Implementation is Everything, and Early Care and Education is No Exception

Emmy Liss

Getting public programs approved and funded takes enormous effort, but it's only half the battle. After the bill is signed and the money is appropriated, another challenge awaits: delivering a new service to people that is on time, on budget, and working as expected. Despite the importance of implementation, few mechanisms exist to help public servants stand up new and innovative programs. Launching and expanding public early care and education services is no exception. People want these programs to work, but a wall of complex funding streams and regulations complicates the path forward.

Even when no playbook exists, there are strategies to smooth implementation. Loose networks of public servants tasked with similar demands emerge to bridge knowledge gaps, sometimes self organizing into more formal structures designed to share lessons, pitfalls, and solutions.

The Early Care and Education (ECE) Implementation Working Group - a group of early education program leaders from 18 different locations - is such an effort. With a year of successful collaboration under its belt, the group is set to relaunch in partnership with New America's New Practice Lab. This iteration of the group will have a refined focus but the same mission: to help families access high-quality ECE services for young kids.

Support for Public Pre-K is Growing, but Complexity Hampers Implementation

In recent years, an increasing number of municipal governments have invested in early care and education (ECE). According to an analysis by CityHealth, 53 of the 75 largest U.S. cities (71%) have enrolled 30% or more 4-year-olds in state or locally-funded pre-k programs, and 65 cities add local dollars to state and federal funds to support early care and education. A mix of factors drives the growth: increased recognition of the importance of high-quality education in a child's first five years, the high costs to families of child care, a focused strategy by municipal leaders to attract families and employers, and insufficient funding at the federal level. The return on investment for early care and education is significant, with evidence that quality services boost children's long-term academic outcomes, has rapid impacts on maternal employment and families' economic mobility, and generates new revenue for businesses and local economies. Cities across the country have successfully raised taxes because of broad public support for early childhood education.

Local administration of ECE programs is surprisingly complex though, with funds and regulations typically coming from multiple federal and state agencies, in addition to whatever structures and requirements have been built locally. Local policymakers creatively blend and braid funding streams together to maximize impact, but each revenue source carries its own eligibility requirements and accountability standards. The fragmentation and historic underinvestment in early care and education creates a need for sophistication and skill in navigating complexity-something I saw firsthand in New York City's Department of Education.

Implementation Experience in New York City

From 2015 to 2022, I had the great privilege to serve on the team charged with implementing universal preschool and building a more comprehensive and integrated set of services for children from birth to five. My time with the Department of Education was a whirlwind as the team rapidly scaled ECE services while emphasizing quality and equity. Over an 8-year period, New York City scaled from 19,000 to 70,000 preschool slots for four-year-olds, guaranteeing a free, full-day, high-quality spot to every child who wanted one, and started down the path to universal services for three-year-olds. We had integrated child care, preschool, and Head Start services under one agency to create a more unified system of early care and education for over 100,000 children from birth to five.

There was no playbook for how to do this well; the classic "build the plane as you fly" saying applied. We called a few leaders in other localities for advice and to compare strategies, but such opportunities were few and far between. We carried out implementation work with only a loose sense of who else was tackling similar challenges, and our interactions were often happenstance. Despite the incredible value of these connections, it was hard to make time for ongoing conversations.

After leaving city government in early 2022, my former colleague Josh Wallack and I were eager to take a step back and reflect on what we had learned. We knew there were lessons to take from our experiences, and we were humble enough to recognize that the missteps made during the program's rapid implementation might be valuable insofar as we could share how we navigated these challenges and corrected course. But without deeper understanding of the implementation experiences in other programs, it was hard to know if lessons learned in New York would resonate.

Partners and Patterns Emerge

We decided to start by simply reaching out and asking - and quickly found peers who were ready to share. We found the Denver Preschool Program, one of the first in the country to be funded with a voter-approved tax, and soon after discovered local efforts sprouting up in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio. We'd watched from afar, in awe, as community leaders and organizers in Portland, Oregon marshaled votes during COVID to fund Preschool for All. We hunted down an email address for the staff member managing Multnomah County implementation and sent her a message, cold, asking to connect.

Contacts at large national organizations focused on early care and education recommended reaching out to leaders in New Orleans, Philadelphia, and the state of Maine, and we did. We reconnected with public school leaders in Baltimore and Chicago, and caught up with old contacts who had relocated across the country. We learned about powerful collective impact movements bringing stakeholders together across the fragmented early care and education landscape, like Hope Starts Here in Detroit and the Commit Partnership in Dallas.

In these initial conversations, early care and education program leaders shared their goals, and their challenges. Patterns emerged, along with a constant lament that ECE implementation work existed in a vacuum. We began to understand that the demands of the job were similar, regardless of location, as administrators were forced to work through byzantine state and federal regulations to braid together funding, persuade families to re-enroll in programs after COVID, and build trust with educators who had every reason to be skeptical of government.

