 My name is Liza Mundy. I'm a program director here at New America, which as you know is a nonpartisan, non-profit think-tank and civic enterprise. I direct the bread-winning and caregiving program, which is our sort of fancy word for work and family, and the purpose of my program is to help shape policy and help us move toward a world where both men and women can fulfill their bread-winning and caregiving responsibilities more easily than many people find it possible to do now. We have a very exciting, very distinguished panel here today to talk about to talk about social policy, families, how better to help families, and to talk about the president's budget, and some of the visions and markers laid down in that budget and moving forward. It's going to be a high-minded and distinguished event, but I thought if you don't mind, if it doesn't seem too facetious, that I would start with sort of a low culture reference and talk about, briefly, about something that I like to think of as the Jetsons fallacy. I'm dating myself with this reference, but there was a popular cartoon in the 1960s that you may remember called the Jetsons and I think I watched it fairly religiously because I remember it pretty vividly. And it was a cartoon that envisioned a family of the future, a family that was a hundred years hence, so it was like 2062 or something like that. This family was of course living in space because we'll all be living in space in 2060-something. They of course had flying cars because we're going to have those any minute, and they were living in elevated buildings. They had robot housekeepers, all the accoutrements that technology is going to give us any day now. So everything had changed. There was a, you may not remember this, there was a two-hour work week. So George Jetson did go to the office, but he only had to work an hour a day, two days a week. So technology was also going to set us free and give us a lot of free time. And I know that that is how you all experience technology in your lives. The one thing that was not going to change, though, was the family. You may remember that the Jetsons are a nuclear family. George Jetson is the family breadwinner. Jane Jetson, there was always a sequence in which he tried to give her some money in the morning to go shopping, and she would take his entire wallet because that's what women do. And so even though everything had changed, the composition of the family had not changed and apparently would never change. We know now that that sort of nuclear family of the 1950s and 60s was, in fact, a historical blip. Historians like Stephanie Coons have shown effectively that, in fact, that was not the way that the human family was always made up. And we know now that it was sort of an artifact of that era, just to sort of quote some statistics. According to pure research, in 1960, 37% of households included a married couple raising their own kids, like the Jetsons. Today, only 16% of households fit that description. In 1980, 61% of kids younger than 18 were living with heterosexual parents in their first marriage, now less than half are. So families are changing. Families will continue to change. In many cases, that's a good and wonderful thing as people have found their way into relationships that meet their needs and desires. The Jetsons also, I don't think any talk of same-sex marriage would have really resonated in the 60s. And we've had that very, very positive development. So many of the changes, I think, have enabled people to have more choice and freedom in their lives. But I think some of the changes in the family, 40% now families are headed by a female breadwinner, which is also a great thing in many instances. But in other instances, it's an artifact of the fact that high-paying industrial jobs of the 1950s and 60s that were available to men are no longer so available. So many of the economic stresses that have materialized in the past couple of decades have shaped and affected the family in some cases in ways that have been not so positive. But our social policies, I think, are still rooted in the ideas of the 1960s that you're going to have a nuclear family with a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home or part-time working wife. And I think one of the challenges today, and it's a big challenge, is to acknowledge the changes that have taken place in the family and to update and coordinate the social policies that serve families and affect families. And it's easy to identify social policies like welfare or the child care development block grant that directly and specifically are designed to affect families. But there are many other policies having to do with education or even small business that affect families and family formation as well. And one of the things that we've been endeavoring to do at New America is to bring together many of our programs to really talk about this. How do you think about a whole range of social policy with families in mind and family well-being and family formation? We're fortunate to have funding from the Annie Casey Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation to engage in a really rigorous conversation about how we can update and coordinate our social policies to recognize changes in families, to support families in all their diverse forms, and to holistically address the family so that needs of parents and children are met simultaneously if possible, or at least so that social families serving children think about the needs of other generations as well. There's a lot of talk these days about a two-generation approach to families, or in some cases a three-generation approach, at any rate a multi-generational approach, and we'd like to be part of that conversation as well. So we have today a number of expert panelists from New America. We have Laura Bornfront, who is the deputy director for our early education initiative. They've done an enormous amount of work around early ed policies, which have gotten a lot of attention, and she'll be talking about the president's budget in terms of early ed. We have Mary Alice McCarthy, who is a senior policy analyst in the education policy program at New America, where she examines the relationship between higher education and workforce development policy. And we have Justin King, who is the policy director of New America's asset building program, helping families amass the resources that they need in order to support generations going forward. And we have more introductions to come, but I would like to introduce Shelly Waters-Butes, who is a senior consultant with the Annie Casey Foundation, who brings over 15 years of experience as a policy expert on issues affecting the lives of children and families. She has helped Casey craft their two-generation strategy for impact investing. And prior to her work with the Annie Casey Foundation, she worked as a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and was a founding director of the Early Education Initiative here at New America. So it's great to have her here. Prior to these positions, she directed childcare and development policy at the Children's Defense Fund. So thanks, Shelly. