Tuned In will be taking a break next week and will see you again on May 7.
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"These are the hallmarks of a broken system. The cost of care places an unsustainable burden on parents, working to hollow out the middle class and close it off to lower- or working-class parents, but the wages keep many practitioners teetering on the edge of poverty, prompting many of those most adept at the work to seek employment elsewhere. Early childhood care is, as one policy expert put it to me, a total market failure, and has been, whether we realized it or not, for decades.
How do you fix a fundamentally broken system? It’s not as simple as blowing it up and starting over. The failure is so textured, so tied up in ideas of gender and race, of women and work, of “choice” and “kids are best cared for at home,” solutions thus far have largely been piecemeal: Add an incentive here, cut a cost there, even take the big step of establishing universal pre-K. Some of these reforms have meaningfully changed kids’ (and parents’) lives, but the entire process feels, as Lea Austin, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, put it to me, “like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.”"
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According to this article from the Hechinger Report, more than 40% of children are currently living in a household struggling to pay for basic expenses. Additionally, as many as 11 million children could be living in homes without enough food.
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State news & updates
Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley announced her plan to run for Ohio governor this week. Among her policy priorities is expansion of high-quality universal pre-k to all children in Ohio, which she helped accomplish for 4-year-olds across Dayton.
The Ohio House passed its version of the two-year state budget on Wednesday. The $74.7 billion budget includes a 2% income tax cut (negligible for most Ohioans) and a $2 billion school funding overhaul. An estimated 100 school districts would lose state funding over the six-year phase in period of the overhaul, so lawmakers added $115 million on Tuesday to address this. Public health funding was cut, as well as funding to improve the state’s water quality. Also, of note for education, the bill allows parents to opt their children out of standardized tests, like the SAT or ACT, starting in July of 2022. The bill now moves to the Ohio Senate.
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Federal
Here’s a worthwhile (5-minute) clip describing how recent federal investments are paving the way for long-term subsidized child care.
This law professor writing for the Conversation describes how the latest child tax credit expansion is significant not just for its poverty-reduction strategy but in how it moves away from discriminating against and shaming the poor.
Pres. Biden and Vice Pres. Harris announced last week historic new investments in child care, explained well by these articles:
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When a single mom in Wisconsin reached the child care “benefits cliff” (described further here by Ohio’s Center for Community Solutions), she decided to launch a co-op network of in-home child care providers that provides low-wage-earning families with quality child care and also provides a living wage to the caregivers. Due to her own experience with the benefits cliff, the co-op was designed to also help parents transition away from utilizing public benefits as their income increases.
This Hechinger Report article focuses on efforts made by Texas businesses to create more flexible workplaces for families during the pandemic, but its lessons can be applied anywhere. The article reiterates that parent-friendly supports in the workplace can increase retention and productivity and that “these policies could be critical to mitigate the disastrous impact the pandemic has had on working parents, especially mothers.”
This week, National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) released its State of Preschool Yearbook for 2020. Perhaps not surprisingly due to the pandemic, the report found growth in state-funded preschool declined in 2020. Ohio’s fact sheet shows that preschool enrollment remained the same as the prior year, but state funding for preschool was down 1% since last year.
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The 74 Million discusses new survey data from the U.S. Department of Education showing that remote learners in rural areas across the country are receiving little or no live instruction time with their teachers. Broadband access continues to be a problem for rural areas which further exacerbates access to high-quality online schooling.
This article showcases the extent of inequality occurring in some of the country’s richest counties, and the growing holes in the nation’s safety nets for families.
Ed Surge discusses how the pandemic has made kindergarten transitions even more difficult for children and their caregivers. For a closer look at this trend, Crane Center scientists conducted research on the difficulty of transitioning to kindergarten for children in central Ohio.
An article published in the Conversation makes that case that cross-class friendships among children are important and can reduce achievement differences, and that “friendships are often left out of the conversation when scholars and schools think about how to improve student performance.” Also left out of too many conversations, we’d argue, is how a lack of cross-socioeconomic friendships across families is a function of the ways in which entire systems are deliberately designed (i.e., schooling, neighborhood boundaries, housing policy, suburban sprawl) to uphold racial and socioeconomic segregation.
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Pre-recorded storybooks can improve preschoolers’ vocabulary, as found in a new study from University of Missouri researchers and described here by Education Dive. As one of the authors said, “If we can teach [students] more challenging words while they are young, we can give them the language skills they will need to be ready for school and set them up for success throughout their lives.”
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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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