decrease in the availability of child care programs. Over the past few decades, child care costs have risen at twice the pace of inflation. In 2023, the cost of care was higher than rent in all 50 states. A small number of lower-income families can secure existing subsidies, but the majority are left to pay their own way.

Meanwhile, child care worker wages remain stagnant, so it’s no wonder many educators exit the field. Availability further declines.

That’s why I wish presidential candidate Donald Trump had responded to a question about the ongoing child care crisis during the June 27 presidential debate. (He ignored the question.)

However, we do know the position of his vice-presidential choice, J.D. Vance, who articulated it clearly in an op-ed he co-authored, proclaiming that “Biden’s Daycare Plan Is Bad for Families” and noting that “Young children are clearly happier and healthier when they spend the day at home with a parent.”

Even though he’s the husband of an esteemed lawyer and father of three young children in nonparental care, Vance argues in the op-ed that child care leads to “negative effects on children’s emotional and social well-being.”

In his opinion, child care should not be subsidized for the middle class. As a pediatrician, I think Vance’s take is wrong.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

When high-quality care is impossible to find or afford, working parents have to make tough choices. Some drop out of the workforce altogether. Others attempt to juggle caring for their kids with nontraditional work schedules. Or they rely on relatives, neighbors or friends for informal care.

What often results is stressed caregivers who struggle to provide the basics — adequate sleep, nutritious food, play, attention and time outside.

When young children don’t have these needs met, their health and development suffer. The impact can be long-lasting. Children with lower physical activity are at higher risk for obesity, and 79 percent of 2-year-olds with severe obesity will remain obese into adulthood.

Children with poor sleep schedules can lack basic readiness for kindergarten and then perpetually struggle to catch up to their more prepared peers. Infants without adequate caregiver responsiveness are at higher risk for mental health problems later in life.

In turn, subpar care for toddlers has ripple effects that create strains on our healthcare, educational and criminal justice systems down the road.

But there is a solution: High-quality child care can make a meaningful difference in child health and development. A 2021 study demonstrated that states with larger child care investments had lower rates of child protective services calls, foster care placements and deaths by abuse or neglect.

Another study, in North Carolina, found that children who were randomly assigned to a high-quality child care program had better health outcomes at age 21 than their peers who didn’t get in.

A 2016 study found that infants in licensed care centers were at lower risk for obesity than those in informal care, and a 2022 study found that infants who attended an Oklahoma center had a wide range of academic advantages years later compared to their peers who didn’t get off the waitlist.

Daily, I see this play out in front of me. Take a 4-year-old patient I saw recently for a checkup.

One year ago, he had little speech, minimal social skills, explosive behavior and poor sleep. We started developmental evaluations. His mom, a medical assistant, explained to me that he was cared for by an overwhelmed neighbor who watched several children and relied heavily on screen time to keep the peace. She had considered sending him to a licensed child care facility, but waitlists were interminable and costs out of her reach.

Five months ago, her son enrolled in a Head Start program. He’s now talking in complete sentences, sleeping well and has marked behavioral changes. This is the power of good child care.

Related: How could Project 2025 change education?

The Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year.

My advice to our leaders like Vance? Keep Head Start and expand child care subsidies. Trust families to decide what’s best for their children.

Trust the providers currently working in this field and pay them more.

Allow parents using subsidies to choose between formal centers, private homes and faith-based institutions.

You’ll see more tax revenue from parents returning to the workforce. You might even lift millions of child care workers out of poverty. But most importantly, you’ll change the health and educational trajectories of millions of young children for the better.

Dr. Megan Prior is a pediatrician at a community health center in northern Virginia.

This story about the child care crisis was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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There is a long overdue movement in states and districts across the country to update K-3 reading and math curricula to ensure they adhere to research-proven practices. However, this movement has a big blind spot: preschool.

