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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: How to boost math skills in the early grades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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OAKLAND, Calif. — Teacher Yasmin Kudrolli sat on a low chair and lit a candle to start the morning meeting in her prekindergarten classroom in Oakland. Speaking quietly to her 4-year-old students, she picked one boy from the group to count his classmates: 22.

California mandates one adult for every 12 students in what it calls “transitional kindergarten,” so there’s an aide standing by the door, ready to take any child who needs to use the bathroom into the main building. Families from Oakland’s higher-income neighborhoods have been drawn to the transitional kindergarten program in her school, which had a waiting list at the beginning of the school year.

Across town, but in the same school district, teacher Alicia Simba leads 13 students, all 4-year-olds, in a breathing exercise in her classroom. Her 14th student is crying in the reading nook. She wants to go home.

“You’re going to be okay, sweetheart,” Simba says soothingly. She brings out a basket of percussion instruments and the crying child smiles broadly.

When a boy says he has to use the bathroom, Simba asks him to hold it until lunch, which is 30 minutes away. She should have an aide to take him, but she doesn’t. The school where she works can’t afford to hire extra staff due to very low enrollment.

It’s the second year of California’s uneven four-year rollout of universal transitional kindergarten, an ambitious, multi-billion dollar initiative to make high-quality education available to each of the state’s 4-year-olds, an estimated 400,000 children.

The plan is that the $2.7 billion program will be fully implemented by the 2025-26 school year across the nearly 900 districts in the state that include elementary grades. It will be the largest universal prekindergarten program in the country.

But like the children in these two classrooms — some of whom are ready for school and others who aren’t even potty-trained — some districts are on schedule and some are not.

There are teachers who should have aides, but don’t. There are districts, like rural Mendocino, where some transitional kindergarten classrooms don’t have attached bathrooms and where school playgrounds aren’t designed for 4-year-olds. Many districts can’t hire enough staff for afterschool programs to accommodate the new transitional kindergarten students, forcing working families to scramble for care. The state has not provided learning expectations for this new grade. Handling toileting issues for young pupils is a headache.

Related: Alabama aims for huge pre-K enrollment boost by 2025, despite pandemic setbacks

Some, but not all, of these kinks might be worked out by the time the program is fully implemented in 2025. The state is slowly increasing the number of children who are eligible based on birth month, an approach that has been confusing for parents but which buys districts time to set up appropriate spaces to meet demand. In the 2023-24 school year, children who will turn 5 by April 2, 2024, were able to enroll. This coming fall, children who have a fifth birthday by June 2, 2025, can enroll. By the 2025-26 school year, all children who are 4 years old by the beginning of the school year in September will be eligible. That year classroom ratios will also go down, requiring one adult for every 10 students.

By offering free, high-quality transitional kindergarten in public schools, California will go a long way to help level the playing field for children entering kindergarten, officials say. Regardless of income, families will have access to top-notch early schooling. Additionally, officials say the state’s massive investment will shine a light on the earliest years of education and make it more likely that districts will align curriculum from preschool through third grade.

That’s the hope. In the meantime, districts are figuring out how to serve this new, and quite different, age group without a unifying roadmap.

“There’s a new grade out there and no clear guidance yet from the state as to what should be covered in it,” said Alix Gallagher, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), based at Stanford University.

On the one hand, Gallagher said, the state could be criticized for not having clear guidance about what transitional kindergarten should look like when it started the expansion, especially since some districts had been offering transitional kindergarten for a decade before the statewide mandate.

“On the other hand,” Gallagher said, “making a new grade and requiring universal access is not something that is always politically available.”

In this case, politics favor early childhood advocates. They have a powerful ally in Gov. Gavin Newsom, who campaigned on his support for early learning and announced his intention to propose universal preschool, which includes transitional kindergarten, in a 2020 legislative master plan.

So ready or not, California’s transitional kindergarten classrooms are open for business.

There is little disagreement among early childhood advocates that California’s investment in early childhood education is good policy. High-quality transitional kindergarten is seen as a bridge between preschool and kindergarten. Done right, it gives children time to develop the emergent literacy, social-emotional and fine motor skills needed to succeed in kindergarten.

