August 2004
What's New!
Recent Reports and Resources
on Early Care & Education Finance
This is the second issue of "What's New in Early Care and Education Finance." We have intentionally kept this list short, and limited it to recent reports and resources that members of the Alliance on Early Childhood Finance found helpful in their work. To guide the reader, the resources are grouped into categories and followed by a brief description and web link. The URLs are links, so hopefully all you have to do is click them. If, however, you have trouble, try cutting and pasting the URL into your browser. Other issues of “What’s New” can be found at www.earlychildhoodfinance.org and then clicking on “What’s New”.
Costing Out Early Care and Education
The Price of School Readiness: A Tool for Estimating the Cost of Universal Preschool in the States. Stacie Golin and Anne Mitchell. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (2004). This report presents a model to estimate the cost of universally accessible preschool at the state level. Since its creation the model has been implemented in a number of states around the country including Illinois, California, and Massachusetts. This report presents the model and details how policymakers, advocates, researchers and other stakeholders can estimate the cost of universal preschool in their jurisdictions. The report also provides an example by applying the model in a fictitious state.
http://www.earlychildhoodfinance.org/handouts/CostingOutConferenceCallPublication.pdf
A conference call on Costing out ECE (with Anne Mitchell and Stacie Golin, authors of the costing out tool described above) was held on Monday, July 19, 2004 at 3:00 PM. A summary of the call is available at www.earlychildhoodfinance.org (click "What's New", then conference calls)
The Financing Universal Early Care and Education for America's Children Project (http://www.hspc.org/) has released four new reports on costing out early care and education. This project, led by Richard Brandon and Lynne Kagan, has focused on analyzing "alternative” methods of paying for high quality child care. This entailed applying financing lessons from other near-universal social benefits, and developing a multi-component simulation model to estimate costs and impacts of alternative financing approaches, featuring dynamic estimates of parental choices regarding care and employment. The simulation model is intended to help policy makers and analysts to obtain comparative costs of care, and distribution of benefits, under different policy
scenarios." The new state reports include:
Office 1100 Wake Forest Road Phone 919-821-9540 Fax 919-821-8050
Raleigh, NC 27604 Email
A Bright Economic Future for Our Children and Our State Begins with Palmetto STARS
http://www.hspc.org/SouthCarolinaReport.pdf
Ohio's School Readiness Goal: Starting Early to Close the Achievement Gap http://www.hspc.org/SchoolReadinessGoal.pdf
Financing Access to High Quality Early Care and Education for All of Illinois’ Children
http://www.hspc.org/Illinois%20final.pdf
Financing Access to High Quality Early Care and Education for All of Mississippi’s Children http://www.hspc.org/MSfinalreport.pdf
Additional links to state and local surveys conducted in conjunction with the above analyses are available at http://www.hspc.org/
Financing Prekindergarten Programs
Prekindergarten Policy Framework is a new web-based resource from the National Prekindergarten Center (NPC) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (http://www.fpg.unc.edu/~npc/framework/index.cfm) The framework is intended to provide a research-based model for states to use as they develop, implement or expand prekindergarten programs. The following sections are included:
Impetus – Why do states fund prekindergarten programs and who takes the lead?
Finance – How much do prekindergarten programs cost and how do states fund them?
Governance – How are prekindergarten programs managed?
Service Delivery Models – Who provides the services?
Children Served – Are programs available to all children or only some?
Program Standards – What standards define high-quality programs?
Infrastructure – What policy mechanisms are in place to ensure programs attain and maintain high quality?
