Child Care

The home visitation program -- a key piece of the Obama Administration's pledge to strengthen programs for children from birth to age 5 -- received another boost yesterday when the Senate's Finance Committee passed its version of the health care bill. The bill includes language that would establish a program for "maternal, infant and early childhood visitation."

Over the summer, the House committees with dominion over the financing and regulation of the proposed program had already cleared the way for the program. And it appears to have support from both Democrats and Republicans. Rep. Todd Russell Platts (R-PA) was among the authors of the first version to be introduced this year, and Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) has introduced similar legislation in the past. Unless something unexpected happens -- and anything is possible given the overheated environment surrounding health care reform (see our post on Chuck Norris) -- chances are good that any health care bill that passes the House and Senate will bring home visitation along for the ride.

The Census Bureau just released America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2007, a report that describes the characteristics of American households and families. The report and extensive data tables that accompany it should interest early childhood policymakers, media, and educators because they tell us about the types of families American children are growing up in, as well as trends and changes in family composition over time.

This year’s report is especially interesting because it zeroes in on America’s parents, taking an extra close look at stay-at-home moms. About 5.6 million American women — about one out of every four mothers with children under age 15 — were stay-at-home moms in 2007. Not surprisingly, stay-at-home moms were more likely to have younger children—and to be younger themselves — than non-stay-at home moms. They are also disproportionately Hispanic, foreign-born, and have less education, compared to all mothers.

Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most states are keeping public child care programs afloat near last year's levels. But a handful of states are not providing the same level of assistance to poor families even with the federal help.

Those are a few of the messages in the 2009 report on states' child care policies, released yesterday by the National Women's Law Center. The center surveyed representatives of all 50 states this summer about how they would use funds from the stimulus bill, known as ARRA, which provided an additional $2 billion in funding for 2010 and 2011 through Child Care and Development Block Grants. Thirty states reported that they were using that money to maintain services, avoid or lessen waiting lists and open their services to more parents in search of work. But several others, including Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania, said they will be cutting funding and tightening eligibility requirements for childcare subsidies.

The center also asked states where they stood in February 2009 (exactly a year from the date of last year's survey) on a range of policies, such as how they determine income cut-offs for assistance, the size of the co-payments they require families to make, and how they reimburse child care center and other providers who enroll qualifying children. Updates on state's waiting lists are also included.

Research has shown for years that placing 3- and 4-year olds from low-income families in high-quality early education settings can curb the relationship between growing up in a low-income family and underperforming in school. Now a new study in the September/October 2009 issue of Child Development goes a few steps further, linking quality child care settings at even younger ages to school achievement up to fifth grade.

The study, led by Eric Dearing, an associate professor at the Lynch School of Education of Boston College, uses longitudinal data from a national study that tracks children from birth up to fifth grade. It includes children from high-, middle-, and low-income families in a variety of childcare environments that ranged from maternal care to structured preschool facilities. The dataset also included information on children's cognitive and academic performance, along with the quality of various childcare settings they attended, as measured by observation-based records of the care-giving environments.

See the words "the network effect" and you might assume that the topic is Facebook or your cellular company's family plan. But take a moment to watch this video of Mario Luis Small talk about child care centers and you realize, ah yes, this is what networking is all about. 

Small, a social scientist at the University of Chicago, has conducted research on child care centers in New York and has written about them in his new book Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life.  We learned about this on Birth to Thrive, and we're hungry to read more. Here's blogger Paul Nhyan's take:

More importantly, parents build social capital at these centers, connecting with other moms and dads. This isn’t a big surprise to me, since I found everything from job leads and story ideas to nanny referrals and parenting advice at our child care center.

Just when you thought that the debate over health care reform couldn't possibly devolve any further, Chuck Norris comes karate-chopping onto the scene.

The "martial arts champ, action star, TV hero, and media phenomenon" has just blogged about "Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare" and the honor goes to the home visitation proposal that provides support to new mothers and their babies. It is, he says, "about the government's coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development."

Funny, we thought it was about giving children every chance to grow up strong and healthy. Last we checked, helping mothers help their children was a pretty universal family value.

Among his remarks: "Children belong to their parents, not the government. And the parents ought to have the right -- and government support -- to parent them without the fed's mandates, education or intervention in our homes."

In May, when President Obama released his budget proposal for fiscal year 2010, he requested funds -- $124 million for the first year -- to create a federal program to send nurses to the homes of low-income women who are pregnant or caring for babies. The idea was to scale up fledgling programs that, according to randomized and controlled studies, improve women's and children's health and well-being and can reduce healthcare costs in the long run.

Home visitation doesn't appear in the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill moving through Congress this month; it was proposed to reside on the "mandatory" side of the funding column and therefore not be subject to the year-to-year appropriations process. But it does have a spot -- for the moment at least -- in the massive health-care reform bills being shaped in fits and starts this summer.

The economic crisis exacted one of its biggest casualities on state pre-k programs last week when Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland signed into law a biennial state budget that zeroes out the state's full-day pre-k program and chopped funding for its half-day program by one-third.

The budget also slashed reimbursements for child care providers that serve low-income children, cut back on the number of poor families that can qualify for child care and reduced funding for the state's birth-to-three program by 25 percent.

The Early Learning Initiative, which funds full-day preschool for some 13,000 children, was one of 61 items that Gov. Strickland struck from the budget last week using the power of his line-item veto. The initiative was designed to bring community-based providers into the state's fledgling early education system by providing them with funds to train teachers. In fiscal year 2009 the program received $128 million, and in an observational study published last month, its teachers showed improvement in literacy instruction and classroom management since its launch four years ago.

Last Friday the House Appropriations Committee passed its version of the fiscal year 2010 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which funds early education programs operated by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.

The bill includes $7.2 billion in funding for Head Start, a $122 million (1.7 percent) increase over the fiscal year 2009 funding level, and $2.1 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the same funding level as in fiscal year 2009. The bill also sets aside $271 million in CCDBG for quality improvement, above the 4 percent of CCDBG funds automatically set-aside for quality. $99 million of these funds are directed towards improving quality of care for infants and toddlers. These funding levels match those proposed by the Obama administration in the President's fiscal year 2010 budget request.

A major new federal investment in early education, the Early Learning Challenge Grant program that was included in legislation introduced last week by House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, and which we wrote about here, cleared its first hurdle on the way to becoming law yesterday. The House Committee on Education and Labor passed a reconciliation bill that would overhaul federal student loan programs and use some of the savings from those reforms to fund Early Learning Challenge Grants. 

As included in the committee-passed bill, the Early Learning Challenge Grant program is virtually unchanged from Miller's original bill. But the House committee did chop funding for the Early Learning Challenge Grants in the last years of the reconciliation bill's 10-year time frame. Instead of a program that sends $1 billion to states each year until 2019, the program is now described as ending in 2017. In other words, the new bill sets the funding at $8 billion over 8 years intead of $10 billion over 10.