Big Dollars for Little Kids: Early Childhood Education

After spending her day in an Albuquerque classroom with 3-year-olds, teaching them how to hold a pencil and other skills to prepare them for kindergarten, Ivydel Natachu puts on her organizing hat.

During the Covid-19 pandemic — as the lives of teachers and families changed exponentially — the 17-year veteran day care teacher got involved with Organizers in the Land of Enchantment, or OLÉ. The nonprofit advocacy group made up of working families has pushed New Mexico for more than a decade to increase its spending on early-childhood education and care. Many of Natachu’s colleagues have left the field in search of better pay. On average, child-care workers in New Mexico make $10.26 an hour, so she and other advocates are demanding increased wages starting at $18 an hour.

OLÉ’s organizing power has gotten a boost since 2021 from a group of a dozen grant makers — including the Irving Harris and Heising-Simons foundations and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative — which together donated $8 million to the Raising Child Care Fund. Grants from the fund help build the leadership power of parents, caregivers, and educators to fight for change so all children have access to affordable quality care and teachers earn livable wages.

While grant makers have historically put more resources into elementary and secondary education than early childhood, support for the youngest learners is on the rise. From 2006 to 2013, foundations over all gave at least $4.6 billion to support early-childhood education, according to data from Candid. From 2014 to 2021, that sum grew to $7.1 billion.
Grant makers are building on decades of philanthropic investments that have helped shape what early education and care look like in the United States. Some donors, including the billionaire J.B. Pritzker and the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, have supported research that provides evidence for how early experiences affect brain development, what young children and parents need to thrive, and how quality early-education programs provide long-term economic benefits to society.

Foundations have pooled money to fund high-quality schools, such as the Educare schools located around the United States, and pilot programs that help parents support their child’s development, demonstrating how the research could play out in real life.

Perhaps most notable, foundations have helped draw liberals and conservatives together to support policies that make child care and preschool more accessible and affordable and improve quality and worker pay. Now with the possibility that the House will come under Republican control in the midterm elections, foundation-supported groups are trying to work in key congressional districts to ensure that momentum on education continues regardless of what happens in November.

To be sure, the impetus for policy makers to act was the impact of the pandemic, which erased two decades of gains in public preschool enrollment and further exacerbated the child-care crisis. But by giving to nonprofit research and advocacy organizations across the political spectrum over many years, foundations have helped generate bipartisan support for early-childhood issues.

Those investments have helped fuel increases in government spending, including during the pandemic, when a broad coalition of advocates successfully lobbied for a major infusion of federal support for child care and early education through three pandemic relief bills. However, even as foundation and government funding has increased, donors say there’s still a lot of work to do searching for solutions to expand access to quality early education and care for more children and to support the educator work force.

“We haven’t seen the scale of change or investment that we want,” says Shannon Rudisill, executive director of the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, a group of some 60 grant makers that launched the pooled fund supporting groups like OLÉ.
In recent years, OLÉ has raised more than $1 million annually to support its work. Money from the Raising Child Care Fund is used to train more parents and educators, like Natachu, to do community organizing, public speaking, and increase their understanding of a constitutional amendment on the ballot in New Mexico this November.

Kitty Clark

The measure would dedicate an estimated $127 million in new state funding each year for universal prekindergarten, expanded child-care assistance, and home-visiting programs for new parents. This year, in response to Covid, New Mexico provided free child care to most families, and child-care professionals like Natachu got raises. If the ballot measure passes, those changes would become permanent.
Natachu uses social media to reach out to other educators and travels to day care centers and preschools to explain OLÉ’s policy goals and ask for their support in November. She hopes more state funding that enables higher pay will help reduce educator turnover and labor shortages in a field that is so critical for children and their families.

“We’re not babysitters,” she says, “We’re actually teaching children at their most critical time of development. With all that we’re doing as teachers for these kids, we feel we deserve those wages.”

Influence on Government Funding

Philanthropy’s support of research on early brain development and the economics of high-quality education for kids under 5 has helped lay the groundwork for change.

Through their foundations, donors like J.B. Pritzker, who is now the governor of Illinois and whose family owns the Hyatt Hotel chain, and Susie Buffett, Warren Buffett’s eldest child, have supported groundbreaking research from Nobel Prize-winner James Heckman, which has shown that preschool programs can be an effective way to break the cycle of poverty.

