Impact of the Early Learning Challenge on State Quality Rating and Improvement Systems
This resource is chapter 8 of BUILD's E-Book - Rising to the Challenge: Building Effective Systems for Young Children and Families. The E-Book shares learnings from the initial implementation of the Early Learning Challenge, the major federal funding initiative, launched in 2011, supporting states in developing high quality early childhood systems, especially targeted to children with high needs. This chapter discusses the impact of what many consider to be the centerpiece of the ELC: the requirement that states establish a tiered Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS), and describes benefits, early lessons, opportunities and future QRIS challenges.
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Workforce Compensation
Report August 29, 2023
A robust early childhood care and education workforce is at the heart of any solution to stabilize the child care sector, and adequate compensation is pivotal to that end. That reality comes through in the PDG B-5 grant applications; many states demonstrate a keen focus on supporting workforce compensation. This brief explores and synthesizes the strategies to increase compensation that states proposed in their PDG B-5 grant applications.

Supporting Multilingual Learners
Report August 17, 2023
As the number of young multilingual learners— children who speak language(s) other than English—increases throughout the country, the focus on supporting language development, rooted in diverse cultural, linguistic, and developmentally appropriate practices, becomes a critical component of the early childhood care and education (ECCE) system.

Systems Building through Governance Processes
Report August 10, 2023
Twenty-one states are drawing on the Preschool Development Birth through Five Renewal Grant (PDG B-5 Renewal) to advance their early childhood care and education (ECCE) systems. These states are undertaking a rich and broad variety of work with this infusion of resources. The BUILD Initiative, ZERO TO THREE, and Start Early, all of whom are members of the National TA Collaborative to Maximize Federal Early Childhood Investments, collaborated on these briefs to share critical early childhood issues that states and their partners are addressing by using the information available in the PDG B-5 Renewal applications. These grants not only provide immediate benefits and long-term systems implications for the states and their communities; they also shed light on the state of the field, which we attempt to outline through this set of briefs.