Weekly E-News: August 28, 2026
August 28, 2026
Hot Topics
NIEER’s new report, funded by the Maher Charitable Foundation, examines the perspectives of child care and Head Start directors in New Jersey who contract with school districts to provide public preschool. New Jersey has a long history as a leader in providing public preschool through a mixed delivery system where policymakers, advocates, and researchers have worked together to address implementation issues. However, efforts to expand the availability of public preschool, along with changes in state policy that no longer mandate partnering with local child care and Head Start providers, bring new challenges. Findings from this study suggest the need for durable, statewide structures to support the continued development of mixed delivery pre-K.
NIEER Activity
An English-Only Mandate for Head Start Will Harm Children
NIEER’s new brief, An English-Only Mandate for Head Start Will Harm Children, by Alexandra Figueras-Daniel and Christina Stephens, summarizes what policy makers should know about the research examining best practices for supporting Dual Language Learners, who account for 36 percent of Head Start enrollment and 40 percent of Early Head Start enrollment across the U.S. Young emergent bilingual children progress better in English language development and other domains when the home language (but not only the home language) is used for instruction. English-only instruction does not produce faster acquisition of English (contrary to what is sometimes naively assumed) and undercuts the development of proficiency in the home language.
Check out the new brief.
Review NIEER’s research on supporting young Dual Language Learners.
Head Start’s current ratio standards are based on expert consensus and empirical evidence that pre-K quality is higher and children’s safety and development improved when there are reasonable limits to the number of young children per staffer in the classroom. Current Head Start standards limit staff:child ratios to 1:4 for babies and toddlers under age 3, 1:8 for 3 year olds and 1:10 for 4 year olds. In contrast, state child care licensing ratios are less salutary and vary enormously.
NIEER’s new brief, The race to the bottom: What replacing Head Start ratios standards with state child care minimums will mean for children in poverty, by Morgan Healy and Steve Barnett, compares Head Start ratio standards as they are currently written to state child care regulations across all 50 states and DC, and asks: if Head Start programs defaulted to state child care licensing minimums, what would change? And how do state child care ratio requirements compare to those of public pre-K in the same state?
Curriculum and Family Child Care: Guidance for Mixed-Delivery Pre-K Programs
In 2024, NIEER, with the support of Home Grown, launched the Enriching Public Pre-K Through Inclusion of Family Child Care (EPIC FCC) initiative. Through this effort, we worked with pre-K system leaders and FCC educators in Alabama, Nevada, Durham, North Carolina, and Michigan as the established advisory groups, examined their pre-K and FCC systems, and/or developed policies and funding streams to support FCCs in their pre-K systems. NIEER’s FCC & Pre-K Policy Data Snapshots were developed as a result of some of the discussions that occurred during the EPIC FCC initiative.
Check out our latest data snapshot, "Curriculum and Family Child Care: Guidance for Mixed-Delivery Pre-K Programs," and the full FCC & Pre-K Policy Data Snapshots series, here.
International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy (IJCCEP) Weekly Feature
How Can Public Policy Improve Quality of Early Care and Education?
Aletha C. Huston examines how public policy can improve the quality of early care and education from infancy through school entry. The article identifies both structural dimensions of quality, including teacher qualifications, child-to-adult ratios, group size, and health and safety practices, and process dimensions involving sensitive, responsive, and stimulating interactions with children. Training specifically in early education emerges as a particularly consistent structural predictor of children’s development. Huston argues that governments can improve quality through funding, regulation, and standards that establish expectations for programs and the early childhood workforce. The article concludes that integrating child care and early education into a unified early education and care system could provide a stronger policy framework for improving quality across programs serving young children.
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
Join leaders from research, government, philanthropy, advocacy, and the early childhood community September 23rd for a day of presentations and discussion examining findings from the Rutgers Child Care Research Collaborative. Together, we will explore what the research tells us about New Jersey's child care landscape and consider how these findings can inform policy, practice, and future research.
The Center for Women and Work (CWW), the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development (Heldrich), and the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) have joined together to form the Rutgers Child Care Research Collaborative. Funding for the Rutgers Child Care Research Collaborative is provided by the New Jersey Department of Children and Families.
