The welfare reforms of 1996 replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) as the primary safety for the poor. But the Great Recession has exposed the failure of TANF as a safety net to catch American families as they experience hardship.

As the Great Recession has pulled more and more Americans into poverty, families’ primary safety net should be TANF, complemented by programs such as SNAP (formerly the Food Stamps program). However, as Figure 1 shows, as SNAP levels have responded to increasing unemployment, TANF recipient levels have not.

Figure 1

The decline in TANF participation has at the same time been accompanied by a 56 percent increase in single-mother families in extreme poverty.[1]

SNAP levels have generally followed unemployment and poverty. Yet there are 3.14 million families eligible for TANF who are not receiving benefits. Why is TANF not providing assistance to Americans who need it now more than ever?

The answer is that the TANF program has significantly reduced the number of welfare recipients even prior to the recession: since TANF was enacted, the number of recipients has fallen by almost from 4.8 million families in 1996 to 1.7 million families in 2008.[2]

However, this outcome has been achieved in part by a significant reduction in the number of eligible families participating, from 84 percent of eligible families in 1995, to 40 percent of eligible families in 2005.[3] The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that 3.14 million eligible families did not receive assistance in 2005.[4]

Figure 2

Although the U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 families are cut off from TANF benefits each year because they lose eligibility due to time limits, most of the decline in welfare recipients is due to drops in the percentage of eligible families receiving TANF benefits.[5]

This is primarily due to the structure of the program, which incentivizes states to cut caseloads and has led to increased barriers of access for eligible recipients.

TANF is distributed to states via block grants, and states are able to use leftover TANF funds for other services which may garner more public support, such as childcare and child welfare services. States therefore have incentives to cut TANF costs for use in other programs.

The “caseload reduction credit” further increases states’ incentives to reduce caseloads without regard to cause. The credit allows states to sidestep financial penalties for failing to fulfill work program participation requirements if they reduce overall TANF caseloads. As a result, the GAO reports that, “nearly all states have at least one type of diversion strategy” to keep applicants from receiving assistance.[6]

Clinton-era welfare reform was intended to reduce welfare dependency by increasing employment levels of potential welfare recipients. However, new restrictions to access were not accompanied by compensating guarantees of employment, which eventually leaves unemployed families without support. Now welfare reform and efficiency in implementing TANF seems to be equated with reducing caseloads regardless of need.

The Great Recession has served to highlight how many Americans have been and continue to be hurt by this outlook. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families now provides a safety net that is far too porous. As Americans continue to fall through the holes in this jobless recovery, the primary safety net designed to catch them needs to be repaired.

Attachments: 

Figure 1

Figure 2

The official arbiters have spoken: The Great Recession ended in the middle of last year. Unfortunately, this decree seems a bit hollow as new evidence of pervasive hardship continues to appear on a daily basis.

Take a look at the poverty numbers recently released by the Census Bureau. Almost 44 million Americans were reported to live in poverty last year. That's the highest number, with the largest yearly increase, since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty in 1959. In some ways, these numbers are depressing but not necessarily surprising. Last year was, after all, a bad year. Scores of workers dropped out of the labor force, unemployment reached 10 percent, almost 3 million families lost their homes, and over 4 million people lost their health insurance. These numbers tell us about the breadth of the recession.

But here's a chilling fact: More than 1 in 5 children spent the year in poverty.

Unlike employment, wages or productivity figures, child poverty isn't just an indicator of how the economy is doing at a moment in time. It is a forecaster of things to come. Children, after all, grow up.

Not only is poverty affecting a growing and diverse set of families, but the social costs of child poverty will rise substantially over time. These costs are real. Georgetown professor Harry Holzer estimates that child poverty costs the economy almost $500 billion a year in lost productivity, increased health expenditures and other factors.

The recession is expected to extend these losses further. That's because too often children born into poverty grow up to become adults living in poverty. According to the Pew Economic Mobility Project, 42 percent of children born to poor parents become poor adults. What's more, The Urban Institute finds that kids who experience persistent poverty have lower rates of educational attainment, higher rates of nonmarital childbearing and lower rates of employment as adults.

While the recession may be over officially, we're still far from recovery. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the rate of child poverty will reach 1 in 4 (25 percent!) before declining, yet remain above 20 percent through the rest of the decade. This sustained level of elevated child poverty will create ripples through the economy for years to come, especially if we don't see a concerted policy response.

So what should our policymakers do? For starters, they should not concede investments in policies that target child poverty to concerns over the deficit. Given the long-run costs of inaction, this is a false choice.

Then, they can learn from recent history. The Recovery Act passed early last year helped mitigate the impact of the recession for many families and infused badly needed capital into the dwindling economy, through targeted programs like SNAP (food stamps), unemployment benefits and refundable tax credits. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that unemployment insurance alone kept 3.3 million people out of poverty. These provisions must be extended to support the economy and keep households from falling further behind.

But we also need a long-term strategy to confront the limits of opportunity, information and resources that allow poverty to pass from one generation to the next. Families rely on income to provide for their daily needs, but they often draw upon a stock of assets in the form of savings, investments and access to other resources to move forward in their lives.

This underscores the necessity for a complementary set of policies that promotes savings and asset building over the long term.

Fundamentally, we should be focusing on ways to help families gain economic stability by rebuilding their balance sheets. This means reducing levels of debt, overcoming barriers to savings and connecting with safe and appropriate financial products.

One place to start is by reforming the eligibility rules governing public assistance programs, which require families to spend down their savings before qualifying for critical services and support. Asking families to jettison their savings runs at cross purposes with the goal of providing stability in times of need.

Given the breadth of the recession, this makes more sense now than ever. The Obama administration has proposed substantially raising the asset limits for the primary federal safety net programs, and Congress should implement the administration's proposal.

In the future we should combine social insurance policies with ones that create long-term pathways to economic security and social development. Savings-based policies can help families increase the resources they have to withstand future crises, whether systemic or personal, and build ladders of opportunity so poverty isn't a default that's set at birth.

Fewer children in poverty will strengthen the economy over time. In this economic climate, that's a return that more than justifies the investment.

On November 22^nd, the Asset Building Program hosted a panel of experts to discuss how Americans are faring in the years since the Great Recession according to different measures. (Video from the event is available here.) Speakers from Wider Opportunities for Women, the Half in Ten Campaign, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Pew’s Economic Mobility Project joined moderator, Rachel Black, for a discussion of current data and indicators, who’s falling short according to these measures and by how much, and policy ideas for  making progress.

Rachel Black noted in her introduction that, two years past the worst recession since the Great Depression, hardship is still pervasive. Income-based measures may not go far enough in capturing the multidimensional needs that contribute to a family’s wellbeing and present a limited tool for prescribing solutions.  This event used multiple indicators to illustrate poverty, mobility, and economic security to better depict how families are really doing today.

Matt Unrath, Director of the National Family Economic Security Program at Wider Opportunities for Women, discussed WOW’s efforts to capture family wellbeing by creating Basic Economic Security Tables (BEST), which indexes family budget items and projects the necessary income that families would have to earn in order to cover those expenses. Unrath highlighted a lack of affordable housing, accessible transportation options, and quality child care as major barriers to economic security for low-income parents, and particularly single parents. His presentation is available here.

Melissa Boteach, Manager of the Half in Ten Campaign, articulated the importance of defining an income threshold below which no family should fall, but also expanding the scope of families with access to critical supports necessary to avoid hardship. She highlighted findings of their new report, Restoring Shared Prosperity, which evaluates how families are faring at the national and state level according to a set of key indicators and three areas where policymakers should focus in order to improve those outcomes: creating good jobs, strengthening families, and promoting economic security. Her presentation is available here.

Next, Indivar Dutta-Gupta from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities discussed the dynamics of inequality. Income inequality, he argues, damages our democracy by making our political process less representative of and less responsive to the needs of people on the low-end of the income spectrum. Additionally, rising income inequality has created a divergence in life expectancy for people at opposite ends of the income spectrum. Progressive taxation, support for worker benefits, and expanding health care access are among the strategies Dutta-Gupta looks to for improving inequality. His presentation is available here.

Erin Currier, from Pew’s Economic Mobility Project highlighted the importance of relative economic mobility as a key indicator. The data show that many Americans remain stuck in the income category they were born into, particularly at the high and low end of the income spectrum, a phenomenon known as “stickiness at the ends.” While Americans agree that government should support economic mobility, existing strategies target middle and higher income people primarily through the tax code. This leaves lower-income families unable to take advantage of these opportunities to move up the income ladder. Her presentation is available here.

The concluding discussion expanded on the topics detailed in each presentation. The panelists talked more in depth about how income inequality and poverty hurt the United States’ economy and global competitiveness. They also addressed the importance of considering wealth inequality and how opportunities for asset building tend to be concentrated at the top of the income spectrum. Additionally, the panel fielded audience questions about the impact of rising health care costs and the value of using a material deprivation lens to analyze United States poverty.

Like all Asset Building Program events, this panel was webcast live. Event footage is available after as well so you can always reference it on our site. At this event for the first time, we used the @AssetsNAF Twitter account to field comments and questions during the Q&A session at the end of the panel. If you live outside of the D.C. area, consider watching the webcast for future events and following along on Twitter.

Attachments: 

Half_in_Ten_Poverty.pdf

Pew_Economic_Mobility.pdf

WOW_Economic_Security.pdf

CBPP_Income_Inequality.pdf

As a child, I knew Santa was keeping an eye on me. Not because of that vague "naughty or nice" nonsense, but because my parents had a direct line to the jolly man from the north. A hotline, in fact. When my siblings and I misbehaved, my mother would pick up the phone and start to dial 1-800-YO-SANTA as she warned us that Santa was about to get an earful. She'd inform him that I was picking on my younger brother, or that he had been caught removing the screen in his bedroom window and attempting to climb onto the roof (again). She was such a tattle-tale. But it worked—we stopped fooling around.

