The age span from birth to Grade 3 represents a new and unique developmental period that is rapidly emerging to connect child care and informal childhood education more closely with formal school education. Comprehensive early childhood care and education can provide critical support for young children, preventing and mitigating their exposure to negative environment and experience that can greatly influence their lifelong wellbeing and economic productivity (Demma, 2010). High-quality early childhood care and education has short-term effects (e.g., improve school readiness, close achievement gap) and long-term effects (e.g., increase high school graduation rate, prepare the next generation of effective workers and parents) (e.g., Barnett, 2000). Child development is a continuous process that must be attended by many programs and services, such as families, schools, neighborhoods (communities), social services, and health care agencies. How can different systems in care and education of young children be integrated to work together as a whole system that is more effective, efficient, and equitable to produce excellent outcomes in children? We aim to tackle this question through a synthesis of the research literature.

This review is a significant intellectual effort for two reasons. First, it emphasizes the new and unique developmental period. Second, the development of an integrated system for better care and education of young children is an emerging issue in the research literature. Watterston and Caldwell (2011) claimed that a key to success in the new era of education reform has constantly been to align strategies among different levels of the school system, including central office, regional (district) office, school, and classroom. A careful inspection of the research literature indicates that the term, system alignment, has been used mainly in two different contexts: within and between systems. Within-system alignment is often defined as the internal coherence of a single social entity (Kasmarick, 2011). On the other hand, between-system alignment refers to the effort of placing or bringing critical functions of various social entities into a logically designed sequence of activities to perform a certain task, with the purpose to systematically describe, analyze, and explain the performance (Schalock & Verdugo, 2012).

Some influential education practices are quite representative of the concept of system alignment and thus can serve as specific examples of how system alignment as conceptually defined earlier is operationalized.Based on the premise that “connected programs benefit learners through the acquisition of life and work skills, and communities in turn may benefit from the services that these skilled learners provide” (Popkin et al., 2009, p. 3), Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) aims to develop integrated holistic programs across several systems with the goal to benefit not only learners but also their communities (Hong & Keahiolalo-Karasuda, 2011).The vision that has led to the development of Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is “creating a safety net woven so tightly that children in the neighborhood can’t slip through” (Tough, 2008, p. 5).Using the approach of complementary learning, HCZ has establisheda multifaceted, comprehensive, collaborative, and continuous support system ina community historically challenging to reform due to its chronically high rates of unemployment, crime, and mortality(Tough, 2008). The approach of Changing, Learning, and Growing (CLG) comes from a program for professional development that is developed to advance the knowledge and understanding of performance assessment of early childhood educators with the goal to eventually enable them to develop their own performance monitoring systems (see Gettinger, 2001).

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