This week’s verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd is a significant step towards confronting the institutional structures that maintain and condone systemic violence towards people of color. As we work towards a country where all children have an equitable opportunity to thrive, we know there is still a long way to go: Since testimony in the case began in late March, three people a day have died at the hands of law enforcement, including children like Adam Toledo and Ma’Khia Bryant, parents like Daunte Wright and others. As members of the early childhood community, many of us are still processing the pain and hurt caused by watching societal systems continue to fail adults and children of color. Just as one community confronts a killing, another happens.

We know early education and care will play a critical role in helping our communities level the playing field and set a foundation for children to succeed in life. We also recognize that quality early childhood experiences are just one critical piece of the solution and alone won’t fix the formal structures and systems that, in tandem with our country’s history and culture of white supremacy, perpetuate racism and inequities.

But as individuals who interact with, shape and influence these systems, we commit to collectively supporting and partnering with our communities, children and families in healing from this ongoing trauma and dismantling oppressive structures. We will continue to reflect upon the ways in which our own early learning community has, at times, aligned with this systemic violence, including disproportionate expulsion rates for young children of color, enrollment patterns, underpayment of staff and continued segregation. We will continue to work towards centering parent and community voices by honoring their leadership, needs, desires and hopes — for themselves, their families, their communities and our country.

We invite our partners and supporters to help us address these imperatives with passion and urgency, and to hold us accountable on our learning journey. Our efforts to dismantle racism will continue not only in the aftermath of incidences of violence, but as long as the health, development, and well-being of the children and families we partner with and serve are jeopardized by racist systems, practices and behaviors.

• Extend Early Intervention (EI) services to three-year olds until their next school year begins. This allows children receiving Early Intervention (EI) services prior to their third birthday and are found eligible for an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) in preschool to remain in the EI program until the beginning of the school year following their third birthday. (Their third birthday must fall between May 1^st and August 31^st.) This change will minimize gaps in services, ensure better continuity of care, and align practices for enrollment of preschool children with special needs to the enrollment practices of typically developing preschool children.
• Establish the Early Education Act, which contains legislative findings that Early Intervention services are cost-effective. The Act encourages the IDHS to prepare and submit a report to the ILGA on the use of the “at-risk” category for eligibility of EI services and an affirmative outreach plan for dissemination of information about the category. The Act also encourages the development of specialized teams to address the complex needs that sometimes arise in the provision of services and to launch a demonstration project with the goal of better coordination and timely connections between neonatal intensive care units and Early Intervention services.
• Establish in state law a kindergarten readiness assessment, an observational tool designed to help teachers, administrators, families, and policymakers better understand the developmental readiness of children entering kindergarten. Illinois began requiring the administration of its kindergarten readiness assessment several years ago, but unlike other state education assessments, there is no current reference to it in law. This formalizes the State Board’s current policy in statute, allowing schools, districts, and the state to understand better where our young learners need support to be successful in kindergarten and beyond.
• Establish the Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Consultations Act, which encourages the state to increase the availability of Infant/Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (I/ECMHC) services through increased funding, encourages relevant state agencies to develop and promote improved materials for families and providers, and encourages relevant state agencies to provide more data on early childhood expulsions, among other things.
• Require behavioral health services providers for children under 5 to use a developmentally appropriate diagnostic assessment and billing system. Previously, state law required that Medicaid diagnosis codes for behavioral health services in young children must be coded by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases, which are not developmentally appropriate for young children. The new legislation requires the use of DC 0-5 diagnostic codes for children under 5 and publicize the existing crosswalk to the ICD-10 codes for billing purposes.
• Establish the Early Childhood Workforce Act, which recognizes the critical role of the early childhood workforce. It encourages IDHS to offer targeted outreach and financial support to those seeking to increase their credentials while prioritizing diversity and communities with the greatest shortages. It provides annual reports on those receiving scholarships and encourages agencies to prioritize reaching compensation parity between early childhood and its K-12 peers.
• Establish the Equitable Early Childhood Education and Care Act, which recognizes the role that high-quality early childhood experiences have on children’s short and long-term outcomes. The act also demonstrates support of the Illinois General Assembly for the goals of the Illinois Commission on Equitable Early Childhood Education and Care Funding and encourages the state to create an implementation planning process and timeline with a designated body accountable for implementing the Commission’s recommendations.

