Tag: Newsletter

Educating teachers to use AI without harming the planet

by Ariel Gilreath and Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report
January 25, 2026

This story appeared in our climate and education newsletter. Sign up here.

I’m one of those rare people (there are others out there, right?) who have yet to try ChatGPT or any other generative artificial intelligence program. Part of my hesitation is driven by a vague concern that AI is killing the planet: Researchers predict, for example, that U.S. data centers could consume as much water as 10 million Americans and emit as much carbon as 10 million cars. At the same time, there’s hope that AI could combat climate change, by accelerating research on climate solutions.

So I was intrigued when I came across an announcement about a new initiative on how to teach K-12 educators to use AI with climate change in mind. The effort, called TEACH-AI, was started last fall by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Bremen in Germany. Among other projects, they are developing a course to help future educators understand how to use AI in an environmentally conscious way, and how to use it to teach lessons on climate change.

My colleague Ariel Gilreath, who covers K-12 education for Hechinger, spoke this week with one of the TEACH-AI creators, Asli Sezen-Barrie, an endowed chair of climate and environmental education and an associate professor at the School of Education at UC Irvine. Here is Ariel’s interview with Sezen-Barrie, edited for length and clarity.

— Caroline Preston

Can you explain the idea behind TEACH-AI, and how it came about?

Institutions have started a lot of initiatives around AI. At this point, it’s hard to basically say: ‘Don’t use this,’ because there are benefits that teachers and students see. So we thought, ‘OK, how do we have them think through the environmental cost of this?’

At the same time, we were trying to understand what is the confidence level and knowledge base that educators have right now, about not just commonly known tools like ChatGPT, but other AI tools developed for education purposes including to understand the changing climate.

What I started seeing is environmentally conscious teachers were actually a lot more cautious than what we initially thought. Even when their students were using it, they were concerned. Their districts are working on adopting certain tools, and these teachers were actually underlining a lot of reasons why not using AI is a good thing right now. We heard similar concerns from our colleagues in Germany.

What we thought then is: If their students are going to use it, if their districts are going to adopt AI tools, and teachers are really concerned, let’s try to figure out a way to understand how we can both use climate change as a context to see how AI can be used purposely — how do we choose the right tools, when the AI tool can align with our purposes — and then also create activities that teachers or their students will be able to use to debate what is the cost-benefit analysis for certain AI tools.

Is the purpose primarily to help future educators use AI to teach environmental lessons, or is it training educators how to use AI in a more sustainable way?

It’s going to be both. Because this is going to be one course, it’s exploratory work. My colleagues developed a tool called StoryAI, which has a specific goal and purpose and, as a result, lower energy cost. We’re going to see how we can leverage big data to store data with that tool on teaching issues like sustainable fashion or food waste or fires.

Given the amount of water and energy AI data centers use, there’s been a lot of debate about whether using AI at all is bad for the environment. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.

Those concerns are valid. But at this point, where I am, it’s hard for me to say: ‘It’s bad — period.’ Because there are valid reasons teachers will tell you they use it, like with overwhelming tasks. Climate change is such a complex topic. And we tell them to teach it in interdisciplinary ways, how communities care about it, what science says about it.

Maybe that’s where AI tools can support educators. It can be that they use AI tools to learn about changing climate and current data and research.

We need to think about what AI tools and what kind of use of AI will align successfully with the way we’re designing teaching and learning, and which ones will fail. We need to prepare educators on working through that judgment.

Part of this initiative involves designing a course that blends AI literacy with geography and environmental science education. What can teachers expect to learn from this course?

The course is called An Education for Sustainable Futures. We’re going to explore the two angles I mentioned: how AI tools have a role in understanding and making projections about climate change, and how do they support the solutions — or not, at times. The other component is bringing in AI literacy.

There’s a lot of professional master’s degrees appearing all over the country right now, and internationally as well. You don’t see so much discussion — or a course or even a curriculum element — on the environmental impact. Bias, language bias and reliance is discussed a little bit, but not from an environmental context.

And the class you described is just one part of this initiative.

We are also doing document analysis to look at guidance from California, Germany, UNESCO, to see where AI recommendations can align with environmental literacy.

Education can have a critical role in these discussions, because people make decisions, people vote for things. Not knowing and not understanding these things doesn’t give them informed actions.

