Author: Katie Morrison-Reed

This is the final piece in a three-part series (here are the first and second articles) exploring an under-examined tension in American education: the fact that young children and their families must navigate two entirely different systems before and after age five. 

---

In the last installment of this series, we examined how historical circumstances and decisions led to an ECE system built around markets and choice and a K-12 system focused on guaranteed access and standardization. But, as we explored, both systems are moving toward a middle ground: further away from pure markets in ECE and further away from pure geographic assignment in K-12.

The goal is to build a system that combines reliable, guaranteed access with meaningful, high-quality customization to family needs and preferences — what the framework below (and introduced earlier in this series) describes as the upper-right quadrant. And so the central challenge for policymakers is not to stop convergence, but to shape it.

Getting there requires a shift in policy and governance design. Here are five priorities, explained in detail below:

• Work toward guaranteed access from birth through high school so families can count on stable, high-quality options.
• Expand meaningful customization so children can learn in environments that fit their strengths, needs, and identities, and so they work with parents’ practical working realities.
• Build the infrastructure, like transportation, coordinated enrollment, data systems, and navigators, that makes choice real and fair rather than theoretical.
• Protect families from fragmentation by providing transparency, aligned governance, and supports across systems.
• Anchor funding in fairness across districts, charters, private providers, and early childhood programs alike.

None of these shifts require abandoning public education or dismantling the early childhood sector. They require a shift in perspective and an alignment and adherence to common goals for both reliable access and meaningful choice.

1. Work Toward Guaranteed Access as a Baseline Public Commitment

We believe (and experience shows) that families want predictability. They want to know that their child will have a safe, high-quality place to learn regardless of age, income, needs, or ZIP code. And the fundamentals of good teachers, with good content to teach, and in the conditions to do it well (including time and support) matter regardless of setting.

Designing for guaranteed access requires:

• Increasing investment in our ECE system, acknowledging the importance of early childhood, including the value of early childhood educators.
• Clarity and alignment in what publicly funded access is available to whom and a concerted effort to support parents in accessing these services through market enablers.
• Protection of rights-based access in K-12, even as new options expand, that are fairly and fully funded, uplifted, and supported. Nobody should be worse-off: protect access standards for students with disabilities and quality neighborhood schools as an option for families.
• Funding formulas that correlate with child/student needs, that are flexible across settings, while acknowledging practical realities placed on existing infrastructure (such as districts, who have commitments and requirements not placed on other school options, discussed in this post)
• Workforce investments to ensure there are enough qualified educators to meet rising needs, with fair teacher compensation and meaningful support.

In practice, this means moving ECE toward a system of public investment, and ensuring K-12 choice expansions do not erode the core guarantee that every child has a quality, fully funded, and supported neighborhood option.

2. Expand High-Quality Customization Options

Families are demanding more flexibility. Not just a different building, but different learning environments, schedules, supports, and pedagogies. Our world is becoming customized and curated in nearly every other realm; education must follow suit to be applicable to modern lifestyles and expectations.

Expanding high-quality customization means:

• Publicly funding diverse models, including community hubs, dual-language programs, career pathways, and hybrid options that allow programmatic opt-in across ECE and K-12.
• Ensuring and promoting equitable services at private providers participating in public programs (via Pre-K, ESAs, or vouchers) including for diverse learners such as students with disabilities and multilingual learners have meaningful choice — and the resources that follow.
• Creating space for innovation within district systems, including flexibility in scheduling, curriculum, and staffing, and making waiver processes clear and fair.

Customization should be something every family can access — not a luxury reserved for those with the most time, influence, or disposable income.

3. Build the Infrastructure That Makes Choice Equitable

Choice without support is chaos. Customization without infrastructure is inequitable. To converge upward, both systems need a shared backbone that makes navigation seamless and fair.

