This is the final installment in a series about how little the United States invests in the education of young children. Read the whole series.

For the past six months, I have been reporting and writing a six-story series for The Hechinger Report and The Atlantic on how we have ended up well behind the rest of the developed world when it comes to investing in young children.

While there are many ways to invest in children younger than 5, I chose to focus on preschool since it is the early years program most closely correlated with K-12 education, my primary focus as an education reporter. As I explained in my first story: “On every level — local, state and federal — this country invests little to nothing in the first five years of a child’s life, putting us decades and dollars behind the rest of the developed world.”

Why don’t we invest much in the early years? There are many complicated factors ranging from a deep-seated American reluctance to let government into family life to a commitment to taxes that are lower than many of our European counterparts, which makes spending on social programs difficult to justify. Some think the problem is one of misplaced values.

“I think we value our children less than other nations do,” said former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “I don’t have an easier or softer or kinder way to say that.”

If he’s right, we can expect very little change in the coming decades. And yet, after six months of reporting on this topic, I’m not convinced the situation is that dire. I feel certain people would act if they knew how much preschool could help the nearly two-thirds of American children who aren’t reading proficiently by third grade. And so I set out to gather the exact details of what we are spending on the early years, how we’re spending it, and what we know works.

“Reasonable people can disagree about solutions,” said Katharine Stevens, research fellow and early education expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

I agree. Not only would vastly expanding our country’s preschool system be a huge undertaking, we also need to be realistic about the potential success or failure of such an effort. Stevens, for example, wants to know why advocates are so eager to believe that a public school system that hardly leads the international pack can be expected to offer high quality preschool programs.

“I think we need to be thinking more in terms of pilot projects and support and incentives for states to be experimenting with things,” she said, “rather than pretending that we have a national public consensus about what needs to be done and that we know the right way to do it.”

Right now, as a country, we are acting more or less as Stevens recommends.

We do spend billions each year on public preschool. Head Start alone, the federal government’s preschool program for poor children, cost $9.2 billion in the 2016 fiscal year. But we still serve only a fraction of the poor children eligible to enroll because that is not enough money to pay enough people to serve all of the children living in poverty in America.

Most states also spend millions of dollars per year on preschool programs that are as yet too small to serve all the children who qualify for them. And while states and cites have been adding to their preschool budgets and creating or expanding preschool programs in recent years, the comparatively slow pace of change is leaving us increasingly far behind early education in other developed nations.

“At the current rate, it will be another 50 years before states can reach all low-income children at age four, and it will take 150 years to reach 75 percent of all four-year-olds,” writes Steven Barnett, director the National Institute for Early Education Research, in his introduction to the 2015 State of Preschool Yearbook.

It was hard to explain where we are and how we got here without glossing over the complexity of our current preschool landscape. I spoke to teachers, advocates, researchers, policymakers and skeptics from Boston to Portland, Oregon. I traveled to England to see how that country has managed to provide subsidized or free care and education for all of the country’s 3- and 4-year-olds. I dug into the history and research on Head Start. And I secured an exclusive interview, albeit via email, with Hillary Clinton on her extensive plans to lead the country in a new direction on early education if she becomes president.

In addition to writing six stories, I worked with a developer to create an interactive map that shows the intersection of quality and availability of public preschool in the U.S. and a timeline of the major early education policy changes dating back to the late 19^th century. We also ran the interview with Clinton, who could be the first president to enter the White House having spent much of her 40-year career focused on early childhood issues, as a stand-alone Q&A.

There were moments when the sheer volume of all the information I was taking in made it seem like I would never synthesize everything into a single comprehensive storyline. My main takeaway is that offering more and better public preschool is probably a good idea. But there is no simple or easy way to do that and there are still some pretty valid questions as to how we would mount such a massive undertaking. The current situation is hard to characterize succinctly, except to say: It’s complicated.

It’s true that we have not fully committed to educating children under 5 in this country, poor or otherwise. We do not pay many of our preschool teachers fair wages. We do not provide young families with the economic help—in terms of free or subsidized care—that many desperately need. Some of our biggest statewide programs, like those in Florida and Texas, aren’t great.

At the same time, a few cities, like Boston, have exemplary public programs. A few states, like Oklahoma, offer universal preschool. Much of the research other countries base their preschool programs on comes from American universities. Most of the public programs we do offer are of decent quality, if not sufficiently accessible. And perhaps most notably in the current political climate, Republicans and Democrats, even those in Congress, have a history of working together on this issue.

We are behind, but we are not without a baseline from which to begin to build. Do we care about our children enough to take the risk?

This post also appeared on Education Week. The Little to Nothing series was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

The post The state of American preschool, in six parts appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is the sixth story in a series exploring the current state of America’s preschools.

For the first time in U.S. history, Americans may be about to elect a president whose signature issue is early childhood.

“If we want our children to thrive in tomorrow’s economy, we must invest in our children’s future today, starting with our youngest learners, especially those from our most vulnerable and at-risk communities,” Hillary Clinton told The Hechinger Report in an exclusive email interview conducted through her campaign staff. “I’ve made a career out of fighting for children and families.”

And while that’s a great talking point, crafted by an experienced politician, it’s also true. Over the course of her 40-year career, Clinton has returned again and again to the trials and tribulations of the nation’s youngest. While at Yale Law School, she added an extra year to her studies to take courses in child development. As a young attorney, she worked for the Children’s Defense Fund, an advocacy group. As first lady of Arkansas, she introduced the state to home visiting, a service for expectant and new mothers that has been shown to help women living in poverty raise healthier, more academically prepared kids.

Related: Read Hechinger’s full interview with Clinton

And as the nation’s first lady, Clinton advocated for the passage of the 1997 State Child Health Insurance Program, which now covers about 8 million children, and she pushed for the creation of Early Head Start, a federally funded care and education program for infants and toddlers living in poverty. She also wrote her first book, “It Takes a Village,” about the importance of investing in young children.

In all her campaigns — from her 2000 Senate campaign to the current presidential race — Clinton has made paid parental leave and universal preschool key talking points.

“She’s been light-years ahead on the issue throughout her life,” said Neera Tanden, co-chair of the Clinton-Kaine Transition Project and president of the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank. She’s also a rumored favorite for a position on Clinton’s potential White House staff. “Much of the country has now come to where [Clinton] was a long time ago,” Tanden said.

If it’s true that the public is finally ready to spend additional tax dollars on services for children in the earliest years of their lives, then a President Hillary Clinton could lead the massive overhaul we need to catch up with the rest of the developed world in our treatment of young children.

“We’re lucky to have one candidate who has a track record like that,” said Kris Perry, head of the First Five Years Fund, an advocacy group that advises both Republican and Democratic politicians on early childhood policy. Perry pointed out that if Clinton were to win the presidential election, she would likely have to work with a Republican House and Senate. “Her leadership will matter because she’ll elevate it in conversations,” Perry said. “But it doesn’t mean her way of doing it is the best way.”

The First Five Years Fund is betting that lawmakers from both parties will be more willing to work on the issue because of voters’ priorities, not because of presidential dictates. The group’s latest annual poll, conducted by two polling firms, Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, supports the idea that additional investment in young children is increasingly important to voters. In the nationally representative sample, 90 percent of voters across both parties agreed with the statement: “The next president and Congress should work together to make quality early childhood education more accessible and affordable to low- and middle-income families.”

The support for taking action on early childhood remained bipartisan, even when pollsters specified that the federal government would be involved. Fifty-four percent of Republicans, 70 percent of independents and 91 percent of Democrats said they agreed that there should be “a federal plan to help states and local communities provide better access to early childhood education.”

“Even our angriest respondents think [Democrats and Republicans] should work together on this,” Perry said. And yes, they actually measured “anger” as part of the poll.

Politicians seem to be listening. In addition to the dozens of governors and hundreds of state senators and representatives who have pushed for local changes in recent years, the issue has moved front and center in the presidential campaign in a way not seen for at least two decades. Even Donald Trump, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment, put forward a proposal to reduce the cost of child care through tax deductions. (Experts on both sides of the aisle said his proposal would only help the upper-middle class and wealthy.) As Trump is not known for proposals meant to increase federal spending on social programs, the fact that he suggested a tax break to blunt the cost of child care was seen by many as a sign of how important the issue has become.

“At the highest level, early childhood is really moving into the spotlight,” said Katharine Stevens, a resident scholar and early childhood policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

And though Stevens managed to avoid mentioning Clinton’s name even once during a half hour interview about the future of early childhood policy, she did suggest that the candidate’s depth of knowledge and detailed proposals could be a disadvantage.

“I feel like if any candidate comes in pushing a particular set of solutions, it runs the risk of shutting down an important public conversation,” Stevens said.

That is certainly possible. It’s also possible that once Clinton raises preschool and other early childhood issues as president, she will again become the flashpoint for all the concerns we have historically had about women joining the workforce en masse and abandoning their children to the care of drab governmental institutions. Proposals to increase federally supported child care in the 1970s and again in the 1990s gained a lot of steam, but were ultimately defeated by concerns, raised mostly by the right, that such programs would lure women into jobs and away from motherhood.

“For the Federal Government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach,” former President Richard Nixon wrote in his veto of a bipartisan bill that would have created universal child care in 1971. Nixon worried that the proposed expansion would replicate existing programs, create more bureaucracy and limit personal choice. He also acknowledged the need to provide better day care options for low-income mothers. “But our response to this challenge must be a measured, evolutionary, painstakingly considered one,” he wrote, “consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization.”

Today, the question of whether government-supported care will change the underlying structure of family life feels moot. The structure has changed. In 2014, 65 percent of children lived in homes in which all available parents worked, according to the Kids Count Data Center, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Many of those children are enrolled in preschools or day care centers where the quality varies greatly. Others are enrolled in home-based day care, have nannies or are cared for by non-working family members. The quality of those situations varies even more dramatically and is vastly more difficult to track or regulate. Regardless, the majority of the country’s parents are in need of someone other than themselves to care for and help educate their young children.

And yet, the kitchen table economics of the new American reality make less sense than ever. “Average weekly child care expenses for families with working mothers who paid for child care … rose more than 70 percent from 1985 ($87) to 2011 ($148),” states a summary of Census data by the Pew Research Center, a think tank. Among all American families with children younger than 5 who pay for child care, a full 9 percent of income is spent on child care costs, according to the Center for American progress. Many two-parent families with full-time jobs — those with two children, those living in major cities, and those earning minimum wage — are spending 20 percent or more of their income on child care.

Despite the crunch, 69 percent of wealthy children attend a center-based preschool, and 54 percent of middle class children attend such preschools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Not surprisingly, millennial mothers are more strongly in favor of creating paid family leave policies than older mothers.

For the working class and those living in poverty, the economics are even tougher. Such families spend up to 36 percent of their income on child care because there is not enough subsidized care. And not enough of what is available at the lower end of the price scale is high quality. As highlighted in the opening story of this series, the chance of a parent without a high school diploma finding a high quality child care setting they can afford is one in 10, according to Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a think tank. And most of the best public systems, like Boston’s school-based preschool program, are not available during the evening and weekend hours when many lower income workers are working.

The one federal program for young children living in poverty, Head Start, helps prepare children for kindergarten, but is too small to serve every child eligible to participate. And nationally, the program has struggled to consistently offer top quality programs. A major study tracking children who attended Head Start in the early 2000s found that their academic achievements plateaued by third grade. As part of an ongoing effort to correct that, the federal Office of Head Start proposed sweeping changes on September 1 that would lengthen the school day and year and raise professional standards.

