Today’s early care and education programs must have two purposes. First, support parents’ work in a 24/7 economy, and second, advance children’s healthy growth and learning during the most crucial period of human development.

We must find new ways to promote and leverage growing state commitment to early childhood, to incentivize state innovation, and to highlight strategies and activities of currently leading states.

A two-generation approach that eliminates silos between current federal programs and reduces regulatory and fiscal barriers to innovation can break the cycle of intergenerational poverty — advancing opportunity for two generations simultaneously.

Pay for Success can’t solve every social challenge alone. But it holds great promise as a bipartisan approach to build more effective, efficient and responsive government programs.

Four national experts explain the Pay for Success model, an innovative new approach to public financing that improves social programs’ effectiveness and advances evidence-based policymaking.

An 80-year legacy of federal policymaking in early childhood has left us with a hodgepodge of fragmented funding streams, disconnected from each other and from a clear, coherent purpose.

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.

Eighty years ago today, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the 37-page Social Security Act (SSA) of 1935 into law, enacting the most fundamental change in social policy in America’s history. But the program's original focus on children’s human flourishing has largely been lost.

An innovative public financing approach known as Pay For Success provides a way to break the cycle of ineffective government spending on social programs.

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.

Voluntary home visiting programs, while not as well-known as Head Start or pre-K, may be the single most promising approach to improving the lives of America’s most disadvantaged young children.

Research shows that good preschool can be critical to young children’s development and is insufficiently accessible to poor and working-class families. But new federal grants are paying states to institutionalize a misguided conception of quality, repeating the same mistakes that the education establishment has been making in K-12 for decades.

An important new study reanalyzed data from the Head Start Impact Study, showing that some Head Start centers are effective while others are not.

The most striking aspect of the newly-reauthorized federal childcare program is its pivotal shift from seeing child care solely as a babysitting service for working parents to recognizing it, too, as a crucial opportunity for young children’s early development and learning.

For pre-K, the outcomes of the governors’ races will make much more of a difference than who controls the US Senate.