Heckman studied the impact of experiments in high-quality preschool programs in the 1960s and ‘70s, like the Perry Preschool Project, which provided two years of preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds from low-income families in Ypsilanti, Mich. His research team found the project had a significant effect on those children throughout their lives. They were more likely to graduate from high school and earned significantly more than their peers.

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Courtesy of Zero to Three

For Early-Childhood Grant Makers, Collaboration Is Key

The Buffett Early Childhood Fund, which receives tens of millions of dollars annually from Susie Buffett’s Sherwood Foundation to sustain its work, also supports early-childhood research. The Erikson Institute, a graduate school of child development in Chicago co-founded by the late philanthropist Irving Harris, and the Harvard Center for the Developing Child are among the Buffett Fund’s other longtime beneficiaries.

Through these organizations and others, foundations have helped get the word out about scientific findings to policy makers and the broader public. After years of support from philanthropies, “early-childhood brain science is common science,” says Helene Stebbins, of Alliance for Early Success, a nonprofit that supports state-level early-childhood advocacy and programs.

Stebbins traces a line from that grant making to how the government has changed its rationale for early-childhood spending over the years.

When the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant was launched in 1990, it was pitched as a program to fund child care so parents could work, she says. By the time the block-grant program — the primary federal funding source for child care for eligible low-income working families — won a bipartisan extension in 2014, child development was added as a purpose for the funding.

“That was a really, really important milestone,” Stebbins says.

During the 2021 fiscal year, the federal program made $9.5 billion available to states, territories, and tribes.

The amount of money for the federal government’s three main early-childhood programs — Head Start, Early Head Start, and the block-grant program — has been on the rise. But they’re still funded at low levels — not enough to help every eligible child from a low-income family. In 2019, only one in nine eligible children under age 6 received subsidized care through the block-grant program.

And while preschool enrollment was increasing before the pandemic, access to preschool was far from universal. Now enrollment is declining.

In 2020, about 40 percent of 3- to 4-year-olds were enrolled in school, a decline from 54 percent in 2019. That dip was largely due to pandemic-related school closures. Among state-funded programs, the 2020 to ’21 school year marked the first time in two decades that preschool enrollment declined, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. Low-income families were hit the hardest, with enrollment dipping from 47 percent pre-pandemic to 31 percent by the fall of 2021.

Daniel Johnson for The Chronicle

Even if states recoup losses due to the pandemic and return to previous enrollment growth rates, they are likely to enroll just 40 percent of 4-year-olds and 8 percent of 3-year-olds 10 years from now.

“The next frontier is access,” Stebbins says. “Advocates must make it untenable for a state to provide these crucial programs to only tiny slivers of the children and families that need them.”

‘Front and Center’ Issue

As philanthropy stepped up support of early-childhood education, more dollars have flowed to advocacy to encourage increased government funding at the state and national levels.

For instance, in 2008, donors to early-childhood programs such as the Pritzker Children’s Initiative and the Irving Harris Foundation, which had been giving to nonprofits at the state and local levels, realized that a bigger investment in federal advocacy could lead to greater impact. Several of the donors had roots in Chicago and elsewhere in the state, and with former Illinois senator Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, they were about to have an ally in the White House.

Start Early, a nonprofit founded by Irving Harris, formerly known as the Ounce of Prevention Fund, became the home of a new federally focused advocacy group — the First Five Years Fund. Today that group, whose annual budget is $4.5 million to $5 million, has helped secure additional federal dollars for early-childhood education and is backed financially by a dozen donors, including the Ballmer Group, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures.

Philanthropy’s investment in research helped open doors with lawmakers, says Charlie Joughin, managing director of public affairs at the First Five Years Fund. “At least for the last 10 years or so, policy makers have had a better understanding about things like the brain science and the return on investment,” he says. “We weren’t starting from scratch with the people who matter most on Capitol Hill.”

Courtesy of Zero to Three

The advocacy landscape focused on early learning has grown significantly over the past couple of years as advocates of paid family leave and child care have come together with labor groups, creating a stronger coalition. The pandemic played a role as well.

“We are very much a front-and-center political issue in a way that we have always wanted to be and worked towards,” Joughin says. “The pandemic accelerated that in a way that would have taken us years to get to this point.”

One of advocates’ biggest wins came during the pandemic, when a total of $50 billion in federal relief funds — through the Cares Act, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriation Act, and the American Rescue Plan — went to support and stabilize early-childhood education and care providers and the families served.

“The ability to secure that level of funding is quite amazing,” says Barbara Chow, who leads the Heising-Simons Foundation’s early-education work, which gives both national and California-focused grants. “I’m still in awe of the fact that the field was able to do that.”

