A Closer Look at the President’s Budget: Early Learning Challenge Fund

On May 7 the Office of Management and Budget released the President’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2010. As Early Ed Watch reported at the time, that budget includes funding for several new early education programs, including Title I Early Childhood Grants, Early Learning Challenge Fund, Early Literacy Grants, and Home Visitation. Yesterday, we looked at proposals for Title I Early Childhood Grants. Today we consider the Early Learning Challenge Fund.

During his 2008 campaign for the presidency, then Senator Barack Obama put forward a “Zero-to-Five” early childhood agenda. The centerpiece of this agenda was a proposal to create a new program of Early Learning Challenge Grants designed to both help and push states to improve quality and coordination amongst the various early childhood care and education programs that serve young children below the age of compulsory school attendance. The President’s fiscal year 2010 budget requests $300 million in funding for an Early Learning Challenge Fund to make such grants to states.

Despite the relatively modest proposed funding level, the goals of the Early Learning Challenge Fund are quite ambitious. The Early Learning Challenge Fund would seek to build comprehensive early childhood systems at the state level—in contrast to the patchwork nonsystems of early care and education that currently exist. As such, the program would provide funding for states to build the infrastructure—common standards, data systems, methods of monitoring quality and supporting quality improvements, systems of early educator preparation and professional development—needed to support such comprehensive early childhood systems. As we understand it, the administration views this as a program that would grow over time: providing relatively modest funding to support infrastructure development in its first years, adding funding in 2011 to sustain stimulus-funded early childhood investments, and once states have infrastructure in place, increasing funding still further to support the expansion of early childhood services.

In the program’s first year, the Department would make competitive awards to a relatively small number of states to put in place key components of this infrastructure. The initial focus is on establishing high, comprehensive quality and outcome standards that apply to early care and education providers across the full array of settings; putting in place systems to measure whether or not programs are meeting those standards; and creating pathways for providers to improve the quality of their programs. To receive the grants, states must make some pretty substantial commitments to building their early childhood infrastructure. According to the Department’s Budget Justification to Congress, states that receive Early Learning Challenge Fund awards would be required to:

• Develop and establish a system of research-based metrics and measures for addressing the quality and effectiveness of early childhood settings;
• Develop and implement a plan to assess the quality of early care and education programs and providers in the state;
• Implement data systems to track children enrolled in early learning programs through at least third grade;
• Align early learning standards with K-3 standards;
• Develop a rigorous monitoring and technical assistance plan;
• Use developmentally appropriate assessment tools linked to child outcomes;
• Collect baseline data on early learning programs across the state; and
• Develop and use program evaluation strategies to establish the effectiveness of early childhood programs.

That’s a lot of work for most states, and states that have already done the most to build their early childhood infrastructure will probably be best positioned to obtain new Early Learning Challenge grants.

Some early childhood advocates may be disappointed that the administration isn’t moving more rapidly to expand access to early childhood programs and meet the President’s campaign pledge to spend $10 billion on early childhood education programs. But we actually think that, by putting infrastructure and systems building first, the administration gets it right. Expanded access to pre-k programs has been the driving force in early education policy for the last several years. There’s an obvious temptation for policymakers to focus on the access issue first when it comes to early childhood—slots created are an easy metric to measure, and new pre-k and childcare slots give parents something they want while also creating new jobs for early education workers. Infrastructure and systems, in contrast, are messier things to work on and deliver less obvious rewards for policymakers. But without high quality standards and the infrastructure to support them, policymakers run the risk that money they invest in early childhood programs will be wasted or programs that are of insufficient quality to produce real learning gains and long-term results for children. Thus, by focusing squarely on infrastructure and systems—and requiring states to do so as well—the Early Learning Challenge Fund is laying an important foundation on which to build future early childhood investments down the road.

Moreover, the Early Learning Challenge Fund proposal laid out by the administration includes some subtle but fairly bold steps to shift the focus of early education quality control away from inputs towards a greater emphasis on outcomes and intermediate quality measures. As we discussed in this post last week, early childhood policy discussions often rely on a fairly crude set of input measures—class sizes, teacher education and training, funding levels, and so forth—that are necessary but not sufficient to ensure quality in early childhood programs. The administration’s Early Learning Challenge Fund proposal calls on states to develop a richer set of measures for evaluating the quality of early childhood programs and providers—including developmentally appropriate measures of child outcomes.

In these two shifts, the administration’s Early Learning Challenge Fund proposal suggests a new theory of action for the federal role in improving early childhood program quality, by developing state-level systems of monitoring and accountability linked to ongoing program improvement. Although how this will work in practice remains to be seen, we think it’s a positive development.

Also good: Evidence that the administration’s “Zero-to-Five” agenda, is, despite its name, actually being crafted with attention to the need for PreK-3^rd alignment as well. Specifically, we are encouraged to hear that states receiving Early Learning Challenge Funds would be required to have early learning standards that are aligned with K-3 standards, and that data systems developed to meet the program’s requirements must track children from early childhood programs through at least 3^rd grade (our view: early childhood data systems must be fully interoperable with state K-12 data systems, to enable tracking of individual children from early childhood through high school and perhaps beyond).

Of course, all of this is assuming that Early Learning Challenge Fund is authorized by Congress, and that it’s authorized in a form that bears some resemblance to what the administration has so far put forward. Neither of these is a sure thing: Despite strong, and increasingly bipartisan, support in Congress for early childhood education programs, passing early childhood legislation this year will not be easy. The best bet is probably for Congress to pass new, freestanding early childhood legislation, rather than trying to attach the program to the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind or the Chid Care and Development Block Grant. But early childhood issues will have to compete for time, energy, and political capital with a host of other issues—particularly health care, which threatens to suck up much of the available political oxygen in the coming months. As Congress and the administration work together to flesh out the details necessary to translate this proposed program into law, divisions could emerge to slow or halt the legislation’s progress. And disputes related to NCLB or CCDBG could also spill over and have negative consequences for early childhood legislation.

Still, with both strong Congressional interest in getting something done on early childhood, and an administration that has made early childhood a signature component of its education agenda, the outlook for new early education legislation this year is better than it’s been in years. It’s also possible for Congress to appropriate funding for the program without Congress first passing authorizing legislation, effectively authorizing it within the appropriations bill, although that is not the optimal outcome. And it’s possible that Congress will pass early childhood legislation this year but that when all is said and done it will look quite different from what the administration has proposed so far.

There is a tremendous amount of work to be done—by the administration, Congress, and advocates—in the coming weeks and months to further flesh out the policy details for this program and to enact it into law. We’ll be keeping a close eye on those developments and also offering our own analysis, commentary, and recommendations to inform this process.