Photo: Alyssa Haywoode for Strategies for Children

A new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center offers key advice to states: Focus on making early childhood systems more efficient and effective.

“This issue is important for two reasons,” the report says. “First, support for early childhood programs can only be sustained if the programs are viewed as effective and efficient in their use of public funds.”

Second, inefficiencies can create “real obstacles to access” for the very children that states want to reach.

“When families have to apply to multiple programs, housed across multiple agencies, often with duplicative paperwork requirements and inconsistent eligibility criteria, many simply give up.”

Improving efficiency is demanding work. States have to manage their own early childhood funds, and they receive child care funding from multiple federal sources including Child Care Development Block Grants, Head Start, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Each funding stream has its own rules and requirements.

The report notes that, “While the federal government has made strides in better coordinating ECE funding, state administration of these programs, with a few exceptions, remains highly fragmented.”

To come up with useful advice, the center looked at key features in each state, including:

• the total amount of federal and state funds spent on early childhood programs

• how states are responding to federal requirements

• the number of state agencies and divisions involved

• whether the state has a functioning early learning advisory council

• how data is used, and

• whether there is a quality rating and improvement system (QRIS)

Using a scoring system, the center ranked the states on their program alignment and coordination.

The top 10 states in ranked order from best to worst are: Maryland, Washington, D.C., Arkansas, Georgia, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Louisiana, Montana, and Washington.

Massachusetts is ranked number 11. Click on this link to see an excellent fact sheet on Massachusetts’ early education system, with Bipartisan Policy Center’s recommendations for improvement.

The bottom 10 states in ranked order from best to worst are: Hawaii, New York, Arizona, Nevada, Mississippi, Missouri, Idaho, South Dakota, Kansas, Wyoming, and Texas.

“Ultimately,” the report says, “the most important metric of success is improved ECE outcomes for young children.” Nonetheless, the center’s analysis is “grounded in a strong assumption that better program alignment and coordination matters to outcomes because it (a) affects how readily families can access services; (b) maximizes ECE benefits by leveraging scarce public resources more efficiently; and (c) promotes better monitoring and oversight to identify service gaps and target continued improvements in program design and delivery.”

The report also provides a list of recommendations for governors, federal agencies, and Congress.

Governors could:

• create an independent review board that would analyze states’ early childhood operations and recommend improvements. Unlike an advisory council or Children’s Cabinet, “an independent review board would be an entity separate from the state bureaucracy, allowing for an objective evaluation… and unbiased recommendations”

• conduct hearings and focus groups with families to identify barriers to services, and

• consider launching a system that would assign each child “a unique identifier number at birth or when the child enters the state’s ECE system,” so that the state could track children’s progress

Federal agencies could:

• develop “technical-assistance capacity to support state efforts aimed at improving ECE program administration and governance,” and

• evaluate Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge grants and Preschool Development Grants “to assess both their impact on state administration and the extent to which states sustained the work as indicated in their grant applications.”

Congress could:

• “Amend the Head Start Act to allow Head Start grantees serving 3- and 4-year-olds to redirect funds to Early Head Start when the state is offering free prekindergarten to 3- and 4-year-olds. This will allow current grantees to better meet the need for infant and toddler services without sacrificing existing grants that were designed to serve 3- and 4-year-olds,” and

• “Request that the GAO [U.S. Government Accountability Office] study state administration and alignment of ECE programs as well as state administrative expenditures. (Previous GAO studies have only reviewed federal agencies.)”

One advantage that states have is “a widely shared consensus about the importance” of early childhood programs “to develop the full potential of America’s youngest children” as well as the fact that “states and the federal government now direct substantial resources to early childhood programs.”

However, “millions of American families continue to struggle to ensure that their young children have the healthy start and early learning opportunities that will enable them to succeed as students and eventually as adults.”

States can help by taking action to improve effectiveness and efficiency.