Head Start

Thank you, Sharon Lerner, for the piece on child care in Obama's FY2011 budget you penned for the online magazine Slate yesterday. As you noted, too often people who talk about childcare are discussing whether to trust the babysitter, and not the urgent need for better child care and preschool policy in America today.

Like so many people who follow early education, we have been waiting for months for the Senate to put forward its version of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. The bill, which quickly passed the House in September, uses savings from a restructuring of college student loan programs to provide funding for a variety of education programs, including the Early Learning Challenge Fund, a $1-billion-a-year program to improve the quality of child care and preschool programs. 

When the stimulus bill passed in February 2009, advocates for Head Start cheered. The legislation provided a $2-billion boost to Head Start, with $1.1 billion reserved for Early Head Start, the program that serves mothers and their babies up to age 3.  The infusion of funding allowed 64,000 more children to participate in the program.

But the money came with a question mark. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was designed to provide money for a short time -- only a year or two. What would happen to those newly participating children when funding ran out? Would Head Start centers have to reduce the availability of slots by 2011? Would they have to cut families off?

This week, we are joining the ranks of wonky podcasters with our debut edition of the bi-weekly Early Ed Watch podcast. On this recording, we interview our very own Christina Satkowski, author of The Next Step in Systems-Building: Early Childhood Councils and Federal Efforts to Promote Policy Alignment in Early Childhood.

On January 25, 2010, Christina Satkowski gave a presentation at the National Head Start Leadership Institute for a panel titled, “The Status of State Advisory Councils for Early Care and Education.”

Poring over budgets is not typically a fun exercise in hard economic times, especially for those in early childhood fields who typically see cuts. But Obama’s budget offers a real contrast. Under the administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2011, child care programs and Head Start would both receive a significant boost in funding.

Today we feature a guest post from Linda Jacobson, veteran education reporter and author of our recent policy paper, "On the Cusp in California."

It’s like trying to build a plane while flying it too: In every state in the country, leaders are trying to create effective early childhood systems while at the same time improving, reorganizing and aligning existing programs. Here at Early Ed Watch, we have written about an important part of their efforts as they create early childhood advisory councils (ECACs) – the state-level bodies established by governors and mandated by Head Start law.