Financing Child Care in the United States - Ewing Marion Kauffman ...

ALLOCATING PUBLIC REVENUES EDUCATION
HOW FUNDS DISTRIBUTED
ECPA is distributed to local school districts. The aid
formula is based on a modified K–12 enrollment and
poverty level.
POPULATION SERVED
Children 3 to 5 years old who are residing in specific
school districts may be served. In 1998–99, there were
44,186 children ages 3 to 5 years old enrolled in ECPA
districts — 8,305 children enrolled in full–day
kindergarten and 35,881 children enrolled in preschool.
The Abbott Districts include about 25 percent of the
state’s children. Taken together, all ECPA districts
account for about 40 percent of the state’s children.
STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS
• Preschool education is a legitimate aspect of
educational equity. Higher income families are two to
three times more likely to enroll their children in
preschool programs than are lower income families.
Research evidence demonstrates both effectiveness
and benefits that far outweigh costs, especially for
disadvantaged children who attend quality preschool.
• The Abbott v. Burke lawsuit has provided an
opportunity to improve the quality of preschool
programs for 3– and 4–year–olds and increase access.
However, litigation as a strategy has limitations,
especially when a lawsuit has continued for several
decades under highly adversarial conditions. In such a
climate, trust can be hard to establish. In its latest
ruling, the New Jersey Supreme Court said: “It is our
hope that the adversarial relationships between the
parties will give way to a cooperative effort focused on
the provision of high–quality preschool programs for
children in the Abbott districts. The children deserve no
less.”
• Other organizations that are not part of the lawsuit
have played useful roles to help successful
implementation. For example, the Association of Urban
Superintendents of the New Jersey Association of
School Administrators meets regularly with Department
of Education staff to share information, and the
Governor’s Task Force on Early Childhood Education
developed detailed expectations for quality programs.
• The state Supreme Court required Abbott Districts to
design programs based on the “particularized needs of
children.” To help districts respond, philanthropy in New
Jersey provided partial financial support to a university
policy center to conduct needs assessments in 22 of
the 30 Abbott Districts. The districts also contributed
to the cost of these services. The assessment focused
on the access to preschool services that 3–, 4– and
5–year–old children currently had, the needs of
children, resources available in families and the
community and the quality of community–based early
childhood programs, including present teacher
qualification levels. These districts were provided with
an essential baseline of information.
• Before attempting to deliver preschool services through
collaboration between school districts and
community–based organizations, considerable attention
and effort must be directed toward building the
constituency for expansion and innovation, both among
community–based organizations and among school
districts. One approach to building the constituency
across sectors is the Early Education Coalition, which
brings together dozens of stakeholder organizations,
including New Jersey Association of Child Care
Resource and Referral Agencies, New Jersey
Association for the Education of Young Children, New
Jersey Head Start Association, the New Jersey
Education Association, the state Principals and
Supervisors Association and the Association of Early
Childhood Teacher Educators. Philanthropy helped to
support this coalition by providing some funding to the
state–wide child advocacy organization, Association for
Children of New Jersey, which convened it.
• To access new resources, community–based early
childhood programs have to admit that there is room
for improvement. This is often a challenge. Arguing that
a program is already providing a quality preschool
education undermines the rationale for investing in
improving quality.
• Advocates believe that ECPA funds are not sufficiently
well–directed toward quality programs, although
reinstatement of the Preschool–Grade 3 teaching
certificate is regarded as a positive move. The
Department of Education has not yet promulgated
quality program standards applicable to all ECPA
districts and continues to permit class sizes of 25
children with only one teacher.
• Differing requirements for Abbott and non–Abbott
districts such as teacher qualifications, class size and
community collaboration in preschool operations have
created unnecessary confusion, which has made
implementation more difficult.
OTHER SITES WITH SIMILAR STRATEGIES
Many states have at least one ongoing lawsuit on school
finance equity. (For information on these, see the
Information Clearinghouse website maintained by the
Education Commission of the States: www.ecs.org.) Some
of these may have the potential to include preschool. For
example, in February 1999, in a North Carolina lawsuit on
the constitutionality of the state’s funding of education, a
Superior Court trial judge ruled that disadvantaged
children have a constitutional right to preschool
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