Back to Basics: Building an Early Care and Education System

Back to Basics: Building an Early Care and Education System

As states expand both their interest and investments in young children, they expect, first and foremost, to have youngsters who are ready for school, youngsters who meet standards, and youngsters who are adept at preliteracy and prenu-meracy skills. Make no mistake, the “basics” have returned in full force to early care and education. So prevalent is this sentiment that White House conferences, vast media attention, countless new initiatives, and fresh legislation are promoting standards, outcomes, skills, and assessments for young children. Awash with good intentions, this orientation has also, however unintentionally, obfuscated another set of less well known, but equally important, basics. Poorly understood, this second set of basics refers to what it takes to make early care and education programs function so that they can, indeed, provide the quality services necessary to achieve the basics so common in today's parlance.

Just what constitutes this second set of basics, and why are they so important? This chapter suggests that these “hidden basics” are the infrastructure and the system of early care and education. At the core of every critical policy question faced by policymakers and advocates, these basics beg for attention as America asks the following questions. How should quality services be “incentivized”? How can we break down the heretofore segregated approach to services? Who should take the lead in administering and/or regulating such efforts? How do we know that such efforts are working, and for what populations do services work best? What will such efforts cost?

Not glamorous, catchy, or well-understood words, infrastructure and system are often neglected in important discussions of early childhood policy. They are regarded as vague and are deemed remote from the daily realities that face parents and children. Little could be further from the truth. Parents care [Page 438]about quality early care and education for their children. And infrastructure is the sine qua non of that quality; it is the essential ingredient that enables expansion and excellence. Systems are also important to parents and policymakers. Systems make the pieces function; they are what enable tax dollars to yield returns and what congeal highly disparate, idiosyncratic, and episodic efforts. Systems eliminate redundancies and maximize efficiencies.

This chapter is about the all-important and hidden basics—the infrastructure and the system. By infrastructure, we mean the supports that are essential to making programs and other direct services to children and families effective. Such supports (or elements of the infrastructure), although differing somewhat according to various authors (as we delineate later), are generally accepted as including (a) professional development and training, (b) regulation, (c) quality assurance mechanisms, (d) information dissemination, (e) finance, (f) governance, and (g) accountability. System, as we use it, is a broader term that encompasses both the infrastructure and the direct services that children and families receive (typically, the programs and services). Using these definitions, this chapter considers the nature of systems, revealing that to date there is no single or uniform definition of an early care and education system or of its infrastructure. The chapter considers why this is the case and discusses the liability of continuing to mount programs in the absence of such definitions. It offers a more elaborated working definition of an early care and education system and of its infrastructure. The chapter asserts unequivocally that unless the system and the infrastructure are addressed and supported, there is little opportunity for achieving early care and education and the desired outcomes for children now being touted. Finally, it concludes with concrete operational suggestions for consideration as new agendas for children are being considered.

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