Closing the Opportunity Gap for Young Children (2023) / Chapter Skim
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For example, such efforts might include reducing barriers to social supports, improving community safety, increasing access to quality health care, addressing factors such as institutional racism, making parents' jobs higher quality and more family friendly, implementing culturally relevant pedagogy and learning, and reducing child poverty. The Every Student Succeeds Act calls for schools to implement "whole child" strategies that promote physical health and healthy social-emotional development as a means of reducing disparities in academic achievement.
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Although achievement and opportunity are related, it is important to distinguish between the two. The potential causes of the achievement gap are individual opportunity gaps across numerous domains that we refer to collectively as the opportunity gap.
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KEY CONCLUSIONS ACROSS THE COMMITTEE'S DOMAINS OF FOCUS The committee's key conclusions identify issues that cut across the domains discussed in this report -- education, physical health, and socialemotional health and well-being. These conclusions highlight contexts that drive opportunity gaps and areas in which there are opportunities to change policies, programs, and interventions to close the opportunity gap for young children.
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Limited access to paid family leave creates an opportu nity gap for young children by limiting parents' and infants' bonding time, decreasing the time available to take care of serious health issues, elevating family stress, and exposing children to financial uncertainty. Limited access to high-quality child care can create opportunity gaps by limiting parents' employment, earnings, and job stability, ultimately leading to family economic insecurity.
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• Data could be shared across agencies that are responsible for in dividual safety net and social insurance programs (e.g., the De partment of Health and Human Services/Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for Medicaid, the Internal Revenue Service for the earned income tax credit/child tax credit, the Department of Labor for unemployment insurance) and linked when possible to create merged data sets.
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• The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Institute of Education Sciences could prioritize studies that fill gaps in knowledge about policies, programs, and practices that reduce opportunity gaps for subgroups of young children that are underrepresented in the existing evidence base. • The Internal Revenue Service and the Census Bureau could create a linked data system for use in analyzing all families' access to and take-up of tax credits -- the most robust antipoverty programs, including the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit -- in support of the development of a systematic outreach approach to reduce the burden associated with and increase take-up.
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In addition to tracking of these metrics, systematic cataloging of evidence-based, effective, and equitable policies and program interventions across domains in a centralized database/registry would provide a significant resource to communities, policy makers, researchers, and philanthropic organizations working to reduce disparities in opportunity for children. Recommendation 2: The federal government and states should establish early learning opportunities -- accompanied by both legal accountability guaranteeing access and inclusive, intentional quality standards that are aligned with scientific evidence -- as a right afforded to all children and families who need and want services.
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Such a unified system would: • ensure that children and families from communities listed in Ex ecutive Order 13985, Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government, are prioritized; • allocate greater resources to historically marginalized communities to compensate for historical and current inequities in resources, experiences, and opportunities; • allocate greater resources for parts of the early care and education system that have traditionally received fewer resources; • require evidence-based program standards that improve population outcomes and explicitly remedy opportunity gaps; • build a corps of diverse, competent, well-trained, well-supported, and appropriately compensated early childhood educators and pro gram leaders, across all age groups and program settings; and • require disaggregated data collection that can be linked with other relevant data sources, as well as continuous quality improvement aimed at bridging opportunity and outcome gaps. Underinvestment in high-quality ECE disproportionately affects children from low-income families, children of color, children who speak languages other than English at home, and children with disabilities.
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system and based on evidence-based policies and practices. Such a system would: • address structural drivers of education opportunity, including seg regation in learning settings by language, disability, race, and in come; and • be adequately funded to support the implementation of high-qual ity benchmarks aligned with those in the ECE system, including • high-quality instruction and asset-driven pedagogies, assess ments, and curricula; • social-emotional and mental health supports and policies to ex plicitly reduce exclusionary and harsh discipline and eliminate disparities in such practices; • full inclusion of children with disabilities in general educa tion settings, with high-quality and individualized services and supports; • bilingual learning opportunities for children who are English learners and dual language learners; • structurally sound, safe, healthy, and engaging learning envi ronments; • a well-qualified, fairly compensated, and supported workforce; • data-driven continuous quality improvement efforts targeted at identifying and addressing opportunity and outcome gaps; • authentic and meaningful family engagement and partnerships; • strong partnerships with ECE systems that promote seamless transitions from ECE to the early grades; and • community partnerships and engagement to promote holistic family wellness.
