Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia: What Parents Should Know

You don’t have to pick a philosophy before you visit. The website tells you which approach a school claims, and the visit shows you whether the room matches it. You can step through a morning in each room below. For costs and eligibility in California, see our preschool and TK guide.

What do Montessori, Waldorf and Reggio Emilia actually mean?

Each name began with a particular group of children and an idea about what they need.

A few other words on the same websites look like a fourth choice, and aren’t.

Montessori began with Maria Montessori, an Italian physician. She opened her Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House, in San Lorenzo, a poor district of Rome, on January 6, 1907 (AMS). The idea underneath it is that children teach themselves a great deal, given the right materials and enough uninterrupted time to use them. Children from about 2½ to 6 usually share one classroom (AMS).

Waldorf began in Stuttgart in September 1919. Emil and Berta Molt asked Rudolf Steiner to start a school for the children of workers at Emil’s Waldorf-Astoria cigarette company (Waldorf 100). Its early childhood association, WECAN, quotes Steiner’s view that young children learn “through imitation.” So the adults do real work, such as baking and cleaning, as an example children can imitate in their play, inside a steady daily rhythm (WECAN). Reading lessons begin in first grade (AWSNA).

Waldorf also rests on a spiritual philosophy, and the movement says so. AWSNA, the North American Waldorf association, lists as a principle that an “anthroposophical understanding of child development guides the educational program” (AWSNA). Anthroposophy is Steiner’s own spiritual philosophy. AWSNA’s guide for new schools says the teacher “is not to teach anthroposophy to the children.” Its FAQ calls the schools “non-sectarian,” based on “a belief that there is a spiritual dimension to the human being and to all of life.” Those are the association’s words. A tour shows you how much of it reaches one school’s stories, festivals and daily routine.

Reggio Emilia is a city in northern Italy, not a person. Right after the war, people in the village of Villa Cella built a school themselves. Reggio Children’s timeline quotes them, in May 1945: “We built the walls of this school together, men and women.” The city opened its first municipal preschool in 1963. The educator Loris Malaguzzi worked with it from the start (Reggio Children). The idea underneath it, in Malaguzzi’s phrase, is that children have “a hundred languages”: “a hundred ways of thinking, expressing, understanding” (Reggio Children).

RIE comes up in infant care. Magda Gerber and Tom Forrest co-founded it in Los Angeles in 1978 (RIE). It’s an approach to caring for babies and toddlers, not a preschool curriculum, and we found no study of how it affects children.

“Play-based” is a broad description rather than a fourth brand. In a California TK classroom it’s the law: Education Code 48000(d)(1) requires a play-based approach, effective July 2026.

HighScope and Creative Curriculum are products, with publishers, materials and training. HighScope shares its name with the Perry Preschool Project, which ran from 1962 to 1967 with 123 children. Its comparison group got no preschool at all (HighScope). Children in the program had two and a half hours of preschool every weekday, and a teacher visited each family at home every week (Heckman et al., 2010). The published curriculum came later, so a school buying it today isn’t rerunning that study. A school that names a curriculum should be able to tell you which edition it uses, and when any staff certificate it names expires.

What does a Tuesday morning look like in each room?

Each approach’s own organizations describe a different morning, from how the day opens to what happens at snack.

These are the approaches as their associations describe them. A school using the name may run its day differently.

The sharpest disagreement between two of these rooms is about pretend play. Maria Montessori concluded that pretend play and fantasy were “not as helpful for children’s development” as most people assume (Lillard & Taggart, 2019). So a classic Montessori room leans toward real tasks, like preparing a real snack with child-sized tools. Angeline Lillard, the first author of that paper, also leads the Montessori lottery study further down. Waldorf goes the other way and lists “free, imaginative play” among the essentials of its early childhood rooms. It’s a live disagreement between two traditions, and no study we found settles it.

