Next week, President Barack Obama will end his term as our nation’s 44th president. This has inspired much reflection on his legacy in recent months – as well as questions about what elements of that legacy will endure. There’s been relatively little attention to the administration’s legacy on early childhood education. But the Obama administration has supported a number of policies and initiatives that have benefited young children and families, some of which are likely to endure into the future.
The legacy starts early, with an infusion of funding for early childhood programs in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. When the administration took office in early 2009, the economic crisis had decimated many state budgets, imperiling child care and preschool funding for hundreds of thousands of children. The stimulus provided $2 billion over two years for the child care and development fund, supplementing child care funding to preserve access as states experienced fiscal challenges. It also provided $2 billion over two years in additional Head Start funding, roughly half of which was used to expand access to early Head Start programs for infants and toddlers.
Although the increased child care funding largely disappeared after the two years of stimulus, it helped sustain services for tens of thousands of children and families at a time of economic hardship. Roughly one-third of the increase in Head Start funding was sustained beyond the Recovery and Reinvestment Act in the 2011 appropriations, continuing expanded access for infants and toddlers.
The Obama administration also took a variety of steps to strengthen Head Start and expand access for infants and toddlers. The Improving Head Start for School Readiness Act of 2007 passed under the Bush administration, but most of the work of implementing it fell to the Obama administration, particularly its first Health and Human Services Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Childhood Joan Lombardi and Head Start Director Yvette Sanchez Fuentes. These and other administration officials had to make crucial decisions about how to implement new provisions of the law, including the Designation Renewal System and observations of adult-child interactions in Head Start classrooms.
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The policies they settled on aren’t perfect, but evidence suggests that they’re producing good results. From 2007 to today, the percentage of Head Start teachers with bachelor’s degrees increased from 38 percent to 74 percent, and the quality of teaching in Head Start programs has also increased significantly. Because of these improvements, millions of our nation’s most at-risk children have entered school better prepared to succeed.
And Head Start is likely to keep improving: in fall 2017, the Obama administration finalized new Head Start Performance Standards designed to accelerate progress by incorporating research on what children and families need; eliminating duplicative or overly bureaucratic requirements; and shifting the emphasis from compliance to ongoing, data-informed improvement.
The Obama administration also increased Head Start funding. Following nearly a decade of stagnant funding under the Bush administration, Head Start funds increased in fiscal years 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2016, and Head Start funding levels today stand more than $1 billion higher than when Obama took office. Many of these funds have been used to expand access to quality early learning opportunities for infants and toddlers, through both Early Head Start expansion under the stimulus, and the creation of Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships, an innovative approach that leverages both Head Start and state and private child care funds to help community-based child care providers meet the same quality standards as Early Head Start programs. Nearly 40,000 children have been served through these partnerships, which offer a promising model for how federal, state, and private funds can be combined to improve quality and outcomes for more children.
These partnerships aren’t the only way the administration worked to improve child care, however. In 2014, Obama signed a long-overdue reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which included numerous provisions to improve the quality of child care and raise standards to protect children’s health and safety. It also made changes to eligibility rules to enable families to access and maintain subsidies and required states to provide transparent information to families about quality. In fall 2016, the administration finalized regulations that support implementation of these new provisions.
Obama also supported creation of Race to the Top–Early Learning Challenge grants to help states build their early childhood systems and infrastructure. From 2011-2013, these grants awarded nearly $1 billion in funding to 20 states to build their early childhood systems. And the Preschool Development Grants, created in the 2014 appropriations legislation, helped 18 states to improve preschool quality and expand access for low-income children.
The Every Student Succeeds Act, which Obama signed into law in late 2015 to replace the No Child Left Behind Act, includes important provisions to integrate early childhood education more fully into federal elementary and secondary policies. It allows states, districts and charter schools to use federal funding for early childhood services; requires state plans to address early childhood; and requires states and districts to consult and coordinate with early childhood policies and programs. The law also permanently authorizes a new Preschool Development Grants program focused on helping states improve coordination, quality and access in early childhood services for low-income children.
The Obama administration has done much to improve early childhood policies and programs for America’s young children. Obama’s greatest early childhood legacy may not be any specific policy, however, but his administration’s elevation of the status of early childhood in federal policy. Both Obama and his HHS and Education cabinet secretaries consistently identified early learning as crucial for both educational equity and long-term economic success. The administration’s agenda also expanded the federal policy dialogue around early childhood education beyond pre-K to address the full birth-to-eight continuum.
It’s too soon to know if early childhood policies will have the same status in a Trump administration. But the fact that both Trump and Hillary Clinton talked about child care during the 2016 campaign illustrates the elevation of early childhood as a federal policy issue. And, because the children who benefited from Obama’s early childhood policies are just starting school and have their whole lives ahead of them, the legacy of these investments will reverberate for decades to come.
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