Close to half of all four-year-olds in the U.S. now start their formal education in a public preschool classroom, and this share is steadily growing. States invested well over $10 billion in pre-K programs in 2022-23, and the federal government invested $11 billion in Head Start.

Most public preschool programs succeed in offering children well-organized classrooms in which they feel safe to learn and explore. But they fall short in building the critical early learning skills on which a child’s future literacy and math skills depend.

Strong preschool experiences matter. The seeds of the large, consequential learning gap between children from higher-income and lower-income families in language, literacy and math skills in middle and high school are already planted by the first day of kindergarten.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

Many studies in widely differing locales around the country have shown that attending preschool boosts children’s kindergarten readiness, and that its effects can — but don’t invariably — last beyond kindergarten and even into adulthood. This readiness includes the ability to follow teacher directions and get along with peers, a solid understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds, a strong vocabulary and a conceptual knowledge of the number line — all skills on which elementary school curricula can build and all eagerly learned by preschoolers.

But as with all education, some programs are more effective than others, and curriculum is a key active ingredient. Most preschool programs rely on curricula that do not match the current science of early learning and teaching. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch to do better. As a new National Academies report explains, we have ample research that points to what makes a preschool curriculum effective.

Three practical changes will help to move today’s curriculum reform efforts in the right direction.

First, public preschool programs need to update their lists of approved curricula, based on evidence, to clearly identify those that improve young children’s learning and development. In the 2021-22 school year (the most recent year for which figures are available), only 19 states maintained lists of approved curricula, and those lists included curricula that are not evidence-based.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

Second, because the most effective preschool curricula tend to target only one or two learning areas (such as math and literacy), programs need to combine curricula to cover all vital areas. Fortunately, preschool programs in Boston and elsewhere have done precisely this.

Third, tightly linking curricula to teacher professional development and coaching is required for effective implementation. Too often, teacher professional development focuses on general best practices or is highly episodic, approaches that have not translated into preschool learning gains.

We can’t stop with these three changes, however. Children learn best when kindergarten and later elementary curricula build upon preschool curriculum.

None of these changes will solve the problem of the inadequate funding that affects many preschool programs and fuels high teacher turnover. But they can provide teachers with the best tools to support learning.

Getting preschool curricula right is crucial for society to receive the research-proven benefits of early education programs. Evidence shows a boost in learning when programs use more effective curricula.

What’s next is for policymakers to put this evidence into action.

Deborah A. Phillips and Christina Weiland are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on a New Vision for High-Quality Pre-K Curriculum, which recently released a report with a series of recommendations to improve preschool curriculum, as is Douglas H. Clements, who also contributed to this opinion piece.

This story about preschool curricula was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s biweekly Early Childhood newsletter.

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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.

Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.

“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”

Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.

The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.

But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.

The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.

Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.

“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.

If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.

That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by  the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”

The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.

Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.

Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.

“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”

The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.

The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.

“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.

Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.

The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent.  Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.

And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.

Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.

Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.

Related: States stuck trying to fix early ed pay as feds drop the ball

Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.

“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.

Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.

“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”

Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.

Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.

Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.

As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.

“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”

Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.

The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.

“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”

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ASTON, Pa.— In Jodie Murphy’s kindergarten class, math lessons go beyond the basics of counting and recognizing numbers.

On a recent morning, the children used plastic red and yellow dots for a counting exercise: One student tossed the coin-sized dots onto a cookie sheet while another hid her eyes. The second student then opened her eyes, counted up the dots and picked the corresponding number from a stack of cards.

The dots showed up again a few minutes later in a more complex task. Murphy set a two-minute timer, and students counted as many dot arrays as they could, adding or taking away dots to match a corresponding written number. Four dots next to a printed number 6, for example, meant that students had to draw in two extra dots — an important precursor to learning addition.

Kindergarten may be math’s most important year — it lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship between number and quantity and helps develop “number sense,” or how numbers relate to each other, experts and researchers say.

