A discussion with Danielle Ewen, director of child care and early education policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), delves into the current state of early childhood education on the national level, including the proposed Early Learning Challenge Fund.
Here’s an excerpt from the Ezra Klein blog on the Washington Post site:
The administration in its latest budget has upped funding for a lot of these programs — Head Start and the block grant program, etc. I’m specifically interested in the Early Learning Challenge Fund. What’s the idea behind that and how might it change the policy outlook?
The Early Learning Challenge Fund is an idea that says, we have core programs that pay for access and obviously that are underfunded, and we need to deal with that, but we need to help states think about how to build the quality of the system for all children. What the challenge fund does is it establishes a metric race and says, how are we going to make sure that more low-income children, more at-risk children, have access to high-quality care, which is what we’ve been trying to do for years.
What the challenge fund does is it says: We’re going to say to states we’ll put money on the table, you put money on the table; we’re going to say what quality is, we’re going to have these things called quality rating systems that help providers know what quality and help them move towards it, we’re going to give states money to build their systems, and we’re going to challenge them to move toward higher quality.
The challenge fund is a competitive grant. The way it was written in the House, which is the only proposal we know about because there was never a formal Senate proposal, there would be two tiers of states: states that are essentially developing their system and states that have a system but need to really invest in it and move more children and more providers toward these higher-quality levels.