I've long suspected that my father came up with the 1-800-YO-SANTA idea while under the influence of some yuletide spirits. But now it seems my parents should have purchased the phone number and charged $2.99 for the first five minutes (plus 99 cents for each additional minute), because there is clearly a market for supplementing Santa's surveillance. Hence the explosive popularity of The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition.

The Elf on the Shelf comes with a short picture book and a small, stiff doll. Parents read to their young kids the book, which tells the story of an elf who keeps an eye on a family during the day, then flies back to the North Pole at night to give Santa a sitrep. The tale helps build the holiday frenzy (and excitement for presents). Then, the parents put the elf somewhere in the house to watch over the children, their good deeds and bad. After the kids go to bed, when the elf is supposedly making its long commute back to the North Pole, the parents must move the doll to a new spot—a bookcase, the mantel, or some other cozy nook. Come morning, the kids try to find where the elf has situated itself for the new day. During sibling fights, moments of petulance, and other interludes of misbehavior, parents can point to the elf—whom the children have named—and say, "Do you want Santa to hear about this?" The elf-as-Big Brother effect, I hear, is a bit of Christmas magic for stressed-out moms and dads.

That magic has translated into big-time sales. Since it was first self-published in 2005 by the mother-and-daughter team Carol Aebersold and Chanda Bell, the book has sold more than 2 million copies. (The mother used to warn her kids in the '70s of an elf who would report back to Santa—see, Mom, you really should have made 1-800-YO-SANTA into a small business!) The company's revenue in 2010 reached nearly $10 million. Earlier this holiday season, a 30-minute version of the story aired on CBS. As with the American Girl dolls, parents can choose an elf that looks something like their family, though the options are a bit limited right now: dark-skinned boy with brown eyes; light-skinned, blue-eyed girl; blue-eyed boy.

To those of us without kids, though, the Elf on the Shelf can seem … creepy. There is something uncomfortably surveillance-state about the whole enterprise. It's the holidays with that extra little dash of 1984. As, the Washington Post's Hank Stuever wrote recently:

"The Elf on the Shelf" is just another nannycam in a nanny state obsessed with penal codes. As long as you believe in him, the pixie-scout elf is no different than the store security camera and the gizmo that automatically generates speeding tickets. The tattle-tale elf, who reports back to the corporate Christmas machine, fits right in with our times.

Parents aren't unaware of the slightly unnerving aspects of the elf. My Slate colleague Dan Kois says that his two kids adore their sprightly monitor, whom they've named Elvis. According to Kois, his children take the elf so seriously, "When friends come over, the kids tell them about Elvis and remind them that Elvis will tell Santa if they're good, too. Visiting our house is like visiting East Germany, circa 1983!"

I have to imagine that many of the millions who have purchased the book belong to or at least sympathize with the ACLU, support the protesters battling the authoritarian Syrian regime, and bristle about Facebook privacy. So where does this cognitive dissonance leave us? Is it shortsighted to encourage children to behave as if they are constantly watched? Perhaps the briefness of the elf's presence—most parents bring it out sometime after Thanksgiving—keeps it from conditioning children to tolerate, even expect, constant surveillance. But I've also heard parents say wistfully that they would like to have an elf as backup year-round.

If I had children, I'm sure I would appreciate having the support of a magical creature who could dole out rewards. (Didn't we used to call that "God"?) But removed from the necessity of maintaining household order, I find myself uncomfortable with the idea. But that is probably ridiculous: I tweet. I'm on Facebook (and am not terribly picky about whose friend requests I accept). How is the elf's (fake) watchful eye all that different from my new-mom friends who documented their pregnancies in extraordinary detail and now post pictures of their babies on a weekly basis? I'm already monitoring the behavior of infants I've never met. I see you when you're naughty, and by naughty, I mean not sleeping through the night or suffering from really explosive diarrhea, which your mommies shared with me and the rest of their acquaintances.

Perhaps the real pitfall of the Elf on the Shelf phenomenon is that parents can't rely on it to keep order for very long. Another Slate colleague tells me that she is particularly concerned that her twin boys will soon deduce from the stacks upon stacks of Elf on the Shelf merchandise at local stores that their elfin monitor is not unique to them. Learning there is no Santa can be traumatizing for kids. But losing the Elf on the Shelf might be devastating to their parents.

This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Schwartz Fellow Brigid Schulte and Global Assets Project Research Associate Nicole Tosh to mark International Women’s Day by discussing girl-centered poverty reduction programs and gender equality at work and at home.

Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post, is writing a book on the struggle of working mothers to manage the scarcest of all resources – time – in balancing work, family and their own well-being.

Schulte's latest article, What’s So Bad About American Parents, Anyway? appeared in ThePost on March 2.

Tosh, who works with the Global Savings and Social Protection Initiative in the Global Assets Project, has written a three-part blog series on girl-centered global development:

Part 1: Girl Talk: Don't Believe Everything You Hear
Part 2: Ending Child Marriage: The Unnecessary Paradox Between Development and Culture
Part 3: International Women's Day Celebrates 101 Years

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include our new Assets Report, welfare reform, food security, veterans, housing, tax time, alternatives to mainstream banking, economic security for the working poor, and student loan debt.<!--break-->

The Assets Report

The big news for us this week was the release of our annual Assets Report. The Assets Report 2012 is our analysis of the President’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget that looks at the different federal allocations to direct spending and tax subsidies that promote asset building. By our calculations, the budget includes about $548 billion in support for asset building, but the vast majority of this comes in the form of tax breaks that overwhelmingly go to higher income households. As Rachel Black points out, “spending billions of dollars to help the wealthy build wealth isn't effective policy or smart spending.” This year, we are particularly excited to release an accompanying infographic that we hope will help readers engage more actively with the report data. Take a look and tell us what you think here. You can also join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AssetsReport.

Welfare Reform

Jason DeParle has a thorough piece at the New York Times that looks at Arizona as a microcosm of the impacts 1996 welfare reform has had on low-income people. He outlines, in devastating detail, the measures families have taken just to scrape by, in the absence of a robust safety net. The legislative transition that accompanied reform was abrupt, he writes: “The old program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, dates from the New Deal; it gave states unlimited matching funds and offered poor families extensive rights, with few requirements and no time limits. The new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, created time limits and work rules, capped federal spending and allowed states to turn poor families away.” Both Ezra Klein and NPR have good follow-up coverage of the piece, elaborating on what all this means against the backdrop of conversation about different budget proposals.

Food Security

The U.S. Department of Agriculture released a new report looking at the role SNAP (food stamps) has played in reducing poverty over the past decade. The New York Times quotes Stacy Dean from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “SNAP plays a crucial, but often underappreciated, role in alleviating poverty.” The study found a particularly strong effect on child poverty: “The program lifted the average poor person’s income up about six percent closer to the [federal poverty] line over the length of the study, making poverty less severe. When the benefits were included in the income of families with children, the result was that children below the threshold moved about 11 percent closer to the line.” NPR reports on the work public schools are doing to make sure children across the U.S. are adequately fed in the form of breakfast, lunch and supper programs. Minnesota Public Radio is seeking stories from people who have received or have children who’ve received free or reduced price lunch. The Washington Post reports that the Manassas, Virginia farmers’ market is participating in a program that allows SNAP recipients to use their EBT cards and receive up to a $10 match when they buy produce at the market.

Veterans

U.S. News reports that “the population of female veterans without permanent shelter has more than doubled in the last half-dozen years and may continue climbing now that the Iraq war has ended, sending women home with the same stresses as their male counterparts — plus some gender-specific ones that make them more susceptible to homelessness.” Meanwhile, NPR reports on the phenomenon of for-profit educational institutions preying on veterans, who have access to federal funding for higher education and are therefore lucrative targets.

Housing

The Treasury Department is faulted in a new report from the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) for failing to do enough to relieve homeowners. The New York Times explains that the Hardest Hit Fund, described as “a fund to support homeowners in the communities hit hardest by the collapse of the housing bubble,” only disbursed 3% of its budget in the two years since its creation.  The TARP report “cited a lack of planning and leadership by the Treasury Department as the reason so little money has been spent.” Both Forbes and the Los Angeles Times report on the rules the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is developing for mortgage servicers. Forbes writer Halah Touryalai writes that “the CFPB wants the servicers to be a held to higher standard in order to clean up sloppy record keeping and bad practices,” to avoid what CFPB director Richard Cordray terms “surprises and runarounds.” The LA Times points out that these rules are similar to those that the five major banks named in the foreclosure settlement (which service 55% of all U.S. mortgages) agreed to: “measures to provide clearer information to customers, such as monthly bills that show unpaid principal, fees and charges.”

Despite all this and the fact that foreclosure activity is at a five-year low, RealtyTrac reports that banks will likely “repossess close to 1 million homes this year. Last year, lenders took back 804,000 homes.” In other housing news, a local paper from Fall River, Massachusetts looks at the local Housing Authority’s Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program. The FSS coordinators point out some of the barriers families face trying to move out of subsidized housing. (For example, with a 30,000 person waiting list for state child care vouchers, many participants are struggling to find affordable child care that would allow them to work more.) For more about the FSS program, check out our paper from last year, Taking Asset Building and Earnings Incentives to Scale in HUD-Assisted Rental Housing. Lastly, the Assistant Secretary for HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing has a piece at the Huffington Post that connects the dots on housing as a crucial building block for good health.

