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With philanthropic support, locales are experimenting with what it takes to reform early learning. They aim to make sure that all community adults have the tools they need to support children’s development.

In the national movement to transform the teaching of our youngest children, California has not been a pioneer. In our 2015 report Not Golden Yet: Building a Stronger Workforce for Young Children in California, we found that the state was not doing enough to prepare early childhood educators to ensure its children are learning and developing important skills for school and life.¹

The Learning Policy Institute called the state’s system of early education “fragmented” and "incoherent" in a report released in January.² Cuts made to California’s preschool and child development programs during the Great Recession were so steep that full funding still has not been restored a decade later.

“I had this novice opinion that California’s funding for early education was more progressive,” said Drew Giles, who came to Oakland public schools from Denver in 2015 to take an early childhood administrator position. “So I thought the early learning workforce would also be well supported. But when I got here, I realized that the systems and structures were just not in place.”

“I had this novice opinion that California’s funding for early education was more progressive … But when I got here, I realized that the systems and structures were just not in place.”

The state does not have universal pre-K. Transitional kindergarten, introduced in 2012, created a new public school grade for some four-year-olds who had previously been served by California’s kindergarten, but only those with fall birthdays are eligible.³ California has dropped to 41st in the nation in per pupil spending for K–12, when adjusted for cost of living.⁴ Its new funding formula for public education, intended to make funding more equitable, provides a lot of opportunities, but advocates say more resources are needed if the state is to adequately prepare its children—many of whom are low-income, children of color, and dual language learners.⁵ A new governor (Gov. Jerry Brown reaches the end of his term in December) brings the possibility of more substantial reforms on behalf of young children.

In select locales, however, those who care for young children are not waiting for Sacramento to take action. Rather, some communities and advocates that have been pushing for these changes for decades are conducting experiments in what it takes to reform an early learning system. It will be some time before data are available to show if and in what ways these experiments have impacted the young children living here, but some early signals point to the beginning of systems change. Networks of school leaders, county administrators, teachers, caregivers, librarians, social workers, and those from the foundation community are working together to improve access to and quality of early learning programs for young children. The state’s network of First 5s supports training and education, home visiting and developmental screening programs, and development of the state’s Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). Communities are experimenting with innovative models that blend public and private dollars to make the most of existing resources, and ballot measures this year could bring in new money for early care and education in various counties across the state.⁶

�鶹������ý has been following work in three of the communities that, with the support of the Starting Smart and Strong Initiative from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, are working to provide stronger teaching and caregiving by 2025. (See Box 1 for more on funding for the initiative.) Leaders in , , and a school district in are reforming how early childhood programs work and teachers are trained.

Starting Smart and Strong is a 10-year effort that aims to ensure all children grow up healthy and ready for kindergarten by improving the quality of adult-child interactions across all settings where young children learn and grow. (See Box 2 for more on adult-child interactions.) The Packard Foundation awarded grants of $500,000 each year for the past three years to the Franklin-McKinley School District (FMSD) in San Jose, the Fresno Unified School District (FUSD), and the Oakland Public Education Fund. The support has helped pay for professional development and training for early childhood educators, support for informal care providers (family, friends, and neighbors who are not licensed), developmental screenings, and collaborations between public and private systems to support young children, as well as planning and technical assistance. These three communities have blended this support with school district dollars, as well as with additional public and philanthropic funding streams.

In the state’s Central Valley, national attention Fresno received for its high poverty rates helped galvanize leaders to better align their systems to support children birth through age eight. In Silicon Valley, San Jose’s new Educare is building a “teaching hospital model” as a laboratory for educators of all types who care for young children. In the Bay Area, leaders in Oakland have begun a 10-year equity strategy that aims to create universal access to high-quality early learning experiences from birth for the city’s diverse population.

This report, based on three and a half years of reporting and interviews with 80 people across the three communities, provides a look at the capacity of these communities to engage families, improve teacher practice, collect and use data, and build cultures that support early learning. We also examine challenges they face in implementing these reforms and changing teacher practice. The central challenge all three face is how to scale up reforms so they make a real difference for all the children of these communities and eventually for California as a whole. Leaders say that the impact will come not just when they see good things happening for some children, but when this work results in community-wide improvement on key indicators of child well-being.

Aiming for Quality in Early Learning: Fresno, Oakland, and San Jose⁷