Why This Matters for Families
Access to affordable, high-quality early care and education (ECE) can determine whether a family can stay in the workforce and whether a child starts kindergarten ready to learn. Increasingly, families are accessing ECE services locally with a growing number of local governments investing in early care and education: 53 of the 75 largest U.S. cities have enrolled at least 30% 4-year-olds in state or locally-funded pre-k programs, and most supplement state and federal dollars with local funding. That momentum continued in November 2025, when cities and counties passed ballot measures dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars to early childhood education, reigniting conversations about the impact of the affordability crisis on families with young children and what policymakers can do to help.
Implementation Challenge
Getting public ECE programs approved and funded takes enormous effort, but it's only half the battle. After the bill is signed and the money is appropriated, another challenge awaits: delivering a new ECE service to people that is on time, on budget, and works as expected. Despite the importance of implementation, few mechanisms exist to help public servants stand up new and innovative programs. Launching and expanding public early care and education services is no exception. With new and bigger local early childhood programs launching each year, the need to do it well becomes more urgent. People want these programs to work, but a wall of complex funding streams, regulations, and workforce challenges complicates the path forward.
Our Approach
Even when no playbook exists, sharing peer-to-peer strategies can smooth implementation. Networks of public servants facing similar demands can bridge knowledge gaps and share effective strategies, as well as lessons, pitfalls, and solutions.
The Early Care and Education (ECE) Implementation Working Group (IWG) — a group of early education program leaders from 20 different locations — is an example of such an effort. In past cohorts, members built a trusted space to share challenges and successes, and with the Lab, shared those lessons more to a broader audience through publications. In this cohort, we want to go farther and understand whether lessons shared can be replicated across a larger and even more diverse cohort.
ECE Implementation Working Group participants may lead programs from a city or county office, a non-profit organization, or a school district. The demographics of the families they serve vary, with some serving populations where 50 percent or more of children under six are economically disadvantaged, and others far fewer. The programs they lead may enroll 200 children, or 100,000. What’s more, the programs are in different stages of implementation, from launching to building to sustaining to scaling.
Are these lessons applicable across a diverse array of programs and locations? We think so, and so do the leaders who choose to participate. The through line is a deep commitment to delivering early childhood services that families need, and a shared understanding that strong implementation is at the heart of delivering a high-quality system of supports that parents, children, and providers can rely on and trust.
What We Learned
During 2026, the Lab has focused on strengthening member relationships, deepening group learning, sharpening communications, building partnerships, and expanding the group's reach and impact:
Member relations: In this cohort, we recruited a larger group of members and diversified the membership to include smaller, more politically diverse locations, such as Louisville, KY and York County, PA. We tested strategies to increase engagement between meetings and help members connect, streamlined our communications to reduce member fatigue, and created mini-cohorts in states with more than two member locations.
Connecting and Learning: We redesigned meetings to go deeper on the group’s highest priority topics, and incorporated hands-on activities to support implementation work. We leveraged the group to get pragmatic feedback on the Child Care Choice Guarantee policy proposal put out in July 2026 to complement previous policy-oriented work in 2025.
Communications: We designed meeting structure and communications templates to make group administration easier and improve the publication process, and launched a new collections page and newsletter to collect subscriber information. We presented at the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center’s State Institute on Governance, and a panel of members will present at the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s centennial conference later this year.
Partnerships: We are working with group members and peers in the field to identify shovel-ready implementation projects in 2027 to improve child care delivery for a subset of members who would like to participate.
Impact: We supported roughly 50 leaders from 20 programs representing 14 states, 8 census subregions representing 2.8 million children under six, more than r 1.1 million who live at or below 200 percent FPL, and 300,000 children enrolled in local early care and education programs.
“The learning and documentation is so helpful. I have links to the writings that I am sharing with our Board of Supervisors today.”
“A huge great reminder/lesson learned [from participating in the working group] is that true administrative innovation is happening in counties and cities and there is so much good to share across this work.”
Next Steps
We will continue planning future meeting arcs that have proven most useful to members: peer-to-peer sharing with time for discussion and engagement on how lessons learned could apply in each other’s locales. We will continue to share lessons learned in ways that better reach relevant policy and practitioner audiences.