The bill Gov. Newsom signed in 2021 to expand transitional kindergarten to all districts calls specifically for high-quality programs. A 2017 study of California’s pre-expansion transitional kindergarten programs found that children who attended were better prepared for kindergarten than those who didn’t. But another, more recent, report found that early benefits did not lead to improved test scores in grades three and four.

That’s why it’s critical that districts ensure that their early-grade teachers collaborate to develop a vision for the grades from pre-kindergarten to third grade, so instruction and assessments are linked, said Steven Kellner, director of program sustainability and growth at California Education Partners. A 2021 report by the educational law firm Foresight Law and Policy notes that California schools are only held accountable for student learning outcomes, in the form of standardized test scores, from grades three and up.

“The statewide incentive system doesn’t promote districts to focus on the early grades,” Kellner said. “They’re untested on the state dashboard, and under No Child Left Behind, but they’re the most essential.”

Related: More schools are adding pre-K classrooms. But do principals know how to support them?

It’s significant, he said, that the state’s initiative requires that transitional kindergarten teachers be fully credentialed and have at least 24 units in early childhood education, childhood development or both. Essentially, California has added a new grade: Teachers working with 4-year-olds are now part of an elementary school’s teaching staff. Keller said that the presence of these new teachers, and students, in schools, may have the effect of linking high-quality early education to success at higher grades — a perspective that isn’t front-of-mind for many administrators.

“If you want kids to be reading at grade level in third grade, you can’t start that work in third grade,” Kellner said. “But if students reach third grade at grade level, they have an outstanding chance of maintaining that [rate of progress] all the way to graduation.”

The state has yet to release an update to its Preschool Learning Foundations, which will spell out what students are expected learn in transitional kindergarten classrooms. Experts say the best curriculum should be play-based. Districts are deciding for themselves which curriculum to use.

“Can students in TK learn their letters? Absolutely,” said Noemi Valdez, director of early childhood education in Oxnard School District. “But not necessarily by writing. They can tear tissue and use glue to paste the letters to paper.”

Oxnard, a district of about 14,000 students 60 miles from Los Angeles, began offering transitional kindergarten in 2017 when it became clear that most of the district’s kindergarteners weren’t ready for school. When the district’s first transitional kindergarten classrooms opened, some 60 percent of its kindergarteners had not been to preschool. Today, the district has more than 700 transitional kindergarten students.

Many transitional kindergarten activities are designed to help children develop their fine motor skills so they will be able to hold a pencil steady for writing, Valdez said. Stations where children can play with dough and sort through buckets of rice to find scattered paper clips will help students attain these skills and meet the goals of cutting with scissors on their own and drawing a straight line, she said.

“All of our centers are manipulated by the teacher for a certain goal or learning experience,” Valdez said. “Play-based is not a free-for-all. It is a context for learning.”

So, what does high-quality transitional kindergarten look like? California requires a transitional kindergarten classroom to have no more than 12 students with one teacher, or up to 24 students with one teacher and an aide. It shouldn’t be a combo class with kindergarten.

The room should have space for children to rotate through learning centers that might include tables with puzzles and manipulative toys, drawing and painting, musical instruments and building blocks. Objects should be labeled with their names in every language spoken by children in the class. Bathrooms used by kids in preschool, transitional kindergarten and kindergarten, the state says, should be accessible only to those students.

But for 4-year-olds, using bathrooms independently is often a major milestone.

Before Sara LaPietra’s son Theodore started transitional kindergarten in San Diego in 2022, LaPietra was worried he might not be completely ready to use the bathroom on his own. It turned out that he was ready, but the bathrooms themselves weren’t.

“It just seems like the state overlooked some details that seem obvious as a parent,” she said. “A 4-year-old needs to be able to reach the toilet and the paper towels.”

