The purpose of this project was to develop a research background for a Poughkeepsie non-profit that is working on providing High-Quality Early Childhood Education (HQECE) to the children and families of the community.

In recent decades, policymakers have turned to early care and education to counter poverty’s negative impact on children ages 0-5. Nevertheless, families and early care centers struggle to find enough resources to access and provide HQECE. The Day One Early Learning Community was recently launched to tackle these challenges in the City of Poughkeepsie.

With this ambitious goal in mind, Professor Riess and I launched into an evaluation of the current state of early childhood education (ECE) in the United States, focusing on three main areas: practice, policy, and long-term results. Our starting point was the notion that there are three perspectives, each with specific concerns, involved in ECE: teachers, who rely on proper compensation and work environments; parents, who rely on options that are both, high-quality and affordable; and children, who rely on stimulating interactions.

Given ECE’s current set-up as a heavily privatized market with little public investment, it is challenging to meet the demands of these three perspectives, leading scholars to argue in favor of increasing public funding for HQECE. However, considering that accomplishing this shift will take a considerable amount of time, we continued to focus on the impact of current policies and practices on performance. With this, our research dealt with the topics of teacher compensation, public investment and scaled-up programs, model programs, and economic returns.

Our final products are a set of three databases focused on literature, visuals, and facts, and a series of executive summaries. Both attempt to synthesize the available knowledge on HQECE and hence serve as a resource for Day One’s community outreach.