Child Care Costs as Compared to College Tuition

Average yearly tuition at a public university in this country is around $8,244.  For that money, we expect college students to receive a quality education, preparing them for their next stage in life.  So what return do we expect for the cost of child care, which nationwide can range from $4,600 to $20,000 for infants and $3,900 to $15,450 for a four-year old?

In Oklahoma, average in-state tuition is around $6,059 a year. When we contrast this information with the average cost of care for infants and four-year olds in Oklahoma, which is $7,288 and $5,397 respectively, it becomes clear many parents are investing as much or more in child care as they would in college tuition.  In a perfect world, we would expect to get a comparable level of return in quality of child care as we do with higher education, that is, children who are better prepared for the next stage in their life.  However, the truth is, for many families, even non-quality child care is unaffordable.

This is one of the issues brought to light in Child Care Aware for America’s recent report, Parents and the High Cost of Child Care. 

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Tulsa’s Promise Neighborhoods: Moving Towards Cradle-to-Career Services

Good news continues to roll in for the Kendall-Whittier and Eugene Field Neighborhoods.  Last December, CAP received a $500,000 Promise Neighborhood planning grant to focus on revitalization in both communities. The inspiration for Promise Neighborhoods is based on the successful model of New York City’s Harlem Children’s Zone, a program featured in Waiting for Superman and various other media. These grants fund programs in high poverty neighborhoods which have a proven capacity to build partnerships and possess the necessary systems to track kids through school, so no one falls through the cracks.

This week, the Tulsa World reported that Tulsa Public Schools pledged to provide longitudinal data to track Kendall-Whittier and Eugene Field students as they progress through school.  This collaboration also includes a pledge to join with other partners in efforts to reform educational strategies. Taken together, this means CAP is in a better position to compete for a $7 million dollar grant to provide cradle-to-career services to children in the Eugene Field and Kendall-Whittier neighborhoods.

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Guest Blog: How we Can Move From Good Child Care to Quality Early Learning

This post was written by Paul Shinn, CAP’s Public Policy Analyst

At Community Action Project (CAP) we provide direct services to Tulsa’s low-income families through high-quality early learning programs and programs that provide families with career, health, and financial supports. Through this work we’ve increasingly appreciated that public benefit programs are an essential support for Oklahoma’s low-income families. As a result, CAP has launched Better Benefits for Oklahoma Families, a series of assessments of Oklahoma public benefit programs.

Our first issue, released in November, looks at the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). CCDF  is a federal-state program to provide child care subsidies to low-income families with parents who work or are in school. CCDF gives families vouchers to pay for some or all of the child care for children up to age 13. Many families pay some of the cost of care as a co-pay that depends on their income and the number of children in care. In Oklahoma, CCDF is run by the Department of Human Services (OKDHS) and is known as child care subsidy.

There’s good news about CCDF in Oklahoma but bad news as well.

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A chance to learn more about young children in Oklahoma and help set the agenda

As Oklahoma’s Early Childhood Advisory Council, Smart Start Oklahoma is charged with making recommendations to Governor Mary Fallin on actions we can take at the state level to better support young children. Interested members of the public will get their chance to review and comment on the recommendations at a forum on August 18 in Oklahoma City. This opportunity comes in the context of a day-long, free conference where participants will learn more about funding early childhood programs and the impact of those programs on children and the state’s economy.

Smart Start is a public-private partnership led by a board of representatives of state agencies, advocates for young children, funders, and local Smart Start affiliates. Recommendations to the Governor are created by Smart Start’s working groups and then reviewed by a coordinating group. After public review and comment, recommendations will be approved by the board and forwarded to the Governor. Recommendations currently under consideration include:

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The Long-term Effects of Early Childhood Poverty

Research indicates that children living in poverty are at risk for a whole host of poor child and adolescent outcomes, especially if that poverty occurs early in childhood.  New research also indicates that childhood poverty can have a significant impact on adult outcome measures.  Possible reasons for the increased impact of early childhood poverty are also beginning to emerge.  Two articles in the Winter 2011 issue of Pathways  investigate these  concepts and how policymakers can use this research to inform better anti-poverty policies. 