Toileting, it turns out, is a big issue in transitional kindergarten classrooms. Coming out of the social isolation many children experienced during the height of the pandemic, some 4-year-olds are developmentally behind. Some kids in transitional kindergarten aren’t fully potty trained, which leads to staffing issues. Kirstin Hills, director of early learning and care for the Mendocino County Office of Education, would like to see bathroom assistance added to the job description for transitional kindergarten teachers.

“When you work in a licensed child care center, you have to supervise the kids every minute they are in your care, including when they use the restroom,” Hills said. “In a TK-12 system, it’s not in the job description to assist with toileting. Same kids, but totally different approach.”

In transitional kindergarten classrooms where there is an aide, they can help, but whether the aide actually goes into the bathroom with children depends on district guidelines. The state has not weighed in. Simba, one of the Oakland teachers, had to hold a class meeting with her students recently to talk about how much toilet paper they are using, because the toilet was getting clogged. Without an aide, Simba has to let the children use the bathroom on their own. She can’t leave the classroom unattended.

“If they are toilet trained, who can take them to the bathroom?” said Simba, who has her master’s degree and is fully credentialed. “Who should take them?”

Related: Behind the findings of the Tennessee pre-K study that found negative effects for graduates

Access to care outside of school hours is another barrier to family participation in transitional kindergarten. In Fresno, for example, nearly 2,000 children attend transitional kindergarten and the district offers afterschool care at all school sites. But the district can’t keep up with demand, even after more than doubling staff.

“Addressing students on the waitlist [for afterschool programs] is ongoing work,” said Jeremy Ward, assistant superintendent of college and career readiness for Fresno Unified Schools. “As soon as we’re able to provide more staffing for an elementary school to take students off the waitlist, more step forward wanting access.”

Offering after-school care is a big priority in Fresno, because so many students come from working families where a full day of care is a necessity. The district has focused on reaching families of English-language learners to inform them about transitional kindergarten and to support their attendance, said Maria Ceballos Tapia, executive officer of the district’s Early Learning Department.

But there’s a staffing shortage for after-school programs. Although districts have money to pay for staff — in 2021 California allocated $4.6 billion for expanded learning opportunities, including afterschool and summer learning programs — in many communities there simply aren’t enough people applying for the jobs.

Willits Unified School District, in rural Mendocino County, puts transitional kindergarten students who need after care on a bus and takes them to a private daycare center for the last half of the day.

“Fast food restaurants are paying $20 an hour and we’re paying $17 or $18 an hour to work with kids,” said Kim McDougal, executive director of the YMCA’s child resource service in San Diego. “[The staffing shortage has] been severe post-Covid and it’s become even more challenging.”

In San Diego, the YMCA operates after-school programs at nearly 30 elementary schools. One site has the capacity to serve 150 students, McDougal said, but is only serving 85 because they can’t hire enough staff.

“After care is the real sticking point,” said Kellner, of California Education Partners. “If we’re looking for the kind of enrollment that Newsom and the legislature predicted, the key is after care. The good news is the funds were appropriated. Now it’s really about marshaling human capital.”

Universal transitional kindergarten will be a success, experts say, if classroom instruction is high-quality and if after-school programs are available to all families who need it. But other early childhood education advocates worry that successful transitional kindergarten programs will come at the expense of private child care and preschool.

California child care providers are operating at 50 to 80 percent of their enrollment capacity because families have taken their 4-year-olds out, said Dave Esbin, executive director of Californians for Quality Early Learning, a nonprofit that supports child care educators.

For years, child care providers have struggled to maintain staffing levels in daycare centers and preschools, Esbin said. Now, low enrollment of 4-year-olds is a bigger problem than retaining staff.

“The child care ecosystem was already very fragile coming out of Covid, and even before that,” Esbin said. “It’s a challenging business model. Now it’s really tipping the scale toward becoming a non-viable business model.”

By the 2025-26 school year, California plans to have transitional kindergarten programs available to all 400,000 of the state’s 4-year-olds.

Caring for infants requires one caregiver for every three babies, he said, while preschools have a 1-12 ratio of adults to children. Caring for preschoolers helps subsidize the more expensive infant care, so losing 4-year-olds could have a major impact.

