(Illustration by iStock/Lilanakani)
In the United States, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the nation’s educational report card) peaked in 2013 and have since stagnated or declined. The percentage of eighth graders failing to meet basic proficiency in math and reading has reached record highs. To address these problems, federal, state, and local governments have poured billions of dollars into smaller class sizes, longer school days, enhanced curricula, and teacher training.
But the evidence increasingly points to a more fundamental challenge: The skills gaps that drive these outcomes start long before children ever reach a middle-school classroom—often before they reach any classroom at all. Parents are the people with whom young children spend most of their time, and it is within families, not schools, that early skill differences take root.
Over more than a decade of working with low-income families, our research has shown that inexpensive, technology-based tools parents can use with their children—including text-delivered conversation prompts, digital libraries, and math apps—can meaningfully help parents close early childhood skills gaps. Yet these proven tools fail to scale because there is no institutional buyer to purchase them, no distribution channel to deliver them, and no trusted intermediary to bring them to families. We propose reversing the sequence: build the institutional market for parenting interventions first, and innovation will follow.
The Parenting Gap
Between birth and age 18, a child who never misses a day of school and attends two years of preschool still spends only 15 percent of their waking hours in classrooms (assuming approximately 1,100 school hours per year across 18 years, with 16 waking hours per day). The remaining 85 percent is spent with family and caregivers. This matters most for children from low-income families, who are less likely to have access to the enriched home environments—including shared book-reading, rich conversation, and educational play—that drive early skill development. Research shows that by kindergarten, children from the lowest-income families enter school scoring more than a standard deviation below their highest-income peers on reading and math assessments, and they rarely climb higher in the skills distribution.
What distinguishes families that build strong skills is not money. The Baby’s First Years experiment gave low-income mothers $333 per month and found no effect on children’s cognitive outcomes after four years. What matters is parental investment in activities that build children’s skills. This is not rote teaching but instead, consistent, stimulating interactions such as open-ended conversation, asking questions, and other joint activities that build vocabulary, curiosity, and reasoning.
The evidence suggests that inexpensive, high-quality technology-based tools can meaningfully support parents in engaging in these activities and building the skills that matter most for their children. Across randomized trials with low-income families, the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab we codirect at the University of Chicago has found that text-based conversation prompts tripled parents’ use of open-ended language with their children. Our research also showed that a preloaded digital library used for an average of just seven minutes a week moved children’s language scores from roughly the 40th to the 50th national percentile, and that math apps used by parents without college degrees closed roughly one-third of the initial child skills gap. So, why aren’t these solutions more widespread?
The Missing Market
Like all parents, low-income parents want to help their children succeed. Research from our lab consistently finds that when low-income parents learn about effective, low-cost digital tools, they embrace them. But what is missing outside the lab is access and awareness. The gap is not motivation. The gap is structural: There is no institution whose job it is to find those families, acquire the tools on their behalf, and get them into parents’ hands.
Consider the contrast with schools. Epic, the digital reading and audiobook platform for children designed to promote reading practice, comprehension, and vocabulary, reached 90 percent of US elementary schools and was acquired for $500 million in 2021. Epic succeeded not only because it was effective, but because schools could buy it at scale. Quality alone is never enough—one needs a buyer. Schools are a functioning, albeit imperfect, market for ed tech like Epic. They have budgets, incentives to improve child outcomes and ease administrative burdens, and decision-makers who can evaluate and purchase products. Developers compete to serve that market. Innovation follows.
Parents with young children at home have no equivalent point of contact. Preschools serve only half of all children, even fewer from low-income families. Pediatric clinics see children too infrequently and are not in the business of parenting support. Home-visiting programs, which send professional health practitioners directly into families’ homes, reach only 150,000 families annually, a tiny fraction of those who could benefit. None of these institutional settings promotes digital learning tools, none has universal reach into the home, and none has the purchasing power to bring effective digital tools to parents.
This is the missing market. Parents use digital tools when available and welcome support that makes their job easier. The problem is a shortage of two things that schools take for granted. The first is a procurement mechanism with the mandate and purchasing power to evaluate, acquire, and distribute digital tools at scale. The second is being seen as a trusted institution that engages all families and provides effective learning tools for use at home. Schools have both. That is why the ed tech market for classrooms is dynamic and competitive, while the market for home-based digital parenting tools barely exists.