Education’s role can be really critical to have these discussions and to learn to look at this kind of data.

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected]. Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at [email protected].

This story about AI in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate change newsletter.

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January 25, 2026
Homeless kids get special treatment at Boston-area child care center

by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
January 21, 2026

To an untrained eye, the “gross motor room” at the Edgerley Family Horizons Center in Boston looks like any other indoor gym for preschoolers. There are mats on the floor, large foam blocks, shapes and stairs to play with and climb on, fabric swings hanging from the ceiling and sensory boards attached to the walls, covered with various materials that provide touch-based activities.

But this room was thoughtfully designed to be much more than a play space: It includes features meant to support emotional development and provide a calming place for children experiencing big feelings. For example, the cocoon swings provide a “hug” feeling that helps children relax. The blue lights above promote a sense of peace. And the soft foam tunnel gives children a place to hide when they need a break. The teachers are also specifically trained to foster feelings of safety and trust, and to reduce child stress.

At Edgerley, which is run by the nonprofit Horizons for Homeless Children and serves more than 250 children ages 2 months to 5 years old, there’s a need for this resource. All the children who are enrolled have experienced or are experiencing homelessness, which for kids, can lead to difficulty regulating emotions, ongoing health issues and developmental delays.

Over the past few years, infant and toddler homelessness has increased in nearly every state. Nearly half a million of the country’s youngest children are living in shelters, in overcrowded homes with other families, or sleeping in temporary spaces, like cars or hotels. At the same time, fewer of these children are enrolled in early learning programs like the one at Edgerley. Such programs, with their enriching environments and stable teachers, can help buffer the effects of homelessness on young children and their growing brains. I recently traveled to Boston to learn more about the early learning program run by Horizons. My story, which also looks at what other cities and states are doing to help these families, was published last weekend with The Boston Globe.

This story about homeless kids was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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January 21, 2026
Early childhood educator apprenticeships offer an answer to child care shortages

by Nirvi Shah, The Hechinger Report
January 7, 2026

About six years ago, an apprentice training to be a machinist in Washington state told her supervisor she would probably have to drop out of the training program after having her baby: She couldn’t find child care that accommodated her shift.

It was one of the first challenges Shana Peschek was tasked with solving when she became executive director of the Machinists Institute, which trains workers for jobs in the aerospace, manufacturing and automotive industries all over the state.

Peschek knew it was essential to do something for workers with young children.

“That worst shift, the new hires are going to get it. The new hires are generally younger people. They have little kids or they are going to want a little kid,” Peschek said.

“It’s beyond the cost of child care,” she said. “If they can’t find anywhere, we’re going to lose them.”

As Peschek worked on a way to address the situation, she also wondered how she could include apprenticeship in the solution. The answer: incorporating early educator apprenticeships into a custom-built child care center tailored to the trade union’s needs. Last month, The Hechinger Report wrote about San Francisco’s child care apprenticeship program.

“Apprenticeship is my jam,” said Peschek, who emphasized that apprenticeship is a mode of education, not limited to any specific profession. While the word apprentice is often associated with roles like machinists, it is just the term for an educational path that includes paid, on-the-job training. Early educator apprenticeships do just that, providing classes and training alongside paid work experience to help hopeful teachers earn required credentials and get full-time jobs. “I want that pathway available for our teachers and assistant teachers,” she said.

With a combination of institute money, grants and donations, the Machinists Institute bought land and is constructing Little Wings Early Learning Academy in Everett, Washington. Its name is inspired by the local economy, which is powered in part by a nearby Boeing factory. The center will serve workers in the trade union, who will be able to send their young children for care starting as early as 4 a.m. through as late as midnight. Care will also be available on weekends, to accommodate a range of shifts. It is scheduled to open this spring.

Machinists, maritime industry workers and other local tradespeople and apprentices will pay a discounted rate for child care, which will also be available to area residents to enroll their kids.

Peschek’s hopes are high, for all of the apprentices the center will involve.

That’s in part because of the experience some early educator apprentices have had. Apprenticeships have been a part of the trades for centuries, but they are relatively novel in education.

The option changed the course of Carlota Hernández de Cruz’s life. For years, with only an elementary school education from when she grew up in Mexico, she was the primary caregiver for her three children while her husband was the breadwinner. When her youngest child was still in child care, at a California Head Start program run by an area YMCA, she began working a few hours a day as a parent intern at the center.