Meanwhile, less is known about the long-term impact of the program, though several recent studies have shown positive effects. One review of data released this summer compared children who attended Head Start with their siblings who did not and offered a compelling argument in favor of augmenting and improving the program rather than ditching it. Among other findings, the study found Head Start children had a higher high school graduation rate, by 5 percentage points, than their non-Head Start siblings.

“Third-grade test scores are only one thing that we care about,” said Diane Schanzenbach, director of the Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institute, the think tank that conducted the recent study. “We care more about the long-term impact on young kids.”

Meanwhile, the people entrusted to make that impact are not faring well overall. Wages for the women (97 percent of the early childhood workforce is female) looking after young children are shockingly low. Three quarters make less than $15 an hour. Nearly half, 46 percent, of child care workers are reliant on taxpayer funded subsidies to make ends meet. Offering such low wages makes it difficult to retain the best, most educated providers. And attempts to improve teacher quality have backfired when those who earn degrees or other advanced certifications move on to higher paying jobs. It’s impossible to improve quality without addressing the salaries and working conditions of preschool teachers and other early childhood caregivers, said Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.

Overall, children younger than age five are treated entirely differently by society at large than children age 5 and older. “No parent is going to hear ‘there’s no room for your second grader’ or ‘you don’t have enough money to come here,’” Whitebook said, “but in early childhood those things are happening all the time.”

Given no other option, parents do what they can to shoulder the costs. Sometimes that means leaving the workforce entirely. Mothers, who are more likely to take time off work to care for young children, can be hit particularly hard by the unforgiving math. According to a calculator created by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, the amount women stand to lose over a lifetime by taking off a few years to care for kids is far more than the cost of child care.

If a 31-year-old woman making $55,000 a year took just one year off to care for a child at age 33, she would stand to lose a total of $148,636 in wages, wage growth and benefits (including retirement benefits) over the course of her life. If she stayed home for longer, say five years, the loss grows to $656,769. That money would also fail to circulate in the economy at large and fail to benefit local, state and federal governments in the form of income tax revenue.

Of course, staying in a job that pays less than the cost of care isn’t an economically sound decision either.

“My big takeaway from that tool is that if you don’t have the resources to put in on the front end, you don’t get the benefit” either financially or in terms of your child’s well-being, said Katie Hamm, senior director of early childhood policy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the political arm of the think tank.

Parents of young children, by virtue of their own age, are less likely to be able to afford child care costs than to afford college costs on the other end, Hamm says. In many states the cost of private child care equals the cost of public college tuition. Yet, far more is spent on financial aid for higher education than is spent on subsidizing early education. That holds true even for the poorest children. Despite the fact that more young children than teenagers live in poverty, the federal government spends three times as much on tuition coverage for poor college students in the form of Pell Grants than it does on Head Start for 3- and 4-year-olds.

“We have a huge disconnect between when people need money to invest in their kids and when they have the most resources in their life cycle,” Hamm said.

Early education advocates have a whole raft of ideas to change that, from paid parental leave to expanded Early Head Start to universal preschool access. All of the proposals, including the one from the liberal Center for American Progress, are modest in comparison to what’s happening in Europe and much of the rest of the developed world.

Clinton has proposed subsidizing child care and preschool directly and through tax credits — which apply to income earners at every level — so that no family spends more than 10 percent of its income on child care. She’d like to expand Early Head Start and to provide states with more money to help them offer better and broader preschool programs. She’d also like to continue the expansion of home-visiting services started under the Obama Administration, create a national program to raise the quality of early education instruction and to offer every new parent 12 weeks of paid leave.

“Supporting families isn’t a luxury — it’s an economic necessity — and it’s long past time our policies catch up to the way families live and work today,” Clinton told The Hechinger Report.

Taken together, Clinton’s proposals would revolutionize how we treat young children in America. And yet, even if the country acted on every single proposal, it would still be far behind a country like England, which educates its 4-year-olds at no direct cost to its citizens, subsidizes fully half of the cost of 3-year-old care for every parent and is beginning to cover care for 2-year-olds from lower income homes. That’s all on top of the fact that new parents in England get nine months of partially paid leave plus three more months of unpaid leave. To be sure, taxpayers cover these costs. And while England’s offerings are only average in Europe, it would take a complete overhaul of our tax code to bring in the revenue needed to get to the same point.

Perhaps because of that massive hurdle and the collective agreement among politicians that raising taxes is verboten, American thinkers on early education, regardless of party affiliation or ideological background, seem loathe to propose more dramatic changes.

Hamm, of the Center for American Progress, simply doesn’t think more is possible given the current financial situation.

“We were thinking about the cost and thinking about who is in most need of child care,” said Hamm, explaining the preschool policy proposal she and her colleagues put out last year, which looks very similar to Clinton’s. Hamm said she’d rather give a full 40 hours per week of care to the children who need it most than give 15 hours of care to everyone. “We chose to target the funding on lower income and middle class side of things,” she said.

Stevens, of the American Enterprise Institute on the opposite end of the political spectrum, urges caution for another reason. The conversation about the need for a better child care solution is just picking up steam, she said, and it needs time to develop into consensus.

“I think we need to be thinking more in terms of pilot projects and support and incentives for states to be experimenting with things,” Stevens said, “rather than pretending that we have a national public consensus about what needs to be done and that we know the right way to do it.”

It would be incorrect to say the complete overhaul of early childhood policy that Clinton is proposing would be impossible. Getting to the moon, which is a whopping 238,900 miles away, seemed impossible too, until we invested the time money and energy needed to develop the right equipment to make it happen.

The ability of former President John F. Kennedy to rally the country around that single cause created a wave of popular and political will strong enough to build the nation’s first space program and to invest millions of dollars in schools and universities to foster the scientific know-how needed to make the endeavor successful. Clinton says she’ll do the same thing for preschool, and all the supporting early childhood and family policies that go with it.

“I’ve made a career out of fighting for children and families,” Clinton told The Hechinger Report. “As your President, I’ll fight every single day to make America the best place in the world to raise a family.”

Perhaps she will. She’ll have her work cut out for her. The distance between where we are now and where she’d need to lead us to catch up with the rest of developed world might as well be 238,900 miles away.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

Unlike most of our stories, this piece is an exclusive collaboration and may not be republished.

The post Hillary Clinton’s preschool revolution? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This interview is a supplement to a six-part series about how little the United States invests in the education of young children. Read the whole series.

Hillary Clinton has been focused on the issue of early childhood education since she was in law school, 40 years ago. Were she to become president, she’d be the first in the history of the office to come in with the protection and education of young children as her signature issue.

To learn more about exactly how she hopes to change what the U.S. invests in young children, we contacted her campaign for an interview. While that wasn’t to be, the campaign did agree to answer our questions by email. Below, please find our questions and Clinton’s answers, exclusive to The Hechinger Report and our partner publications.

In the name of transparency, we haven’t edited the conversation at all. In a few cases, Clinton’s answers are not as direct as one might hope. Still, Clinton’s expertise on the issue is undeniable and we have highlighted several of her key statements in pull quotes throughout the piece. We have also fact-checked her statements and linked to relevant articles or research throughout.

Finally, though Donald Trump does not have equivalent experience on early education, he has made affordable child care one of the talking points of his campaign in recent weeks. We reached out to Trump’s campaign several times asking for his thoughts on these issues and received no response.

1) You’ve dedicated yourself to the issue of caring for young children for 40 years at this point. Why is early childhood such an important issue for you?

Every child deserves the chance to fulfill their God-given potential. In law school, I was deeply inspired by Marian Wright Edelman’s work to give children the best possible start in life, and it led me to the Yale Child Study Center. After law school, I went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund, where I documented the challenges facing children with disabilities. Later, I had the opportunity to apply these ideas in Arkansas when I helped launch a home visiting program called HIPPY, which teaches parents to be their kids’ first teachers.

In the 1990s, scientific breakthroughs led us to understand more about early brain development and the importance of early learning from birth. I lifted up this scientific research as first lady by hosting the first ever White House conference on early learning and brain development, and then fought for the creation of Early Head Start to help low-income children receive the support they need from infancy.  As a Senator, I called for a national pre-K initiative to provide funding to states to establish high-quality pre-K programs. And, after I left the State Department, I started a program called “Too Small to Fail,” to raise awareness about the “word gap,” which refers to the fact that children from higher-income families hear 30 million more words than their low-income peers by the time they are 3 years old. As a result, higher-income children start school with double the vocabulary. But we know that parental awareness coupled with real early learning supports can close this word gap.

Just last week we learned that our collective efforts have paid off: researchers from Stanford University, Columbia University and the University of Virginia found that from 1998 to 2010, the school readiness gap between low-income and high-income children shrunk by 10 percent in math and 16 percent in reading. They attributed this narrowing of the school readiness gap to the collective investments our country has made in preschool and the awareness we have brought to low-income parents who may not have previously known the importance of talking, reading and singing to their children from birth to engage their brains during this critical time.

Throughout my career, I have been guided by a strong belief, backed by rigorous research, that what happens in the early years has a profound effect on overall child well-being and success in school and life—and that every child deserves a fair shot at achieving their dreams, no matter what they look like or where they are born.

2) The title of our series, “Little To Nothing,” is a reference to how much we invest in the country’s youngest children. You’ve visited many other developed countries and know how far behind we are. What is your perspective on why other OECD countries are spending so much more on young children than we are in the U.S.?

I fundamentally believe that every child has something precious to offer the world, and all they need is opportunity. I have visited countries around the world that make investment in young children a priority. They know that investing in early childhood is good for families and good for economic development. The evidence is overwhelming.

I’ve fought for a very long time for childcare, paid leave, early learning programs, and good schools. That’s what I wanted for my daughter and grandchildren, and it’s what I want for all of our kids. If we want our children to thrive in tomorrow’s economy, we must invest in our children’s future today, starting with our youngest learners, especially those from our most vulnerable and at-risk communities.

Today, I am more hopeful than ever that we are making progress. Universal preschool is not a partisan issue. It has been embraced by Republican and Democratic governors alike, and public awareness campaigns around early learning are often led by business coalitions in communities across the country. The country is ready to work together to continue to make forward progress in early learning.

3) You have proposed that no family would pay more than 10 percent of their income to cover child care. How would that work?  I’m looking for specifics about how families would receive subsidies and tax credits; i.e. would a family be reimbursed at the end of the year through their tax return? Would there be a Health Savings Account type of situation? Would subsidies and credits flow directly to child care centers and preschools?

It’s pretty simple: when families thrive, our nation thrives. That’s why we need to enact policies to meet the challenges families face in our 21st-century economy. Today, many families rely on two incomes to make ends meet, and 40 percent of moms serve as the sole or primary breadwinners in their household, making access to high-quality, affordable childcare an economic necessity. And yet, the cost of sending two kids to a childcare center can exceed the cost of rent. That’s outrageous. Single moms are too often spending 40 percent of their income on child care, and two working parents earning minimum wage spend 20 percent. If we’re going to say that we’re for “family values,” then we need to value families.

No family should have to pay more than 10 percent of their income on childcare, and every family should have access to universally available public preschool. My plan will significantly increase our investment in federal childcare subsidies and provide tax relief to offset the cost of care in working families. We’ll also make targeted investments in programs that supplement child care needs. For example, we’ll double the number of children served by Early Head Start, make pre-school universal for every 4-year-old in America, and increase support for campus-based child care centers to serve an additional 250,000 children. And to increase the quality of care and pay childcare workers what they deserve, we’ll launch the Respect and Increased Salaries for Early Childhood Educators (RAISE) initiative.

4) You’ve said preschool should be available for all children. Why do you see subsidies and tax credits as a better method to achieve this end than creating a federally funded program run through the country’s K-12 public schools?

