Investing in Early Education and Care in Massachusetts: Release Event
October 8, 2024
Since the calamitous early lockdown days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Massachusetts has come to see—and fund—early education and childcare with renewed appreciation.
In light of that, and intended as a follow-up to the 2021-2022 When the Bough Breaks series, the Boston Foundation commissioned the Rennie Center to assess and report on where the field is today. Investments in Early Education and Care in Massachusetts: Celebrating Success, Looking Ahead, examines the recent and evolving development of funding sources—philanthropic, local, state, federal—and the profusion of funding streams that are working to distribute the funds. The report was released at TBF on October 8, with a presentation by authors and panel discussion among sector experts.
Rennie Center Executive Director Chad d’Entremont welcomed the in-person and online audience, and introduced State Representative Alice Peisch, a longtime supporter of the early education and care sector.
Peisch spoke of the state’s many recent achievements in supporting the early education and care sector, notably the codification of the COVID-era Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grants program. She expressed a worry shared by many though, that the struggle for balance between access and quality “will land us with more care and less education.” In addition to optimizing new funding for ongoing stability, she said, “I hope we do not miss the opportunity to attach quality control to funding…. If you show up in kindergarten without exposure to learning, you are behind before you begin.”
Authors of the in-depth report, the Rennie Center’s Brian McGahie and Elle Janson, summarized it admirably. It explores successes, such as:
- the importance of the sector is better acknowledged,
- there’s a commitment to sustaining investments in it, and
- there’s cohesion within the sector.
And the challenges, including:
- investment is still insufficient to cover the true costs,
- attracting and retaining talent is hard, and
- a mixed delivery system makes everything complicated.
Event agenda
Welcome
Danubia Camargos Silva, Senior Program Officer, Child Well-Being, The Boston Foundation
Chad d'Entremont, Ph.D., Executive Director, Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy
Opening Remarks
Alice H. Peisch, Representative, State of Massachusetts
Research Presentation
Brian McGahie, Senior Associate, Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy
Elle Jansen, Chief of Staff, Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy
Panel Discussion and Q&A
Latoya Gayle, Senior Director of Advocacy, Neighborhood Villages
Colin Jones, Deputy Policy Director, Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center
Kim Lucas, Ph.D., Professor of the Practice in Public Policy and Economic Justice, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, EEC Board Member, Northeastern University
Amy O’Leary, Executive Director, Strategies for Children
Tom Weber, Foundation Fellow & Executive Director, Eastern Bank Foundation (Moderator)
Closing Remarks
Chad d'Entremont, Ph.D.,Executive Director, Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy
They shared the questions raised by the report, and summarized five recommendations that all stakeholders, levels of government, and types of funders can play a role in advancing.
After the presentation, a panel of sector leaders with experience as providers, advocates, researchers and policymakers grappled with issues raised in the report. Moderator Tom Weber of the Eastern Bank Foundation opened by saying, “In Massachusetts… we’ve never seen the kind of investments in this space as we do today. And yet, so there’s so much more to do. By many measures, we’re back where we were at the start of the pandemic. What does all the policy progress mean to the people doing the work every day?”
Latoya Gayle, Senior Director of Advocacy at Neighborhood Villages, answered with an analogy that carried through much of the conversation: “If you’re in a restaurant, you don’t know all the chaos going on in the kitchen.” What the C3 grants have been able to do is expand the menu of options for providers, so they can expand the quality and variety of opportunity they can offer to the families they serve.
Strategies for Children Executive Director Amy O’Leary expanded on that, saying that providers’ knowing what’s up in the kitchen means there’s “opportunity in staying together working for the good of the field, not fighting for our own piece of the pie.”
Northeastern Professor Kim Lucas shared that in her research, she’s seeing an attitude of “thank goodness for C3. When we make things easy in terms of ability to receive and spend funds, it allows [providers] to do things like provide quality.”
And yet, said Colin Jones, Deputy Policy Director at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, “It doesn’t feel different enough for parents. You’re still trying to find care that works and is affordable. We need a single point of entry for parents, and to be able to guarantee spots.”
Weber further engaged the panel on how to measure successes and challenges to inform decisions; how to engage families and caregivers; how treating early education and care as a public good might look in a mixed-delivery system, and how can we secure and grow progress.
More money, more coordination, and more local infrastructure would help on all fronts. Creativity is required to expand our thinking on these old and knotty problems. As O’Leary said, “We did not design our current system around what people need or want, but what was there…. We should be investing time, energy, and political power in trying to change this.”
A new focus on abundance rather than scarcity was called on by all—get that metaphorical restaurant kitchen stocked! Above all, “we need to lower our tolerance for watching families and children struggle,” declared Gayle.