States Seek To Improve Early Childhood Outcomes Through Consolidated Governance Structures

This report contains corrections.

Child care, preschool, early intervention, home visiting, and other early childhood programs are some of the most important initiatives focused on aiding young children’s development in order to set them on a trajectory for better outcomes in school and life.¹ But because the early childhood system in the United States is largely fragmented, so, too, are the administrative systems that oversee it. While federal oversight exists for many early childhood programs, state governance structures vary widely in how they administer those programs, with services often siloed and scattered across a number of state agencies.

Such fragmentation of services makes collaboration across programs and coordination of policies and service delivery piecemeal and unaligned. This can result in confusion among providers regarding what supports they are eligible for or which standards they must meet and among families regarding their eligibility for and access to various services. Fragmentation also frequently puts different offices serving children and families at odds with one another with regard to how financial resources are allocated through the state budget, personnel availability, and other supports. While at least one state began the work of consolidating its early childhood governance structures as early as 1993—and another handful began to do so in the early 2000s²—in recent years, a new wave of states has introduced or passed legislation to establish a single agency or department that consolidates the governance of these programs under one umbrella. Consolidated agencies can help highlight that early childhood is a priority of the governor and/or state legislature and improve coordination and collaboration across early childhood programs, building a more cohesive and streamlined system for families, educators, and providers. Consolidating services and the administration of programs under one agency would also help states build the infrastructure needed to efficiently distribute large-scale public investment and implement sweeping federal legislation—such as that needed to fully support a comprehensive and inclusive mixed-delivery child care system—should such developments come to pass in Congress.

The authors of this report conducted a scan of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to identify the overseeing agency for a selected set of eight early childhood services that best represent a holistic model of early childhood programming:

1. Child care licensing: Licensing oversees and monitors the regulatory process for child care and early learning programs, including ensuring licensed programs are in compliance with requirements around child health and safety as well as setting staff training and qualifications and program group sizes and ratios.
2. Child care subsidy programs: These financial assistance programs help eligible low- and moderate-income families pay for child care through full or partial reimbursements paid directly to subsidy-accepting child care programs. States sometimes refer to their child care subsidy program as a “child care assistance” or “child care scholarship” program.
3. Child care quality improvement systems: These state-established systems assess, improve, and communicate child care program quality and are often based on a set of common standards tied to early learning quality, such as program environment, child-teacher interactions, and educator training.
4. State-funded preschool: These public early education programs beginning for children at age 3 or 4, depending on their state of residence, provide enriching educational experiences and promote children’s school readiness and overall educational outcomes.
5. Head Start state collaboration offices:³ These coordinating entities at the state level facilitate partnerships between different Head Start grantees to promote high-quality services to children and families with low incomes.
6. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part B preschool program:⁴ This federal program is administered at the state level to promote access to a free and appropriate education by ensuring that children as young as preschool age have access to special education services to support their school readiness and overall educational outcomes.
7. IDEA Part C early intervention program:⁵ This federal program is administered at the state level to provide services to children with disabilities from birth through age 2, improving access to screenings and evaluations for developmental delays so that families can provide their children with early intervention services.
8. Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program:⁶ The federal MIECHV program funds states, territories, and Tribes to support home-visiting programming to promote child and family health and well-being by supporting healthy pregnancies, improving family economic status, reducing rates of child neglect and abuse, and encouraging positive parenting behaviors.

The authors conducted online research on 11 states—and held follow-up interviews with leadership in seven states—that have already consolidated key early childhood services into a new or existing agency or are in the process of transitioning services to a dedicated agency. Through these state interviews, the authors sought to learn more about the impetus and rationale for consolidation, the timeline for and challenges of implementation, the systemic changes that occurred, any outcomes that were achieved, and lessons learned for other states.