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Fighting the Good Fight

I am sure you have all seen the poverty data released by the US Census Bureau last week.  While the median household income did not change in 2009, the poverty rate rose from 13.2% to 14.3%.  This represents the second statistically significant increase since 2004.  This rate is also at its highest since 1991, but it is still 8 percentage points below the highest poverty rate on record.  The number of people in poverty is at an all time high.  All of this really means one thing, the poverty crisis in America is getting worse.  But, what can be done to fight poverty? 

Here at Community Action Project of Tulsa County (CAP), we believe in an intergenerational approach to fighting poverty.  This means CAP serves both children and parents.  We serve children through Head Start, Early Head Start, and the State Pilot Program at 13 sites across Tulsa County.  While in one of CAP’s Early Childhood Education programs children develop the emotional, cognitive, physical and social skills that will serve them throughout their lives.  Through a partnership with Family and Children Services (F&CS), each family in our early childhood program also has what we call a Family Support Specialist.  F&CS provides family support, parent education, case management, crisis intervention, and family counseling services to families.  All of these services are aimed at making sure kids are prepared to be successful students when they enter kindergarten.

CAP also offers a myriad of services to the parents of children in our early childhood education programs.  Two programs that faithful readers of the blog are already aware of are Healthy Women, Healthy Futures and CareerAdvance.  Healthy Women, Healthy Futures works with mothers to make sure they are as healthy as possible before becoming pregnant because the more healthy the mom, the more likely a child will be born healthy.  CareerAdvance provides parents training in the nurse career pathway and also job readiness skills in hopes of parents obtaining employment that provides a family sustaining wage.  In addition to these programs CAP also supports families who are taking GED and ESL classes through our Adult Learning Initiative.  These programs in addition to programs such as free tax preparation and our First Time Homebuyer program offered through our Financial Services division are meant to strengthen the families and households that influence children away from school. 

We hope that by supporting the development of children and helping connect adults with the skills and services they need, we can help families end the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

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Impact of Low-quality Child Care Continues into Adolescence

This post is written by Amy Fain.

A new research study finds children who have received poor childcare are impacted negatively for many years, even after they leave the low quality care environment.  This study looked at 1364 children from varied background and found a similar patterns to their behavior as old as fifteen.   The study was started with the growing concern for so many children being cared for outside the home.   One interesting fact the researcher found was that poor care impacted the children regardless if the care was provided in their home or outside their home.   One important note the researchers did find that the influence of parents and family member were “clearly more important than child care”.

Researchers had speculated that the negative effects of lower-quality care would disappear as the influence of other factors, such as peers, teachers and maturation, overcame the early childhood experience. But in the latest analysis of the data, they discovered that teenagers who had received higher-quality child care were less likely to report engaging in problem behaviors such as arguing, being mean to others and getting into fights. Those who spent more hours in child care of any kind were more likely to engage in impulsive and risky behaviors. And those who received moderately high- or high-quality care scored higher on tests gauging cognitive and academic achievement.

As an early childhood professional I found this research to be very important to support more teacher training, degreed teachers in the classroom and funding to help support the cost of providing high quality early childhood learning environments.

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Amy Fain is Professional Development Coordinator at Community Action Project.

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Hyperventilating Heritage

Heritage is shocked, SHOCKED, that someone would want parents to have the option to bring trained professionals into the home to help their children develop. Isn’t there a T.V. show with this theme?

Section 440 of the House bill – Home Visitation Programs for Families with Young Children and Families Expecting Children – would provide grants to states to establish home visitation programs to educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills. The “well-trained and competent staff” will:

…provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains…modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices; [and] skills to interact with their child…

Aside from the obviously questionable role of the federal government in such practices, the vaguely-worded program specifics are troublesome. The home visitation provision dictates that the state will “prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families or a high incidence of child maltreatment.” While the home visitation program is described as “voluntary,” it’s not clear whether it would remain voluntary throughout or just up to the time a parent trainer enters the home.