This requires:

• Coordinated enrollment systems that allow families to explore and compare options across sectors. Let’s build shared family infrastructure such as portals that can maximize public investment.
• Transparent, family-friendly quality information, based on what quality means to families (not bureaucrats) and not compliance reports no parent can interpret.
• Transportation systems that make actual access possible, not theoretical.
• Shared service alliances and back-office supports that help small providers thrive.
• Cross-sector data sharing that lets educators, health providers, and parents support children across transitions.
• Accounting for some excess capacity in the system, knowing that if we’re funding for enough seats for everyone to have a guaranteed option and a choice, we’re going to have some seats unfilled. We have to account for that in funding and be comfortable with some level of not-100% enrollment

This infrastructure is what turns theoretical choice into real opportunity.

4. Protect Families from Unnecessary System Fragmentation

As ECE evolves to become more public and K-12 becomes more flexible, both the risk for fragmentation and the opportunity for coherence elevate. Without alignment, families will continue to feel the burden of navigating two separate systems that operate on incompatible rules, calendars, funding structures, and support pathways.

To avoid that, policymakers must:

• Align standards and expectations across the birth-8 continuum, at minimum. ****Supporting continuity in policy can lead to continuity in experience.
• Integrate special education pathways so parents don’t restart the process from early intervention to preschool special education to K-12 special education.
• Ensure consistent health, safety, and data protections across sectors receiving public funds.
• Build or designate regional or state-level governance structures that coordinate ECE, districts, charters, and private providers to address challenges and support families.

Fragmentation is a policy choice. So is coherence. While we must choose some governance dividing lines, effective coordination (at a minimum) across systems and services that families access must be designed through the lens of family experience.

5. Ensuring Fairness Across All Providers, Applying the Effective “Fund Family Empowerment” Narrative

One of the most striking developments in K-12 over the past decade is how effectively choice advocates have shifted the public narrative around education funding. “Education freedom,” “funding students, not systems,” and “parent empowerment” have resonated with families across political lines in ways older debates around “school reform” never did. This messaging has helped bring significant new attention and resources into the K-12 choice conversation, even if the distribution of those resources and the impacts on districts remain deeply contested.

But while the message has been effective, the underlying funding decisions are far from settled questions of fairness. In many states, new choice programs sit alongside long-standing district underfunding, creating tensions between sectors serving the same children. The political strength of the “fund the family” narrative does not automatically produce a funding model that treats all providers and all families fairly.

Early childhood education offers a parallel opportunity. ECE already operates as a diverse provider ecosystem where families make choices every day. But its funding model does not reflect that reality. Instead of resources following children in coherent ways, ECE dollars remain locked in fragmented streams, disconnected income-based eligibility rules, and structures that depend on administrative complexities rather than family needs. Providers (especially those serving infants and toddlers) operate on chronically thin margins that would be untenable in any other publicly supported sector. And the workforce makes far below a living wage, imposing stress on the people whose relationships with children are fundamental to their development.

As convergence accelerates, policymakers have an opportunity to take the political clarity of the K-12 “family empowerment” message and pair it with a much stronger commitment to investment across the entire educational landscape. That means:

• Extending family-centered funding messaging to early childhood, and promoting the viability of ECE providers who are doing the hard work to meet family needs today with drastic underfunding.
• Ensuring that any public dollars that follow children – whether in ECE or K-12 – are grounded in the true cost of quality, especially for high-need learners and early age groups.
• Developing funding rules that support all providers equitably, rather than privileging one sector through political momentum or historical precedent.
• Avoiding zero-sum dynamics that pit ECE against K-12, or districts against choice providers, by setting consistent standards for how public money flows based on children’s needs.

The promise of convergence is this:

If we anchor our messaging in parent empowerment and anchor our policy in fairness, we can build a system where funding decisions elevate families rather than divide providers. K-12 has shown the political power of framing; ECE has shown the practical realities of operating choice-based learning environments and the potential for market failures — an important lesson K-12 can’t overlook in its emerging choice system design. Together, they point to a more coherent and just approach to funding from birth through high school.

