Following the pioneering efforts of a federal Head Start program, U.S. state policymakers have rapidly expanded access to Early Care and Education (ECE) programs with strong bipartisan support. Within the past decade the enrollment of 4 year-olds has roughly doubled in state-funded preschool. Despite these public investments, the content and priorities of early childhood legislation–enacted and failed–have rarely been examined. This study integrates perspectives from public policy, political science, developmental science, and machine learning in examining state ECE bills in identifying key factors associated with legislative success. Drawing from the Early Care and Education Bill Tracking Database, we employed Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a statistical topic identification model, to examine 2,396 ECE bills across the 50 U.S. states during the 2015-2018. First, a six-topic solution demonstrated the strongest fit theoretically and empirically suggesting two meta policy priorities: ‘ECE finance’ and ‘ECE services’. ‘ECE finance’ comprised three dimensions: (1) Revenues, (2) Expenditures, and (3) Fiscal Governance. ‘ECE services’ also included three dimensions: (1) PreK, (2) Child Care, and (3) Health and Human Services (HHS). Further, we found that bills covering a higher proportion of HHS, Fiscal Governance, or Expenditures were more likely to pass into law relative to bills focusing largely on PreK, Child Care, and Revenues. Additionally, legislative effectiveness of the bill’s primary sponsor was a strong predictor of legislative success, and further moderated the relation between bill content and passage. Highly effective legislators who had previously passed five or more bills had an extremely high probability of introducing a legislation that successfully passed regardless of topic. Legislation with expenditures as policy priorities benefitted the most from having an effective legislator. We conclude with a discussion of the empirical findings within the broader context of early childhood policy literature and suggest implications for future research and policy.

Parental investments in the activities and materials that drive learning are central to young children’s school readiness and life success. Little is known, however, about how parents adjust these investments in response to outside pressures, including their children’s impending entry into kindergarten. In the present study, we employ two analytical strategies (multilevel residualized change and regression discontinuity) within national data from the Head Start Impact Study to examine whether parents of children facing an impending entry to kindergarten invest more time and materials in their children’s language and literacy skill development compared with parents of otherwise similar children who are not yet facing formal school entry. Results suggest that low-income parents react to the impending kindergarten transition by increasing their provision of parent–child language and literacy activities (d = .15) but not related materials. We discuss the implications of our findings for the timing of parenting interventions.

One in three children enrolled in US early childhood programs is a dual language learner. While dual language learners have been the target of sweeping educational reforms under the guise of justice, these reforms—which pathologize dual language learners as problems to be remediated rather than assets to be developed—have largely ignored the priorities and experiences of young multilingual learners and their families. This historical omission of centering dual language learners in research, policy, and practice is unjust and has contributed to marginalization, homogenization, and linguistic erasure. Asian Americans, the second-largest group of dual language learners and the fastest-growing racial group in the USA, have remained an underexplored group of emergent bilinguals across early childhood research, practice, and policy. Thus, this article draws on the multilingual expertise of Asian American families of young dual language learners to portray how parents construct and navigate multiple knowledges, beliefs, and pedagogies of cultivating their children's dual language and literacy development. The key findings present a justice-centered framework that conceptualizes three cultivating practices across diverse spaces, borders, and time. Counterstories of planting, pollinating, and pruning position Asian immigrant parents as agentic gardeners of bilingualism and biliteracy, and interrogate the deficit paradigms that are too often placed on dual language learners to fit the narrow, monocultural, and monolingual definitions of school readiness. Centering Asian American families in generating theory and future research directions, this article envisions the future potentiality of early childhood education in pursuit of equity and transformative justice.

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South Korea has experienced the world’s lowest birth rate for more than two decades. In fact, South’s Korea’s population of close to 52 million is on track to halve by the end of this century. Yet spending more than $270 billion (390 trillion won) on policies including subsidized housing, paid parental leave, child care and early education programs, and family support services failed to reverse this declining trend. Thus, this paper explored the role of socioeconomic and gender inequities that have shaped cultural beliefs regarding parenting, child care, and family life in Korea, and how the sociocultural, educational, historical, and political processes have subsequently shaped the contemporary landscape of Korean early childhood policies and programs. Employing the critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper describes, interprets, and explains the ways in which discourses of parenting and child care construct, legitimize, and at times, resist inequities in parenting and early childhood development. Key explanatory frameworks emerged from data: 1) Family socioeconomic status and excessive comparison in a hyper-competitive culture; 2) Childrearing as luxury: Gender inequities in parenting and family life; and 3) Parenting as investment: The opportunity cost of childrearing. The paper concludes with implications for early childhood policies designed to strengthen families and children’s well-being.