Tax Time

This op-ed from Iowa’s Des Moines Register makes the case for expanding EITC (Earned Income Tax Credit). The piece points out something we identify in our Assets Report: people who aren't homeowners miss out on the home mortgage interest deduction. They point out: “Low-income workers contribute to the economy and the common good in many ways, and they pay property, sales, gasoline and other taxes to support that common good. Doesn’t it make sense that low-income taxpayers should have a chance to achieve greater financial security, build an asset base, and plan for a better future?” The Washington Post and Asset Building Research Fellow David Rothstein write about the demise of the refund anticipation loan this year. RALs have historically posed a financial risk to low-income taxpayers because paying back the loan can ultimately eat up the actual refund. The Wall Street Journal has an article and accompanying video that recognize the tax time moment as a potential savings opportunity, particularly for low and middle-income households. Watch David Wessel explain below:

Bloomberg Businessweek has a great piece up about taxpayer behavior and director of the Taxpayer Advocate Service, Nina Olson. The piece is long, but a fascinating read and full of tidbits about the tax code and the ins and outs of the IRS (100,000 employees! 3.8 million words in the tax code!) Here's a quote from Olson: “Taxpayers bring a whole bundle of life circumstances, history, economic circumstances, baggage, biases.… They bring a whole bundle of things to the table. Your job is to listen to what they’re bringing.”

Banking Alternatives

Students at an elementary school in Auburn, NY are learning about savings accounts by opening real accounts with a local bank that comes to their school to collect deposits. The article describes the incentive system (small prizes) as well as the program’s goal of expanding financial services to kids of all income backgrounds. This 2 minute video from Roberto Daza for The Economist “Banking the Underbanked” highlights the work of a San Jose, California credit union that describes itself as a “hybrid check cashing/credit union concept” that is aiming to meet customers “where they are both physically and in their financial lives.” Bloomberg Businessweek reports that prepaid card use is up 18% in 2011 due to a drop in consumer use of mainstream products. Depending on the card fees, prepaid cards may end up being more costly than some checking accounts, the article notes. Spending on credit and debit cards is up, Visa and Mastercard both report. TIME looks at the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group proposal for reforming the credit score. The Advocate has a piece describing conversations between the Louisiana state legislature and banks over the new practice of providing state tax returns on debit cards. One state representative said, “I have to tell you I’m finding a lot of resistance back in my district,” adding “I know y’all aren’t doing it for nothing. You’re not doing it as a service for the state.” Concerns range from a worry that people in rural areas won’t be able to access funds, that elderly residents will struggle with the new system, and that people will incur fees (the first withdrawal is free but there are fees for non-Chase ATM withdrawals).

Economic Security for the Working Poor

Reuters reports that the number of people classified as “working poor” rose in 2010, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Cuts to subsidized child care in California, this Huffington Post piece argues, will place an added burden on working poor parents: “child care absorbs as much as one-third of total household income among poor families with small children, according to Census data.” Matt Yglesias argues that anti-poverty spending cuts will have a disproportionate impact on women. Jodie Levin-Epstein of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) takes a critical look at Brookings data on marriage as a solution to poverty and concludes that a range of factors make marriage a questionable route out of poverty, in part because “one plus one does not always add up to two stable incomes.” Although unemployment has improved somewhat in recent months, there remain 3.66 unemployed people for each new job opening, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Student Loan Debt

This New York Times opinion piece looks at new legislation that will “require colleges and lenders to do a better job of making students aware of their borrowing options and the marked difference between federal and private student loans.” The differences include interest rates, default protection, and deferral policies, but many students aren't aware.  New America’s Education Policy Program has more on their blog about the Know Before You Owe Private Student Loan Act.

The Asset Building News Week is a weekly Friday feature on The Ladder, the Asset Building Program blog, designed to help readers keep up with news and developments in the asset building field. This week's topics include childcare, food security, housing and foreclosures, and financial products.

Childcare and Education

The Urban Institute has a series this week on their blog about childcare. The first part looks at the challenge of finding quality, affordable care, particularly for immigrant parents who face additional barriers when locating services. The second part looks at raising awareness of different local options and the third focuses on the supply and demand dynamics for childcare. Also check out this new video from Half in Ten that features interviews with Head Start families and teachers discussing how important the program is to low-income families and young children. A new report shows a widening achievement gap among high and low-income students. Finally, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a set of infographics that illustrate education-based health disparities. For example, they find that college graduates can expect to live a full five years longer than people who do not finish high school.

Food Security

A new study shows that food insecurity (the inability to access enough food for a healthy life) compounds the problems people living with AIDS already face. The San Francisco Chronicle also notes that only a fifth of study participants received federal food assistance, such as SNAP (food stamps), which suggests increasing participation may be a potential avenue for improving the situation. Grist looks at recent Gallup data on food hardship and notices something interesting: many of the states with high rates of people unable to afford food historically vote Republican. A new report from the U.S. Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund shows that 24.8 million Americans live in areas with limited supermarket access. The Huffington Post looks at the issue of senior poverty, profiling a 74-year-old woman who relies on $140 every month in food stamps after losing her retirement savings when the stock market crashed.

Housing, Poverty, and Foreclosures

Hurricane Isaac’s trajectory across the Southeastern U.S. prompted stories about ongoing economic difficulties in New Orleans. The Seattle Times reports that seven years post-Katrina, the number of homeless people there has doubled and describes ongoing outreach efforts to connect the homeless population with resources and housing. Meanwhile, with the Republican National Convention underway in Florida, both Al Jazeera and CBS News covered the high level of homelessness in Tampa. The New York Daily News and Buzzfeed both have pieces critiquing the utter silence from politicians on the issue of poverty during this campaign. As John Stanton writes, “The talk in Tampa will be entirely of the middle class, but I wonder whether at least some of those in the middle class might want to hear politicians’ plans to help the poor.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has released new guidance for housing authorities on how to manage waiting lists for public housing and voucher programs. Voter outreach organizations are finding that the foreclosure crisis is making their work more difficult, as addresses change and houses are left uninhabited. NPR reports that according to the Office of Mortgage Settlement Oversight, Bank of America has not modified any loans following the 2011 agreement with the federal government to do so. The New York Times reports that GFI Mortgage Bankers has “agreed to pay more than $3.5 million to settle allegations by federal prosecutors that it charged higher interest rates and fees on mortgages to nonwhite borrowers than to whites with similar financial backgrounds.”  The money will go to “600 black and Hispanic borrowers who federal authorities said paid unfairly high rates from 2005 through 2009.”

Financial Products

From cradle to grave, Americans have little in the way of savings: TIME Moneyland reports that very few children are saving any of their allowance money and Marketwatch writes that roughly half of Americans die with almost nothing left in the bank. On a somewhat cheerier note, Bank On Greater Cincinnati is reporting on its first year of success: helping over 1,000 previously unbanked residents access bank accounts. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal takes a look at Bank of America’s adoption of easy to understand fee disclosures, which are designed to help consumers better understand their account terms.

Quick Hits

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research looks at the issue of small dollar lending and credit products.

Maine is imposing a 60-month time limit for people receiving TANF benefits. The change in policy is causing many people to turn to help from town-level general assistance funds, putting a strain on local resources.

Bryce Covert with The Nation looks at the data behind the latest jobs numbers and finds that discrimination may be driving hiring trends in the retail sector.

As the school year starts again, parents across the country are concerned with finding reliable, safe and affordable child care. But with the presidential elections in full swing, neither President Obama nor Governor Romney has made much mention of child care or early learning.

Discussions of the economy have dominated the political landscape, discounting the critical role that child care plays in supporting working parents. But many voters are parents, and all Americans have a vested interest in a high-quality, effective early learning infrastructure, especially for disadvantaged children. So what should the presidential candidates be saying about child care and early education?

Join the New America Foundation for a discussion of early learning politics and policy next week on September 27 from 12:30-2:00 PM.  The event will be moderated by David Gray, director of New America’s Workforce and Family Program, whose recent Huffington Post blog, “Child Care Missing From Party Platforms,” provides more context on this issue. Participants include:

• Lisa Guernsey, director of the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative;
• Grace Reef, chief of Policy and Evaluation for Child Care Aware® of America (formerly NACCRRA);
• Christopher Toppings, Legislative Assistant in the office of Senator Richard Burr (R-NC)
• Robert H. Dugger, chairman of the ReadyNation Advisory Board and of the Invest in Kids Working Group; and
• Helen Blank, director of Leadership and Public Policy for the National Women’s Law Center.

We look forward to seeing you at the event. Register now. (Video of the event will also be available on the registration page.)

States around the country have big plans to improve the collection and coordination of data on young children, including data dashboards, scorecards and tools for tracking the well-being of children from the day they are born. But how -- and if --  these plans turn into reality depends on whether they can win support from federal  grants, state funds or private philanthropy, according to a report released today by the Early Childhood Data Collaborative.

In Developing Coordinated Longitudinal Early Childhood Data Systems, members of the Collaborative analyzed the plans of 35 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC as described last year in applications for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC).  Of the 37 applicants in the competition, 30 included details on improving state data systems.

The Collaborative is a partnership led by Child Trends in conjunction with six other national organizations* that focus on early education. Its inaugural report, published in 2011, provides a baseline report on the state of statewide early childhood data systems.

The Collaborative’s analysis starts by pointing out that timely, reliable data is scarce, with policymakers often unable to get answers to basic questions on the number of children participating in high-quality programs. In fact, as we reported last week, it’s even difficult to get comprehensive information at the local level on the number of children participating in pre-K programs or gaining access to full-day kindergarten at all, let alone whether they are enrolled in classrooms or centers that meet a high bar for quality.    