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As part of achieving this goal, the Department of Education, states, and districts should under take specific reforms explicitly addressing opportunity gaps identified in this report, including: • uneven access to early intervention and preschool special education; • uneven quality and dosage of early intervention and preschool special education; • inclusion of children with disabilities across age groups, especially preschoolers, who are the most likely to be served in separate settings; • nonbiased, accurate identification, specifically addressing over- and underidentification of specific groups of children, such as children of color, English learners, and others; and • prohibition of harsh forms of discipline, including suspensions, expulsions, all forms of corporal punishment, seclusion, and inap propriate restraint for all students with disabilities, with special attention to students of color, who are disproportionately subject to these practices. The maximum federal share of funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
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should create, lead, and be accountable for coordinating an inter agency group focused on children's mental health and social-emotional well-being that includes the several HHS operating divisions, including the Administration for Children and Families, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Preven tion, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others, as well as the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other relevant agencies, for the purpose of designing, implementing, and evaluating a comprehensive system of primary psychosocial care for young children and their families. Such a comprehensive system of primary psychosocial care for young children and their families would include: • universal support across the lifespan from the prenatal period through third grade, consisting of regular screening and identifica tion of needs in mental health and social-emotional development for both families and children, followed by facilitated access to community resources that address those needs; • sufficient community capacity to address young children's needs through a comprehensive array of well-funded, evidence-based in tervention programs and resources; • an integrated data system, much like a child's electronic medical record, that charts a child's needs and interventions across the life course, to facilitate cross-agency communication and program and policy evaluation, and serve as a resource for future providers; and • an evaluation plan and support for research to understand systemic and structural drivers (e.g., racism)
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Recommendation 7: The Department of Labor and the Department of Health and Human Services, in partnership with other relevant federal agencies, should review, update, and enforce existing labor standards and employment policies to address disparities that disproportionately affect working families with young children. To implement this recommendation, the federal government could: • build on the current job protections offered under the unpaid Fam ily Medical Leave Act to create a paid social insurance program, administered by the Social Security Administration, to support parents needing time away from work to care for infants and newly adopted children and attend to their own and their family members' serious health issues; • address documented issues in access to paid family and medi cal leave for low-income families and families from marginalized communities by implementing progressive wage replacement rates, making coverage more inclusive by eliminating firm-size require ments, and using existing hours and duration criteria for Social Security Disability Insurance or Medicare Hospital Insurance; • develop recommendations on the definition of good-quality jobs for families with children, an effort that should include setting standards for family-sustaining wages and family-friendly employer practices; • update existing labor standards and policies, raise the minimum wage floor, make work schedules more predictable, budget more
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Recommendation 8: The federal government, in partnership with state and local governments, philanthropy, and relevant public and private organizations, should support policies and interventions targeting social determinants of health that create and perpetuate opportunity gaps at the community level. To further the development of targeted policies and interventions for addressing the opportunity gap at the community level, the following actions should be taken by federal, state, and local entities and private philanthropic organizations: • Federal and state governments should expand existing safety net programs that have been shown to address poverty and food inse curity as social determinants of health, including the Special Sup plemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the earned income tax credit, as well as the 2021 expanded child tax credit.
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For children living in poverty and those from other marginalized populations, inequities in experiences and access to resources that support healthy developmental outcomes can vary greatly, leading to persisting opportunity gaps for young children. State and local governments have opportunities to examine existing policies that have demonstrated promising outcomes for young children and to leverage resources and partnerships with the private sector to invest in interventions with the potential to promote healthy development and close opportunity gaps for young children.
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and philanthropic organizations should support and prioritize historically marginalized communi ties and groups to improve their access to professional development programs, apprenticeships, and scholarships, and to diversify the pipeline of health care professionals, public health practitioners, teachers, early educators, and early childhood researchers. • National professional organizations and accreditors should im prove curriculum training and require minimum competencies in antiracist approaches; social determinants of health inequities; and culturally competent, trauma-informed, and resilience-building health care, ECE, and early grade education.
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