But too often teachers spend that crucial year reinforcing basic information students may already know. Research shows that many kindergarteners learn early on how to count and recognize basic shapes — two areas that make up the majority of kindergarten math content. Though basic math content is crucial for students who begin school with little math knowledge, a growing body of research argues more comprehensive kindergarten math instruction that moves beyond counting could help more students become successful in math later on.

Because so many students nationally are struggling in math — a longstanding challenge made worse by remote schooling during the pandemic — experts and educators say more emphasis needs to be put on foundational, early childhood math. But for a variety of reasons, kindergarten often misses the mark: Math takes a backseat to literacy, teachers are often unprepared to teach it, and appropriate curriculum, if it exists at all, can be scattershot, overly repetitive — or both.

Manipulating numbers in different ways, part of a supplemental math curriculum for Murphy’s whole class at Hilltop Elementary in this suburb of Philadelphia, is an attempt to address those problems. In an effort to improve math achievement district-wide, all elementary students in the Chichester School District get an extra 30-minute daily dose of math. In kindergarten, the extra time is spent on foundational skills like understanding numbers and quantity, but also the basics of addition and subtraction, said Diana Hanobeck, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.

Related: You probably don’t have your preschooler thinking about math enough

Chichester district leaders say implementing the intervention, called SpringMath, along with other steps that include hiring a math specialist for each school, has brought urgent attention to students’ math achievement by bringing more students to mastery — and a lot of that has to do with how much students are learning in kindergarten. Student math achievement, which dropped to a low of 13.5 percent of students proficient or advanced during the pandemic, has more than doubled across grades since the intervention began, although still below the state average. Last spring, 47 percent of the district’s fourth graders were proficient or advanced in math on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test.

“The intervention is very targeted by skill and gives teachers data for each student,” said Hanobeck. “We are seeing it close gaps for students, and they are more able to access elementary school math.”

Murphy, the kindergarten teacher, said that while some students arrive at school able to do “rote counting,” others arrive with no prior knowledge or a very limited understanding of numbers and counting. The interventions have improved all students’ accuracy and fluency in more complex tasks, such as being able to count up or down from a number like 16 or 20, and adding and subtracting numbers up to 5.

“It used to take all year for some students to count on from different starting points, that’s actually really hard for kids to do,” Murphy said. “Students are meeting their goals far faster now. We are moving on, but also moving deeper.”

That deep thought is important, even in the earliest grades. Kindergarten math proficiency is especially predictive of future academic success in all subjects including reading, research has shown. In one study, students’ number competence in kindergarten — which includes the ability to understand number quantities, their relationships to each other, and the ability to join and separate sets of numbers, like 4 and 2 making 6 — presaged mathematical achievement in third grade, with greater number competence leading to higher math achievement.

It’s also the time when learning gaps between students are at their smallest, and it’s easier to put all students on equal footing. “Kindergarten is crucial,” said University of Oregon math education researcher Ben Clarke. “It’s well-documented in the research literature that gaps start early, grow over time and essentially become codified and very hard to remediate.”

But the math content commonly found in kindergarten — such as counting the days on a calendar — is often embedded within a curriculum “in which the teaching of mathematics is secondary to other learning goals,” according to a report from the National Academies of Science. “Learning experiences in which mathematics is a supplementary activity rather than the primary focus are less effective” in building student math skills than if math is the main goal, researchers wrote.

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

The math students are taught in kindergarten often progresses no further than basic counting and shapes. In a 2013 study, researcher and University of Colorado Boulder associate professor Mimi Engel found that students who spent more time on the advanced concepts in kindergarten learned more math. Engel hypothesizes that exposure to more advanced content in kindergarten may help students in later grades when content grows more complex.

“We want some amount of repetition across grades in content,” Engel said. “There’s variation in kids’ skill sets when they start kindergarten, and, as a teacher, there are a number of reasons why you want to start with the basics, and scaffold instruction. But what I’m interested in is: when does repetition become redundancy?”

