OMEP’s 78th World Assembly and Conference will take place in Poznań, Poland, sometime in mid-July 2026, bringing together researchers, educators, and policymakers from around the globe. The theme, “When a Child Speaks…” Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights, has a literary quality. However, the events that take place in those Polish conference halls have actual repercussions for preschoolers in the United States, and they won’t be distributed equally. A few states are already in a position to welcome this change. Others are far away.
Despite carrying out important work, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, is one of those organizations that seldom appears on American front pages. The foundation of the 2026 conference is the legacy of Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish educator who made the case that children are complete human beings deserving of respect and involvement rather than being passive recipients of adult education decades before anyone considered codifying it. Despite his death at Treblinka in 1942, his ideas have endured for almost a century. Seeing a global education organization in 2026 turn to a man who perished in the Holocaust for moral guidance on what early childhood should entail is striking.
The seven thematic axes of the conference cover everything from teacher recognition and children’s agency in the classroom to digital wellbeing and climate impacts. Their shared insistence that children’s voices are an ethical duty rather than a courtesy is what unites them. This global framing comes at a difficult time for American early childhood education, which is still a disjointed, underfunded patchwork of public programs, private preschools, and Head Start initiatives. There is still no universal pre-K program in the US. State politics, income level, and zip code continue to have a significant impact on access to high-quality early childhood care.
There may be little resistance to the 2026 agenda in states like Massachusetts, California, and Vermont, where progressive education policy and pre-K investment have moved in a direction similar to OMEP’s framework. These states have already been developing culturally sensitive curricula, increasing access to early childhood programs, and, in certain situations, experimenting with child-centered pedagogy that is somewhat similar to Korczak’s vision. You can already see aspects of it when you stroll through a well-funded preschool classroom in Boston or Berkeley, such as open-ended play, the teacher acting as a facilitator, and documentation of the kids’ thinking rather than just their test-readiness.
However, the scene drastically changes if you drive south or into the country’s rural interior. According to early childhood investment indices, states like Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia are still at the bottom. The philosophical leap toward children as “rights-bearing agents of change”—language the OMEP framework uses without hesitation—can feel abstract against the reality of underfunded classrooms and undertrained staff in these places, where preschool access is restricted and teacher pay is remarkably low. Using participatory pedagogy with twenty-four four-year-olds in a portable classroom with outdated materials is challenging.
The UN’s SDG 4.2, which calls for inclusive and high-quality early childhood education for all children by 2030, is directly related to the 2026 agenda. That commitment was signed by the United States. State-level data on preschool enrollment and quality ratings tends to provide an uncomfortable answer to the question of whether it is truly moving in that direction. International frameworks such as this one seem to act in part as mirrors, reflecting what a nation secretly knows about itself but hasn’t fully addressed.
Practically speaking, the implications of OMEP’s 2026 global agenda for American preschoolers are both straightforward and intricate. It implies that international standards for children’s rights in education are being reaffirmed and reinforced, that there will be more pressure on national systems to conform to those standards, and that the states paying attention will have a chance to take advantage of this global momentum to advocate for improved funding, improved policies, and improved practices at home. States that don’t pay attention risk falling farther behind than they think, not only in terms of equity but also in terms of preparing kids for a world where expectations are changing more and more.
It’s difficult not to feel that the most significant voices in this discussion are still the ones that are least likely to be heard in the policy rooms as all of this takes shape. The kids themselves. That would probably sound familiar to Korczak.
