Weekly E-News
October 30, 2026
Hot Topics
A new brief published by the Learning Policy Institute and authored by UC Berkeley researchers Rucker C. Johnson and Austin Land found that California’s Transitional Kindergarten (TK) program had greater benefits for children who previously attended preschool at age 3. Those benefits also lasted longer when children entered better-funded elementary schools.
For states expanding universal pre-K, these findings reinforce the importance of starting early and providing continuity with sustained support to produce substantive gains in children's learning and development. This resonates with NIEER’s finding that persistent effects were much greater when children had two years of quality early education prior to kindergarten.
NIEER Celebrates Robin Wilkins for Winning the 2026 NASLEE Light Award
On October 8, Robin Wilkins of the New Jersey Department of Education received the Light Award at the National Association of State Leaders in Early Education's (NASLEE) annual roundtable in Phoenix.
"Robin has served the ECE field her entire career with particular focus on state leaders. She has been an integral and impactful part of the NJ DOE early learning endeavors for most of the last 25 years. Before that she was the health coordinator in the Trenton Head Start program,” said NIEER’s former Co-Director, Ellen Frede.
Robin served as NASLEE’s President from 2022 - 2026. Alongside the Executive Committee and Executive Director, she has guided NASLEE to successfully expand its membership, strengthen strategic planning efforts, and secure new sponsorships and funding, elevating the organization’s national visibility and long-term sustainability.
“Robin's dedication to colleagues and the work of ECE is exemplified by her leadership within NASLEE and her gracious willingness to continue serving as President when the organization asked her,” said Frede.
The NASLEE Light Award is sponsored by Teaching Strategies.
In Educational Research Review, Elizabeth R. Wynberg, Femke van der Wilt, Annerieke Boland, and Chiel van der Veen systematically reviewed 42 studies examining relationships between object-oriented play and motor and language development among children ages 6 months to 5 years. The review found that sensorimotor forms of object play (such as holding a toy, turning it over, feeling its texture) were positively related to fine motor and visual spatial skills, while evidence for physical manipulation was more mixed and no clear relationship was found with gross motor development. Object oriented play was also associated with early language development. Children’s attention, joint attention, and caregiver input emerged as important factors shaping these relationships.
NIEER Activity
By the time a child reaches the age of 4 or 5, most parents and caregivers have heard about “kindergarten readiness.” But what if a 5-year-old still struggles to count to 10, sing the alphabet song or play cooperatively with other children? In cases like this, parents may choose to “redshirt” their child or delay their entry into kindergarten by one year. New research from NIEER’s Rachel Fidel and University of Delaware’s Kenneth Shores and Anamarie A. Whitaker, published in Educational Researcher, found that Delaware rates of kindergarten redshirting and retention changed dramatically during the pandemic. However, this is part of much longer-term trend: nationally the proportion of 9-year-olds in grade 4 decreased from 73 percent to 59 percent over the past half century.
NIEER Leaders to Headline International ECE Symposium in Brazil
On November 10, NIEER’s Steven Barnett and Milagros Nores will take the stage as keynote speakers at the 3rd International Symposium on Early Childhood Education in São Paulo.
Bringing vital international evidence to help address Brazil’s current early education challenges, they will join discussions on what it takes to guarantee quality early childhood education nationwide. Key topics on the agenda include:
- Aligning early childhood and elementary education
- Building national indicators for educational quality
- Developing robust evaluation and monitoring systems to drive continuous policy improvement
The 3rd International Symposium on Early Childhood Education is a partnership between the Bracell Foundation, the Ministry of Education (MEC), the Sérgio Henrique Ferreira Chair at USP (Ribeirão Preto), FLUPP, the Van Leer Foundation, the FEFIG Institute, the João and Maria Backheuser Institute, Itaú Social, Todos Pela Educação, and the Brazil Office of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, with technical support from UNICEF Brazil.
