On the Bottom Rung: Canada’s Early Care and Learning

Early care and learning should be one of Canada’s most significant educational policy issues in this new decade. Why? Because we are so very bad at providing high-quality early learning environments for our youngest citizens and the rest of the world knows it. It was less than two years ago when UNICEF issued a report card in 2008 that compared government policy and results for young children and their families in 25 developed countries. Canada ranked in last place, achieving only one benchmark out of ten (for staff training in child care programs) while missing benchmarks for measurements of child poverty, parental leave, access to essential child health services, and quality early childhood education and care programs. Similarly, the OECD’s 2006 international study of early childhood education, Starting Strong II, also ranked Canada’s approach to child care last among the over 20 countries included in its study, noting that our nation had the lowest public investment, the lowest access rates, and among the highest parent fees in the world.

Responsibility for early care and learning, like its primary and secondary education counterparts, is primarily a provincial responsibility. There have been many attempts, dating back to the late 1980s through the present, to develop a national approach to early care and learning, but the abolishment of the Canada Assistance Program in 1996 and the establishment of the Canada Health and Social Transfer block fund asserted the provinces’ primacy in this policy area. With the exception of Quebec, which expanded its early learning and child care programs beginning in 1997 to ensure better access to families, child care in the majority of the Canadian provinces is primarily a fee-paying service with many families not able to access services due to costs. While fee subsidies are available in all jurisdictions, limitations on subsidies exclude some eligible parents or the subsidy itself is insufficient to cover the child care fee. It is not unusual for middle class or modest income families to fail to qualify for a fee subsidy. Quebec alone offers a flat fee for child care at an impressively low $7/day.

These policy strategies ignore the human capital arguments that support government investments in early care and learning. Human capital theory suggests that a well-educated population is able to innovate and more readily adapt to technological changes, contributing to the society’s capability to produce wealth. The educational process happens over multiple time periods, and the stock of skills generated in one period depends critically on the stock of skills that served as a foundation in the previous period. Therefore, investments in human capital early in a child’s life cycle are likely to be more efficient than investments made at older ages.

Economic arguments citing positive social outcomes of early childhood education also support the idea of government investments. Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, and Shonkoff (2006) cited evidence of positive economic, neurobiological, and behavioral outcomes to support their argument that providing early child education to disadvantaged children was the most efficient strategy for strengthening the future workforce and improving its quality of life. Karoly, Kilburn, and Cannon (2005) presented a similar range of outcomes, including increased high school graduation, college attendance, and labor force and participation, and decreases in socially negative behaviors such as crime, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy.

Cost-benefit analysis in particular has been applied to provide evidence that investments in early care and learning have the potential to generate government savings and produce returns to society that outpace most public and private investments. The best-known early care and education cost-benefit analysis was the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project study in the United States. Utilizing random assignment of its 123 low-income, African-American participants to control and intervention groups with virtually no attrition during the almost 40 year-period under study, this study showed a consistent pattern of causes and effects from preschool to adulthood. In summary, this study provided solid evidence that children living in poverty who attend good preschool programs experience a series of positive effects that stretches from improvements in early childhood intellectual performance and disposition towards learning, to reduced need for placement in special education classes in later childhood, to higher school achievement and commitment in early adolescence, to lower rates of high school dropout, arrests, and welfare assistance and higher earnings and wealth in later adolescence and early adulthood. Significantly, most of the outcome gains accruing to program participants were maintained over the longer term—even as late as age 40.

Other economic studies of early care and learning programs reached similar conclusions to the Perry Preschool study. A random-assignment study of the Abecedarian program, conducted in North Carolina in the 1970s, focused on African-American children at risk of social and cognitive problems. The program delivered full-day high quality child care services from infancy to 5 years of age. By the time children had reached the age of 21, the total public benefits were calculated as $2.69 for each public dollar invested. A benefit-cost study conducted in Canada by Cleveland and Krashinsky in 1998 found that the incremental benefits of a universal high-quality early care and learning program for two to five year old children across the nation would be twice as high as the costs.

Given evidence from these studies, it is not unreasonable to presume that cost savings for provincial governments could be large enough to not only repay the initial costs of investments in early care and learning, but also to generate savings to the provinces as a whole several times greater than the costs. These findings move early care and learning policy from being strictly a social-service policy and philanthropic endeavor to help children from low-income families to also being considered an economic development strategy.

There are encouraging signs across the country that more provinces recognize the benefits of investing in early care and learning. Starting in September of this year, Ontario will provide a full day of learning to four- and five-year-olds as part of the province's plan to build a stronger school system and a well-educated workforce. British Columbia, guided by its Early Learning Framework, will make full day kindergarten available to up to half of its eligible five year olds this September, with access to all eligible children by September 2011. And Manitoba’s five-year policy agenda, Family Choices, commits Manitoba to maintaining the second lowest child care fees in Canada, after Québec, among many other innovative policy strategies.

