This week, the House Education and the Workforce Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held hearings on early childhood education and child care.
House
On February 5, the House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing, “The Foundation for Success: Discussing Early Childhood Education and Care in America.”
Kay Brown, director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security, Government Accountability Office (GAO), noted that there are 45 federal programs that address early learning and child care. Of the 45, Ms. Brown said 12 of them “have an explicit program purpose of providing early learning or child care services,” including Head Start and the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). CCDF is a combination of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and Child Care Mandatory and Matching Funds.
Arguing that many of the federal early learning and child care programs are redundant and, in some cases, ineffective, Dr. Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings Institution, said, “If the point of federal expenditures is that vulnerable children will learn transformative skills and dispositions from early center-based care that will eliminate the gaps in school readiness between them and more advantaged children, and enable them to get more out of every additional investment in their education, we are almost surely not getting our money’s worth from current programs, much less the rich returns on investment that are touted by advocates for universal pre-K.”
Harriet Dichter, executive director, Delaware Office of Early Learning, and Dr. Elanna Yalow, chief executive officer, Knowledge Universe Early Learning Programs, also testified.
Senate
On February 6, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a hearing, “Supporting Children and Families through Investments in High-Quality Early Education.”
Testifying in support of investments in early education, Dr. Hirokazu Yoshikawa, professor of Globalization and Education, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, New York University, said, “The evidence is clear that middle-class children can benefit substantially, and that [the] benefits outweigh costs for children from middle income as well as those from low-income families. However, children from low-income backgrounds benefit more. Studies of both Head Start and public pre-K programs suggest that dual language learners benefit as much as, and in some cases more than, their native speaker counterparts. Finally, two large-scale studies show that children with special needs benefit from large-scale preschool programs that take an inclusion approach.
The following witnesses also testified:
