What should states watch out for?

Daunting price tags

Early childhood care and education initiatives can be expensive. Usually, the need for additional resources (for raising professional development requirements and wages for providers, etc.) are so large as to require significant funding increases to yield even slight improvements for children.

At first, high cost projections for initiatives may alienate potential supporters – particularly if the cost of a long-term, multi-year initiative is presented in a single sum. Therefore, it's important to emphasize significant long-term savings that effective early childhood initiatives could yield, such as:

• Higher employment rates
• Lower welfare, incarceration, and teen pregnancy rates
• Savings on other social outlays

A step-wise budget approach that includes the use of existing funding streams, as well as strategies to leverage others, also helps soften the blow.

Stakeholder turf battles

It can be difficult to obtain public understanding and support of investment in early childhood policy, programs, and services because these things are so complex.

The array of programs, services, and approaches is matched by a diverse collection of stakeholders – who often have a history of competing against one another for scarce resources. Consequently, turf battles are common.

The challenge for policymakers is to leverage everyone's inherent wish to help children in order convince competing groups to build consensus around an agenda that will ultimately yield the best support for children. It is important to assure players that their particular interests stand to gain by collaboration – and that cooperation will be rewarded in the long run.

Public ambivalence

Public resistance to investment in early childhood programs is common. Many people believe that parents (not the state) are primarily responsible for childcare, and that ideally one parent should stay home to provide this care. The exceptions are single-parent and low-income families for which work outside the home is necessary.

School readiness is the most compelling argument for early childhood investment, since the public also often sees preschool as a way to close the achievement gap and level the playing field.

Gaining public support for programs for the very youngest children (birth to age three) can be especially difficult. There is general resistance to government involvement for very young children (except for supporting parents through education, resources, and healthcare access), so programs for children ages three to five tend to enjoy more public support.

Some voters are concerned that early learning programs could fuel the trend of putting more academic pressure on children at increasingly younger ages. However, there is evidence that explaining the benefits of early childhood education yields more support for public investment.

Polling data in several states shows that public awareness and educational outreach efforts reduce public ambivalence toward investment in young children – and also yield stronger public support for early childhood initiatives.

Research limitations

The results of rigorous research on early childhood interventions are well-documented, but policymakers should be aware that there is only a limited number of such “gold standard” impact studies. Also, the results of these studies are limited to what the evaluators chose to measure.

Impact studies measure the outcomes of children who receive program services, and compare them to the outcomes of similar children who do not. This shows the effects of a program or initiative, or which results are attributable to intervention.

The Abecedarian Project, the High Scope/Perry Preschool Program, and most recently the Chicago Child-Parent Center Longitudinal Study are three of the most well-documented and influential studies in the early childhood field, However, these studies cannot answer every question related to early childhood intervention programs.

Therefore, policymakers should be cautious when attempting to draw conclusions beyond what the research can truly support.

Problems measuring program effects

Policymakers at all levels of government naturally want to make sure that specific programs and investments are yielding the desired results.

Many early childhood programs are implemented with the goal of preparing young children for school. Specifically, children in an effective program should gain the social, emotional, and cognitive skills needed to succeed in an academic environment. However, quantifying gains in school readiness is a complex task requiring a thorough understanding of the possibilities and limitations inherent in testing very young children.

Researches in the early childhood field have reached consensus on how to use assessment to improve program instruction. However, they have yet to agree on how to measure program impact on young children.

Traditional testing methods that work for older children are inappropriate for younger children. Experts are still debating appropriate alternative methods.

Without a solid understanding of the limitations of existing assessment methods, policymakers could potentially misuse assessment tools and tie high stakes to results that are not appropriately measured. Therefore, policymakers must consider:

• The complexity of assessment

• Implications of developing high-stakes testing for very young children

• Viable solutions to developing, implementing, and measuring effective policy in this area

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Closing the Achievement Gap
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