According to researcher Amanda VanDerHeyden, founder of SpringMath, breaking numbers apart and putting them back together and understanding how numbers relate to each other does more to help develop kindergarteners’ mathematical thinking than counting alone. Students should move from using concrete objects to model problems, to using representations of those objects and then to numbers in the abstract — like understanding that the number 3 is a symbol for three objects.

To improve students’ math skills, some schools and districts have recently upgraded the math curriculum and materials teachers use, so they are able to build increasingly complex skills in an organized, orderly way.

Kindergarteners in Hailey Lang’s classroom at Dr. William Burrus Elementary School in Hendersonville, Tennessee, were recently counting penguins — a digital whiteboard showed a photo of a mother penguin with seven fuzzy babies in tow.

“Can we make a math drawing about this picture? No details, you can just use little circles,” Lang said. Students drew one big circle and seven smaller circles on their papers to represent the penguins. Then they translated the circles into a number sentence: 1 (big circle) + 7 (small circles) = 8.

The lesson is new to students this year since they adopted the Eureka Math curriculum. It’s what Sumner County Superintendent Scott Langford calls “high-quality” instructional material, with lessons that move students beyond simply counting objects like penguins. Students look at penguins in a picture, translate them into representational circle drawings, then finally move on to their abstract number quantities.

Sumner County elementary coordinator Karen Medana said she appreciates the fact that the curriculum offers explicit guidance for teachers and builds on a sequence of skills.

One reason for redundancy in kindergarten math may be that classrooms lack cohesive materials that progress students through skills in an orderly way. A 2023 report from the Center for Education Market Dynamics showed that only 36 percent of elementary schools use high-quality instructional materials, as defined by EdReports, a nonprofit organization that evaluates curricula for rigor, coherence and usability. Eureka Math is one of several math programs that meet EdReports’ standards.

Related: How to boost math skills in the early grades

Often teachers are left to gather their own math materials outside the school’s curriculum. The Brookings Institution reports that large numbers of teachers use a district-approved curriculum as “one resource among many.” Nearly all teachers say they gather resources from the internet and sites like Teachers Pay Teachers — meaning what students learn varies widely, not only from district to district, but from classroom to classroom.

What students learn might not even be aligned from one grade to another. In a new, unpublished paper still in revision, researcher Engel found “notable inconsistencies” between pre-K and kindergarten classroom math content and how it is taught in New York City schools. Engel said results suggest that in many classrooms, kindergarten math might be poorly aligned with both pre-K and elementary school.

When teachers have access to well-aligned materials, students may learn more. At Marcus Hook Elementary, a Title I elementary school in the Chichester District, kindergarten teacher Danielle Adler’s students were deep into first grade addition, using numbers up to 12. They had already completed all the SpringMath kindergarten math skills in March, so she let them keep going.

“In the past we did focus more on counting, recognizing numbers and counting numbers,” Adler said, “But over the last three years I’ve seen the kids’ skills grow tremendously. Not only what they’re expected to do, but what they’re capable of doing has grown.”

What kindergarteners are expected to do at school has changed dramatically over the last 30 years, including more time spent on academic content. Adler and other kindergarten teachers agree that they hold higher expectations for today’s students, spend more time on teacher-directed instruction and substantially less time on “art, music, science and child-selected activities.”

Some worry that increasing time spent on academic subjects like math, and pushing kindergarten students beyond the basics of numbers and counting, will be viewed as unpleasant “work” that takes away from play-based learning and is just not appropriate for 5- and 6-year-olds, some of whom are still learning how to hold a pencil.

Engel said kindergarteners can be taught more advanced content and are ready to learn it. But it should be taught using practices shown to work for young children, including small group work, hands-on work with objects such as blocks that illustrate math concepts, and learning through play.

Related: How can you help your kids get better at math?

