Early Care And Education Plan

Early Care And Education Plan

Child care and early education are vital to economic growth and future competitiveness. Working families need access to affordable and high-quality child care and preschool education in order to meet their families’ basic needs. At the same time, investing in child care also meets a national need by ensuring that children can develop their full potential to become critical thinkers and engaged citizens. 

There is substantial research indicating that birth to age 3 is a crucial time in a child’s development, impacting later school performance and life chances.¹ For example, children who benefit from early care and education programs are less likely to engage in criminal behavior later in their lives and are more likely to graduate from high school and college. Higher graduation rates translate to higher incomes upon entering the labor force, the long-term benefits of which include higher tax revenue which might be considered a return on the public’s investment in that child. Multiple cost-benefit analyses conducted on three of the intensive educational programs that have been studied long term – Abecedarian, Perry Preschool, and ChildParent Center – have found that the public benefits far exceed the costs of the programs; benefits range from $6 to $13 for every $1 spent on the programs.²

Yet child care is exceedingly expensive: Demos and Young Invincibles’ “State of Young America” study reports that child care fees for two children (an infant and a 4 year-old) in a child care center exceeded annual median rent payments in every state in the U.S.³ The national average for center-based child care costs in 2010 was $8,900 for full-time care for an infant and $7,150 for full-time care for a preschooler.⁴ While well-off families can afford the type of good child care and education all children deserve, low-income and middle-class families often cannot, and may end up with lower-quality care or lose jobs as they juggle unstable child care situations. The federal Head Start program, aimed at families in poverty, reaches only about half of three- and four-year-olds from poor families and seldom provides the full-day care that parents trying to work their way into the middle class often need. Federal block grants that subsidize child care are inadequate, as are tax credits that aim to offset the cost burden for middle-class families. 

Accordingly, the Zero-16 Contract for Education includes a plan for affordable, high-quality child care which expands tax credits to low- and middle-income families, increases federal block grant funding allocated to child care assistance, provides resources to enhance the training of child care providers, sets up a system to monitor child care facilities for safety, and calls for specific techniques and approaches for improving the quality of child care services to families with limited English proficiency and children with special needs. It also expands public investment in Head Start and Early Head Start to ensure access to all low-income families interested in enrolling their children. A high-quality early care system would cost an estimated $88 billion a year.⁵

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