Conclusion: Intentionally Designing a Family-Centered System

The working mother at the kitchen table the we met in the beginning of this series – tabs open, options narrowing, clock ticking – is not an outlier. She is the system. Her late-night search reflects the structural divide we have inherited: a market-driven early childhood sector built on scarcity and a public K-12 system built on guaranteed access but limited customization, mostly for those with means to access it.

Yet something important is happening. Both systems are moving. K-12 is expanding options. Early childhood is building access and infrastructure.

The familiar boundaries between “market” and “public” are blurring. Not because of any single policy, but because families are demanding flexibility, reliability, and coherence across the full developmental continuum.

This convergence presents a choice. We can let it unfold haphazardly, producing new inequities and deeper fragmentation. Or we can shape it intentionally, designing a system that finally aligns with how families live their lives.

The path forward is clear:

• Work toward guaranteed access from birth through high school so families can count on stable, high-quality options.
• Expand meaningful customization so children can learn in environments that fit their strengths, needs, and identities, and so they work with parents’ practical working realities.
• Build the infrastructure with transportation, coordinated enrollment, data systems, and navigators that make choice real rather than theoretical.
• Protect families from fragmentation by providing transparency, aligned governance, and supports across systems.
• Anchor funding in fairness across districts, charters, private providers, and early childhood programs alike.

None of these shifts require abandoning public education or dismantling the early childhood sector. They require seeing them they way families do: as parts of one ecosystem where families should have both reliable access and meaningful choice, supported by infrastructure that lightens rather than deepens their load.

Designing such a system is not merely a policy exercise. It is an act of respect for families. It acknowledges that the burden of navigating complexity should not fall on parents. And it recognizes that children’s needs and families lived realities do not change simply because kids turn five.

We stand at a rare structural inflection point. Convergence is already underway. The question now is whether leaders will seize this moment to create a system worthy of families’ trust – one that reflects the world they live in, the choices they deserve, and the future their children need.

This piece is the second in a three-part series (read the first article here) exploring an under-examined tension in American education: the fact that young children and their families must navigate two entirely different systems before and after age five.

While policymakers often debate early childhood and K-12 separately, families experience them as one continuous journey — full of hopes, tradeoffs, and structural contradictions. Over the coming weeks, this series will unpack how we arrived here, how these systems are evolving, and what it would take to design a more coherent pathway for every child.

---

Our current systemic divide between ECE and K-12 wasn’t intentionally designed — it emerged.

In ECE, the federal government took the lead first. Major programs were created to solve specific problems rather than to build a universal system. Head Start began in the 1960s as part of the War on Poverty, aimed at supporting low-income children and families. Child care subsidies were originally designed as a work support to help parents – especially mothers – enter or stay in the workforce by making care more affordable. Because neither Head Start nor child care was created as a universal public good, the system grew around targeted programs instead of a single coordinated structure.

Over the past few decades, states have increasingly recognized the educational and economic importance of early learning. Many have created their own Pre-K programs, expanded funding, and developed infrastructure—often layering these efforts on top of the existing federal programs.

Today, the result is a complex patchwork of programs, funding streams, regulations, and provider types. Access varies widely, and while many children receive some form of early learning or care, there is no guaranteed or universal level of service. (One nuance – the federal government did briefly provide for universal child care access during World War II.)

K-12 public education developed gradually through local and state efforts, evolving over centuries into a central institution of civic life. Publicly funded schools began to take shape in the 19th century, and the policy structures recognizable today emerged in response to changing social, economic, and political conditions. Every state constitution requires the state to run a public school system, and each state has an education agency that sets basic rules and provides oversight. Most often, local school districts then run the day-to-day operations of schools and must make sure every child in their area can attend or receive services for free.

The federal government plays an important role in protecting students’ civil rights, providing funding, and encouraging improvements, but the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to education. That means states (not the federal government) carry the main responsibility for ensuring students have access to public schooling.

These origins shaped the systems we have now. Over time, it has created stakeholders invested in maintaining the structures that evolved, with families left navigating this historical divide that was never designed for them.

