November is Native American heritage month. OSU provides context for Ohio’s Native American history here, and this blog provides good storybook recommendations to celebrate, learn about, and honor Indigenous peoples. 

Quotable & Notable

Fact of the Week

Data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Center show that 5% of Ohio’s children (127,000 children) were in kinship care between 2020-2022, compared to the national average of 3%. The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services has a great explainer on the difference between kinship care and foster care. 

Policy Radar

State

A proposed bill, which has already passed the Ohio House, would eliminate the state’s student retention provision of the Third-Grade Reading Guarantee, after studies have shown the provision’s ineffectiveness related to student outcomes. However, supporters of the policy say the reading guarantee ensures high-risk students receive extra assistance with reading. 

Events & Happenings

Join us next Wednesday, November 9th for our November Crane Research Forum “Developmental brain imaging of human cognition” featuring Dr. Zeynep Saygin, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Saygin will discuss recent studies on how individual variability in language, executive function, and reading emerges in the brain. Register here. 

Beyond the Buckeye State

A new program in Wisconsin called “Partner Up!” will pay for employees’ child care if their employers pay 25% of the cost. This article describes one woman’s experience with the program as well as the impetus for its creation, including survey findings showing a discrepancy between business owners’ belief in the importance of care - and whether they actually funded it. Specifically, “A 2021 DCF survey found that while 64% of business owners and 86% of employees believe it’s important for businesses to support child care for their employees, just 10% offer child care subsidies.”

North Carolina offers several models for reducing suspensions and expulsions for preschoolers that other communities can learn from. 

The Children’s Funding Project has a fantastic case study explaining how Louisiana state and local policy makers are working together to fund early care and education. Successes include a dedicated state special early learning fund, new state dollars for early care and pre-K, a ballot measure recently passed in New Orleans that will add funds to city efforts, and strong coalitions and advocacy to make all of this happen. 

What We're Reading

As more school districts look to universal free school meals, K-12 Dive looks at the implications for data collected through the free and reduced-price meal applications and the impact of losing this child poverty indicator. 

On the topic of employer-paid child care (like the Wisconsin example above), Elliot Haspel argues that we should be careful not to turn child care into a job-related perk like healthcare. Instead, he suggests that employers pay taxes into a common system to pay for early care and education as a common good. 

The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center released its 2022 State Policy Roadmap, the annual report which tracks states’ progress on five policies and six strategies “that foster the nurturing environments infants and toddlers need.” Check out Ohio’s Roadmap here. 

Research Round-Up

New OSU research from President’s Postdoctoral Scholar in sociology D. Adam Nicholson affirms the importance of state-level policies when it comes to how many residents live in poverty. He found that poverty rates varied greatly between U.S. states, even more than between countries in the European Union. Furthermore, common risks that push people below the poverty line (e.g., unemployment, single motherhood, low education levels) were riskier for individuals in some states than in others. For example, an individual with four risks would almost certainly be under the poverty line in Alabama (over 92% probability), but if an individual in Hawaii had four risks, there’s only a 25% chance they would be under the poverty line. These results suggest that state policies have an important role to play in reducing poverty. The full study can be found here.