Child Care and Early Education at CLASP

Starting Early, Starting Right Act Introduced

On May 5, Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) took an important step forward for low-income families by introducing the Starting Early, Starting Right Act. With the addition of $10 billion in new funds each year, the legislation will make a significant investment in the child care subsidy program in order to increase access for low-income families, raise reimbursement rates for providers, and improve the quality of care through training, monitoring, and new initiatives.

While the Child Care and Development Block Grant was scheduled to be reauthorized in 2000, it has remained low on the priority list for Congress and the President.  Funding for child care assistance has been near frozen for six years, yet as the economy worsens, more families need help paying for the child care they need to go to work.  Across the country, more than 360,000 children are on waiting lists for help.  Many more thousands of children and families need help but do not even bother applying for assistance.

As child care resources have grown scarcer, many families struggle to find providers who will care for their children.  Most states pay low rates to providers, forcing them to put off needed improvements, preventing salary increases, and making it difficult for low-income families to find high-quality caregivers in their communities.

Congress has been silent for too long regarding child care; Senator Casey’s proposal should get his colleagues talking.  The low-income working families of America are waiting.

Summary of TANF final rules

Earlier this month, the final rules implementing changes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, made by the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, were published in the Federal Register. These new rules will be effective October 1, 2008. CLASP has written a document summarizing the final rules and changes to the TANF program. The summary details changes in the areas of:

• Counting education and training toward participation rates, including rules around counting post-secondary education, basic education, and ESL classes;
• Serving individuals with disabilities and other barriers to participation, including the definition of a work-eligible individual; and
• Job search and job readiness, including counting of weeks towards statutory limits and other counting issues.

The final rules also detail allowable expenditures and other spending issues.

President’s budget: Young children don’t count

February 4 began a new budget process, the last of President Bush’s presidency. Every Administration uses the budget to send a signal about its priorities for the coming year.  In this period of economic downturn, when our most vulnerable children and families need access to comprehensive supports, the message of this budget is simple and stark: children in low-income working families don’t matter.  The President proposes flat funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant that will cause 200,000 children to lose access to child care assistance by 2009.  This loss is in addition to thousands of children who may already have lost services due to years of flat funding.

The Administration also acknowledges that fewer children will be served in Head Start under their proposal.  While the budget provides for a small increase, the amount is barely enough to cover inflation, let alone the costs needed to implement changes in the program required by the recent Head Start reauthorization, including provisions to expand access to Head Start, strengthen and expand Early Head Start, and important quality improvements.

For an analysis of the President’s budget proposal’s impact on child care and early education programs, see President’s Budget Disregards Sound Investments for Young Children.

Reauthorization of Head Start: Key changes in the new law

The federal Head Start program was reauthorized in December 2007. The new legislation made substantial changes to the program, including provisions to expand access to Head Start programs, strengthen and expand Early Head Start, increase the quality of the program, and improve collaboration between early childhood programs at the state and local levels. This PowerPoint presentation from CLASP, presented at the 2008 Head Start Johnson & Johnson Advanced Management Institute, provides an overview of key changes in the new law.

Questioning the candidates for the kids

Do you have questions for the presidential candidates about their positions on children's issues, but don't have the opportunity to ask them because you don't live in New Hampshire, Iowa, or South Carolina? A coalition of 20 Iowa organizations has leveraged their location in one of the key states in the presidential race to ask them for you.

A new website, www.itsaboutourkids.org, has posted the results of this effort to survey all the Republican and Democratic candidates on a set of questions on child care, preschool, afterschool, health care, services for children with disabilities, child abuse and neglect, family economic security and success, immigration policy, and ensuring equal economic opportunity.  No Republican candidates have responded thus far, but all the Democratic candidates have submitted their answers. The website also contains links to all the candidates’ websites, guides to finding child and family policy positions on the websites, and tools for citizens on how to find out more information about the candidates.

No matter the candidate, child care and early education policies should receive serious attention during this election season.   Working families need child care, and children need high quality, nurturing early learning experiences. Three-quarters of children under age five with employed mothers experience non-parental child care regularly, often full time. Babies and toddlers under age three are not excluded from this trend, and there is evidence the care they experience is more likely to be of low quality. But quality is expensive, and the average cost of full time care for an infant in a child care center is as high as $14,647 depending on the state. Stagnant federal funding for child care and early education programs has meant fewer children get access to the assistance that helps their parents pay for child care. A federal commitment to helping more low-income families choose the best care for their children – that would get our vote.