The report spotlights several ideas states have put forward to improve the ability to link data between databases and enable the tracking of individual children’s progress over time, across multiple providers of child care, preschool and, in places where links are made to K-12 education data, to the public school system.

Rhode Island, for example, plans to build a universal database that includes data on individual children starting at birth. It proposes to build on its public health data system called KIDSNET that tracks immunizations and data from newborn screenings and connect that data to the statewide longitudinal data system for K-12 education.  Rhode Island is a triple winner– winning an RTT-ELC grant, a K-12 Race to the Top grant and a competitive grant from the Maternal Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program – so it may actually have the dollars to bring this kind of longitudinal database to fruition.

Other innovations revolve around the creation of portals or dashboards. Minnesota, for example, proposed the creation of a web-based dashboard that can create reports tailored for different audiences of parents, administrators and teachers. Pennsylvania wants to develop a “provider scorecard” that includes data on individual preschool and child care providers, such as how many stars they have earned in the state’s quality improvement and rating system (QRIS), the credentials of members of the workforce and data on  children’s growth and development.  Minnesota was an RTT-ELC winner.  

Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Illinois are three examples of states that proposed new strategies for linking data from early childhood programs with K-12 systems, according to the report. And at least nine states proposed integrating Head Start data into coordinated state-based systems of early education.

The breadth of ideas in the report show that many states would like to tackle the problem of disparate and disconnected early childhood data – a good sign. One thing missing from states’ plans, however, is any mention of how to provide good, comprehensive data on pre-K and kindergarten enrollment and funding to leaders at the local level, whether superintendents of school districts or county supervisors.  This omission likely derives from the fact that those data points did not appear to be priorities for the U.S. Department of Education, nor the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources, when writing the guidelines for the RTT-ELC.  In our report last week, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten, we highlighted the need for states to collect basic data from the local level that can be integrated into school district databases, and we described the need for a task force to help states and the federal government agree to some common definitions for data collection. We hope that work may flourish on its own, but as made clear in the Collaborative’s report, improving data systems often requires a boost from programs like the RTT-ELC or other federal funding streams. 

If there is a next iteration of Race to the Top grants (both K-12 and the Early Learning Challenge), improving local data collection should be a priority, helping to ensure that reliable and usable data is part of states’ longitudinal systems.

*The six organizations are the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC-Berkeley, the Council of Chief State School Officers, Data Quality Campaign, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, and the Pew Home Visiting Campaign.

CORRECTION 9/25 at 2:15 p.m.: An original version of this article incorrectly stated that Minnesota was not an RTT-ELC winner. It was.

Last week, the Newark Star-Ledger's Linda Ocasio asked me why our presidential candidates should be talking about early learning and child care -- the lead topic in an open panel discussion hosted by the Early Education Initiative and the Workforce and Family Program in Washington, D.C. this Thursday.

I answered with three main reasons: the potential for childcare to boost parents' ability to climb the job ladder and strengthen the economy, the tight connection between strong early learning experiences and children's later success in school and the urgent need to counter the pernicious effects of worsening child poverty in this country. The United States is one of the richest nations in the world, and yet nearly one in four children under age 6 are in poverty, and that number soars to more than one in two children when looking at families led by single mothers, according to Census numbers released earlier this month.

The Star-Ledger's Q-and-A also gave me a chance to explain why we need increased funding for early learning programs to prevent staff turnover, increase professional development opportunities for teachers and open access to more children. I also noted how quality rating and improvement systems are ramping up in dozens of states around the country.

In another venue last week, Dana Goldstein, one of New America's Schwartz fellows, also discussed the importance of early education and how it is playing out in the presidential campaign. Listen to her interview on the Brian Leher Show that includes a detailed discussion of what quality learning experiences look like in pre-K classrooms. (Goldstein begins speaking at minute 25.)

Also don't miss David Gray, director of New America's Workforce and Family Program, in his Huffington Post blog earlier this month pointing out that child care is oddly missing from both presidential candidates' policy platforms.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on New America's Education Policy program blog, Early Ed Watch.

A new report from two child advocacy groups, First Focus and Save the Children, gave the United States a grade of C- on children’s issues for last year. The report, America’s Report Card 2012, considered White House, federal agency, state and community efforts on family economic security; early childhood and K-12 education; permanency and stability in welfare programs and for immigrant families; and children’s health and safety. The groups examined federal, state and local efforts in each of these areas, and gave scores according to qualitative analyses.

The report issued the United States a C+ for early learning programs and a D for access to child care. The early learning grade reflects falling funding for state-funded pre-K programs and limited enrollment in Head Start and Early Head Start. Here at New America, the Federal Education Budget Project and the Early Education Initiative collaborated to collect and display data detailing funding and enrollment for state-funded pre-K and federal Head Start and special education programs across the country. According to our analysis, half of the 40 states with state-funded pre-K programs reported no increase or a drop in funding for state-funded pre-K from 2010 to 2011. One state, Arizona, eliminated its pre-K program last year. Meanwhile, in 25 of the 40 states with pre-K programs, enrollment increased, which means many states were forced to either limit access to pre-K or stretch resources to cover more children.

Federal Head Start funding increased from 2010 to 2011 in all but three states, and enrollment increased in all but five, but the report’s authors also measured enrollment in these programs against the number of eligible children. They found that in 2010, less than five percent of eligible children under age 3 and only 29 percent of eligible children aged 3-5 were enrolled in Head Start.

The report’s overall assessment of early childhood education does not weigh the quality of various Head Start programs, nor does it take into account the Obama administration’s Head Start recompetition process, which aims to improve quality by forcing subpar Head Start providers to compete for federal funds.

In access to child care, the U.S. rated even lower than it did in early learning programs. According to the report, only one in six eligible families actually receive federal child care assistance from any of the relevant programs, including the Child Care Development Fund, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and the Social Services Block Grant. Again, efforts by the White House and by governors across the country to improve the quality of child care programs by installing and incenting participation in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems did not earn the nation any extra credit.

Perhaps the most disturbing grade in the report was the D for children’s “economic security.” The organizations cited census numbers that show one in four children under five were living in poverty in 2011; Department of Labor statistics that show 7.7 percent of parents with children were unemployed; and USDA numbers that show more than 8.5 million kids were in homes without enough to eat.

With growing numbers of single-parent families and unemployed and low-income parents, children are feeling the brunt of the recession. Census statistics show 57.2 percent of kids with single moms were in poverty in 2011 – more than four and a half times the rate for children in two-parent homes. State budgets are just beginning to bounce back from recession-based shrinking, and tight budgets typically mean less access to affordable child care, pre-K and other early learning programs. According to America’s Report Card 2012, that means the U.S. is not serving families well at the time many most need help.

Each January, Early Ed Watch predicts where we will see the most action, innovation and consternation in the year ahead. Here are the hot spots we see for 2013. Notable is the absence of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act, otherwise known as No Child Left Behind. Prognosticators don’t give the bill much chance of making progress this year, given stalemates between the two houses of Congress.

The Child Care Development Block Grant, on the other hand, could see some action on Capitol Hill.  Debates on how to evaluate teachers will likely continue to dominate, as they did in 2011 and 2012. And at least one topic has popped up consistently since 2010 when we started this exercise: Head Start reform via the new "re-competition” process.

Have we missed anything? Let us know by posting a comment below or dropping us a line. We’d love to get your input.

#1 Big Budget Questions

In recent years, Congress has struggled to pass federal spending bills on time. This year, there’s an added twist: Only weeks before lawmakers will have to contend with the expiration of a six-month stopgap funding bill on March 27, they will also have to address mandatory across-the-board spending cuts. These “sequesters,” which will affect public schools, child care, Head Start, and the Early Learning Challenge, were originally scheduled to take effect on January 2, 2013, but were delayed in a last-minute agreement until March 1. And in addition to sequestration and the expiring 2013 funding bill, the U.S. hit the debt ceiling on New Year’s Eve. Members of Congress will be forced to take up all three issues in the beginning of 2013 – and that will all be before we get to the start of fiscal year 2014 in only 10 months, on October 1. Meanwhile, state funding for early childhood and PreK-3rd education could vary tremendously, with states such as Illinois facing drastic budget problems and others finally rebounding from the recession.

#2 Defining Effective Teachers

Efforts to improve the quality of teaching continue to drive policies for fixing public education, both in pre-K settings such as Head Start and in PreK-12 schools. Districts across the country will be implementing new approaches that link teachers’ evaluations to their students’ test scores and other indicators of how much children have learned. (We already saw a flare-up around this issue in Chicago last year.) In the PreK-3^rd grades, the result could become a minefield, since standardized test scores are not readily available in most of those grades and many early childhood experts advise against using high-stakes one-time tests with young children. Another hot spot centers on improving the rigor of the observation of teachers in the classroom, something we've argued for in Watching Teachers Work. And teaching preparation will hit the headlines too as education schools and other workforce and teacher-prep programs are scrutinized for evidence that their graduates make a difference.

#3 Reforming Head Start

This spring, pre-K providers around the country will anxiously await an announcement of the winners of Head Start grants under a new, controversial funding regime officially known as Designation Renewal and informally called “re-competition.” The announcements were originally expected last December, but as first reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pushed the date off. More than 500 organizations applied and expert panels of 250 reviewers will evaluate their applications, according to Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, director of the Office of Head Start.  More details on how the new funding process works can be found in our recent issue brief, Reforming Head Start: What ‘Re-competition’ Means for the Federal Government’s Pre-K Program, and basic information on how Head Start works in our Federal Education Budget Project. Also to watch: any fall-out from the controversial Head Start Impact Study, which released its third-grade results a few weeks ago.

#4 More Races to the Top?

