Giving Compass' Take:

• As part of an ongoing project, countries share their early education systems success stories, providing lessons for the U.S. to potentially utilize in the future. 

• What are the top issues that U.S. officials need to address regarding early education? What is the role of donors in improving early education systems? 

• Read about the power of education data for early childhood learning. 

The U.S. should stop striving for "one best strategy" for providing early-childhood education and care, and consider instead a diverse funding system for serving all children and families that honors America's "entrepreneurial, market-driven society," a leading early-childhood education researcher said Thursday.

"We've been too intellectually reliant on the public sector," Professor Sharon Lynn Kagan of Teachers College, Columbia University, said during the live-streamed release of the second of two "Early Advantage" books examining early education systems in other high-performing countries and what the U.S. can learn from them.

While the U.S. has a strong knowledge base about educating young children and public will to improve services, there is not yet a clear path toward addressing issues such as qualifications and compensation for early educators, and how data should be collected and used to improve programs and measure child outcomes, she said.

Part of an ongoing project of the National Center on Education and the Economy, the study included in-depth case studies of the early care and education systems in Australia, England, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, aiming to identify lessons from those countries that can inspire change in the U.S. Kagan chose those for comparison based on their results as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, as well as how they rank on access to early education according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The speakers also highlighted shifting contexts and challenges in their own countries, including growing diversity and inequity, which has led some to move away from providing the same amount of funding for every child to implementing sliding scales or providing more funding and resources for those in poverty or with special needs.

Read the full article about early education systems provide lessons for U.S. by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.