WECAN adds a caution that’s worth borrowing for all three rooms. It says play materials, wall colors and even “the menu for snack” may be “mistakenly taken as essentials.” What it calls essential is the adult: “the essential element in early childhood education is actually the educator” (WECAN).

Will our child be happy there?

The name on the sign can’t tell you. You’re judging the adults and the children in one particular room, and you judge that by watching.

Happiness is the question research answers least directly. What has been measured is narrower: whether programs that deliberately teach young children to handle feelings and get along build those skills. They do. A 2018 review of 79 studies covered 18,292 children aged 2 to 6 in group programs, and found gains in emotional and social skills. That’s a finding about deliberate teaching. It doesn’t say which philosophy children like best, or whether yours will want to go in the morning.

We found no study that matches a child’s temperament to a philosophy. So we’d set aside the question of which kind of child each room suits, and look at the room itself.

Bring your child on a visit if the school allows it, or come back at drop-off, when the day is real. Don’t try to grade the whole room. One study followed 211 mostly low-income 4-year-olds in one US city. How each child engaged with teachers, classmates and tasks predicted their school readiness, even after accounting for trained observers’ ratings of the room (Sabol, Bohlmann & Downer, 2018). It was correlational, so it can’t show cause. It still suggests a practical move: find the child who most resembles yours, and watch what happens to them for twenty minutes. See how an adult greets a child who arrives upset. Then watch the ordinary hard moments rather than waiting for one big one: two children wanting the same toy, a tower knocked over, a missed turn.

Will our child learn more in one of them?

On learning, the studies compare different things at different ages, and none crowns one approach.

Start with curricula as products. The federal government’s Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research project tested 14 preschool curricula in randomized trials. Each was compared with other classrooms at its own sites. Two of the 14 moved a measured child outcome by the end of pre-K. By the end of kindergarten, four had: three for the better, and one for the worse on behavior. Three of those four had shown nothing a year earlier. In about half the trials, those classrooms used another published curriculum. In the rest, they mostly used lessons teachers built themselves. So each curriculum was measured against what its own sites already did, and the results don’t rank the 14. “No detectable effect” can still hide a small one. Across the 14, buying a named curriculum didn’t reliably beat what classrooms were already doing.

Is one preschool philosophy better for learning? The studies we found don’t show an overall winner. A 2025 US lottery study of public Montessori programs (Lillard et al.) found children offered a seat ahead at the end of kindergarten. They led on early reading and on three measures of thinking and self-control, but not at ages 3 or 4. A randomized trial in one French public school (Courtier et al., 2021) also found a reading advantage. A 2025 follow-up of 97 of its 150 children found it gone by fifth grade. An Italian study of 4,019 people, from first graders to adults of about 60 (Biroli et al., 2018), found Reggio Emilia’s city preschools ahead of no formal childcare. It found no clear difference from other preschools. An Austrian study of 149 Waldorf 15-year-olds (Salchegger et al., 2021) found lower science scores once students were matched on family background. None of these studies shows a winner, and none shows the approaches are equivalent.

The Montessori lottery study offered seats at 24 public programs with more applicants than places. A private school using the name doesn’t inherit its result. The authors adjusted for testing several things at once. After that, three of the four kindergarten results landed at 0.053, just missing their own 0.05 cutoff. Two of the nine outcomes came out slightly negative. Only about one in five families in the lotteries agreed to take part, and families on the Montessori side agreed more often. By kindergarten, 32% of the Montessori group and 42% of the comparison group were missing from testing. The authors say the missing data meant the study could detect only larger effects than it was built to find.

The French trial and its follow-up are a different study, in one disadvantaged public school where no parent chose a classroom. In fifth grade the researchers found evidence of no reading difference. They also found a math problem-solving advantage. It came from an exploratory test, outside the question they set out to confirm, so it needs a second study before anyone leans on it.

The Reggio study compared cities rather than assigning children, so it can’t show cause. It studied the city’s own municipal schools, and a US school calling itself Reggio-inspired doesn’t inherit the result.

