Catherine Davis and Jordan Brown | June 18, 2024
TX State Agency Leaders, Fort Worth Mayor Cast Vision for a Stronger Early Learning System
In April 2024, community and state leaders from across Texas gathered in Fort Worth for the 2024 Momentum Early Learning Summit, a two-day event designed to develop a common statewide vision for the state’s early childhood system. The summit focused on two cornerstone issues foundational to a well-functioning early learning system: 1) better incorporating community-based child care programs into the state’s prekindergarten program through a “mixed-delivery system,” and 2) bolstering the early educator workforce.
In a sector where less than 2% of pre-k seats are offered in community-based settings and where early educator turnover rates have reached a staggering 39% annually, the time is ripe to reimagine our statewide approach. The summit was intended to create consensus and build momentum across lines of difference on these two issues, and ultimately address existing policy design flaws and spark new ideas that could propel Texas’ early childhood system forward.
Prefacing a set of intensive design sessions, the Momentum Summit featured a panel discussion among Texas Workforce Commission Chairman Bryan Daniel, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, and Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath. Each of these leaders influence the early learning system in different ways, and they each play a key role in shaping the state and local early childhood education landscape. Questions posed by moderator Kara Waddell, President and CEO of Child Care Associates, sought to shine light on their respective agencies’ priorities and the role that each panelist sees themself playing to improve the early childhood education system in Texas.
Key Takeaways
Topics raised during the conversation ranged from Texas’ tepid uptake of community-based prekindergarten and the need to ensure more options for families, to the volatile child care system—marred by an unstable and underpaid workforce—and the growing need for greater public investment. The leaders on the panel provided their individual perspectives on these topics, leaving advocates and policymakers with several important key takeaways:
1. Texas must encourage a stronger mixed-delivery system by removing barriers to Pre-K Partnerships and exploring new models for community-based prekindergarten.
2. In order to alleviate challenges with the early educator workforce, Texas must find solutions that address both upward mobility in the profession and better compensation.
3. The return-on-investment (ROI) of early childhood education is clear, and Texas must explore more efficient uses of existing resources and find opportunities to infuse new resources into the system in order to capitalize on child care’s ROI.
Encouraging a stronger mixed-delivery system
Despite being a critical lever for improving access to quality early learning, promoting parent choice, and stabilizing child care, Texas’ mixed-delivery prekindergarten system lags behind most other states. With less than 2% of the state’s prekindergarten enrollment currently within community-based programs, Texas leaves roughly $1 billion in designated pre-k funding on the table at the capitol due to missing enrollment of eligible families. Ultimately, the state’s model has fallen short of meeting families’ needs and has inadvertently contributed to rising financial instability for child care providers.
Panelists acknowledged that Texas’ current approach to mixed-delivery, known as Pre-K Partnerships, are simply too cumbersome to implement at scale. Commissioner Morath noted that the high level of effort needed to successfully pull off partnerships, in addition to a lack of enforcement by state law, has given school districts little incentive to partner with child care programs to provide pre-k. LEAs are required to pass through a portion of their already limited pre-k funding to community-based classrooms, which creates a complicated set of logistics that many LEAs do not find worth the effort.
On the child care side, Pre-K Partnerships are challenging to navigate due to differing eligibility requirements for child care subsidies and state-funded prekindergarten. Expecting child care programs to make the financing work while only receiving a portion of the pre-k resources from their partner LEA is often unrealistic. And, until the recently passed HB 2729, a major barrier for child care programs has been their inability to employ a fully-certified teacher to teach in the pre-k partnership classroom, due to their inability to recruit qualified educators and pay them realistic salaries on already razor thin margins.
Commissioner Morath, Chairman Daniel, and Mayor Parker all underscored the need to lessen administrative burdens to Pre-K Partnerships, while at the same time working towards identifying a new, more streamlined model for mixed-delivery pre-k that maximizes funding and encourages participation across all settings.
