6. Promote Efficiency and Coordination to Improve Outcomes for Children

Early education is funded and delivered by multiple federal and state agencies and offices within agencies. These agencies and offices often operate in silos. Even when there are actors who seek to engage colleagues and work across these silos, collaboration can still be daunting. State leaders must establish governance structures that promote efficiency and facilitate coordination even in the face of turnover of policymakers and officials who set priorities and staff members who carry them out. To determine the effectiveness of implementation and promote continuous improvement, states must also strengthen data systems, ensuring vertical alignment between early childhood, K–12, and post-secondary data and horizontal alignment across other systems serving children and families.

Coordinate legislation when reauthorizing. As Congress and federal agencies address points of connection or overlap within the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the Higher Education Act (HEA), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the Head Start Act, they should eliminate conflicting requirements and reduce implementation barriers for states, school districts, and early education programs. Several of these laws that touch early education are overdue to be revamped; when reauthorizing, Congress should take care to align them. CCDBG and ESEA (as the Every Student Succeeds Act) were reauthorized fairly recently, but new iterations of the others have yet to be passed into law. Now, in 2020, may be an opportunity for HEA reauthorization, as bills are being discussed in the House and Senate. This makes the time right for connecting, for instance, Title II of ESSA and Title II of HEA. Both govern the development of teachers, but there is limited coordination between them. In one way, ESSA can serve as an example when it comes to coherence with the Head Start Act. The law now requires LEAs to have reciprocal memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with Head Start, which is helpful because it makes both LEAs and Head Start programs responsible for coordinating with each other. As Congress and federal agencies address points of connection or overlap within these and other laws, they can eliminate competing requirements and reduce implementation barriers for states, LEAs, and early education programs.

Harness the power of open licensing and open educational resources. OER are free and openly licensed teaching and learning materials that can be shared, downloaded, and edited by anyone, such as guidebooks for teachers, frameworks for curricula, and content for young children’s learning activities. Unlike proprietary textbooks and instructional materials, OER allows educators to access content for free from several repositories, tailor it to their particular classroom needs (keeping inclusion and representation in mind), and redistribute the customized materials to other educators to use and reuse. OER provides opportunities for cutting costs and increasing access to instructional materials that are potentially more relevant to young students’ and families’ local experiences and cultural backgrounds. In order to encourage more effective use of these materials, leaders in both state education agencies and school districts should ensure that educators have targeted professional learning on searching for, discovering, and customizing materials; implementing them in the classroom; and sharing resources in repositories where other educators can find them. Similar to the U.S. Department of Education’s open licensing requirement, where recipients of competitive grants must openly license resources created with grant funds, departments of education and school districts would benefit from sharing their created resources with open licenses to provide efficient and coordinated access to all educators.

Experiment with Head Start Grants to ready states. Funding for Head Start programs is currently channeled from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services directly to thousands of local providers, bypassing state agencies. This system causes headaches and costs in monitoring and communicating regulations and it creates silos between Head Start and state-funded pre-K programs, other early learning providers, special education, and elementary schools. To better coordinate Head Start with these other state programs, Congress should direct HHS to award pilot grants to states that signal readiness by agreeing to meet quality standards in pre-K and assure continued access. These grants could help to eliminate redundancy in state and federal regulations. HHS should collect information from these pilots about the advantages and disadvantages presented by state-level streamlining across pre-K programs and use that information to strengthen subsequent pilots.

Commit to federal cross-agency collaboration and state early learning councils. The Early Learning Interagency Policy Board was established in 2010 to improve alignment and coordination across federally funded early learning programs. While it began as only an ED and HHS board, over time representatives from other agencies participated. This kind of cross-agency collaboration is important and should be expanded and formalized. Furthermore, rekindled federal investment in state coordination via early learning councils that also strengthens connections to K–12 could go a long way to improving vertical and horizontal alignment of programs serving children birth through age eight and families.

Promote regional and community hubs to improve efficiency and coordination. States often offer a variety of programs led by health, human services, and education agencies, each with different eligibility criteria and enrollment processes. Creating a regional or community hub is a strategy to streamline and coordinate a family-centered system. Regional hubs can help support coordinated policies, systems, and funding opportunities. For example, Oregon employs regional hubs to coordinate early childhood systems and link education systems with health care and human services. Community hubs can help with service coordination for a family. These hubs bridge otherwise siloed service providers into a coherent and comprehensive network to serve whole families. Community-level organizations often have the benefit of being staffed by people with the cultural and linguistic competence to serve their own community. When housed at community-based organizations, hubs can provide an important perspective on system-level and organization-level barriers families face accessing services. The input of hub organizations should be honored by government agencies and incorporated into strategic planning and quality improvement efforts.

• New America resources:
  • Voices from the Social Safety Net (article)
  • How to Fuel Government Innovation That Lasts (article)
  • Making Connections: PreK–12 OER in Practice (policy paper)
  • How a Hashtag Catalyzed PK–12 Open Educational Resources: Reflections and Recommendations (policy paper)
  • Creating Systems of Sustainability: Four Focus Areas for the Future of PK–12 Open Educational Resources (policy paper)
• Other resources:
  • Oregon Early Learning Division, Early Learning Hubs
  • U.S. Department of Education, Early Learning Interagency Policy Board Report to the Secretaries of Education and Health and Human Services
  • Bellwether Education Partners, Renewing Head Start’s Promise: Invest in What Work’s for Disadvantaged Preschoolers
  • Teachers College Press, Early Childhood Governance: Choices and Consequences (book)
  • Build Initiative, A Framework for Choosing a State-Level Early Childhood Governance System
  • U.S. Department of Education, Open Licensing Requirement for Competitive Grant Programs