When it comes to pre-K, we seem to have forgotten that kindergarten test scores aren’t the goal of early human development.

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.

Business leaders have long understood the importance of a well-educated workforce to support a strong economy, keep America competitive globally, and ensure a vibrant democracy.

Advancing access to high-quality childcare is a wise investment in America’s future — strengthening business today while building the workforce we’ll depend on tomorrow and for decades to come.

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.

For low-income and working-class Americans, access to high-quality child care is essential to achieving the American Dream.

Done right, high-quality early childhood programs can help to level the playing field for disadvantaged kids before they enter school. But no program can inoculate children to the damaging effects of poor-quality education down the line.

It’s hard to see how funneling a little more money into a badly underperforming, inefficient system will result in the “high quality” schools promised by Issue 44 promoters.

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?

Parents are their children’s first and most important teachers. Yet many don’t recognize how deeply influential they are on their child’s development.

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?

Widely cited early childhood programs vary greatly in both design and results. The research on these programs shows neither that “pre-K works” not that it doesn’t; rather, it shows that some early childhood programs yield particular outcomes, sometimes, for some children.

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

A couple of weeks ago, RAND released a report on public pre-K, announcing that high-quality pre-K "works." But the research showing pre-K's impacts is weaker than commonly understood, and the impacts shown are much less important than reported.

We know that pre-K can work, but not enough about what makes it work and how.