The State of Early Childhood: Can Connecticut’s Struggling Family Child Care Providers Fill a 50,000 Child care Gap Amidst the Coronavirus Recession?
This year, our report examines the status of Connecticut’s child care industry before the coronavirus pandemic, and explores recommendations that can help state policymakers create a stronger early childhood environment that is necessary for rebuilding the state's economy. We find that while Connecticut has made some progress, many indicators point to the same conclusions that we have drawn in our previous years’ reports on the state of early childhood. This year’s report concludes that the state continues to see the following: a shortage of child care slots, high child care costs that are not affordable to most families, and a continuing divide in preschool experience between higher and lower-income towns.
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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.