Student-parents face unique postsecondary persistence and completion challenges as they balance raising children with the demands of coursework and possibly employment. In order to help lowincome student-parents earn degrees and credentials, the federal government provides Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) grants to institutions…

Center-based early care and education (ECE) is important for promoting positive early development and supporting families by providing child care so parents can work. However, the center-based supply varies substantially in terms of funding sources, indicators of quality, and services offered; and many families experience a lack of equitable…

Partnerships between Early Head Start (EHS) programs and child care providers aim to increase access to high quality, comprehensive services that meet the needs of infants and toddlers from families with low incomes. Quality in early care and education matters. In prior research, high quality early care and education was associated with better…

Developing healthy eating habits in childhood may support future healthy food choices. With most children spending some time outside of the home, child care facilities have the opportunity to positively influence children's eating habits. The purpose of this paper is to review recent research regarding foods served in child care settings and…

The Early Childhood Directors Leadership Institute (ECDLI) project addressed a need for effective professional development with a series of Institutes using the Program Administration Scale (PAS), the Program Management Inventory (PMI), and the Plan-Do-Study-Act model, over a 3-year period. Each of the 100 participating program directors in the…

This study uses longitudinal data to follow a cohort (N = 4,465) of all early childhood education teachers working in publicly funded, center-based settings in Louisiana over a 3-year period. We present the proportion of teachers still at their sites across six time points between 2016 and 2019, providing the first statewide, longitudinal…

Early childhood educator's emotional socialization may contribute crucially to young children's social-emotional competence. Here, we examined the contributions of self-reported reactions to children's emotions and beliefs about emotional socialization of 90 teachers to the social-emotional competence of 334 pre-schoolers. Teacher-reported emotion…

The early care and education (ECE) system has been under-resourced and undervalued since well before the pandemic. Low pay and poor working environment have long plagued the ECE industry as key drivers of chronic high turnover rates and teacher staffing shortages in the field. Additional disparities within the system place providers on vastly…

Early care and education (ECE) leaders often consider new content, curricula, and models to include in their quality improvement (QI) toolkit. The Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) centers equity in its approach to engaging staff at all levels in an ECE program. It is a promising approach for center-based ECE programs (with the potential to…

Most states in the United States operate their public preschool programs in a mixed delivery system that serves children in local education agencies (LEAs) as well as non-LEA settings, such as Head Start agencies, child care centers, private schools, and family child care homes. To inform state preschool administrators and policymakers as they…

FNS Research Corner provides a continuing series to summarize recently completed and current research conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in the area of Child Nutrition Programs (CNPs). Summaries of recently completed research projects and in-progress research are provided in this article.

Four recent publications describe the progress of nine states that received Round 1 Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) grants in implementing systems that rate early learning and development programs on quality and help them improve. These systems are known as tiered quality rating and improvement systems (TQRIS). RTT-ELC had…

This National Early Head Start Services Snapshot summarizes key data on demographics and services for infants, toddlers, and pregnant women served by Early Head Start programs. The data in this Snapshot is a subset of the annual Program Information Report (PIR) submission to the Office of Head Start. Data categories include: (1) Funded Enrollment;…

Half of all infants and toddlers receive care in nonparental settings, such as centers and family child care (FCC) homes. On average, infants and toddlers spend more hours per week in care than preschoolers do. Yet infant-toddler care has been identified as lower quality than care for older children, suggesting that professional development (PD)…

Young children and their families benefit from early care and education (ECE) settings implementing high-quality practices that support children's well-being, health, and safety. Activities to support quality are a focal point of federal and state investments, including over $1 billion of the Child Care and Development Fund and nearly $240 million…