Early care and education

This chapter briefly reviews the history of early care and education (ECE) in the United States, the ECE conceptual frameworks, how ECE is organized, who uses ECE, and associations between ECE experiences and child outcomes. Nonparent care is now experienced by most children in the United States, with home-based care most common for infants and toddlers and center-based care for preschoolers. ECE settings that involve frequent and responsive teacher-child interactions and access to age-appropriate activities appear to promote children's cognitive and social development, although those associations tend to be quite modest. Publicly funded programs like Head Start and pre-kindergarten programs tend to serve children from low-income families, and are successful in promoting school readiness skills, especially early academic skills. However, the impacts of today's programs largely disappear in the first years of elementary school, and even flipped from being positive to negative in the methodologically most rigorous studies. Explanations for this fadeout are explored.