It’s no secret that preschool can be a financial challenge.

As the title of this Business Insider article states: “In 23 states, it costs more to send your child to daycare than college.”

There is federal and state funding, but not nearly enough to meet the demand for high-quality programs.

The solution? Fix the EEC financing system, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says in a new report – “Transforming the Financing of Early Education and Care.” This report builds on a 2015, Institute of Medicine report about transforming the birth-through-age-8 workforce.

Famous for issuing reports on science and health care, the national academies “provide nonpartisan, objective guidance for decision makers on pressing issues.”

The financing report sounds an alarm, noting:

“Despite the great promise of early care and education, it has been financed in such a way that high-quality early care and education have only been available to a fraction of the families needing and desiring it and does little to further develop the early-care-and-education workforce.”

Or, as our board member Jill Dixon found out first hand, children who would thrive in high-quality programs are regularly turned away because they can’t pay the bill – or because there aren’t enough slots. Dixon started a foundation to address the problem locally. But according to the national academies report, what the country needs is a major financing makeover.

The report asks a vital question: What is the “true cost” high-quality early care and education for all of the country’s children?

The estimate: “$140 billion per year (from all sources public and private),” which is about “three-quarters of 1 percent (0.75 %) of U.S. gross domestic product, or slightly less than the current average of 0.8 percent of GDP allocated to ECE for the nations in the OECD.”

“How can a reasonable share of costs per family be determined?” research committee chair LaRue Allen asks in a webinar on the report, shedding light on families’ burdens.

It’s all a matter of creating a new financing structure, a summary of the report explains. Related PowerPoint slides are posted here.

This financing structure should include “adequate and integrated funding for service delivery, workforce supports, and system supports, including mechanisms for accountability and improvement.” It should also provide “flexibility to reduce silos and facilitate nimble and efficient coordination of funding streams, standards, and requirements from disparate sources.”

The report lists 10 specific recommendations to do this work, including:

• regardless of income, “All children and families should have access to affordable, high-quality early care and education”

• state and federal governments should establish consistent program standards, and funding should be linked to achieving these standards

• state and federal funding should cover the actual costs of high-quality programs

• “payments for families at the lowest income level should be reduced to zero”

• state and federal governments should invest in the workforce

• federal data collection requirements should be aligned, and

• governments and other funders should provide sustained funding for research

 This “will require significant mobilization of financial and other resources shared across the public and private sector, including a more equitable distribution of the share from family contributions and a commitment to major increases in public investment,” the report summary concludes.

It will be a giant, financing infrastructure project – the Big Dig of early education and care financing – so ask your elected officials to get started and press forward.

Young children and their parents are waiting for this badly needed revolution in preschool financing.