How State Early Learning Structure and Funding Impacts Local Governance

More and more cities and counties fund and run their own early childhood programs, but each seems to operate them in a unique way. A recently-released report from the New Practice Lab explores different local approaches to early childhood governance, identifying at least six different archetypes and offering lessons on how to maximize impact under any structure.

It’s worth mentioning that six may be an undercount, as there may be additional nuance within each archetype or even ones we did not identify. This may raise a bigger question: why is early childhood governance such a complicated patchwork? To understand this complexity, we have to first look at state governance and funding models for early care and education.

Governance: States take varied approaches to governing early childhood education: some administer child care out of one agency and pre-K out of another, some manage both funding streams and programs within a single larger agency, and others have created entirely new agencies specifically to manage early care and education. Though 13 states have created a single agency focused on early childhood, half of states have three or four different agencies involved in early childhood, according to analysis by the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center. These structures often have direct bearing on local systems.

Funding: All states allocate federal child care funding to communities and most states fund some preschool education for 3- and 4-year-olds. Some states operate multiple different preschool programs, targeted at different populations. Collectively, states spend over $13.6 billion annually on preschool. Some states augment federal child care funding with additional state investments to expand eligibility and access. How exactly these funds all flow from the state to communities and to families vary.

There is limited variation in how funds are disbursed in state child care programs, largely because of the federal regulations attached to the Child Care and Development Block Grant. States typically award child care vouchers directly to eligible families or distribute funds to a county or regional agency that then awards vouchers to families.

State pre-K programs—of which there are 64 programs in 44 states and DC—are governed in many different ways and follow different strategies to administer funds. In their simplest form, there are at least five different approaches that states take to distribute pre-K funds to localities:

• School District Operated: State distributes funds to school districts, and school districts choose whether to provide 100 percent of services directly or subcontract some services to private providers. For example, Wisconsin’s funding for the state’s universal pre-K program is distributed to districts as part of the overall school funding formula. Then, districts may operate programs directly or subcontract services.
• School District Operated with Mixed Delivery Requirement: State distributes funds to school districts, but districts must subcontract at least some services to private providers. For example, West Virginia Universal Pre-K funds are distributed to school districts which are then required to subcontract at least 50 percent of services to community providers.
• Regionally Coordinated: State distributes funds to a coordinating body which then works with a mix of public and private providers. The coordinating body typically operates at a regional level. These bodies can be county agencies, school districts, quasi-governmental or entirely private entities. Some states mandate who the regional coordinating body is; others leave it up to communities to decide. In Florida’s universal Voluntary Prekindergarten program, funds are distributed by 30 regional councils.
• Provider Contracted: State distributes funds directly to pre-K providers, typically through a competitive grant process for contracts that is open to public providers (like school districts and Head Start providers) and private providers. This model is used by a number of states with large-scale pre-K programs, including Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, and New Mexico.
• Voucher Based: State distributes funds directly to families as tuition credits or vouchers. This model is used in Arizona’s Quality First Scholarship Program and Indiana’s On My Way Pre-K program, both of which are relatively small.

State pre-K funding structures matter to local governance because they empower—or disempower—specific local systems and organizations. In a state where the local school district has a mandated role to administer pre-K funds, it positions the school district to play a broader role in program administration. Where local school districts are bypassed, or treated as just a provider and not an administrator, it opens up an administrative role for a different kind of organization. When different entities manage pre-K and child care funds at the local level, it often leads localities to treat those services as entirely different from each other, artificially hardening the lines between care and education.

State governance choices trickle down to local early childhood systems, and this matters given the growth of these local programs. Sometimes, municipalities build their governance structure on top of the one mandated by the state, but; in other cases, the local program is run entirely separately. In many cases, there are multiple parallel structures. This governance complexity is the direct result of funding fragmentation; in many cities and counties, there are multiple different early childhood programs with different oversight bodies, different goals, and different eligibility requirements.

For example, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (home to Charlotte) has a locally-funded preschool initiative. In North Carolina, every county has a ‘Smart Start’ organization, a statewide public-private partnership created in 1993 by the Governor to support school readiness for all North Carolina children. All 100 counties in North Carolina have local Smart Start partnerships with funding from the North Carolina legislature, corporations, foundations, and individual donors. In Mecklenburg County, the County Board of Commissioners funds MECK Pre-K- a preschool program open to all four-year-olds in the county, administered by Smart Start of Mecklenburg County. The state’s preschool program, NC Pre-K, is run separately from MECK Pre-K. NC Pre-K is managed by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Every county has a local NC Pre-K Committee with oversight of local program implementation and a local contracting agency to manage aspects of local implementation. The school district and the county Smart Start organization must be represented on the local committee; either of those bodies- or a third, different organization- can serve as the local administrator. In Mecklenburg County, the local administrator for NC Pre-K is Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools.

Every community has its own jigsaw puzzle of early childhood governance, and as more and more localities invest in early education, the complexity is proliferating. Taking lessons from existing programs can give local leaders insight into how to design the most efficient and effective structure, both in spite of and served by the governance choices made at the state level.

Read the New Practice Lab’s recently-released report, “Maximizing Impact Under Any Structure: Governance Lessons from Local Early Childhood Programs” to learn about different governance models, how and why they have evolved as they have, and to take lessons from local early childhood programs that can help leaders build stronger systems.