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be back at New America. I have many fond memories of good deep policy conversations here and really an organization that's leading the way, I think, in a lot of the social policy challenges that we have today. So it's wonderful to be back. And thanks to Liz for the introduction. I want to tell you just briefly a little bit about this framework that Liz mentioned around two-generation approaches to poverty. Because it's something that the Annie Casey Foundation, but also Kellogg and many other funders have been talking about as a framework. Again, not a model, but really a framework of ways of thinking about how we can do our work differently. And why does the Annie Casey Foundation care about this? Those of you who know us, you probably heard her name on NPR, is an organization that really is deeply concerned about the well-being of our nation's most vulnerable children. And Casey, for a long time, has always believed that for children to do well, their families must do well. So this idea of serving a whole family and giving opportunities to a whole family, truly a two-generation approach, child and the caregiver, is really nothing new for our foundation. But we have renewed a sense of really intentionality of how we actually do our work at the foundation, what we're actually supporting, and how we can actually help glue some of these pieces together, which you'll be hearing about today. Just specifically to put some meat on what we mean when we say two-generation approaches to ending the cycle of poverty at the Annie Casey, we really talk about three pillars. And I just want to explain those briefly, because I think it'll help frame the conversation from the panel. So the first pillar that we talk about is, in and of itself, a set of things that have to come together. And Casey's been working for almost 20 years in the family economic stability space where we're trying to align workforce, assets, income supports, the things that really help stabilize a family's income so that you can actually then gain the skills and tools that you need to provide for your family. A second pillar is really, and I will hear a lot about this today too, is about the early childhood education supports. We know a lot from the research about what we can do to support young kids and their growth and development, but it's not just pre-K. It's also paid leave. It's also making sure that there's high quality education experiences, K to 12. So there's a whole host of things in this early ed and education pillar. And then the third pillar, which sort of grew out of our work in communities, was really about a lot of what Liz talks about, which is the parent themselves as breadwinner, as caregiver, as an individual who has their own needs for social network. Because if you raise a family like I do, I don't do it alone. It takes a village, as Hillary Clinton said, in order to keep my family held together. So there's a set of supports that are really kind of focused on the parent, building parent efficacy and empowerment, bringing their voice to the tools and supports and services that they're trying to corral and bring into their family. It's also about mental health and I want to really raise that up because it's something that we see in the communities that we're working with. I think the statistics are somewhere as high as 60% of low income moms can have mental health or depression symptoms that affect the well-being of their children. So we have to pay attention to mental health issues. So for KC, it's those three pillars. Family economic success. The parent as an individual and really thinking about parent efficacy and parent empowerment. I use the term engagement, but that's such a loaded term, but it's really about thinking about the parent and then the early childhood education. So in all of that, we have a whole set of supports and investments that we're looking at across the foundation. One is really thinking about how do we turn research into practice. We have a lot of new brain science out there. We have a lot of interesting research going on, but it's not really filtering into practice or policy. We have a set of investments around that. We're also really working on the ground to demonstrate evidence and really look at programs that are trying to bring these pieces together. A lot of times the foundation money is the glue that brings the workforce programs and the early ed programs together, and then we really are looking at how we can influence policy and systems. So really thinking about how our policies are designed and that's what we'll talk about here today and how we can actually help them connect better to each other. We oftentimes provide workforce interventions for a low income family, but don't think about the childcare that they need and don't really do much to help them access childcare to get into a workforce development program. We sometimes give people childcare support because they're working, but we don't give them a chance to get the training to advance their skills. So we have to think about where we have these policy barriers that really aren't designed around whole families and find ways to both nudge those policies closer together but also fill the gaps. And we have a new report that was out just last fall at the Casey Foundation that has a lot of policy ideas around this area. I'm happy to talk more about those in Q&A. So thanks. And now Mary Alice McCarthy is going to introduce her former boss. Good morning everyone. So glad to see you all here. Thank you for coming. So it is my great pleasure to introduce to you Acting Assistant Secretary Johann Juven of the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education at the U.S. Department of Education. For those of you who don't know, the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, also known as ACTE, oversees some very important investments including all of the Department of Education's investments in adult education, which includes adult basic education, investments in English as a