The science is clear: the first three years of life are the most critical for development. However, it is in these earliest years where we shortchange our children the most. We know that we have a lack of programs and services across the country for infants, toddlers and their families – and those that we do have are extremely underfunded. In order to address these disparities and ensure a bright future for youngest children, bold and collective action is needed.

Last year, in Illinois, a broad group of 100+ diverse stakeholders convened to develop an ambitious, comprehensive, multi-year and strategic policy agenda that spells out exactly what Illinois families need to have the strongest foundation in their first years of life. Through the agenda’s execution, 100,000 more expecting families, infants and toddlers will receive services and supports they need by 2025. In developing recommended policy priorities, we examined data, applied a racial equity lens and focused on Illinois’ priority populations.

We have since kicked off our work to implement our Illinois Prenatal to Three (PN3) Policy Agenda through the Prenatal to Three Coalition, as part of a national movement of 19 states funded by Pritzker Children’s Initiative to move prenatal to age 3-focused efforts and policies forward. Start Early, together with the Illinois Governor’s Office of Early Childhood Development, will lead the Coalition as a public – private partnership.

While our agenda is comprehensive, its structure is clear and simple with four interconnected priorities:

1. Healthy parents and babies, so that each expecting family and family with infants and toddlers has access to the critical services they need.
2. High-quality learning, so families have access to the types of care and education they need during the earliest, most foundational years of their development.
3. Economically secure families that have access to basic income supports necessary to provide essential needs and do not have to sacrifice a job to care for children.
4. Strong infrastructure with an equitable, cohesive system of supports for families, providers and communities.

At the time of the agenda’s development, we had no idea that the last year would bring such radical changes. In this unprecedented landscape, many of us have seen, in increasingly stark terms, the growing number of families who face frightening financial hardship and have uncertain access to health services that could not be more critical.

If we truly want to end the racial inequities that persist today, we must start at the beginning and ensure that expecting families and babies have what they need for a strong foundation. Together, we are addressing the root causes of disparities and working to create an equitable and cohesive early childhood development system of supports for Illinois’ expecting families, infants and toddlers and the communities in which they live.

The support of individuals and/or organizations is critical to delivering on the Illinois Prenatal to Three Agenda. To join this collective effort, please complete our Interest Form or reach out to our team at IllinoisPN3@StartEarly.org.

Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) have become a popular policy strategy for assessing, improving and communicating about the quality of early childhood education programs. Bolstered by federal grant requirements and significant investments of state dollars, nearly every state has established QRIS, and tens of thousands of programs have chosen to participate over the last 20 years. Research shows that most QRISs can distinguish between low- and high- quality programs and can help children access higher quality early learning experiences. While QRIS has significant potential, it is limited by the communities actually reached.

The reality is that access to high-quality early childhood education programs is currently inequitable—high-quality options are far more limited in under-resourced communities where many low-income families and families of color live. For QRISs to help correct economic and racial inequities, they must serve and support the programs in these communities. Most QRIS participation is voluntary, so to do this, it must be relevant and beneficial to a diverse array of programs.

So, which early childhood programs and communities do—and do not—participate in QRIS? In a recently-published study, Jade Jenkins and Jennifer Duer from the University of California at Irvine and I explored this very question. We learned that:

• Approximately 1/3 of center-based early childhood education programs nationwide participated in QRIS in 2012 (the most recent year for which data are available)
• Centers that blend multiple funding sources and those with state pre-K funding participated in QRIS at higher rates than other programs
• Participation was more likely for programs in some communities than in others – 1) participation was higher among centers located in higher-poverty communities 2) participation was lower among centers located in communities with more Black residents.

These findings show that resources, supports and other benefits of QRIS have not been equitably distributed across communities. Our study cannot answer the question of why centers are more or less likely to participate in QRIS, but we do have some speculations. As mentioned previously, since QRIS participation is often voluntary, a center would likely only choose to partake if the benefits outweigh the burden of time and cost. Participating in QRIS requires an early childhood education program to invest money and staff time, which many simply cannot spare.

In addition, the calculus of costs and benefits may look different for different programs. For example, advocates have raised serious concerns about whether the measures, supports, incentives and processes that comprise QRIS are relevant to programs serving communities of color. In fact, advocates in California came to the devastating conclusion that their state’s “QRIS is racist.” If programs in Black communities do not see themselves or the families they serve reflected in QRIS standards, then what benefits would they gain from participating?

