Child Care

Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, most states are keeping public child care programs afloat near last year's levels. But a handful of states are not providing the same level of assistance to poor families even with the federal help.

Those are a few of the messages in the 2009 report on states' child care policies, released yesterday by the National Women's Law Center. The center surveyed representatives of all 50 states this summer about how they would use funds from the stimulus bill, known as ARRA, which provided an additional $2 billion in funding for 2010 and 2011 through Child Care and Development Block Grants. Thirty states reported that they were using that money to maintain services, avoid or lessen waiting lists and open their services to more parents in search of work. But several others, including Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania, said they will be cutting funding and tightening eligibility requirements for childcare subsidies.

The center also asked states where they stood in February 2009 (exactly a year from the date of last year's survey) on a range of policies, such as how they determine income cut-offs for assistance, the size of the co-payments they require families to make, and how they reimburse child care center and other providers who enroll qualifying children. Updates on state's waiting lists are also included.

Research has shown for years that placing 3- and 4-year olds from low-income families in high-quality early education settings can curb the relationship between growing up in a low-income family and underperforming in school.

See the words "the network effect" and you might assume that the topic is Facebook or your cellular company's family plan. But take a moment to watch this video of Mario Luis Small talk about child care centers and you realize, ah yes, this is what networking is all about.

Small, a social scientist at the University of Chicago, has conducted research on child care centers in New York and has written about them in his new book Unanticipated Gains: Origins of Network Inequality in Everyday Life. We learned about this on Birth to Thrive, and we're hungry to read more. Here's blogger Paul Nhyan's take:

More importantly, parents build social capital at these centers, connecting with other moms and dads. This isn’t a big surprise to me, since I found everything from job leads and story ideas to nanny referrals and parenting advice at our child care center.

Just when you thought that the debate over health care reform couldn't possibly devolve any further, Chuck Norris comes karate-chopping onto the scene.

The "martial arts champ, action star, TV hero, and media phenomenon" has just blogged about "Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare" and the honor goes to the home visitation proposal that provides support to new mothers and their babies. It is, he says, "about the government's coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development."

In May, when President Obama released his budget proposal for fiscal year 2010, he requested funds -- $124 million for the first year -- to create a federal program to send nurses to the homes of low-income women who are pregnant or caring for babies.

The economic crisis exacted one of its biggest casualities on state pre-k programs last week when Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland signed into law a biennial state budget that zeroes out the state's full-day pre-k program and chopped funding for its half-day program by one-third.

Last Friday the House Appropriations Committee passed its version of the fiscal year 2010 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which funds early education programs operated by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.

A major new federal investment in early education, the Early Learning Challenge Grant program that was included in legislation introduced last week by House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, and which we wrote about here, cleared its first hurdle on the way to becoming law yesterday.

The early childhood community is just starting to digest yesterday's news about legislation in Congress that could provide a new stream of money for states setting up high-quality early learning systems.

A centerpiece of President Obama's early education plan -- the Early Learning Challenge Fund -- just got its ticket to ride in a sweeping student aid bill introduced today by House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller.