Amy O’Leary, Junlei Li, and Titus DosRemedios

“The National Smart Start Conference is the nation’s largest conference devoted to early education systems and strategies,” according to the conference website.

And last month Amy O’Leary, director of our Early Education for All Campaign, and Titus DosRemedios, our research and policy director, traveled to Greensboro, N.C., to attend the conference and learn more about early education work in North Carolina and other states.

Among the featured speakers was Junlei Li, the co-director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College.

“Junlei gave a fantastic keynote speech,” Titus reports. “He had a very thoughtful way of presenting the research and child development science, encouraging the field to go beyond some of the common messages we use when ‘making the case’ for early learning.

“For example, we all talk about the return on investment for early education – but Junlei encouraged us to focus more on the up-front investment than the future returns. To illustrate his point, he shared a slide on Perry Preschool and described how that program invested in teachers, providing ample time for them to work with children, families, and their fellow teachers in the program. Perry also paid its teachers $65,000 in today’s dollars.”

Don’t worry if you couldn’t make the conference. Videos of some of Li’s speeches are available online, including these:

And here at the 10:00 minute mark.

Click here for more information about the conference’s sessions, and check out Smart Start’s YouTube channel for speeches from past conferences.

News coverage of the conference is available here.

And if you’re curious about next year’s conference, click here and sign up for updates.