I believe that we need a mix of federal investments. That is why I have come out strongly in favor of developing a universal preschool program in the United States, funded with a federal-state partnership so that every 4-year-old in America has access to high-quality preschool in the next 10 years.

But, frankly, we cannot wait to invest in children until they are 4 years old. In addition to preschool, there is a wide variety of great programs across the country that serve children from infancy through preschool — community-based programs, neighborhood providers, Head Start programs, school-based programs and many more — but families can’t always access those options. We need to give parents the ability to make the right choice for their families, and this will take a mixture of increased child care subsidies and tax breaks to make it possible for families to afford this care.

5) What do you think of Donald Trump’s proposal to make child care and preschool more affordable by making more child care expenses tax deductible?

Donald Trump’s proposal is a thinly veiled effort to pretend he cares about the challenges facing working families. Earlier in the campaign, Trump said childcare is “not an expensive thing” because “you need some blocks and you need some swings.”  And unsurprisingly, Trump’s proposal is designed to benefit wealthy families just like his own while providing little to no support for the vast majority of American families.

6) You’ve long been a champion of Head Start and Early Head Start, the federally funded preschool and early care program for families living below the poverty line. How would you describe your role in launching Early Head Start, the program that serves children 3-years-old and younger, in 1994?

The Head Start program has helped millions of children get a strong start on the road to a successful education. I’ll never forget my conversations with David Hamburg, then president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, following his release of the Starting Points report that made the case so persuasively for the importance of investing in the early years. I was proud to advocate for the creation of the Early Head Start program when I was first lady, which provides comprehensive services to our youngest learners and their families — including health, nutrition, and pre-literacy support, with a strong focus on children’s social and emotional development. I also support the Early Head Start — Child Care Partnership program, which brings Early Head Start’s evidence-based curriculum into child care settings in order to provide comprehensive, full-day, high-quality services to low-income families. As president, I will double the number of children served by Early Head Start and the Early Head Start — Child Care Partnership program to ensure that all of our children have a strong foundation from which to learn.

7) The lack of federally guaranteed, paid family leave for a broader array of workers is an issue that’s been gaining more attention as millennial women enter the workforce. Together with your husband, you helped implement the Family Medical Leave Act, which guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave to people working at companies of more than 50 employees who have worked there for at least a year. You have proposed to pay workers at least two thirds of their current wages during their 12-week leave. How would that proposal work and what would it achieve? Also, would your proposal cover employees of smaller companies, those employed part-time as shift workers, and others who are not currently covered?

No one should have to choose between keeping their job and taking care of a sick family member. Too many moms have to return to work just days after their babies are born. And too many dads and parents of adopted children don’t get any paid leave at all. Neither do sons and daughters struggling to take care of their aging parents. And today, the United States is the only developed nation in the world with no guaranteed paid leave of any kind.

We’ll work to pass twelve weeks of paid family leave, in which hardworking Americans get at least two-thirds of their current wages, up to a ceiling. And we’ll pay for it by making the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share — not by increasing taxes on working families. Supporting families isn’t a luxury — it’s an economic necessity — and it’s long past time our policies catch up to the way families live and work today.

8) Nurse home-visiting services that provide expectant and new mothers with medical check-ups, child development information and parenting skills have been found to be an excellent way to increase school readiness and child health, especially among low-income families. Again, you’ve long been a champion of such programs. However, other countries provide these services for all of their citizens. And, even in this country, such services have been shown to improve child outcomes and reduce infant mortality among higher income families as well. Would you support expanding home visiting to middle class mothers? Why or why not?

All new parents deserve support, no matter where they live. As first lady of Arkansas, I brought the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) to the state to help parents become their children’s first teachers. As president, I will expand home visiting programs nationwide, by doubling our investment in initiatives such as the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program. These programs — which provide home visits by a social worker or nurse during and directly after pregnancy — significantly improve maternal and child health, development, and learning. And these programs can promote economic growth: scientific evidence shows that brain development in the earliest years of childhood is crucial to economic success.

9) Early childhood is widely touted as a bipartisan issue, yet in the last four years Congress has made only incremental progress on increasing our funding for it or changing our country’s policies about it. How, if at all, would you expect to change that?

Investment in early childhood is — and should be — a bipartisan issue. We’ve seen progress and examples of bipartisan cooperation — in communities around the country, in states with both Democratic and Republican governors that have increased state investment in pre-K, and on the passage of a bipartisan child care bill in Congress.

Just like I have throughout my career, as president, I will work with leaders across Washington and our nation to increase our investment in early childhood and fight for policies like universal preschool, affordable child care, and paid family leave that will make a difference in the lives of our families and advance our country’s economic competitiveness.

10) If you had just a few minutes in a room with every mother and father of a child under 5, how would you tell them a vote for you would affect their lives and the life of their child?

The American people deserve a president who understands not only the big challenges we need to tackle as a country, but also the everyday realities — the quiet problems — that can keep families up at night.

I’ve made a career out of fighting for children and families. For my first job out of law school at the Children’s Defense Fund, I went door-to-door to talk to children and their parents, gather facts, and build a coalition — and our work helped convince Congress to guarantee access to education for students with disabilities. To drive progress, you need both understanding and action.

I’ve always believed, as some of you know, that it takes a village to raise a child, that we have a responsibility to support each other and create the best possible environment for kids to grow up so they, too, can thrive.

I’m also committed to supporting working parents because I’ve been one myself, and because I’ve worked with so many men and women with children who have given so much to their jobs while doing the most important job of all — raising their kids. As your president, I’ll fight every single day to make America the best place in the world to raise a family.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

The post Hillary Clinton answers 10 questions on early education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is the fifth story in a series exploring the current state of America’s preschools.

BRISTOL, England — Any child in England who has turned 3 by Sept. 1 is guaranteed 15 hours a week of free child-care or preschool for 38 weeks a year, or 570 hours total, paid for by the national government.

“We don’t think of it as socialism at all,” said Oxford University professor Edward Melhuish, who studies child development and was instrumental in conducting the research that largely led to England’s current policies. “We think of it as common sense.”

Apparently, so do most parents, 94 percent of whom take the government up on its offer of free education starting at age 3, according to government data. At age 4, 99 percent of children have started “reception,” the English version of kindergarten. Most 4-year-olds attend reception at their local primary school, but parents can choose to send their 3-year-old to a private center, a publicly funded nursery, a state-funded primary school or a home-based day care provider. Parents can also spread their 570 hours out over all 52 weeks of the year at centers with year-round enrollment options. Parents who need more coverage pay the difference between tuition and the amount covered by the government.

(All of the United Kingdom’s member countries—Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England—have similar preschool programs. However, they are not exactly alike because each country has formed its own policies. This story examines the English program.)

To better understand how this all plays out in real life, we spent one week in June visiting preschool programs in Bristol, a fairly typical British city of 449,000 in South West England. Like their counterparts across the country, Bristol’s 3-year-olds were forging new skills in a wide variety of settings and neighborhoods.

On Monday, a petite black girl in the play yard of the Redcliffe Nursery School, a publicly funded program located on the grounds of a housing project, twisted a big wooden swing hanging from a tree, then she let it go and watched it spin. Redcliffe leaders, in the long tradition of English nursery leaders, believe children learn best when they are taking the lead and exploring the world on their own, complete with the risks that independence carries like, say, a bump on the head from a wooden swing. Nursery schools, which have a long history in England, have also been tapped to help improve the quality of care offered at all of the settings available to parents under the universal plan.

On Tuesday, in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of young professionals, a small group of 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled at the Southville Centre, a private, non-profit community center, made play-dough. They had made play-dough the previous week too, with their teacher’s instruction. This week, they re-concocted the recipe from memory while their teacher fetched requested ingredients and looked on. To the north that same afternoon, in one of Bristol’s oldest middle class neighborhoods, a mixed-age group of students at the private, for-profit center, The Red House Children’s Centre, cut slices of pear with plastic knives for their afternoon snack. Toddlers and children as old as 5 play together at the Red House, in what’s meant to be a more natural, family-like environment. Private centers have become increasingly common in England since the late-1980s when women began entering the workforce in growing numbers.

On Wednesday, in a mostly working class neighborhood, way on the east end of town, a Polish boy selected a book from the kid-sized bookshelf in his classroom and brought it over to his teacher at Badock’s Wood Community Primary School. “This is a breakthrough, actually,” said veteran teacher Ellie Hurley, as the child snuggled to her side and she opened the front cover. The child does not speak English at home, she said. “He’s never brought a book to show me.” Hurley has been teaching nursery classes for 20 years at this state-funded school that we would call a public elementary school. Of all the settings, this preschool looks most like public preschool classes in the U.S., with a more obvious focus on academic skills than the other Bristol programs. The reception class for 4-year-olds was housed in the next classroom down.

Nothing observed in any of these schools is wildly different from what happens in American preschools every day, yet it is striking to consider that the parents of these children have paid either nothing, or only about half the cost of the program their child is attending. This is even more remarkable when contrasted with the economics of child care in the U.S.: An average American family with children under age 5 spends about 9 percent of its income on child care, according to the Center for American Progress, a liberal U.S. think tank. Families living in poverty with children under age 5 in care spend 36 percent of their income on preschool bills.

In England, the country at large is instead investing in the education of young children right from the start. As a result, these children — from different families, different neighborhoods and different ethnic backgrounds — will reach the age at which most American children start kindergarten with at least a year and a half of state-funded education under their little belts.

“Like the U.S., we have big inequalities,” said Sally Jaeckle, head of early years services for the city of Bristol. “What gets me up in the morning is trying to get those kids the same opportunities as their middle class peers.”

Leaders of government-funded preschool programs in the U.S. express a similar sentiment. The difference in England is that the British have taken a completely different approach to improving outcomes for poor children. They’ve made preschool available to everyone.

The American strategy has long been to provide public preschool only for children from very low-income families. Both liberal and conservative thinkers on early childhood in the U.S. endorse this idea, saying a universal program is impractical politically. Some question whether the government would do any better at universal preschool than it does with universal K-12 education. Others argue that since poor children have the most to gain from preschool, they should be first in line for services.

“In a world of limited resources, we have to set priorities and I think that the public in general feels that addressing children with the greatest needs makes sense as our first priority,” said Katharine Stevens, a resident scholar with a focus on early education at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

No country can serve as is a perfect comparison to the U.S., which is much larger, more diverse and has a more diffuse system of national government than many OECD countries. Still, England shares many cultural and economic similarities, certainly more than the Scandinavian countries often cited as having ideal educational systems. And, as recently as the mid-1990s, the early education policies of the U.S. and the U.K. weren’t that different. Studies showing the importance of early childhood brain development and the potential of early education programs were also available in both countries.

But in England, the reaction to that research was dramatically different. Just over a decade ago, in 2004, Parliament reviewed the research on the multiple benefits of 3-year-old preschool — presented in a multi-year study by Melhuish and his team — and decided only one conclusion could be drawn: The government should pay for preschool for all 3-year-olds. (Primary school has started with reception at age 4 for most children for decades, according to Melhuish. In 1998, it became mandatory for primary schools to offer reception, something most were already doing.)

The study in question, called Effective Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education (EPPSE), tracked 3,000 children from the mid-1990s through 2008. The government funded the study and made policy decisions based on its results. Melhuish explained this as if it were unremarkable; he viewed as commonplace a government’s decision to recognize new scientific information and change course accordingly.

The types of academic and developmental gains observed in children in the EPPSE study are very similar to those observed in U.S. studies on the effects of preschool, although the gains seem to carry through as children continue to later grades with less fade-out than has been observed in the U.S., a finding Melhuish attributes to better primary schools.