For the past three years in the PreK-12 world, Race to the Top -- a competition among states, and most recently districts, for generous federal grants -- has reigned as the most talked-about federal program to improve public education. The Early Learning Challenge, part of Race to the Top, has dominated discussions on how to improve publicly-funded programs for children from birth to age 5. Will tightening budgets and the threat of sequester spell the end of Race to the Top? If there is another round of the competition, will it include early learning – and might it enable better coordination between those programs and PreK-12 districts? Other big questions are the fate of the Striving Readers competition, a birth-to-12^th grade program aimed at states; the Investing in Innovation Fund, which supplies competitive grants to non-profits and schools; and the Promise Neighborhoods program, which funds local-led initiatives to improve educational outcomes for children in high-poverty neighborhoods by providing comprehensive health, safety, and other support.

#5 A Dearth of Good Data

Last September, the Early Education Initiative integrated district-level pre-K data into the Federal Education Budget Project database for the first time. In doing so, it became clear just how far states still have to go in collecting data and using the information to design better, more equitable policies. Many elementary school principals and superintendents don’t even know how many children coming to their schools were enrolled in pre-K and superintendents have no way to accurately compare pre-K and kindergarten funding to their neighboring districts. The Early Childhood Data Collaborative has also been beating the drum for better data. In a recent webinar it focused on the use of program, teacher and child data in the Early Learning Challenge program. But even the basic data on pre-K programs available now might not be next year. As Early Education Initiative director Lisa Guernsey wrote in October, the National Institute for Early Education Research may not have the necessary funding to publish their annual State of Preschool Yearbook. We’ve recommended establishing a national task force to study the issue of data in early childhood education, and we’ll be watching the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, along with state leadership, to see whether they address these critical issues in the coming year.

#6  A New Child Care Bill?

Before last year’s presidential election and the fiscal cliff got in the way, members of the Senate were making progress in drafting a bill that would reauthorize the Child Care Development Block Grant, the legislation that allows Congress to give money to states to put toward subsidizing child care for low-income families. (See David Gray’s update from the child care event we co-hosted with his Workforce and Family Program in September.) Congress may take up that task again this year, if it can get past the now-postponed “fiscal cliff” deadline looming in March. Reports have shown that the United States lags woefully behind other countries on providing access to good child care. But debates are coming over whether it is fair to tighten standards, or even just require background checks, with little promise of new funding.

#7 Monitoring States’ NCLB Waivers

In the last year, 34 states and Washington, D.C. were awarded waivers by the U.S. Department of Education allowing them to abandon certain provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) -- particularly the requirement for all students to reach proficiency in reading and math by the end of the 2013-2014 school year. Ten additional states have waiver applications pending or plan to apply. Yet relief from NCLB comes at a price. States are required to overhaul school accountability systems, implement new standards and assessments and tie educator evaluations to student achievement. Waivers are often confusing for parents and even education experts to understand. Will state education officials improve their efforts to explain the new policies? More important, will they be receptive and responsive to public feedback? For example, while we were disappointed with states’ lack of attention to early learning in the waivers, advocates could lobby officials to better integrate the early grades into states’ plans.

#8 The Role of Early Learning in School Turnarounds

The federal government’s “turnaround” initiative -- known as the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program -- received a makeover and a one-time, $3 billion influx in funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Now experts are wondering if the SIG investment has paid off. In November, the U.S. Department of Education released the first snapshot of school performance from hundreds of schools receiving SIG funds, yet the data left us with more questions than answers. Here at Early Ed Watch, we are particularly interested in whether PreK-3^rd grade initiatives or other early learning programs are being used as an effective school turnaround strategy. For instance, the Department noted that a larger proportion of elementary schools saw student achievement gains in the first year of the SIG program, compared to middle and high schools. Did access to early learning -- if it was even offered -- affect student outcomes? For a discussion of these questions and more, join us on January 14 at our event Turnaround 2.0:  Tapping the Potential of the PreK-3rd Grades to Improve Schools.

#9 A Continued Push for Literacy

Several forces combined in 2012 to keep literacy on the radar screen in state houses around the country. The nationwide Campaign for Grade-Level Reading spotlighted the continued low achievement of disadvantaged student groups on national reading tests, and 124 cities signaled their commitment to closing those gaps. Governors and state legislatures raised the issue of early literacy as well, with some of the attention resulting in new laws. Several of those laws require children to be held back from advancing to fourth grade if they cannot pass reading tests. Several of those laws keep children from advancing to fourth grade if they cannot pass state reading tests. We’ve questioned the wisdom of those third-grade retention policies, especially because research has not yet untangled whether retention by itself makes a difference. And previous studies have shown that repeating a grade can have ill effects on students over time.  We’ll be watching whether states that have legislated the threat of retention will also make it possible for children to achieve by building strong early learning and kindergarten programs and by redoubling efforts to ensure that teachers in the early grades are effective at teaching reading.

#10  Library and Tech-Assisted Partnerships

At the end of 2012, the Institute for Museum and Library Services convened a group of experts on libraries and early childhood to lift up the often-forgotten role that libraries can play for families, schools and early childhood programs.  The Office of Head Start issued a memo on this issue last spring, and we outlined new possibilities in a technology brief for the Education Commission of the States last summer. Continued momentum could come from the Institute’s report, expected later this year. We’ll also be watching and participating in a series of forums and webinars that note the potential in sharing print and digital resources, early literacy personnel and tech-assisted outreach programs, such as those noted in our recent report with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center for the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West: Empowering Parents and Educators.

As President Obama gave his second inaugural address yesterday, many of us couldn’t help but linger over these words:  “We are true to our creed,” Obama said, “when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.” 

Could Obama be signaling that he plans to push for better opportunities for young children? If so, exactly what does he have in mind? Last Monday, at an event here at the New America Foundation, White House education adviser Roberto Rodriguez offered detailed remarks about challenges that remain in early education and said the administration is “committed to an agenda that has at its center quality, innovation and access.” Access and quality have been named as agenda items for years, and “innovation” is obviously part of the Investing in Innovation Fund (and arguably, the Early Learning Challenge grants), but these are relatively small programs. So far, the Obama Administration has not made sweeping changes that could open early childhood education to many more children. With funds tight, what might be ahead?

An article in the Huffington Post last Friday, “Obama Evaluating Early Childhood Education Push in his Second Term,” contributed to the hubbub by reporting a potential new universal pre-K program for 4-year olds, to be managed by states.* Columnist Ezra Klein of the Washington Post noted yesterday that rumors abound over what early childhood changes the president may announce.

But before early childhood observers and advocates get too excited (or concerned), remember: There is not yet any actual proposal to analyze. Obama administration officials are mum about what might be coming. The Department of Education’s acting press secretary Daren Briscoe said on Monday that the Huffington Post piece contained inaccuracies but would not comment further.

It is unlikely that even broad strokes will be visible before Obama’s State of the Union address on February 12. And if the president describes policy changes at that time, the details may not be available until the release of his budget proposals for fiscal 2014, which will be released later than the usual early February time frame.

So at the moment, our job is to hone our questions: Are yet more big changes ahead for Head Start, and how much change is even possible without Congress reauthorizing the Head Start law? Will the two U.S. agencies -- the U.S. Department of Education and Health and Human Services -- come up with new ways to encourage states to blend child care subsidies and Head Start dollars?  Could the pending reauthorization of the Child Care and Redevelopment Block Grant make any difference? Will the U.S. Department of Education encourage states and school districts to use existing federal dollars (such as Title I, for disadvantaged children, and Title II, for professional development) to increase access and quality of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten programs? Have they found more carrots and sticks to enable them to do so? Or could another Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge be in the offing?

Ever since the downscaling of the 2009 vision for the Early Learning Challenge, and the lack of attention to early learning in the presidential campaign, many advocates have been hungering for Obama to do something bolder in the early childhood realm. For example, two weeks ago, the Schott Foundation and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education issued an open letter to Obama calling on him to focus on early childhood education.  My colleague Laura Bornfreund, in her remarks at our event at the New America Foundation last week, urged the administration to push states and districts to improve children’s first years in elementary school -- from pre-K through third grades -- as part of efforts to turnaround failing schools.  Numbers released last month from the Child Well-Being Index, which show an increase in child poverty and a decrease in median family incomes since 2001, add urgency to these arguments. 

It’s easy to get jaded here in Washington, especially when the pending fiscal fights of 2013 loom large. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be watching closely to see if maybe something new and bold might come from Obama’s second term to give that little girl born into the bleakest poverty a better chance to succeed.

* I was interviewed by Huffington Post reporter Joy Resmovits last month. My quoted comments in her January 18 article derived from my attempt to set some historical context. I was asked about the idea of sending federal dollars to states, instead of directly to local organizations, to run Head Start centers.

The American social contract is in crisis. Even before the Great Recession exposed its inadequacy, it was clear that the existing American social contract — the system of policies and institutions designed to provide adequate incomes and economic security for all Americans — needed to be reformed to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. What is needed is not mere incremental tinkering, but rather rethinking and reconstruction. Policies that have worked should be expanded, while others that have failed should be replaced. The result should not be just a modification of today’s partly failed economic security system, but a substantially reformed system incorporating the soundest elements of the old — a new social contract for a new America.

Click here to read "The Next Social Contract: An American Agenda for Reform," by Michael Lind.

Attachments: 

Lind_Michael_NextSocialContract_2013.pdf

The Asset Building Program is hosting an event Monday to feature Jonathan Cohn’s recent article for The New Republic "The Hell of American Day Care." A great panel will help us piece together the complicated picture of day care systems (or lack thereof) in America and offer ideas that address the issue from multiple angles. RSVP to come Monday at 12:15pm or tune in online to watch live. Bring your lunch with you; we'll have cookies, water, and soda waiting for you.

