“Whole Child, Whole Day, Whole Year”

In which I am jealous of a colleague

Occasionally I’ll read a report and think to myself, “I wish I had written that!” So it is with a new paper that came out last week, authored by the first-rate economist Kathryn Anne Edwards (who is also a fellow senior fellow with me at Capita’s Family Policy Lab) for the Roosevelt Institute. It’s called “Whole Child, Whole Day, Whole Year: Assembling a Comprehensive Child Development System for America.” I recommend giving the whole thing a read, but the headline is that Kathryn is proposing unifying early childhood, before/after school, and summer care into a singular universal, free system that would wrap around America’s universal, free public education system.

You can probably imagine why this appeals to me. A theme in my work is that we have to stop chopping up family life into a series of barely connected programs and age bands. Back in Crawling Behind, I called for universal “Child Development Credits,” a version of a very large annual stipend that parents could use on early care and school-aged care needs. That was a thought experiment as much as anything. Kathryn’s proposal is a lot more sophisticated and concrete.

On first principles, having a unified system that complements the public education system makes all the sense in the world. As Kathryn writes in her introduction:

There is a fundamental disconnect between the K-12 public school system and the labor market demands faced by parents. While most parents must return to work mere weeks after a child is born and typically work 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, children are in school ages 5–18, and school days mostly end by 3:00 pm and stop for two months in the summer. The gaps—before children are school age, outside of school hours, and during the summer—fall to parents to fill, either by providing care themselves, finding unpaid care arrangements, or purchasing private care.

At minimum, all children should have access to a safe environment while their parents are at work, and parents shouldn’t have to ration work because they can’t find or afford a safe place for their children to be during the workday. The patchwork approach that many parents must use in finding care—a mix of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, regular and irregular providers—is not serving parents or children well. We need a comprehensive system for filling these gaps that starts in early childhood, spans after school and summer, and is affordable for all families and accessible by all children.

Getting from the current broken system to a legible one is going to require some fundamental changes. Kathryn proposes, for instance, rolling all existing federal funding streams—including the Child Care and Development Block Grant (which currently funds child care subsidies) and the 21st Century Community Learning Center grant program (which currently funds a lot of after-school programs) into a singular Child Development System Fund that flows to states, which would then be topped up by additional federal funds until it was large enough to provide universal, free access.

For providers, this would indeed represent a massive change; “Existing and new providers will be brought into that system via a reimbursement model that compensates them for the programming provided at cost.” This is somewhat similar to the Canadian model as well as cost-of-quality reimbursements that several states have moved toward within their child care subsidy system, albeit expanded to serve all ages of childhood.

Other long-held assumptions would need to be put on the table as well. For instance, in a universal free Child Development System, there is less need for a free program like Head Start that targets lower-income families. Rather than simply fold Head Start into the new system, Kathryn suggests leaning on Head Start’s strengths and converting sites into “federally funded early intervention centers for children in need of services, regardless of income.”

One thing I particularly appreciate about the Roosevelt report—and something that I think many policy shops would be well served adopting—is that Kathryn lays out tensions, tradeoffs, and potential alternatives. There are nearly 10 pages dedicated to “The Hard Questions.” For instance, a fully universal and free Child Development System would be, um, expensive. So the paper talks about possible ways to include parent fees, acknowledging tradeoffs with administrative burden and complexity.

Similarly, Kathryn and I have a perfectly cordial disagreement about what role family, friends, and neighbor (FFN) caregivers, as well as stay-at-home parents, should play in a future system. She argues that allowing these individuals to fully participate in the CDS without getting licensed could create unintended incentives and inequities. I believe that the benefit of ensuring families truly have viable choices around whatever care situation works best for them outweighs these costs, and the bad outcomes could be designed around.

But you know what? That’s OK! The point of reports like this isn’t to hand over a fully-baked piece of legislation. The point is to put forth a well thought-out idea that moves the conversation in new directions and provides fertile ground for discussion. In that respect, Kathryn’s paper hits the ball out of the park.

We can keep pointing out that it makes no sense to have a fragmented and disconnected system of care and learning outside the bounds of school-age, school-year, and school-day, or we can start building a new, well-designed system that works for kids, parents, and providers. This report should be considered the gates swinging open: it’s time to get going.