Melinda Gates penned a compelling article for Time on why now is the time for a national paid leave policy.
Quotable & Notable
“Children, their parents, and the economies in which they operate are all better off when societies provide easily accessible, high-quality child care and early education options.”
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U.S. Department of the Treasury, in a report last week that condemned the U.S. child care system as unworkable and broken
Columbus City Council President Pro Tem Elizabeth Brown is proposing a $4 million investment into high-quality pre-K through the Early Start Columbus program. City Council approved the funds this week. Meanwhile, Mayor Ginther announced that $3.5 million in COVID relief funds would go toward child care scholarships for families as well as signing bonuses for care staff.
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Student achievement in Ohio
Dayton Daily News reporter Jeremy Kelley describes the drop in Ohio student test scores on last spring’s statewide achievement exams. Worryingly, “Black students learned roughly 40% less than a normal year in third-grade English according to the OSU analysis, Hispanic students learned 34% less, Asian-American students learned 28% less and white students learned 18% less.” The full report on COVID-19's impact on student learning in Ohio, authored by OSU professors Vladimir Kogan and Stéphane Lavertu,can be found here.
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Federal report on child care supply
The U.S. Department of the Treasury released a report last week, The Economics of Child Care Supply in the United States, which described the economics of the current system as “unworkable” and the entire system in dire need of investment and repair. The average family with a young child is spending nearly double what the government deems as affordable, too many care workers themselves live on the edge of poverty, and the child care market as a whole is “broken,” according to the report.
Current legislation in Congress would make 12 weeks of paid family and sick leave available to most U.S. workers starting by 2023. Depending on income, workers would receive between 60% and 80% of their pay for up to 12 weeks.
Events & Happenings
Registration for Crane’s annual Symposium on Children is open. Join us (virtually) on October 8th from 12-3 pm. This year’s theme “Challenging Ourselves: Rethinking Family Engagement” will feature a keynote from Dr. Angel Harris, professor of sociology at Duke University who researches social inequity, policy, and education. Register here.
New Jersey Gov. Murphy has set forth a 10-year plan to make pre-K universal in the state. Regarding the timing of the plan, portions of which will fall to future governors, Politico reported that the announcement “marks a more deliberate acknowledgment by Murphy of how slow significant policy change can be.”
FYI
These articles shared insights from last week’s press briefing of the early childhood landscape study published by the Crane Center in partnership with the City of Columbus and Future Ready Columbus.
This piece by the Century Foundation, part of a series of briefs laying out the case for investing in a comprehensive learning system, sums it up well in saying that “Investing in our children is not a political choice: It is a moral choice, and it is a smart choice.”
A toolkit published by New America and borne out of research during the pandemic on how to connect with “under-connected" families offers sample recruitment flyers, questions, and discussion group protocols for community leaders to use when wanting to gather data and information from families.
This edition written by: Jamie O'Leary, Associate Director of Policy and Caitlin Lennon, Communications & Policy Specialist
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