Federal spending on child care and early-childhood education increased 76 percent from 2008 to 2022, according to the First Five Years Fund.

In the spring of 2020, the organization launched its 501(c)(4) arm, a social-welfare organization that has more legal freedom to pursue an active role in lobbying for government financing than charitable organizations. Grant makers such as the Heising-Simons Action Fund have supported that work.

States have started to spend the federal relief money and will continue to over the next few years. But a one-time infusion of federal dollars isn’t enough, says Rudisill of the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative. “The next question is how do we sustain this movement for progress and get where we need to go, which is more public investment,” she says.

Advocates viewed the Build Back Better bill as a momentous opportunity to expand the number of families eligible for free preschool and child-care assistance subsidies. Despite disappointment that that legislation is effectively dead, Phyllis Glink, executive director of the Irving Harris Foundation, sees evidence of progress in the fact that the legislation included such a large infusion of funds to benefit children under age 6. A total of $100 billion was proposed over the first three years.

It’s evidence that donors’ long-term investments in policy and advocacy organizations have paid off, she says. Early-childhood care and education is no longer the first issue to get knocked off a list of policy maker priorities. “Before we wouldn’t have even been on there,” Glink says, of Build Back Better. “This is the first time we were like the last issue standing.”

Advocates had their sights on ensuring that the next big federal budget measure included investments in child care. But the Inflation Reduction Act passed in early August excludes such funding. Now advocates are putting a lot of their energy and dollars into pressing states to do more.

Bipartisan Support

By supporting nonprofit groups across the political spectrum, advocates think philanthropy deserves some credit for building bipartisan support for the youngest learners.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, a longtime early-childhood grant maker, has supported centrist and right-leaning organizations focusing on early-childhood issues, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Niskanen Center, and the Bipartisan Policy Center. Grants from the foundation support research that helps give conservative policy makers an understanding of the issues and ways to prioritize early-childhood education in policy agendas, says Jon-Paul Bianchi, a senior program officer who has led Kellogg’s national early-childhood grant making for more than a decade.

Those centrist and right-leaning groups’ motivations and justification for supporting early-childhood programs sometimes look different than those of advocates on the left — focusing, for example, on how child care is essential to economic growth and to allowing parents to find and keep jobs. But the result, Bianchi says, is that “in the current era of increasing polarization, policymakers on both sides of the aisle have made early childhood a priority.”

The largest bump in the Child Care and Development Block Grant program — a $2.37 billion increase — occurred during President Donald Trump’s administration, for example.

With foundation support, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Bipartisan Policy Center have hosted gatherings that bring business leaders, advocates, educators, and families from both the left and right together to talk about the benefits of supporting early-childhood education. The idea is to help create common ground to build momentum for legislative changes that appeal to diverse audiences. The fact that early-childhood education is delivered in a mix of public and private settings, in schools and homes, and by faith-based providers appeals to advocates and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Bianchi says.

In an effort to ensure early-child concerns maintain broad support, Kellogg is working with the Packard Foundation and other donors to hold more local events, some in congressional districts where seats may change parties in the midterm elections.

Joughin, of the First Five Years Fund, says early-childhood issues draw bipartisan support for another reason. “A lot of Americans have seen the effect that not having child care has had on either their lives or someone in their families’ lives or somebody they work with,” he says. “That has really opened some doors in terms of ability to make gains in Congress on this issue on both sides of the aisle.”

Demonstrating Quality

While grant makers agree that government has to be a part of the solution, philanthropy has an important role to play in funding innovation and filling gaps.

Grant makers have been instrumental in helping to demonstrate what quality early care or education — which nurtures a child’s physical, intellectual, social, and emotional development — can look like. One example is Educare, a nationwide network of schools that serves about 4,000 kids from low-income families from birth through age 5.

The idea came from a model early-learning program in the Robert Taylor Homes, a large public-housing development on Chicago’s South Side, that began in 1986. The Beethoven Project, funded with $1.2 million from the federal Department of Health and Human Services and the Irving Harris Foundation, provided prenatal care for mothers, developmental screenings for babies, parenting classes, and early education through age 5.
When the city began tearing down the homes, removing locations where services could be provided to families who lived there, Start Early developed what would become Educare Chicago. The first school opened in 2000.

Start Early is among the biggest recipients of early-childhood education philanthropy, raising at least $204.7 million from foundations since 2006, according to Candid. In addition to Educare, the nonprofit provides direct services such as home visiting and doula training in Illinois and works to expand early-childhood learning through federal and state funding.

