Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee,
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the coordination of
early childhood programs. Mr. Chairman, I know that early childhood education has been a
top priority of yours for many years, and I particularly welcome the chance to discuss
these important issues with you because of my deep respect for your accomplishments on
behalf of young children during your tenure as Governor of Ohio.
As you know, early childhood education has also been a high priority for the
Administration. In partnership with the Congress, the Administration has provided
leadership in three different and complementary ways: by expanding public investment to
serve more needy children and families, by stronger efforts to improve program quality and
accountability, and by creative work to support partnerships across different early
childhood programs.
There is a tremendous need for public investment to help low income families with child
care expenses and to provide high quality, comprehensive early childhood programs to help
children enter school ready to learn. Data from 1997 showed that less than 15% of the 10
million children who qualify for the Child Care and Development Block Grant were obtaining
a subsidy and Head Start still serves less than 50% of low-income preschool children.
Accordingly, President Clinton has placed a high priority on steady increases in early
childhood funding, leading to doubling the level of funding for child care, expansion of
Head Start to serve 1 million children annually by 2002, and establishing the Early Head
Start program which has grown to more than 500 community-based programs for children under
the age of three. The President has continued this commitment to early childhood programs
in his FY 2000 budget proposal by requesting an historic increase of $607 million for Head
Start expansion and quality improvements, as well as $19.3 billion over five years for
critically important investments in child care, including a new Early Learning Fund to
provide states and communities additional resources to enhance the quality of early care
and education services for our youngest and most vulnerable children.
We are encouraged to see similar efforts by states and local communities to invest in
these same priorities. Since 1987, state funding for prekindergarten programs has
increased from $180 million to more than $1.5 billion and state funding to expand Head
Start services has increased from less than $14 million to more than $154 million. State
funding of child care has also grown significantly. In order to draw down the full amount
of funds available under the Child Care and Development Block Grant, states in FY 1998
appropriated $1.6 billion in maintenance of effort and matching funds, and a number of
states report additional appropriations of state resources. Recent initiatives such as the
commitment of $40 million over three years to expand and improve early childhood and
health programs in Cuyahoga County, Ohio are further exciting evidence of continuing
public commitment to support working families with young children and help all children
enter school ready to learn.
The second component of federal leadership in early childhood programs is to improve
program quality and hold programs accountable for results. Working hand in hand with the
Congress, we have developed new performance standards and program monitoring procedures
for Head Start and adopted a tougher stance in enforcing these standards, leading to
replacement of more than 125 local programs. At the same time, we have made investments to
improve Head Start staff training and compensation and to support other local quality
improvement efforts. We are also pleased that last year the Congress made a down payment
towards the President’s child care initiative by providing an increase of $183
million for much-needed quality improvements, research and evaluation efforts.
Another critically important aspect of our leadership to enhance early childhood
quality is the development of outcome standards and measures for Head Start and child care
programs. The Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) set in motion the first
national effort to identify specific outcomes for federally-funded early childhood
programs, and a system to measure and track progress on these performance measures. For
example, we have made rapid progress in implementing performance measures for Head Start
programs, drawing on the work of the National Education Goals Panel and extensive
consultation with early childhood experts, including the Department of Education. We
created a comprehensive, cutting-edge system of 24 outcome measures to track progress
towards our overall goal of improving the healthy development and learning readiness of
young children.
Next, we set up our Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) to assess performance
on these measures in a nationally-representative sample of local Head Start agencies.
Initial findings from the FACES survey are already being used to pinpoint strengths and
areas for needed improvements in Head Start, giving us a powerful new tool to continue to
improve the effectiveness of more than 1400 local programs. For example, we can document
that the quality of teaching in Head Start is good, that children are making progress in
key learning areas such as vocabulary growth, and that parents are heavily involved in and
highly satisfied with Head Start. FACES also allows us to track specific indicators such
as the fact that two-thirds of Head Start parents read to their children at least three
times per week, and the finding that Head Start programs could be doing more to increase
the proportions of parents that read to their children every day. We are convinced that
our success in implementing GPRA will form the foundation for continued progress in
improving program quality and outcomes, as well as serve as a model for state and local
efforts to upgrade all forms of early childhood programs.
In addition to these achievements in expanding and improving child care and Head Start
programs, I am pleased to have the opportunity to highlight for the Subcommittee the many
things that we are doing to improve coordination so that the full spectrum of early
childhood programs work together for children. As we work to administer each
program authorized by Congress, we seek to work with state, local, and community partners
to make it easier for them to bring programs together and to use resources from different
federal and state agencies to serve children and their parents with high quality, safe,
affordable early care and education.