Mathematician John Mighton, the founder of the curriculum JUMP Math, said it’s a mistake to believe that evidence-based instructional practices must be laborious and dull to be effective. He has called on adults to think more like children to make more engaging math lessons.

“Children love repetition, exploring small variations on a theme and incrementally harder challenges much more than adults do,” he wrote — all practices supported by evidence to increase learning.

Simple lessons, when done well, can teach complex ideas and get children excited.

“People say kids don’t have the attention,” to learn more advanced concepts, he said, but he strongly believes that children have more math ability than adults give them credit for. Getting students working together, successfully tackling a series of challenges that build on each other, can create a kind of collective effervescence — a feeling of mutual energy and harmony that occurs when people work toward a common goal.

That energy overflowed in Adler’s classroom, for example, as students excitedly colored in graphs showing how many addition problems they got correct, and proudly showed off how the number correct had grown over time.

VanDerHeyden pointed out that, for young kids, much of a math intervention should look and feel like a game.

It’s often harder than it looks to advance kindergarten skills while keeping the fun — elementary teachers often say they have low confidence in their own abilities to do math or to teach it. Research suggests that teachers who are less confident in math might not pay enough attention to how students are learning, or even spend less time on math in class.

Teachers like Murphy have made some tweaks geared to engaging students. In class she calls SpringMath “math games,” and refers to timed fluency tests as “math races.” She even turned choosing a partner into a game, by spinning a wheel to see who students will get.

“We can do all these little things so they’re having fun while they’re learning,” Murphy said.

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A record share of children – about 35 percent of 4-year-olds and 7 percent of 3-year-olds – were enrolled in a state-funded preschool program last academic year, according to the 2023 State of Preschool report published last month by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.

Notably, though, the actual number of 4-year-olds enrolled in state-funded pre-K is lower than pre-pandemic levels due to declining birth rates.

The report also found that overall, states are spending more money on pre-K than ever before: $7,277 per child enrolled, or $11.7 billion total. Much of that funding increase is driven by the $571 million in federal Covid-19 relief aid that 28 states used to boost pre-K dollars. Researchers and advocates are concerned that spending will drop in states that don’t have a plan to replace those funds when they run out this year.

“We’ve seen it in the past: When budget belts tighten, preschool, in many places, is a discretionary program. And discretionary programs are easier to cut,” said Steven Barnett, founder and co-director of NIEER.

That said, states, on average, have not raised the amount they spend per child in pre-K by much over the years: In 2002, that figure was $6,945. And 16 states spent less on pre-K programs in 2023 than in the year prior; six still have no state-funded pre-K programs.

Meanwhile, California accounted for 70 percent of the nation’s rise in pre-K spending by itself last year, said Allison Friedman-Krauss, an assistant research professor with NIEER and co-author of the report.

Only five states (Alabama, Hawaii, Michigan, Mississippi and Rhode Island) met all 10 of NIEER’s quality benchmarks, which include caps on student-teacher ratios and class sizes as well as professional development and teacher licensing requirements. Although D.C. met only four of NIEER’s 10 quality benchmarks, the district was ranked highest in the nation on per child spending and access to programs for both 3- and 4-year-olds.

And while some states, like Florida, have a high share of 4-year-olds enrolled in pre-K (67 percent), the amount spent per child is far lower than the national average ($3,142).

“If you’re in Florida, you can have access to the program, but what you’re getting in Florida is not as good as what you’re getting in Alabama, on average,” Friedman-Krauss said.

Another report on pre-K issued last month, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and called “A New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum,” made recommendations aimed at improving pre-K curriculum, with a focus on students from marginalized communities. (Research for this report, like the one from NIEER, received some financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is also one of The Hechinger Report’s many funders.)

While the researchers found that most pre-K programs in the U.S. use the two most common curricula (The Creative Curriculum and HighScope), the group reviewed 172 existing pre-K curricula.