The authors conducted online research to investigate the consolidation of early childhood education programs in 11 states that either have long-standing consolidated agencies or have recently moved to establish one: Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, and Virginia. These states had either fully established or very recently changed their governance structures and represent a wide geographic range of bipartisan examples where consolidation has been effective and helpful for administration. These states also exemplify how the process is being conducted by states newer to this approach. The researchers conducted follow-up interviews over Microsoft Teams with state leaders in the seven states that have seen some successes: Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, and Virginia. State consolidation of early childhood programs largely followed one of three governance models:

1. States consolidated a wide range of early childhood health and early learning programs into a single, new stand-alone agency focused on children and youth, such as the Ohio Department of Children and Youth, or exclusively young children, such as the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood.
2. States consolidated a narrower range of programs, typically those related to child care and state-funded preschool programs, into a new agency, such as the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care.
3. States consolidated early childhood programs under the umbrella of an existing state agency, such as the Division of Early Care and Education within the Virginia Department of Education.

National landscape of early childhood governance structures

Across the country, more than half of states administer key early childhood programs through a consolidated governance structure that fits in one of the three categories outlined above. Among the 26 states with consolidated early childhood governance structures, eight have a widely consolidated agency, seven have a narrowly consolidated agency, and 11 have consolidated programs under an existing agency, such as the state department of education.

States vary widely in the number of agencies that oversee these early learning programs, illustrating the piecemeal and often fragmented administration of state-level early childhood programs. The majority of states oversee early childhood programs across three or more agencies: Fourteen states administer programs across three different agencies, 11 states administer programs across four different agencies, and four states administer programs across five different agencies. Only three states have consolidated all key early childhood programs under one agency, while 19 states administer early learning programs across two different agencies.*

When and how programs have been consolidated

Georgia and Massachusetts were the first two states to create stand-alone departments for early childhood programs, with Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) launching in 2004 and the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) following in 2005.⁷ Also in 2005, Maryland transferred its Office of Child Care to the State Department of Education, consolidating early childhood services under the existing infrastructure.⁸ Connecticut followed in 2014 with the creation of its Office of Early Childhood.⁹ In recent years, several states have taken action to consolidate early childhood programs: New Mexico in 2019,¹⁰ Virginia in 2020,¹¹ Oregon in 2021,¹² Colorado in 2022,¹³ Minnesota¹⁴ and Ohio¹⁵ in 2023, and Illinois¹⁶ in 2024.

Some of the state agencies are cabinet-level executive agencies that report directly to the governor, but others have an overseeing governing body. For example, the Massachusetts EEC is part of the Executive Office of Education, which oversees that department, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (K-12), and the Department of Higher Education, as well as the state’s public colleges and universities.¹⁷ In Virginia, the state Board of Education is responsible for setting policy priorities for the early childhood programs within the state Department of Education.¹⁸

In all cases that the authors researched, the consolidation was authorized via legislation. This ensures the longevity of the governance changes beyond a single governor or legislative leader’s tenure.

Who has championed consolidation

• Governors: Given the executive purview of governors, it is no surprise that they have often championed state consolidation of early childhood services. In Illinois, for example, the establishment of a new stand-alone early childhood agency was a key recommendation that came out of Gov. JB Pritzker’s (D) Early Childhood Funding Commission, established in 2019 to study and identify ways for the state to improve equitable access to high-quality early childhood education and care services for all children from birth to age 5.¹⁹ Pritzker signed an executive order in 2023 to officially move forward with the creation of the Illinois Department of Early Childhood.²⁰
• Legislators: Since they tend to be codified in legislation, consolidation efforts typically also require support from key members of the state legislature. In New Mexico, legislators were key to passing the legislation that created the new Early Childhood Education and Care Department. As Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) stated in a press release, “This new department is the vehicle to arguably the most important turnaround we must and will make as a state in the coming years. … [O]n behalf of families across New Mexico, I’m grateful to legislators who put our shared principles into practice with this bill.”²¹
• Advocates and service providers: Advocates and members of the service provider community who are most affected by governance changes are also key stakeholders for ensuring successful program consolidation. Virginia held listening sessions across the state with child care providers to get their input and support for the consolidation of early care and education programs into the Virginia Department of Education.²² In Massachusetts, the push to create the Department of Early Education and Care came from advocates, who formed a coalition with supporters from the business and philanthropic communities and worked with key legislators to pass the establishing legislation.²³ Similarly, in Minnesota, there was a groundswell of support for consolidation from the child and youth advocacy community, spearheaded by a concerted early childhood advocacy effort.²⁴