ECE Research
Tharanirakshita Asokan, Bianca Jovanovic, and Gudrun Schwarzer, writing in Acta Psychologica, examined the development of three-dimensional mental rotation from infancy through the preschool years. The longitudinal study initially assessed 24 infants at 9 months and reassessed the same children between ages 4.5 and 6 using age-adjusted mental rotation tasks. Mental rotation performance in infancy was strongly and positively associated with performance during the preschool years, suggesting continuity in spatial abilities across early childhood. Exploratory analyses also found associations between motor development and later mental rotation, including children’s early crawling status and concurrent motor skills during the preschool period. The findings suggest that three-dimensional spatial abilities emerging during infancy may provide a foundation for later spatial cognition and point to motor experiences as a potentially important contributor to the development of mental rotation skills.
Amir Hossein Faghfouri, Amin Mokari Yamchi, Fariba Babaei, Fatemeh Maleki Sedgi, Ehsan Rikhtegar, Fahim Bani, Yousef Mohammadpour, and Shahsanam Gheibi, writing in BMC Pediatrics, evaluated a six-month home based nutritional intervention for 260 children ages 2 to 5 with overweight or obesity in Urmia, Iran. The program combined nutrition education, culturally adapted lower calorie recipes, and behavioral counseling delivered to families during twice monthly home visits. Compared with the control group, participating children showed significant improvements in weight, BMI, BMI z scores, waist circumference, and overall diet quality. The findings suggest that culturally responsive, family focused nutrition programs delivered in the home can improve dietary behaviors and weight related outcomes among overweight and obese preschool children.
Megan Gath, Cara Swit, Mia McLean, Ying Wang, Jen Smith, and Jenna Gawn, writing in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, examined whether the educational content of television viewed at age 2 was associated with language, literacy, and mathematics skills at age 4.5 among 5,338 children participating in the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal study. Educational media containing language focused features was associated with stronger vocabulary and communication skills among children living in areas of greater socioeconomic deprivation, while greater exposure to mathematics rich content was associated with stronger counting skills among children with higher viewing time. In contrast, greater viewing of content with few mathematics instructional features predicted lower counting skills, and literacy focused features were not associated with later literacy outcomes. The findings suggest that the developmental implications of screen time depend partly on what children watch, highlighting the potential value of high-quality educational media for supporting language and mathematics development in some preschool children.
Samantha Burns, Zhangjing Luo, and Michal Perlman, writing in Learning Environments Research, examined variations in the quality of educator interactions experienced by 610 children across 94 early childhood classrooms in Toronto, Canada. Using repeated observations, the researchers assessed warm interactions, negative interactions, and language specifically intended to promote children's language development and identified three patterns of interaction quality across the morning: None to Some Quality, Decreasing Quality, and Consistently Low. Notably, most children experienced relatively few interactions with their educators, and children experiencing consistently low-quality interactions were more likely to speak a language other than English at home and were rated as more hostile and less considerate than children whose interaction quality decreased over the morning. The findings highlight the importance of assessing children's individual experiences rather than relying solely on classroom level measures of quality and suggest implications for educator training and early childhood policy.
Opportunities
National Association of State Leaders in Early Education (NASLEE) Roundtable
It's not too late to register for the NASLEE Roundtable, Oct 7-9 in Scottsdale, AZ!
Lead Advocacy Officer, ZERO TO THREE
Program Officer, Children and Families, The David & Lucile Packard Foundation
Chief of Early Learning, First Steps, State of South Carolina
Vice President, Early Childhood Policy, Center for American Progress
Director of Community Impact, Early Matters Texas
Director of Rural Initiatives, Early Matters Texas
Early Childhood Policy Manager, Zero To Five Montana
Director of Early Childhood Policy, Colorado Children’s Campaign
The Authors
Allison Muhlendorf manages external affairs for NIEER, including communications, earned and owned media, government relations, partnerships, and outreach. Allison and her team at Longleaf Strategies are conducting a communications audit for NIEER and developing a long-term external affairs strategy.
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.
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Stay Informed on Early Childhood Education Each Week