When Jessie Rasmussen ran for a seat in the Nebraska legislature, she prioritized serving children and families. She brought to the role practical expertise, having spent more than two decades working as an early childhood educator.
What Rasmussen didn’t have at the beginning of her political career, however, was much knowledge about how to turn her ideas into effective policies.
“I remember when I was elected to be a state senator, I bet I spent the first year figuring out the processes and the nuances of how decisions really get made,” she says. “I didn’t learn until after the fact that you can write a policy for law that’s really well-intended, but how it gets implemented is the real story.”
Experts say this kind of policy knowledge gap threatens to slow the momentum that issues such as affordable child care and state-funded preschool have gained at all levels of government and with candidates across the ideological spectrum. To address the problem, more than a dozen researchers across the country are collaborating to develop resources to prepare future policymakers for success designing, building and evaluating programs for young kids.
Their effort, called the Early Childhood Policy in Institutions of Higher Education Initiative, also aims to establish early childhood policy as a field of inquiry, including at universities, which serve as training grounds for policymakers and hubs of research. Over the past two years, the consortium has created open-access materials intended to make it easy for universities to start offering coursework on the topic of early childhood policy. They’ve made 12 modules, four syllabi for upper-level bachelor’s or master’s courses, and several handbooks for guiding faculty and creating internship programs.
They’re not stopping at resources, though. The initiative also aims to launch full degree and certificate programs in early childhood policy—and to build an alliance among host universities. One sign of progress: Next fall, the University of Colorado at Denver is launching a new doctoral program in the field.