The Waldorf comparison is about teenagers, not preschoolers. It covered all 149 Austrian Waldorf students who took the international PISA test at 15, matched with other students from similar family backgrounds. Before matching, they were slightly ahead in science; after matching, they were behind, a shift from +0.09 to −0.32 in the study’s units. They still enjoyed science more and were more interested in it. Matching shrank those gaps, from 0.48 to 0.24 for enjoyment and from 0.48 to 0.30 for interest. It’s one snapshot and can’t show what caused the differences. We found no lottery or randomized study of Waldorf at any age.

What each study compared, and what it found

Apart from Reggio’s, the comparisons of one approach with another stop at kindergarten, fifth grade or a single teenage snapshot. “Prepared for life” needs longer evidence than that.

Does any of them prepare children better for life?

We found no controlled study that follows Montessori or Waldorf preschoolers into adulthood, and Reggio’s adult comparison shows no clear edge over other preschools.

The long-run finding most worth knowing is about a trait all three say they build.

The Montessori lottery study stopped testing at the end of kindergarten, and we found no reported follow-up. Reggio’s Italian study included adults of about 43 who had gone to the city’s preschools. Against people who went to other preschools, the differences were generally small and not statistically significant. The authors call them small, and the study couldn’t tell them apart from chance.

One childhood measure has been followed well into adulthood, and it isn’t a curriculum. A New Zealand study followed 1,037 children from birth to age 32. The researchers measured how well the children managed themselves between ages 3 and 11: waiting their turn, keeping their temper, sticking with a task. That predicted their adult health, income and criminal records about as well as their IQ or their family’s social class did (Moffitt et al., 2011). It’s a prediction from one group of children; the study didn’t test whether preschool puts the trait there, or whether changing it changes a life.

All three approaches say they build that kind of self-management. We found no study that compares the three on it.

The curriculum built from the ground up to teach self-management shows how hard this is to prove. Tools of the Mind is a separate curriculum, not a version of Montessori, Waldorf or Reggio. A randomized trial covered 60 preschool classrooms and 877 children. It found no positive effects on any measured outcome through the end of first grade (Nesbitt & Farran, 2021). A separate team tested its kindergarten version and found small gains, some of them larger in high-poverty schools (Blair & Raver, 2014). Two trials gave two answers, at two different grades.

So our answer to “prepared for life” is a bet on what has lasted: self-management in childhood still predicted adult life at 32, and every approach here says it’s working on it.

How can we tell whether a school really follows the approach?

Each name lets you check something different, and none of the checks tells you how good the school is.

Checking the sign tells you whether you got what was promised.

Montessori isn’t a protected name. AMS says any school can call itself Montessori, and AMI/USA says the name “isn’t trademarked.” Both have member schools you can look up. AMS also accredits some of its members. When we checked on October 12, 2026, it said “207 of our 1,300 member schools” were AMS-accredited (AMS). For a Montessori school, look it up rather than reading the sign.

Waldorf works differently. AWSNA holds Waldorf as a registered service mark. AWSNA’s own guidelines let a standalone early childhood program put “Waldorf” in its name only as a full member of WECAN, or with an explicit license. A school that isn’t a member may call itself “Waldorf-inspired” in its text. It may not use that in its name, tagline, web address or page headings. So “Waldorf” in a preschool’s name signals membership under the associations’ policy, and “Waldorf-inspired” in its description usually means it isn’t a member. Both kinds of school are legitimate. WECAN’s directory lists programs.

Reggio has no certification. NAREA, the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance, says the city of Reggio Emilia “does not approve of any certifications.” It adds that labels like “Reggio-inspired” are “self-determined.” NAREA has member schools, but membership doesn’t certify what happens in a room. A school that has joined nothing has done nothing wrong.