Our research helped to shine a light on the problem. If QRIS is going to advance its of goal of improving economic and racial equities in early childhood education, they must engage and support a diverse set of programs in a broader range of communities.

Policymakers, systems leaders and advocates have an important opportunity to make QRIS more equitable. Solutions will require careful examination of QRIS recruitment and outreach strategies, assessment tools, supports and incentives offered to programs, and barriers to participation. The process must include the voices of those programs and the families they serve in redefining quality and redesigning the system.

QRIS is a vehicle through which we can create change in early learning policy. We must steer it towards equity—now.

In this blog, Amanda Stein, Start Early director of research and evaluation, shares findings and takeaways from our latest research study of pre-K access and enrollment policies in Chicago which aimed to remove obstacles and drive engagement for children and families in underserved neighborhoods.

Equity-Focused Research and Policymaking
At this poignant time, a public health crisis is both holding a magnifying glass to and further exacerbating racial and economic disparities and systemic injustices for young children and their families. The need for equity-focused policy making and research has never been more pronounced. And the field of early care and education (ECE) is no exception.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), in their 2019 position statement on advancing equity in ECE, defines equity as “the state that would be achieved if individuals fared the same way in society regardless of race, gender, class, language, disability, or any other social or cultural characteristic.” This means eliminating “differences in educational outcomes as a result of who children are, where they live, and what resources their families have.”

The Value of Early Care and Education
Given the well-established body of research evidence, there is no doubt that the type and quality of ECE experiences children receive both inside and outside of the home have an impact on their short-term learning and development and later life success. Furthermore, public investments in early education and intervention programs generate savings that benefit the economy long-term.

Yet children, their families, and the broader society are unable to reap the benefits of high-quality ECE programs if children and families are not able to access them. Existing research evidence shows that differential access is an important contributing factor to inequities in enrollment. The long-term benefits associated with strong care and education in the early years make these disparities particularly concerning.

A Focus on Pre-K Access and Enrollment in Chicago
Recently, Start Early partnered with a group of researchers from NORC at the University of Chicago, UChicago Consortium on School Research and policymakers in Chicago to explore whether and how policy efforts in the city helped to create more equity within the district’s early education system for high priority students. We examined access and enrollment to school-based pre-K in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), before and after significant policy changes that began in 2013-14, with a focus on re-allocating pre-K classrooms to schools throughout the city and increasing the number of full-day pre-K classrooms.

The overall goal was to improve access and enrollment for high-priority groups to help them better prepare for success in kindergarten and beyond – including students of color, students speaking a language other than English and students living in neighborhoods with lower income and higher unemployment.

Adopting A Neighborhood-Centered Approach in Chicago
In addition to examining changes in pre-K access and enrollment, we used a “neighborhood-centered” method to explore patterns of access and enrollment based on the neighborhood where students resided.

Our methodology resulted in a concise set of five neighborhoods groupings focused on the characteristics of residents and variations within communities, which is critical to informing policy decisions about how to most equitably allocate services, supports, and resources.

What We Learned: Evidence of Greater Equity
Prior to Chicago’s policy changes in 2013-14, White students and students living in the highest-income neighborhoods had the greatest number of full-day pre-K classrooms nearby and were most likely to enroll in full-day pre-K.

We found evidence of improvements following the policy changes:

• A larger portion of CPS elementary schools offered full-day pre-K, students lived an average of 0.6 miles closer to a school with at least one full-day pre-K and full-day pre-K enrollment rates grew nearly four-fold during the study.
• Enrollment tripled in school-based full-day pre-K among Black students and students living in lowest-income neighborhoods.
• Latinx students were more likely to enroll in full-day pre-K, at slightly lower levels than other groups.

Our Work & Focus on Equity

Our belief that all change happens through relationships will shape the project activities, training, technical assistance, and resources produced by the NCPFCE.

Working with a consortium of partners, Start Early will lead the NCPFCE to support family well-being, effective family and community engagement, and children’s school readiness, including transitions to kindergarten. These partnerships will integrate the research-practice knowledge of family and community engagement, human services, early childhood, social work, mental health, parenting, leadership, and family economic mobility into the NCPFCE content and activities.

The NCPFCE will have a strong equity focus and seeks to bring program, family and community voice to the forefront of early childhood education. Throughout the project, schools in the Educare Learning Network and other Early Head Start and Head Start grantees will serve as on-the-ground labs for piloting and field-testing innovations in parent, family and community engagement.

