Renewing Childhood’s Promise: The History and Future of Federal Early Care and Education Policy
By Katharine B. Stevens
REPORT
November 2, 2015
Key Points
Today’s federal early care and education policies are fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex. Recent efforts to fix current policy have fallen into four categories—tinker, expand, add, and eliminate—none of which actually improve the lives and opportunities of disadvantaged children.
Since the 19th century, the US has gone from one program to the next—orphanages, home care, child care, Head Start, and pre-K—by a circuitous, unintentional path. Over time, these policies have drifted from their core purpose.
The best way to advance good early childhood policy is to facilitate, rather than constrain, states’ commitment and innovation, giving states additional flexibility with federal funds and shifting the ultimate control of resources to parents.
Executive Summary
Since 1935, the federal government has supported early childhood care and education for poor children to promote their healthy development and give them a fair opportunity to succeed. Informed by recent advances in brain science, our understanding of the lifelong importance of children’s earliest years has never been greater. But federal early childhood policy is in urgent need of reform.
Today’s federal early care and education policies are fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex. Federal policymaking is driven by coping with what exists rather than by what we are trying to accomplish. At the state and local levels, integrating incoherent federal funding streams with growing city- and state-funded early childhood programs is difficult to impossible.
In the dysfunctional landscape of federal early childhood policy, policymakers have gotten locked into choosing among three bad options: tinkering around the edges of existing programs, trying to cut them, or adding new ones on top of what is already in place. Yet none of these approaches will enable us to achieve the most important aim: giving America’s least-advantaged children a fair chance at a happy, productive life.
INFOGRAPHIC | Studies used to promote Pre-K actually make the case for a different approach (click to enlarge)
To move forward, we must begin by confronting a problematic legacy of federal policy. Its roots lie in the 19th century, when America first committed to improving the well-being of poor children. Since then we have gone from one thing to the next—orphanages, home care, child care, Head Start, pre-K—by a circuitous, unintentional path, implementing one solution after another to problems caused by previous solutions to previous problems. Over the course of this long, tangled history we have drifted far from our core purpose—indeed, we barely remember what it is.
This paper aims to provide a starting point by exploring how we ended up where we are today. It traces our evolving approach to early childhood care and education, sketching a brief, broad history of the three major federal funding streams: the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Head Start. Why are these our three major funding streams? Where did they come from? What does their history tell us about how to move forward? Key findings include:
Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), enacted as a part of the Social Security Act of 1935, aimed to foster children’s healthy development by enabling widowed and abandoned poor women to remain at home to raise their children. But as the 20th century wore on, public and policy emphasis gradually shifted from child well-being to the financial welfare and self-sufficiency of adults. The 1935 program ultimately evolved into today’s welfare and child care systems: TANF and CCDF, both aimed to promote mothers’ work outside of the home.
Over this period, the central goal of child care itself was redefined from ensuring children’s healthy development to ensuring that their mothers could go to work. As adult employment was foregrounded, child care increasingly came to be viewed as a work support for parents while its effects on children’s early development and well-being were deemphasized.
At the same time, federal policy has evolved to reinforce a counterproductive, false distinction between “custodial” and “developmental” care for children. All programs for children from birth through age four have two important functions: supporting parents’ work in a 24/7 economy and fostering children’s healthy growth and learning during the most crucial period of human development. But current policy fails to recognize that those two aims are complementary, equally important strategies for building human capital in our nation’s most disadvantaged communities.
As early nurture and care have been deemphasized, formal education through the public schools has come to dominate public and policy attention as the leading strategy to improve the well-being of poor children. Initiated by passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary School Act and the establishment of Head Start 50 years ago, this is most recently reflected in today’s accelerating push for public pre-K.
Our concept of child well-being has devolved to a narrow focus on children’s economic status and cognitive skills. The technocratic aims of increasing family income and children’s test scores have largely eclipsed a broader, once-held goal of advancing the overall welfare and life chances of poor children.
The most promising path forward is to facilitate the work of leading, innovative states. A new, carefully planned state option could give special flexibility to states that have demonstrated ongoing commitment to providing high-quality early-learning programs for disadvantaged children from birth through age four, while shifting the ultimate control of resources from government officials to parents.
Understanding how we got to where we are now can help us remember what our true aims are and refocus on what we are really trying to do. That, in turn, will give us the foundation for making thoughtful, principled decisions about where to go next: setting children “upon surer paths to health and well-being and happiness,” in President Herbert Hoover’s words from almost a century ago.
See Also
Blog ~ July 6, 2015
Blog ~ August 13, 2015
Report ~ April 8, 2021