Check out the College of Education and Human Ecology’s 10 most popular news stories for 2022, three of which featured Crane and Schoenbaum faculty and staff.  

Quotable & Notable

Fact of the Week

Ohio was ranked 37th for the number of women elected to the Ohio General Assembly (2022), with women comprising less than 30% of the legislature (28.8%) according to a report from Rutgers University. 

To be clear, policy issues like child care, preschool, paid leave, and maternal/infant health are not just “women’s issues,” but a lack of representation among women in our statehouse may limit attention to these topics for no other reason than that they tend to affect women disproportionately, and they bring that experience to bear in their work. Ohio needs better political representation of women (and women of color) as well as more champions of children’s issues broadly. 

Policy Radar

Student wellness

This op-ed provides a solid argument for why Ohio should continue investing in student wellness and wraparound services. First proposed during Gov. DeWine’s first administration, the Student Wellness and Success Fund has thus far funded 1,300 mental health programs and trained 6,500 educators and school staff.

Tax credits or deductions?

Here’s a timely read from CLASP outlining the key differences between tax credits and deductions – with specific mention of Ohio and its latest proposed tax deductions for items related to infants and children. The piece articulates why credits – particularly refundable ones – better target families in poverty and address inequities. Deductions, on the other hand, often benefit higher-income earners and white families. Here’s a snippet that explains it (emphasis ours):

Deductions are a regressive option, especially compared to a fully refundable credit, because deductions benefit higher-income families more. Itemized deductions also disproportionately benefit white taxpayers compared to Black and Latinx taxpayers. Deductions reduce taxable income for a taxpayer. Their value differs based on the filer’s tax bracket. For example, moderate-income taxpayers who are in the 5 percent bracket will only see their taxes reduced by $50 if they receive a $1,000 deduction. Higher-income taxpayers in the 10 percent bracket will see their taxes go down by $100 if they receive that same deduction. And a lower-income worker who does not owe state income taxes—or who takes a standard deduction—would not benefit at all. 



Refundable state tax credits, such as a state CTC and/or a state EITC, that are targeted toward individuals and families with lower incomes are successful options to lessen poverty and promote prosperity. When states implement a fully refundable CTC, it makes the credit available to families with little to no earnings. 

Beyond the Buckeye State

New Jersey is working toward providing universal, full-day preschool; this piece describes the latest of those efforts. New Jersey has long had an interesting model of funding preschool for the highest need students. A state Supreme Court ruling (Abbott v. Burke) mandated the state to provide enhanced funding for Abbott districts – the most impoverished in the state – and part of the ruling also required universal high-quality preschool for children aged three and four. The achievement impacts of the program have been found to be positive and lasting. Notably, preschool teachers in Abbott districts receive pay parity with K-12 teachers and are highly qualified, and funding per child is about $15,000 per year. 

I started my career teaching kindergarten in an Abbott district (Camden). The difference between students who had attended full-time, state-funded preschool or Head Start – and those who hadn’t - was stark. Anecdotally speaking, this meant some of my students had the skills to begin reading by mid-year, while others were working toward holding a pencil properly or recognizing the correct way to hold a book. Kindergarten teachers tasked with differentiating their instruction and managing these immense disparities may be the among the strongest (most underutilized?) champions of high-quality early care and education in our midst. 

What We're Reading

Elliot Haspel argues that sound child care policy proposals must account for the need to increase compensation for early educators.

Another Early Learning Nation piece describes a new funding opportunity to build innovative new systems for early childhood educator compensation.

Bipartisan Policy Center offers a toolkit for understanding the current child care landscape in the U.S. to help stakeholders build bipartisan support for quality care and the funding necessary to make that possible.  

Research Round-Up

A new research brief from Syracuse University examined possible associations between offering free school meals in kindergarten and long-term student attendance and health. The study used a sample of over 132,000 kindergarteners in NYC who either received Universal Free Meals (UFM) or did not, based on changes in school policy. The authors found that children who received UFM in kindergarten had better school attendance than those who did not, and these lower rates of absenteeism persisted through 3rd grade. (And Crane faculty associate Dr. Arya Ansari has shown that chronic absenteeism in early elementary school is related to lower academic achievement, especially among children from minoritized backgrounds.) Additionally, the authors found no meaningful evidence to suggest that UFM leads to adverse weight outcomes for students.