Another reason to offer universal preschool, Bristol’s Jaeckle said, is to preclude the possibility of a stigma attaching to free preschool. There can be no stigma, if everyone gets the same service, she pointed out. She thinks this makes it easier for the low-income families who need the service most to feel good about enrolling their children. That is not a concern commonly heard in the U.S. in regards to the uptake of government services.

But mostly, both Jaeckle and Melhuish argue, it makes sense to offer a universal preschool program because it is the best way to ensure quality, something Head Start, our own federally funded public preschool program, has struggled with.

“If you have a system which excludes the middle class, that system is almost doomed to be poor quality,” Melhuish said. “Without the pressures of various kinds — social and political — that the middle class are able to exert because of their social capital, quality of service will not be maintained.”

And though it’s not a common position among lawmakers, some experts in the U.S. have reached the same conclusion: Universal access is the only way to ensure quality.

Right now, whether a parent has access to a high-quality preschool program in the U.S. has more to do with that parent’s education than anything else, said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, a U.S. think tank. Even parents with graduate degrees have only a one in three chance of enrolling their child in a high-quality program, he added. “And that’s after 50 years of a policy of targeted preschool,” he said. “I think 50 years is enough. We need to try something different.”

Government data from England is bearing that notion out. By the time English children have finished reception, 66.3 percent of them have reached a “good level” of development. That includes measures of academic skills like reading, mathematics and writing as well as measures of non-cognitive skills like self-confidence, making relationships and being imaginative. The percentage of children achieving “good development” has increased year over year since the introduction of free preschool 12 years ago. Remember, the age of children attending their first year of primary school in England is younger than that of children attending their first year of elementary school in the U.S., so these gains accrue to English children before their American counterparts have even started kindergarten.

Perhaps most spectacularly, the academic achievement gap between rich and poor—yes, there’s a gap in England, too—has been shrinking. The gap between children who were eligible for Free School Meals — an indicator of economic disadvantage similar to the Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program in the U.S. — and those who were not shrunk by two percentage points between 2009-10 and 2014-15.

And while the divisive Brexit vote has made it clear that Britain is not exempt from the extreme politics currently pulling Americans apart, Britons are united around the importance of early care and education. The liberal Labour Party introduced the reforms that ushered in universal preschool. When the Conservative Party took control of Parliament in 2010, promising a slimmer national budget, it didn’t touch the money allocated for free 3-year-old preschool. Instead, it expanded the guarantee of 15 hours per week of free care to 2-year-olds from families whose annual income is in the bottom 40 percent, which has proven popular. And the party is set to expand the 3-year-old free care provision to 30 hours a week for all working families earning less than 100,000 pounds per year, per parent, in September 2017. (Families with an income about 200,000 pounds will still be eligible for the free 15 hours.)

“They see this as part of the good policy for improving the educational capacities of the population and as a part of the infrastructure of economic development,” said Melhuish of the Conservatives.

Still, there has been some discord. Preschool heads we met in Bristol were unsure what to think about the advent of the free 30 hours a week for 3-year-olds. Many were concerned about space and staffing and felt that the Conservative leaders championing this change were in it to push more young parents into the workforce and not to provide improved educational programs for their children. Others expressed concern that 30 hours a week would be too many for young children, though many, especially those with middle class professional parents, already attend preschool for at least that many hours.

“I think politics are all about quick wins,” said Elizabeth Carruthers, head of Redcliffe Nursery and Children’s Centre and Teacher’s School, explaining her concerns about the new 30-hour provision. She saw the move to 30 free hours of preschool for working families as a politically expedient way to keep working mums voting Conservative.

Carruthers and every other preschool director we spoke to also worried that the government was offering too little per child and wouldn’t to cover the cost of enrollment. And since the amount centers can charge full-time parents to make up the difference will shrink, providers could be expected to meet quality levels they’d no longer be able to afford. However, by mid-August the government had announced a larger reimbursement amount and Jaeckle said that most of the center directors in Bristol were more confident they’d be able to make ends meet under the revised plan. The government also agreed to continue funding nursery schools, like Redcliffe, separately as long as they continued their role in improving the quality of care offered in all of the free settings.

These disagreements about the details feel far removed from the big-picture questions Americans are grappling with about who, if anyone, should get free preschool in the first place. And while the publicly funded programs in Bristol don’t appear to be throwing money around, many teachers here are paid on par with primary school teachers, inexpensive field trips are common and fresh food is cooked on site. It should be noted that public programs tend to have larger budgets to cover things like comparable teacher pay and that low pay is still a concern in the private sector.

“I think the U.K. is around about halfway along a journey towards a Scandinavian system,” Melhuish said. That system, which he considers ideal, took about 40 years to evolve. “We probably are 10 to 15 years away from achieving that level.”

And yet, England and the rest of the U.K. countries have made rapid progress. The U.K. nations are among a handful of countries that have made a concentrated push to both expand and improve their early education systems in the last decade and a half, said Rowena Phair, project leader of the education and skills directorate at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Phair listed Japan, Poland, and Australia as examples of other countries that have expanded free preschool programs over the past decade.

When it comes to preschool enrollment, “the U.S. is not one of the lead countries,” Phair explained politely. In fact, we ranked 35th among OECD countries for school enrollment for 3- to 5-year-olds in 2012. The following year, the OECD found that 53.7 percent of American 3- to 4-year-olds were enrolled in school. In the U.K. as a whole, that number was 96.3 percent.

“Clearly on overall investments, participation, results … well, the results speak for themselves,” Phair said. “[The U.S.] is not in the top group of countries on any of those measures.”

Nor are we tops in the percentage of women in the workplace. We ranked 19th among OECD countries on this measure, with 62.9 percent of women working in 2014; the United Kingdom ranked 12th with 67.2 percent of women working. Research has shown that at least a third of the difference in female labor force participation between the U.S. and other European countries is due to our family leave and early education policies.

Because of a lack of high quality and affordable child care, “many folks don’t have options,” said Sarah Jane Glynn, the director of women’s economic policy at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. “Folks who are very wealthy are really the only ones who can make those decisions. For most families, they aren’t making free choices about what works best for them.”

In England, several policies combine to lessen the financial burden on families as they try to make choices on how to cover child care. Mothers are offered nine months of at least partially paid maternity leave and three more months unpaid. Combined with the provisions for free child care, the length of time families have to pay for child care out of their own pockets before the government steps in to help is down to about two years. In the U.S., that length of time is closer to five years in most communities.

The parents hurriedly dropping off their children at the Redcliffe Children’s Centre in Bristol last June didn’t have much time to chat with an American reporter about the state of preschool in their country. Has universal preschool helped them make ends meet? Encouraged them to keep their job? Advanced their child’s learning? Annoyed them in some way? “Sorry,” they said, “I’d love to talk but I’m off to work.” And with a hug, a kiss, a wave for their kid, they were out the door; just another day in a country with free preschool.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

Top photo: Children play with musical instruments during free time at Redcliffe Children’s Centre, a public nursery school in Bristol, England. (Photo: Lillian Mongeau)

Unlike most of our stories, this piece is an exclusive collaboration and may not be republished.

The post Is universal preschool the answer? Britain says ‘yes’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is the fourth story in a series exploring the current state of America’s preschools.

NEW YORK — There are, New York City public school principal Kristina Beecher discovered, an awful lot of types of play blocks. There are wooden blocks, cardboard blocks, magnetic blocks, clear plastic blocks, number blocks, letter blocks, and fish-shaped blocks, to name a few. And all of them are advertised as the best possible blocks for outfitting a preschool classroom.

Such choices have been faced by principals like Beecher across the city in the last two years as New York has moved to accommodate all of the city’s public school 4-year-olds in high quality preschool classrooms. Between the 2013-14 school year and the 2015-16 school year, the city converted thousands of preschool seats from half-day to full-day and also added thousands of brand new seats for a total new enrollment of 49,360 full-day seats.* They also added 2,000 teachers.

“We believe that preschool is an integral part of the public school system and public school should be universally available because every child can benefit from it,” said Josh Wallack, Deputy Chancellor of New York City’s Department of Education. “Therefore, preschool should be universal.”

The changes have come with new money and support to ensure that the city is not only offering preschool to all, but top quality preschool to all. Teachers — many of whom are veterans of the city’s smaller, existing preschool program — have been asked to change their classrooms and step-up their teaching to improve the overall caliber of the program. In particular, classrooms are now held to the standards laid out in the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS), a tool designed to evaluate preschool classroom environments. After a mixed review in 2014-15, P.S. 3 teachers were advised to add more dress-up options in their dramatic play area, purchase outdoor play equipment like tricycles and grow their block collection.

Which is how Beecher, who has led P.S. 3 in the Bedford Village neighborhood of Brooklyn for 17 years, and her five preschool teachers came to be staring at never-ending lists of play blocks. Finally, they gave up on choosing the best blocks and just bought some of nearly every type to spread among the classrooms.

Hiring and supporting a better preschool teaching force has been more complicated.

At every school site in the city ongoing support has been needed to help both new and veteran teachers to improve their classrooms. And school leaders, used to concentrating on the “testing grades,” as Beecher put it, have had to be convinced that all this effort around the early years is worth it. To that end, district officials have led training sessions for teachers and principals on things like child development and creating welcoming classrooms. Coaches and evaluators have been deployed to every school. Social workers have been assigned to work with schools on family engagement initiatives.

“Trying to do something this quickly presents a lot of challenges,” Wallack said. But so far, he said, the push for universal preschool here has proven to be “a great example of what a municipal government can do when focused on a really ambitious goal.”

The city’s experience with improving and expanding its existing preschool teaching force could provide a good test case for other cities or for the entire United States, were we to pursue a national universal preschool program. Though New York City is certainly one of a kind, its internal diversity more closely resembles the country as a whole than any other single city. Because it is so large, officials here have had to do everything “at scale,” meaning they needed to create systems that would work for thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of children, not just a few hundred.

Right now, as a country, we are way behind New York City. The majority of the country’s preschool teachers and child care workers are poorly paid and under-educated. Changing that would be necessary to the success of any attempt to expand preschool options and improve quality on a national level.

Back on the first floor of P.S. 3, in a classroom stocked with a variety of blocks, teacher Lauren Kendall was preparing to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to her 4-year-old students. Before starting, she asked each child to turn to a partner and explain how he or she had changed since the beginning of the school year. One girl felt the beginning of the year hardly covered her own transformation. “I couldn’t walk,” she told her partner, starting with her infancy. “I crawled. Then I grow a little. Now, I’m a kid. When I came [to school], I cried. Then I stopped crying.”

Transformation was the key word in Kendall’s classroom in June. It was the name of their unit, which was all about changes, from caterpillars turning into butterflies (there was a butterfly chrysalis in an enclosure near the class rug) to bricks turning into bridges (bridge building was the current focus of the block section).

Having a detailed unit plan in which all the activities relate back to a broad topic was new for Kendall. So were the open-ended questions she was asking students about what fate they expected to befall the hungry caterpillar after he’d eaten his way through two pears, five oranges, a slice of pie, an ice cream cone and a pickle, among other foods. (Hint: He’s going to turn into a butterfly.) Two girls started flapping their arms rapidly. “A butterfly flying in the sky!” one called out.

“I feel like children are learning so much more now,” said Kendall, who was inspired to leave a communications job at Lehman Brothers, the now-defunct investment bank, and become a teacher after Sept. 11, 2001. When she got her first preschool classroom in 2003 though, she said she had to write her own curriculum and figure out what her kids needed.