Still, the lack of federal leadership on early care and learning is a hindrance to major policy improvements. In 2006, the authors of the OECD international report on early childhood education noted that almost all governments in Canada recognize that the lack of coherent early learning policies across the country was problematic and that collaborative action was needed. While there have been several sputtering attempts at the federal level during the past three decades to develop a national approach to early care and learning, nearly all have failed to gain traction. The previous Liberal government, under Prime Minister Paul Martin, had made the most successful effort, having negotiated bi-lateral agreements with all ten provincial governments. While there was some variation in the provinces’ agreements, all provinces committed to developing detailed Action Plans based on the four principles of Quality, Universality, Accessibility and Developmental [programming] that formed the basis of the Liberals’ national early learning and child care framework. All agreements also included provincial commitment to collaborative infrastructural work in areas such as a national quality framework and data systems. This was all cancelled by the minority Harper government, which opted to replace this commitment in favour of a $1,200 annual allowance to parents with children under six years of age and a capital funding initiative to support the creation of child care spaces by employers and communities through tax credits. The latter initiative has yet to meet its goal of creating 250,000 new child care spaces. Instead, federal funding cuts threaten to close more subsidized spaces, with child care advocates in Ontario stating that as many as 15,000 spaces are at risk when federal funding runs out in 2010.

Early care and learning in Canada has progressed little since the UNICEF report card and OECD report were issued, guaranteeing us a bottom rung position on this critical quality of life indicator should these studies be repeated in the near future. Given our current understanding of the positive societal benefits of investments in early care and learning, we cannot turn a blind eye toward this policy issue any longer. Our federal leaders need to work with the provinces and territories to create a nationally coordinated, publicly funded early learning and care system that ensures that Canadian families have universal access to quality child care.

Economics of Early Childhood

One of my personal areas of advocacy is improving the quality of early childhood education. As a working parent seeking high-quality daycare and preschool services, I was frustrated by the lack of information about the quality of these services. I was, after all, leaving my child--my most precious possession--in the hands of these providers. For this reason, I now contribute my services to a local coalition dedicated to raising the quality of early childhood education. Coalitions like these are emerging across the country and have gained support through the use of economic arguments that declare the cost effectiveness of early childhood education.

Perhaps no other area of educational policy has benefited more from economic analyses than early childhood education. The landmark cost-benefit study of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project, conducted over a forty-year period, provided empirical evidence of a host of social and economic outcomes. This type of evidence has shifted the terms of debate about early childhood education policy in the United States. While early arguments in support of early childhood programs focused on equity and promoting individual well-being, advocates today focus on these programs as sound public investment that supports human capital and economic development and, in the long term, lowered government spending. These arguments have realized higher levels of state investment in early childhood care and education, including in my state of Virginia.

Economic arguments have cited several positive social outcomes of early childhood education beyond those typically described for secondary and postsecondary education. Knudsen, Heckman, Cameron, and Shonkoff (2006) cited evidence of positive economic, neurobiological, and behavioral outcomes to support their argument that providing early child education to disadvantaged children was the most efficient strategy for strengthening the future workforce and improving its quality of life. Karoly, Kilburn, and Cannon (2005) presented a similar range of outcomes, including increased high school graduation, college attendance, and labor force and participation, and decreases in socially negative behaviors such as crime, substance abuse, and teenage pregnancy.

Economists Rolnick and Grunewald (2003) calculated an internal rate of return for one of the best known early childhood education programs, the Perry Preschool program. Following the identification of costs and the monetization of benefits, the authors estimated the time periods in which benefits and costs in constant dollars were paid or received by program participants and society. Rolnick and Grunewald estimated the internal rate of return for the High/Scope Perry School program at 16 percent, which they argue makes early childhood education an excellent buy when compared with other public investments.

The findings from the Perry Preschool study have often been cited as part of an economic argument for funding early childhood education initiatives, especially at the state level. The general argument is that cost savings for government could be large enough to not only repay the initial costs of the program but also to possibly generate savings to government or society as a whole several times greater than the costs (Karoly, Kilburn, and Cannon, 2005). These findings moved early childhood education policy from being strictly a social-service policy and philanthropic endeavor to help children from low-income families to also being considered an economic development strategy (Clothier & Poppe, 2008; Stone, 2008).