A New Pattern of Convergence is Emerging

A clear and consequential pattern is emerging: both systems are drifting away from the positions they have historically occupied on the framework introduced in the first part of this blog series.

K-12 is expanding choice at unprecedented speed and scale.

“School choice” has evolved over time — from magnet programs to charter schools to a significant focus on private school choice in the past several years. States have enacted sweeping expansions of vouchers, Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), and open-enrollment policies. As of 2024–25, 33 states now offer some form of private school choice—up from only a handful a decade ago. States including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, and West Virginia have removed income caps entirely, making school choice available (in theory) to all families regardless of means.

The political narrative has also shifted. What was once framed as “school reform” is now positioned as “family empowerment” and “parental rights.” And this reframing appears to be resonating across diverse constituencies in ways earlier reform efforts did not. As a result, K-12 is moving away from a guaranteed, geographically-assigned system and toward more market-like forms of access and selection more quickly than it has in the past.

ECE is simultaneously gaining momentum toward universal access.

Meanwhile, early childhood systems are undergoing their own transformation. New Mexico is the first state intending to offer universal, no-cost child care to all residents, regardless of income. Illinois’ Smart Start Workforce Grants and Massachusetts’ C3 Grants, along with similar programs in other states, offer direct investments to promote program sustainability through “base operating funds” — supply-side investments to build the operating capacity of child care programs. And states across the country have invested in universal preschool – starting with 4’s and moving down to 3’s.

Telling also are governance reforms. Eleven states (and counting) have created new, unified early childhood agencies, reducing fragmentation and positioning early learning as a public system focused on child development rather than an individual responsibility or a workforce enabler. Regional organizations charged with local coordination, shared services alliances, and coordinated enrollment portals are creating something akin to public infrastructure within what has historically been a decentralized market.

By all accounts, ECE is shifting on the framework—toward more reliable, publicly guaranteed access.

Yet neither system is delivering meaningful customization for families.

Despite their movement toward the middle of the framework, both systems remain far from delivering what families need: reliable access to quality education services that fit their children’s needs, without undue burden, particularly for families without social and financial means to navigate.

In K-12, new choice mechanisms promise customization but reach has been notoriously limited. Often, the best-performing charter schools have hundreds of lottery applicants for each available slot. And in a rampant push for choice through vouchers and ESAs, essential policy and infrastructure necessary for families has been left behind. ESAs in particular promise education curation capabilities, but without market enablers and navigation supports, we risk exacerbating inequity. And importantly, schools supported through many voucher and ESA programs may not adapt instruction to individual learners and often remain inaccessible to students with specialized needs.

ECE offers abundant variety in programs and providers, but the ability of those options to actually meet families’ needs and expectations vary widely. True quality choice is limited given market inefficiencies, which frequently leads to staffing instability and financial challenges. Stories of local programs abruptly closing doors and leaving families with impossible choices are far too common. And in most states, a vast majority of families find child care and early learning supports outside of the licensed system entirely, shifting arrangements between neighbors, friends, or grandparents; making it work with one parent working at night and one during the day; or patching together a variety of all of the above. Customization exists — but often as a way to ‘just make it work’, not as a way to reach the ideal. It is inconsistent, and too often depends on a family’s financial, social, or geographic advantage.

The Strategic Inflection Point

Taken together, these shifts point toward a deeper structural convergence: both systems are moving toward a hybrid model that — if done well — has the potential to blend reliable access with meaningful choice. This trend is unfolding despite profound political polarization, suggesting forces that transcend partisan debates — shifting family expectations, demographic pressures, workforce shortages, and the desire for flexibility among both parents and providers.

The critical question isn’t whether convergence will continue. It will. The question is whether education leaders will shape this convergence intentionally or allow it to evolve haphazardly.

Will the system move toward the upper-right quadrant — guaranteed access with meaningful customization — or toward a muddled middle where neither system works particularly well for families?

Leaders who recognize this moment can design for enacted reality rather than simply react to structural inertia. The next decade offers an opportunity not just to reform around the edges, but to reimagine how our systems support families across the education continuum.