The 1960s witnessed major innovations in early childhood education in the United States with the creation of programs such as Head Start and television shows such as “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” But since then, there’s been an ongoing debate about just how much early childhood education is necessary and whether it’s the best investment of public dollars.
Isabelle Hau, who heads up the U.S. education efforts at Omidyar Network, hopes those debates will soon be a thing of the past. With new supply and demand for early childhood education, the U.S. is reaching a tipping point, as she writes in Omidyar Network’s newly released “Big Ideas, Little Learners: Early Childhood Trends Report 2019.” She sat down to discuss the report and what it uncovered about the investment opportunities in early learning in the U.S.
Q: First, please tell me more about Omidyar Network’s education focus.
A: Omidyar Network’s education mission is to unlock human potential through learning by catalyzing people, ideas and systems – so every individual can contribute and thrive in a changing and interdependent world. Our education work operates globally, in Africa, Latin America, India and, of course, in the U.S. Our strategy in the U.S. focuses on early childhood education with a two-generation lens driving education attainment of both the young child and the parent, and economic mobility and flourishing of families as a result.
Q: So what is this “tipping point” in early childhood education that you mentioned?
A: Let’s start with where we are coming from, and that is a place of underfunding and scarcity. The statistics are telling: The United States spends only 0.3 percent of GDP on early childhood education, whereas the average for other developed countries is 0.7 percent, so we’re starting off behind.
What’s exciting is that so many things are coming together in early childhood education. We have evidence from science that early years matter in terms of brain development – both from a cognitive and a socio-emotional perspective. We also now have concrete results from years of study that show the positive economic impact of early childhood education, estimated at 13 percent return on investment by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman. Parents are investing more in early childhood, and voters express strong support for early childhood. Policymakers are responding with 18 recently elected governors having early childhood on their agenda, including a bold $1.8 billion proposal in early childhood by the new Governor in California.
Q: Is there any way to track or measure this increased interest in early childhood education?
A: Yes, we can track it at multiple levels.
On the public side, there has been an 18 percent increase in public funding for early childhood education over the last two years – which is by far the fastest-growing age segment being funded in education, with public funding in K-12 largely flat and trending down in higher ed.
On the private side, early childhood has also experienced a 13 percent increase in private funding flowing to early childhood over the past two years.
Parents are investing more in early childhood – especially those with the ability to do so — and employers are also looking at new ways to support their employee base. For example, Starbucks announced in late 2018 it would begin providing subsidized backup child care days for employees.
Q: Can you share some of these new innovation trends?
A: Absolutely! We are excited about innovations we are seeing in several areas.
First there is an innovation trend around child care platforms that are being used to empower the early childhood distributed workforce. For example, All Our Kin provides coaching to home-based child care providers. Wonderschool offers a platform for child care providers to connect and improve their business and care practices, and for parents to look for quality childcare.
Second, there is an exciting trend to reach each and every child. Genius Plaza, a multicultural education platform, is responding to the fact that America’s shifting demographics require early childhood classrooms to embrace cultural, racial, language and other differences (in 2017, more than 50 percent of children in the U.S. under the age of 5 were minorities). Waterford UPSTART delivers an evidenced-based solution in rural communities through a combination of a digital program paired with parental engagement. Our partner organizations Sesame Workshop, the LEGO Foundation and BRAC are doing exciting work with refugee children.
Third, there are great solutions in socio-emotional learning emerging. ThinkEqual offers a full socio-emotional learning curriculum. Tinkergarten focuses on creativity, empathy and resilience through guided play. Khan Academy Kids has integrated socio-emotional learning within its new platform focused on the whole child.
Fourth, there is also a trend to use tech to increase administrative efficiency – for example, Brightwheel is a mobile app that helps pre-K teachers and care providers manage their businesses, while also sending parents updates about their kids throughout the school day. Lastly, we are seeing new modalities to engage modern parents. For example, ParentPowered created Ready4K, an evidence-based family engagement curriculum delivered via text message. Every week, parents receive tips on how to promote their children’s development by building on existing routines, like pointing out the letters on shampoo bottles during bath time.
There are so many more trends and innovations in our report – please check out Big Ideas, Little Learners!
Q: What’s next? Where are you looking for innovations?
A: While we are moving from scarcity to possibility, there is still much more to be done if we want to see all our youngest learners, from all backgrounds, fully ready to learn and thrive. As you have seen, we are at a tipping point on the demand side with more proof, public awareness, and research about the critical years of early childhood. And as mentioned, there are already some exciting new innovations out there – but we still need to increase the supply to find better and new approaches to reach each and every child with quality, affordable solutions. This is especially needed in areas such as trauma-informed care and mental health, informal child care, professional development for educators, and inter-generational solutions supporting both the child and the parent in achieving their full potential.
For this, beyond innovations, we need to continue the trend of increasing funding for early childhood education to help spur this great progress. It is up to all of us to ensure that those innovations can be supported and talent can rise, so that all our littlest learners can unlock their full potential.
Read Omidyar Network’s new report Big Ideas, Little Learners: Early Childhood Trends Report 2019