NIEER Experts Set to Share Early Childhood Research at APPAM Fall Conference
NIEER will have a strong presence at the upcoming Association for Public Policy & Management (APPAM) Annual Fall Research Conference, “50 States, 50 Systems: State Policy Variation & Impacts,” in Boston. Four NIEER experts will showcase insights on early care and education (ECE) policy, funding complexities, and workforce issues across three major sessions:
📊 Examining the Complexities of ECE Funding from a National-, State-, Program- & Family-Level Perspective
- Date & Time: Thursday, November 5, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM Eastern
- Location: Berkeley Room
- NIEER Expert: Allison Friedman-Krauss (Discussant)
🗺️ Using Research-Practice Partnerships to Increase Quality of Early Care and Education Programs Statewide in Indiana
- Date & Time: Friday, November 6, 10:15 AM – 11:45 AM Eastern
- Location: Hyannis Room
- NIEER Experts: Erin Harmeyer (Presenter) and Milagros Nores (Presenter)
📈 Early Care and Education Access, Quality, Spending, and Worker Turnover: Implications for Child Development
- Date & Time: Friday, November 6, 1:45 PM – 3:15 PM Eastern
- Location: MIT Room
- NIEER Expert: Rachel Fidel (Presenter)
If you’re attending APPAM, be sure to add these sessions to your schedule to engage with NIEER’s latest data-driven insights.
International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy (IJCCEP) Weekly Feature
Role of LSG in Realizing the Right to Education in North India
Puneet Pathak, Naina Catherine Benny, and Ramandeep Kaur examined how rural local self-governance supports the right to education in Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh, with particular attention to implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (India's flagship elementary school program). Using the Respect Protect Fulfil Promote framework, the researchers collected mixed methods data from 1,050 respondents, including 150 Panchayat policy makers and 900 beneficiaries, along with institutional checklists from 29 government schools across 15 villages. Awareness of the legal right to education and physical access to schooling were generally high, but monitoring of enrollment, retention, and dropout, enforcement of protective responsibilities, and community mobilization were comparatively weak. Punjab showed the greatest weaknesses in monitoring and awareness, while Himachal Pradesh demonstrated the strongest integration of local governance with education. The findings suggest that decentralization is most effective when local governments have sufficient capacity, financial autonomy, and systems for monitoring educational outcomes rather than relying primarily on formal structures and legal mandates.
Publish in the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy (IJCCEP)
- It’s FREE – article processing charges for all articles published in the journal are fully sponsored.
- The journal is indexed by Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and by Scopus.
- All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 license. Authors will retain copyright.
Focus on New Jersey Weekly Feature
Licensed Center-Based Child Care Providers in New Jersey: Revenues and Expenses
In a Rutgers Child Care Research Collaborative report, Milagros Nores, Christina Stephens, Allison Friedman-Krauss, Andrea Kent and Karin Garver analyze revenue sources and operating costs for New Jersey child care centers. The findings offer insights into licensed center-based providers in NJ that may be useful for identifying supports and policies to strengthen and improve access to the state’s ECE system:
- Most centers received tuition payments from families (80%), about 2 out of 3 responding centers reported receiving funding from the state’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP; 61%), and 18% received state pre-k funding.
- The NJ provider landscape appears largely divided (with some overlap) between those receiving mostly CCAP and a smaller share receiving state pre-K funding. That is, CCAP and state pre-K mostly support different segments of the ECE market, functioning as complementary policy levers.
- Staff salaries represented the largest share of centers’ total operating expenditures, accounting for two-thirds of total expenses (66%).
“It’s critical that we understand the financial structure of child care,” said the report’s lead author Milagros Nores. “We should be reviewing the fiscal state of the child care system regularly to understand how its doing and inform policy decisions accordingly.”
The Rutgers Child Care Research Collaborative is a partnership between NIEER, the Center for Women and Work, and the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, made possible through funding and support from the New Jersey Department of Children and Families.