School districts are also struggling to predict where 4-year-olds will go. While officials in districts like Oakland and Fresno study birth rates to anticipate which schools will have full transitional kindergarten classrooms, parents may be unaware that transitional kindergarten exists or are confused by the age requirement.

“It’s quite complicated for parents to know if their 4-year-olds are eligible,” said Kellner, “and for districts to know how many 4-year-olds will come. That’s why progress has been so uneven.”

Messaging about the program isn’t reaching everyone, or every group, equally. A recent survey conducted by Stanford University’s Center on Early Childhood found that most California families with young children are aware of free transitional kindergarten and plan on enrolling their children. But there are discrepancies: While just over 90 percent of surveyed middle- to upper-income families had heard of transitional kindergarten, only about 60 percent of lower-income parents knew about it.

“By 2025-26, when every 4-year-old is welcome,” said Kellner, “we’ll get a much better sense of how this will play out.”

Teachers of students who are enrolled in transitional kindergarten now say that it is making a positive difference, even amid the statewide challenges.

“You can tell the children who haven’t been to preschool. They aren’t used to the socializing and the routines,” said Kudrolli, one of the Oakland teachers. “Last year there was one boy who stood in the middle of the room for the first month and just soaked it all in, like ‘What happened? Where am I?’ By the end of the year he was completely adjusted.”

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

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DERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. — On a bright fall morning last year, a shimmering, human-sized Hershey’s Kiss with bright blue eyes greeted delighted children and their parents outside of the first early childhood education center launched by the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning.

Inside the new nearly 51,000-square-foot facility, built to accommodate 150 students, children funneled into their bright, well-stocked classrooms. They were welcomed by teachers who had spent 12 months in paid professional development, unusual in a field where teacher training varies greatly. The young students, ranging in age from 6 weeks to 5 years, went about their day in well-stocked, spacious classrooms, playing and learning in small groups. The ample staff provided low student-to-teacher ratios and allowed for large amounts of individual attention.

The day featured visits to the center’s “STEM Garden,” where children could learn about gardening, nature and animals from several interactive displays that offer child-appropriate introduction to science, technology, engineering and math. The kids had abundant time to run, climb and pedal bikes in one of several outdoor play spaces. And they gathered with their classmates to enjoy several family-style meals and snacks, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, Southwest turkey chili and tuna casserole.

On paper, this child care program seems like it would cost parents tens of thousands of dollars a year, rivaling college tuition, as many early learning programs do. But here in picturesque Hershey, Derry Township’s best known community, it’s all free: the first brick and mortar of a new initiative cooked up by stewards of the Hershey billions.

The early learning center, located in a town that engenders Willy Wonka vibes with street names like “Chocolate Avenue,” street lights shaped like Hershey’s Kisses and a faint scent of sweetness that wafts through the air, is one of the most recent examples of billionaires launching child care programs.

Similar efforts to provide free early care and learning are sprinkled throughout the country, including “Montessori-inspired” preschools in six states funded by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, as well as several programs sponsored by hotel magnate Harris Rosen in Orlando, Florida. In Pennsylvania, the Hershey early learning program is one of what will ultimately be six free early childhood education centers around Pennsylvania, at a cost of $350 million, funded by the Milton Hershey School Trust. (Catherine Hershey Schools are a subsidiary of the Hershey-based residential Milton Hershey School.)

Related: Will the real Montessori please stand up?

In a country with exorbitantly priced child care and a lack of available, high-quality options, initiatives like these provide a new opportunity to see the effect that free or heavily subsidized high-quality child care — something that is already the norm in many other wealthy, developed nations — could have in America. The fact that robust federal child care funding legislation has repeatedly been killed by legislators means that foundation funding may be among the few — and the fastest — ways to launch and test certain programs or approaches to the early years.

The hope is that ultimately, private investment will help a community “invest in something and push it forward and … help it move to the point where it gets public attention,” as well as public funds, said Rena Large, program manager at the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative (ECFC), an organization that helps philanthropists invest in the early years.

