Something essential has been missing from the national conversation about what it will take to improve and sustain early childhood education. We are not producing nearly enough leaders with the specialized expertise to turn good policy ideas into lasting systems that work.
Early childhood policy decisions are made every day by people who care deeply about children but were prepared to do something else entirely. The consequences show up in systems that don’t talk to each other, investments that don’t reach the families who need them most and reforms that look good on paper but collapse when the programs are designed and put in place.
You will likely not find the kind of early childhood expertise needed in the offices of governors, state legislatures, congressional corridors, county health agencies, small and big businesses or school district central offices.
Infrastructure like power grids and transportation networks is built by experts because we have collectively decided these things are too important to leave to chance. Early childhood policy is no different.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
The systems that determine what the first five years of a child’s life look like — child care, health care, housing, family economic support — are too complex, too consequential and too underfunded to be managed by well-meaning but underprepared professionals.
The fix is not mysterious. We must invest in graduate programs that are building this field so they can reach more students and prepare more practitioners to bring the lived experience that effective policy demands.
We must also create entry points for early childhood policy graduates in national, state and local governments that currently don’t know this expertise exists. And we must update our expectations of what expertise in this space looks like.
There is a reason to be hopeful. Last month, 56 graduate students and faculty from 12 universities across the country — including from schools in Washington state, Washington, D.C., California, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Massachusetts — gathered in Washington, D.C., to begin preparing for the next generation of early childhood policy in America.
These graduate students are the emerging leaders of early childhood policy as a discipline — a distinct field of professional preparation built on the conviction that the decisions shaping the experiences of tens of millions of children and their families are too consequential to be made by people who haven’t been trained to make them well.
These students work at the intersection of science, systems and equal opportunity. They think big and act strategically. They come from the front lines — from Head Start and child care centers, social work, health care, and home visiting and family support programs.
They understand the value of lived experience in effecting change.
Meanwhile, several states have been making important, groundbreaking decisions. New Mexico recently passed landmark legislation tying early childhood investment to revenue stabilization. Connecticut extended its child care subsidy system to serve families it had never reached before.
Related: Lessons from the first state in the nation to offer universal child care
Kansas launched a new early childhood initiative with bipartisan support that would have seemed unimaginable five years ago. New York City and New York State financed plans for a universal child care infrastructure that is one of the most ambitious ever designed.
States are running ahead of the federal government on early childhood in ways not seen since the 1990s.
All that momentum won’t meet the need to prepare a new generation of policy professionals who speak both the language of developmental science and the language of program reform.
This is the problem that Early Childhood Policy in Institutions of Higher Education — ECPIHE — was created to solve (ECPIHE is led by the National Center for Children and Families, which is housed at Teachers College, Columbia University; The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College). The leaders of ECPIHE have spent about a decade helping to build graduate programs at 17 institutions of higher education that will prepare a new generation of policy professionals and emerging leaders who know how to turn evidence into decisions.
They have succeeded in working across health care, child care, housing and family support systems — an effort in which other policymakers have traditionally fallen short. They are trained to see the full landscape and act precisely to design effective programs that will return long-term benefits.
So let’s be honest about what has stalled progress at the national level in meeting the needs of young families, who admittedly are not a powerful lobby: It is not only a lack of ideological consensus and the frustrating cycle of deadlock, inaction and funding shortfalls. It is also a lack of trained expertise matched to the complexity of the task.
What we need from policymakers, from higher education institutions and from the philanthropic community is a commitment proportional to the stakes. That means investing in the graduate programs that are building this field — like the ones represented in Washington, D.C., last month — so they can reach more students and prepare practitioners to bring the kind of knowledge, skills and dispositions that effective policy demands.
These remarkable students are not waiting for the national conversation to catch up. They are building a field their communities need, in states and localities that are taking action.
We need to build national support for an early childhood policy preparation strategy; millions more children and families can benefit from leaders who combine deep expertise and passion.
Michael H. Levine is a child development and policy expert. He is director of communications for ECPIHE, a higher education consortium that is preparing the next generation of early childhood policy leaders.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about early childhood policy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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