Executive Summary
S
ince 1935, the federal government has supported early childhood care and education for poor children to promote their healthy development and give them a fair opportunity to succeed. Informed by recent advances in brain science, our understanding of the lifelong importance of children’s earliest years has never been greater. But federal early childhood policy is in urgent need of reform. Today’s federal early care and education policies are fragmented, inefficient, and unnecessarily complex. Federal policymaking is driven by coping with what exists rather than by what we are trying to accomplish. At the state and local levels, integrating incoherent federal funding streams with growing city- and state-funded early childhood programs is difficult to impossible. In the dysfunctional landscape of federal early childhood policy, policymakers have gotten locked into choosing among three bad options: tinkering around the edges of existing programs, trying to cut them, or adding new ones on top of what is already in place. Yet none of these approaches will enable us to achieve the most important aim: giving America’s least-advantaged children a fair chance at a happy, productive life. To move forward, we must begin by confronting a problematic legacy of federal policy. Its roots lie in the 19th century, when America first committed to improving the well-being of poor children. Since then we have gone from one thing to the next—orphanages, home care, child care, Head Start, pre-K—by a circuitous, unintentional path, implementing one solution after another to problems caused by previous solutions to previous problems. Over the course of this long, tangled history we have drifted far from our core purpose—indeed, we barely remember what it is. This paper aims to provide a starting point by exploring how we ended up where we are today. It traces our evolving approach to early childhood care
and education, sketching a brief, broad history of the three major federal funding streams: the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and Head Start. Why are these our three major funding streams? Where did they come from? What does their history tell us about how to move forward? Key findings include: • Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), enacted as a part of the Social Security Act of 1935, aimed to foster children’s healthy development by enabling widowed and abandoned poor women to remain at home to raise their children. But as the 20th century wore on, public and policy emphasis gradually shifted from child well-being to the financial welfare and self-sufficiency of adults. The 1935 program ultimately evolved into today’s welfare and child care systems: TANF and CCDF, both aimed to promote mothers’ work outside of the home. • Over this period, the central goal of child care itself was redefined from ensuring children’s healthy development to ensuring that their mothers could go to work. As adult employment was foregrounded, child care increasingly came to be viewed as a work support for parents while its effects on children’s early development and well-being were deemphasized. • At the same time, federal policy has evolved to reinforce a counterproductive, false distinction between “custodial” and “developmental” care for children. All programs for children from birth through age four have two important functions: supporting parents’ work in a 24/7 economy and fostering children’s healthy growth and learning during the most crucial period of 1