In the past few years, private foundations have taken on an outsized role in early learning programs and systems, funding initiatives that raise staff compensation, support existing or new programs and provide emergency funds. Nationwide, the amount of grants aimed at early childhood has increased significantly, from $720.8 million between 2013 and 2015, to $1 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to data compiled by the collaborative from the nonprofit Candid’s philanthropy database. (Data is self-reported and categorized by funders.)

Within the early childhood collaborative, membership numbers have tripled since 2016. “The pandemic brought more people to the table,” said Shannon Rudisill, executive director of the funders collaborative. “There’s been a real blossoming of innovation.” Many of those funders are hopeful that their efforts will lead to federal investment, as well as “policy and systems change,” she added.

At the same time, philanthropic involvement in education overall, including in early learning, raises questions around best practices. Are philanthropists adequately considering the needs of communities? How can and should a philanthropy involve community and existing efforts in the field? Are philanthropies listening to research and experts as they go forth and create? Should philanthropies reinvent the wheel or invest in what already exists?

Some in the early childhood community have criticized Bezos’ efforts, for example, arguing the billionaire should have supported existing, research-backed early learning programs and systems rather than creating “Montessori-inspired” schools based on what he thought children needed. And there could be unintended downstream effects of philanthropic programming or influence. For example, Hershey’s salary and benefits package is comparable to that offered by local school district, which may draw child care employees away from local programs that pay less.

Related: Who should pay for preschool for the middle class?

Hershey’s latest endeavor came from a clear community need identified by officials at the early childhood center. In Hershey — a community about 95 miles west of Philadelphia — and surrounding areas, child care is scarce and poverty is high. Over the past decade, teachers at the nearby Milton Hershey School, a private K-12 boarding school, noticed their youngest students were coming in markedly behind previous cohorts.

“The needs of the children enrolling at 4 and 5 and 6 were more pronounced than they ever were before,” said Pete Gurt, president of the Milton Hershey School and Catherine Hershey Schools. They needed more support with social and emotional, academic, language and even life skills, like potty training.

“When you look at the landscape [of child care] in Pennsylvania, it’s no different than anywhere else. You’ve got high demand, short supply, and of the supply, not as many organizations would be identified as high quality,” he added.

When I visited the Hershey school in October, friends and colleagues delighted in the idea of chocolate billionaires funding child care:

“Do they give them chocolate all day long?” (No, they do not.)

“I hope they give them dental screenings, ha.” (They do, for free.)

“Is it secretly a training pipeline for future Hershey employees?” (Not that I could tell, although officials from Hershey’s hospitality division were in the school’s lobby one morning to provide career information for parents.)

In addition to the trained educators, low ratios and research-based curricula, the Catherine Hershey Schools offer free transportation to its building, free diapers and wipes in classrooms, occupational and speech therapy, an in-house nurse, community partnerships, a parent resource center with individual parent coaches, external evaluators and an in-house researcher from the University of Pittsburgh who is tracking the school’s outcomes to see if all of this is working.

I was mostly curious to see if free child care is as life-changing as many early childhood experts think it could be in America, especially for low-income families — Hershey sets income limits for families at 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or $77,460 for a family of three.

Nearly two weeks after the first center launched, I met with Tracey Orellana, the mother of two toddlers at the school. Orellana was delivering packages for Amazon one day when she saw the early learning center, then under construction. She had been considering putting her two youngest children in child care so her husband, who works nights, could rest during the day while she was out working. The potential to get free child care made the decision a no-brainer.

“We were juggling. We were juggling so much,” said Orellana, who also has two school-age daughters. At the time, the family had incurred a mountain of debt and was struggling to afford basic needs like groceries. Now that the toddlers are in child care at no cost to their family, Orellana has been able to increase her work hours to full time, adding to her income and stability. The family is now able to afford food and has almost caught up with bills.

The school “provides the opportunity to build a life for our kids and keep them out of whatever the situation may be, streets, poverty, keep them clothed, keep them fed, keep the electric on, the heat on,” she said. Her daughters also have opportunities they wouldn’t have at home, Orellana added, such as getting to ride bikes, play games and make new friends.

