Access, Quality, and Alignment in Early Childhood Programs
My interview with Elliot Regenstein
What’s the current state of the early childhood sector? How can state leaders improve both the quantity and quality of the services offered in their states?
To learn more about these questions, I sat down with Elliot Regenstein, a Partner at Foresight Law and Policy and the author of a new book called Readiness: Preparing State Early Childhood Systems for a Bright Future. I picked his brain about the book, how early childhood fits within the “abundance” agenda, and how states can better serve parents looking for early childhood services for their children.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Chad Aldeman: You spend time at the beginning of the book talking about the different goals behind early childhood investments. Can you talk about what those are and how casual readers should think about them?
Elliot Regenstein: Sure, there are a few different rationales for early childhood investments. The book talks about how those can overlap and shape public services in different ways.
For example, one of the major arguments is child development, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that high-quality experiences for young children are impactful in both the short and long term. I often say that there’s pretty strong agreement and understanding that the first five years of child development are super important, and that adults influence that development in meaningful ways. What there’s less consensus about is, what exactly should government do about that?
Another major rationale for early childhood investment is keeping parents in the workforce, particularly when unemployment is very low [and workers are in high demand.] This has been a powerful rationale, because the argument is that if parents don’t have somewhere that they trust their kid will be well cared-for during the day, then one parent, usually the mom, will drop out of the workforce, which will reduce the overall pool of potential employees. And so there have been a few examples where business leaders have taken the lead in pushing for early childhood investment, in part because they’re just trying to get more folks in the workforce.
Different folks within the early childhood field have different views about those arguments, but fundamentally, those are the major reasons, and most early childhood services are designed to meet some combination of those two needs.
Aldeman: One takeaway I had from the book is just how fragmented the early childhood system is, if you want to call it a system. In addition to serving multiple goals, it has different funding sources, different pools of kids who are eligible, etc. We’ll get back to that.
But for now let’s set that aside and say you’re talking to a governor in a random state. If they said they wanted to be known as an “early education governor,” what would you recommend they do?
Regenstein: For a governor to show leadership on early childhood, there are a few things that are really important. One is at the state government level, you’ve got to get your act together to administer the system in a coherent way. If the pieces of the system do not work sufficiently well together, you can’t just add money and expect good results. The fragmentation negatively impacts providers and families, and you have to solve for that in some way. Different states have addressed that differently.
It’s also the case that in early childhood, more investment is necessary. In K-12, every child is required to be enrolled and offered a spot at a public school. Neither of those things are true in early childhood. I’m not arguing for mandatory early childhood. No one has argued for that. But even as a voluntary service, there are a lot of families who would take advantage of it if the opportunities were there, and there currently aren’t options available. Strengthening not only the administration of the system, but also the availability of quality services, is key.
And then a final piece is to emphasize the quality of child and family experience in designing the system. Historically, a lot of the measurement of quality in early childhood has been focused on essentially bureaucratic inputs as opposed to the actual experiences of children. There are a couple of states that have led the way in reorienting that conversation. That quality aspect is an important piece as well.
Aldeman: In your book, you write about South Carolina’s Parent Portal. What is it? How does it work? And what are other good examples of making early childhood supports work well for parents?
Regenstein: South Carolina has been a national leader, but there are a lot of states currently working on the issue of how to make it easier for families to access services.
The South Carolina people would tell you is it’s not strictly a technology problem. Technology can certainly help, but it’s really important to get the human systems in place to support families. Because in addition to the statewide technological infrastructure they’ve built, they also have a network of local-level supports to help families in a human way, to supplement the improved technology.
Historically, and still today in most places, if you were interested in finding child care, you had to do the research on your own. There are some websites that aggregate information, but those are not always comprehensive, and it’s not always set up for parents to contact or apply for the services. With South Carolina’s portal, not only could you identify services in your area, but you could apply for those services. Then, if you fill out one application and start on another, it pre-populates that application with all the information you entered to the first one, so that at the very least, you’re not having to repeat yourself over and over again.
Ultimately, what you’re hoping to achieve is a situation where parents can look and not only see what providers are available, but also see if they have spaces. Could I even enroll my child? Just having a child care center close to you, if it’s over-subscribed with a two-year waiting list, doesn’t really help you.
Aldeman: These types of supports could help in many realms. K-12 education is becoming increasingly unbundled. In early childhood, it’s certainly unbundled, and it can be hard for parents to know where to go. Are there places that have funded some sort of navigational support for families?
Regenstein: In fact, that’s been funded for a long time through a network of what are known as “resource and referral agencies” that are generally funded with child care funds. And there are resource and referral agencies in pretty much every state across the country.
