From Apples to Apple Pie: Presentation to HighScope Foundation

Over the past few months, the Early Education Initiative has been invited to give several talks about what it will take to build a new system of early learning for children from pre-kindergarten up through third grade. (Depending on the context, we also try to ensure that policies to support infants, toddlers and their families are part of the picture as well.) I gave the most recent presentation at the HighScope Educational Research Foundation‘s annual conference in Ypsilanti, MI (the slides are now available here), where I made an analogy between apples and early childhood programs. 

The conceit goes something like this: At the moment, we’ve got a situation in which most policymakers and administrators are focused – as they should be – on making sure that good programs are in place for young children. It’s as if they are bakers making sure that they’ve got a batch of high-quality apples. It’s still important work — there are still huge gaps to fill to give more and more children access to high-quality settings.

But now we’ve got to go further. Instead of this…

 …we’ve got to aim for something like this:  

The current trend toward building connections between early learning programs is about turning those apples into something even better — an apple pie of a system that can become more than the sum of its parts.