Creating the Market
What the ed tech market for schools demonstrates is that institutional buyers transform innovation. When schools have budgets and purchasing power, developers build for them. We propose replicating that dynamic for parents. In each state, a “Digital Tool Learning Center” would serve as a universal point of contact and distribution mechanism, enrolling every child at birth and providing families with a tablet for exclusive use with the center’s vetted tools. Developers, who now have an incentive to have the state purchase their digital tools, would be more inclined to submit their tools to rigorous evaluation. The more states that do this, the bigger the market—and the stronger the incentive to build tools that actually work.
Here’s the logic: First, enroll large numbers of families who want support. Second, secure funding to purchase tools on their behalf. Third, create competition among developers to build the tools families need and want. In that sequence, innovation flourishes because there is a market waiting for it.
The Learning Centers also address a second barrier: skepticism of technology-based learning tools. A trusted institution that vets these tools, endorses them to families, and supports their use can distinguish a good digital tool from the ineffective ed tech that has soured parents and teachers on the category.
With millions of families enrolled on a common platform, developers would have a real market to compete in. Learning Centers could evaluate and distribute tools that promote language development, math, and parent-child engagement at scale. Once that procurement infrastructure exists, targeted innovation funding makes sense: guaranteed purchase commitments to pull the best tools to market and competitive grants to push the development of new ones.
This is the logic behind advance market commitments for vaccines: Philanthropy and science establish proof of concept, governments create the institutional infrastructure that guarantees a market, and private innovation scales what works. The parallel for digital learning tools is direct. Philanthropists and researchers must fund the rigorous demonstrations that prove which tools work and build the evidentiary base that overcomes skepticism. State and federal governments must build the institutional infrastructure—Learning Centers with universal reach and purchasing power—that creates a real market. Only then does developer competition make sense, with entrepreneurs building for a market that procurement infrastructure has made real.
From Concept to Reality
Consolidation of existing state departments can also help generate opportunities for a universal point of contact and a distribution mechanism. Illinois offers a concrete example of how a single point of access institution could work in practice. In June 2024, Governor JB Pritzker signed legislation creating a new cabinet-level Department of Early Childhood, consolidating preschool grants, subsidized childcare, and day care licensing under a single agency. By July 2026, Illinois will have consolidated purchasing power over programs serving all children under 6. That agency could evaluate technology-based tools, negotiate a statewide license, and deploy them to every enrolled family. More importantly, it could enroll families at birth or when they move into the state, reaching even parents who never touch the formal early childhood system. Illinois has roughly 125,000 births per year. The market that does not exist today could come into existence within a single legislative session.
Illinois is not alone in creating departments that can serve as a universal point of contact and a distribution mechanism. Ohio’s Republican governor created the Department of Children and Youth with a mandate to be “laser-focused” on children’s issues, while New Mexico’s Democratic governor established an Early Childhood Education and Care Department to house all prenatal-to-age-5 programs under one roof. Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Virginia, and Connecticut have taken similar steps, creating dedicated early childhood agencies that serve as a single point of access for families and, critically, a unified procurement channel for evidence-based programs and tools.
Sequence Matters
The conventional approach to social innovation—fund the supply, then hope demand materializes—has repeatedly failed in early childhood. Dozens of evidence-based interventions sit on shelves. Promising pilots never reach the families who need them.
The alternative is to reverse the sequence. As a market emerges, philanthropists and researchers can take the lead and fund rigorous demonstrations that prove which digital tools work, building the evidentiary base that gives parents, teachers, and policy makers reason to trust them. As states and the federal government move to build the institutional infrastructure, developers will find it in their interest to develop effective digital tools and financially support research to prove their value for students and families.
The children entering kindergarten today will form the workforce of 2050. For the first time, we have the tools to meaningfully close the skills gap before they ever set foot in a classroom—not through more spending on schools, but through tools that reach parents during the hours that schools never will. What we lack is not knowledge, not resources, and not willing families. What we lack is the institutional architecture to turn scattered proofs of concept into something every parent can access. That architecture is buildable. The question is whether philanthropists, governors, and legislators will act in the right order—and soon enough to matter.
Read more stories by Ariel Kalil & Susan Mayer.