The years of early childhood serve as a critical opportunity not only to support the academic, physical, and social-emotional development of young children, but to demonstrate and reinforce America's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Young children benefit greatly from exposure to racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity…

The pandemic has amplified and exacerbated many of the existing challenges facing the field of early childhood education and care (ECEC) and forced the field to innovate and change much of what had become the status quo. The McCormick Center has a 30-year history of providing intensive (6-12 months in duration), cohesive (curriculum content is…

Early care and education (ECE) programs for children prior to kindergarten in California are provided through a mixed delivery system that includes licensed home- and center-based programs as well as school settings. The requirements, experience, and supports for educators vary widely across settings, depending more on funding sources and…

Strong evidence of the benefits of high-quality early childhood education for all children, and of the economic returns for the nation, has led to the rapid expansion of publicly funded prekindergarten (pre-K) in recent years and an explosion of interest among the public and policymakers in how best to increase access to high-quality early…

This document outlines strategies and guidance on collaborative funding strategies and mechanisms, including braided funding, to create and sustain high-quality inclusive regular early childhood settings that are inclusive of preschool children with disabilities. The use of federal funds is outlined specific to supporting young children with…

With support found in the literature for the utilization of push-in, or integrated therapy when providing speech language pathology, the use of a set of criteria for determining how therapy would be provided was evaluated in a preschool for children with special needs. Using a 5-item Likert scale, teachers and speech pathologists were surveyed…

While fiscal year 2012-2013 was a year of transition for the Office of Early Learning (OEL), fiscal year 2013-2014 proved to be a year when new leadership, organizational structure, direction and vision coalesced, producing results that demonstrated the office was moving in the right direction. The first day of the fiscal year--July 1, 2013--was…

Over the last decade, Colorado has emerged as a national leader in crafting innovative solutions for challenges facing its public school system. From implementing the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reforms to more recent legislation including standards and assessments for a preschool-through-college…

In 1997, New York State lawmakers passed the Universal Prekindergarten (UPK) legislation, a bold new approach to early childhood education. It established new part-day Pre-K programs that were free and open to all four-year-olds. Today, the state invests $414 million annually in Pre-K, which serves more than 100,000 children in public schools and…

Facing mounting evidence that California has fallen behind on many key indicators of educational performance, policymakers and the public share considerable interest in exploring whether California should expand public funding for preschool education. This expanded funding will be most effective if resources can be directed to their most efficient…

Today, policymakers with an interest in school success no longer debate why states should provide pre-kindergarten; that case has been made successfully to voters, educators, and researchers. Instead, policymakers now wrestle with how to get the job done. Increasingly, they turn to what those in the pre-k field call "diverse" or…

The federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) has launched a five-year initiative that will support state efforts to build comprehensive early childhood service systems. This initiative--the State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (SECCS) Initiative--provides planning and implementation grants to the state and territory Maternal and…

The UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities (CHCFC) has developed the School Readiness Critical Pathways (SRCPs) as an evidence-based conceptual model that links related outcomes and strategies. This helps to organize an array of broad and diffuse evidence regarding the strategies that produce school readiness outcomes for…

This report is designed to support the planning and implementation of the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (SECCS) Initiative. It addresses a set of principles that these agencies can use to advance their planning process, reach out to new partners, develop collaborative strategies, and build a…

In 2003, the Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) released a "Strategic Plan for Early Childhood Health." In recognition of the critical role states play in the development of early childhood initiatives and of the unique contributions that state Title V programs can make to these initiatives, the Bureau operationalized their…