As child care received unprecedented attention in this year’s presidential election — with presidential and vice presidential candidates alike pontificating about cost, funding and policy — a growing number of researchers turned their attention toward the field of early care and education.
In the spring, an article in Science, a peer-reviewed academic journal, reignited a debate about the long-term effects of early education. A well-circulated paper authored by Chris Herbst, a professor at the University of Arizona, raised uncomfortable questions about how the rock bottom wages of child care workers may be keeping many talented early educators from the field. And in several recent job market papers, rising scholars investigated topics such as the effects of mandatory minimum staff-to-child ratios in child care settings and how having access to child care during nontraditional work hours could impact families.
These studies illustrate a growing awareness of the role early care and education plays in America’s current and future workforce, its tax base and family budgets. To celebrate outstanding early learning research — Early Learning Nation asked more than a dozen scholars, including economists, policy researchers and developmental psychologists, which 2024 studies related to quality and impact of care or the workforce providing it, were most notable. Here are three papers the scholars surfaced:
1. A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families’ Constraints
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Authors: Chloe Gibbs, University of Notre Dame; Jocelyn Wikle, Brigham Young University; and Riley Wilson, Brigham Young University
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Key takeaway: Expansion of full-day kindergarten programs made it easier for mothers across the income spectrum to work while boosting academic outcomes for young children.
If ever there were an antidote for working mom guilt, this is it. The study featured in this working paper provides the first large-scale evidence on how full-day kindergarten expansions influence work-life balance for parents as well as children’s academic development. Herbst of the University of Arizona noted that it “moves beyond simply looking at mothers’ employment (it does this as well) by starting to think about how families trade-off child care for formal education, and how these trade-offs might affect child well-being.” It turns out that with more full-day kindergarten, both moms and kids come out winning.
Before 1990, most kindergarten programs were half-day. Then, between 1992 and 2022, the share of kindergarteners in full-day programming nearly doubled in the U.S. Researchers found that when parents had access to full-day kindergarten, mothers across the income spectrum spent more time working for pay than mothers with half-day kindergarten. But men spent the same amount of time working, suggesting that child care policies generally impact women more, likely because women continue to shoulder a greater share of child-rearing.
With women working more, mothers spent less time with their children, but the study suggests that this didn’t harm children, in fact, access to expanded programs led to slightly better academic scores among kids.
2. The Power of Play: Investigating Student Success in Kindergarten Classrooms
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Author: Karyn Allee, Mercer University
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Key takeaway: Playful learning can enhance academics while helping to close adversity-related early learning gaps.
In the 1990s, the field of cognitive science definitively determined that many children will not become fluent readers without explicit instruction on the connection between written letters and sounds. Though this knowledge took a long time to inform contemporary classroom instruction, there has been a massive, recent push to infuse kindergarten classrooms as well as preschools nationwide with activities and lessons that help build phonemic awareness and word decoding skills. Some educators fear this will exacerbate what they see as a wider national trend of pushing academics on younger and younger children, and especially those from low-income families. Allee, this study’s author, refers to this movement as “the schoolificication of early childhood education.”
Allee’s study suggests that academic instruction and rigor need not come at the expense of the discovery and critical thinking skills that can arise from a playful classroom.
This pilot study compared reading and math gains in two kindergarten classrooms. Both teachers followed the same academic curriculum, including phonics-based lessons, but differed in their implementation. One followed a more didactic approach, which included assigned seating and few opportunities for students to make choices. The other embraced what the paper refers to as a “playful approach,” with flexible seating and time for movement, music and play. Children in the playful classroom demonstrated more gains in reading and math, suggesting that a playful classroom can enhance rigorous learning.
The study is small, but Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, a professor at the University of Delaware School Education, said its findings offer important insight into how playful learning can benefit young children, particularly those from low-income families who are often the least likely to receive it.
3. Effects of Subsidies on the Child Care Market: Large Increases in Capacity, Small Increases in Prices
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Authors: Won Fly Lee, Stanford University; Aaron Sojourner, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; Elizabeth Davis, University of Minnesota; and Jonathan Borowsky, University of Minnesota.
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Key takeaway: Providing child care subsidies can increase the supply of available child care without large increases to its price.
One concern about offering families child care subsidies is that the subsidies will grow demand for child care which, in turn, will drive up the cost for families who pay out-of-pocket. This study looks at how an increase in the value of subsidies for low-income families impacted child care supply and price in Minnesota, and finds a very different dynamic at play. While child care costs did rise when Minnesota raised the value of subsidies, the difference was minimal. The more noteworthy change was the marked increase in licensed child care capacity. In other words, when more subsidy dollars were available, “local resources expanded to meet increased demand with relatively little adverse effect on unsubsidized families,” the authors wrote.
“Half of families live in child care deserts, and so it’s really important for us to know that these federal investments are helping increase the supply of care — which is desperately needed — while not actually having impacts on prices,” said Laura Valle-Gutierrez, a fellow at The Century Foundation who writes a quarterly newsletter about child care research.
What Research Might 2025 Bring?
Valle-Gutierrez expects that in the coming year the field will see more research examining the relationship between child care demand, supply and pricing. A number of cities and states that have been forging their own solutions to the high cost of child care for families and the low wages for workers that will soon be ripe for analysis. “I think looking to see what’s having the best impact on supply, or what’s helping lower prices for families, or what is sustainable, will be really helpful,” Valle-Gutirrez said.
Jessica Brown, an economist at the University of South Carolina, expects to see more researchers wielding a “structural model” in their analyses. This research tool attempts to extract cause and effect from data, and Brown said it is “really useful for understanding how markets operate and may respond to policy.” Already, a handful of researchers have been using structural models to study the child care market and Brown anticipates that it “will continue to grow in importance” to the field.
Golinkoff, meanwhile, wants more research looking at the intersection of early education and technology. With technology continuing to take on a bigger role in society, it’s something she says the early education field simply cannot ignore.