ECE Research
In the International Journal of Behavioal Nutrition and Physical Activity, Zheng Ye, Johannes Carl, Feiyu Liu, Siu Ming Choi, James Robert Rudd, Jia Yi Chow, Cindy Hui Ping Sit, Suzannie Kit Ying Leung, and Raymond Kim Wai Sum systematically reviewed 203 studies involving 30,521 children ages 3 to 6 and included 164 studies with 23,073 children in the meta-analysis. Physical activity interventions were associated with improvements in overall physical literacy, with the largest effects in the physical domain and smaller but positive effects in cognitive, affective, social, and behavioral domains. Results varied substantially across studies, with intervention effects influenced by factors including who delivered the program, intervention duration, comparison group, and target population. The authors also note that the evidence base remains heavily weighted toward physical outcomes, with less research addressing the broader dimensions of physical literacy. The findings suggest that well designed physical activity interventions can support multiple aspects of preschool children’s development, while highlighting the need for more comprehensive and standardized research across all physical literacy domains.
In Journal of Intelligence, Davide Apicerni, Paolo Stievano, Giulia Brandi, Lilian Zotti, Sergio Melogno, and Lina Pezzuti examined how different executive functions relate to specific early numerical skills among 316 Italian preschool children ages 3 to 6. Using a tablet-based assessment battery, the researchers measured inhibitory control, verbal short term memory, visuospatial working memory, set shifting, receptive language, rapid automatized naming, and three foundational math building blocks: procedural cardinality, non-symbolic quantity reproduction, and approximate number system performance. Age was the strongest predictor across outcomes, while verbal short term memory uniquely predicted procedural cardinality and inhibitory control predicted approximate number system performance. Rapid automatized naming was the most consistent predictor beyond age, contributing to both nonsymbolic quantity reproduction and approximate number system performance, while set shifting did not show robust associations. The findings suggest that executive functions do not contribute uniformly to early mathematics, but instead support different numerical skills in distinct ways, with some preschool math abilities relying more heavily on general processing efficiency than on executive control.
Emily Carver, William Coventry, Stephen Petrill, Robin Corley, Stefan Samuelsson, Richard Olson, and Brian Byrne, writing in Twin Research and Human Genetics, examined whether socioeconomic status and time spent in preschool help explain shared environmental influences on reading development. The longitudinal behavior genetic study followed 511 identical and 515 same sex fraternal twin pairs from Australia, the United States, and Scandinavia from preschool through grade 2. Socioeconomic status and preschool time together explained 9 percent of total variation in reading at preschool and 4 percent by grade 2, with socioeconomic status accounting for most of this contribution at both points. The interaction between socioeconomic status and time in preschool did not explain reading differences at any stage, and time in preschool contributed relatively little compared with socioeconomic status. The findings suggest that family socioeconomic conditions account for a meaningful portion of shared environmental variation in early reading, while the amount of time children spend in preschool appears to play a much smaller role.
Opportunities
Founding Generation Summer Fellowship for Undergraduates, International Congress of Infant Studies
Senior Research Associate, Annenberg Institute, Brown University
Assistant Director for Program Evaluation, Harlem Children’s Zone
Sr. Project Manager of ECE Strategy, Policy, and Planning, City of Philadelphia
Evaluation Manager, Children’s Council of San Francisco
Vice President, Early Childhood Policy, Center for American Progress
National Sales Manager, Professional Development, ZERO TO THREE
Advisory Services Analyst, Early Childhood Programs, Mathematica
Analyst, Research and Evaluation, Illinois Action for Children
Early Learning Policy Associate, Texans Care for Children
The Authors
Allison Muhlendorf manages external affairs for NIEER, including communications, earned and owned media, government relations, partnerships, and outreach.
About NIEER
The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at the Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, conducts and disseminates independent research and analysis to inform early childhood education policy.
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