Shantel E. Meek is a professor of practice and the founding director of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University. She previously served as a consultant in early childhood policy and strategy at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and she served in the Obama administration at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and in the Domestic Policy Council at the White House, advising senior officials on a wide range of policy issues, including Head Start, childcare, public preK expansion, and efforts to promote equity and reduce disparities across the early care and education system. Meek also played a key role in President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, leading its early childhood policy component. She serves on the boards of Child Trends and the Pyramid Model Consortium, is a member of the Ideal Learning Roundtable, and has published opinion pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets.
Meek holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree and doctorate in family and human development from Arizona State University. She is the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, and her personal experiences as a Latina and first-generation college graduate from a small border town inform her work and contribute to her drive to improve the learning conditions of children from historically marginalized communities. Today, she lives in Phoenix with her husband and two babies, both of whom are growing up bilingual.
PHI DELTA KAPPAN: To start, can you give us a broad overview of the challenges facing early childhood education in the United States? If you were looking down at our system from 5,000 feet, what would be the main features you’d point out?
Shantel Meek: The first thing I’d point out is that we’ve created an extraordinarily splintered system, made up of both public and private childcare and preschool programs, Head Start and Early Head Start, special education preschool services, childcare vouchers and tax credits, and a variety of other local, state, and federal programs. Each has its own rules, standards, and forms of accountability, and they are often not aligned with one another in states. Nor are they aligned with the curriculum in kindergarten and the early elementary grades, and they’re not integrated with other programs and services for parents and families. The central issue here isn’t the lack of coordination per se, but the lack of commonality in quality, standards, and accountability that results in children having very different experiences based on where they live or what they can afford. So, one of the biggest challenges, from my perspective, is that our approach to early care and education is incredibly uneven in quality, standards, and accountability.
At the root of the problem is the fact that Congress has failed to provide adequate funding for any part of the system, fueling wide variations in access and quality. For instance, we’ve never come anywhere close to providing full funding for Head Start. The program has received an infusion of federal dollars during the pandemic, but that’s highly unusual. Prior to COVID, Head Start was able to serve only about a third of eligible preschoolers and 5-7% of eligible infants and toddlers. And it’s a similar story for federal childcare subsidies. Since 1990, the government has provided block grants to states to help working families with childcare, mostly via childcare vouchers or subsidies. But Congress has authorized only enough funding to serve a fraction of eligible children. And the vouchers almost never cover the full cost of childcare, so if parents are lucky enough to get a voucher, they still have to make up the difference. Even with the subsidy, high-quality care and preschool tend to be prohibitively expensive, so many parents have no choice but to send their kids to crowded, often lower-quality programs.
Another significant problem is the way we treat our childcare and preschool workforce. In every state in the country, the median income for childcare workers is too low to cover basic expenses. In many states, this income makes them eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (i.e., food stamps). Compensation is too low for the entirety of the early care and education workforce, including preK teachers, but childcare teachers for infants and toddlers tend to earn the lowest compensation, despite the critical role they plan in brain development and caring for our youngest. Not to denigrate parking lot attendants, but I find it shocking that the people we entrust to watch over our cars sometimes make more money than the people we entrust to care for our children.
So, that’s my view from 5,000 feet: I see a disjointed and chronically underfunded system with wide variations in the quality of experiences children have, unequal access to programs, and a deeply underpaid workforce.
Kappan: Can you say more about our disparities in access to high-quality early care and education? Some of the programs you’ve mentioned — Head Start, childcare, public preK programs — were created specifically to address long-term disparities by family income, race, and other factors. To what extent have those programs moved the needle, and to what extent does access to childcare and preschool remain unequal?
Meek: Head Start was explicitly created to disrupt intergenerational poverty, and several long-term studies of the program have shown that it has had some positive, sustained benefits in this area. But it’s important to keep in mind that no early education program, Head Start included, can inoculate children against the effects of attending poorly funded, subpar schools later on. Many children who graduate from Head Start go on to under-resourced schools that undermine their early gains. If we really care about closing disparities, then we need sustained, coordinated investments that start in the early years and continue throughout the K-12 system. And it should be a holistic approach, supporting children’s development in every domain and ensuring they have their basic needs met — nutritious food, health and mental health care, safe housing.
