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.

Big scale-ups of “pre-K for all” are much more useful to politicians and the middle class than to the disadvantaged children most in need of help.

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.

The well-being of America’s most vulnerable kids is crucial to both their life chances and the success of our country as a whole. Failing to act on this issue condemns millions of our youngest citizens to a bad start that many can never overcome.

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.

While adding tens of thousands of pre-K slots in a matter of months makes for good headlines, it does not make for good pre-K.

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

While teachers are entitled to due process, the current system goes far beyond that, prioritizing the rehabilitation of ineffective teachers over ensuring adequate teaching for children.