When the Gates Foundation first launched 25 years ago, Bill and Melinda were looking for ways to support local children and families in Washington state. Inspired by the idea of helping young children get a strong start in life, the Gates Foundation made one of its first grants to help launch the Washington State Foundation for Early Learning. That was the spark of our early learning work, and since 2006 the foundation has invested more than $300 million in partnership with the field to support educators in delivering high-quality early learning experiences. Our work has evolved over the last two decades and eventually expanded into a national strategy that works toward the goal of ensuring that all young children have access to a high-quality pre-K experience that prepares them to read, write, problem-solve, and communicate effectively by 3rd grade.
Today, the Gates Foundation’s work focuses on ensuring pre-K educators have what they need to engage curious young minds and spark joyful learning for all children. That includes better tools and professional development resources to help educators connect the learning and instruction that happens in their pre-K setting to children’s various needs, backgrounds, and interests.
Our grant funding has helped MDRC launch Measures for Early Success, an initiative that is rethinking child-level assessments to make them more useful and relevant for teachers and more meaningful for children and families. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, with our grant support, recently created a consensus study that, for the first time, aligned on the elements that are crucial to a high-quality preschool curriculum.
In recognition of this progress, Gates Foundation leadership has given the Early Learning team approval to leverage more than $90 million in funding over the next four years to build on this work to ensure that the field has access to quality products that enable pre-K teachers to support our youngest learners.
At the same time, anticipating the need to focus our foundation’s resources in the future, Gates Foundation leadership also decided that this will be our last four years of funding early learning in the United States. We will wind down our early learning efforts by 2029.
I want to be clear that while this decision reflects an intentional shift in the direction of the foundation’s funding priorities, it is not a judgment on the importance of early learning nor on the work of our partners. On the contrary, we are incredibly proud of the work our grantees have done to elevate the importance of improving pre-K quality so that all young learners are prepared to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. That is reflected in our leadership team’s approval to invest more than $90 million in funding to help our partners continue the development of this meaningful work.
Over the next four years, we will collaborate with our partners to ensure that the impact of our shared work continues to benefit our nation’s youngest learners. This means continuing to elevate conversations around pre-K quality and focusing on assessment and curriculum products, resource guides and research, and other tools that we believe will help strengthen the early learning field.
Our Early Learning team will work with partners to determine the best path forward. You can sign up for our newsletter as well to stay up to date on our work over the next four years.