Aldeman: Are those working well?
Regenstein: Well, some of them are. Some of them are visible and known to families, and have the sort of comprehensive coverage and ability to support families. Not all of them are, and to some degree that’s dependent on state context and the people involved. The need has been identified, and there are some resources going toward it.
It’s also the case the technology matters to this. Historically, a lot of these things were set up as, say, a phone number you would call, but young parents today are not calling phone numbers. They’re looking on the internet, from their phones. So what you need is more sort of app-based, or text-based, and some places are adapting faster than others. But the general gist is that states know that there’s much more to do here, and they are trying to ramp up those efforts.
Aldeman: Another area I’d like to get your feedback on is the so-called “abundance” agenda. There have been several popular books pushing for abundance in the housing space in particular, but also in energy and healthcare.
But those authors have not touched on K-12 education. They have also not touched on early childhood. But it seems like early childhood is ripe for this conversation as well. Parents say they want more of it, and yet the market is not delivering it in the quantities or at the prices parents can afford.
Meanwhile, there’s also a tension between quantity and quality. How do you see this tension playing out in the early childhood space?
Regenstein: I’ve enjoyed those books. As a brief aside, I really enjoyed Why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman.
Aldeman: Yes, me too.
Regenstein: Early childhood is easy to square with an abundance agenda, right? If you want children to have positive early experiences, if you want adults to be engaged in the workforce, then early childhood is really important.
But there is a huge market failure, because early childhood is extremely labor-intensive, particularly for the very youngest children who can’t change their own diaper and couldn’t get themselves out of a burning building. For those kids, it’s really important that the adult-child ratios are kept relatively low. You cannot have too many kids in the room or else it becomes a safety hazard.
But it’s also the case that young families don’t have a lot of spare income. In general, people make more money as they get older, and so if you are just a few years out of high school or college, which most first-time parents are, then you haven’t reached your full earning potential. You haven’t had a chance to save up, and now, all of a sudden, you’re hit with this enormous expense, and it’s very difficult to pay for it.
Historically, the market for early childhood has been dependent on a lot of free labor, so the salaries are also very low, with the exception of pre-K teachers employed by public school districts. The percentage of early childhood personnel who are on some form of public assistance is about half. These workers are in the third percentile of income nationally. Anecdotally, you’ll talk to center directors who lose staff to Walmart and Target or who decide to start driving for Uber full time because they can make more money that way.
So you have a couple of problems politically. One is that it is very hard to get people to pay more on a per-unit basis for a service that they’ve gotten used to pricing at a certain level. For state government leaders to say, “We’re going to invest a lot of money, not just so that more kids can have service, but so that that service is going to be much better and that the staff are going to be better paid” becomes a tough sell politically.
On top of that, a lot of the early childhood workforce isn’t particularly powerful politically. It’s low income, over 90% female, more diverse than the K-12 teacher population, and it doesn’t have unions that are making major political donations and mobilizing people to vote. It’s just not a constituency that policymakers have responded to. There are probably some number of abundance-oriented officials who, if you asked them, would say, “of course, we should be paying these folks better and delivering higher quality and expanding services,” but at the end of the day, they’re not going to get punished by voters for failing to do that.
Aldeman: My mind goes to advocates who push for bachelor’s degrees for all early childhood workers, in the hopes of professionalizing the workforce and boosting quality, but which costs more. Or, you note in the book that the Obama Administration passed Head Start regulations that will require them to raise employee wages to match that of local school districts by the year 2031. That’s going to cut the number of seats available at Head Start programs, no? They’ll have to scale back to serve fewer kids. How should we think about this?
Regenstein: There’s actually a point about Head Start that I want to come back to, but this has been a very lively debate within the field.
There’s a group that feels that, for early childhood professionals to be treated on equal footing with K-12 teachers, that’s going to require having the same kinds of credentials that K-12 teachers do. Degrees aren’t the only thing that define a profession, but they’ve historically been an important element. And if we’re going to deliver a quality service and take the field seriously, it needs to have degree requirements.
There’s a competing school of thought that the that degrees are not proven to improve competency. And, particularly in a diverse workforce, when many of the current workers don’t have bachelor degrees, putting in a degree requirement will make it almost impossible to hire, particularly for positions that are so low paid. Moreover, a lot of the skilled people already in the workforce will be pushed out, and there will be no one there to replace them.
There are also concerns about what happens when states or now the federal government start evaluating bachelor’s degree programs by the income of their graduates. At the very moment we’re talking about the need to expand early childhood services, higher ed would have a strong incentive to get out of the business of training people for it. For early childhood, that’s dangerous territory.
