Back to Basics: Essential Components of An American Early Care and Education System
Infrastructure and system are two words often neglected in discussions of early childhood policy. This paper is about these all-important and hidden “basics”. It offers a working definition of an early care and education system, and of its infrastructure. The paper unequivocally states that unless the system and the infrastructure are addressed and supported, there is little opportunity for achieving quality and the desired outcomes as a result of policy change.
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Work It Out Wombats! Family App
Fact Sheet February 27, 2025
Designed for adults and children to use together, the App has everything families need to have fun learning computational thinking (CT).
Bridging the Divide between Child Welfare and Home Visiting Systems to Address the Needs of Pregnant and Parenting Youth in Care
Article February 21, 2025
This article presents findings from an implementation study of a pilot project that connected pregnant and parenting youth in care with home visiting services. It draws primarily on semistructured interviews conducted with the practitioners who delivered those services and the parents who received them. We find that home visiting services can be delivered successfully to pregnant and parenting youth in care and that both practitioners and parents reported that parents benefit from those services. We also find that engaging and delivering services to pregnant and parenting youth in care presents substantial challenges and that home visiting programs sometimes deviated from their standard practices in response. The study has implications for future efforts to provide home visiting services to pregnant and parenting youth in care or to other families involved in the child welfare system.