Early Childhood Education and Care: Research
Active family engagement is essential to ensuring children benefit fully from early childhood education and care programs. Yet language barriers and cultural misunderstandings can sometimes keep educators and the families of Dual Language Learners (DLLs) from forming this important partnership. This policy brief explores strategies to better utilize federal funding to engage with DLL children and families.
Although one-third of U.S. young children have a parent who speaks a language other than English, early childhood educators often lack the tools to effectively monitor the development of those not in monolingual, English-speaking households. This issue brief examines why many preschool classroom assessments are a poor fit for Dual Language Learners, and ways to make them more effective for diverse populations.
Immigrants comprise 15 percent of Connecticut’s population, and nearly 30 percent of children in the state are part of immigrant families. Having driven all state population and workforce growth over the last 15 years, immigrants are an important part of Connecticut’s present and its future. This report examines state policies and systems that aim to support upward mobility for all families, highlighting ways in which they could better meet the needs of low-income immigrant families.
Dual Language Learners (DLLs)—young children with at least one parent who speaks a language other than English—make up one-third of all children ages 0–5 in the United States. This fact sheet series and related resources provide essential data on the number and characteristics of DLL children and their families nationwide and in the 30 states with the most DLLs.
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems across the United States are grappling with worker recruitment and retention challenges. At the same time, immigrants with relevant education and work experience obtained abroad often find it difficult to gain recognition for those qualifications. This policy brief highlights strategies for improving hiring and licensing processes in the ECEC field.
Infant and early childhood mental health (IECMH) services can offer vital support for young children’s healthy development. Yet, young children in immigrant and refugee families often do not benefit, due in part to lower levels of health-care coverage and limited cultural responsiveness in the field. This issue brief explores the benefits and barriers to supporting these children via IECMH services, and some ways to close key gaps.
The Task Force on New Americans launched by the Biden administration represents an important occasion to deepen understanding of immigrant integration issues and to identify ways to address them. MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, which has long argued for the need to create such an office within the White House, has developed recommendations for the task force in key areas, drawing from its extensive record of research, policy analysis, and technical assistance.
How many Dual Language Learner (DLL) children live in your state, and what share do they comprise of all children under age 5? What languages are most commonly spoken in their households? Answers to these and other questions that are critical to the design and implementation of early childhood programs that reach all children equitably are presented in a series of state-level data fact sheets.
Dual Language Learners (DLLs)—young children with a parent who speaks a language other than English at home—benefit greatly from early childhood programs, but they also enroll at lower rates than their peers. This policy brief looks at federal and state language access policies that aim to make such programs more accessible to DLLs’ families. It also examines persistent gaps in participation and ways to address them.
Language barriers can hinder immigrant families’ access to services and make it challenging for immigrant parents to find family-sustaining jobs and actively participate in their children’s education. This brief explores approaches service providers are using to make their offerings more culturally and linguistically responsive, and to support language learning among children and their parents.
Child care provided informally by relatives, friends, and neighbors is the most common form of U.S. child care, and it is particularly prevalent among immigrant and Dual Language Learner families. Yet it is frequently overlooked in child-care policy conversations. This brief explores the importance of this type of care and highlights promising practices for increasing support for care providers and the families they serve.
A large and growing number of young children in the United States have at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home. These Dual Language Learners (DLLs) have been shown to benefit considerably from high-quality early childhood programs, but better data are needed to make sure these services are responsive to the experiences and learning needs of these preschoolers. This issue brief sets out a framework for comprehensive DLL identification.
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