Early childhood is at an inflection point

and I want to help leaders navigate this more varied and challenging landscape

Following early childhood policy over the last six years has been a lot like riding roller coaster: The start of the COVID-19 pandemic hit early childhood programs hard, forcing many to close. Even though child care providers reopened much sooner than public schools in many cities and states, they struggled with COVID safety protocols, reduced enrollments, and worker recruitment and retention—and thousands never reopened at all. Within a year of the start of the pandemic, though, federal COVID relief legislation brought an infusion of funds to child care: As required by law, states plowed tens of billions of dollars of relief funds directly into child care businesses, helping keep many afloat and allowing them to make important delayed investments in materials, staff pay, facilities improvements and more. Many states also used the infusion of federal funds to enact ambitious changes to their child care and early learning systems: Expanding child care subsidy eligibility, paying providers based on enrollment rather than attendance, raising reimbursement rates, and distributing ongoing operating grants to child care programs. These changes expanded family access to child care subsidies in many states, increased pay for child care workers, and demonstrated the potential of new ways of using public funds to finance child care infrastructure.

As relief funds expired, however, states found themselves facing a child care funding cliff—at a time when many also faced long-term structural budget shortfalls, lagging revenues due to lingering economic effects of the COVID pandemic and other fiscal pressures. As a result, while some states have sustained all or part of their COVID-era early childhood investments, many have pulled back, implementing waitlists and enrollment freezes for child care subsidies, rolling back eligibility, and reducing or ending investments in the early childhood workforce or other child care programs. Then Congress and the Trump administration passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (why is all this legislation brought to us by the letter B?), which included tax, Medicaid, SNAP and other changes that are projected to cost states more than $1 trillion in revenues over the next 10 years. That will make it even harder for many states to sustain—let alone expand—early childhood investments.

Changes in public funding have implications for families, who now faced reduced access to child care assistance in some states, as well as child care providers who accept public funding—the numbers of which grew during recent state program expansions. When changes in public funding combine with demographic changes reducing the number of children in many states and communities; increasing costs for food and basic necessities that make it harder for families on the margins to pay for child care; and the end of COVID-era financial assistance to families with children, child care operators in some parts of the country now face the most challenging landscape since the pandemic. Analyst Elliott Haspel argued recently that the child care sector writ large is “buckling.”

It’s not all doom and gloom, though: Some states and local governments are bucking the headwinds, moving forward with initiatives and efforts to expand early learning access or improve quality and outcomes. New Mexico recently expanded child care subsidy eligibility to families regardless of income. New York Mayor Mamdani is working to complete the unfinished expansion of preK to all 3-year-olds and add free child care for 2-year-olds as well. Vermont is in the process of implementing groundbreaking legislation that expanded eligibility for child care subsidies and made it an entitlement for families. Connecticut recently established a new Early Childhood Education Endowment that dedicates funding for early childhood and is poised to grow over time. Illinois will launch its new unified Department of Early Childhood later this summer and has substantially increased funding for early childhood programs.

So, is the roller coaster heading up or down? The answer is….it’s complicated. Some states and local jurisdictions are pushing forward with expansions of early childhood access and quality, implementing new approaches to funding child care and early learning, and strengthening systems and improving connections across fragmented programs and funding streams to serve families in better ways. Others are pulling back, cutting already limited funding, imposing new requirements and restrictions that will make it harder for families to access programs or providers to operate. As a result, fewer families in these jurisdictions will have access to support, early learning programs may close, and even families who pay for care out of pocket may have less access care and education they need.

There’s also a vacuum in national leadership: In a recent speech, President Trump asserted that it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund child care and states should instead take the lead (nevermind that his own recent OBBBA legislation made it much harder for them to do so!). His administration has taken steps to dismantle Biden-era changes to Head Start and federal child care funding programs and added burdens to states and child care operators based on largely unfounded concerns about child care “fraud” without presenting a positive alternative vision for these programs.