“Basically none of them were fully meeting the vision that we have outlined, particularly around issues of anti-racist/anti-bias approaches, culturally and linguistically responsive, and the issues of being supportive of children’s home language,” said Sue Bredekamp, an early childhood specialist and editor of the report, during the webinar presentation.

The report, which is 376 pages long, includes more than a dozen recommendations for addressing bias, equity and inclusive teaching practices in pre-K curriculum.

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IQ tests created by French psychologist Alfred Binet in the early 20th century paved the way for widespread intelligence testing in American schools  — including of the youngest learners.

But Binet also had early doubts as to whether intelligence could be measured at all and he was adamant that his tests, adapted into the Stanford-Binet intelligence scales in the U.S., could not be used to determine how much progress an individual student was capable of making in the long term.

“I have often observed, to my regret, that a widespread prejudice exists with regard to the educability of intelligence,” Binet wrote in 1909. “The familiar proverb, ‘When one is stupid, it is for a long time’ seems to be accepted indiscriminately by teachers … [They] lose interest in students with low intelligence.”

I learned about Binet, and his ideas about how IQ tests should — and should not — be used in elementary schools while reporting a piece last month for The Hechinger Report and Slate on the debate over cognitive testing in school placement and psychology. In recent decades, more states and school districts have shifted in the direction of downplaying the role of intelligence testing in special education evaluations. Yet change isn’t happening fast enough for some educators and experts, who argue the tests should be used less frequently and more thoughtfully.

Binet’s interest in early childhood stemmed from watching his two young daughters develop and from observing firsthand the very different cognitive strengths and processes they brought to learning. He made his first attempt at crafting a formal assessment in 1905, when asked by French officials to devise a way to identify which students had intellectual disabilities and could benefit most from specialized support.

French officials asked for his help because they saw a need for something distinct from a medical doctor or a classroom teacher to help in diagnosing and supporting children with disabilities. In that sense, Binet was an early forerunner in the field of school psychology.

Many experts believe he was prescient on three main tensions and challenges that persist in the field today:

Binet wanted to avoid testing the quality of a child’s school and their exposure to books and learning at home.

“None of the tests in the original 1905 version assumed that the child could read or write,” wrote Derek Briggs in his 2021 book, “Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Measurement in the Human Sciences,” which has a chapter focused on Binet. His tests “were intended to be insensitive to information or skills that a child would have acquired through instruction.”

This effort to separate out innate intelligence from school-acquired knowledge remains a holy grail of contemporary intelligence testing, with test creators including Jack Naglieri, trying to assess “thinking” rather than “knowledge.”

Binet held the conviction that intelligence was changeable with access to high quality schooling.

While he was aware that some children could be more easily helped than others, Binet likely would have opposed some contemporary policies or practices that steer kids away from academic instruction based on their IQ score, or indirectly withhold learning disability diagnoses — and the academic support that should come with it — to children with lower cognitive scores.

“The aim of his scale was to identify in order to help and improve, not to label in order to limit. Some children might be innately incapable of normal achievement, but all could improve with help,” wrote biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man.”

Ranking children within a group was not Binet’s goal.

Binet was more interested in what cognitive tests showed about an individual child’s strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. As such, biographers say he likely would have opposed gifted programs that cull students from the top percentiles of intelligence test scorers. “He would have greatly objected to using IQ tests to classify — first, second, third, fourth,” Briggs, based at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s College of Education, told me. “Binet was interested in the immediacy of what to do next for an individual student, particularly for those with some sort of need of support.”

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Interest in artificial intelligence has surged among K-12 and college educators, who are looking at ways it can be used to support both students and teachers. But in the early childhood arena, those discussions are still in the beginning stages. I asked Isabelle Hau, the executive director of Stanford Accelerator for Learning, to share about the potential benefits and challenges of AI in early learning. Our conversation below is edited for length and clarity.

