Renewing childhood’s promise: The history and future of federal early care and education policy

Key Points

• Today’s federal early care and education policies are fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex. Recent efforts to fix current policy have fallen into four categories—tinker, expand, add, and eliminate—none of which actually improve the lives and opportunities of disadvantaged children.
• Since the 19th century, the US has gone from one program to the next—orphanages, home care, child care, Head Start, and pre-K—by a circuitous, unintentional path. Over time, these policies have drifted from their core purpose.
• The best way to advance good early childhood policy is to facilitate, rather than constrain, states’ commitment and innovation, giving states additional flexibility with federal funds and shifting the ultimate control of resources to parents.

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Executive Summary

Since 1935, the federal government has supported early childhood care and education for poor children to promote their healthy development and give them a fair opportunity to succeed. Informed by recent advances in brain science, our understanding of the lifelong importance of children’s earliest years has never been greater. But federal early childhood policy is in urgent need of reform.

Today’s federal early care and education policies are fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex. Federal policymaking is driven by coping with what exists rather than by what we are trying to accomplish. At the state and local levels, integrating incoherent federal funding streams with growing city- and state-funded early childhood programs is difficult to impossible.

In the dysfunctional landscape of federal early childhood policy, policymakers have gotten locked into choosing among three bad options: tinkering around the edges of existing programs, trying to cut them, or adding new ones on top of what is already in place. Yet none of these approaches will enable us to achieve the most important aim: giving America’s least-advantaged children a fair chance at a happy, productive life.

To move forward, we must begin by confronting a problematic legacy of federal policy. Its roots lie in the 19th century, when America first committed to improving the well-being of poor children. Since then we have gone from one thing to the next—orphanages, home care, child care, Head Start, pre-K—by a circuitous, unintentional path, implementing one solution after another to problems caused by previous solutions to previous problems. Over the course of this long, tangled history we have drifted far from our core purpose—indeed, we barely remember what it is.

This paper aims to provide a starting point by exploring how we ended up where we are today. It traces our evolving approach to early childhood care and education, sketching a brief, broad history of the three major federal funding streams: the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Head Start. Why are these our three major funding streams? Where did they come from? What does their history tell us about how to move forward? Key findings include:

• Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), enacted as a part of the Social Security Act of 1935, aimed to foster children’s healthy development by enabling widowed and abandoned poor women to remain at home to raise their children. But as the 20th century wore on, public and policy emphasis gradually shifted from child well-being to the financial welfare and self-sufficiency of adults. The 1935 program ultimately evolved into today’s welfare and child care systems: TANF and CCDF, both aimed to promote mothers’ work outside of the home.
• Over this period, the central goal of child care itself was redefined from ensuring children’s healthy development to ensuring that their mothers could go to work. As adult employment was foregrounded, child care increasingly came to be viewed as a work support for parents while its effects on children’s early development and well-being were deemphasized.
• At the same time, federal policy has evolved to reinforce a counterproductive, false distinction between “custodial” and “developmental” care for children. All programs for children from birth through age four have two important functions: supporting parents’ work in a 24/7 economy and fostering children’s healthy growth and learning during the most crucial period of human development. But current policy fails to recognize that those two aims are complementary, equally important strategies for building human capital in our nation’s most disadvantaged communities.
• As early nurture and care have been deemphasized, formal education through the public schools has come to dominate public and policy attention as the leading strategy to improve the well-being of poor children. Initiated by passage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary School Act and the establishment of Head Start 50 years ago, this is most recently reflected in today’s accelerating push for public pre-K.
• Our concept of child well-being has devolved to a narrow focus on children’s economic status and cognitive skills. The technocratic aims of increasing family income and children’s test scores have largely eclipsed a broader, once-held goal of advancing the overall welfare and life chances of poor children.
• The most promising path forward is to facilitate the work of leading, innovative states. A new, carefully planned state option could give special flexibility to states that have demonstrated ongoing commitment to providing high-quality early-learning programs for disadvantaged children from birth through age four, while shifting the ultimate control of resources from government officials to parents.

Understanding how we got to where we are now can help us remember what our true aims are and refocus on what we are really trying to do. That, in turn, will give us the foundation for making thoughtful, principled decisions about where to go next: setting children “upon surer paths to health and well-being and happiness,” in President Herbert Hoover’s words from almost a century ago.

Introduction 

Since 1935, the federal government has supported early childhood care and education for poor children to promote young children’s healthy development and give them a fair opportunity to succeed in life. Informed by recent advances in brain science, our understanding of the lifelong importance of children’s earliest years has never been greater. Yet, while the nurture and education of children from birth through age four is increasingly recognized as a crucial policy area, federal early childhood policy is in urgent need of reform.