The Universal vs. Targeted Debate: Should the United States Have Preschool for All? Steven Barnett, Kirsty Brown and Rima Shore. NIEER. (April, 2004). The debate over universal vs. targeted preschool programs is explored in this policy brief from the National Institute for Early Education Research. The brief stresses that while targeted programs traditionally have lower costs, universal programs are more effective at reaching all targeted children. While the academic achievement gap is most dramatic between children in poverty and those with the most resources, school readiness is not just a problem of the poor. School readiness for the majority of children can improve with better preschool education. http://nieer.org/resources/policybriefs/6.pdf
Los Angeles Universal Preschool Master Plan: The Sky's the Limit. Karen Hill-Scott. First 5 Los Angeles. (February, 2004) This report provides the blueprint for providing universal prekindergarten to over 70% of the 153,000 4-year-olds in Los Angeles, California. In addition to describing the project vision, mission, goals and overall framework, the report projects capacity/enrollment and facility and workforce needs for the next 10 years. The report also proposes the establishment of a non-profit public benefit corporation to create and build the system, as well as "an innovative hybrid--application of a five-star quality rating system" for quality assurance. http://www.prop10.org/docs/Partnerships/UPK/Proj_UPK_MasterPlanFinalDraft.pdf
Child Care Subsidy Reimbursement Rates
Report of the BUILD Subsidized Child Care Rate Policy Task Force: Recommendations for Action. Louise Stoney. Pennsylvania BUILD Initiative. (June, 2004) This report summarizes the work of a Pennsylvania Task Force charged with examining the issue of child care subsidy rates. As part of this effort, provider forums were held across the state. Both the forums and Task Force deliberations underscored concerns that basing child care reimbursement on the price of care is a fundamentally flawed approach. To this end, the Task Force elected to expand their charge. In addition to making recommendations about how the current child care reimbursement rate system -- based on market rates -- could be improved, the report also recommends policies aimed at linking rate ceilings to quality (via rate adjustments, rather than market rate survey data) and offering quality improvement grants that can supplement child care reimbursement rates and parent fees. http://www.pde.state.pa.us/early_childhood/lib/early_childhood/RatePolicyReport--FINAL_6.17.04.pdf
Linking Economic Development and Early Care and Education
The Linking Economic Development and Child Care Project has several new resources on their website, including:
· 50-State Data Base that provides an overview of all current, national sources of comparative data on the early care and education sector including: child care economic data, demographic data, and early care and education policy data from 31 sources. Federal census and administrative data, federal survey data, and national organizations that collect or maintain comparative data on children and families or early care and education are also included.
· Methodology Guide: This interactive version of the methodology guide provides a basic set of tools for states and localities interested in conducting a regional economic analysis of the child care sector, including several "pop up" spreadsheets. In addition, the guide includes the key steps of a regional economic analysis, guidelines for data collection and analysis using examples from previous studies, and policy applications for an economic development frame.
Several new states and localities -- including North Carolina, Massachusetts and Long Island, New York -- have recently released economic studies. Copies of these are available at http://economicdevelopment.cce.cornell.edu/ (On the main page, scroll down to "Browse the Matrix and Database" of Child Care Economic Impact studies, and click.)
Public Schools and Economic Development: What the Research Shows. Johnathon D. Weiss. Knowledge Works Foundation. 2004. This report reviews the existing research on the relationship between schools and economic development, and implies that since schools are an important contributor to our economy, education should be viewed as an investment rather than a service that governments provide. Weiss concludes that Americans must closely examine the inputs of a high-quality school that will realize both achievement outcomes for students and also the economic outcomes that are consistently identified as a top priority by American citizens.
http://www.kwfdn.org/ProgramAreas/Facilities/econ_devel.html
Resources for Early Care and Education Program Administrators
True Cost of Quality Care Toolkit (August, 2004). The Northwest Finance Circle (NWFC) has recently released a Toolkit that child care centers can use to prepare true cost of quality budgets. NWFC believes early childhood and school-age programs need to understand, calculate, and be able to articulate the gap between the cost of high quality programs and the price charged for services. The Toolkit is designed to support that process. It can be downloaded from the web, and includes a several documents, such as:
· Definitions of true cost (what is required to meet national accreditation standards on a constant basis), ideal cost (what is required to provide the best possible program);
· Budget overviews for full-time center and home-based early care and education programs;
· Budget overviews for out of school time (OST) programs;
· Excel spreadsheets to accompany the overviews.
The NWFC True Cost of Quality Care project also provided budget training for child care centers and family child care homes. The Toolkit can be downloaded at http://www.seattle.gov/humanservices/fys/TrueCostQualityCare/#toolkit