Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children
The financing of early education and care in this country is a confusing mix of private and public dollars, with much of it coming from high fees for parents and low pay for early educators – and much of it built as a service working parents, not a birthright for young children. A recent paper from the Alliance for Early Childhood Finance,“Toward Better Policy for Early Care and Education in the United States,” describes the complex web of public funding that includes subsidies for the children of low-income working parents, Head Start and public school pre-kindergarten. It makes recommendations for streamlining funding to build a child-centered system of high-quality early learning.
“Historically, the care and education of children before they enter school has been viewed as a personal (maternal) responsibility, with limited public support largely focused on poor families,” the report states.
“The result is many distinct public funding sources, each with a distinct and significant purpose and population, which together have created chaotic and competing demands for accountability, with differing assurances that children are doing better and families are thriving…. When our economy was growing, these tensions of purpose between child care funding as a workforce support for parents and early learning funding in support of children’s school readiness were challenging but did not halt progress…. The reality, however, is that public funding has never been sufficient to support direct services for more than a very small fraction of the population.”
Even Massachusetts, which streamlined governance by creating the nation’s first consolidated Department of Early Education and Care in 2005, struggles with the disparate public funding sources described in the report, the bulk of which come from the federal government.
“Policy that focuses squarely on the needs of children will not be defined by their parent’s engagement in the workforce or by their age or where they live,” the report states. “We challenge the current, siloed approach to early care and education policy and finance, and encourage a new approach… that establishes systemwide direction for all ECE settings, regardless of funding stream.”
One way to meet this goal, the report notes, is to require programs and providers receiving public funds to participate in the state’s Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS). Massachusetts, which launched its QRIS in 2011, is in the process of implementing such a requirement.
The report also recommends that federal, state and local agencies work together to establish common standards and requirements instead of the separate rate structure and reporting mechanisms that currently characterize funding sources. A streamlined, child-centered funding system, the report states, “needs fiscal policy that creates a framework for using funding from multiple sources to support a single child or ECE program. It is not necessary to merge funding streams to achieve this goal; what is needed are clear and consistent policies that harmonize the rules, regulations, policies and procedures used by the entities that administer funds.”
(A nod to Birth to Thrive Online for pointing out the study.)
Eye on Early Education focuses on the twin goals of ensuring that Massachusetts children have access to high-quality early education and become proficient readers by the end of third grade.
Thank you for making available this excellent report by Ann Mitchell and Louise Stoney. These two have been leaders in early childhood policy for as long as I can remember. When they talk, I listen. This report describes the current situation very clearly. We will not be able to implement our dream of universal care and education in the current economy. They lay out what we can do,and how to do it. Up to that point the report is sound.
What the report does not do is tell us whether in a better economy at a future time we will ever be able to afford universal pre-kindergarten for all children and make it free for all parents. Will we always be focusing on poor and needy children? Will we always require children to be poor and stay poor before we can help their parents rescue their children from poverty? That is the part of the issue we need to take seriously as we plan for the future.
Excellent response by Gwen Morgan, who has been a leader in early childhood policy for as long as I can remember! We are rich enough to provide pre-K for all, but we and our leaders choose to spend our resources elsewhere. Politicians keep cutting taxes on the wealthiest while shifting the costs of their errors and failures to everyone else.