One concept that bubbled up among panelists was the potential to designate regional intermediaries that could stand up partnerships on behalf of both parties, coordinating with LEAs and child care directors to manage logistics, support quality administration, and build up the child care workforce. These intermediaries could also serve as centralized hubs for families seeking early learning services that meet their individual needs. Regardless of an intermediary, policymakers and advocates must identify solutions for overcoming the many administrative and funding barriers to a more viable mixed-delivery system in Texas.
Addressing the Early Childhood Workforce
A functioning child care and mixed-delivery pre-k system necessitates a stable, well-supported early educator workforce. The current lack of workforce stability, including inability for child care programs to attract and adequately compensate qualified staff, has posed challenges for community-based child care programs seeking to participate in Pre-K Partnerships. While HB 2729, passed in the 88th Legislature, helped address this challenge by creating specific, more attainable standards for Pre-K Partnership teachers in child care programs, more work is needed to ensure all early educators are better compensated and supported with advancing in their career.
The panelists agreed that early childhood educators need more on-the-job development and pathway opportunities that allow for stacking credentials and experience, giving child care teachers the opportunity to stair-step their way towards leading public pre-k classrooms without having to leave the classroom for years to embark on a traditional degree pathway. The speakers also agreed that a child care educator who gains additional experience and credentials should receive higher pay, and that it is unreasonable to assume that simply leaving it up to the market will generate these extra wages from nothing.
However, Chairman Daniel expressed the limitations and tradeoffs of using available child care block grant (CCDF) funding to increase compensation for child care educators given the many other required uses (such as child care scholarships and quality improvement initiatives), indicating that this will likely require a different set of resources proposed by the legislature.
Mayor Parker pointed out that local efforts in Tarrant County, such as the Prime Early Learning Pilot and the Pre-K Today program, have been critical to piloting new approaches to increasing child care educator wages and better leveraging pre-k dollars to support and compensate Pre-K Partnership teachers, respectively. Data and insights from these pilots can provide important proof points for new policies and program models that more efficiently achieve the state’s vision.
Maximizing the Return-on-Investment
Every dollar invested in high-quality early learning for educationally disadvantaged children delivers a 13% return on investment (ROI) (Heckman, 2017). This ROI reduces drastically throughout the school age years and into college, making educational investments in the later years less impactful in the long term.
Despite the proven ROI for investments made into early education, panelists unanimously agreed that compared to K-12 and higher education, the state’s current early learning system is significantly underinvested in. They also acknowledged the need to ensure a more efficient use of existing funds before requesting additional funding from the state. Again, reiterated was the need to remove barriers for child care programs to tap into public pre-k resources, as well as better supporting independent child care programs to improve business practices and increase revenue, as noted by Chairman Daniel.
Chairman Daniel also left the door open for additional state funding, should the legislature choose to invest in it. Obtaining an investment from the state will require local actors to highlight their greatest needs and exemplify local solutions that could be implemented at a larger scale. But government funding inevitably comes with stipulations, and within the current Texas political landscape, there must be consensus around tracking program outcomes and designing fiscally-conservative methods of funding distribution.
Mayor Parker also pointed to private-sector involvement as a largely untapped resource for increasing child care access. Businesses have the potential to become partners in this effort either directly through employee child care benefits or through more indirect investments into existing local child care programs. However, businesses and employers are likely to need additional information from experts in the field about how to maximize investments, and incentives from the legislature could encourage them to become more involved.
Conclusion
The 2024 Momentum Early Learning Summit Keynote Panel created a key moment in Texas’ early childhood education history—a moment in which our state leaders acknowledged the need for widespread systems change. They recognized that Texas is not currently maximizing the potential of its early childhood system, and that it is certainly not meeting the needs of all Texas families.
This conversation serves as a robust starting point for stakeholders seeking to improve early childhood education in Texas. By understanding top line priorities for bolstering the sector, we can more effectively work towards creating a cohesive and functioning system that supports mixed-delivery prekindergarten and the early educator workforce. Key leaders at the state and local levels must become strong voices in building these structures, and we must work in tandem with them to chart a path forward.