second language, and also corrections and reentry education. The Office also oversees our career and technical education systems, and that's at both the high school and community college level. And it is the Office responsible for developing policy around community colleges. Acting Assistant Secretary Juven joined the Department of Education back in 2009, so he has been with the department for some time. He joined as a senior policy advisor then and is now to what was then the Assistant Secretary, Brendan M.S. here, and in 2014 became the Acting Assistant Secretary. The reason that, and I should say that prior to joining the administration, Acting Assistant Secretary Juven was very active in the state of Rhode Island and oversaw the Adult Education and Career and Technical Education program there. So he's been at the state level and brought that knowledge and experience to the federal level. The reason, though, that we really wanted to have, and I hope you don't mind if I just said that we wanted to have Johan join us today, was that he also has been working in the administration steadily and quietly for the last, since 2009, and doing a lot of work of building relationships across agencies and across departments and across programs. He has led initiatives in sort of trying to get different programs and services that serve disconnected youth to come together and think about how to better align their policies. He's led efforts around immigrant integration and tried to work with different departments and different agencies on how do we align federal policy in the area of immigrant integration. Similarly on the prisoner reentry, there are so many policies affecting prisoner reentry and providing services, and he has led a lot of that work. And the work on, which is I think a little bit more high profile, is some of the work on building career pathways. He's led an interagency work group with the Departments of Labor Education and Health and Human Services that has put out quite a bit of technical assistance to states and local areas about how to combine different programs that help low-skilled youth and adults get onto career pathways. So we know that that work is not easy. And we wanted to sort of, as we're thinking about here at New America, how we build a family-centered social policy that is integrated that does sort of break down some of these silos. We're hoping you can share with us how you've been doing that and what we should be thinking about in the process. So with that, I will turn the microphone over to you. Thank you, Mary Alice. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to spend some time with you. And what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about all the work that we've been doing, basically fighting for working families and strengthening our economy if I can use those two broader themes to summarize what we have focused on for a number of years now. I'll do this in two ways. I want to remind us that there actually is a strong foundation of work that we have already accomplished over the last couple of years as it relates to supporting families and particularly working families. And then I will speak a little bit about how the 2016 budget proposal sort of amplifies and builds upon that work. I won't go into the details of every element of the budget proposal or the work that we've accomplished, but I wanted to, at least for setting the context for our conversation, identify sort of what the broad areas of work are that we have accomplished and then talk a little bit more about the budget proposals that I think are relevant to our conversation today. We must mention access to healthcare services. I don't need to elaborate on that, but that in and of itself when you think of families and what their needs are was a major accomplishment, I believe. Now, we have done many other things crossing the activities of many, many different agencies and offices, and I will summarize because I believe that they follow into six clusters of work that we have focused on. One cluster of work deals with expanding the workplace flexibility and empowering workers, and there are a number of initiatives that we could discuss that would fit under that broader cluster of work. Just to illustrate, extending workplace protections to all families equally would be one particular effort under that first broad cluster. The second one is increasing access to affordable childcare. There have been a number of initiatives that we've pursued that speak to that goal directly. The third one is the multiple efforts we've undertaken that indicate that we are making progress towards solutions for paid leave in our country. The fourth one is continuing the focus on closing the pay gap by increasing access to non-traditional occupations, and one can look at our work we have done in the area of STEM to advance opportunities for girls and women. We can look at a number of other efforts that we've undertaken, most recently, for instance, in our work around apprenticeship where we are prioritizing the participation of women and groups who historically have not had opportunities to participate in those programs. As I'm flipping through this, we have done so much in that area. The fifth cluster of activity that I want to mention has to do with expanding tax credits that support working families. And then the final sort of cluster of work that I would like to mention is in the area of working with our partners in the private sector, whether that is in the non-profit sector or in the for-profit sector. And it's really to bring solutions to more workplaces. I think our most recent effort to engage both the national and international unions and multiple labor management initiatives that exist in our country to make commitments to expand access to opportunities for workers to improve their skills and to make commitments to creating the flexible policies that are needed for people to take full advantage of these opportunities is just one illustration. So I hope this was helpful sort of as a foundation in terms of, okay, we have been working on this for quite some time and have achieved significant progress there. Now looking at the budget, if there is a way to sort of tie all the proposals together, I would want to go back to the President's 2014 State of the Union where he said, opportunity is who we are and it's our, I'm paraphrasing now, it's our job in this generation to actually restore that opportunity for everyone. So under that broader umbrella, I think there are a number of things I would like to highlight in the budget proposal that deal directly with