Today’s federal early care and education policies are fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex. An outsider surveying the federal policy landscape encounters a daunting alphabet soup of disparate, uncoordinated federal funding streams: Head Start, Early Head Start, CCDF, TANF, IDEA, MIECHV, ESEA, RTT-ELC, and EHS-CCP, among others.

Head Start, along with Early Head Start for infants and toddlers, is the largest and most visible federal preschool program. The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are also major funding streams, providing child care for poor and low-income working families. The Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) offers funding for preschool children with diagnosed learning disabilities. The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV) funds 16 different home-visiting programs for children under five. Advocates are currently pushing for a bigger early childhood component to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Over the last several years, the Obama administration has added Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC), Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCP), and Preschool Development Grants to this unwieldy mix.[1]

Each of these programs has its own administration, rules, standards, monitoring requirements, and accountability frameworks. Further, the quality of children’s experiences often varies greatly depending on which funding stream they are attached to. A series of US General Accountability Office (GAO) reports over the last 20 years reflect this persistent problem: Early Childhood Programs: Multiple Programs and Overlapping Target Groups published in 1994, Early Education and Care: Overlap Indicates Need to Assess Crosscutting Programs in 2000, and Early Learning and Child Care: Federal Funds Support Multiple Programs with Similar Goals in 2014.[2]

At the state and local levels, integrating these multiple federal funding streams with growing city- and state-funded early childhood programs ranges from difficult to impossible. Entire offices in early childhood programs are staffed with experts dedicated to what the early childhood field calls “blending and braiding”: the complicated, bureaucratic task of combining incoherent federal funding streams into money that is actually useful to children and working families.

Everyone agrees that current policy is inadequate. But the question remains: how can we fix it? Recent efforts have fallen into four categories: tinker, expand, add, and eliminate. The problem is that none of those approaches will get us where we really want to go, which is improving the lives and life chances of poor children.

Reforming federal early childhood policy to help the children who need it most will be harder than growing existing federal funding streams, cutting them, or adding new ones. Twenty more years of GAO reports, funneling more money into the current system, or layering additional programs on top of what is already in place will not enable us to achieve the most important aim: to promote the flourishing of the nation’s youngest, most disadvantaged children.

To move forward, we must begin by confronting a problematic legacy of decisions and policies made long ago. The roots of our federal policies lie in the 19th century, when America first committed to improving the well-being of poor children. Since then we have gone from one thing to the next—orphanages, home care, child care, Head Start, pre-K—by a circuitous, unintentional path, implementing one solution after another to problems caused by previous solutions to previous problems.

Over the course of this long, tangled history we have drifted far from our core purpose—indeed, we barely remember what it is. Our current debates are confined to well-worn ruts in the early childhood policy road, when instead we should be taking a step back, defining our fundamental goals, and pursuing the most promising avenues to achieve them.

This paper aims to provide a starting point by exploring how we ended up where we are today. It does not recount a comprehensive history of federal early childhood policy; that would require several long books. Rather, its purpose is to sketch a brief, broad history of the three major funding streams for federal early childhood education and care: CCDF, TANF, and Head Start. Why are these our three major funding streams? Where did they come from? What are they trying to accomplish? Why are they designed the way they are? What does their history tell us about how to move forward?

Understanding how we got to where we are now can help us remember what our true aims are and refocus on what we are really trying to do. That, in turn, will give us the foundation for making thoughtful, principled decisions about where to go next: to set children “upon surer paths to health and well-being and happiness,” in President Herbert Hoover’s words from almost a century ago.

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Notes

1. In total, the federal government funds 45 programs that provide or support early-learning and child-care services. Of these, Head Start, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are by far the three major federal funding streams, together expending close to $15 billion for services to young children in 2014. See Kay E. Brown, Early Learning and Child Care: Federal Funds Support Multiple Programs with Similar Goals, US Government Accountability Office, February 5, 2014, http://ift.tt/1kp0Ncb.
2. US General Accounting Office, Early Childhood Programs: Multiple Programs and Overlapping Target Groups, October 1994, http://ift.tt/1MeAbFB; US Government Accountability Office, Early Education and Care: Overlap Indicates Need to Assess Crosscutting Programs, April 2000, http://ift.tt/1MeAekK; and US Government Accountability Office, Early Learning and Child Care: Federal Funds Support Multiple Programs with Similar Goals, February 2014, http://ift.tt/1kp0Ncb.

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