Presentation begins at the 10:40 time mark.

California has a brand new plan for early childhood education.

It has arrived in the nick of time, with sweeping changes that will benefit children and families, and with lessons for Massachusetts and other states.

“Few would argue that California’s child care system is in need of major reform,” public radio station KQED reports. “Today, a whopping 77% of children statewide lack access to a licensed child care program, and many of those who teach and care for the state’s youngest are making marginally above minimum wage.

“The system is currently ‘at a crisis level,’ according to Michael Olenick, head of the Los Angeles-based Child Care Resource Center. Yet he’s hopeful that things will improve. Olenick just finished participating in a state Assembly blue-ribbon commission, which released a report on Monday suggesting major improvements to the state’s early childhood education system.”

This report, from the Assembly Blue Ribbon Commission on Early Childhood Education, draws on two years of hearings, meetings, and focus groups.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who formed the commission, said at a press conference, “The single program that’s closest to my heart and what I believe is the best tool for lifting families out of poverty is early childhood education,” the LAist website says.

“Instead of focusing on fighting for dollars, the Blue Ribbon Commission began by asking: What do we need? How should we run ECE? That took us away from the budget battle and allowed us to focus on the needs of children and families, instead of dollars and cents,” Rendon said in March, at the Blue Ribbon Commission’s last public hearing.

The report covers a sweeping range of topics, including family engagement, access, quality, financing programs, infrastructure, and the early childhood workforce.

In addition, the report calls for “significant investment and comprehensive cultural changes around two-generation policies that promote equity.”

“We understood from the beginning of the process that we will only achieve systemic change if we invest simultaneously in access for families, adequate compensation for this vital workforce, and partnerships to strengthen the system that administers these programs and services – all while ensuring inclusive governance.”

Among the many strong ideas in the reports, here are three that Massachusetts policymakers should consider.

The first idea would increase access to early childhood programs by capping families’ costs. As the report explains, “California families at or below the State Median Income (SMI) would pay no more than 7% of their income on early care and education for children under the age of 6, regardless of whether they have access to subsidized child care, the state preschool program, or a federally funded program.”

Advocates in Massachusetts are working on a similar proposal, with an affordability cap and progressive sliding scale fee structure, and they have filed An Act Relative to Affordable and Accessible High Quality Early Education and Care (H.470 and S.288) this legislative session.

The second idea is to modernize the early education workforce. Massachusetts has already gotten started, making workforce development and compensation a priority in recent years. California’s plan is to pay early educators who have comparable education and experience the same salaries as teachers in K-3 classrooms – as well as provide “competitive benefit packages including health dental, vision, 20 days paid time off annually, and retirement contribution.”

The report also calls for developing guidelines and providing incentives “to licensed family child care homes who wish to specialize in care of infants and toddlers by establishing a specialized reimbursement rate for those with demonstrated experience and specialized training.”

Another key step is increasing professional development opportunities by, in part, investing in a range of initiatives that would help people from “a wide spectrum of cultural, educational, and financial backgrounds.” This includes providing scholarships, tutoring, conveniently scheduled and located classes, advisors, and resources for early educators whose first language is not English.

The third idea that Massachusetts and other states should consider is creating “family navigators” who would help low-income parents. The report suggests that these navigators should be former recipients of CalWORKs, the state’s public assistance program; it’s an approach that could build trust because navigators would understand parents’ experiences. The navigator model is currently used in health care settings such as the University of Iowa’s Child Health Specialty Clinic and at the Mailman Center for Child Development at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.

“Family navigators make perfect sense,” says Titus DosRemedios, Strategies for Children’s director of research and policy. “In our work with local communities, we often hear that there are lots of programs and services available, but families don’t know about them or have trouble accessing them. Navigators are a low-cost solution to help better connect families to early childhood supports in their community.”

Of course, the biggest lesson for Massachusetts and other states is the importance of having such a comprehensive early childhood plan.

As Speaker Rendon also said at the final public hearing:

“We can’t turn around cycles of poverty, crime, or discrimination without ECE, it’s how you give children a strong foundation for education, and it’s how you lift up families.”