the issue of supporting families and particularly working families. A big cluster of proposals deals with a topic that I know my panelists will also talk about and it's expanding access to high quality early learning initiatives. From the preschool for all proposal to the preschool development grants, the IDA preschool grants to a number of other initiatives in collaboration with our colleagues at the Department of Health and Human Services that affect childcare, early head start, head start, and evidence-based home visiting. There is a cluster of very specific initiatives in the budget proposal that actually advance the agenda of making sure that all of our children have access to high quality early learning opportunities. The second cluster of activities I want to mention or proposals I want to mention deals with expanding college opportunity and quality. The budget proposal includes 60.3 billion investment in mandatory funding over the next decade for America's College Promise and what that initiative would do would create a new partnership with states to make two years of community college free for responsible students. A second thing that we can see throughout the budget is our continued commitment to further simplifying the process for accessing federal student data and this deals with efforts to further simplifying the FAFSA form to eliminate any burdensome and unnecessary complex questions and make it easier for individuals to access that aid. From a statistics point of view, the likelihood that someone will actually enroll in college when they complete the FAFSA is extremely high. I believe in some years it's over 90%. Then we continue to work on improving and streamlining income-driven repayment options creating a single simple and better targeted plan for borrowers while helping them manage their debt. Clearly some of the more recent announcements that have been made speak directly to this theme as well. Full funding for Pell is another continued commitment that is reflected in the budget proposal. Then I want to point out a few specific discretionary funding opportunities that I think are relevant to the broader theme of expanding college opportunity and quality. One is in the section of the budget that deals with career and technical education under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act an additional 200 million was proposed for something called an American Technical Training Fund. It's a fund intended to create innovation in the career and technical education space in conjunction with some of the investments proposed at the Department of Labor to ensure that more individuals will have access to the type of programming that is linked to either clear transfer pathways or clear career-oriented programming that result in high completion rates and subsequent very high job placement rates and initial earnings. Then there is the increased investment in the world competition that I want to mention and then want to briefly point out that there is also an interest in looking at performance through a college opportunity and graduation bonus program. That in terms of the higher education agenda, there are a few other important developments that I want to point out. One is related to the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act while that is not necessarily a highlight in our 2016 budget proposal. It is a law that was enacted this past July and is one of the major pieces of legislation supporting workforce development in our country. We are very excited about the opportunity here and I believe this week we will make available for public inspection a draft of the proposed regulations for that act but the reason why I mention it is that unlike under current law which is the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act there are a number of specific changes that I believe will lead to more holistic policy making at the state and local levels and will significantly increase the opportunities for low skilled individuals and very hard working families. One is the commitment in the law to develop career pathway systems at the local level as a matter of fact it is mentioned 21 times throughout the law. The other one is an emphasis and even an expectation to focus on individuals with significant barriers to employment and that is going to bring about I think a considerable change in the state and local policies and practices for this work. WIOA which is the acronym for the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act affects roughly half of our workforce development investments in our country and to affect the other half as you may recall the vice president submitted in July to the president is ready to work reports that lays out 50 executive actions intended to make our workforce development and education programs more responsive to the needs of business so that when youth and adults leave our programs they actually will have skill sets that will allow them to first of all land that job and secondly command the wage that would allow them to support their families. I also want to mention one additional effort and perhaps can then revisit some additional initiatives during the conversation and that is the work around apprenticeship. We have made a commitment to doubling the opportunities over time for individuals interested in taking full advantage of this work and learn model. We think it is a significant direction that we have taken in that the registered apprenticeship program or other forms of high quality apprenticeship address a number of the key issues that families face. You actually don't need to worry about your income while you are learning. You have ongoing access to a mentor and coach as you go through this program and the transition into full employment as a journeyman or journey woman upon completion of the program is almost automatic and then there is also the expectation that you subsequently will then train or participate in the training of the next generation of apprentices. There is another reason why this is a very exciting direction. We have been working very hard with our colleagues at the Department of Labor to really look at registered apprenticeship as a very viable post-secondary pathway and we have created something called the RAC which stands for the Registered Apprenticeship Community College Consortium. What we are doing there is really advancing the idea that if you complete a registered apprenticeship program there might be and in many cases there are significant opportunities to articulate your experience with either a certificate, a degree or a number of college