Now, Kendall gets support from the district, including a curriculum that helps her plan classroom activities and personal coaching that helps her understand how to best engage young learners. She says she is less focused on rote instruction or on the discipline involved in keeping 4-year-olds sitting on a rug. Her kids are more independent now, she said, because they choose their own activities for part of the day. She’s also asking them to think critically about everything from the stories she reads them to the math puzzles they are trying to solve. She says her new questions hold their attention better than asking them to memorize color patterns or the alphabet, for example.

“I’m working now on allowing my kids to learn from each other,” Kendall said.

The lessons Kendall has learned in the last two years about the best way to teach young children would please any early education expert. But apart from her lack of specific early childhood development training before being hired to lead a preschool classroom, Kendall doesn’t closely resemble the early education workforce at large.

Two million adults, mostly women, care for 12 million children under the age of five in homes and centers across the country every day, according to the 2016 Early Childhood Workforce Index by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, a think tank at the University of California, Berkeley. Most are not as well-educated as Kendall, who holds a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a New York State teaching certification. Just over a third of the people teaching preschool in centers or public schools hold bachelor’s degrees. Home-based care providers are far more likely to hold only a high school diploma or some college credits but no degree.

For Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, who has been focused on this group of workers for three decades, the very fact that there is debate about qualifications for teachers of young children is evidence of how little we value their work.

“What’s perplexing to me is: How come we haven’t moved?” she said. “There were all these excuses you could make 40 years ago about why we were stuck. But now, there’s no excuse.”

We have the brain science, Whitebook said, to back up what educators could only theorize in the 1970s: The first five years of children’s lives are key to their overall brain development. What children learn before age 5 — both academic skills like critical thinking and social skills like taking turns — sets the stage for the rest of their lives. The single most important element in capitalizing on that crucial window, Whitebook said, is who provides education in those years.

“People don’t tend to think teaching young children [is] as complex work as teaching older children, but in fact it is,” Whitebook said. “It’s hard for people to see that because of the nature of young children and because we have a historical approach that anybody can do it.”

Caring for young children can’t be separated from teaching them, Whitebook said. Wiping a nose or accepting a hug is part of the work of encouraging children to become confident young learners who will ask questions and try new things. Without the caring, little learning can take place.

Teachers like Kendall know this. Over the course of one morning in her Brooklyn preschool classroom, she never really stopped moving—patting backs, leaning forward to ask questions, crouching to talk to upset kids face-to-face, twisting to show everyone a picture book. Constantly weaving together care and education, she admired a girl’s painting of a butterfly in the art corner, resolved a dispute over sharing a pair of dress-up butterfly wings, then checked out the butterfly-free bridge taking shape in the block area.

When the dramatic play area was full, Yeison Dixon, 4, jutted his bottom lip out so far tears seemed inevitable. But Kendall noticed, told him it would be OK, held his hand and asked if he wanted to go to the butterfly table to draw the lifecycle of a butterfly. Minutes later, Yeison was smiling again and happily drawing a picture of a caterpillar.

In fact, brain science shows that this combination of caring and educating must go hand in hand for this age group. While a 14-year-old might manage to learn something about the Constitution from a social studies teacher he doesn’t like, a 4-year-old is incapable of learning much from an adult he does not trust. That truth contradicts the idea that the care and education of children can ever be separated, Whitebook argues.

“A child doesn’t think ‘Oh now I’m in child care and I’m being cared for. Oh, I’m in preschool, now I’m learning,’” Whitebook said. “They’re learning all the time and there’s the potential to facilitate their learning all the time.”

That is also an argument for paying everyone in charge of young children more than we’re paying them now. While teachers like Kendall, who work in public school districts, tend to be paid on par with their K-12 peers, other public preschool teachers, private center teachers and home-based child care workers are paid far less. Three quarters of the early educator workforce is paid less than $15 an hour, according to the National Survey of Early Care and Education. Forty-six percent of child care workers, a group that does not include “preschool teachers,” receive state or federal benefits available to very low-income earners, according to the Workforce Index. Among preschool and kindergarten teachers, that figure is 34 percent. Among workers overall, it’s 26 percent.

“People want good, cheap child care, which doesn’t really exist,” Whitebook said. “When you don’t put enough resources into it, it’s not like those costs don’t show up somewhere else.”

And while the low education requirements we hold for much of the early childhood labor force are one of the drivers of the low pay, another critical element is that caring for and teaching young children is primarily seen as women’s work. Ninety-seven percent of the early educator workforce is female. And research has shown that work considered the province of women is routinely devalued, both in terms of pay and respect. And that’s on top of the fact that women are paid less — 79 cents on the dollar — than men for the same work.

It’s also worth noting that most preschool classrooms have at least two teachers: a lead teacher and an assistant teacher. Assistants are critical team members, because they can focus on individual students who need extra help, lead activities with small groups, and facilitate the logistical acrobatics involved in making sure every kid goes to the bathroom before recess, among other daily tasks. However, these women, who are more likely to be people of color or to speak a second language, or both, are generally not as well educated as lead teachers and are usually paid even less.

Some efforts have been made to help assistants improve their educational credentials and move up the career ladder, but such efforts can backfire. Preschool directors routinely lose their better-educated staff to better-paying jobs elsewhere. That means hiring and training new people, which means more churn for kids.

Making the changes needed to usher our current early educator workforce from where it is to where it needs to be to provide every child with the opportunity to attend a high-quality program won’t be simple or easy.

With a shake of her head, Desarie Forde, another preschool teacher at P.S. 3, describes her past year as “really one big learning experience.” Despite her 18 years teaching preschool, she said that much of what she learned from the district in the past two years was new to her. And like Kendall, her colleague, Forde already held a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a teaching certification when she started the year. The learning curve for someone with less training and experience would be even bigger.

For Forde, the extra work it took to make her classroom a better learning environment for her young charges was worth it because of students like Josiah Taft, 4. Josiah wasn’t talking on his first day of school. By June, after months of playing with his peers and being gently pushed by his teachers, he was able to chat steadily with a visitor to his classroom. The boy had learned to love copying the patterns Forde set out with his own colored blocks, doodling with a pencil and “going to see the flowers” in the school’s garden. His mother was ecstatic about his progress, Forde said. “She cries and grabs us,” Forde said, smiling. “She’s very excited.”

The work put into revamping her school’s preschool program has also had an effect on Principal Beecher.

“It’s opened up my eyes,” said Beecher. “It’s unfortunate it took 17 years, but it’s been good. I can say now that our children are going up stronger through the grades.”

And it’s changed the way she’s thinking about later grades too.

“I’m having a conversation about kindergarten teachers using best practices from pre-K now,” she said. “I would like to see blocks in kindergarten.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

* Clarification: The story has been updated to reflect more complete information about the overhaul of New York’s preschool program to a systemwide, primarily full-day program. The original numbers included in this story were based on incomplete information available for download on the district website.

Unlike most of our stories, this piece is an exclusive collaboration and may not be republished.

The post What do preschool teachers need to do a better job? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is the third story in a series exploring the current state of America’s preschools.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Fifty-one years ago this summer, former President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the launch of Head Start in the White House Rose Garden.

“Five and six year old children are inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators,” Johnson told his audience as he explained that the federal government would be, for the first time, funding education and health services for children living in poverty in the form of a public preschool program. That first summer, according to a press release from the time, the program was to serve 530,000 children in 11,000 centers at a cost of $112 million, or $857 million in today’s dollars.

“This program this year means that 30 million man-years — the combined life span of these youngsters — will be spent productively and rewardingly, rather than wasted in tax-supported institutions or in welfare-supported lethargy,” Johnson promised.

But has that come to pass? No rigorous research project followed the children Johnson was talking about to determine whether now, in their mid-fifties, the 1965 Head Start graduates are living the productive and rewarding lives predicted for them. Critics charge that Head Start is a big federal program spending billions of tax dollars on a pipe dream — that the effects of being born into poverty can be averted for a lifetime with a few hours a day spent in a classroom at age 4. On the other hand, its champions argue that everything Johnson predicted is still possible, if only we give the program the resources it needs to succeed.

Today, Head Start is nearing the end of a decade of big reforms, meant to improve quality and get closer to meeting the goals laid out for it in Johnson’s announcement of this new front in his War on Poverty. Simultaneously, cities and states are increasing their public preschool enrollments slowly, but steadily. If all continues apace, the largest public program in the country could be just one step ahead, creating a road map for how to operate an early education program big enough to serve more than a million children without sacrificing quality.

One of the key elements to Head Start has always been its emphasis on local control. Rather than rolling out a one-size-fits-all program, the idea was to give grants to local agencies, like school districts, churches and other non-profits, which would develop their own programs based on local needs. That doesn’t mean there are no standards to be a “Head Start” program; there are many, and directors often say that a significant portion of their time is spent documenting how they meet the federal government’s requirements. But there is also substantial variation between programs, depending on which local agency holds the grant.

The Portland Public Schools in Oregon was one of the local agencies that received a grant that first summer. And like many other agencies, it made the transition to a full-year program when that funding became available. Today, the Sacajawea Head Start center in North Portland appears to be exactly what Johnson had in mind all those years ago. The building is clean and bright, student art covers the walls, teachers with a solid background in early education lead small classrooms of 3- and 4-year-olds in daily half-day programs. All of the primary federal requirements have been accounted for: medical check-ups, eye and dental screenings, a nutritious lunch, a parent council. They also have family case workers who help adults access services for which they’re eligible and set goals to help them move into steadier, better paying work.

“Comprehensive services — that’s what makes us amazing,” said Deborah Berry, the director of Portland Public Schools’ Head Start. “I go to that old term: whole child. If they’re healthy, they can learn. If they’re hungry, they can’t.”

On the last day of the school year, most of the children here are finishing their morning snack, served family style —  a Head Start norm — as quickly as they can. They eat peaches from shared platters that they have learned to politely pass to each other. But today is field day, and no one wants to linger over their food too long. Next, it’s clean-up time and then hand-washing and teeth-brushing, another norm and part of Head Start’s focus on teaching hygiene and self-care alongside the ABC’s and 123’s.

“When I grow big, I’m going to be a teacher,” said one little girl in braids who, when asked her age, held up one hand, fingers splayed wide. Their teacher, a classmate chipped in, was “nice and good.” (The center director asked that children not be identified by name for this story.) After they were done cleaning, the girls said excitedly that it would be time for a story and then, finally, time to go outside.

The Portland program, which served 844 children at seven sites in the 2014-15 school year, has a lot going for it. Every teacher has a state teaching certification, which requires a master’s degree. Teachers here are union members paid on par with the K-12 teachers in the district. Kids learn from a carefully selected curriculum for both reading and math that is aligned with the district’s kindergarten curriculum. They even have a certified, full-time art teacher, a rarity in a Head Start program. (Full disclosure: The art teacher is this reporter’s cousin.)

Moreover, 27 percent of program staff are parents of current or former Head Start children. One of the original goals of the program, and one Berry takes seriously, was to provide jobs for parents of Head Start children. Hiring parents, whose educational backgrounds are often scattered, has become harder as qualifications to work in the program — meant to raise quality — have risen, Berry said.

“Before, we could hire parents and grow our own [staff],” Berry said. Now, she says they are looking more to a pool of professional early childhood providers.

Reviews of the program conducted in 2016 by the Administration for Children and Families, the federal governing body for Head Start, found nothing to correct. Evaluations of classroom climate and teacher competence are well above the national mean.

Despite its evidently strong program, there is scant empirical evidence supporting Portland’s success at improving the academic futures of its graduates beyond that first year of kindergarten entry. The same is true of Head Start as a whole. And lacking hard numbers, political thinking as to whether or not children’s futures could be affected positively by Head Start has vacillated between certainty and skepticism.

