Exploring Early Childhood Care and Education Levers to Improve Population Health Proceedings of a Workshop (2019) / Chapter Skim
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4 Potential Policy Challenges and Opportunities
4 Potential Policy Challenges and Opportunities
Pages 47-68
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From page 47... ...
There are two national certifications in the field of early childhood education, the Child Development Associate credential for entry-level teachers and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards for accomplished teachers. However, Jones added, in the middle tier, which accounts for most of the early childhood workforce, there is no national certification that defines what should be known and what skills should be required.
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From page 48... ...
, discussed opportunities to engage the business community in supporting early care and education. Aly Richards, the chief executive officer of the Permanent Fund for Vermont's Children, described the various approaches being used to reach the organization's goal of high-quality, affordable early care and learning for all who need it in Vermont by 2025.
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From page 49... ...
• Significant brain architecture is built early in life, and the return on investment from early childhood development interventions is well established. However, the pattern of investments in children -- as well as the compensation structure for early care and education providers -- is inversely related to the brain devel opment curve of young children.
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From page 50... ...
There was a focus on co-location of services, bringing mental health and other health practitioners into child care centers and homes, and thinking more holistically about the families and the communities in which children develop. In the process, W hitebook said, each discipline gained more respect for and understanding of the unique contributions made by other disciplines.
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From page 51... ...
Whitebook said that the United States devotes a much smaller percentage of its gross domestic product than other industrialized countries to early childhood services (see Figure 4-1)
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From page 52... ...
For child care teachers who are also parents of young children, the stresses brought on by their low wages and high care costs are even greater. The lack of sufficient financing of subsidies for early care and education means that rates for care are usually held low, so that more children can be served, Whitebook said.
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From page 53... ...
Study of Child Care Employment training and which ultimately threatens their well-being. Whitebook told participants that a related National Academies study on financing high-quality early care and education in the United States is currently under way.2 Educational interventions during the early years have the highest returns on investment because they provide the highest returns on learn ing, Whitebook said.
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From page 54... ...
Forty-six percent of child care workers participate in some kind of federal income support (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid, food stamps) , and many receive state- or local-level subsidies (e.g., child care subsidies, housing support)
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From page 55... ...
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has been working with the Collaboration of Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning to incorporate aspects of SEL into schools and early childhood programs.
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From page 56... ...
States define SEL skills to reflect children's need to understand and manage emotion, set goals, and build positive relationships. Illinois, for example, has established pre-K to grade 12 SEL standards, and the implementation of these standards is supported by integration into multi-tiered support systems (MTSSs)
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From page 57... ...
In particular, there are tax-advantaged opportunities, such as tax credits or tax deductions, which are ways to share the cost of partnering to support early childhood education. Higgins offered these three examples: 1.
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From page 58... ...
58 Toxic Stress Lack of Health Services " Healthy" Trajectory Poverty " At Risk" Trajectory Pre-school Health Services " Delayed/Disordered" Trajectory Appropriate Discipline Ready to Learn Reading to Child Parent Education Emotional Health Literacy Late Preschool Birth Late Infancy Late Toddler 6 mo 12 mo 18 mo 24 mo 3 yrs 5 yrs Age Early Infancy Early Toddler Early Preschool FIGURE 4-3 Opportunities for collaboration to influence health along the early childhood learning trajectory. SOURCES: Higgins presentation, September 14, 2017, reprinted from IOM, 2015 (from the Halfon, 2014, presentation)
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From page 59... ...
provides a 50 percent tax credit for qualified contributions to child care programs. For example, if an employer has many workers who use a particular child care center and the employer chooses to support that center, the employer will get a Colorado tax credit for half of what it donates.
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From page 60... ...
That goal is high-quality, affordable early care and learning for all who need it in Vermont, and the deadline is 2025. The entire endowment is committed to achieving this goal by this date, she said, and then the Permanent Fund will "go out of business." It is not possible to accomplish such a huge societal change without linking to health care, Richards said, and the Permanent Fund is working on integrating health care and child care.
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From page 61... ...
One example of linking health care to child care is work the Permanent Fund has done with the health care system to have the medical community train child care providers to conduct developmental screens and referrals. They have blanketed the entire state, and child care providers in every region of the state have now been trained, she said.
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From page 62... ...
Head Start (discussed by Shinn-Brown in Chapter 3) and the SEL standards required by ESSA (discussed by Grafwallner)
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From page 63... ...
The DC Public Libraries had heard about the word gap research and saw an opportunity to use some of their public service money to educate families about how communicating with their children builds their vocabulary. They launched a public awareness campaign, and now, for example, people riding in a taxi cab in Washington, DC, will hear a public service announcement about Sing, Talk, and Read.
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From page 64... ...
Jones, who was a member of the National Academies consensus committee on transforming the workforce, said that a well-prepared workforce would have a wide range of competencies related to child development, partnering with parents and other professionals, and other skills and might perhaps require a bachelor's degree or higher. She noted that the Boston Public Schools preschool program requires teachers to have a m aster's degree.
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From page 65... ...
Tax Credits In response to a question, Higgins provided more details about the tax credits in Colorado. The tax credit has existed for nearly 20 years and is up for reauthorization again in 2018.
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From page 66... ...
A country's policies on support for families and young children affect birth rates, especially for women who are in the labor force. When countries have lower rates of reproduction, it alters the dependency ratio, which is the ratio of the number of children and older people (the dependent population)
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From page 67... ...
Robert McLellan of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center pointed out that engaging private investors has been helpful in driving energy conservation and environmental sustainability efforts, as investors saw better returns from investing in energy efficiency than other marketplace efforts. Lantz suggested that there is a parallel between that example and social impact bond projects.
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From page 68... ...
Lantz added that pay-forsuccess or social impact bonds are generally a proof-of-concept approach and are not themselves sustainable. The potential of the model is to fund innovative programs with private investor dollars to demonstrate to the government that a program or intervention is effective, at which point then government would assume financial responsibility for implementing such a program or intervention.
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