credits towards a degree. We have been very successful at signing up a growing number of registered apprenticeship programs and community colleges for that purpose. Let me pause here and I am sure that we can find opportunities in the dialogue to revisit some of the additional initiatives. Thank you. What is going to happen now is three of our experts at New America are going to talk about the budget and what it means for families from the point of view of their programs and then we are going to pepper our guests from the administration with questions. I am just kidding. We are going to try to have a lively conversation about how you align policies and programs in a way that serves and supports families and multiple generations. Mary Alice, I think you are going to start. Great. I would love to. I will say my comments will echo much of what the Assistant Secretary just said. You can tell where I used to work because we have much in common. I want to talk briefly about three areas of the budget and look at them again through the lens of the families. The context for that is that we here are in the process in America finalizing a white paper that lays out the big social and economic trends over the last few decades that have placed a lot of strain on the family, particularly on family financial stability. Among these are the rising cost of higher education, the very difficult labor market that people face today and the decline in job tenure and job security, and the decline in locally owned businesses and in particular the loss of manufacturing jobs and manufacturing businesses. The President's budget has a number of proposed investments, both large and small, some of which we just heard about, that address each of these areas. I want to talk about three of them, one from the Department of Education, one from the Department of Labor, and one from the Department of Commerce. Each one really focuses on big sources of strain on American families, and as we look at the proposals, I think really also pushes us to think about it as we're thinking about how do we build a family-centered social policy and to think about who else needs to be part of this conversation outside of the federal government because each one sort of raises questions around who else needs to be at the table to make them actually happen. So we'll start with the higher education one, and I also am going to talk just a moment about America's College Promise, the Free Community College proposal that the Obama administration has put out that the Assistant Secretary already spoke about. You know, it directly addresses, this proposal directly addresses one of the major sources of strain on family budgets today. We know that the cost of higher education has been rising incredibly fast and faster than the rate of inflation for the last several decades. That is leading to much higher levels of borrowing among American families. In 2012, a record share of the nation's new college graduates, almost 70%, had taken out student loans to finance their education, and the typical amount that they had borrowed was more than twice that of college graduates 20 years ago. So we know from the New York Federal Reserve Bank, too, that this debt, these tremendous debt loads that students are carrying into their post-graduation years is delaying household formation, it's delaying household buying, it's a drag on our economy. So America's College Promise, by guaranteeing those first two years of college for free, basically really addresses that issue head-on. But I want to point out something else within that program that I think is important for us to think about, which is that the way it's structured is as a federal-state partnership. The federal government is offering to put 75% of the first two years of a community college tuition to pay for that. That's based on an average community college tuition of $3,800. That's sort of a national average. But then states have to put up the rest of the funds. So again, one of the big issues we've seen in higher education over the last couple of decades, or over the last decade, in particular has been declining state investment in higher education. So this really does get to this issue of, as we're thinking about creating family-centered social policy, how do we think about the relationship between the federal government and state governments? Because the federal government can't do everything on its own. The second one that I wanted to talk about is registered apprenticeship, because it is such an exciting proposal. And I'm so happy to hear you talk about it, because I also think that when I first started thinking about which of the budget proposals really speak to me in terms of supporting families, I immediately thought of the registered apprenticeship programs. Over the last three decades, it's gotten harder to find and to keep a job. And that is particularly true for young people, but also for dislocated workers, for transitioning veterans, for many others. There are a number of investments or proposed investments in the budget that look at sort of the labor market and making labor market transitions easy, but I don't think any is as exciting as the registered apprenticeship proposal, which is a $2 billion proposed investment in building registered apprenticeship. This builds on the $100 million program that the administration already has to start out on the street and sort of gets to this goal of doubling the number of apprentices. So I think the Assistant Secretary already laid out the case for why apprenticeship is a family-friendly policy. It provides an affordable pathway into good jobs. It is effective. The job placement rate of the US in the United States, the job placement rate of registered apprenticeships is close to 90%. And the average starting wages are over $50,000. And it's a clear and predictable pathway. Apprentices, unlike students in higher education, know the moment that they start, how long their apprenticeship will last and where it is leading to. That kind of stability and predictability is something that families desperately need and don't have and actually have less and less of every day. And our higher education policies right now don't really guarantee that. So thinking about ways to bring this kind of apprenticeship approach, which provides a lot more predictability together with higher education degrees and credentials and pathways is very exciting. Also, the apprenticeship approach represents a very different kind of commitment in relationship between the employer community and the folks that they hire and the folks that they train. It