The impact of these advocacy arguments is clear. Overall, states have been increasing investments in early childhood education. Child care state appropriations from combined state general fund and TANF sources increased by $482 million from FY 2007 to FY 2008. Prekindergarten appropriations increased by almost $540 million from FY 2007 to FY 2008, with total state appropriations to prekindergarten programs were $4.5 billion. States reported an increase in total appropriations to additional early learning strategies of $26 million from FY2007 to FY 2008, with total reported appropriations were $347 million (Clothier & Poppe, 2008). Significantly, school funding formulas are increasingly used as an effective way to protect and advance state pre-k by tying funding to the popular support for K-12 education. The growing popularity of pre-k programs has prompted state policymakers to take this action (Stone, 2008).

In the Commonwealth of Virginia, arguments for expanding preschool education have often centered on the long-term benefits of this strategy. Economic arguments for preschool have fostered support by state-level economic development and workforce development interest groups. This support has helped Virginia’s Governor Kaine increase state funding of early childhood education. Child care state appropriations from combined state general fund and TANF sources increased by $9,800,000, or by 18.6 percent, from FY 2007 to FY 2008. Prekindergarten appropriations, funded as the Virginia Preschool Initiative, increased by $6,900,000, or 14.9 percent, from FY 2007 to FY 2008, with FY2008 state appropriations to prekindergarten programs at $53,100,000 (Clothier & Poppe, 2008).

Recommended ed policy blog

One of my recent blog finds is Dean Millot's blog on the Education Week website. Dean offers straight talk on a range of school improvement topics from a market-driven perspective. His critiques of school district requests for proposals (RFPs) on school improvement topics are usually dead on (and this comment is from yours truly -- someone who reviews RFPs on a daily basis). Check out this blog sometime.

New Education Sector Report: Waiting to be Won Over: Teachers Speak on the Profession, Unions, and Reform

In the world of educational policy, where the chatter of policy wonks and policymakers often edges out the voices of key stakeholders, it is refreshing to see a publication such as "Waiting to be Won Over" (Education Sector, 2008), which shares the opinions of teachers on a wide range of issues facing K-12 education today. Want to know about teachers' opinions on incentive pay? Burnout? Teacher retention? Unions? Then dig into this great report. A link to the report is provided below.

Use of Cost-Benefit and Cost-Effectiveness in K-12 Education

Hooray for the new Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. The Center is led by the very able Henry Levin, the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the David Jacks Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Economics at Stanford University, and Clive Belfield, an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Queens College, the City University of New York, and widely published author in the economics of education. Levin and Belfield most recently contributed to an examination of the economic losses associated with high school dropouts in California.

This focus on cost-benefit (and cost-effectiveness) studies in K-12 education is long overdue. Standards-based reforms come in many expensive forms these days, ranging from school choice and charter schools to school-based management and year-round schedules. Most educational reforms face constraints in the availability of budgetary and other resources, and limiting their evaluation to educational outcomes without considering their costs provides an inadequate basis for decision-making. Both costs and effectiveness must be known in order to make good educational decisions. Cost-effectiveness analysis is a proven evaluation tool designed to assist in comparing alternative programs or policies when resources are limited and providing guidelines on which of the alternatives provides the most impact relative to cost.

Popular in other fields, such as health care, cost-effectiveness analysis is, unfortunately, rarely used in education. A panel of experts convened by the New York State Board of Regents in 1995 identified three factors hampering use of cost effectiveness evaluation in education. One of those barriers was the lack of incentives for superintendents, principals, and other stakeholders to use cost effectiveness in decision making (NY State Board of Regents, 1996). Levin (2001) has also pointed to policymakers’ lack of demand for cost-effectiveness analyses as a reason for their paucity in educational evaluation.

Policy could be an effective tool to promote the use of cost-effectiveness analysis. The federal government could incentivize its use through inducements, such as discretionary grants to support evaluation activities for the implementation of innovative programs and policies. This approach has proven effective in promoting “scientifically-based research” and rigorous evaluation through discretionary grants under the No Child Left Behind Act. However, federal grants provide a very small percentage of school revenues and, therefore, have minimal impact on creating a widespread demand for cost-effectiveness analysis.

States, on the other hand, fund a considerable share of local education and exercise strong authority over local spending. State policy on use of cost-effectiveness analysis could have a substantial impact on school district practices. Working on this issue with a powerful bipartisan public policy group such as the National Governors Association or the Education Commission of the States might provide the lever to ensure that cost-effectiveness analysis becomes a widely accepted technique of educational evaluation.

Educational decision-makers need to understand the relationship between policy expenditures and student achievement outcomes in order to make the most informed decisions on how to allocate funding. Use of cost-effectiveness analysis in program evaluation holds the potential to make considerable contributions to informed public discussion on educational policy and resource allocation.