She eventually encountered Pamm Shaw, who created one of the first early educator apprenticeship programs in the country for the YMCA of the East Bay, in California’s Alameda County. Shaw encouraged Hernández de Cruz to take classes and work toward becoming an early childhood teacher.

“I’m originally from Mexico,” Hernández de Cruz said, remembering her apprehension. “I came with zero English.” But Shaw was convincing.

Hernández de Cruz took classes, one or two at a time, balancing them with motherhood and homekeeping duties. Then her husband got sick and could no longer work. It took years, but she completed the courses for her associate degree. Just a few months before graduation, her husband died.

Hernández de Cruz, now 53, knew that although what she had accomplished was monumental, it wasn’t enough. Thanks to her apprenticeship, however, her bachelor’s degree coursework was paid for, even though it was sometimes a struggle to keep up with the requirements of online courses and lectures in English, while solo parenting and working.

In 2019, Hernández de Cruz earned that bachelor’s degree but turned down a job running a child care center. She wasn’t ready. When she was approached again in 2021 about a director role, at the center where she was working, she agreed. There have been ups and downs: That center closed and she was back to teaching for a while. But now she runs the Vera Casey Center, a Head Start site for infants and toddlers in Berkeley that is part of the YMCA of the East Bay.

“I feel I can say financially I’m stable,” Hernández de Cruz said, and she said she is proud of herself and her children. Her kids grew up watching their mother work and study hard and have had opportunities she didn’t when she was younger, even though she said they all faltered, and flunked a few classes, when their father died. Her younger daughter just graduated from a nursing program and her older daughter completed a bachelor’s degree in child development and is now pursuing a master’s degree. Both daughters live at home with her, as do her parents. (Her son, she said, is still taking classes and finding his way.) “I’m stable but he’s not here with us,” Hernández de Cruz said of her husband, but “being in the classroom with kids, it helped me to heal. That’s what I feel at work. I still feel happy every day.”

Contact Executive Editor Nirvi Shah at 212-678-3445, on Signal at NirviShah.14 or [email protected].

Reporting on this story was supported by the Higher Ed Media Fellowship.

This story about child care apprenticeships was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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January 7, 2026
5 early childhood education highlights of 2025
by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
December 24, 2025

In the nearly 13 years since I wrote my first early childhood story for The Hechinger Report, I have never experienced a year quite like 2025. From the gutting of federal early childhood offices to threats to Head Start and the deeply felt ramifications of aggressive federal immigration enforcement, news on the early ed beat felt constant — and especially urgent — this year.

Amid all this, there were some promising steps taken, especially at the state level, to elevate children’s issues and pay for programs that support the earliest years of life. Here are five highlights, including a few you may have missed:

New Mexico introduced universal child care. New Mexico was the first state in the country to roll out universal child care to every family, regardless of income. Experts are cautiously optimistic, and acknowledge the state likely has some kinks to work out. One New Mexico source I spoke to said she’s especially worried that wealthier families will snatch up spots if guardrails aren’t put in place to prioritize certain populations, including children with disabilities. Another advocate told me she is worried that the wages for early childhood educators are still too low. This is a story that will continue to play out over the next few years, and will be watched carefully. Still, in a country that has long underfunded early learning, experts are hopeful that other states will follow suit and invest more in the child care industry in ways that support the child care staff and families.

New Jersey, which leads the nation in excluding young children with disabilities, committed to investigate how to improve inclusive practices: Earlier this year, a Hechinger Report investigation found New Jersey is the worst in the nation at making sure young students with disabilities are learning alongside their peers for at least 80 percent of the day, which is a federal metric for inclusion. After our series was published, a council that advises New Jersey education officials on special education issues announced it will investigate inclusion rates for young children and look at how state educators and administrators are trained.

States and municipalities invested in early childhood: Cincinnati, Montana and California’s Alameda County increased their support for early learning this year, said Emmy Liss, a researcher and policy consultant for the think tank New America’s New Practice Lab. In San Antonio, the city’s pre-K program expanded this year to serve infants and toddlers. In Colorado, voters approved new “taxing districts” that will raise sales tax for early childhood programs. “We see this consistent pattern of mayors, would-be mayors, county officials, saying, ‘Our families can’t withstand this anymore, and we have the power and the mandate from our community to invest in early childhood,’” Liss said. “I feel optimistic because of that.”

