The Delta Issue #91

The Wrong Curriculum Debate Is Coming for Early Childhood

Hi y’all, Jessica here.

For years, the HQIM conversation has largely been a K-12 conversation. We’re now seeing energy to pass the curriculum baton to early childhood.

We’ve spent years arguing that what happens before kindergarten matters at least as much as what happens after, with roughly 90% of brain development happening before age five. So it’s a bit of a hallelujah to see more high profile education players take early childhood education seriously. 

At the same time, we have seen some ideas—such as subject-specific curricula for early childhood—that give us pause. 

While states should absolutely be driving toward high-quality curriculum for every kid in early childhood, you can’t copy and paste the same K-12 solutions onto an ECE system that operates under fundamentally different conditions:

1. Three-year-olds aren’t eighth-graders. They learn through repetition, play, and connection to what they already know. Research shows that early learning is deeply tied to attachment, regulation, and language development. The developmental and structural reality of an early childhood classroom necessitates a different approach to curriculum than what works in middle school.
2. Early childhood settings aren’t K-12 classrooms. Early childhood happens in mixed-age classrooms, family child care homes, home-based programs, and centers, not standardized public school buildings with same-aged students and degreed teachers in every room. There are dozens of unique settings in which children receive care and education before the age of five, and that reality has to shape how we think about curriculum, implementation, and quality.
3. Early childhood educators aren’t trained or paid like K-12 teachers. While K–12 teachers are required to hold a bachelor’s degree, often a master’s, and have access to structured training and support, many early childhood educators enter the field with far less preparation and little to no ongoing support. Despite doing some of the most consequential work in the system, they are also among the lowest-paid educators in the country.

Here are three guiding principles for state chiefs as they think about curriculum in early childhood.

1. Own the whole system, not just pre-K in schools.

Across most states, no one at the state level, and often no one in a given community. is responsible for every child in early childhood.

So while we should absolutely be having a conversation about high-quality materials for our youngest learners, state chiefs need to take a more fundamental first step: owning responsibility for birth-to-five the way they do for K-12.

Ownership means:

• Being accountable for what kids experience across every setting, not just those inside school buildings.
• Knowing what’s happening on the ground, wherever kids are: in a center, a family child care program, or a school-based classroom.
• Setting a clear vision for what every child should experience, and aligning the system so that vision becomes reality for most kids.

Curriculum is in service to your academic vision, not the other way around. Don’t define the answer by a program and then try to make the system accommodate it. Define what should be true for kids, then marshal the system around it, just as you would in K12

2. Stop putting perfect above scale

Perfect for ten kids is not better than solid for ten thousand, especially in ECE, where the typical classroom is operating with no curriculum, no aligned training, and no implementation support.

There’s a lesson here from K–12: We spend too much time on curation and not enough on implementation. Curriculum is the floor, not the finish line. We need to shift our focus from creating a “best in class” curriculum that fifty well-resourced centers can execute, to creating serviceable, widely available, implementable curriculum with embedded state-level supports that can serve thousands of centers. More kids getting a good curriculum will always beat a handful of kids getting the best one.

Virginia is an example of a state that’s thinking about this the right way. The state identified a curricular gap in birth-to-five, partnered with the University of Virginia to develop a comprehensive curriculum, and used a combination of an approved list, subsidy alignment, and accountability integration to get that curriculum into use across settings (not just school-based pre-K). Then they paired it with the training, coaching, and support providers need to use it well, just as we would in K-12.

The lesson for other states: Don’t wait for consensus on the “best” curriculum to get something good enough into classrooms. Build something strong for every setting, with the training, coaching, and supports providers need to use it well. And feed real-time insights from classrooms back to curriculum developers so they can improve their products over time.

3. Be clear-eyed about implementation in birth-to-five.

We’ve talked about how kids, settings, and the workforce are different. Implementation is where those differences come home to roost. Take the recent push for separate domain-specific curricula. In middle school, you’ve got an English teacher who specializes in literacy, a math teacher who specializes in math, and so on.

Now imagine applying that same approach in an early childhood classroom.

There’s a room of young children, often in a mixed-age setting, at very different developmental stages. The provider, with no dedicated professional learning and no subject-specific training, is expected to learn and implement four separate programs.

They’re then expected to guide this group through a literacy lesson, a math block, a science activity, and an SEL program—without aligned planning time, without coaching, and without professional learning to make any of it cohere.

All of this unfolds in a room of three-year-olds with different needs, different starting points, and constant transitions, with no clear through-line tying the day together.

This just isn’t something our current ECE system can deliver. It’s not realistic, and while it might be theoretically possible someday, right now it’s a poor investment of time and resources.

In K–12, implementation infrastructure exists (imperfectly, but it exists) to make that kind of complexity workable. In ECE, the distance between what a stack of domain-specific curricula requires for successful implementation and what current ECE classrooms can deliver is enormous. Pretending otherwise is counterproductive when we could be focused on getting good curriculum to thousands of children. 

If we want to improve early childhood outcomes, we have to start with what’s implementable and build from there.

Let’s Get Muddy

• Join our upcoming webinar on how states can build ECE systems to prevent errors before they happen, hosted by Watershed ECE expert Nasha Patel with panelists Rebecca Ullrich , and Ann Stock on May 20 at 1 pm ET. Click here to save your seat.
• Read more on early childhood curriculum: What Are the Ingredients of a Good Preschool Curriculum?

Special thanks to @Nasha Patel for contributing to this issue.