Senate Committee Advances Appropriations Bill Funding Early Childhood Programs

As Congress determines how to spend federal dollars in the next fiscal year, a significant federal investment in advancing preschoolers’ literacy skills – Early Reading First – appears to be in jeopardy.

On Thursday the Senate Appropriations Committee marked up its version of the fiscal year 2010 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which includes funding for major federal early childhood programs. Last week, we reported on the House Appropriations Committee’s version of the same legislation.

When it comes to early childhood programs, the two bills have a lot in common. Both would hold funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant to its fiscal year 2009 level of $2.1 billion, and both would provide a modest $122 million increase in funding for Head Start, raising total Head Start funding to $7.2 million.

While the House and Senate committees funded CCDBG and Head Start at the same levels President Obama requested for 2010, neither committee was willing to fund new early childhood initiatives requested in the President’s budget. Like their House colleagues, the Senate appropriations committee would provide no funding for proposed Title I Early Childhood Grants or the Early Learning Challenge Fund. (As we have reported elsewhere, the Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act currently in the House would provide $8 billion in mandatory funding—not subject to the appropriations process—for the Early Learning Challenge Grants over the next eight years. A Senate version of the legislation is expected to also include provisions creating and funding the Early Learning Challenge Grants, but has not yet been introduced.)

The Senate committee also provided an increase in funding for the Striving Readers program, although a much smaller one than President Obama requested. The President had requested $370 million in funding for Striving Readers (the program was funded at $35 million in fiscal 2009), including $70 million to expand the adolescent literacy activities the program currently funds, and $300 million for a new PreK-3^rd early literacy initiative intended to replace the Reading First program, which Congress defunded in the fiscal year 2009 budget. The President also requested $163 million in funding for the Early Reading First program, which supports the implementation of scientifically based early literacy strategies in preschool programs.

The Senate bill would provide $263 million in funding for the Striving Readers program, and it would eliminate funding for the Early Reading First program altogether. A press release from the Labor-HHS-Education Subcommittee states that Early Reading First will be subsumed into a revamped Striving Readers program, which “will take a comprehensive approach to literacy, serv[ing] children from birth through grade 12,” but as a practical matter this would almost certainly mean much less funding available to support the implementation of research-based literacy strategies in preschool classrooms. Cutting a program aimed specifically at improving the quality of pre-k programs in this crucial area seems like a step backwards at a time when Congress is taking other steps to advance and support quality improvements in early childhood programs. More generally, the decline in federal investment in PreK-3^rd literacy—from $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2007 to less than $300 million under either of the funding bills emerging from the House or Senate committees—should trouble early childhood advocates.

The fact that both House and Senate committees have passed their versions of the Labor-HHS-Education bill before the August recess raises a possibility that Congress may actually finish work on these bills before the start of the 2010 fiscal year – October 1 -- and without resorting to a big Omnibus bill that combines several spending bills—something that hasn’t happened since 2005. Regardless of when Congress wraps its work on these bills, Early Ed Watch will continue to follow the process until it does so.