Book Launch | Cradle to Kindergarten
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join us for a discussion and reception to celebrate the release of Cradle to Kindergarten by Ajay Chaudry, Taryn Morrissey, Christina Weiland, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa. Chaudry and Yoshikawa will be in discussion with journalist Heather Long and public policy scholar Jane Waldfogel.
Early care and education for many children in the U.S. is in crisis. The period between birth and kindergarten is a critical time for child development, and socioeconomic disparities that begin early in children’s lives contribute to starkly different long-term outcomes for adults. Yet, compared to other advanced economies, high-quality child care and preschool in the U.S. are scarce and prohibitively expensive for many middle class and most disadvantaged families. The U.S. government invests less in children under the age of five than do most other developed nations. Most working families must seek private child care, which means that children from low-income households, who would benefit most from high-quality early education, are the least likely to attend them.
Reducing educational and economic inequalities requires that all children have robust opportunities to learn, fully develop their capacities, and have a fair shot at success. Cradle to Kindergarten presents a blueprint for fulfilling this promise by expanding access to educational and financial resources at a critical stage of child development. The authors offer a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy that diagnoses the obstacles to accessible early education and charts a path to opportunity for all children.
Ajay Chaudry is senior fellow at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Services Policy at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Hirokazu Yoshikawa is the Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and a University Professor at New York University.
Heather Long is an economics correspondent for The Washington Post, where she writes for Wonkblog about a wide range of economic and domestic topics. She is also a reporter and editor at CNN, covering topics as varied as unemployment, the difficulties of working in the fast food industry and the ways economics and politics intersect.
Jane Waldfogel is professor social work and public affairs at Columbia School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the LSE. She has written extensively on the impact of public policies on child and family well-being, and is the author of Steady Gains and Stalled Progress: Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap, What Children Need, Securing the Future: Investing in Children from Birth to College, and other books.