Interest in AI has obviously surged the past couple of years in K-12, for both teachers and students. With early childhood, the use of AI may be a little less obvious. Have you noticed that trend in early childhood classrooms — are teachers interested in using AI or teaching about it?

Hau: I’m observing some activity in a few areas. One is interest in novel forms of assessment, or assessment areas that have been a big pain point for early childhood teachers for a long time, because observational assessments take a long time. There are some innovations that are starting to materialize in making assessments less visible, or invisible maybe, at some point. So discussion around how to leverage, for example, computer vision or some form of voice inputs in classrooms, or some gamified approaches that are AI-based.

Are there any specific ways you’re seeing AI technology emerge in early childhood classrooms?

Hau: At Stanford, we have one super interesting project that is not necessarily in a classroom but could be in a classroom context. It’s a tool my colleague, Dr. Philip Fisher, has developed called FIND that looks at child-adult interactions and takes video of that interaction. It is very expensive for humans to look at those videos and analyze the special moments in those interactions. Now, artificial intelligence is able to at least take a first pass at those interactions in a much more efficient manner. FIND is now an application for early childhood educators; it used to be mostly for parents, initially.

Two of my colleagues, one in the school of medicine and one at the school of education, have partnered to build Google Glasses that children with challenges recognizing emotions can wear. And based on the advances that are happening with AI, especially in the area of image recognition, the glasses that young children can wear help them detect emotions from adults or other young people they are interacting with. Feedback, especially from parents and families of young children, is quite moving. Because for the first time, some of those young kids are able to actually recognize the emotions from the people they love.

Others have been working on language. Language is a complicated topic because we have, in the U.S., more and more children who speak multiple languages. As a teacher, it’s very complicated. Maybe you’re bilingual or trilingual at best, but if you have a child who speaks Vietnamese and a child who speaks Mandarin or Spanish, you can’t speak all of those languages as a teacher. So how do we correctively support those children with huge potential to thrive when they may not be proficient in English when they arrive in this classroom? Language is a really interesting use case for AI.

When you look up AI tools or products for early educators online, a lot comes up. Is there anything you would be cautious about?

Hau: While I’m excited about the potential, there are lots of risks. And here we are speaking about little ones, so the risks are even heightened. I’m excited about the potential for those technologies to support adults – I have a lot of questions about exposing young children.

For adults, where it’s very confusing right now is privacy. So no teacher should enter any student information that’s identifiable in any of those systems, especially if they are part of a district, without district approval.

That information should be highly private and is not meant to go in a system that seems innocuous but is, in fact, sharing information publicly. There are huge risks associated with that, the feeling of intimacy for a system that doesn’t exist. It’s a public place.

And then one concern is on bias. We’ve done some research at Stanford on bias sentiments in those systems, and we have shown that systems right now are biased against multilingual learners. I can see that myself, as a non-native English speaker. When I use those systems, especially when I use voice, they always mess up my voice and accent. These biases exist, and being very mindful that they do. Biases exist everywhere, but certainly they do exist in [AI] systems. And we have proven this in multiple ways. And then I also have huge concerns on equity. Because right now some AI systems are paid, some are free.

Are there any other ways you could see AI used to fill a need in early childhood?

Hau: Right now, a lot of parents are struggling to find care. You have people who are providing care – it could be center, it could be home-based, nanny, preschool, Head Start, you have all these different types. And then you have families. It’s a mess right now – the connection between the two. Of course it’s a mess because we don’t have enough funding, we don’t have enough slots, but generally, it’s a mess. This is an area that, over time, I’m hoping there will be better solutions powered by technology.

If I want to dine tonight at a restaurant in Palo Alto, this is really easy. Why don’t we have this for early childhood? ‘I’m a low-income parent living in X, and I’m looking for care in French, and I need hours from 8 to 5,’ or whatever it is. It would be really nice to have [technology] support for our millions of parents that are trying to find solutions like this. And right now, it doesn’t exist.