I’m not fully resolved on how to navigate these questions, but if I were a leader of that optimal state you described earlier, I would get stakeholders together and have a coherent strategy for what we want this to look like in 5-10 or 20 years. What pieces are we putting in place to make that happen? Because if the state’s not dealing with these questions, no one will.
Aldeman: Last year, the federal government created a tax credit scholarship program for K-12 education. But why not expand that to cover all kids from ages 0 to 18? That could potentially open up funding for scholarships at early childhood programs. What are your thoughts on that way to get money into the system?
Regenstein: Well, I don’t know if I agree with her broader philosophical point, but when Iggy Azalea said, “Never turn down nothing,” I think there was something to that.
As an early childhood advocate, when there are moving trains, there is a value to getting on them. That includes education savings accounts or tax credits from the state or federal levels. These may be imperfect vehicles for the kind of thoughtful system expansion that I advocate for, but it’s also the case that I’d rather have an imperfect world with more money than a perfect one with less.
If there is the opportunity to bring new resources into the system to serve families, I wouldn’t want to reflexively say, “No.”
And, if a state has a coherent thesis and strong leadership, they’re going to be able to figure out how to work an ESA or a tax credit into the existing fabric in a way that is additive. If a state doesn’t have that strong leadership, it may be more of a struggle, but one way or another, if there are opportunities to get more money, I think we should at least be open to that and be part of those conversations.
Aldeman: You wanted to go back to Head Start?
Regenstein: Yeah, and it’s about a tension within the early childhood field, which is, what age range should we focus on?
When Pre-K Now did its big campaign roughly 20 years ago, the focus was mainly on 4-year-olds. But there are a lot of people in the field whose emphasis is on birth through age three, because developmentally, that’s the most critical time period. But for the most part, when states have invested, they invest more in those later years than the earlier years.
One of the things that’s happened in Head Start is that in some of the states with very large state-funded pre-k programs for 4-year-olds, Head Start has adapted and started serving 3-year-olds, or even converted to Early Head Start to serve kids 0-3. Even though converting from a Head Start slot to an Early Head Start slot is a process that’s not easy or automatic, in most cases, the federal money is more flexible than the state money when it comes to serving infants and toddlers. So where states invest in 4-year-olds, Head Start often adjusts to serve other children.
If you look at the data on Georgia and Oklahoma, for example, those Head Start programs have de-emphasized 4-year-olds to focus on younger children. That is incrementally more expensive on a per-child basis, but it’s positive from a system perspective. The idea that these programs should be complementary rather than in conflict is a really powerful notion, and it would be great to see a future iteration of Head Start that accounts for changes at the state level.
Aldeman: For my last question, let’s go back to my hypothetical. If you could build a Frankenstein model of elements from multiple states, what core components would you like to see?
Regenstein: Well, I’m not a deep expert on every state, so my answer is going to potentially omit some good work happening in some places…
But I’ve actually been using Virginia as one of my primary examples. First of all, it emphasizes just how bipartisan this work is. There are a lot of blue states that have done great work in this area. There are a lot of red states that have done great work too. But in Virginia it’s been both. A Democrat brought in Jenna Conway and her team, Republican Governor Youngkin promoted them, and then {newly elected} Democratic Governor Spanberger promoted them all again.
There are a few things that are really core to Virginia’s success. One is they have unified state leadership. They have the core programs under the same roof. And in Virginia’s case, it’s not a standalone agency, it’s the Department of Education. They made the choice to bring the programs together so that they can be run as a holistic unit, not as multiple different things administered by different mid-level managers.
They also have a relentless focus on data and quality. They are one of the states that has a definition of quality focused on child experience, and more importantly, when it comes to both quality and access, they are scarfing up all the data they can and analyzing it to inform their decisions in a way that a number of states are working toward, but that not everybody is there yet. Notably, Virginia has also increased its investment in the last few years.
It’s also important to give credit to the states like Oklahoma and Georgia and West Virginia, which have had a longstanding commitment to access and quality. Alabama, Rhode Island, and Michigan are also known for their focus on quality. These states insist on ensuring quality in their pre-k programs. So again, there are a lot of different states that are doing some aspect well.
We’ve clearly made enormous progress in the last 10-20 years, in terms of access and quality and system design. And my hope is that when we look back in another 20 years, we’ll see that we’ve continued to make substantial progress, because there is still a long way to go.
Aldeman: That’s a great point to end on, Elliot, and hopefully your book will help lead us in that direction.
Reading List
Chalkbeat: Indiana restarts child care vouchers with one-time $200 million boost
Urban Institute: DC’s Early Childhood Educator Compensation Program Helps Stabilize Child Care Businesses