Why We Need Early Education and Child Care

Child care is needed:

• More than 12 million children under the age of six (63 percent of all children under six) receive some type of regular child care or early education from some one other than a parent. [1]
• The percentage of women in the work force with children under the age of 6 has increased from 12 percent at the end of the World War II to 64.5 percent at the turn of the century. [1]
• Seventy percent of single mothers are employed in the paid labor force. [6]
• The implementation of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which required welfare participants to work, contributed to an even greater demand for child care. [6]
• Non-standard shifts are becoming increasingly common in the 24-hour-economy of the United States. 40 percent of full-time workers and more than half of part-time workers with non-standard shifts work evenings. [3]
• Majority of child care services are operational only during the traditional work day, between 9 and 10 hours. [13]

Early education is important:

• 90 percent of children’s brain growth takes place before they enter kindergarten [11]
• Children under the age of 5 are eager and capable learners [11]
• Quality preschool improves the ability of children to do well in K-12 schools, lowering grade repetition and reducing the need for special education [11]
• 93 percent of kindergarten teachers either moderately or strongly agree that more children would succeed in school if all families had access to qualtiy pre-kindergarten programs. [12]

Education gap is strongly influenced by socio-economic status:

• At age 3, high socio-economic status children have average vocabularies of 1100 words, middle SES children have average vocabularies of 750 words, and low SES children have average vocabularies of 480 words. [2]
• In families where parents have to work in the evening, measurements of the quality of the cognitive stimulation and emotional support provided to children by families were reduced by 10 percent (11 percent if the mother worked evenings; 8 percent if the father worked evenings). Poor children are doubly affected by parental evening work because their parents have the least choice about which hours to work and have the least resources to counteract the negative effects of evening work on their children. [3]

Child care is not affordable:

• Nearly one in five children under age six lives in poverty, and the number is rising. [4]
• According to statistics published by the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives, 60 percent of families earning less than $1,200 a month pay out of pocket for their child care. The cost accounts for 37 percent of their income. [1]
Child Care, Inc., a New York City-based non-profit organization, found that “Child-care expenses for a family of four can exceed the cost of food, rent and taxes, often making child care the single largest item in a family’s budget. Child care in New York City is $5,440 more expensive per year than tuition at a City University.” [1]

Child care is low quality:

• Only 12 states require specialized training to be a child care worker. Of those states, only 8 require a Child Development Associate Credential. [8]
• Salaries for child caregivers average a shockingly low $14,000 per year, and frequently they receive no benefits. [14]
• Turnover is around 27 percent. [14]

Government funding and policies are insufficient:

• Only six states—Georgia, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wisconsin—have policies in place or a goal to move toward universal access to pre-kindergarten. [4]
• According to the Government Accountability Office, at least 23 states have limited child care assistance for some families since 2001, and many have also made cuts in their activities to improve child care quality. [4]
• The conference agreement on the spending reconciliation bill (Senate Bill 1932) includes a major restructuring of TANF work participation requirements, imposing expensive and unfunded new requirements on states and severely limiting the flexibility they were afforded under the 1996 law that created the TANF block grant. [5]
• Despite the high cost of child care, 23 states have decreased the availability of child care subsidies since 2001, and just 18.3 percent of eligible children receive child care subsidies. [6]

We know how to provide quality child care:

• By 2005, over 10,000 programs were accredited, serving over 850,000 children. [9]
• Further, there are currently 165 accredited college and university programs. [9]

Early Childhood Development Programs are a sound financial investment:

• In a study of four leading ECD programs, the benefit-cost ratio ranged from a minimum 3.78-to-1 to a maximum 8.74-to-1. An investment is justified if the benefit-cost ratio exceeds 1-to-1. [7]
• The benefits are not restricted to those families enrolled in the ECD Program. A Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study determined that annual real rates of return on public investments in the Perry Preschool program were 12 percent for the non-participating public and government and 4 percent for participants, so that total returns exceeded 16 percent. [7]
• Decrease over time in crime rate and criminality, which would in turn reduce costs incurred by judicial and prison systems. [7]
• Can lead to increased earnings later in life of individuals enrolled in the ECD. [7]

Child care funding is not cheap, but it is affordable to taxpayers:

• The tax cuts passed by the Bush administration in 2001, 2002, and 2003 would reduce revenues by $276 billion in 2004. [10]
• To provide universal pre-K to all children ages 3 and 4 at no cost to parents, would cost between $68 and $76.5 billion annually. [13]

References

1. Family Initiative. Better Childcare, Preschool, and Afterschool. NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. Family Initiative document

2. Corporate Voices for Working Families. Early Childhood Education: A Call to Action from the Business Community. Corporate Voices statement

3. The Project on Global Working Families: Work, Family, and Child Development. Work, Family, and Child Development website

4. Rachel Schumacher, Danielle Ewen, Katherine Hart, and Joan Lombardi, All Together Now, State Experiences in Using Community-Based Child Care To Provide Pre-Kindergarten. Prepared for The Brookings Institution & University of North Carolina (2004). All Together Now document

5. Sharon Parrott, Conference Agreement Imposes Expensive New TANF Requirements On States and Will Result In Loss Of Child Care For Working Poor (2005). Conference Agreement document

6. Katie Hamm, Barbara Gault, Ph.D., and Avis Jones-DeWeever, Ph.D., In Our Own Backyards: Local and State Strategies to Improve the Quality of Family Child Care. Institute for Women's Policy Research (2005). In Our Own Backyards document

7. Robert G. Lynch, Exceptional Returns: Economic, Fiscal, and Social Benefits of Investment in Early Childhood Development. Economic Policy Institute (2004). Benefits of Early Childhood Education document

8. Marcy Whitebook, Early Education Quality: Higher Teacher Qualifications for Better Learning Environments - A Review of the Literature. Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (2003). Early Education Quality document

9. National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Nationally Recognized Programs. Nationally Recognized Programs Website

10. Isaac Shapiro and Joel Friedman, Tax Returns: A Comprehensive Assessment of the Bush Administration's Record on Cutting Taxes. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2004). Assessment of the Bush Administration document

11. Preschool for All, Spotlight on Preschool for Working Families. Labor Project for Working Families (2004). Spotlight on Preschool website

12. Mason-Dixon Polling and Research, National Kindergarten Teacher Survey. Fight Crime: Invest in Kids (2004). Fight Crime document

13. Preschool for All: Investing In a Productive and Just Society. Committee for Economic Development (2002). Preschool for All document

14. Almanac of Policy Issues: Childcare (1997). Child Care entry