Some states expanded family-friendly policies: After reporting by Hechinger contributor Sarah Carr this year found few parents are made aware of their infant’s rights to early intervention services, Illinois passed a law requiring that families with infants who stay in the NICU are connected to those early therapies. In Colorado, state officials added NICU leave to the state’s paid family medical leave program. Minnesota policymakers are on the cusp of launching their state’s paid family leave program.

Pittsburgh embraced a citywide play-based initiative: After decades of research that shows the importance of play for healthy development, a new initiative in Pittsburgh is putting research into action. After funding several years of play-based projects around the city, the Let’s Play, PGH program, funded by the nonprofit Remake Learning and the Grable and Henry L. Hillman foundations, rolled out permanent play-based experiences this year. Those include a “Clayground,” where families can try hands-on clay sculpting, and a “Discovery Tree,” an indoor structure with various play and learning features. “I think society, especially in education, we’re moving away from valuing play in a way that it’s often spoken of more in a pejorative sense, like there’s more serious things we have to do,” said Tyler Samstag, executive director of Remake Learning. “But there’s this rich research around the importance of play,” he added. And, “there’s a kind of reeling back from the pandemic era of always being in front of a screen.”

I also asked a few early childhood experts what they plan to watch for in 2026:
- I’m watching the dual trends of state momentum for universal child care proposals against the budgetary headwinds states are facing as a result of economic policies and H.R. 1 [the “big, beautiful bill”].
— Elliot Haspel, senior fellow at Capita
- The early care and education community will have the opportunity to stake out bold policy positions, like those we saw in New Mexico, New York, Connecticut, Montana and Vermont this past year, while facing the challenge of protecting children, families and educators from federal policies that will wreak havoc on safety net programs and state budgets.
— Albert Wat, deputy director of advocacy and impact at the Alliance for Early Success
- I am paying attention to whether there are signs of even a minor shift away from this dominant narrative — that something close to universal child care is the ‘true goal,’ which we now seem to be accepting without question. My concern is that the needs of young children will once again get blotted out by the needs of grown-ups, the needs of the economy, the needs of business.
— Katharine B. Stevens, founder and president of the Center on Child and Family Policy
- Differences between the House and Senate funding bills, which will be settled in January, which could affect funding for various early childhood programs.
— Sarah Gilliland, senior policy manager, New America’s New Practice Lab
- With New York City’s cost of living driving families away in droves, the time is ripe for universal child care — and it can happen! We look forward to working with Mayor-elect Mamdani and his team as they develop plans that lift up home-based child care as a vital support.
— Jessica Sager, CEO, All Our Kin

Thank you so much to all of you for your support and readership this year, and please don’t hesitate to reach out with any story ideas, questions or comments. Happy holidays!

This story about early childhood education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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December 24, 2025
What the US can teach other countries about home-based child care

by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
December 17, 2025

Each day, nearly 70 percent of the world’s children are cared for and educated by adults other than their parents in home-based settings, many of which are informal and run by women. (In the United States, it’s about 30 percent.) In many countries, these home-based settings receive little financial or training support from their governments.

This summer, I moderated a panel made up of global child care experts at the National Association for Family Child Care’s (NAFCC) global learning convening. The event marked the first time that the association brought together child care leaders from across the globe to share their expertise in how family child care works in their countries. About 1,000 people attended, including representatives from Bangladesh, Ecuador, South Africa and the United States, to discuss how early learning programs face similar challenges around the world, including low pay and a lack of respect. Attendees also discussed progress securing funding and more awareness and recognition for the sector.

The session I moderated, on home-based child care policy and advocacy, featured Grace Matlhape as one of the panelists. Matlhape is the chief executive director of SmartStart, a nonprofit that supports high-quality home-based early learning programs in South Africa.

The organization’s model, which trains community members to teach a play-based curriculum and run their own early learning programs, has been found to decrease achievement gaps between higher- and lower-income children.

In early 2025, after advocacy from Matlhape and other early childhood organizations, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced he would prioritize the early years in his education agenda, acknowledging the country is decades behind in the field. The government also dedicated $500 million to expand early childhood development programs to some of the country’s 1.3 million young children not already enrolled in early care. That number represents about 18 percent of the country’s 0-5 population.

