Still More Stimulating Child Care

The recommendations for early education in the stimulus package just keep on coming. Before Christmas we wrote about proposals from Pre-k Now, CLASP, the Early Care and Education Consortium, National Women’s Law Center, NACCRRA, and others. Last week the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) added to the fray with a “Federal Early Childhood Policy Guide for the First 100 Days.”

NIEER’s offering four recommendations for federal policy action on early education in the first 100 days of the Obama administration:

• Pass a stimulus package that includes $19 billion (spread over two years) to create new places in quality early care and education for 1 million children.
• Increase Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funding by $500 million
• Increase Head Start appropriations by $1 billion
• Create a presidential Early Learning Council to coordinate federal early care and education programs and facilitate federal-state cooperation. (This last proposal reflects a proposal President-elect Obama made during the campaign).

In addition to these specific policy proposals, NIEER offers more detailed background and recommendations for several areas of early education policy, including state pre-k/child care collaboration, Head Start, Early Head Start, home visiting, child care subsidies, and early childhood special education. There’s a lot of information–and a number of good ideas–crammed into the six-page brief.

We’re concerned, however, about NIEER’s proposal to create 1 million new, quality early care and education slots over the next two years. This would be an unprecedented expansion. To give some context, 1 million new slots would be roughly equivalent to doubling the number of children served in state pre-k programs over the next two years. And it’s just not clear that states have capacity to do this in a high-quality way in such a short time span. Most important, there may not be enough qualified teachers out there to staff high-quality pre-k and early education programs. To be sure, creating new jobs in early care and education could attract talented individuals to the field, and the economic downturn offers a valuable opportunity to attract skilled people who might not otherwise have considered working in early education. But those people will still need time and opportunities to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be good early childhood educators. And it will take states, non-profits, and institutions of higher education time to develop programs to train these people.

As we’ve written previously, the stimulus is just not the right way to go about expanding access to pre-k and other early education programs. There’s a real risk that the need to create spaces quickly will get ahead of the capacity to create them well, resulting in a large number of new, low-quality programs that deliver disappointing outcomes for children and ultimately undermining support for early education investments.

We do think that investing in early education facilities–as part of a larger school construction package–would be a smart way for Congress and President-elect Obama to support early education in the stimulus package. In making school construction the lion’s share of their funding proposal, NIEER is on the right track. We’re going to assume that the $15 billion proposal is an effort to set the terms of debate so that the final legislation provides substantial funding for early education facilities–not the amount NIEER actually believes Congress can provide, or, for that matter, that states and providers will be able to put to work in a two-year time frame. By way of comparison, the Obama-Biden transition team’s proposal called for $25 billion in infrastructure investments in schools, roads, and bridges combined. In that context, a $1 billion set-aside for early education facilities, as Pre-k Now has proposed, might be closer to the right amount. And we have no doubt states could get that money out the door quickly, particularly if they include community-based providers and charter schools offering early education in eligibility for the funding.

Beyond its specific proposals, NIEER’s policy brief solidifies a concern that we’ve been feeling in recent months as early childhood groups have ramped up their advocacy for a piece of the stimulus. Over the past decade, preschool advocates have worked very hard to propagate the message that these are educational programs–not just childcare–that have long-term, positive benefits for children. And that message has been central to building public and policy support for early childhood programs. Yet in an effort to win a piece of the stimulus money, advocates have shifted focus, emphasizing the value of early education as child care to help parents work and as a jobs program for childcare workers. We’re concerned that this shift, while generating some short term boosts in federal early education funding, could ultimately undo all the hard work early childhood advocates have done to convince policymakers of the educational value of these programs. Over the long-run, this could make it harder to sell policymakers on sustained early education spending increases. And there are also substantive concerns that packaging pre-k as a jobs program for adult workers, rather than an educational program for children, could take the focus off quality and education and undermine long-term quality, thereby undermining outcomes and ultimately public support.

We’re excited about the potential for improved prospects for early education under the new administration and Congress, and we’re pleased to see increased attention to these long-neglected issues. But, as we’ve noted before, these opportunities are also full of risk for the early education movement, and it would behoove early education supporters to proceed with caution, putting quality first and integrating early education into a broader education reform agenda.