The Early Care and Education Consortium (ECEC) is a non-profit association of America’s leading national, regional, and independent providers of high-quality child care and early learning and development programs for young children representing over 7,500 programs in all 50 states. ECEC affiliates are devoted to serving as the unified voice for providers of high quality programs and services that support all families and children. They recently released a report outlining the importance of high-quality community early care and education programs. Click here to read the full report. We’ve put together a short summary for you below.

High-quality community early care and education programs play a critical role in supporting the workforce of today and tomorrow. It proposes developmentally appropriate early education opportunities for children; at the same time, it delivers a safe, dependable care that empowers parents to be financially productive within the labor force. Affordable high-quality community early care and education program options remain at the core of effective early childhood structures and include a range of programs (e.g. Early Head Start and Head Start, kindergarten, and home visiting).

High-quality community early care and education programs deliver evidence-based school readiness experiences to children of working class families. These families depend on year-round, full-functioning day program accessibility in order to continue being part of the workforce. The excerpt below displays the importance of high-quality community early care and education programs and the effect they have on parents and businesses:

Nationally, 76% of children under age five with employed parents spend some time in out-of-home care each week. Working families of all income levels need readily available, affordable, and reliable settings that provide high-quality care and early learning opportunities for their children during their hours of employment. Today’s working families generally require extended hours of care that exceed the traditional school day. Lack of access to affordable, stable care means substantial losses in worker productivity. On average, employee absenteeism based on disrupted access to child care is estimated to cost U.S. businesses $3 billion annually.

An increasing amount of research confirms that investment in high-quality early care and education programs produce positive results in school readiness, well-being and long-term efficiency. With 90% of brain development occurring between birth and age five, high quality care and learning environments shape children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and physical growth, and promote executive function skills during their early years[1].

High-quality community early care and education programs support tomorrow’s workforce by:

  • Participating in state licensure as a foundation for continuous quality improvement.
  • Ranking within the top levels of state Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS).
  • Holding accreditation by a nationally and internationally recognized entity, including NAEYC and AdvancED.
  • Relying on an evidence-based curriculum, including Teaching Strategies’ Creative Curriculum and HighScope’s Infants and Toddlers or Preschool Curriculum.
  • Administering a developmentally appropriate, research-based child assessment, including Teaching Strategies’ GOLD, TeachStone’s CLASS, HighScope’s COR Advantage, or a statewide Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA).
  • Ensuring strong instructional leaders and accountable management systems. Benefiting all children by promoting diverse and mixed-income learning environments.