I recently caught up with Matlhape to hear more about progress she is seeing in South Africa, stereotypes of home-based care and which countries she’s looking to for guidance as the sector continues to grow. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the landscape of early childhood in South Africa?

Up to now, South Africa’s main approach is center-based child care. There’s still a gap in access, it’s not equitably accessible, but the main seen, acknowledged, recognized and regulated mode of child care is center-based care.

SmartStart is the first organization to look at home-based care as a model to build. Having said that, South Africa is very similar to the U.S. in that the early childhood care education is market-driven. The government does not run programs directly. From time to time, they may have a school here and a preschool there, but in the early years, government is not the main provider of programs. SmartStart is the first organization that decided to build [home-based care] into a national model that becomes acceptable even to policy makers.

Why are you focusing on home-based care?

It enables rapid setup, because it avoids all of the lead times in buildings and so on. It lowers the cost when you take away all of the infrastructure investments required. It’s community-based. People have very strong local relationships, for example, a shopkeeper down the road delivers bread every day. It builds on this very strong local culture of looking after children and just investing in their care and their stimulation.

We recruit our providers within close proximity to one another so that they can form into communities of practice to support one another. It’s a very powerful vehicle of building belonging and identity. It creates cultural acceptability very quickly.

Finally, we’ve seen fantastic child outcomes compared to the national average in South Africa. Many of [the programs] are in informal housing in very, very poor environments, but their child outcomes outperform the national average. We think it is a matter of good child ratios. You can’t have a massive class of children at a home. You have children in smaller groups, and we think that’s the answer.

What challenges have you encountered?

It is really hard for people to let go of this overreliance on quality associated with physical structures. People expect to see quality with their eyes, whereas what we are seeing in home-based child care is the experience and the love and attention, and the power of practicing good pedagogy between one loving practitioner and a handful of children. That’s the secret sauce. And so it’s been a challenge just to change mindsets, for people to see child care, home-based child care, in that way.

This summer you came to Dallas and met with other home-based child care experts from around the world. Did anything stick out to you regarding how South Africa’s home-based landscape compares to other countries?

What was very different in the U.S. is just how mature the sector is. It’s significantly more mature. It has matured to a practitioner-led advocacy level, with a platform like NAFCC and people who are leading the organization! [In South Africa], it is very strongly practitioner led. We are still on that journey of the practitioner representing themselves and driving advocacy in their own provinces or states. It gave me a sense of what the future might look like, the power in the practitioner-led alliance or coalition.

What are your goals moving forward?

We’ve actually moved into the zone now of regulation and funding by the government. We co-founded an advocacy organization about three to four years ago with other early childhood development organizations in South Africa. We’ve invested in policy research on what’s going on around the world [in early childhood]. My colleagues really invested in understanding what home-based child care looks like, particularly in Latin America — we drew a lot from that. And we are partnering with the government, with the Department of Education. As insights emerge, we partner with them to say, ‘This is what the research says. These are the trends.’ We are very effectively influencing policy in South Africa by getting the president to announce early childhood as one of the apex priorities for our government. We are trying to make early childhood development in general, and promoting home-based child care as a first tier approach, a societal priority.

This story about home-based child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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December 17, 2025
Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators

by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
December 10, 2025

Close to 40,000 foreign-born child care workers have been driven out of the profession in the wake of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation and detainment efforts, according to a new study by the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America. That represents about 12 percent of the foreign-born child care workforce.

Child care workers with at least a two-year college degree are most likely to be leaving the workforce, as well as workers who are from Mexico, a demographic targeted by ICE, or those who work in center-based care, the left-leaning think tank found. The disruption has worsened an already deep shortage of child care staffers, threatening the stability of the industry and in turn is contributing to tens of thousands of U.S.-born mothers dropping out of the labor market because they don’t have reliable child care.

In addition to workers facing detainment or deportation, many people are staying home to avoid situations where they may encounter Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the report found. Agents are detaining people who have not traditionally been the focus of ICE actions, including those following legal pathways like asylum seekers and green card applicants. Child care centers were once considered “sensitive locations” exempt from ICE enforcement, but the White House rescinded that in January. In at least one example, a child care worker was detained while arriving for work at a child care program.