Education Week examines passage of Head Start reauthorization

An article in this week's edition of Education Week (free registration required) offers insight into how key congressional leaders - including Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Sen. Michael Enzi (R-WY), Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-CA), and Rep. Danny Davis (D-IL) - perceived the reauthorization process of the Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007. Quoted from the article:

“This process in working on Head Start has shown Congress at its best,” Rep. Dale E. Kildee, D-Mich., the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees early-childhood education, said during a floor debate this month. “This is one of our better days, [and] one of our better bills. ... We’ve had differences. We resolved those differences.”

Head Start advocates were pleased with the outcome. “The four years of working on this, while they were long and sometimes difficult and sometimes frustrating, [resulted in a bill] that will improve opportunities for young children,” said Danielle Ewen, the director of child-care and early-education policy at the Washington-based Center on Law and Social Policy, a nonprofit organization that is an advocate for low-income people. “Maybe it takes four years to come up with something that actually works.”

New provisions in the bill were the result of years of bipartisan work, culminating in a bill that passed the House by a vote of 381-36 and the Senate by a vote of 95-0.  The legislation is expected to be sent to the President for his signature soon.

Congress passes new Head Start legislation

Last week, both the House and Senate approved a Head Start reauthorization bill that focuses on serving younger children, includes new language to increase the quality of services, and improves collaboration between early childhood programs at the state and local levels. The bipartisan bill, Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007 ends years of discussion and debate about the future of Head Start.

However, while the bill authorizes funding levels that would support the positive changes in the bill, these levels must be appropriated each year. In FY 2008, the bill authorizes $7.35 billion, a substantial increase from current year funding, yet the most recent version of the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bill—vetoed by the President—provides only a $154 million increase for Head Start. For future years, the bill authorizes $7.65 billion for FY 2009, $7.995 billion for FY 2010 and such sums as necessary for FY 2011 and FY 2012. Without funding at these levels, Head Start will be unable to implement the changes in the bill.

The Head Start reauthorization bill includes the following provisions:

Expands Access to Head Start Programs

• Increases funding for both the Migrant and Seasonal Head Start program and the Indian Head Start program.
• Allows up to 35 percent of the children served by a grantee to have family incomes between 100 percent and 130 percent of the federal poverty level if the grantee can demonstrate that children with family incomes below 100 percent of poverty are already being fully served.
• Ensures that children with disabilities are promptly identified and served.
• Allows part-day Head Start programs the flexibility to convert to full-day year-round services.

Strengthens and Expands Early Head Start

• Requires that half of all new funds be used for Early Head Start expansion.
• Provides existing Head Start programs the flexibility to convert slots currently used to serve preschoolers to those for infants and toddlers.
• Requires a minimum of at least one full-time infant and toddler specialist in every state.
• Sets new standards for home visitors in Early Head Start programs.
• Increases credentials Early Head Start teachers providing direct services to children and families.

Invests in Quality

• Requires programs that are not meeting high quality standards to recompete for their grant using an application review process developed by an expert panel, which will consider multiple measures of program performance.
• Requires all Head Start teachers to have an Associate’s degree by 2011 and half of all teachers nationally to have at least a Bachelor’s degree in early childhood education or a Bachelor’s degree with coursework equivalent to a major relating to early childhood education and experience teaching preschool-age children by 2013.
• Establishes Centers of Excellence program that will identify high-quality grantees to serve as models for early childhood programs in their communities and states.
• Sets-aside 40 percent of new Head Start funds for quality enhancements in programs, including salary increases for Head Start staff.
• Requires all curriculum specialists to have at least a Bachelor’s degree and all Head Start assistant teachers to have at least a child development associate credential and be working toward completing a degree within two years.
• Requires all Head Start teachers to have at least 15 hours of in-service training every year.