With respect to access, Head Start has fewer disparities than other parts of the early care and education system. About 30% of the children in Head Start are Black, 37% are Latinx, 4% are American Indian/Alaska Native. About 28% speak a language other than English at home. Programs are required to reserve 10% of their slots for children with disabilities, with few exceptions. There are specific programs for children in migrant and seasonal farmworker families and for American Indian and Alaska Native communities. It’s a richly diverse program. One disparity that I would highlight, though, is the gap in services from state to state. For instance, Head Start programs in North Dakota serve 100% of children in poverty, but programs in Nevada serve just 17%. New research out of Brandeis University points to one other disparity: Nationwide, Black and Latinx children, as well as immigrant children, tend to have the worst neighborhood access to Head Start; that is, they have to travel farther to get to their program, which can be a barrier for access.
I find it shocking that the people we entrust to watch over our cars sometimes make more money than the people we entrust to care for our children.
When it comes to public preK programs, disparities tend to be much wider, given that those programs are run by the states, and states vary so much in their standards, per-pupil expenditures, and levels of need. The National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University publishes an annual study on preK access, quality, and per-child spending in each state. They’ve reported an expansion in public preK in most of the country over the past 10-15 years (with the exception of a large dip caused by the recession in 2008). At this point, just about every state has a public preK program that it can build on. Some places have done an a better job than others — for instance, four-year-olds in Vermont and the District of Columbia now have more or less universal access to good public preK programs, and we’ve seen access and quality improve a lot in some states that you might not expect, given their reluctance to invest in other public services — for instance, in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Georgia.
Actually, early care and education is one of the few areas where we see strong bipartisanship these days. While Democrats are certainly more inclined to support universal preK, a lot of Republican governors have made solid commitments to early education. And even during the Trump administration, Congress authorized big increases for childcare programs. On the other hand, the Education Trust recently published a study of public preK programs across the country, and they reported that, nationwide, only 1% of Latinx and 4% of Black children currently attend high-quality public preK programs. So, while the picture is evolving, and while we’ve seen a lot of investment and growth in recent years, we still have a long way to go before we get to equitable access.
The picture gets a lot murkier when it comes to access to high-quality childcare. We know how many children benefit from public childcare subsidies, and we know something about their demographics — for instance, in a typical month, 38% of children who benefit from a federal subsidy are Black, 19% are Latinx, 25% are white, 1% are Asian, and 1% are American Indian/Alaska Native. But we’ve never had good data on the quality of the programs they access, which is the key to children’s experiences and outcomes. When Congress reauthorized the Childcare and Development Block Grants in 2014, it shored up the health and safety standards that states have to follow, and it added important requirements for childcare staff to have some training in child development and social-emotional needs. But those standards don’t really ensure quality — they focus on basic health and safety. So, given that the landscape varies so much from state to state, it’s difficult to say what effects our childcare policies have had on outcomes like school readiness.
Kappan: Last year, your organization (in partnership with the Bipartisan Policy Center) published a report, titled Start with Equity, that describes three topics that deserve urgent attention from state and federal policy makers: the extent to which children of color tend to be subjected to harsh discipline in early care and preK programs, the frequency with which young children with disabilities are segregated from their peers, and the shortage of bilingual programs and services in early education. Why focus on these three topics in particular?
Meek: In K-12 education, we’ve seen a lot of attention to data showing that students of color tend to be suspended, expelled, and otherwise disciplined in school at much higher rates than white students. But people tend to be less aware that researchers have also found stark racial disparities in the disciplining of children in preschool. Some data indicate that early care and preK programs expel kids at much higher rates than do elementary and secondary schools, and, across the board, children of color and children with disabilities are much more likely to be kicked out.
The pandemic has made me even more alarmed about the potential for inappropriate and disproportionately harsh discipline. Over the past 20 months, millions of children have experienced isolation, health issues, the death of family members, economic instability, and more, and these sorts of traumatic experiences often translate to behaviors that adults perceive as challenging. Add in the stress and instability that early care providers and preK teachers have also faced, and this can lead to serious problems, especially if they’re left unaddressed. Researchers at Yale just released early data showing that rates of depression are much higher among childcare providers today than before COVID, and depression in adults is associated with harsh disciplinary practices, so I’m very concerned. I think we all should be. But I also think that the infusion of resources through the American Rescue Plan provides some hope that kids, families, and providers will get the supports they need, with an emphasis on mental health and social emotional development.