“It is some of the most important work in the country,” said Joan Lombardi, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a think tank. Lombardi also served as a deputy assistant secretary in the Administration for Children and Families during both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “It is a life-changing program. It has been a life-changing program for millions and millions of children,” she said.

UPDATE: Three separate studies on the long-term impacts of Head Start released since the initial publication of this story support Lombardi’s statement. A study out of Georgetown University found that Head Start students in Tulsa, Oklahoma did better in middle school math and were less likely to be held back in elementary or middle school. A study by University of California Berkeley found that Head Start graduates are likely to earn $2 for every $1 invested in them. And a study by The Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute, a think tank, found that Head Start students were 5 percent more likely to graduate high school than their siblings who did not attend the program.*

But the work isn’t reaching enough children early enough or for long enough, Lombardi argues. Indeed, the program has never reached all of the children it’s meant to serve, 3- and 4-year-olds whose families make less than the federal poverty limit, which is currently $24,300 annually for a family of four. Head Start served just 41 percent of its eligible population in the 2014-15 school year. Early Head Start, for children 3 years old and younger, served 4 percent, according to the National Head Start Association, a professional organization.

“Many times during the course of its history it’s been underfunded and run into issues of quality,” Lombardi said. “You’ve got tremendous potential, but it’s time for us to fully fund it.”

For Head Start to serve every eligible child at the current rate would cost at least twice the $9.2 billion spent to serve about 1 million children in the 2016 fiscal year. The price tag for Early Head Start, which is included in the $9.2 billion figure, would have to increase 25-fold. Those increases are rough, back of the envelope calculations based the percentage of eligible children currently served and do not account for possible economies of scale. It should also be noted that some portion of children eligible for and not served by Head Start are covered by state-funded preschool programs.

Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that the cost of serving every 3- and 4-year-old child living in poverty in America (our poverty rate is more on par with countries like Mexico than with our European allies) would be closer to $30 billion than $9 billion. For comparison, that’s still less that the $32 billion available in tuition support for disadvantaged students though the federal Pell Grant program this year.

But the U.S. has a long tradition of deferring to the family when it comes to the education of very young children. And spending $30 billion on preschool may be too high a price tag for the American public and politicians to accept.

They’d be right to hesitate before signing a check, said Mark Lipsey, director of the Peabody Research Institute at Vanderbilt University, who has researched large public preschool programs and is uncertain of their efficacy. “I think people are misled about the strength and depth of the evidence of scaled-up public preschool studies,” Lipsey said.

The only long-term study of the program, called the Head Start Impact Study, began following enrollees in 2002 and stayed with them through third grade. Researchers found that by third grade, all the academic advances the children had made during their Head Start year had faded. And yet, Lipsey also says that we know enough about the potential for strong outcomes that tossing out existing public preschool programs is a bad idea too.

“If you’ve got a platform, the most obvious thing is to see what you can do with that and make it better,” Lipsey said, referring specifically to state preschool programs but voicing an idea that could easily apply to Head Start.

And that is exactly what Head Start has been doing since the initial results of the Impact Study were released in 2006. New regulations, laid out in the Head Start Act of 2007, require better educated teachers, a stronger focus on academics and more stringent requirements for local agencies to continually re-qualify for their grant money. Even those in the world of education research and those closely connected with Head Start who challenged the Impact Study’s findings, saying it was poorly set-up, admit that the changes it spurred were positive ones.

“There’s been a lot of work done to intensify the impact, and I think its a much stronger program now,” Lombardi said.

However, none of the changes address the number one culprit advocates blame for Head Start’s middling performance: a severe lack of cash. Broadly speaking, many of the most common complaints about Head Start’s quality can be traced to money. Many programs have long wait lists, serve children for only a few hours a day and are sometimes not even able to provide services for the entire school year, let alone the summer months.

Head Start teachers also tend to be poorly paid. Many live close to the poverty levels of the students they serve, especially if they live in expensive areas or are single mothers trying to make it on Head Start wages. The mean salary for a Head Start teacher with a bachelor’s degree (and 73 percent of the teaching force has a bachelor’s or higher) was $33,072 in 2015, according to the Early Childhood Workforce Index put out by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, a think tank. For Early Head Start, where more teachers have a certification, but no degree, the mean salary was $23,268, according to the National Head Start Association.

Low pay is not a new issue. Members of the National Head Start Association first brought their concerns about wages to Congress in 1986. In 1988, more money was allocated for salaries, but the increases over time have never kept up with the rising cost of living or with the salaries of kindergarten teachers, whose students are just one year older.

“You can’t solve this problem without putting more money into it,” said Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at U.C. Berkeley. “Beyond that, the ECE [early childhood education] field generally has pursued a strategy of: ‘Raise qualifications and the rest will come.’ I think we’ve pretty much seen that’s not the case.”

Many people in Head Start have earned degrees in the last decade, she points out, but wages have stayed flat. Requiring, even helping, employees get higher degrees without being able to compensate them for their new skills means turnover is an ongoing problem. Teachers with a bachelor’s degree in education can make as much as twice their Head Start salary at the local public school.

Meanwhile, current Head Start teachers also tend to be better at the care part of their jobs than the instruction part. An evaluation tool, known as CLASS, evaluates how emotionally connected preschool teachers are to their charges — a critical element of successful teaching for young children — as well as their ability to teach literacy, math, and critical thinking skills. As a whole, Head Start teachers score high on their ability to provide emotional support to their students and lower on their ability to teach academic content. Proponents say higher wages would keep the best teachers in the field longer and allow for more continuous development of their instructional skills.

Leadership capacity at the small local agencies that receive federal grants to run Head Start also varies. Not every Head Start program is placed within a school district like Portland’s. And school district placement alone is no guarantee of quality, since many schools districts have plenty of their own problems. Some small non-profits do an excellent job offering Head Start preschool in an intimate setting, while others struggle year-to-year.

In spite of these issues, there are many bright spots. There’s the program in Glendale, California, that has made math and science a daily focus. There’s the one in Guilford, North Carolina, that provides GED and computer skills classes for parents on site. And there are the countless testimonials from former students who tell how the program changed their lives.

Head Start, always conceived as an anti-poverty program and not just a vehicle for 4-year-old education, is also one of the only major federal programs Washington lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree on. Funding increased this year and a new stream was added that will allow existing programs with successful grant applications to offer full-day services.

Berry, the Portland Public Schools’ Head Start director, said that, for the most part, she is a fan of the new focus on quality; she is hoping to qualify for new funds to make more of her classrooms full-day. However, most of the new requirements have had little effect on her program, she said, because it already exceeds most of them. In large part, she said, that’s because she has access to funding well beyond what is provided by the federal grant.

“We wouldn’t be able to provide the services if we were not able to blend the funds,” Berry said.

Only 43 percent of Berry’s funding comes from Portland Public Schools’ federal Head Start grant. The rest comes from the state of Oregon’s preschool grant program (45 percent), a local Portland tax (5 percent), and Portland Public Schools (7 percent). All told, Portland spent about $8.9 million on its school district-based Head Start program in fiscal year 2016. On average, that’s $10,650 per enrolled child. The national average is $1,000 to $2,000 less, depending on how it’s calculated.

Were more programs to get the support Portland’s program enjoys, perhaps they too could provide the staff, curriculum and comprehensive health and family services that leaders here say make a difference.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

Unlike most of our stories, this piece is an exclusive collaboration and may not be republished.

Top photo: In this New York Post photo from the summer of 1965, Elizabeth Ching is first in line at PS 177 in New York City to register for Head Start, described in the original caption as “a special summer program for children between 4 years and 7 months and 6 years old who have never been to school before.” (Photo: Louis Liotta (c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images)

*Update: This story has been updated following the publication of new research showing more definitive benefits for Head Start children.

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This is the second story in a series exploring the current state of America’s preschools.

BOSTON — On the ground floor of Russell Elementary School in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston one February morning, three teachers supervised 20 students in what is considered one of the best free, public preschool programs in the country.

Sitting on a bright rug in a cozy classroom, 4- and 5-year-old students discussed how the letter M looks a lot like the letter W. Judging by their looks of concentration, this was a tricky point. Having established, with the help of lead teacher Mary Bolt, that their classmate Mario’s name contained an M, but not a W, they moved on to clapping once for each syllable in classmate Avah’s name and then counting the letters (four) and giving her a rousing cheer (Gimme an A! Gimme a V! Gimme an A! Gimme an H! What’s that spell? Avah!).

Next, it was free-play time. Students scattered to different areas of the room, to create capes out of donated fabric in the art section, build the city of Boston out of blocks in the block section, illustrate their own books in the writing section, sketch some yellow daffodils in the science section, and play house in the make-believe section.

“Where is the ice cream?” one little girl asked, moving her father doll through every room of a toy house looking for the treat. Alas, there was no ice cream to be had, so the little girl had the father doll come up with a new plan: “Let’s go to the supermarket!”

Later, there’s story time. First, Bolt offered a preview of the new words the kids would hear, like “ambled,” “curious” and “swishing,” which students acted out by swaying their hands back and forth. Then Bolt read The Lion and the Little Red Bird, a story about a curious bird and a lion who loves to paint colorful scenes by using his tail as a brush and natural pigments as paint.

“Why didn’t he use paint like we have?” asked Bolt.

“No money,” suggested a girl.

“He would scare people at the store,” pointed out a boy.

In the afternoon, once recess, lunch and nap had been wrapped, it was math time. Bolt scattered a bunch of shapes on the rug. “What’s my rule?” she asked her students. Looking at all of the various four-sided objects, none of which were squares, one child called it: “Rectangles!”

Then, once again, the kids were loosed on the room, finding math games or puzzles at all of the pint-sized tables and rug-based play areas scattered throughout. Bolt and the other adults moved from table to table asking kids questions about their pursuits or challenging them to try something new.

From start to finish, a day in Bolt’s Russell Elementary classroom could be a primer on what high-quality preschool is supposed to look like. Children had free time to play with friends in a stimulating environment, received literacy instruction that pushed beyond comprehension to critical thinking and communication and were introduced to complex mathematics concepts in age-appropriate ways. All three practices have been shown to go beyond increasing what children know to actually improving how well they learn in kindergarten and beyond.

Boston’s preschool program, called K1 locally, serves about 68 percent of the 4-year-olds likely to enroll in public kindergarten. But while it has been criticized by some for its slow growth, the program has won repeated recognition from experts in the field for its high quality and has been validated by outside researchers for being student-centered, learning-focused and developmentally appropriate.

“If it’s not a quality program and it’s just a place for 4-year-olds to be all day, it’s not effective,” said Marie Enochty, a program director in the school district’s early childhood education department, neatly summarizing the message heard at every turn here, from the classroom to the mayor’s office.

Providing high-quality public preschool is no small feat. Only a handful of city and state programs meet the quality standards established by the National Institute for Early Education Research, a think tank that publishes annual reports evaluating state preschool programs across the country. Boston’s program exceeds those standards. In fact, the school district here is so enamored of its preschool program, city school officials hope to soon bring the principles of high quality early education to later grades.

The key elements of quality are simple, says Jason Sachs, director of the district’s early childhood education department: A great curriculum and ongoing, effective staff support.

“Who the teacher is and what the teacher is teaching? Huge,” Sachs said.

Of course, a dozen other factors contribute to the program’s success. To start, Boston’s students are among the highest performing urban kids in a state routinely ranked as one of the highest performing in the nation, as judged by reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a test given to a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders.

What led to that success? It depends on whom you ask, but the answers include well-educated, well-paid teachers, strong unions, a population willing to pay significant amounts in taxes to fund education, and relatively small class sizes.

