A Pivotal Shift in the New Child Care and Development Block Grant
By Katharine B. Stevens
BLOG
November 24, 2014
Last Wednesday, largely overshadowed by the immigration reform debacle, President Obama signed into law a bipartisan bill reauthorizing the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act (CCDBG)—the primary federal grant program providing child care assistance to low-income working families—just two days after it passed in the Senate with an overwhelming majority of 88 to 1. In an era when signed bills are all too rare, the CCDBG reauthorization isn’t just a signed bill but a good signed bill, with thoughtful new focus on early learning, quality, and transparency.
The most striking aspect of the newly-reauthorized CCDBG is its pivotal shift from viewing child care solely as a babysitting service for working parents to seeing it, too, as a crucial opportunity for young children’s early development and learning. CCDBG’s aim has long been to help lower-income parents—especially mothers—remain employed and off welfare, by ensuring they have safe, affordable care for their children while they’re at work. But a rapidly growing body of scientific research shows that a child’s early years are much more important to learning and brain development than was understood when CCDBG was first written in 1990 and last reauthorized in 1996. And in response to this new knowledge, the bill’s focus has been considerably expanded to providing young children with high quality learning opportunities, while supporting their working parents at the same time.
The new bill heavily stresses child development and learning (neither “development” nor “learning” were even mentioned in the previous bill), now requiring that states establish guidelines for what very young children should know and be able to do at progressive stages of their early development. It puts much stronger emphasis on improving program quality: while not telling states how to define quality, the bill requires that states both come up with their own definition of quality and develop a plan for improving it. “Standards” were barely mentioned in the previous bill, but in this one they’re underscored throughout with respect to program design, quality, safety, licensing, and oversight. The new CCDBG reflects an impressive commitment to maximizing the benefit of child care for the children who are in it.
Finally, the reauthorization includes a notable new stipulation for the federal government itself, mandating that in the coming year the Department of Health and Human Services (which runs both CCDBG and Head Start) work with the Department of Education (which runs several other early education programs) conduct an “interdepartmental review” of all programs for children from ages 0 – 5 and submit a recommendation to Congress for integrating and streamlining them. Those two agencies are hardly known for their close collaboration and, in theory anyway, this approach could lead to big improvements in the quality and combined impact of the federal government’s fragmented early childhood programs. Such reform would be an admirable accomplishment for stakeholders “inside the beltway” and a significant win for America’s most vulnerable young children.
In the meantime, CCDBG’s reauthorization establishes a solid, sensible framework that enables the people closest to children to make decisions for their care, while leaving the major decision-making and implementation power in the hands of the states. Now it’s up to the states to use that power wisely—so parents who have to can work and kids get the early care and education they need to thrive.
See Also
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Op-Ed ~ January 12, 2017
Report ~ November 2, 2015