Do you have any tips for teachers who want to learn more about AI programs to use in class?

Hau: For safety, in particular, I really like the framework the EdSAFE AI Alliance has put together. It’s mostly oriented toward K-12, but I think a lot of their accommodations on when is it OK to use AI and when it is not are very clear and very teacher-friendly. There are some great resources at other organizations, like TeachAI or AI for Education, that I really like. At Stanford, we partner with those organizations because we feel like this is an effort that needs to be collaborative, where research needs to be at the table. We need to build coalitions for effective and safe and equitable use of those technologies.

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Last week the Massachusetts Senate unanimously passed a child care bill that would significantly expand state investment in child care. 

Less publicized: The bill also includes provisions that could make it harder for private equity-owned child care providers to expand significantly in the state.

Specifically, the bill takes steps to ensure that any given for-profit provider operating more than 10 programs in the state consumes no more than 1 percent of the $475 millions in grants being proposed.

Investor-backed chains now manage an estimated one in 10 child care centers in the country. That figure is likely to grow, according to several child care researchers, as states — and potentially the federal government — put new funding into the area, attracting investors interested in low start-up costs and access to public money.

As a result, advocates and experts are pushing for more extensive and widespread regulations of the kind that are moving forward in Massachusetts. “We need to make sure there are real guardrails,” said Melissa Boteach, the vice president overseeing child care and early learning at the National Women’s Law Center. Along with colleagues, she plans this June to release a report outlining recommended regulations and safeguards.

In making the push, Boteach and others cite private equity’s troubling record in managing other government-backed social services, including nursing homes and autism services. “Private equity’s track record in other sectors supported by public dollars – including home care, hospice care, and housing – foreshadows challenges the child care sector could face,” Boteach wrote in an email. In child care, profit-driven companies will take “money out rather than using that public funding to pay child care providers and teachers a living wage, upgrading facilities, [and] expanding into under-served communities,” she said.

In a written statement, Mark Bierley, CEO of the Learning Care Group, one of the largest for-profit child care operators in the U.S., offered a very different take, calling it “our duty to prepare children socially, emotionally and developmentally for their transition into K-12 education.”

“We have the resources to upgrade facilities, equipment and technology to ensure we fulfill that commitment,” he added.

The proposed regulations in Massachusetts follow a couple other related state efforts. Vermont recently put ownership disclosure requirements into its package expanding funding for child care, and also capped tuition hikes by providers. New Jersey limits for-profit programs that participate in its public pre-K system to a 2.5 percent profit margin.

But Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the think tank Capita, who has been tracking private equity expansion in child care closely, described the proposed Massachusetts measures as “the most targeted guardrails we’ve seen to date” against investor-backed companies consuming the lion’s share of new public investment. 

Haspel points out that there’s been similar momentum internationally, with British Columbia specifying that priority for public funding goes to public and nonprofit programs, and Australia requiring larger providers that manage more than 25 sites to submit more extensive financial reports.

The U.S. has historically spent very little on child care compared to other wealthy nations. Partly as a result, investor-backed, for-profit chains in the U.S. operate predominantly in middle-income and wealthier neighborhoods and communities, where they can often charge substantial tuition. That could change if more public funds flow into child care, leading to significantly increased government subsidies for lower-income children.   

Last year, President Biden’s administration pushed for greater transparency and accountability in nursing home ownership after research showed that private-equity owned facilities on average had worse outcomes, including more patient deaths. But there’s not much information that compares the quality of for-profit and nonprofit child care programs, which could hinder efforts to put restrictions and regulations on the companies.

Haspel said “the first step for the federal government is trying to get a lot more information” in a landscape where the quality can vary dramatically within all ownership types — investor backed or not. That said, he added that there’s no reason not to take such steps as ensuring a certain percentage of public funding is used to pay educators and requiring centers to disclose financial and ownership information.

“Some of the potential guardrails are common-sense,” he said.

This story about private equity and child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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