Improves Collaboration

• Requires states to create State Advisory Councils on Early Education and Care in order to determine needs across programs serving children birth to six and to develop recommendations for collaboration between early childhood programs, data collection, review of early learning standards and professional development for educators that cross program auspices.
• Provides new Early Education and Care federal incentive grants (if new funds are available) to states to promote the development and expansion of state early education systems.
• Maintains and expands Head State Collaboration Offices in each state.
• Creates State Training Offices for Head Start.

Child care on the national agenda

Research demonstrates that child care supports benefit families: low-income parents who receive help paying for child care are more likely to be employed, to have higher incomes, and to remain off of welfare.  A study of 17 states found that in 11 communities, families without any help paying for child care could only afford 10 percent or less of the center-based care in that community. Receipt of a child care subsidy made child care centers and regulated family child care homes more accessible for these low-income families.  Yet child care—the high costs, the lack of quality settings, the large number of children on waiting lists—continues to be missing from national debates.   Across the country, only one in 7 children eligible for help is supported by the child care subsidy program; and the GAO has reported that 19 states have made it more difficult for working families to get help with child care costs over the last several years.

Recently, Senator Hilary Clinton announced a new agenda for working families as part of her Presidential Campaign.  One component of the proposal is expanded access to high quality child care through increased funding for subsidies to low-income working families and an expansion of the Dependent Care Tax Credit, as well as investments in licensing, training for providers and quality rating systems.

Every day, working families send their children to child care.  They hope that their children will be safe, happy and healthy.  These families are thinking, and worrying, about child care.  Hopefully, all of our politicians on the national stage will take this opportunity to come forward with new proposals to increase and expand access to child care that will help put parents' worries to rest.

Education Week focuses on federal early childhood proposals

An article in this week's edition of Education Week (free registration required) discusses three preschool bills that have been put forward in Congress. Legislation proposed separately by Sen. Clinton (D-NY), Sen. Casey (D-PA), and Rep. Hirono (D-Hawaii), would authorize varying sums of money to expand state pre-kindergarten programs, the vast majority of which serve primarily 4-year-olds.

CLASP is concerned that a federal preschool bill would draw attention and resources away from the full range of birth to five early childhood programs that many states are currently investing in, as well as away from existing federal early childhood programs, including Head Start and child care subsidies, that have been severely underfunded for years. Quoted from the article:

“We have a federal preschool program, and it’s called Head Start,” said Danielle Ewen, the director of child-care and early-education policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy, based in Washington. “And Head Start only serves half of the eligible kids.”

She added that she was disappointed that following Speaker Pelosi’s May summit meeting—which Ms. Ewen described as a “wonderful day of science” that focused on the comprehensive needs of children from birth through age 5—most of the proposals being offered focus only on preschoolers.

“The message from the summit was invest early,” Ms. Ewen said. “A 4-year-old program doesn’t do that.”

The preschool debate at the federal level is being linked to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). CLASP's research in this area, however, reveals that school districts already have the ability to fund preschool programs through Title I of NCLB and districts are taking advantage of that flexibility:

Ms. Ewen of the Center for Law and Social Policy pointed to school districts’ existing option to use Title I money to serve young children, either in classroom-based pre-K programs or through other approaches, such as home visits or health screenings. Integrating preschool into the NCLB law, she warned, could imply that those funds should be used only for 3- and 4-year-olds.

Reauthorization of NCLB is moving forward

During this Congress, the nation’s federal education bill, known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), will be renewed.  There are many issues being addressed through this process including early childhood issues. An initial draft of the new legislation from the House Committee on Education and Labor has some focus and will include more as the process moves forward.

Many school districts have used Title I of NCLB for early childhood programs including one of the nation’s premier early childhood programs, the Chicago Child-Parent Centers. While nationally only about 3% of children served by Title I are younger than kindergarten age, studies suggest there are a number of high-quality early childhood programs that use Title I funds to provide direct services, salaries for degreed teachers, comprehensive supports, and other services.

As reauthorization NCLB moves forward, it appears that it will include some new provisions around early childhood. CLASP has made a number of recommendations in this area and we hope that any language included in the final bill will maintain the ability of school districts to use Title I, or other NCLB funds, to support children birth through the age of school entry and will expand funding so that school districts and states do not have to choose between funding early childhood programs and funding other priorities for school improvement.