But critically, each team felt that they had to essentially build their program from scratch. We knew there had to be a better way.

Pitching a Bigger Tent

Sharing the lessons we learned in New York City was the tip of the iceberg. There was potential to build something meaningful that would allow a more diverse group of leaders to share lessons and learn, not just from us, but also each other. We began inviting leaders to participate in an emerging professional community. With each additional conversation, the vision became clearer, and in the fall of 2022, the ECE Implementation Working Group was born. Once fully assembled, the group included implementation leaders from 18 different cities and counties - as well as one state.

Participating localities in the first iteration of the ECE Implementation Working Group included Alameda County, CA; Allegheny County, PA; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD; Birmingham, AL; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Columbus, OH; Dallas, TX; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; Harris County, TX; Maine; Multnomah County, OR; New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ; and Saint Paul, MN

Each team was at a different point in their implementation journey - some were just beginning the fight to expand services, while others had well-established programs serving thousands of families. Because of the oddities of ECE governance, participants represented many different institutions - school districts, city and county agencies, mayor's offices, local nonprofits, and collective impact groups, to name a few. Regardless of affiliation, each member played a critical role in designing and implementing ECE services, and brought that experience to the table.

Rolling Up Our Sleeves

Over about 18 months, our group delved into the nitty-gritty of implementation. At monthly meetings, we chose a specific topic that surfaced from participants' top concerns, and looked at how different communities had tackled the challenge.

The conversations were often very, very wonky.

Participants shared procurement documents and job descriptions, and even opened up their budgets for study. They talked about how they had approached conversations about flexibility with their state regulators, and the steps they had taken to integrate local data systems. We took on both the technical and political challenges of implementation, discussing centralized enrollment, family application systems, and the inner-workings of various software platforms.

But also discussed were the real trust issues between elected leaders and the providers whose buy-in and participation was needed. When talking about home-based child care, we looked at the ways program leaders had adapted policy manuals across settings, and the biases sometimes held against home-based care by influential leaders. We strategized about what it would take to convince people across all political lines to invest in ECE programs-listening to stories from places as politically diverse as Alabama and Washington, D.C. that had invested in wages for child care workers-and examined different models for inclusive planning and leadership that brought provider and family voice into the policymaking process.

Drilling Down on Implementation

It became clear that this group served a unique purpose. While there are many settings for elected leaders to come together and share best practices - with some initiative even focused explicitly on early care and education - there are few spaces for the people working on implementation to really dig into the details together.

We found a real hunger within the group to continue sharing these lessons. There was also a sense that this effort could be part of something bigger, that we could harness the experiences of these practitioners to elevate policies that could streamline implementation locally. At the group's final (and only in person) meeting in Nashville at the end of 2023, the momentum to continue the work was clear.

Members of the ECE Implementation Working Group in Nashville, November 2023. (Photo courtesy of Josh Wallack)

Growing the Movement and Momentum

We are thrilled to reconvene the ECE Implementation Working Group for a second round of learning and collaboration, this time with the support of the New Practice Lab at New America. We previously worked with the Lab in 2023 to share out the group's lessons on using family outreach as a tool to boost enrollment. Their work at the intersection of policy and implementation, their focus on families with young children, and their commitment to equity aligns closely with the Working Group's priorities.

In this second iteration of the working group, we will continue the knowledge transfer among our members, but bring the lessons shared by the group to the wider audience of implementers around the country, working to close the- gap between delivering a policy win and delivering a functioning program. We hope to inform not only the work of implementers who crave the nitty-gritty detail, but also the policy makers who can shape future ECE proposals with implementation challenges in mind.

We are well underway in reconstituting the membership of the working group. With lessons learned from the first iteration, we are more clearly defining who should participate: each cohort member will represent a place that 1) has an existing municipal ECE program or a clear path to launch one within the next year and 2) a commitment to equity in implementation.

It is our goal that collectively, the cohort represent a diversity of places - different geographies, different politics, a range of sizes, a range of demographics, and a diversity of governance models. We are starting with the members of the original cohort and will then expand outward as space allows.

Throughout this project, we will be documenting key learnings from the working group through blog posts and longer briefs on the New Practice Lab site. We invite you to follow along as we kick off this second collaborative learning opportunity. We hope and believe that the work of this group can strengthen opportunities not only for the children and families this group represents, but also serve as an inspiration and resource for leaders across the country.

The New Practice Lab (NPL) is a research and policy design team focused on improving economic outcomes for families with children under five years old. Part policy research group, part pro bono consulting firm, NPL works closely with policymakers and administrators to help policy and delivery work together to understand and meet families needs in a more sustainable and human-centered way. Our mission is to bring improved benefits delivery systems for families with young children, and in doing so, create a culture of user-centered design in government.