I will highlight four key areas:
- Ensuring that funding strategies provide incentives for collaboration;
- Ensuring that federal policy supports collaboration and correcting misinterpretations of
federal rules or regulations that may be barriers to partnerships;
- Providing technical assistance and sharing successful models of coordination; and
- Convening federal, state and local partners to facilitate collaboration.
Ensuring that Funding Strategies Provide Incentives for Collaboration
For the past three years, the Head Start Bureau placed a priority on partnership
strategies in awarding more than $340 million in program expansion funding. This policy
led to providing full-day/full-year services to more than 50,000 additional children in
partnership arrangements with child care and prekindergarten agencies and resources. The
Head Start and Child Care Bureaus are working together to help states and communities find
effective ways to combine Head Start, child care and pre-kindergarten program funds to
provide high quality, full-day/full-year early childhood programs.
For instance, Child Focus, Inc. in Clermont County, Ohio uses resources from state and
federal Head Start, child care, Even Start, mental health, alcohol and substance abuse to
offer families a wide array of coordinated services, including early childhood education,
family literacy, health care, substance abuse and violence prevention in a single center.
The agency also provides on-site training for Head Start and child care staff via a
partnership with the University of Cincinnati and collaborates with local child care
centers and family child care homes to serve additional children and families.
Supporting Collaboration Through Federal Policies
Our second key strategy is working to ensure that Federal policies support
collaboration and to identify and remove obstacles to collaboration that are based on
misinterpretations of federal rules and regulations. For instance, the Child Care Bureau
provided guidance to prevent unwarranted problems in auditing agencies that use funding
from different federal programs, and issued a memorandum clarifying the flexibility
available to states in addressing issues of defining eligibility across early childhood
programs, including subsidized child care. In a similar manner, the Head Start Bureau has
issued clarifications of policies on collecting fees, sharing equipment and supplies, and
recruiting and enrolling children on a year-around basis to make it easier to partner with
child care and pre-kindergarten providers.
We are also working in close partnerships with the 13 states that provide funding to
Head Start programs. In states such as Ohio, Minnesota, and Oregon, federal and state
officials are working together in funding, monitoring and providing training and technical
assistance to local programs. These leadership efforts support new emerging partnerships
such as the City of Chicago’s innovative strategy to link more than 150 family child
care providers with Head Start resources to provide full-day, full-year Head Start and to
enhance the quality of services in family child care homes across the city.
Providing Technical Assistance to Remove Barriers to Collaboration and Sharing
Successful Models & Strategies
Another indicator of our sustained commitment to promoting early childhood
collaboration is a new initiative by the Head Start and Child Care Bureaus to jointly fund
and manage a national training and technical assistance project called "Quality in
Linking Together: Early Education Partnerships" (QUILT). The QUILT will work to
engage states, communities and Indian tribes in developing a strategic approach to
fostering early education partnerships to maximize federal, state and local early
childhood resources. The QUILT will disseminate information on successful partnership
models, and provide on-site technical assistance for child care, Head Start,
pre-kindergarten, and other early education providers. The QUILT will draw on the examples
and lessons of a wide array of emerging collaborative models including a new effort in
Denver, Colorado where Head Start and child care providers have joined with the United Way
and a number of public agencies to launch the Ready to Succeed Partnership. This
initiative is working to improve the quality of care through toy and resource lending
libraries, parent outreach workers, teacher scholarships, professional development
opportunities, and linkages to health care providers.
We are also supporting additional partnership efforts in training and technical
assistance to assist Head Start and child care agencies in collaborating with Department
of Education programs such as the Even Start family literacy effort and programs for
infants, toddlers, and young children with disabilities. For example, in a public-private
partnership with the Conrad Hilton Foundation, we are contributing to a $15 million
initiative to train teams of Early Head Start, early intervention program providers,
parents, and other community agencies to improve the capacity of Early Head Start programs
to serve infants and toddlers with disabilities. In addition, the Head Start Bureau is
launching a new $15 million technical assistance project targeted to enhancing family
literacy services and partnerships between Even Start, Head Start and other early
childhood programs.
ACF early childhood programs are also working together at the state and local levels to
share training resources and develop more effective and inclusive career development
systems for teachers of young children. States such as Kansas and Ohio have created
innovative distance learning and interactive television systems to offer training to child
care, public school and Head Start teachers. Local agencies such as the Macon Program for
Progress Head Start in North Carolina have developed regional training sites to offer
model demonstration classrooms, on-site college courses, training for the Child
Development Associate credential and a variety of other services to staff from all
community programs, using funding from a variety of state, federal, and higher education
institutions.
