The Alliance for Early Success is a 50-state resource for early-childhood advocates as they pursue the big, sustained impact that will ensure every child in every state, birth through age eight, has an equal chance to grow, learn, and succeed.
After years of advocacy, Zero to Five Montana—along with other advocates, parents, and providers—has succeeded in passing a new early childhood endowment: the new Early Childhood Special Revenue Account.
A new law in Arkansas makes early educators eligible to participate in the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, a defined benefit retirement plan established for public school and other public education employees in the state. The new law means that any early educator who is licensed by the state and receives state or federal child care funding is eligible to save for retirement through the system.
As state policymakers work to address the huge budget shortfalls created by the federal government’s enactment of H.R. 1, state early childhood policy advocates are the next line of defense. And they need big investments in capacity to get the job done.
Missouri advocates learned from Alliance network peers in Ohio as they created the grassroots network that advances an early childhood agenda by placing those most directly impacted by state policy to the forefront of advocacy.
Your Voice Matters, South Carolina’s centralized community feedback initiative, is showing impressive family response rates, shaping policies, and engaging and educating state legislators on the impact of supporting early childhood programs and services.
The Alliance and the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment discuss CSCCE’s 2024 child care workforce index and how the index’s messages and findings can be used to drive policy change that centers the experiences of early educators in all 50 states.
Each year, the Alliance for Early Success surveys early childhood policy advocates representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia to create its annual 50-State Early Childhood Policy Progress and Landscape Report. The 2024 report, released in January, shows that support for state early childhood policies and funding continued to be strong, with policymakers from every region and political landscape acting to improve their early childhood policies.
We talk about centering lived experience and sharing power, but what does that look like in action? The Alliance for Early Success hosted a convening on November 13-14 in Seattle, Washington that showcased how advocates from Child Care Aware of Washington (CCA) “flipped the script” by facilitating a process that puts early childhood educators in the decision-making role.
It is no secret that early childhood educators face challenges in Wisconsin and beyond, and yet plans to make the system more equitable are often missing the voices of these practitioners themselves. In Wisconsin, a new study that centers the voices of Wisconsin early educators from traditionally marginalized groups is already having an impact on policy in the state.
State allies in the Alliance for Early Success network recently gathered to discuss the challenges the family child care workforce is facing. The group focused on two growing challenges: the rising cost of liability insurance and the availability of coverage. Allies were joined by NAEYC who shared findings based on recent surveys conducted with child care providers.
