Here’s an interesting program started by an OSU doctoral student to support grandparents caring for their grandchildren – a category of “kinship caregivers” who may be overlooked.
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"But here’s the thing: Child care is work. Even in average families, it’s work that often complicates holding down a paid job. We’ve developed various ways of dealing with this reality, including public schools, paid day cares, maternity leave, and an acceptance that some people are going to be stay-at-home parents — at least while their children are too young to attend school. But many parents still fall through the cracks of these systems. Unlike most government aid programs, this new proposal isn’t aimed at people specifically because they’re poor. Instead, it’s aimed at those who do a certain kind of work: parenting." |
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who:
June Kreml writing for Vox
where:
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State biennial budget
Ohio House lawmakers are discussing which changes they would like to see to the state’s biennial budget, with a substitute version of the bill expected as soon as early April. Rep. Erica Crawley signaled that child care eligibility is on their radar. The governor’s budget proposal expanded publicly funded child care eligibility from 130% of the federal poverty line to 138%, but Rep. Crawley and others are considering shifting that to 200% in their version of the bill. According to Gongwer News, maternal and infant health as well as wages for caregivers may be among other priorities to be addressed.
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Racial equity
The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services said it is working to respond to this report that examined the impact of racism in the state’s child services system, and its effect on childhood wellbeing. The findings and recommendations listed are significant and worth reading in full. It’s also good to see this acknowledgement from Gov. DeWine, who also supports the official declaration of racism as a public health crisis in Ohio: “It is wrong that Black and multiracial children are disproportionately represented in the children services system. We need better solutions to this problem, and where better to start than with the young people, biological parents, and others who have experienced the system first hand.”
Talk is certainly not enough and needs to be followed by action, but naming and identifying systemic racism and racial inequity is an important step – especially when many policy leaders have yet to do so.
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Federal policy
An historic amount of child care stabilization funding has just been approved via the American Rescue Plan, but the work has just begun. The Bipartisan Policy Center explains that states will need to act quickly to determine how the funds are allocated: “Because state child care administrators are facing the looming responsibility of managing an unprecedented amount of money, understanding their potential challenges and creatively considering how to support their efforts should be a priority as they begin to expend the funds from the ARP.”
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Child Care is Infrastructure Act
New legislation has been proposed in Congress that would invest in child care infrastructure, its workforce, and care providers. This article explains more, including the importance of the bill name itself: “This bill’s title alone promotes an important framing of child care that is important for lawmakers and the general public to understand as our focus shifts from relief to recovery: child care is infrastructure. For the millions of women who have lost their jobs in the pandemic, having access to affordable child care — just like having access to roads to get to work — will be a determining factor for whether they are able to hold a job or not.”
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The latest episode from the College of Education and Human Ecology’s Inspire Podcast focuses on racial bias in K-12 education. Scholars and educators weigh in on addressing a history of disparities in discipline and academics for marginalized students.
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New Mexico lawmakers just voted in favor of a ballot question that would ask state voters to establish a constitutional amendment to create an annual revenue stream for pre-K, an outcome that NM lawmakers have been pursuing for five years.
Last week, the Illinois Governor’s Office of Early Childhood Development announced a new pilot program to improve child care in the state’s rural areas. The pilot program is expected to run for three years and will provide $3.8M in funding per year to 35 rural child care centers to hire staff or increase existing staff salaries.
Here’s an interesting look at Wyoming’s school funding model, said to have one of the nation’s “fairest” school funding models. The state is one of the biggest spenders per student in the U.S. and has relied on mineral wealth to fund schools for decades. As those industries collapse, maintaining school funding levels would mean raising state taxes, in a tax-averse state.
A school district in San Jose, California has been training its teachers to better understand how to support students’ social emotional learning since 2016, leading to improved kindergarten readiness scores. During the pandemic, leaders built on these efforts and worked with community organizations to help families meet their basic needs.
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This Early Learning Nation opinion piece argues that the United States’ failure to invest in early childhood practitioners curbs the impact that could be possible from other investments made to the system. The author urges that American Rescue Plan funds allocated for stabilizing child care be spent to raise early childhood teacher wages. The article references a study released in January that looked at Louisiana's early childhood data system (pre-pandemic) and found that nearly half of lead teachers left their jobs every year. The lead author of the study noted that child care teachers weren’t just transitioning between centers; nearly all of those studied were exiting the sector entirely.
Hechinger Report lays out four clear and succint ways that experts recommend for a high-quality, equitable and more accessible early childhood system. The recommendations are geared toward policy makers, in particular.
This opinion piece from a first-time dad chronicles the difficulty of pandemic parenting and asks: why does child care cost so much when child care providers make so little? This Romper parenting piece focuses on how the pandemic has impacted mothers and asks how we still have a child care system that, unless you’re wealthy, only works for families with a full-time, stay-at-home parent.
It might seem at face value that it’d be difficult to provide services to babies and toddlers virtually, but this article illustrates how certain kinds of therapeutic interventions can be effectively provided digitally to the youngest children as well as how it builds vital pathways to meaningful family engagement and training. However, many states have made cuts to early intervention services, and there are additional challenges to getting eligible children enrolled – no doubt made more challenging under pandemic circumstances.
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A study published this month compared children’s paper books and digital ones with respect to learning outcomes. Hechinger Report breaks down the findings of the meta-analysis, which found that while paper generally “has an edge over digital,” there are exceptions to that rule. Additionally, the benefits of paper over e-books appear to be stronger for adults than for children.
This is an important read for anyone interested or invested in interventions for school-aged children, as well as public policies that mandate schools to “follow the science” when selecting such programs. The “dark side” of educational research, as explained here and grounded in research from Johns Hopkins University researchers, is that studies conducted by the insiders who developed the educational product or program tend to show much more favorable results than do studies that are independently commissioned. One analogy underscoring why this matters so much comes from the pharmaceutical industry: Consider the possible bias embedded in “Big Pharma”-led studies showing the positive effects of drugs from which they make an immense profit.
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This edition written by: Jamie Davies O'Leary, Associate Director of Policy and Caitlin Lennon, Communications & Policy Specialist |
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