“What’s different now is the ferocity of the enforcement,” said Chris Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs and one of the authors of the report, in an interview with The Hechinger Report. “ICE is arresting far more people, the number of deportations has risen dramatically,” he added. “People are scared out of their minds.”

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

America has long relied on immigrants to fill hard-to-staff caregiving positions and enable parents to work. Across the country, around 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. In Florida and New York, immigrants account for nearly 40 percent of the child care workforce. One study that compared native-born and immigrant child care workers found that nearly 64 percent of immigrants had a two- or four-year college degree, compared to 53 percent of native-born workers. The study also noted that immigrant workers are more likely than native-born workers to have child development associate credentials and to invest in professional development activities.

Overall, the child care industry supports more than $152 billion in economic activity.

In Wisconsin, Elaine, the director of a child care center, said her program has benefited greatly from a Ukrainian immigrant who has been teaching there for two years, ever since arriving in the United States as part of a humanitarian parole program. (The Hechinger Report is not using Elaine’s last name or the city where her child care center is located because she fears action by immigration enforcement.) Elaine’s center has experienced a teacher shortage for the past 13 years, and the immigrant, who has a college degree and past experience in social services, has been a steady presence for the children there.

“She’s their consistent person. She spends more time than a lot of the parents do with the children during their waking hours,” Elaine said. “She’s there for them, she’s loving, she provides that support, that connection, that security that young children need.”

In January, the Trump administration suspended the Uniting for Ukraine program, which allowed Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion to live and work in the United States for two years. While the program later opened up a process to apply for an extension, Elaine’s employee has encountered delays, like many others.

The teacher’s parole expired this month. Under the law, she is now supposed to return to Ukraine, where her home city in southeast Ukraine is still under attack by Russian forces.

Elaine fears what will happen if the center loses her. “As a business, we need her. We need a teacher we can count on,” Elaine said. “For our teachers’ mental health, to have her leave and knowing where she would go would be really difficult.”

Elaine has decided to allow the employee to keep working, and is appealing to state lawmakers to help extend her stay. Several parents have also joined in the effort, writing letters to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin telling her how much their children love the teacher — and how important she is to the local economy. One factor in granting an extension is that the person offers a “significant public benefit” to the country.

The authors of the new report found immigrants are not the only caregivers affected by ICE enforcement this year. There has also been a drop in U.S.-born child care workers in the industry, especially among Hispanic and less-educated caregivers. This could be the result of a “climate of fear and confusion” surrounding enforcement activity, according to the report, as well as a “perceived pattern of profiling or discriminatory enforcement practices.”

“These deportations have been sold under the theory that they are going to be a boon for U.S.-born workers once we sort of unclog the labor market by removing large numbers of undocumented immigrants,” Herbst said. “We’re finding at least in the child care industry, and at least in the short run, that appears not to be the case.” Some foreign-born and U.S.-born workers have different skills and do not seem to be competing for the same caregiving jobs, he added.

Not all workers are leaving the caregiving industry altogether. Some immigrants are shifting to work as nannies or au pairs, Herbst said, “finding refuge” in private homes where they are less likely to come into contact with state child care regulators or be part of formal wage systems. (Already, an estimated 142,000 undocumented immigrants work as nannies and personal care or home health aides nationwide.) That contact with regulators and other authorities may be a reason why center-based early childhood educators are leaving the field in greater proportions now, Herbst said.

These findings come at the end of a difficult year for the child care workforce, which has long been in crisis due to dismally low pay and challenging work conditions. More than half of child care providers surveyed this year by the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford University reported experiencing difficulty affording food, the highest rate since the survey started collecting data on provider hunger in 2021. Other recent reports have found child care providers are at a higher risk for clinical depression, and in some cities an increasing number are taking on part-time jobs to make ends meet.

Across the country this year, early childhood providers have seen drops in enrollment as families pull their children out of schools and programs to avoid ICE. Child care centers are losing money and finding that some staff members are too scared to come to work or have lost work authorization after the administration ended certain refugee programs. Many child care workers have taken on additional roles driving children to and from care, collecting emergency numbers and plans for children in their care in case parents are detained and dropping off food for families too scared to leave their homes.