But the vacuum in national leadership extends to leaders who champion early childhood, as well. Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, and immediately following Joe Biden’s election, a network of think tanks, child care advocates, federal legislators and their staffs (many of whom would later take roles in Biden’s administration) consolidated around a view for a new federal role in child care that was eventually incorporated into Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation. Following that legislation’s failure to pass, however, no successor vision has emerged for the federal path forward on early childhood. While the proposed Child Care Modernization Act has bipartisan support, and would make some positive improvements in the Child Care and Development Fund, its scope and vision are notably limited—particularly because it would authorize states to use federal child care funds in new ways, but is not able to actually increase the funding to enable them to do so.

There’s no going back to the “Build Back Better” approach: As a growing number of state and national child care leaders have been willing to acknowledge since that legislation failed, Build Back Better had crucial shortcomings that would have made it impossible for states and child care operators to implement as written. And now that OBBBA and other Trump administration actions have pushed the federal deficit to unsustainable levels, contributing to higher interest rates on federal debt that put further pressure on the federal budget, increasing federal investment in child care and other social programs is going to be much harder than it was during the debate over Build Back Better.

None of this means we should be pessimistic about the outlook for early childhood in the current landscape. I wouldn’t be starting a new substack focused on early childhood if that’s what I thought! And the examples of progress in states and local jurisdictions across the country should provide early childhood leaders both a source of hope and tangible examples to learn from.

But it does mean that the path forward is going to be both more varied and more challenging than it’s seemed in the past.

Making progress in this more varied and challenging landscape is going to require both new solutions to improve access and quality in early childhood and new approaches for advancing them politically and fiscally. It requires paying attention to the variety of things that are happening in early childhood at the state and level across the country—both to understand what this evolving landscape currently looks like and to learn from what’s working (and what’s not!) to inform future efforts in other states and communities, as well as federally. And it will require good data, rigorous analysis, candid discussion about trade-offs, and a willingness to confront hard truths and sacred cows—all of which are sometimes lacking in early childhood.

That’s why I’ve created this substack: to help federal, state, and local leaders across government, advocacy, philanthropy, and media track and understand what’s happening in early childhood; connect with others working to make progress in this landscape; have hard conversations about trade-offs and places where established orthodoxies may need to evolve; and surface and test new ideas and approaches. I’ll be sharing things that I and my colleagues at Afton Partners are seeing and learning from our work with states and local jurisdictions across the country, as well as news and developments from other places and commentary and analysis by others working to influence change in early education policy, practice and funding.

A little bit about me: I’m currently managing director of early childhood at Afton Partners, where my team and I work with system leaders across the country to help them build early childhood systems that children and families deserve. For five and a half years before this, I led the early childhood system in the District of Columbia, as Deputy Superintendent for Early Learning with the Office of the State Superintendent for Education. I also have over two decades of prior experience working with K-12 and early childhood system leaders, funders, advocates, and program operators as the federal, state and local level as a researcher, analyst, and consultant. Most importantly, I’m the mom of a 3-year-old who will be transitioning to DC’s public preK system after spending three years in a licensed child car facility in DC that participates in DC’s innovative early childhood educator compensation program and receiving Early Intervention services—so I understand firsthand what access to high-quality early childhood programming means to children and families. And a major motivation for my work in this space is to help more families experience the benefits my family has enjoyed.

In addition to my own writing, analysis, and perspectives, I’m excited for you to get to know my smart and thoughtful Afton colleagues through regular guest posts they’ll be sharing here, as well as other colleagues doing interesting work in early childhood from a variety of perspectives. While this substack will draw on work that Afton and our clients are doing from time to time, all of the perspectives and analysis (including any errors!) are those of myself or other named authors alone, and shouldn’t be interpreted to represent official positions of Afton or any Afton clients.

I’m grateful to be able to keep riding this early childhood roller coaster, and to have your company on the ride.