Education plan's aim is to catch students young

LITTLE ROCK — Tucked away in an $87 billion bill for higher education that passed the House earlier this month was a broad new federal initiative aimed at the nursery rather than the college campus.

The goal is to raise the quality of early learning and care programs that serve children from birth through age 5.

The initiative, the Early Learning Challenge Fund, would channel $8 billion over eight years to states with plans to improve standards, training and oversight of programs that serve infants, toddlers and preschoolers.

The Senate is expected to pass similar legislation thisfall, giving President Barack Obama, who proposed the Challenge Fund during the presidential campaign, a bill to sign in December.

Experts describe the current array of programs serving young children and their families nationwide as a hodgepodge of efforts with little coordination or coherence. Financing comes from a shifting mix of private, local, state and federal money. Programs are run out of storefronts, churches, homes, Head Start centers, public schools and other facilities. Quality is uneven, with some offering stimulating activities, play and instruction but others providing little more than a room and a television.

Oversight varies by state, but most lack any early childhood structure analogous to the state and local boards of education that govern public schools. A result is that poor children tend to enter kindergarten less prepared for school than those with wealthier parents.

To qualify for grants, states would have to demonstrate that they have established or improved what the bill calls a "governance structure" for their networks of child-care centers and prekindergarten programs.

The structure would include quality standards; a curriculum of sorts, appropriate for young children; a mechanism for reviewing programs and assigningquality ratings; minimum training requirements for providers; a plan to involve parents; and a system for collecting data on children and families. The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services would jointly administer the Challenge Fund.

Sharon Lynn Kagan, a professor at Teachers College who has traced the history of American childcare programs to the early 19th century, wrote a paper last year advocating federalaid to states to help build a more coherent and robust early childhood infrastructure.

"No one bill can solve everything," Kagan said, "but this will move us more than any other piece of legislation toward higher quality in early education, not just more spaces for children."

Since the campaign, Obama has raised expectations among early learning advocates with his endorsements of public investments in the careful nurturing ofyoung children, especially the disadvantaged. In the spring economic stimulus bill, Congress appropriated more than $4 billion in new financing for child care and education efforts, including Head Start, the federal program that serves about 900,000 preschoolers.

Still, not all early learning advocates are satisfied that the administration is doing all it could to integrate early learning efforts into the nation's broader public-education system.