Following an approach closely hasn’t been shown to cause better results for children. In the one randomized test of this we found, the Tools of the Mind trial above, researchers checked whether classrooms that followed the curriculum more closely did better. They found no consistent link with any child outcome. The lead teacher’s training, and how new staff learn the approach, still tell you whether the school delivers the approach it promises.

For safety, use the license record. For a California center, SchoolScope’s preschool search shows the state’s licensing record with inspection visits and citations. A family child care home’s page shows licensing only, so use the state facility search for its inspection history. TK is a public school grade, outside child care licensing. Its building is approved under the state’s school construction rules. The school publishes a yearly School Accountability Report Card, which has no citation history.

A search by philosophy word misses a lot. Many schools describe their approach only on their website, and family child care homes rarely carry these names in their licensed names. Search by city or zip as well.

A visit has limits too. A review of 185 studies found only small links between trained observers’ ratings of a room and how children did that year (von Suchodoletz et al., 2023). So use a visit to watch one child and the adults around them, not to score the room. A single visit is also a single day. You may be told the class was mid-transition that day, and that might even be true.

What do the other words on the website mean?

Some words name public programs with rules you can check, some name a credential, and some name nothing you can look up.

Head Start, California State Preschool (CSPP) and TK are public programs. TK is free for every age-eligible child. Head Start and state preschool are free or low-cost for families who qualify, and our cost guide has the income rules. None of the three requires a particular brand. Federal rules require Head Start to use a “research-based” curriculum without naming one (45 CFR 1302.32). That phrase describes how a curriculum was designed, not how well it works. State preschool programs must use California’s prekindergarten learning guidelines (Ed. Code 8203.3). TK must be play-based by law.

Immersion is about language, and it can sit inside any of these rooms. The reading results you may have heard about come from a Portland lottery study of children who applied for an immersion place at pre-K or kindergarten. It measured English reading in grades 3 to 8, using the 56.3% of applicants whose lotteries were truly random. It never tested whether the program caused the second-language learning. The one randomized preschool trial we found reported no significant difference in English between two-way immersion and English-only rooms (Barnett et al., 2007). Ask how many hours a day children hear each language, and what continues in kindergarten.

A California license means background checks, a fire clearance, an inspection before opening, and a public file of unannounced visits and citations. The legal floor for centers is a visit at least once every three years, plus yearly visits to some centers with problems, such as a license on probation, and to at least 30% of the rest, picked at random (H&S 1597.09).

“License-exempt” covers a long list with conditions. H&S 1596.792 has fifteen categories. Section 1596.793 exempts recreation programs run by groups like the YMCA, while child day care run by those same groups stays under licensing. One route for public recreation programs, such as a city’s, applies only outside school hours and under 20 hours a week or 14 weeks a year. Drop-in care while a parent stays on site is exempt, except at ski areas, shopping malls and department stores. A faith affiliation alone isn’t an exemption. If a program says it’s exempt, the category tells you which rule lets it run without a license, and “exempt” and “unlicensed” mean different things.

Accreditation is voluntary and private. NAEYC is one accreditor you’ll see, and California doesn’t require accreditation for a license. A school that names its accreditor can be looked up in that organization’s directory.

Child-led, whole child and hands-on have no registry or standard that we found. They may describe good teaching. Ask for an example: “What did the children choose this week?”

So which one should we choose?

Choose the day you want among the care you can reach and afford, check the record, and visit the room.

That doesn’t make preschool itself unimportant. Two often-quoted results, Reggio’s and Perry’s, compared preschool with no formal childcare or preschool at all. Where one approach was compared with another, the results don’t line up behind any one approach. The three still aren’t interchangeable: a philosophy shapes what your child’s Tuesday feels like, whether or not a test picks it up.

Some things are simply yours to want: handwork, the seasons, and how a room handles screens and reading. So are a faith woven through the day, the pace of it, and whether the adults call it work or play. Pick the morning you want your child to have. Then go and watch what the adults do when a child starts to cry.