New Video: Local Lessons from a Decade of Early Childhood Reform in California

Sarah J. Jackson

For ten years New America has followed three communities in California: Oakland, Fresno, and East San Jose as they work to reform their early childhood systems and how teachers are trained. Today, we release a video we produced about this decade of interviews and analysis. The lessons we came away with are instructive for local communities everywhere-especially in this time of crumbling federal investment.

California communities, for example, struggled with how to provide training across their mixed-delivery systems and how to serve incredibly diverse communities-challenges also faced by communities across the country.

Here's just some of what we found in California:

• In Fresno, a coalition developed the Language Learning Project, a training model focused on supporting teachers and practitioners working with young dual language learners. The model has been expanded across the state.
• Because teachers need support with students with challenging behaviors, Oakland Starting Smart and Strong developed a training program in trauma-responsive classroom practices. Educators say it has helped them understand their own responses to working with children with challenging behaviors and to engage with families in a deeper way.
• The Franklin-McKinley School District in East San Jose partnered with Educare California at Silicon Valley to train teachers and paraprofessionals alongside Head Start teachers on social emotional learning. A key part of the work's success was that teachers and child care providers were trained as leaders who co-designed the professional development.

Across all three communities, there were improvements in the design and delivery of professional development to early childhood educators, according to evaluation data, and the investments led to improvements in classroom level settings and student outcomes.

New America's analysis, which you can read more about here, finds that these communities were able to succeed because of their ability to lean heavily on local expertise, to center BIPOC and multilingual families, and to invest in building trust and relationships across communities and institutions. The knowledge held by early care and education professionals and by families in local communities is deep and vast and needs to be tapped into and trusted in order to spearhead successful reforms.

"This initiative gives me hope," said New America's Director of Early and Elementary Education Policy Cara Sklar. "When the educators are driving," she said, "the reforms are responsive to children's needs, they are workable in real classrooms, and they tend to last."

In interviews community members also said that long-term funding is very important. This initiative was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, but it has helped lead to additional investments. For example, in the Bay Area, two new funds are using local tax dollars to invest in early care and education.

Finally, experts we spoke to in California also emphasized the need to invest in community leadership.

"These kinds of changes happen because of real people," said Clare Nolan, co-founder of Engage R+D who evaluated the initiative, "and they need support to bring their ideas to fruition."