For children with disabilities, the systemic challenges are also significant. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, kids are supposed to be placed in the least restrictive learning environment — that’s supported by the research, it’s considered best practice, and it tends to be monitored and enforced in K-12 education, at least to some extent. But things look different in early education. Before COVID, less than half of young preschoolers with disabilities were receiving services in inclusive settings. You would think that early care and preK would be the easiest places to practice inclusion, but huge numbers of children have been segregated from their peers, and this has gone on for a very long time, with minimal improvements. It’s driven by a lot of interrelated factors — antiquated beliefs and prejudices about children with disabilities, confusion about what inclusion means, misguided policy perceptions, and, most important, a lack of federal, state, and local oversight and accountability. There’s just very little attention paid to how school districts manage special education at the preschool level.
And when it comes to dual-language learners, most early education programs haven’t even begun to catch up to current thinking about best practices (with the exception of Head Start, which has pretty good standards in this area). The research is very clear about the value of bilingual instruction that allows dual-language learners to become fully proficient in both languages and to build on all of their cultural and linguistic resources. But in a lot of places, young dual-language learners are only exposed to English instruction, which is taught as a remedial subject.
We’ve made some progress over the years. For instance, my mom, who is the daughter of Mexican immigrants, went to a school that practiced corporal punishment if she or her peers spoke Spanish. Hopefully, we’re beyond that in most of the U.S. today. But we’re nowhere near where we ought to be, especially when it comes to acknowledging the benefits of bilingualism and thinking more carefully about how we incorporate languages into the classroom. The English-only status quo has always done a profound disservice to those children — to all of us, really. Aligning our teaching practices with the science in this area could be a game changer for the early development and later academic outcomes of dual language learners.
Kappan: Can you share any favorite examples of states or cities that are making headway on these issues?
Meek: California is definitely a state to keep an eye on. There’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment, not only because of the pandemic and issues associated with climate change, but also because the governor has been facing a recall election (which will have happened by the time you publish this piece). But the state’s master plan includes a significant expansion in early care and education, and it spells out some important priorities for equity, including efforts to promote dual-language instruction and rethink disciplinary practices. The governor and the legislature have made this a high priority, so I’m optimistic.
I also like what I’m seeing in several Head Start programs across the country. A couple of programs are top of mind. One of them, the Miami-Dade Center for Excellence in Early Education, in Florida, has created some outstanding dual-language programs for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, and it’s partnering with school districts to ensure a smooth transition. It’s a powerful model, and I’m hopeful that it will continue to grow. Another, the Southwest Human Development Center, here in Phoenix, Arizona, is doing innovative work to improve professional development for the state’s early care and learning workforce. It has an explicit focus on equity, and it has made it a priority to support refugee families, a particularly relevant goal today.
But what I’m most excited about right now is the proposal that’s in front of Congress to build a universal public early care and education system, including public preK, for the entire country. In fact, my organization just published a new report on this very issue, arguing that the best way forward on universal preK is to build on the expansive, holistic, and family-focused federal model that already exists: Head Start. It has stronger oversight and better standards in place than many state-run programs. It already has a national presence and infrastructure. So it makes sense to start there and expand upon what we’ve already built. What’s more, the holistic model of Head Start — which, in addition to early learning, addresses children’s (and families’) physical and mental health, nutrition, financial stability, and more — was built for this moment, as we continue to wrestle with COVID-19 and all the challenges it has thrown at families and young children.
Regardless of how the smaller details shake out, the big dream for many of us in early education policy is a well-funded, accessible, equitable, high-quality learning system for our youngest learners, one that works for kids, families, and the providers doing the hard and important work day in and day out.
This article appears in the October 2021 issue of Kappan, Vol, 103, No. 2.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rafael Heller
Rafael Heller is the former editor-in-chief of Kappan magazine.