Rationales for consolidation

Common reasons that states provided for consolidating early childhood programs into one agency include elevating early childhood issues as a high priority, creating a seamless and integrated early childhood system, and improving service access and delivery for children and families. In more than one case, state agency leaders also cited the need to make changes to the state budget: Pooling personnel, resources, and other supports into one department can be more effective than operating under a zero-sum framework that puts programs serving the same communities on uneven or competitive footing.²⁵

A major theme the authors identified across multiple states is using consolidation as an opportunity to drive change through a focus on young children and the needs of families:

• In Connecticut, the Office of Early Childhood was established with the stated purpose of improving early childhood service delivery for children.²⁶ The stand-alone agency seeks to effectively partner with families to advance equitable early childhood policies, support early learning and development, and center equity for children and families, promoting the vision that “All young children in Connecticut are safe, healthy, learning, and thriving.”²⁷
• Georgia’s former Gov. Sonny Perdue (R) recognized that early care and education programs being housed in multiple agencies had caused logistical inefficiencies in the state. He called for the creation of the Department of Early Care and Learning with three goals: 1) consolidating child care licensing into a single agency; 2) changing the culture of child care to focus on school readiness; and 3) increasing efficiency across programs.²⁸ According to staff from the department, the state also found that the success of its preschool program was key to generating legislative momentum behind the consolidation, as it showcased how effective program administration can have meaningful impacts on the outcomes of the children and families served.²⁹
• Staff from the Maryland State Department of Education said that the state transferred its Office of Child Care to the department in an effort to professionalize the child care field and align child care with other parts of the education system.³⁰
• The mandate of New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department is to “build a more cohesive, equitable, and effective prenatal to five early childhood system.”³¹
• According to Jeffery Van Deusen, the assistant director of the Ohio Department of Children and Youth, Gov. Mike DeWine (R) had a vision to create a single agency that would be “laser-focused” on children’s issues.³²
• The creation of the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families was seen as “an opportunity to create a permanent champion for children, a clear front door for families and those who serve them, and a leader in changing systems to work better for the people who rely on them and the providers who deliver them.”³³

What consolidations have included

States vary with regard to which programs they include in a consolidated state agency for early childhood, depending on the agency’s goals and purpose. Some agencies focus solely on child care- and preschool-related programs, with the primary goal of improving the state’s educational outcomes and children’s school readiness, while others also incorporate additional services for children with disabilities and/or home visiting programs.

The New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department houses all prenatal-to-age-5 programs, including the state-funded preschool program, home visiting, IDEA Part C, and the state’s child care subsidy program.³⁴ Virginia chose to include its out-of-home programs for early care and education as part of its effort to improve school readiness and implement a common measurement system across programs. These programs include child care licensing and subsidy, child care quality improvement, state-funded preschool, and IDEA Part B.³⁵ Ohio’s Department of Children and Youth incorporates a wider range of programs that meet the needs of young children and their families, including child care licensing, subsidy, quality improvement, state-funded preschool, Part B, Part C, and MIECHV. It also includes child welfare, early childhood mental health, and maternal and infant wellness.³⁶ While Minnesota’s consolidation structure has a specific focus on early childhood programs, the programs that have been transferred or are planned to transfer to the new Department of Children, Youth, and Families are broader in scope. With a focus on a whole-family approach, programs that have already been or will be transferred to the new agency include family economic supports, such as the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance Needy Families program, child protection, and youth programs and services.³⁷