The district estimates it spends about $12,450 per K1 student each year. That helps cover a salary for an assistant teacher in every classroom and a sizeable budget for materials and supplies. That amount does not include the costs of providing one-on-one teacher coaching, improving and customizing the curriculum and making sure each classroom meets the accreditation standards of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Much of the funding for those functions comes from the Barr Foundation, a Boston-based philanthropy. Having private funding has been critical, Sachs said, though he doesn’t expect it to last forever. The district has also won some federal grant money.

To offer universal preschool at the quality level needed, local funds and a revolving set of federal and private grants won’t cut it, Boston Public Schools Superintendent Tommy Chang said.

“We need state and federal support,” Chang said.

The district does receive some ongoing state and federal funding, but officials here say it is not enough to cover everything they need to keep quality high. As a state, Massachusetts ranks poorly on measures of access and better on measures of quality in its public preschool program.

Boston Mayor Martin Walsh, a Democrat, tries to make up what the program lacks in state support with enthusiastic local support. Like his predecessor, former Mayor Thomas Menino, Walsh sees preschool investments as the key to a better educated, stronger workforce, a falling crime and incarceration rate, a growing stream of new businesses to “Bean Town” and a more affordable cost of living for residents. Despite a budget deficit, Walsh committed $3.1 million to public preschool for the 2016-17 fiscal year.

“It’s an investment in the future of America,” Walsh said. “It’s an investment in young people. Any time we can make an investment in young people it’s a positive step for a city.”

And then there’s Sachs. He has been leading the district’s early education department for more than a decade. His blunt confidence in the system-changing potential of high-quality early education and his indefatigable pursuit of the funds needed to do so make him a forceful presence in the district.

Sachs worked on early learning policy in the state education department before moving to Boston. Now, he leads a 21-person team of coaches and curriculum experts. Sachs and his team have brought in so much money through outside grants that only seven of the team’s positions are paid for directly by the district.

For a teacher like Bolt, 10 years into her career, Sachs’ laser focus on quality means she is constantly interacting with the team that developed the curriculum she uses in her classroom. She gives them feedback on what works or doesn’t work with her students and then tries out potential improvements. She sticks to a district-wide schedule, but has the prerogative to make alterations as she sees fit. Bolt says she follows her kids’ cues. If they’re bored by a book she’s supposed to read several times, for instance, she moves on to a new one. Still, she has no hesitation about using a curriculum aimed at increasing academic abilities, including skills like critical thinking and problem solving.

“The curriculum is so fun, they don’t realize it’s rigorous,” Bolt said. “Kids tell parents on Saturday that they want to go to school. If we were drilling them and doing worksheets, they wouldn’t be saying that.”

Such a planned learning environment is anathema to some early educators. The necessity, or even benefit, of hiring teachers with bachelor’s degrees or having a structured curriculum are still matters of debate in early education. But many non-public school preschool programs in Boston have bought in to the district’s way of thinking, thanks to an initiative that provides their teachers with additional training and pay.

Using funds from a federal Preschool Expansion Grant, Boston will support 300 spots in community-based preschools next fall in addition to its 2,800 public school-based spots, according to district spokesman Daniel O’Brien. Part of the Obama administration’s push to improve public preschool programs, the grant should provide $15 million annually for four years to be split among five Massachusetts communities.

While each Preschool Expansion Grant recipient has outlined a different plan for using its funds, Boston is focused on improving citywide preschool quality. Participating teachers learn how to teach the public school curriculum and a receive pay bump that brings them up to par with the starting salary for a Boston Public Schools teacher, which is $52,632 for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree, but no master’s degree.

“It’s totally helped,” said Mary Kinsella Scannell, the vice president of the non-profit Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester, which offers day care and preschool to children ranging from 2-months- to 5-years-old. “Our programs have been strengthened by BPS [Boston Public Schools] and to some extent, BPS has been strengthened by community-based organizations.”

Kinsella Scannell started working with the district in 2006 as part of a pilot public-private partnership model. Since then the program has gone through two rounds of expansion. Some, Kinsella Scannell acknowledges, are wary of working within the more rigid structure of the public school system.

And results have been mixed so far. During the second phase of the partnership program, children did improve both their literacy and math skills when their teachers had received more instruction on how to teach those things. However, not all of the center-based teachers used the district curriculum consistently. And the pay increase for lead teachers didn’t eliminate turnover, a constant problem for most private preschools. In this, its third phase, Boston has tried to address those issues by improving its training model and extending the pay bump, albeit on a smaller scale, to assistant teachers.

If Boston’s initiative to involve more community-based preschools works, it could provide a model for cities and states across the country that are trying to perfect partnerships between districts and private providers as a potentially faster and cheaper solution to expanding public preschool.

Meanwhile, back at Russell Elementary School, yet another compelling result of Boston Public Schools’ increased focus on early education is playing out two stories up, in Ed Ballard’s third-grade classroom.

Instead of sitting at their desks one afternoon, kids sprawled on the floor around a giant sheet of paper covered in fraction calculations or gathered at a kid-sized table to solve a complex word problem. According to Ballard, this is at least a weekly sight in his classroom these days.

“I like doing group work, because if we have a question, [our classmates] can give us an opinion or help us figure it out,” said Vianca Melo, 9, a member of the fractions group. “We don’t have to struggle.”

Working in groups, or “centers” where kids can explore different activities in different areas of the room, is not a new idea in elementary education, but Ballard’s room is on the leading edge of a new focus in Boston that Sachs likes to call “percolating up.” That means the ideas that have been found to be effective in the earliest grade are now beginning to be applied to later grades.

“We didn’t use to do reading groups and centers so much in third grade,” said Ballard, Vianca’s teacher. “They really can get things clarified. I say things a certain way. [In groups,] they can hear it in another way. They’re more interested in talking to each other.”

Changing all of early elementary school in a methodical and purposeful way to better resemble the student-centered structure of preschool would be a much bigger win than just proving that preschool helps students do better in kindergarten, Sachs said. And those aren’t just words. Starting this coming school year, his department will be responsible not just for preschool and kindergarten curriculum and coaching, but for first and second grade as well.

“The impact of prekindergarten is significant and substantial, but there is some fade,” Sachs said, using a common term to describe how the academic benefits preschool graduates display when they first enter kindergarten often seem to “fade” as they move up. “That’s why we moved on,” he said, “because the fade is not in the kids; it’s in the program.”

Despite its success, Boston faces hurdles. For one, its highest-income residents tend to view their city’s public schools as a last resort. Were they involved, higher-income parents could bring the power of their wealth and political muscle to expanding the program to serve all children.

“Boston NAEP scores are great, but in the context of Massachusetts, we’re not getting the job done,” Sachs said.

The city also has minimum support from the state, which provides free preschool to just 7 percent, or about 6,500, of the state’s nearly 92,000 4-year-olds, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has not made preschool a signature issue, though he did authorize an incremental increase in funding that will serve 2,000 additional students in the coming school year.

Steven Barnett, the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, thinks that cities, not states, are leading the way to the idea that preschool should be a right guaranteed to every 4-year-old in America.

Major changes in education policy “tend to come locality by locality, rather than statewide,” Barnett said. “If we look at the introduction of the comprehensive high school, the big cities led the way on that,” he said. Now, Barnett thinks we could be about to see the same kind of widespread adoption for public preschool, one city at a time.

And he may be right, because Boston is not alone. New York City, Cleveland, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Antonio, to name a few, also have large and growing public preschool programs. In many cases, Barnett said, that’s because they were “dissatisfied” with what their state has to offer. Several city mayors, especially former Mayor Julian Castro in San Antonio and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York, even made expanding preschool a key campaign issue.

At a meeting of the Boston Public Schools Early Education Department in February, the staff was working on offering productive critical feedback to teachers. They watched a video of a teacher who kept her kids sitting on a rug for a 30-minute morning meeting. There were groans from the staff. The classroom in the video, though friendly and warm, did not look as engaging or productive as Mary Bolt’s classroom and the coaches, most of whom know Bolt, agreed that it was not.

After the video, the group broke into teams to role-play a coaching meeting with the teacher in the video.

“I think it’s a delicate balance,” said longtime coach Nicole St. Victor. “Sometimes the person will say, ‘Oh yeah, next time I’ll make sure circle time is shorter.’ But not elaborate. And you want the teacher to understand the rationale behind that. So you keep talking.”

St. Victor has studied early childhood in Haiti and law in Paris and then early childhood again in the United States. She takes her work very seriously and is insistent that there’s always room for improvement.

“Just because you have 20 years doing something, doesn’t mean you’re doing it well,” she said.

Her way of thinking is echoed by most of the early education staff and by teachers like Bolt and Ballard. There’s always room for improvement. So while Boston’s program is exceptional by the standards of what is offered nationally, no one here is satisfied.

This story was written by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

Unlike most of our stories, this piece is an exclusive collaboration and may not be republished.

The post Which city has the best public preschools in America? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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This is the first story in a series exploring the current state of America’s preschools.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — “He was very angry. He was scratching his face, kicking, and screaming,” preschool teacher Carrie Giddings said of one of her students during his first days in her class at Kruse Elementary School in northern Colorado.

The boy’s father had been in and out of jail, Giddings said. She thinks the 3-year-old had witnessed abuse at home before he enrolled in preschool at Kruse. His family was poor. For a while, they had lived with relatives, unable to afford their own place.

“Everything that could happen to a kid, he’d had it all,” Giddings said, asking that the child’s name not be used. “He was a year and a half behind.”

A child like this boy will have a tough road ahead. Research has shown that unrelenting stress at a young age, known as toxic stress, causes long-lasting brain damage. The worse the damage, the harder it is for children to pay attention, absorb new information or trust adults — all skills critical for success in school — as they get older.

In fact, the fate of all children is largely determined by their first years on this planet. Forming healthy relationships with adults early on lays the foundation for future healthy relationships. Exposure to language through stories, songs and conversations sets the stage for academic achievement. Playing outside to master gross motor skills, creating art to master fine motor skills, pretending to be a doctor, chef or firefighter to learn teamwork, building a tower of blocks to learn basic physics lessons — all of these activities are critical preparation for a successful school and adult life.

The most straightforward way to ensure all children have such experiences is to provide free or affordable high-quality preschool for them when they are 3- and 4-year-olds.

The idea is not as radical as it sounds. The U.S. has even provided universal public preschool before, for a few years during World War II. That program ended in 1946. Since then, a growing body of research has demonstrated the value of high-quality preschool for both children and their communities. Nearly every industrialized country has recognized that value and begun offering a version of universal public preschool for its children. Not the U.S.

On every level — local, state and federal — this country invests little to nothing in the first five years of a child’s life, putting us decades and dollars behind the rest of the developed world.

“I think we value our children less than other nations do,” said Arne Duncan, the former U.S. secretary of education who pushed hard for increased federal investment in early care and education during his seven-year tenure in the Obama administration. “I don’t have an easier or softer or kinder way to say that.”

In 2012, the U.S, ranked 35th among developed economies in pre-primary or primary school enrollment for 3- to 5-year-olds, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international economic association.

The implications of failing to offer public preschool, especially for children from the highest-need communities, are “massive,” Duncan said. “It’s a loss of human potential. We don’t truly believe there’s tremendous talent in rural America or among black and brown children or among poor children. So we choose to under-invest.”

But that may be about to change for the first time since 1971, when former President Richard Nixon vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have created universal daycare.

At least a dozen major cities, including New York, Seattle and Denver, have recently started high-quality universal preschool programs. States are collectively spending more on early education year-over-year, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, a think tank. And this fiscal year, Congress even broke out of its partisan gridlock to increase federal spending on early childhood by about $1 billion. That action followed a similar increase the previous fiscal year. And a growing chorus of voices — including those of academics, advocates and politicians from both major parties — has begun to call for more and better preschool options.

