Early childhood educators provide foundational support for communities, yet they often face challenges including low wages, burnout, and inadequate opportunities for professional development. In 2022, to alleviate these burdens and build a pipeline of qualified early educators, a partnership of local community support organizations and universities in Washington, DC, coalesced to form the Advancing Early Education Collaborative (AEEC). In this third and final report presenting findings from the evaluation of the AEEC, we share data collected in 2025 and offer final reflections of the collaborative’s successes and lessons learned over the duration of the grant period.
Why This Matters
Early childhood educators play a central role in community well-being by supporting families fostering childhood development. Efforts to support the opportunities, emotional health, and economic mobility of these caregivers are vital to the well-being of the communities that they serve, especially during shortages of early childhood educators. Academic institutions and nonprofit service providers that are seeking to support early childhood educators in their communities can use this report to replicate the impacts of AEEC by learning from the collaborative’s implementation strategies, meaningful partnership, and adaptative responsiveness to the challenges faced along the way.
What We Found
Partners in the collaborative were largely successful in meeting their goals for student enrollment. By June 2025, a total of 375 students participating in AEEC had enrolled in early childhood degree programs, surpassing the target of 270. The collaborative also exceeded its targets for providing support services including scholarships, child care vouchers, and grocery distribution.
AEEC partners faced a series of challenges, including slow recruitment and enrollment in the first year, limited completion of credentials and coursework, lower uptake of specific services, and general capacity constraints. However, partners were proactive in addressing these challenges over time.
The collaborative also had several unexpected impacts, including supporting increased student self-advocacy, allowing participants to center their families and overall well-being in decisionmaking, and establishing standard procedures for work experience. For some students, the collaborative’s impacts on breaking stigmas of mental health care were especially valuable: offering space for participants to process trauma, transitions, and everyday stress was often just as impactful as helping them update a resume or enroll in school.
Key successes achieved by the collaborative since the start of the AEEC include adding dedicated staff positions that resulted in increased student engagement and a notable shift in the overall student experience, establishing internal structures and processes for increased collaboration and problem solving among partners, and building the muscle of collaborative decisionmaking to better align targets with the realities of implementation and partners’ capacity.
How We Did It
The three-year evaluation was informed by various qualitative and quantitative methods including partner and participant surveys, partner interviews, participant focus groups, and a data walk of participants. Urban researchers also reviewed data reported by partners to conduct their evaluation. Data and insights gathered from the evaluation were also regularly brought back to the AEEC partners to highlight successes and challenges and to help the AEEC engage in a process of continuous learning and improvement to better support AEEC participants and to achieve the collaborative’s goals.