Cohn's article details the tragic outcomes of our inadequate, unequal, and essentially unregulated day care system. Stressed by the demands of the workplace and facing a dearth of quality day care options, families struggle with difficult decisions. Many child care workers are poorly compensated and inadequately trained, and few workplaces are set up to support parents as they seek out better options. With limited public funding allocated for creating, evaluating, regulating and maintaining high-quality day care facilities, millions of young children miss out on valuable early educational opportunities, and their parents struggle to stay in the workplace.

We'll ask our panel to reflect on strategies that can improve both our early education system and workplace support for families more broadly. What changes to the system would help children, especially children with low-income parents, to achieve better academic and social outcomes? Can we design programs and policies that work both to build economic stability for families and a better future for children? We'll explore "two-generation" strategies that simultaneously address the needs of both parents and their children, to provide early educational opportunities and support for parents participating in the workforce.

If you're on Twitter, join the conversation by tweeting @AssetsNAF with the hashtag #fixingdaycare. 

The Asset Building Program and New America’s Early Education Initiative co-hosted an event yesterday on “The Hell of American Daycare,” so titled after a recent piece by Jonathan Cohn for The New Republic. Cohn and a panel of experts explored this controversial issue at the intersection between early education and the American workforce. Asset Building Program director Reid Cramer introduced the subject of child care as an “issue at the heart of the social contract.” The event made clear that today’s workforce cannot succeed without adequate, affordable child care to which it can entrust its children; that those children cannot succeed without safe, stimulating experiences in their earliest years; and that tomorrow’s workforce will not thrive without the formative educational experiences only pre-kindergarten learning can provide.

Jonathan Cohn began the event by discussing his piece and recounting some of the most horrendous stories about how bad child care abuses can be. He made sure to point out that these were not isolated incidents; rather, what is so shocking about this whole subject is that we truly have a “system” of negligent (even felonious) child care in this country, not just a set of “scandals.” His examples demonstrate that not only are certain irresponsible child care workers offering services without regulatory oversight, but that the regulatory system itself is unable to enforce even the states’ own lax standards. Either the states’ regulatory agencies lack the statutory authority to conduct thorough inspections and deliver meaningful penalties, or they lack the funding to do so effectively. Either way, Cohn and the other panelists agree that a national set of standards and regulations would be one way to limit the occurrences of such tragedies. Unlike health care, child care is not that complicated, he argued. To provide good child care, we merely need good care givers. Yet since the average provider earns just $19,000 per year (which, he notes, is less than janitors, parking lot attendants, and retail workers), we get what we pay for. Still, raising prices would not necessarily solve the problem when so many working families cannot afford child care as it is.

Karen Kornbluh, the former Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, suggested a few solutions to this current state of affairs. In particular, she pointed to the experiences of countries like France and Sweden that have robust child care systems that provide affordable and safe child care for all families. By comparison, the United States is very often a low outlier, or at least embarrassingly far down on the list, on measures of child poverty, early education spending, and quality of child care. The United States is the only country in the OECD in which the public school system exacerbates income inequality rather than improves it, Kornbluh stated. A big part of that, she says, is due to a lack of quality early education.

Brigid Schulte, a Schwartz Fellow at New America and a reporter for the Washington Post, spoke next about her work reporting on child care in Virginia and alerted the audience to the astounding fact that one half of all children in child care in Virginia Beach are receiving unregulated care. Child care providers affiliated with a religious institution are exempt from regulatory oversight in Virginia, a fact which Schulte blames in part for the death of an infant who suffocated while not being watched by a child care provider. Some of the regulatory holes evident in Virginia were supposed to be filled by federal legislation passed by Congress during the Nixon administration that would have allowed for universal access to child care. The bill was vetoed by that president, however, because of fears that it advanced “Soviet Union-style totalitarianism.”

According to Lisa Guernsey, the director of New America’s Early Education Initiative, the issue of access to child care is so important that the conversation surrounding it deserves to be reframed as one not around facilitating work for adults, but around education for children. Child care workers must be treated and educated first and foremost as teachers, not merely babysitters who respond to the basic needs of their charges. Even in infancy, she argued, children learn from their surroundings and daily experiences, so poor quality child care in which the child receives low stimulation is a lost opportunity to provide essential early education.

The Obama administration’s recent push for universal pre-K is a step in the right direction, according to Guernsey, though Cohn is doubtful about the possibility of its passage. Because of recent research showing the importance of early education for later outcomes, and because of the Obama administration’s famous evidence-based approach to policymaking, Cohn and Guernsey are both optimistic about the education community’s support for better child care. Such an alliance could bring together important voices in the push to reform our current, broken system.  Accessible and affordable high-quality child care remains central to fulfilling the social contract. The panelists agree that the issue is one that demands a more rigorous national conversation for the sake of our workers, our children, and our future.

You can see a full-length video of the event here and check out tweets from the event here.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared on New America's In The Tank blog.

The average childcare worker in the U.S. earns less than a janitor. Sure, some daycare centers pay well, but the average parent can’t afford those high-end centers that can cost as much as public university tuition.

Piling on to that: The daycare industry is largely unregulated with low standards on quality of care. At an event this week based off of a recent New Republic article, The Hell of American Daycare, panelists showed how that painful reality -- a broken system full of tales of toddler deaths and injuries – can also have dire consequences for our economy.

Afterwards, we asked three of the event panelists, Reid Cramer,Brigid Schulte and Lisa Guernsey, to reflect on how we begin to fix the biggest problems in the system, how it got so defective, and why everyone, not just parents, should care about improving daycare. Their edited answers are below.

If you could write a presidential speech that argued for more investment in early education and childcare, how would you write the paragraph that opened the case for it?

Reid Cramer: Our existing childcare system is a mess. Here’s what we know: caregivers are poorly compensated and not adequately trained. Facilities receive little oversight, the quality varies, and the costs are high. This means that care expenses can eat up the majority of earnings for a parent working full-time at the minimum wage. And even then they can’t be sure their child is getting good care. High-income families can buy their way out with money and a bit of luck, but low-income parents have poor and painful choices. Our childcare “system” is a scandal - and a source of financial instability, anxiety, and stress. It doesn’t have to be this way.  

How has America's historic understanding of the role of government – and the role of women – played a role in our stunted system?

Brigid Schulte: Americans have come a long way in recent decades. Polls show that nearly everyone agrees that women should be educated and can work in any field. But those same polls show we’re not quite sure what we think this woman should do once she has a baby. Both men and women are ambivalent about whether mothers of young children should be away from them at all.

That ambivalence is a big reason why we have yet to make much universal and sustained progress on changing the structure and culture of the workplace, on implementing good family policy and ensuring that everyone has access to good, high quality childcare. If we’re not so sure Mom should work, why should we make it easier for her to do so?

What I find fascinating, however, is that these polls never ask the equally important question: should fathers of young children work? We need to understand that both mothers and fathers do work, out of both choice and need. And that both mothers and fathers want to have close and meaningful ties with their children.

Once we recognize that childcare is not just a “Mommy issue” for those mean, selfish working moms and recognize that it’s something that families need – and that businesses need to get the most out of their workforce – that’s when we’ll start to see real change.

Lisa Guernsey: I’d like to twist the question a bit. We should also be asking: How has America’s historic understanding of children -- and how they grow -- played a role in our stunted system? The average American adult is not yet aware of how much children’s brains are shaped by interactions with adults and peers in their environment.  Science shows us that there are significant differences in growth between a child who has access to individualized attention and nurturing conversation, and a child who spends hours each day in lousy childcare with adults who pay little attention to him and who rarely have conversations that extend beyond “Drink your milk. Don’t touch that. Here are some crayons.” When policymakers and the Average American Voter begin to recognize how much the foundation of learning for the next generation is formed by experiences in these early years, we may start seeing some breakthroughs.  Fortunately, we already have seen the impact of this new thinking in the last decade of home visiting programs for mothers of infants and in state-funded preschool. We need the momentum to continue.

What single change in state legislation is required to make daycare serve the population more effectively, either from an economic or educational perspective?

Lisa Guernsey: No one state law or regulation will solve this problem, of course. A focus on quality (higher standards) and access (more dollars to be able to serve more low-income families) are key. But here’s one often-overlooked method for pushing people to recognize those needs:  Collect and publicize data on how many children and how many families are underserved in each city and school district. Until people see data on the number of children going without good care in their own towns and neighborhoods, the severity of the problem may not register with them. (For more on the data issue, see our paper Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level.) Then couple that with stories like the ones told by Jonathan Cohn and Brigid Schulte at New America’s recent The Hell of American Daycare event, so that people see real families and the potential for real tragedy if something is not done.

Schulte:  It would be great to fully fund the Child Care Development Fund that provides subsidies to help low-income families pay for the often exorbitant cost of childcare. Right now, the $5 billion the federal government spends, with states kicking in various sums, covers only one in six eligible children, or about 1.6 million children, according to research by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. (See Schulte's piece in the Washington Post about the struggles of parents in Washington, D.C., trying to get a childcare subsidy – and often losing their jobs in the process).

But that’s not likely to happen, given the tough economic times and a political climate that favors budget cuts, particularly to the social safety net. So a far better and perhaps far more powerful change would be to change the fairly universal mindset that low-income parents are bent on scamming the system. Right now, it is sometimes close to impossible for low-income parents to even get a subsidy. The way systems operate now in most states is unwieldy, paperwork-intensive and humiliating. Streamlining the process, too, has been found to give parents greater stability at work, children less disruption with childcare and has actually saved states money.

Why should those of us who don't have kids care about fixing daycare? In other words, what's in it for the U.S. when we improve the system?