Convening Federal, State and Local Partners to Facilitate Collaboration
Our fourth key strategy in building early childhood collaboration is to sponsor forums
and initiatives to bring together early childhood and child care leaders and other
partners to solve common problems and plan for the future. Our Head Start State
Collaboration Office initiative links Head Start with state programs in child care,
education, welfare, disabilities, homeless services, community service, family literacy
and health. Maine’s Collaboration Office took the lead in creating a unified state
proposal to use Head Start expansion funding in partnership with child care centers. In
addition, it convened a coalition of Head Start and child care organizations in the
Alliance for Children’s Care, Education and Supportive Services (ACCESS). With
funding from the Head Start Bureau, ACCESS created 11 regional early childhood planning
groups to document community needs and the current capacity of early childhood and child
care programs and agencies across the state. This effort led to a comprehensive,
state-wide data base with enrollment, eligibility, and waiting list information for all
child care, family child care, Head Start and preschool programs and the numbers of
children who are eligible but unserved in each region of the state. This data base and the
convening process has led to a series of legislative proposals to expand funding for early
childhood services in Maine.
In both Head Start and Child Care, collaboration efforts extend to linking with other
key services for young children and their families, such as medical, dental and mental
health care, nutrition, services to children with disabilities, child support, adult and
family literacy, and employment training. These comprehensive services are crucial in
helping families progress towards self-sufficiency and in helping parents provide a better
future for their young children. For instance, the Healthy Child Care America Campaign, a
partnership with the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, supports collaborative efforts of
health professionals, child care providers, and families to improve the health and safety
of children in child care settings. In Pennsylvania, the Healthy Child Care project works
with child care and Head Start programs to establish linkages with health professionals,
and provide telephone advice to staff members about health and safety issues.
Head Start, Child Care Bureau and other HHS staff are also active members of the
Department of Education’s Federal Interagency Coordinating Council to coordinate
programs to serve young children with disabilities. These efforts reflect the long history
and considerable current efforts to use community-based Head Start and child care programs
as inclusive environments for young children with special needs. ACF is also actively
involved with ED in joint funding of new national data bases on early childhood
experiences and programs, and coordinating efforts to use common outcome measures in
studies sponsored by a variety of federal agencies. For example, ACF is supplementing
funding for the National Center for Education Statistics’ Early Childhood
Longitudinal Study Birth Cohort to supplement the study’s ability to support analyses
of Head Start enrollees and eligible children who are not enrolled.
Community, state and Federal efforts are paying off in partnerships that truly make a
difference for children and families. The story of one family served by the Drueding
Center/Project Rainbow in Philadelphia demonstrates the power of collaboration. Thelma, a
recovering drug-addicted mother of five children, was separated from her family and became
homeless. Two of her children were physically and cognitively delayed. Through the
Drueding Center, a collaborative program receiving Federal and private funding, Thelma
received temporary housing with the use of HUD funds, a child care subsidy through the
Child Care and Development Block Grant, as well as job training to help her become
employed. One of her children enrolled in a residential treatment center, and another
participates in the Project Rainbow Head Start/child care collaborative program. With this
array of support from Drueding and her own hard work, Thelma is now reunited with her
children. She is a full-time student enrolled in Temple University, and is now supporting
the Drueding Center as a member of it’s Board of Directors and in fund-raising
activities for its many programs.
Future Directions
Recognizing the positive impact that coordinated early childhood programs have on
states, communities, and most importantly, children and families, ACF seeks to build on
and expand our existing coordination efforts in three ways. First, we will support
collaboration and the use of outcome measurement around early childhood programs through
the Early Learning Fund, which is part of the President’s Fiscal Year 2000 budget.
The Early Learning Fund will, for the first time, specifically devote funding to
communities to enhance the quality of care for children, with a focus on promoting school
readiness for children through age five. The dollars will be distributed through states
and the services under the Fund will be delivered at the local level to enable communities
and parents to take action based on their assessment of what is needed and what will work
best. We believe that this flexible, results-focused funding will assist States and
communities in maximizing existing early childhood resources, strengthening partnerships
and improving quality. Second, ACF will be convening State Administrators of child care
and prekindergarten programs and Head Start leaders this fall to explore collaborative
approaches to program funding, monitoring, performance outcomes, professional development
and technical assistance. Third, we will begin a new effort with the Department of
Education to review opportunities for further coordination in the areas of performance
indicators, funding, service strategies and research.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Subcommittee today. I would be
pleased to answer any questions you may have.