Implementation timelines and challenges

The states examined in this report varied in terms of how long it took to consolidate early childhood programs into one agency, with timelines ranging from six months to two years. Ohio moved at a rapid pace, transitioning its programs to the Ohio Department of Children and Families within six months of the governor signing the establishing legislation, though some statutory language will take until January 2025 to be adjusted.³⁸ Moving quickly was a strategic move for the administration: According to Van Deusen, since Gov. DeWine is in his last term, he wanted to further emphasize his commitment to children and families by consolidating the programs as quickly as possible to achieve demonstrable positive outcomes.³⁹ The administration also moved quickly to ensure that the new department would have several months of data going into Ohio’s biennial budget, both to demonstrate the need for the department and to make a stronger case for department budget requests. Illinois, on the other hand, is planning for its implementation of the Department of Early Childhood to take place over two years. According to the transition director, this gives leadership time to make thoughtful decisions about integrating programs and systems. It has allowed for a process that centers the voices of families and providers as part of a transition advisory committee and that has made time for public bimonthly listening sessions to allow for input from multiple stakeholders throughout the state. Similarly, Minnesota has a two-year implementation timeline and allocated temporary resources to staffing and supporting its transition to the Department of Children, Youth, and Families.⁴⁰ The department’s temporary Implementation Office, housed at the Minnesota Department of Management and Budget, has been authorized for two years to oversee the launch of the new department, with efforts guided by a cross-agency steering team that oversees six work streams.⁴¹ Georgia took three months to staff up and establish its agency board but took until 2012 to transfer its child care subsidy administration into the new agency, due to a lack of political will to do so and funding constraints when the department was initially established in 2004.⁴²

One challenge common among states in consolidating agencies is the marrying of multiple programs’ cultures. As Commissioner Amy Kershaw of the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care said, “The first year was really about the humans.”⁴³ In Georgia, DECAL Commissioner Amy Jacobs shared that bringing together staff from child care licensing, which had a culture of inspection and monitoring, and preschool, which had a culture of education, was a challenge that took years to overcome.⁴⁴Interviewees also mentioned the challenge of integrating multiple systems, fiscal structures, human resource processes, data systems, policies, and reporting processes. Minnesota similarly experienced timeline challenges in securing needed access to federal data, especially given that data access was being requested for a department that did not yet exist.⁴⁵

Systemic changes spurred by consolidation

States vary in their approaches to building an integrated early childhood system. Virginia set out to create a unified public-private early care and education system through its consolidation of programs into the Virginia Department of Education. Its biggest systemic change has been to create a uniform system of measurement and improvement for all birth to 5 early care and education programs, including child care and pre-K programs in the state’s mixed-delivery system.⁴⁶ This new uniform measurement and improvement system, named VQB5, measures program quality based on teacher-child interactions and curriculum.⁴⁷ Participation is required from all publicly funded early care and education programs in the state.⁴⁸ Illinois, meanwhile, is centering the voices of parents and early childhood providers. Though early in the implementation stage, these efforts will make parents and providers co-designers of services and systems under the new Department of Early Childhood. The state is also building an improved data system that might support a parent portal, which would make it easier for families to find services and apply for benefits.⁴⁹ Many programs in Ohio are state supported but county administered, so its new Department of Children and Youth has focused on partnering with local communities to help families, providers, and practitioners understand the various early childhood programs and help the department learn how it can collaborate at the local level for better outcomes.⁵⁰ Like Illinois, Ohio seeks to incorporate families’ lived experience at decision-making tables: It currently has 12 parent ambassadors within local child care resource and referral agencies, with the goal of integrating 24, whose role would be to conduct outreach and connect families to different programs based on their needs.⁵¹