The organization is just one example of how foundations focused on early childhood are pooling their resources.

“We each can do individual impactful things, but if we’re really going to establish institutionalized practices and policies, that’s a much bigger effort,” says Jessie Rasmussen, president of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund. “It really does take a collection of philanthropies to achieve that.”

The 25 Educare schools in urban, rural, and suburban neighborhoods across the country, including Washington, D.C., and the Winnebago Nation in Nebraska, are each funded by Head Start grants and other government funds as well as by philanthropy.

For every four classrooms, the schools employ a mentor teacher who helps coach educators to improve their professional skills and learn to develop individualized plans for children. The Educare schools also seek to engage families as partners in their child’s development. Some schools, like Educare Seattle and Educare Flint, in Michigan, have Parent Ambassador programs that train parents to advocate for policy changes like more inclusive eligibility requirements and increases in teacher compensation.

Every school participates in rigorous evaluations, working with universities and other research institutions to study program quality and the schools’ impact on children.

What Philanthropy Has Accomplished

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In the evaluations, Educare students are shown to outperform low-income peers in other schools on vocabulary assessments. And the more time young people spend in Educare schools, the higher they rate on tests of social-emotional skills. The majority of Educare parents report spending time with their children at least three times a week in activities like talking about their school day or reading to them. But the impact goes beyond children who attend these schools.

The data from the evaluations and other research informs broader changes in the early-childhood education field. Over the past few years, more than 600 educators who are not affiliated with Educare schools have participated in professional development training that helps spread the network’s research-based approaches, such as how to collect and interpret data to make decisions that support an individual child’s learning.

Educare has helped shape a program financed by the state of Nebraska and private sources to make high-quality early care and education available to more infants and toddlers who need extra help before kindergarten because they face barriers to success such as poverty and premature births.

With a $20 million grant, matched by $40 million from the state, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund helped develop an endowment — called the Sixpence Early Learning Fund, named for the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.”

To win the government portion of those funds, Nebraska had to pass a constitutional amendment. Buffett awarded $1 million to the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation, which led the advocacy effort in favor of the amendment.

Grants from the Sixpence fund are distributed to school districts that work with providers of high-quality early-care and learning services as well as home-visiting programs that coach parents and caregivers. As the Sixpence Fund board developed the quality standards that would make a group eligible to receive funding, it largely based them on the first Omaha Educare school, Rasmussen says. Since it began, the program has served more than 6,000 infants and toddlers across the state.

“People had seen how that worked, how that made a difference,” says Rasmussen.

Many Shades of Impact

Early-childhood donors measure the results of their giving in a wide array of ways. Success may be more government dollars flowing into programs or more children entering kindergarten ready to learn. And some measure achievement based on who was at the table when a policy was designed or whether organizations and leaders are working toward a common goal.

In evaluating their results, grant makers should take a broad view of their work in the context in which children and families live and work, says Sherri Killins Stewart, a director at the Build Initiative, an organization that helps states improve how they serve young children.

Grant makers often focus only on education or on the education work force but don’t connect that work to broader issues related to child and family well-being like health and housing, she says. Such efforts that fail to address these other factors that may hold children back from achieving their potential can restrict leaders’ ability to define the best solutions.

“Young children are nested in families, which are nested in communities, which are nested in state and federal policies and resources and support,” she says. And that’s where donor dollars are essential. “Philanthropy has the ability to cross all of those and kind of tie it together.”

In New Mexico, Ivydel Natachu and OLÉ and other early-childhood advocacy organizations are still working to win approval for the November ballot measure to increase state funding. But the state has already made changes that by some measures make it a national leader.

In 2020, it launched its Early Childhood Education and Care Department — one of just six states with a stand-alone department dedicated to services for children under age 5. The department has a permanent revenue source fueled by a $320 million early-childhood trust fund.

The longtime work of advocates from urban, rural, and tribal communities across the state, many of them backed by foundations, was instrumental in making that happen, says Bianchi, of the Kellogg foundation.

“They’re tackling the early-childhood system in a comprehensive way that touches everything from governance to financing to quality to teacher support,” Bianchi says.

While New Mexico has ranked at or near the bottom in terms of the multiple indicators of child well-being, such as child poverty, these changes are evidence of transformation, he says. “It’s a really big deal for the state. and it’ll be a really big deal for families and kids for years to come.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. See more about the grant and our gift-acceptance policy.