September 28, 2026
Amy Schmidtke, the Buffett Institute's director of educational practice, originally wrote this guest blog about the work of the Superintendents' Early Childhood Plan, for the AASA, the School Superintendents Association. It is the third in a series of three blogs. Read the excerpt below, and then read it in full on the AASA site.
Read the previous blogs in this early learning series.
Most school districts already recognize the importance of early learning. The harder question is how to organize around it.
How do districts translate a birth through Grade 3 vision into action across the people and settings that shape children's learning?
More than a decade of learning alongside eleven school districts has led us to five shared commitments: align, center, reach, partner, and reflect. Together, they provide a common direction for how people across roles and settings work to support children's learning and development.
Our framework puts that shared direction into practical terms, showing how those commitments can shape action across leadership effectiveness, instructional excellence, and family and community partnership.
ALIGN: Connect What Surrounds the Child
A child's learning moves across home, child care, preschool, school, and community settings. Children carry their experiences, relationships, and learning with them, even when the adults and systems surrounding them operate separately.
The goal isn't to make every setting the same. It's to create enough connection across settings and developmental stages that children's experiences build on one another over time.