“It gives them a childhood,” Orellana said.

Related: Five elements of a good preschool  

Other parents say they’ve been able to access a higher quality of care for their children now that money isn’t a factor. Allyson Anderson, the single mother of a preschooler, had to return to her job as a therapist at a rehabilitation center a year after giving birth to her daughter, Lilah. When Anderson went back to work, she chose child care using a method familiar to many American parents: “Honestly, just an open space.”

The programs her daughter ended up in were mediocre, Anderson said. While caregivers generally kept Lilah safe, classrooms lacked structure and Anderson was disappointed with the low level of attention Lilah received during the day.

But she had few other options. During Lilah’s first few years, money was tight and Anderson was struggling to cover her mortgage, bills and child care, which cost “the same as a mortgage payment” each month.

At Hershey, Anderson is most impressed by the experience and training of teachers, as well as by the fact that there are three teachers in a classroom capped at 17 children, far lower than the state mandated ratio. “They have more teachers in the classroom. They can pay more individual attention to each kid,” Anderson said. She is no longer concerned about the level of care Lilah receives.  “I don’t really have to worry. I know she’s in good hands.”

Downstairs in a classroom for preschoolers, I watched 3-year-old Lilah, who was hard to miss in a bright red jumpsuit featuring one of her favorite characters (at that moment), the Grinch.

“Did you hear what happened to me this morning?” one of the teachers asked the children who sat, riveted, in front of her for morning circle time. “I woke up and I came downstairs and guess what?”

“What?” a child asked.

“My dog had chewed one of my shoes!”

Several children gasped.

“I was so upset because they’re my favorite shoes. So, I started crying. Then I was so mad at my dog, and I started yelling. Do you think I made a very good choice?”

“No,” the children said in low, disappointed voices.

“What do you think I should have done?”

“Take a deep breath,” one child suggested. The teacher nodded.

Related: How to bring more nature into preschool

While philanthropically-funded programs can benefit those lucky enough to access them, without receiving public funds or partnering with others to expand, experts caution that the reach of these programs will be limited and exist only in areas with willing funders.

Some philanthropically funded early childhood programs, like Educare, have developed a model of launching centers using philanthropic dollars, then pulling in public funding later, a more sustainable model for allowing replication, said Rudisill from the early childhood funders collaborative. Funding sources need to “fit together to solve the problem,” she said. “You could scoop up all the private philanthropy in America … and you cannot make up for the fact that in our country, we don’t fund an early care and education system.”

Senate Alexander, executive director of Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning, said he hopes the centers will ultimately become a model that can be replicated — once the program has the data to show it’s working to improve kindergarten readiness skills and outcomes for families.

“We thought about not wanting to fan out too far and too fast, we’re just starting this,” he said. “We want to get it right … we want to perfect the model.” In the meantime, the program’s first school has invited other local child care programs to attend training with Hershey staff in an effort to share resources and possibly expand their reach.

While Hershey’s funding is limited in scope to programs within the state of Pennsylvania, Alexander said replicating the model in its entirety in other parts of the country is not out of the question. That could bring free childcare and extensive resources to more children. All it will take are a few more willing billionaires.

This story was produced with support by the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School.

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

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Consider this a head’s up: This week’s newsletter is about poop.

Specifically, potty training.

In January, Utah Rep. Doug Welton introduced a bill that would require kindergarten students be potty trained before parents enroll them in school. Children who aren’t potty trained would be referred to a social worker or counselor.

Potty training — or the lack of it — clearly strikes a nerve with teachers.

“The fastest and number 1 way to get parents to potty train their kids at home is to call them to the school every time the child needs a diaper to be changed,” said a self-identified kindergarten teacher in one potty-training focused Reddit thread.

“My friend just started teaching kindergarten and says she has at least 1 in a diaper and probably another 2 in pull ups. I cannot fathom this,” said a daycare teacher in another Reddit thread that drew more than 1,000 comments.

So, are more children coming to school in diapers?