When you write hyperventilating nonsense about whether the government will force their way into your home against your will so that they can observe your child at play, well, you invite nonsense in your comments. Take it away, Jerry Smith from Oklahoma:

What in the world is wrong with the american people letting congress run their lifes (sic). They cannot run their own lifes (sic). People Please pull your head out, open your eyes up and see what (sic) going on, their (sic) trying to detroy our country (sic) within, call your congressman tell them, there will be changes (sic) 2010, they will lose their jobs if they keep spending our money, they won’t (sic) to control our lifes (sic), so wakeup (sic) people, and call your congressman now, before it’s to (sic) late.

Meanwhile, less panicky people have found such programs increase the health of mothers and their children, increases the level of father involvement, improves mothers’ employment, increases children’s school readiness, and even reduces the use of welfare and food stamps. I thought conservatives wanted “welfare queens” to work, fathers to take responsibility for their children, and families to get off the government dole. Oh, and since it provides parents another educational option, shouldn’t the “school choice” people (and I generally consider myself one) like that? (It might, after all, equip parents with the skills needed to homeschool their children or take greater interest in their educational development.) Guess not.

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The Enormous Cost of Education Gaps

Gaps in educational achievement between the U.S. and other countries, between black and Hispanic students and white students, between low-income students and middle and upper-income students, and between low-performing states and the rest essentially amount to a permanent national recession, according to a recent report by McKinsey & Company.  The economic cost of these gaps is astronomical:

• If the U.S. performed as well as nations such as Finalnd and Korea, GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher.  This is equivalent to 9 to 16% of GDP.
• If black and Latino students performed as well as white students, 2008 GDP could have been $310 billion to $525 billion higher, or 2 to 4% of GDP.
• If low-income students performed as well as higher-income studnets, 2008 GDP could have been $400 billion to $670 billion higher, or 3 to 5% of GDP.
• If the gap between low-performing states and others were narrowed, 2008 GDP could have been $425 billion to $700 billion higher, or 3 to 5% of GDP.

That’s a lot of missed economic horsepower. 

The report has fascinating things to say about each of these achievement gaps.  One point that seems particularly relevant to our work at CAP is the observation that divergence in performance between low-income students and others appears early in a child’s life and tends to persist throughough his or her academic career.  At CAP, we work with very young children to try to eliminate that gap by investing heavily in high-quality early childhood education.   

Another relevant point made in the report is that while gaps do exist between broad categories of students, there are enough variations within categories to suggest that improvement is absolutely possible.  Low-income students can perform as well or better than wealthier students; black and Hispanic students can attain achievement levels similar to white students.  The trick is to identify the strategies that make for successful students anywhere, and then spread those strategies everywhere.  The McKinsey report is optimistic.  What do you think?

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Pre-K Teacher Brings the Knowledge

The organization Pre-K Now has a blog called Inside Pre-K that shares the stories and experiences of actual pre-K teachers. The advocacy organization already does very good policy work and an excellent daily newsclipping email, and the Inside Pre-K is a very creative contribution to the advocacy world. They should be congratulated on recognizing the saturation in the policy-oriented advocacy world and choosing instead to fill an important gap with personal stories and experiences.

I tell you all that because, despite my praise of their experiential niche, I’m linking to them today because of a very good policy post. J.M. Holland, a Head Start teacher in Virginia, rebuts some tired criticisms of pre-K program effectiveness by marshalling up some evidence I hadn’t seen before:

It is strange that [pre-K critic Chester] Finn would say that only a “few tiny, costly programs targeting very poor children have shown some lasting positive effects.”

A RAND corporation study disagrees and suggests that pre-k positively impacts the impact of every child who attends. RAND suggests that in calculating potential benefit of high quality preschool, high risk students may realize 100% of benefits, medium risk students may realize 50% of benefits and low risk students may realize 25% of benefits. A voluntary universal pre-k system would increase the total number of children realizing benefits that would be passed on to our society as well as provide the most benefit to the students that most need it.  

And:

It seems that high SES students would not benefit as much from attending a public preschool program but benefits exist. Affluence does not mean a student is not at risk.  In fact, high SES students have been shown to be at greater risk than low or middle SES students for depression and drug use in adolescence, both issues that are positively affected by preschool.

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