The compelling promise of the early childhood focus is its real potential to close the opportunity gap and significantly improve outcomes for the nation’s most disadvantaged children.

Despite the widely-repeated claims, pre-K doesn’t give disadvantaged children a strong start, and it doesn’t provide useful child care for large numbers of working parents.

Katharine Stevens joins James Pethokoukis to discuss the current state of research on early childhood education. Is there any evidence that universal pre-K would have the results that policymakers increasingly claim?

While early childhood has rapidly been moving into the national spotlight, much of early childhood research remains weak and ill-focused. A $35.5 million grant given to Harvard last month could make a big impact in moving high quality research forward.

Failing to differentiate among early childhood programs results in misleading polls about support for pre-K.

Does pre-K work? We don’t know — and it’s the wrong question to be asking. The critical question is: what are the most effective early interventions for improving disadvantaged children’s lives?

Four business leaders join Katharine Stevens to discuss the role of business leadership in the expanding early childhood field.

Is the current research base sufficient to guide new and expanding early childhood initiatives? Katharine Stevens hosts a panel of four prominent scholars to discuss the state of early childhood research. While some argue that current knowledge provides adequate support for growing pre-K programs, others suggest that stronger evidence is needed.

Today’s federal early care and education policies are fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex. Federal policymaking is driven by coping with what exists rather than by what we are trying to accomplish: giving America’s least-advantaged children a fair chance at a happy, productive life.

Instead of launching a costly and unproven program for 4-year-olds, California should invest in helping vulnerable, young children in the home and in child care.

Despite decades of effort and trillions of dollars, neither preschool nor other reforms have made a difference by the time it really matters: when children finish school.

Our current debates over early education are confined to well-worn, counterproductive ruts in the early childhood policy road.

Building new bureaucracies or tacking preschool programs onto failing public schools are not the correct strategies for moving forward. Instead, we should target funding at the most vulnerable children, strengthen existing federal programs rather than create new bureaucracies, and promote research and innovation to raise the bar for action.

Minnesota’s fascinating preschool battle drags on, highlighting crucial questions for the expansion of early education across the country.

Jack P. Shonkoff, director of the Center of the Developing Child at Harvard University joins Robert Doar and Katharine Stevens to discuss the science of early learning and how it can be harnessed to improve opportunity for disadvantaged children.

Minnesota’s unusual debate highlights three crucial questions that the growing early care and education sector is increasingly going to face as more initiatives get off the ground across the country.

Early education is starting with a clean and unencumbered slate. This is the right time to make crucial decisions about how teachers should be prepared to educate very young children.

State leaders have an extraordinary opportunity to build effective early childhood systems right, from the ground up. Here is what they should do — and what they shouldn't — to accomplish that.

Early education advocates would be wise to remember the fundamental value of school choice and what it means for the long-term viability of the early education sector.

It’s important to remember that getting money in the budget isn’t enough to realize the promise of early education. How early learning programs are designed and carried out is as important as whether they’re done at all.