Our Partners

• Child Trends
• LIFT
• Early Learning Lab
• Fred Rogers Center
• UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute

Our Funders

The National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) is jointly administered by the Office of Head Start and the Office of Child Care.

Start Early is pleased to announce it has been awarded the National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) by the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Head Start, in partnership with the Office of Child Care. The NCPFCE is one of four National Centers that develop evidence-based best practices for Early Head Start and Head Start programs across the country, as part of a comprehensive Office of Head Start Training and Technical Assistance System.

This award provides up to $5.9 million annually ($29.5 million over 5 years) to Start Early and a consortium of partners — Child Trends, LIFT, Early Learning Lab, Fred Rogers Center, and the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute — to support family well-being, effective family and community engagement, and children’s school readiness, including transitions to kindergarten. These partnerships will integrate the research-practice knowledge of family and community engagement, human services, early childhood, social work, mental health, parenting, leadership, and family economic mobility into the NCPFCE content and activities. Start Early will focus on creating high-quality responsive training and technical assistance, rooted in equity and cultural and linguistic responsiveness, to support staff, families and communities nationwide.

“We are honored to work with an incredible group of partners as we continue building upon Head Start’s commitment to parents as their child’s first teachers,” said Start Early president Diana Rauner. “Together we will further bring family engagement, parent voice and community engagement to the forefront of early childhood education over the next five years.”

The NCPFCE identifies, develops and disseminates evidence-based best practices to support the growth and development of young children and strengthen families and communities. Its work includes providing training and technical assistance on staff-family relationship building practices that are culturally and linguistically responsive; integrated and systemic family engagement strategies that are outcomes-based; and consumer education, family leadership, family economic stability, and individualized support for families facing adversity.

The NCPFCE will have a strong equity focus and will partner with schools in the Educare Learning Network and other Early Head Start/Head Start (EHS/HS) grantees across the country to create, pilot and field test innovations in parent, family and community engagement. This will ensure that training and technical assistance (TTA) activities result in high-quality comprehensive services that bring diverse family, community and program voices to the center of the work.

Start Early brings nearly 40 years of expertise delivering best-in-class doula, home visiting and Early Head Start and Head Start programs and advocating for thoughtful policies and adequate funding at the local, state, and federal levels. From roots directly serving families and children on Chicago’s South Side and in rural Illinois, Start Early has expanded to impact early childhood programs and policies nationwide, with partnerships in 25 states.

Dr. Rebecca Berlin, senior vice president of quality, solutions and impact and Dr. Mallary Swartz, director of family engagement research at Start Early will serve as principal investigators for the NCPFCE. Berlin has more than 25 years of experience in strategic visioning in the early childhood field, including assessment and professional development initiatives. Swartz brings 20 years of experience as an applied researcher in family engagement and relationships-based professional development in early childhood education, particularly EHS/HS programs.

Start Early has also hired Brandi Black Thacker, director of TTA and integrated services and Manda Lopez Klein, director of the NCPFCE to lead the NCPFCE. Together, the two early childhood professionals bring a combined 40 years of experience as Head Start leaders and advocates to the work.

Throughout her career, Thacker has served communities as an educator, case manager, advocate, Head Start director, TTA specialist and served as the director of TTA for the NCPFCE for the past nine years. Klein is a former Head Start director and the founding executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association (MSHS), and is an expert in curriculum development, family engagement material development, and professional development, including services for monolingual and bilingual families.

“As national Head Start leaders and advocates, Brandi and Manda bring decades of experience collaborating with families and community partners to the new NCPFCE,” said Rebecca Berlin, senior vice president of quality, solutions and impact. “Under their leadership, the NCPFCE will continue to elevate diverse voices that strengthen the work and ensure better outcomes for children and families across the country.”

As a first step, Start Early will sign the cooperative agreement later this month and launch the center by the end of November.

About Start Early

Start Early (formerly known as the Ounce of Prevention) is a nonprofit public-private partnership advancing quality early learning and care for families with children, before birth through their earliest years, to help close the opportunity gap. For nearly 40 years, Start Early has delivered best-in-class doula, home visiting, and Early Head Start and Head Start programs. Bringing expertise in program delivery, research and evaluation, professional development, and policy and advocacy, Start Early works in partnership with communities and other experts to drive systemic change so millions more children, families and educators can thrive.