Speaking of Federal Funding … Birth-to-8 as well as Birth-to-5

Last week, I was at the Erikson Institute in Chicago where I had the good fortune to meet with a roomful of nearly 100 educators interested in learning more about what PreK-3rd education reform strategies look like and where they are happening. (The slides for my presentation, “A Bird’s Eye View of PreK-3rd,” are now online.)

Given that federal funding issues are in the air these days — particularly today, when here in Washington, D.C., no one can talk about anything other than the potential of a government shutdown — I thought it might be timely to show two bar graphs from my presentation. The slides tell the story of how much the federal government has been spending on early education over the past few years.

Before I continue, I have to stress, of course, that these numbers do not include data on the current fiscal year (2011) in part because of the federal budget stalemate. All programs — with the exception of Striving Readers (more on that here) — have been operating in these past few months at the same level of funding they received in fiscal year 2010.

Here’s what federal funding looks like for federal early childhood programs as they are typically defined: covering the ages from birth up through age 5:

And here’s what federal funding looks like for federal early childhood programs using the “birth-through-3rd-grade” framework, which enables us to look at what funding is available to pay for aspects of the early years of elementary school in addition to the 0-5 years:

The first point to keep in mind is how small these numbers are when compared to the overall federal budget. As you can see above,  last year the federal government spent about $10 billion on early education through age 5 and about $14 billion on early education through age 8. This is a fraction of one percent of the annual federal budget, which is roughly $3 trillion if you count mandatory ($2 bil) and discretionary ($1 bil) spending together.

Lastly, it’s important to look at that ARRA bar in both graphs: If you take into account the funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and spread them across the past few years, the amount spent on early education goes up to about $12 billion annually for the 0-5 graph and $17 billion annually for the 0-8 graph. (For a back-of-the-envelope measure, I’m imagining those dollars spread evenly over 2009, 2010 and 2011, which is not exactly how it’s been working but should be close enough for this large-scale comparison conversation.)

In short, the early education community receives a tiny share of federal dollars each year, but it has also been operating under a sizable boost of federal dollars, in relative terms, ever since the ARRA passed. The troubling question today is not only how early education will fare under a budget that doesn’t sustain those levels, but how programs will fare if federal spending is reduced to even less than non-ARRA levels. Stay tuned.

ADDENDUM 4/11/11: Here’s a glossary for the acronyms in the two bar graphs above:

• CCDBG is the Child Care Development Block Grant, a federal funding stream to states to subsidize childcare programs for low-income families.
• IDEA is special-education funding under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act. Part C is for infants and toddlers. Section 619 of Part B is for preschoolers.
• SLDS stands for Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems, a federal grant program to help states build databases that track achievement levels and school/program enrollment, year to year and student by student.
• i3 is for Investing in Innovation Fund, one of the competitive grant programs made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
• RTTT is for Race to the Top, another competitive grant program made possible by ARRA.