Act early

Spitzer's first priorities must include care, education of youngest children
By Karen Schimke

This is another in an occasional series of articles on issues Eliot Spitzer will face when he becomes governor on Jan. 1.

As the first expression of this priority, we urge our state's leaders to make the quality and availability of early care and education a public concern, shifting it from what is today a largely private burden. This not only aligns state policy to the economic reality of life in New York, it helps change this economic reality for the better.

As a key first step, we ask state leaders to create an Early Learning Commission charged with developing a smart, coherent investment strategy for high quality early care and education services for New York state.

Here's the issue: The child-by-child cost of high quality early care and education lies beyond the buying power of low-income families. Even many middle-income families find the cost a stretch. Meanwhile, under the current "private responsibility" arrangement, the public pays the indirect cost of having generations of children growing up without quality early care and education.

The long-term cost of such frugality spans the fiscal impact of poverty everything from welfare payments, to health care and criminal justice as several academic studies have enumerated. The old ad slogan, "pay me now or pay me later," applies to quality care for kids from birth to age 5, and we also know that paying later means paying more, usually to less effect.

Making access to early care and education a public responsibility allows children of all economic classes to share in the well-documented developmental benefits of such care. This, in turn, helps reduce future achievement inequalities between more- and less-advantaged children. This may cost us taxpayers more today, but we'll reap handsome rewards in the future.

How so? Because public dollars invested into child care and pre-kindergarten have a lifelong impact on the ability of our state's children to be productive and happy. Put simply, these investments cultivate New York state's human potential, our most important resource.

Over the long run, public early care and education investments pay for themselves and then some. They lead to better educated and socially adjusted children these being the well documented paybacks from improved quality and access provided by increased support. Future paybacks arrive as both higher public revenue and lower costs. The earning power and productivity of the next generation of workers feed tax collection. Declining levels of poverty lead to lower per capita spending for a host of state programs.

It's worth noting that the debate about New York's early care and education policy doesn't take place in a vacuum. The United States lags the rest of the world's industrialized nations in rates of public spending on early care and education. This may put our nation in economic peril, as we look toward a future driven by ever more complex technologies and globalized markets. Our current national administration has overlooked this vulnerability, but let's not wait for 2008 to make a change. If anything, New York should assert leadership in closing the gap.

Where to begin? Creation of an Early Care and Education Commission to oversee the effort is a smart start. It will save missteps later and provide heightened accountability and transparency to the state's early care and education investments. With this, we urge consideration of the Winning Beginning NY coalition's 100-day plan to make New York early care and education the "best in the nation."

Winning Beginning NY, a coalition of human services groups in the field, supports creation of the commission. We also call on the governor-elect to push for an immediate state budget increase covering early education, child care and services for the earliest years, such as early intervention and home visiting.

Also, we call on the Legislature to pass two key packages: funding for teacher and caregiver supports, and for development of a statewide quality assurance program. In other words, help people in the field improve, and make sure there's a system to measure how they're doing.

In urging Gov.-elect Spitzer and the Legislature to form an Early Learning Commission and to follow the Winning Beginning NY recommendations, we argue that our state can become best in the nation at nothing less than achieving human potential. And in so doing, New York also takes a giant step toward becoming a better society here and now.

Karen Schimke is President/CEO of Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy in Albany and a co-convener of the Winning Beginning NY coalition.