This story about immigration enforcement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/immigration-enforcement-is-driving-away-early-childhood-educators/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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December 10, 2025
December College Expert Newsletter | College Expert

Failure is not the opposite of success, but a deeply valuable learning experience. In this issue, we rethink what it means to “fail” and discuss how setbacks can make an even bigger impression on admissions officers than a spotless record. Other articles include:

Focus on Majors: Psychology – A path for students fascinated with human behavior.
Financial Matters – How tuition reciprocity can make out-of-state options more affordable.
Honors Colleges – Is an honors program worth it? Benefits often include preferential registration, small classes and honors housing options.

Read the December issue.

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December 3, 2025
5 cheat sheets for parents of preschoolers

by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
November 27, 2025

When my oldest child was a 2-year-old, we relocated to a new state and I found myself back at square one with my search for child care. In my new city, I now had a very good problem: There was an abundance of programs with availability, and I had a choice of where to enroll my son. As I toured a half-dozen of them, however, I worried that even as an early childhood reporter, I wasn’t asking the right questions or paying attention to the right thing.

A few months later, our early childhood team at Hechinger launched a project digging into the elements of a high-quality preschool. That article and the corresponding video became a quick and easy guide as I looked at options for my second child. It’s what I sent to friends who asked me for advice while navigating their own searches.

While I love telling stories from the field, my colleagues and I are also passionate about providing helpful tools and guides for teachers and caregivers. Here are a few of my favorite early ed “cheat sheets” from our decade of reporting on early childhood.

1. The five elements of a good preschool: What should you look for when you step inside a preschool classroom? What clues can you find on the walls or bookshelves? What questions should you ask teachers and school administrators? This video and article break it down. While classrooms and programs will vary by setting, many of these elements, like the way teachers talk to children and an emphasis on play, apply everywhere.

2. Cracking down on unsafe sleep products: As an anxious new parent, nothing scared me more than hearing about infant deaths due to unsafe sleep products. Still, when desperate and exhausted, I tried several items that I heard would help my babies sleep, including some that the American Academy of Pediatrics later discouraged in updated safe sleep guidelines in 2022. While reporting this article, I was stunned by the lack of evidence and oversight of products that many parents like myself believe are tested before they are available to buy.

3. How to boost math skills by talking about math with your kids: Most parents know how important it is to read to children. But did you know that there are easy ways caregivers can develop math skills? Earlier this year, my colleague Jill Barshay looked at a wave of research from the past dozen years on simple things adults can do to lay an early foundation in math.

4. How to answer tough questions about race and racism with your children: Research shows racial stereotypes start early, and that’s why it’s important to talk to young children about different races and read books and offer toys that have diverse characters. Many parents feel ill equipped for these conversations, however. In 2020, I asked three experts how they would respond to real questions from young kids about race and racism so adults feel better prepared for the questions that children inevitably ask.

5. How parents can support their kids with play: With all the challenges of being a parent, it can be hard to hear there’s yet another thing we should be doing. But this 2023 conversation with researcher Charlotte Anne Wright helped me reframe the way I think about play and my role in it with my own children. While it’s important to give children opportunities for free play, Wright’s research shows “guided play,” or play with a learning goal in mind and light support from a parent, can have benefits for children, too. It’s not as heavy of a lift as it sounds, and Wright provides simple ways parents can engage in playful learning with their children on bus rides and trips to the laundromat.

This story about preschoolers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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November 27, 2025
Can gifted testing spot potential in young children?

by Sarah Carr, The Hechinger Report
November 13, 2025

In New Orleans, a few hundred dollars could once help a family buy a “gifted” designation for their preschooler.

As an education reporter for the city’s Times-Picayune newspaper several years ago, I discovered that there was a two-tiered system for determining whether 3-year-olds met that mark, which, in New Orleans, entitled them to gifted-only prekindergarten programs at a few of the city’s most highly sought-after public schools.

Families could sit on a lengthy waitlist and have their children tested at the district central office for free. Or they could pay the money for the private test. In 2008, the year that I wrote about the issue, only a few of the more than 100 children tested at the central office were deemed gifted; but dozens of privately tested kiddos — nearly all of them tested by the same psychologist for $300 — met the benchmark.

Since working on that story, I’ve been interested in the use of intelligence testing for high-stakes decisions about educational access and opportunity — and the ways that money, insider knowledge and privilege can manipulate that process.

But I knew less about what the research shows about a broader question: Should gifted-only programming for the youngest students exist at all and, if so, what form should it take? When New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced in October that he would end long-standing gifted programming for kindergartners (while preserving it for the older grades), I reached out to some leading researchers in search of answers to those questions. Read the story.