It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because it’s not data that is tracked, and also because there aren’t a lot of recent studies on potty training and the average age of children who master it. In the 1940s, toilet training generally started before children were 18 months old, according to an article in the magazine American Family Physician. Around 60 years later, in the mid-2000s, the same article said parents were generally starting toilet training when a child was 21 to 36 months old.

Those numbers haven’t significantly changed in the last couple of decades, according to Dr. Ari Brown, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a pediatrician of 28 years, based out of Austin, Texas. Typically developing children will be day trained between ages 2 to 3 1/2, and night-time training can take a few years longer, she said.

By 5, most children know how to use the bathroom. But having an accident at that age isn’t uncommon, and there are plenty of medical and behavioral reasons for these mishaps that have nothing to do with knowing how to use a toilet, Brown said. They can include physical complaints like constipation, fear of loud auto-flushing toilets, anxiety about large, crowded school bathrooms, or worry about asking a teacher for permission to leave.

“This is not a ‘toilet training’ issue and it should not preclude a child from attending school,” Brown said.

Although the legislation proposed in Utah allows for exceptions among students with a documented disability, Brown said medical issues like constipation might not show up on an individualized education program.

The Utah Department of Education does not track bathroom incidents in classrooms, and several local districts said they also have no data on this. The communications director for Alpine School District, the largest school system in Utah, said potty training incidents in the classroom is “not a trend that has surfaced as a concern (knock on wood).”

A communications administrator for the Nebo School District — located in an area represented by the bill’s sponsor — echoed that sentiment. “According to the teachers we have heard from, the rates are the same as they have always been, and there has not been a noticeable change,” he said.

But state leaders have heard otherwise.

Christine Elegante, a K-3 literacy specialist with the Utah Department of Education, said she heard from school districts that potty training kindergarteners was not a concern.

But she heard a different story when she had a statewide meeting with kindergarten program leaders.

“I was really taken aback by how many said that it was a problem, that they were seeing more and more kids that did not have the skillset they needed to be able to toilet themselves. If they had an accident, they weren’t capable of changing themselves,” Elegante said. “It was a bigger, more widespread problem that we hadn’t really heard of.”

After that meeting, Elegante said she heard from more elementary school principals who reported that potty training has become a bigger problem in kindergarten classrooms since the pandemic, particularly during this school year.

Elegante doesn’t know why students might be struggling with potty training more this year than any other, but she said schools have increased the number of full-day kindergarten classes they offer starting this year. Last year, 46 percent of kindergarteners in Utah were in a full-day program. This year, 77 percent attend full-day kindergarten. A full-day program essentially doubles the amount of time students are at school, from being in class for two to three hours a day to six or seven hours.

The increase in the amount of time in class could account for the rise in the likelihood that a child will have an accident at school. However, it doesn’t explain the claim that more kindergarteners do not know how to use the bathroom.

This isn’t the first time in recent years potty training in school has come up — pre-K teachers in Buffalo, New York, petitioned the school district to create a policy on potty training in 2019 because they said diaper-changing was taking up class time.

Unlike Utah, New York and New Jersey have laws that prevent schools from barring children from class because they are not potty trained.

Child care workers have always dealt with potty training, but schools are increasingly dealing with this for a simple reason: Children are coming to school at younger ages because there are far more pre-K classes located in schools than in years past, said Zeynep Ercan, president of the National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators.

“You have public school teachers who are not used to seeing this kind of variation in development, and now they feel as though they have to be the caregivers [as well as] educators. These two concepts are always a conflict in child care and education systems,” Ercan said.

The expansion of pre-K is a good thing, Ercan said, but it also requires schools to adapt their environments.

“The issue is, how can we make our environments more developmentally appropriate for children? How are we ready for the children, versus how are children ready for it?” Ercan said.

Even though it’s unclear if schools are seeing more kindergarten students attend class in diapers, teachers can help prevent accidents by being flexible about when children go to the bathroom, said Brown, the Austin pediatrician.

“Teachers can play a pivotal role in normalizing the need to use the bathroom when the urge occurs and not stigmatizing a child who needs to stop their learning to do so,” Brown said.

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

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