Cramer: The failure of our childcare system is not a boutique issue. Forty percent of children under five spend at least part of their week in the care of someone who is not their parents. Early childhood is a critical time in the child development process that can support future learning and growth. Without a strong foundation, many children struggle to catch up. This has long-term economic consequences and leads to a widening of socio-economic disparities, which has large societal impacts. The Obama administration has proposed making pre-K universal for all income-eligible four-year-olds. This strategy can better prepare children when they enter primary school, lessen their parents’ financial stress, and make our economy more effective by facilitating increased workforce participation. Transforming daycare into a universal early education system is an investment that would pay large-scale dividends to us all.

Guernsey: Far reduced risk of tragedy and neglect. Members of the childcare workforce who see themselves as teachers and operate as professionals. Parents who can excel at their jobs knowing their children are in good hands. And perhaps most important: Well-adjusted kids surrounded by learning, giving them a better chance of growing up to be compassionate, creative, productive adults.

How will childcare change in 2050?

Cramer: By the middle of the 21^st first century, America will have embraced a small set of universal policies tied to citizenship. Targeted assistance for lower-income families will be higher than it is today and this will include subsidies to help offset the costs of childcare. Those costs will be higher than they are today in order to cover the higher salaries of a professionalized staff providing high-quality services.

Schulte: In 2050, I’m hoping that my son will feel just as passionately about being an involved and primary parent as my daughter does. I hope their workplaces will understand that caregiving, working flexibly, having stable child care and having time for life actually helps people be more productive and creative at work, focusing on the task at hand, rather than worrying about whether children are safe or happy.

When it comes time to finding childcare, I hope that there will be plenty of good, high-quality affordable options, like the French, with a cozy ecole maternelle in every neighborhood. Like the “pedagogues” I saw in Denmark, I hope that the teachers, even for infants, in these homes or centers will be educated, trained, highly respected and valued and compensated well.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on New America's Early Education Initiative blog. Conor Williams recently joined the Early Education Initiative as a Senior Researcher. He's just completed a PhD in Government at Georgetown University, a degree he pursued after teaching first grade in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Conor's research addresses the challenges immigrant families face in the American education system, educational equity as a means to increased social mobility, and the history of education in the United States.

In an era of Washington gridlock, there’s almost nothing quite as gratifying as seeing big policy changes that echo one’s recent arguments. Along those lines, Thursday was a great day for advocates of more and higher-quality child care in the United States. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced a new Obama administration proposal to raise the federal baseline for subsidized child care centers across the country. 

She introduced the new rules at CentroNía, a bilingual community center in Washington, D.C. that includes early childhood programs, a PreK-5 charter school, and parent outreach initiatives.

The proposed rules would considerably improve American child care in three ways:

1) They would require states to raise child health and safety standards at child care centers. Before becoming licensed, child care providers would have to submit to criminal background checks and fingerprinting; enroll in training on safe sleep for babies, CPR, and first aid; and go through (unannounced) safety inspections.

2) They would allow parents more access to providers’ track records by posting these on websites. The rules would push states to develop systems for measuring the quality of care—and to take these quality metrics into account when setting reimbursement rates for public subsidies.

3) They would make child care subsidies more “family friendly.” Specifically, the rules would allow parents to continue receiving public child care subsidies if they lose their jobs and need coverage during their job search. What’s more, they would ask states to streamline application procedures.

During the press conference, Sebelius and other members of her team repeatedly noted that many parents believe that rules like these are already in place. Unfortunately this is not the case. State regulations for child care providers vary considerably. The proposal would address this by requiring states to update their regulations as a condition for accepting any of the $5 billion in annual federal subsidies for child care.

Why now? Why regulate instead of revamping CCDBG legislation? Secretary Sebelius offered this rationale:

Tragedies...do finally provide momentum for stronger regulations and more safety standards. I think it is always in tension—and we hear it constantly here in the nation’s capital—between the federal government reaching into state policies and practices and states wanting flexibility, but I think that there’s no question that 15 years and the fact that too many states have not actually voluntarily stepped up their standards, it’s clearly overdue that the federal floor be raised and incorporate what we know are best practices.

Furthermore, on page 17 of the proposal (.pdf), the HHS describes the changes as filling gaps in existing law:

In large part, the changes in this proposed rule articulate a set of expectations for how Lead Agencies are to satisfy certain requirements in the CCDBG Act, which the current regulations either only minimally address or where they remain altogether silent.

Regardless of their impetus, the proposed rules reflect a growing consensus among those who study child care in the United States. For instance, Brigid Schulte, a Schwartz Fellow here at New America, has been tracking the heavy bureaucratic barriers that prevent many low-income parents from getting child care subsidies (click here for her Washington Post coverage of the HHS press conference). This week, at a New America panel discussion of Jonathan Cohn’s recent New Republic piece, “The Hell of American Day Care,” Early Education Initiative Director Lisa Guernsey argued that American child care needs higher professional standards. Cohn, meanwhile, bemoaned the low quality and inconsistency of many state child care regulations. He noted that, in too many cases, weak regulations and inadequate enforcement have led to horrifying tragedies.

Clearly, the proposed rules could do much to allay these concerns, but they’re only a first step. During the press conference, Shannon Rudisill, Director of the HHS’ Office of Child Care, noted that further progress is limited by other constraints. For instance, the Obama Administration has requested additional funding for the Child Care and Development Fund for several years—to no avail. This money would expand access to high-quality child care and close the gap between public reimbursement rates and the total cost of child care for low-income families.

Nonetheless, it’s no use weeping for the best in the presence of the better. Early childhood advocates have good reason to be cheered by these new rules. As several speakers at the press conference noted, child safety is a prerequisite for excellent early childhood education.

The public has 77 days to comment on and make suggestions for improving the proposed rules (commenting ends on 08/05/2013). Comments are being accepted here.

Editor's note: This guest post was authored by Catherine Myers, the volunteer executive director of the national grassroots nonprofit Family and Home Network, founded in 1984.

Americans are passionate about equality and justice, and we should apply those principles to family policy discussions. We need to transform the prevailing frame—the focus on “working families”—to one that embraces all families with inclusive family policies.

The lens of equality and justice would illuminate the disparity between the value of parents’ roles in raising healthy children and the level of economic support provided to parents. Inclusive family policies would support parents equally regardless of how they choose to meet their income-earning and caregiving responsibilities. Policymakers striving for equality and justice would rely on robust research that shows how to improve the well-being of parents and their children by lifting families out of poverty and by implementing best practices in maternity care as well as in child and parent development.

Many current family policies violate principles of equality and justice—for example, child care policies discriminate by giving economic support to caregiving when it is done by a paid provider but not when it is done by a parent. The one-size-fits-all “solution” of child care services fails to support the great variation in families’ situations and preferences. A few examples: 

• Baby ‘A’ is cared for by his mother while his father works a day shift; in the evening, father cares for him while mother works—the parents prefer to care for their child themselves. 
• Baby ‘B’ is in child care even though her parents would prefer to have her mother care for her; this lower-income family receives a child care subsidy but would receive no financial help if a parent provided care.
• Before Baby ‘C’ was born his parents reserved a spot for him in an excellent child care center; after his birth his mother felt a strong desire to care for him herself most of the time and her husband agreed with this change of plans—she is an at-home mother.
• Baby ‘D’ is cared for by her grandmother, who also cares for several other grandchildren; in exchange the parents of the children help the grandmother with home maintenance and there is an expectation that if needed, the grandmother will receive assistance from family members as she ages.
• Baby ‘E’ is cared for by a child care provider in center-based care; his parents prefer to stay in the full-time workforce; the federal Child Care Tax Credit covers a portion of the cost of their child care.

In the examples above, some of the adults caring for babies are paid; others are not. Government policies offer child care subsidies to some families and tax credits to other families. Parents who do not pay for child care but incur the cost of lost income due to time spent caregiving are ineligible for subsidies or tax credits. Principles of equal pay for equal work are ignored when it comes to paid and unpaid caregiving.

Questions about how we raise children in the U.S. are significant and complicated. A simple description of caregiving activities does not reveal the most important factor in promoting healthy development—the quality of the relationship between adult and child. Is there warm, engaging two-way communication through eye contact, body language, and sounds? Do the adult and baby have enough time together to build and maintain an ongoing, close relationship? Emotional development is the foundation for learning. A child’s intellect, health and character are built in ordinary moments, day by day.

Most parents act intuitively to nurture their children. And they know that relationships and time together are critically important, not only for infants and young children but for older children and adolescents too. Listen to what parents are saying: among mothers who are currently working, 52% would prefer to be home with their children; among fathers, almost half would prefer to be home with their children (according to The Pew Research Center, reporting on current attitudes of parents with children younger than 18). Pew also found that among all mothers, only 32% would prefer to work full-time; 47% prefer part-time work and 20% prefer not to be employed. Yet 51% work full-time, only 19% of mothers are working part-time, and 29% do not work at all.

While many of America’s parents want to spend more time with their children, they know that spending less time in the paid workforce has financial consequences. Parents weigh the value of financial assets against other things they value—these might be called well-being assets, and most can be achieved only by the expenditure of time. As philosopher Jean Kazez writes, the parent grows with the child and parenting changes as the child changes; each parent faces the challenge of wrestling with his/her unique puzzle over work-family conflict and the meaning of a “good life” (and repeating the task periodically). Research data shows that many families periodically reconsider and adjust their income-earning and caregiving practices, and that many low-income families have one parent at home. 

