Early Care and Education

Six guiding principles drive this work:

BRAIN DEVELOPMENT
Study after study explicitly and unambiguously documents that the early years are critical to a child's long-term cognitive and behavioral development and to physical growth in childhood and health in adulthood.

Modern brain and child development research supports the need to provide nurturing, educationally stimulating, and safe environments and experiences in the early years.

ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS OF SUCCESS ARE KNOWN
Research over the past 30 years has revealed in detail the important components of effective early child education and development programs.

This knowledge extends from facility design, curriculum, teacher training, teacher-pupil ratios and learning standards to the provision of nurturing and stimulating experiences, and the importance of quality ratings, parental roles, and community participation.

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION AND EMPLOYABILITY
While early education is a public issue affecting the quality of society at a micro level, it also affects the quality of our workforce. [DeVita, C. and Montilla, M. “Improving Child Care Quality: A Comparison of Military and Civilian Approaches,” July 2003 The Urban Institute]

Employment has become a social norm for mothers as well as fathers. Parents are more productive at work if their children are cared for in a safe, nurturing, and developmentally effective environment.

Reciprocally, employment is necessary to generate family income sufficient to afford quality early childhood education.

AVAILABILITY, AFFORDABILITY, AND QUALITY
Early childhood education services are not readily available to all children. This is true when one considers: the inconsistent availability of high quality programs; the cost of the high-quality programs; and the lack of facilities in certain communities.

It has been shown that the high-quality services that are available often result in household expenditures that equal or surpass what one might pay for a college education.

[Kagan, S. “Giving America’s Young Children a Better Start: A Change Brief,” May 2001 Education Commission of the States]

EARLY CARE AND EDUCATION NEEDS AFFECT ALL
Except perhaps for those at the highest income levels, most children in the U.S. are in households where the single mother or both parents are working and require early education services.

Unfortunately, not only is access to early education services haphazard, but a large percentage of the care provided to children, irrespective of income, is neither educational nor developmentally promotive.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Evaluations of several early childhood education and development programs have yielded important results on cost-effectiveness.

Some of these studies have followed the children closely into early adulthood and beyond. According to the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, for every tax dollar invested in quality early childhood education and development returns more than $17 to the community at large.

The returns are almost evenly divided between the individual in increased wages, and the state in enhanced tax revenues and savings on costs of the criminal justice system, crime victim losses, and repeating grades in school.

Unaccounted for in these studies, but large returns nonetheless, is the dollar value and savings from improved health in adulthood and the benefit to the national economy of a better educated, trainable, skilled, and employable workforce.