More on gifted education

Hechinger reporter Jill Barshay, who covers education research, has written several stories about different facets of gifted education, which she captured in a column earlier this month.

In 2020, The Hechinger Report and NBC News produced a three-part series on the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools and efforts to diversify gifted classes.

More early childhood news

Federal immigration agents pulled an infant teacher out of her classroom at a Chicago child care, pinning her arms behind her — and traumatizing the families who witnessed the incident, report Molly DeVore and Mack Liederman for Block Club Chicago.

Growing numbers of child care workers are running for elected office, hoping to work directly on behalf of change and more support for a sector that desperately needs it, writes Rebecca Gale for The 74.

Colorado voters approved two sales tax levies to support child care providers and families with young children, reports Ann Schimke with Chalkbeat Colorado.

Research quick take

Contrary to perception, there’s little evidence that an increased academic focus in the early elementary years disadvantages boys, write researchers in a new working paper published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. The researchers, Megan Kuhfeld and Margaret Burchinal, examined growth in reading and math test scores for a sample of 12 million students at 22,000 schools between 2016 and 2025. They found that boys are surpassing girls in math by the end of elementary school, and that girls maintain an advantage in reading through fifth grade.

This story about gifted testing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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November 13, 2025
‘The clock is ticking’: Shutdown imperils food, child care for many

For families in more than a hundred Head Start programs across the country, November could mark the beginning of some hard decisions.

On Saturday, 134 Head Start centers serving 58,400 children would normally receive their annual federal funding, but the ongoing government shutdown has put that money in jeopardy. The federally funded Head Start provides free preschool and child care for low-income families, and is particularly important to rural communities with few other child care options.

At the same time, the federal government has said that because of the shutdown, it cannot distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that families also expect on the first of the month. Plus, a program that provides extra money for families to buy milk, baby formula, and fruit and vegetables is also running out of $300 million in emergency funding provided to it earlier this month.

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

All this means low-income families are facing upheaval on multiple fronts, said Christy Gleason, the vice president of policy, advocacy and campaigns for the nonprofit group Save the Children. Families in Head Start often receive other federal benefits, so they could simultaneously be facing a disruption in child care — and the meals provided there — and public food assistance.

“You’re going to end up with parents and caregivers who are skipping meals themselves, because that’s the way they put food on the table for their kids,” Gleason said. Save the Children manages Head Start programs in rural Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee, but its programs are not among those affected by the Nov. 1 annual funding deadline. Head Start has 1,600 programs that receive their yearly funding throughout the calendar year.

There are still a few days left to avert the crisis, Gleason said. More than two dozen states are suing the government to force it to use a pot of money that had been set aside for paying SNAP benefits in an emergency. President Donald Trump also said this week that the food aid situation would be fixed, but didn’t offer details. Federal lawmakers have also introduced different proposals to keep food assistance money flowing. A handful of states said they will continue to pay for the supplemental milk and formula program, known as WIC. Head Start programs may be able to tap local money, but that isn’t expected to last long.

“The clock is ticking,” Gleason said. “Every hour that goes by is an hour where the stress for these families grows, but it’s not too late for government action to change course and make sure children are not the ones to suffer the consequences of political decisions.”

New data quantifies child care gaps

Nearly 15 million ages 5 and under in the United States have “all available parents” — both adults in a two-parent household, or one if the child has one adult caregiver — in the workforce. The country has about 11 million licensed or registered child care slots.

That leaves about 4 million children whose families may need child care — a hard-to-grasp number that obscures the fact that some parts of the country may have greater needs than other regions because child care providers are concentrated in some areas and sparse in others.

The Buffett Early Childhood Institute, based at the University of Nebraska, is trying to address that problem. It has created a map that it says will give a more accurate view of where child care is needed the most, down to the congressional district.

The map captures the number of children with working parents and the number of available spots in licensed child care. What it cannot capture is demand — not every family needs child care, even families with parents in the workforce — but the map does allow policymakers a starting place for a more nuanced evaluation of their community’s needs.

“We know the limitations of the data, but we also know in order to address the gap, this needs to be broken down into bite-sized pieces,” said Linda Smith, director of policy at the Buffett Institute.

This story about the government shutdown was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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October 30, 2025