Related: Poll: Voters agree, candidates should talk preschool

Moreover, Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, continues to put a spotlight on early childhood issues, as she has since she stepped on the political scene more than four decades ago. (So far, Donald Trump has not addressed any issues or programs related to early childhood.)

All told, advocates say there is a new momentum that could be enough to switch the conversation from whether we should provide public preschool to how best to provide it.

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But though many have acknowledged the need for forward motion on preschool expansion, the overall pace of change has been glacial. “At the current rate, it will be another 50 years before states can reach all low-income children at age four, and it will take 150 years to reach 75 percent of all four-year-olds,” writes Steven Barnett, director the National Institute for Early Education Research, in his introduction to the 2015 State of Preschool Yearbook.

Most existing public programs, including the federally funded Head Start program, are targeted at the poorest children and don’t have enough money to serve every eligible child. Long waiting lists and complex regulations mean many low-income families are left trying to cover the cost of private care, which can be as much as 85 percent of a family’s income in expensive states like Massachusetts.

That’s why a comparatively small percentage of children from low-income families, the ones research shows benefit the most from preschool, attend center-based care before they start kindergarten. Only 44 percent of children with a low socioeconomic status attend center-based preschool, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracks thousands of children through their first year of kindergarten. That’s compared to 69 percent of children with a high socioeconomic status who attend preschool, and 54 percent of middle class children.

Upping the percentage of low-income children attending center-based programs could be an even bigger deal in the U.S. than it is in Europe, since we have a comparatively high ratio of children living in poverty. Statistics from the OECD put us roughly on par with Mexico, even though we continue to rank as one of the richest countries in the OECD, behind only Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia.

The same data that showed only 44 percent of children from low-income families attended preschool revealed that children who did attend center-based care did better in reading and math than children who had received informal care or care from a stay-at-home parent. And that is without controlling for quality, which varies dramatically, said Barnett.

“Access to real quality is pretty darn low,” he said.

Related: How the military created the best child care system in the nation

The chance that parents without a high school diploma will be able to place their child in a high-quality preschool program is one in 10, Barnett said. For parents with graduate degrees, the odds are slightly better: one in three.

“And that’s after 50 years of a policy of targeted preschool” programs for the lowest income families, Barnett said. “Which I think means 50 years is enough. We need to try something different.”

While middle-income families have better access to high-quality private preschool since they can pay for it, access to free or subsidized preschool is only available in a handful of cities and states. At the same time, many working families who do not qualify for public assistance struggle to pay for either daycare for infants and toddlers or preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. Year-round private care averages $18,000 a year for two children, according to Care.com. Thirteen percent of families pay more than $30,000 annually. In some states, the cost of care for just one child is more than a year of tuition at a state college.

In part, the lack of preschool options is the result of a system built on the outdated notion that families are made up of one working parent who can provide for the financial needs of the family while another, non-working parent can stay home to care for young children.

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Most families don’t look like that anymore. In 2014, more than a third (35 percent) of children lived in homes headed by single parents, according to the Kids Count data center. Among single mothers, 70.8 percent worked outside the home in 2015, as did 82.1 percent of single fathers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And even in the majority (60.6 percent) of families led by married partners, both adults worked.

For these families, some form of child-care, whether preschool or something more informal, is not an option; it’s a necessity.

That’s a reality the U.S. did once acknowledge. From 1943 until 1946, the wartime Lanham Act guaranteed quality child-care to the children of working women as part of the war effort. As soon as World War II ended though, the program was shut down. With the war over, it was assumed women would stop working. They did then and they have again. The U.S. ranked 19th among OECD countries for percentage of female workers in 2014; in 2000 it ranked 15th. Research has shown that up to a third of the decline in female participation in the labor force relative to European countries can be attributed to our family leave and child-care policies.

In 1965, the federal government re-entered the preschool game and launched Head Start, a preschool program for the nation’s poorest children. Conceived as a fix to poverty, the program focused on getting more mothers to work, teaching them to be better parents, providing health screenings for children and preparing them for kindergarten. And while Head Start continues to this day, the program is run by independent local agencies, so quality and availability vary greatly.

As in later grades, teacher quality is a huge factor in the success of preschool classrooms. Historically, the complexity of educating young children has been discounted, and preschool teachers tend to be underpaid and poorly qualified as a result, said Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

“You don’t hear conversations about, ‘Do teachers really need to have a college education [to teach] in kindergarten on?’” Whitebook said. “Routinely, you hear that in early childhood.”

Nationally, the median preschool teacher salary is $28,570 a year, or about half (52 percent) of the median elementary school teacher salary, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Child care workers, mostly women who work in more informal settings that may or may not involve a focus on education, make even less, earning a median of just $20,320 a year. Forty-six percent of early childhood teachers are enrolled in a federal income support program, compared to 13 percent of elementary or middle school teachers, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.

Related: California’s early ed workers struggle to stay afloat

“I think that there’s a disconnect between our expectations of high-quality preschool and the earnings and environment in which early educators are working,” Whitebook said.

Therein lies a major hurdle to expanding public preschool: money. To pay early educators on par with K-12 teachers would be hugely expensive. Creating appropriate facilities for young children to learn and play would not be cheap either.

While the return on such an investment could run as high as $7.20 for every $1 spent, according to research out of the University of Minnesota, the initial outlay would be substantial. Many cities and states that have beefed up preschool programs in recent years have levied new taxes to cover their costs. Obama’s 2013 proposal to spend an additional $75 billion over 10 years to expand preschool access called for a new federal tobacco tax. It died in committee in both houses.

Another major problem is that even if preschool access were greatly expanded, it’s not entirely clear how to ensure children attend the highest possible quality programs.

Related: Why Oklahoma’s public preschools are some of the best in the country

It’s not that there has been no research on the subject. Many studies have examined the impact of a preschool education and advocates find the preponderance of evidence falls squarely on the side of expanding public access.

Some of the longest studies — those that have followed children from preschool graduation through adulthood — point to benefits that include a lower likelihood of incarceration, less need for public assistance, longer-lasting marriages and a lower risk of heart disease. More recent, shorter studies of some public preschool programs, like the one in Washington State for children from struggling families, have found boosts to reading and math ability that lasted through fifth grade. (The study is ongoing.) And nearly every study finds that children who have attended preschool are more academically and socially prepared for kindergarten than they would have been otherwise.

But while it is clear that some programs can produce stunning results, especially for children from low-income families, it’s less clear exactly which elements of those programs are the keys to their success.

It’s also unclear what elements make for long-lasting impacts and which affect merely the number of facts a child knows on the first day of kindergarten. There is also research suggesting attendees of some large public programs, including Head Start, are no better off by third grade than their peers who didn’t attend such programs. Fueling the argument against rapid expansion of public programs, one Tennessee study found children who attended the state’s public preschool program were actually doing worse in reading by third grade.

“I’m not saying that we know [preschool] is a failure,” said Mark Lipsey, one of the lead researchers on the Tennessee study and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. “We just don’t know.”

Related: Preschool education: Go big or go home?

Specific compliments for newly gained skills decorate the walls in a Colorado Preschool Program classroom at Eyestone Elementary School in the Poudre School District.[/caption]And even assuming most preschool programs help more than they hurt, which even most skeptics concede, not everyone is convinced that it should be a universal offering or that it’s the best way to invest limited dollars in the early years.

“The strongest research points us to other approaches, like expanding voluntary home visiting to support vulnerable families, and improving child care, where many low-income children spend thousands of hours in the earliest, most crucial developmental years of their lives,” writes Katharine Stevens, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in a Hechinger Report Op-Ed.

Backing up the idea that it makes more sense to invest in programs for infants and toddlers first, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman — who is nevertheless a champion of expanding public preschool programs — routinely points out that the earlier a dollar is invested in a child’s life, the higher return it has later. Assigning nurses or social workers to visit pregnant women at home and help them through pregnancy, child birth and the first years of their child’s life has been shown to have enormous positive impact.

Expanding guaranteed parental leave to all wage earners — not just those who have worked at a company of 50 or more for at least 12 months — would be another measure that could help parents better nurture their infants well-ahead of preschool age. Right now, under the Family and Medical Leave Act, the U.S. guarantees some employees just 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave after the birth or adoption of a child. In contrast, Germany offers 58 weeks of paid leave.

Making parental leave longer and paid, as it is in every other OECD member country, might make it easier for families to both care for infants and reduce the amount of paid child care needed by shortening the period between the end of leave and the start of public school.

In the current political climate however, it is unlikely that any of these changes will be made on a broad scale at the federal level.

“Political will is a major factor,” said Barnett of the National Institute for Early Education Research. “In terms of the leadership capacity to make the change in states, we have more of that than we have the political will to give them the resources and marching order to do that.”

The political challenge of passing preschool-focused legislation is unusual. Democrats at all levels have long been in favor of expanding and improving early childhood education. Many Republican governors and state legislators have also been outspoken in favor of expanding and improving early childhood education. Even Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a conservative Republican, made expanding his state’s preschool program one of his campaign promises. Twenty-two states headed by Republican governors increased state spending on preschool in fiscal year 2015-16, along with 10 states headed by Democratic governors, according to the Education Commission of the States, a policy-research organization.

Despite the bipartisan support in cities and states across the country though, preschool has become a Democrats-only issue in Washington, D.C.

Former Secretary Duncan, who is now a managing partner of Emerson Collective, a philanthropy established by Laurene Powell Jobs, told of an incident that happened after President Barack Obama had mentioned expanding preschool in one of his State of the Union speeches. A high-ranking Republican senator approached him, Duncan explained. “He said, ‘I love what you guys are doing. Our families need it. Our communities need it. Keep going. Don’t stop. I’m so sorry I can’t help you.’’

“It killed me,” Duncan said.

To be sure, preschool attendance alone does not guarantee every possible educational, cognitive and social benefit that can come from a high-quality early education. If a child attends a poorly run preschool program, there is little benefit at all. And even if a child attends a great preschool program, but then spends the next decade attending struggling schools, none of the biggest benefits are likely to accrue. Preschool is not an inoculation against the next 12 years of a kid’s life.

But, says Colorado teacher Giddings, it’s a start.

Her student — the boy who started out as an angry, kicking 3-year-old — was able to attend her class for two years. As a student at a well-staffed elementary school, he received behavioral therapy to address his tantrums, cognitive therapy to address his developmental delays, speech therapy to increase his ability to communicate and occupational therapy to help him catch up on things like putting on his own jacket. At Kruse Elementary, his needs were identified and addressed. And that has made all the difference, Giddings said.

She choked up remembering the transformation of the boy, now 5. “Now, he takes deep breaths, gives himself hugs and apologizes to friends,” she said, wiping away tears.

Today, the boy can count to 10, recognize his name, join in play with other kids and build a zoo out of blocks, Giddings said. She and his therapists have met with his kindergarten teacher for next fall and told her what to expect and what teaching methods work best for him. Giddings expects him to “soar.”

“When I look at him, I think ‘this is exactly why I’m doing what I’m doing,’” Giddings said. “He’s an extraordinary kid and this program mattered [for him].”

And while there was no luck involved in the sensitive, research-based care the boy received at Kruse, as an American, he was lucky to get such care.

This story is the first in a series that will examine top-performing preschool programs in the U.S., Head Start, preschool solutions found in other countries, the condition of preschool teachers and the political future of preschool.

This story was written by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about early education.

Unlike most of our stories, this piece is an exclusive collaboration and may not be republished.

The post What do we invest in the country’s youngest? Little to nothing appeared first on The Hechinger Report.