The fact that most parents prefer part-time employment and some prefer to be at home full time is rarely acknowledged in family policy discussions. Inclusive policy options respect parents’ choices. Greg J. Duncan and Katherine Magnuson describe some such policies in One Percent for the Kids: New Policies, Brighter Futures for America’s Children. These policies (generally called child benefit, child allowance or early childhood benefit) trust parents to decide how to allocate their time and money; they promote flexibility and accommodate change as families’ needs shift over time. Policies like these are used by other nations, including France and Finland. 

Michael Lind summed up years of work by NAF scholars in the recently-published paper “The Next Social Contract.” He writes: “the most solvent, efficient, and equitable social contract is one based on a few simple, universal programs of social insurance.” Pointing to core American values, Lind calls for policies that confer “equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”

In recent decades, most family policy discussions have focused on support for parents in the paid workforce and children in child care. Families with an at-home parent are ignored, as are employed parents who want to spend more time with their children. Advocacy for working families is closely associated with advocacy for women in the paid workforce and it has substantial support from academia, foundations and corporations. Advocates representing “other” families have little financial or institutional support. Family policy discussions must be transformed to include the voices of all families.

Adopting an inclusive approach to craft family policies aligns with the recommendations of NAF scholars. Individuals, families, communities and our nation have an essential interest in healthy human development. Inclusive family policies will increase the well-being of America’s parents and children—with greater equality and justice.

This guest post was written by Paul Nyhan, a journalist and early education expert. He writes about early education at Thrive by Five Washington.

In the next few months, guest blogger Paul Nyhan will provide a window onto four places around the country where federal grant programs, including Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, the Social Innovation Fund, Investing in Innovation, and Promise Neighborhoods,are triggering changes in early childhood systems. In this post, the second in Nyhan’s series, he explores how Detroit is using a Social Innovation Fund grant to help improve early learning. The first post in the series was "Washington Races Forward In First Year of its Early Learning Challenge Grant."

Detroit may be bankrupt, but it is also home to an early learning model that was promising enough to win a Social Innovation Fund grant in 2011 to figure out just how effective it is.

It began five years ago, when the United Way for Southeastern Michigan started building its Early Learning Communities platform. The intent was to nearly double the percentage of low-income children ready for kindergarten in Detroit. But the effort had been slowed by challenges documenting which parts worked and by a lack of money to pay for expansion.

Then two years ago the group won a $4 million Social Innovation Fund (SIF) grant to do both. The grant allowed the United Way to be a middleman and a mentor. It started by awarding smaller grants to 11 non-profits that formed a web of nearly every aspect of early learning in the city, from family, friend, and neighbor child care to nutritional counseling. Then it helped these groups develop tools to measure, evaluate, and replicate what they were doing.

One group, for example, is measuring the effectiveness of an intensive approach to teaching home-based caregivers about what high-quality early education looks like and how to implement it. Using assessments that track caregivers’ knowledge about child development and teaching practices, the group should know within five years whether the approach led to more kids being prepared for kindergarten.

Across the 11 non-profits, the development of evaluation tools has been the hardest. The project had to forge partnerships between local non-profits, which knew how to deliver services, and top researchers, who knew how to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. This step toward sound evaluation is at the heart of the federal Social Innovation Fund, which strives to identify successful programs that can be shared locally and nationally.

The idea, said Jennifer Callans, who manages the Social Innovation Fund project for the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, is that “communities already know what needs to be done. The right people are in place. We just need to figure out what is working and how we need to leverage it for broader impact.”

During the first year, it took longer to develop measurement plans than some hoped. At times, researchers struggled to introduce rigorous analysis and high standards of data collection to non-profits accustomed to providing services first and asking how those services worked later. Smaller agencies struggled because many essentially were learning a new language of research and analysis.

This meant evaluation plans that were supposed to take three months stretched to six months, and in some cases more than a year. Making things even more complicated, some non-profits struggled to raise matching funds in an impoverished city where social agencies often seek help from the same funders.

“There were a couple of soul crushing moments,” Callans recalled. “Once we went through five revisions. I was on the phone with their evaluation team on a weekly basis convincing the subgrantee to stay with it, to keep going on.”

A year into the project all 11 of the original subgrantees were still in the program, in part, because the payoff could be huge. Rigorous evaluation is a door to identifying successful programs that can be replicated around Detroit, Michigan and the country.

If any place needs this door opened it is Detroit, where half the children live in poverty and less than half are ready for school when they start kindergarten. The city’s fourth and eighth grade public school students recorded the lowest scores in the country in math, science and reading on the 2009-10 National Assessment of Educational Progress test, according to the United Way’s SIF application. Reading scores were the lowest ever recorded by the test.

The grant’s idea is to lift those scores and educational achievement overall by focusing on 40,000 newborns, toddlers, and preschoolers in ten of Detroit-area’s poorest neighborhoods.

Now that some of the trials of the first year are over, the initiative appears to be taking off. Family coaches are working with parents. Detroit Public Television is sending HighScope curriculum videos to families. Breakfasts, lunches, and dinners are improving in homes and child care programs thanks to nutritional counseling. And child care experts will begin helping home-based providers in October. In each instance, meaningful data is being collected to evaluate which interventions are most effective.

“If it works…it just creates this amazing model for other communities,” said Kimberly Browning, a veteran early education researcher who is working with several grantees. 

Building Quality One Family, Friend, and Neighbor Provider at a Time

Of all the project’s initiatives, its effort to improve the quality of child care provided in homes of family, friends, and neighbors could have the biggest impact.

A nine-person non-profit with nearly 20 years of experience working in the North End of Detroit, Vanguard Community Development Corp., leads this project, the only one of its kind in the city and possibly Michigan. Over the next three years, its team will explain child development, improve interactions between teachers and children, and reduce stress among 400 caregivers. And they will do a lot of this by mentoring providers in early literacy, a focus of the SIF grant.

They already helped one teacher who thought preschoolers could only learn early writing skills by filling out worksheets. She handed out homework that asked children to find the letters of their names from a box at the bottom of a page. The head of the family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) project, Mignon Murray, taught her a more developmentally appropriate exercise, where children pick letters, cut out of magazines, from a bucket and glue those letters on a sheet of paper.

“The concept was the same, but the process was much different,” Murray said.

Evaluating this type of help is critical because even though FFN child care is the most common type of care, outside of parents, there is little research on the effectiveness of efforts to improve it, according to Vanguard’s evaluation plan.

But, Murray wants to do more than raise quality in family, friend, and neighbor care in Detroit’s North End and Central neighborhoods. She wants to fundamentally change how providers there view their work.

“That informal level of caregiving is where we could see kind of a shift of what people think of what it means to care for a child,” Callans said. “As opposed to ‘Oh, I am babysitting.’ That is where I think we can have huge impact.”

Murray knows she can have an impact because she has been doing that for the last five years.

Two years ago, for example, Murray visited a home-based child care in the shadow of the General Motors plant in Southeast Detroit. The owner kept a 42-inch television on all day and the telephone rang constantly.

“She wanted to do the right thing. She wanted to come and get the training,” Mignon recalled, referring to the provider. But, “she wasn’t really doing anything with the kids.”

The children were smart enough to anticipate when “Dora the Explorer” came on, but it became clear that their daily routines weren’t helping them develop early literacy skills they would need in kindergarten. The director didn’t even want children to use Play-Doh because she worried it would ruin her carpets. She also didn’t think the preschool-age children were old enough to start writing. And she didn’t see the connection between the two. Murray, who has held every position in child care from assistant teacher to owner, explained to the woman that the children “can’t write because their hands are not strong enough.” Murray pointed out that by using Play-Doh, she could help children build the fine motor skills that help them write their name.

Two weeks later, Murray and the owner had overhauled the child care.

“By the time I finished she had her living room set (with) divided spaces, Murray said. “She had the toys in a closet. She had a schedule so the kids could predict what the routine would be…She had story time and lunch time,”

Now, Murray wants to do the same thing with hundreds of other family, friend, and neighbor providers in Detroit. After spending the last year developing an evaluation plan, her team of eight will start knocking on doors and walking through neighborhoods this fall, looking for collections of toys in backyards and other signs of in-home child care.

“The goal is to create a model of training focused for family, friends, and neighbors that does not really exist in Detroit,” Murray said.               

The Challenge of Evaluation and Replication

If the family-friend-and-neighbor project holds the most potential, developing rigorous evaluation plans for 11 non-profits holds the greatest challenge. Many of the non-profits have never conducted large-scale evaluations. While these groups may have collected data, it was not the level of detail and quality required by the Social Innovation Fund.

In fact, simply creating a control group – an essential building block of an evaluation – runs counter to the nature of some social services groups because it means people do not get help, Michael Tenbusch, vice president for educational preparedness at the United Way for Southeastern Michigan, said.

“They see a need and they want to answer it,” Tenbusch said. “That is where their heart is.”

But, a SIF grant asks non-profits to embrace control groups and all of the other steps of an evaluation because that is where replicable solutions are. They are asked, for example, to add administrative staff to manage reporting, not just program staff to deliver services.

A key lesson from the first year: Hire experienced staff because the evaluation process is often not intuitive, project staff added.

"Hire folks who are really good evaluators, who have a lot of experience, who have federal experience,” said Browning, who is one of those evaluators. “There is a language that is being spoken and the people on the ground need help understanding and speaking that language.”

In the grant’s first year, evaluators invested a lot of time helping subgrantees understand this language, so that in the next three years these groups could identify what strategies were preparing children for kindergarten.

The SIF grant is also elevating Detroit’s early learning work nationally and locally. The grant connects Detroit-based groups with national experts and resources. Those connections, and the status of winning a federal grant contest, in turn, give these groups credibility in the neighborhoods where they work.

Despite Detroit’s financial decline, the city’s early education prospects are rising.

“Early childhood can be kind of marginalized,” said the United Way’s Callans. The grant “is the game changer for our region.”