Coordination across programs and with other agencies

The need for successful coordination across programs and with other agencies was a common theme across interviews with state agency workers. The Ohio Department of Children and Youth has dedicated a full-time position to coordinating with the governor’s office and other state agencies on programs that affect children and families.⁵²Georgia’s DECAL serves as a catalyst for collaboration across multiple agencies. Georgia’s Children’s Cabinet, for example, includes members of multiple child-serving agencies, and the DECAL commissioner is a co-chair. DECAL also houses the state’s multiagency Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Task Force⁵³ and hosts the state’s cross-agency, two-generation leadership academy, which is intended to advance state agency leadership skills, offer training on interagency collaboration, and change the culture of state government to ensure services and programs are serving the whole family.⁵⁴ Georgia also has a cross-agency data system that collects de-identified child-level data from across programs and agencies.⁵⁵ In Maryland, representatives from the Division of Early Childhood sit on the Governor’s Office for Children’s Benefits Access Group, which is working to make all services from conception through college accessible in one place. The biggest challenge lies in getting consent to share data across agencies to help determine eligibility for services.⁵⁶

Overall, the most prevalent impacts of consolidation are raising the visibility of early childhood care and education as issues and improving service coordination and delivery. Having a single agency for early care and education has provided Massachusetts with an opportunity to elevate the importance of the earliest years of life for children’s development and learning. With leadership from the governor, the Department of Early Education and Care’s budget has grown by 125 percent in the last year, making it a $1.5 billion agency.⁵⁷ And in Ohio, though it’s still too early to effectively measure any impact, the new Department of Children and Youth has three short-term goals that it will be tracking closely: 1) reduce infant mortality, 2) prepare children for kindergarten, and 3) reduce the number of children in the foster care system.⁵⁸

How states responded to the influx of federal pandemic-era funding, such as that made available through the American Rescue Plan Act, demonstrates the value of having a consolidated agency or division for early childhood services. According to Massachusetts EEC Commissioner Kershaw, the state’s early care and education field benefited greatly from having a single entity dedicated to dissemination of federal COVID-19 relief funding.⁵⁹Likewise, Georgia’s DECAL Commissioner Amy Jacobs believes the state’s consolidated agency was a strength in itsresponse to supporting children, families, and the child care sector throughout the pandemic: “We would have never been able to get the [federal COVID-19 relief] funding out the door as quickly as we did [without a consolidated early childhood agency].”⁶⁰ Georgia funded approximately 30 projects, the largest of which provided $1 billion to stabilize child care businesses.⁶¹ As a result, Georgia’s child care industry not only is more secure, but also has been able to grow. As Commissioner Jacobs stated, “There are more child care programs available now than there were before the pandemic.”⁶² During the pandemic, Georgia also paid the full cost of child care for children receiving subsidies and increased the subsidy rolls by 20,000 children, expanding access to care for more low-income families.⁶³

State leadership shared key lessons learned from experiences leading consolidation efforts:

• Consolidation requires patience and a lengthy implementation timeline to see outcomes. Consolidating programs under a new or existing agency is more than just moving the pieces; it often takes eight to 10 years to fully systematize changes, do it well, and see change.⁶⁴
• Leadership and support for consolidation from some combination of the governor, legislators, advocates, and other stakeholders are crucial for success. Political will and the resources to implement are key.⁶⁵
• Critical to helping departments navigate the process of consolidation are dedicating an individual or team to oversee the consolidation effort and appointing a staff member to manage changes in culture and climate during implementation.⁶⁶ Changing the culture of agencies takes time and an intentional approach.⁶⁷
• Communicating frequently with staff and external stakeholders is key to successful implementation. Building multiple opportunities for families, educators, and community members to be engaged in the design and implementation process is valuable and helps generate buy-in. It is helpful to have multiple paths for engagement, including community meetings, surveys, and focus groups.⁶⁸
• Creating a consolidated agency is not a silver bullet, but it can drive policies and enable decision-making that will ultimately achieve and promote equity.⁶⁹
• All programs do not need to be moved into a single agency at the same time. Some states adopt a phased approach, consolidating their programs over the span of several years in recognition of the fact that the political will and the resources necessary to make this change take time to generate.⁷⁰
• It is valuable to have data that tell the story of how effective programs are. Establishing an internal research team can be a valuable way to shape key messages about program and agency successes.⁷¹
• Establishing a plan early on to determine how and when to request data access and necessary plan approvals from federal agencies is key to ensuring that data are accurate and up to date, as well as to adhering to federal timelines that may vary. Federal agencies have their own timetables for granting permission, so it is important to factor that into the planning and timeline of agency consolidation.⁷²

