Our Work

Issue Brief: Health Insurance for the Earl Childhood Workforce

Developed in collaboration with Opportunities Exchange, this issue brief explores the ways in which early care and education providers can leverage the infrastructure and financial supports through the Affordable Care Act to directly offer health insurance to their staff. Informed by our growing body of work in supporting access to health insurance for the early childhood workforce, in this brief Pillars offers practical, actionable guidance on how to catalyze a necessary paradigm shift in the field, in which health benefits for early educators are the norm in the sector, not the exception.

Guide: Early Care and Education Workforce Salary Scale Playbook: Implementation Guide

Pillars supported the National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance in developing Early Care and Education Workforce Salary Scale Playbook. The Playbook is an implementation guide designed to provide practical guidance on five essential actions that state, local, and program leaders should consider in the process of building and implementing a comprehensive, equitable salary scale for early educators and caregivers.

Analysis: Arkansas LEARNS Act: Child Care Licensing Analysis

In 2023, the Arkansas legislature passed Senate Bill 294, known as the Arkansas LEARNS Act, which aims to increase literacy rates, expand school choice, improve accountability systems, enhance career-ready pathways, and strengthen the early childhood system. Among the early childhood activities, the LEARNS Act requires the Office of Early Childhood (OEC) to “reduce any burdensome, unnecessary rules for the licensing of child care facilities; and report on the reduction of rules...to the General Assembly.” Pillars supported OEC in performing this analysis.

Report: Colorado Early Childhood Compensation & Benefits Task Force

Despite the integral role of early childhood educators, low wages and a lack of benefits are causing national staffing shortages and reducing available child care options for families. In response, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood launched the Early Childhood Compensation & Benefits Task Force to address the undercompensation of the early childhood workforce. This report outlines a plan for state action and investment in fairly compensating the early childhood workforce, including recommendations for salary scales, stipends, and benefits.

Report: Workforce Compensation

A robust early childhood care and education workforce is at the heart of any solution to stabilize the child care sector, and adequate compensation is pivotal to that end. That reality comes through in the PDG B-5 grant applications; many states demonstrate a keen focus on supporting workforce compensation. This brief explores and synthesizes the strategies to increase compensation that states proposed in their PDG B-5 grant applications.

Report: Career Pathways

This brief focuses on the ways that states are using PDG B-5 grant funding to create and sustain career pathways in the early care and education field. “Career pathways” are broadly defined here, referring to a wide range of activities that support prospective and current early educators in advancing in the profession. States’ initiatives span an early educator’s complete career trajectory, from strategies to recruit new candidates into the profession to initiatives that create new specializations for educators who want to propel their careers further.

Brief: LR378: Child Care Subsidy Reimbursement Rates

Nebraska’s subsidy reimbursement rate process affects the stability of the state’s early childhood providers and the working families that depend on them. This brief discusses the role of child care in supporting the economy, challenges with Nebraska’s subsidy reimbursement rates, and alternatives to the market rate approach.

Report: Setting Child Care Subsidy Reimbursement Rates: Nebraska’s market rate survey and other methodologies

Child care subsidies help low-income families access care, allowing parents to participate in the workforce and economy. However, using market rates to calculate subsidy reimbursement rates creates financial challenges for providers, affecting the availability and quality of these settings for subsidy families. This report and brief address the questions in Legislative Resolution 378, which is an interim study that examines the implications of the market rate survey, alternative methodologies, and the reimbursement rate-setting process in Nebraska and five other states.

Analysis: Why and How to Improve Pre-K Assessments: What Do Head Start Providers Think?

Pre-k assessments provide critical information for educators, families, and state and local leaders. This blog discusses priorities that Head Start educators shared in a brief survey about the challenges and opportunities for improvement in early learning assessments. These priorities include the need for assessments to capture social-emotional skills, generate useful information, strengthen communication between educators and parents, and be more equitable and culturally relevant.

Brief: A State Scan of Early Learning Assessments and Data Systems

Building on our work on early learning assessments and data, we gathered information from interviews with 53 state partners and highlighted examples of how states approach pre-k assessments and data systems. Key questions include:

Does the state have any specific considerations for assessments for dual language learners?

Does the state use a standard student identifier?

What type of technology does the state use to maintain and hold its early learning data?

Analysis: A Continued Call to Action: Building a Comprehensive Birth-to-Three Strategy in D.C.

Through this brief, we share D.C.’s infant/toddler story — the recent investments and decisions, the evolution of its approach and strategies, and the people who made this progress possible. As other state and community leaders seek to create comprehensive systems of care for young children and their families, D.C.’s story shows what the future might look like.

Analysis: Improving Child Care Compensation Backgrounder

Issues with early educator compensation are complex and multifaceted. Compensation systems need large-scale overhaul, but that level of change requires time - and early educators need financial relief now.

States and territories are simultaneously pursuing both short-term fixes and long-term reforms. The Compensation Backgrounder providers leaders with tactical information for how to increase compensation for early educators.

Op-ed: “To fight poverty, we need a two-generation strategy”

If President Biden wants the government to work for people again, a good place to start is making it work for low-income families.

The administration should pursue a two-generation social and education initiative — using existing funding streams and infrastructure — to efficiently and effectively support the country’s most vulnerable families.

Analysis: Bringing Home-Based Child Care Providers Into the Fold

Any effort to improve access to and quality of early care and education must not repeat the mistakes of the past. Specifically, home-based child care providers — those who do not operate out of more formal settings, like schools or centers — must be truly brought into the fold of the early childhood ecosystem.