The early childhood system is complex and multifaceted, and oversight and implementation of its various programs can be challenging for state administrators and families to navigate, particularly when those programs are spread across multiple state departments. Integrating those programs—including child care subsidy administration, program licensing and quality assurance, the MIECHV program, Head Start, and state-funded preschool programs—is crucial to helping remove administrative barriers, consolidate resources, improve data collection and sharing, and promote ease of access for the thousands of children and families who depend on them. It also helps build the supportive infrastructure necessary to implement large-scale federal investments in comprehensive early childhood services, if Congress were to ever act on such legislation. Recently, a wave of states across the country, representing both major political parties, have taken steps to integrate their programs and services. The lessons learned from how these states approached the process of consolidation can be foundational in shaping future efforts at the state and federal levels to create a comprehensive, holistic early childhood system of support.

The authors would like to thank Erin Grant for her thorough fact-checking and review of this report and Riley Blaugrund for her support throughout this project. The authors would also like to thank all the state administrators who gave their time, expertise, and insights, as well as colleagues at the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center for their collaboration and partnership.

* Correction, January 8, 2025: This report has been corrected to clarify the number of states that have all key early childhood programs consolidated under one agency.

The authors of this report collected and fact-checked state governance data through a combination of online search and direct outreach to state agency leadership between August and November 2024.

State scan data

The authors recorded the primary overseeing agency for eight key early childhood services: 1) child care licensing, 2) child care subsidy, 3) child care quality improvement, 4) state-funded preschool, 5) the Head Start State Collaboration Office, 6) Part B preschool, 7) Part C early intervention, and 8) MIECHV. After collecting this information, CAP fact-checked state scan data with partners at the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University. Early childhood governance structure data for all states can be viewed in the table below. Scroll right to see all early childhood programs, consolidation category labels, and the number of separate agencies that oversee early childhood services in each state. Search by state or toggle by page to see all state data.

Outreach to state administrators

Once the authors completed a full state scan, recording the primary overseeing agency for each of the target programs, they identified several key states that either had successfully merged their programs under a single authority or were in the process of doing so. The authors then identified state administrators—including commissioners, deputy superintendents, and agency directors—in the 11 states noted at the beginning of this report and contacted them with a request to meet for a 45-minute interview and respond to a list of prepared questions. Speaker consent forms were collected and are on file with the authors. Interviews were ultimately conducted with representatives from seven states: Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, and Virginia.

The list of questions is as follows:

1. Can you provide an overview of the transition to [state agency or department]? What was the impetus behind the creation of a stand-alone agency?
2. Which programs are included in the agency/department?
3. Who championed the consolidation (e.g., governor, legislature, both)?
4. How long did the consolidation process take, from start to finish? What were some of the logistical barriers experienced during that period of consolidation (e.g., time-limited funds, data/digital infrastructure needs, personnel)?
5. What systemic changes took place as a result of the consolidation (e.g., data systems, accountability measures, quality improvement, supply-building efforts)?
6. What outcomes have been achieved as a result of consolidation? What difference has it made to service delivery, quality, data tracking, provider and family engagement, and/or child and family outcomes?
7. Has consolidation into a single agency/department shifted how legislators in the state see early childhood and early childhood education? Have you identified any messaging/framing impacts of how early childhood services are talked about in the state?
8. Could you speak more about how providers and families are involved in informing the direction of the agency? What does engagement look like with families and educators?
9. How is coordination across programs encouraged/facilitated? How does this agency/department interface with other departments that may still oversee child/family programs, outside of early education (e.g., health care navigators, housing supports, nutrition access programs)?
10. Could you speak to the future directions for this agency/department?
11. What did the rollout of COVID-19 stabilization dollars look like in the state? Do you think the consolidated agency/department eased that process at all?
12. Can you share any lessons learned for other states? Have you given advice/guidance to other states that have also started consolidating services?