Op-ed: “Schools need help bringing special-needs kids back to class”

Since COVID-19 upended American life, story after story has highlighted students with disabilities falling behind and families bringing lawsuits to force schools to serve students with special needs.

Schools must do more to focus on students with disabilities, but they can’t do it alone. Policymakers at the federal, state and local levels must provide resources and flexibility on in-person-focused requirements.

Op-ed: “Our schools need to do more. They should look to charters and early childhood for answers.”

We know from other crises that traumatic effects are long-lasting for students. Schools should make the whole-child approach their core mission—and should be provided with the resources to do so. Leaders around the country and the world are looking for examples of how to do this work effectively.

Analysis: Broader, Fairer, Deeper: Strategies to Radically Expand the Talent Pool in ECE

The early childhood workforce is the key to a stronger, more resilient future for our country, but educators are often underprepared and undersupported.

This report explores how early childhood educator preparation could be improved for the educators themselves, as well as for the children and families they serve.

Analysis: Improving Early Childhood Educator Preparation and Compensation

This series includes three publications:

• A comprehensive exploration of issues the field faces to determine why states struggle to make progress for the early educator workforce, where progress should be made, and what barriers need to be overcome.

• A detailed look at on-the-ground experiences that demonstrate why reform is so difficult, providing insight into how the field effects change, particularly as circumstances become increasingly dire.

• A deeper look at educator preparation systems—their role in the early care and education system and why institutions of higher education and states need to consider this key component.

Analysis: Promise in the Time of Quarantine: Exploring Schools’ Responses to COVID-19

COVID-19 has altered education as we know it, and no one school has found the perfect approach to distance learning. Every school struggles with the dual priorities of sustaining student learning and ensuring students are safe, fed, and well, all outside of the school building.

However, some schools more quickly adopted promising practices in response to common challenges, offering lessons for other schools seeking to improve their distance learning models.

Report: 50-State Early Educator Policy and Practice Research

Analysis: Leading by Exemplar: Lessons from Highly Effective Head Start Programs

The Leading by Exemplar project is a multi-year study of five Head Start programs that demonstrate significant positive impacts on children’s learning outcomes. In this project, every aspect of the Head Start exemplars’ program design and practice was closely examined in an effort to understand each program’s “secret sauce.”

Leading by Exemplar has three goals: to identify Head Start programs that are producing powerful results for children, elevate them as proof points of what is possible for the field, and inform policy and other efforts to improve early learning outcomes.

Analysis: Leading by Exemplar: Case Studies of Head Start Programs

Op-ed: “By 2023 all DC early childhood teachers will need a degree. But will they actually learn anything?”

In an attempt to elevate the child care profession and in turn increase compensation, advocates have pushed to increase degree requirements for early childhood educators. Five years from now, all lead teachers in child care centers in DC (and many other places) will be required to hold an associate degree in early childhood education. That may seem like a low bar — particularly since teachers in public schools typically have bachelor’s degrees — but it’s a radical change from the status quo.

Op-ed: “New Mexico’s $10 million bet on teacher recruitment”

Six out of 10 students of color in New Mexico will go through their entire schooling without ever having a teacher who looks like them. That’s a problem: Research has repeatedly shown that students, particularly students of color, benefit academically from having a same-race teacher.

The good news is that the state is taking steps to address this student-teacher diversity gap. The bad news, however, is that the state may be putting most of its eggs in the wrong basket.

Analysis: Reforming Head Start for the 21st century

Head Start was born in 1965 as a federal program that aimed to lift America’s neediest children out of poverty and enhance their lifetime opportunities. Today, Head Start continues to play an important role in our nation’s early learning and development system; it serves nearly 1 million children and remains the only preschool option for poor children in many communities. Yet Head Start faces real challenges if it is to remain relevant and competitive.

In this article, we examine the major actions undertaken by bipartisan policymakers to improve Head Start and propose three distinct prescriptions of our own.

Analysis: Let the Research Show: Developing the Research to Improve Early Childhood Teacher Preparation

Policymakers and advocates are doing all they can to support early educators’ classroom practice, often through improving the quality of their preparation. But as a field, we know next to nothing about how to prepare an effective early educator.

“Let the Research Show” digs into the research on how an early educator’s preparation affects their effectiveness in the classroom — and ultimately finds that there are no clear answers about what high-quality teacher preparation looks like.

Analysis: The Charter Model Goes to Preschool

Over the past 20 years, both charter schools and pre-kindergarten education have taken on increasingly prominent roles in the schooling of America’s children.

This growth is far from accidental. Yet recent research also suggests that neither high-quality charter schools nor pre-K alone may sufficiently level the playing field between children in poverty and their middle-class peers over the long term.

This point raises an intriguing question: What happens if we combine high-performing charter schools with high-quality pre-K education? Could the combination of these two reforms produce a result better than the sum of its parts?

Appearance: Pre-K Charter Schools

Discussion of Education Next article in the Winter 2017 issue on pre-K programs at charter schools in the U.S.

This program was part of a “Washington Journal” series highlighting recent magazine articles.

Op-ed: “A roadmap for better teacher prep”

Late last week, after five years of deliberation and debate, the U.S. Department of Education released new regulations to hold the nation's teacher preparation programs accountable for the quality of their graduates. The controversial regulations require states to track the performance of new teachers after they enter the classroom, use the data to rank programs based on how well they prepared those teachers, and then publicly report the findings. For a sector unaccustomed to much accountability, this is radical.