represents a long-term commitment between employers and workers. Longer than we've sort of grown accustomed to in the last few decades. Apprenticeship approaches sort of offer the promise of a more collaborative approach or a shared value approach based on loyalty and sort of shared commitments to training and work that would really be a refreshing sort of change and how we think about the relationship between employers and workers today. So just as America's college promise is predicated on greater federal and state cooperation around how to support America's families, I think registered apprenticeship reminds us that we can't talk about family-centered social policy without talking about employers, without talking about the business community, without talking about the kind of strategies that they use to sort of recruit and train their workforces and how that can actually support families. The third thing, the third just sort of proposal that I just want to mention briefly is out of the Department of Commerce and it is a proposal to keep building the National Network of Manufacturing Institutes. You'll see in our white paper when it comes out that we talk a lot about the sort of erosion of the manufacturing sector in the United States and how that has put a strain on families. The Department of Commerce has been working in communities and cities to set up these institutes of manufacturing that sort of are developing new advanced manufacturing approaches to try to bring manufacturing back. I think the Germans have demonstrated to us that it's possible for an advanced economy to compete effectively in manufacturing with the right kinds of investments and the right kinds of supports. So this effort is focused more at the city or regional level and it's all about building partnerships among businesses, educational institutions, and local government agencies to support the development of advanced manufacturing hubs. And this gets to that third piece of this, three things I'm talking about which is we need more affordable higher education, we need more secure and predictable pathways into good jobs and we need more good jobs. And so when we think about family-centered social policy, the family ultimately needs access to good jobs and how can policy support the development of good jobs in ways that are sort of also who do they need to work with in order to be able to do that. So those are my three thoughts on the budgets. Thank you so much, Laura. So first just highlighting, when we talk about pre-K, the states have really, you know, stepped up over the last 10 years to expand their pre-K programs and so what the president has put out is really that same sort of federal state partnership where the federal government would, you know, invest 75 billion over 10 years and really have a cost sharing with states that want to expand or, you know, create new pre-K programs because now we're just about every state has one. We have, I think it's about eight states that don't currently have any kind of pre-K program for four-year-olds and some states even have slots open to three-year-olds. And so the administration's proposal would, you know, fund children up to 200% of the poverty level and that would be a requirement for states to meet certain, you know, sets of quality indicators for the program. So this would be, states would be, you know, able to participate if they did things like provide a full-day program for students, if they required teachers in those programs to have bachelor's degrees and then they paid them comparably with K-12 teachers, which is a really important thing to do and not something that most states are doing right now. And part of that, as Yohan mentioned, is the preschool development grants, which that's part of this, you know, overall pre-K for all proposal, but actually the first round of preschool development grants was funded in last year's appropriations bill. So we've already seen one round of states be able to apply and receive in December some funding through the preschool development grants and so the president, you know, in this budget request proposed expanding that to another $500 million and allowing more states to, you know, participate. Another piece that, you know, we think is particularly important at the Early Education Initiative is a focus also on, you know, encouraging states to use some of those funds to expand and provide full-day kindergarten and you might be surprised a lot of people are when, you know, I bring this up is that not every state, you know, requires full-day kindergarten. Kindergarten in a lot of places could be as little as, you know, two and a half to three hours a day and so when we're talking about expanding pre-K and expanding that to a full day of learning for children, we don't want to set them up to have an instance where they would then go to kindergarten for, you know, three hours and then back to first grade for another full day. So I think, you know, it's both important to focus on expanding our opportunities for, you know, three and four-year-olds but at the same time make sure that that's scaffolded and that we're providing high-quality opportunities to follow that year pre-K up. And the other piece, you know, the president proposed an expansion to Head Start. You know, Head Start is often considered, you know, the original two-generation program because of its emphasis on providing comprehensive services for families in addition to a pre-K program that, you know, is a whole child focus, a focus on, you know, helping them to develop social-emotional skills as well as, you know, more academic areas, early reading skills, early math skills. It's really a, you know, a well-rounded program that supports both children and their families and so that the president proposed an expansion to that program as well. And in his State of the Union, the president really referred to this as a must-have. It's not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have for families. And, you know, we've all likely heard the 30 million word gap stat by age three that, you know, children of affluent families have heard, you know, 30 more million words than children from low-income families. And so beginning early, beginning with infant toddlers, making sure that they are in, you know, higher-quality settings is especially important. So just a couple of points. You know, first, the president proposed a child care, an expansion to the child care and development tax credit that would essentially, you know, triple the maximum benefit for families and, you know, help support families up who are making up to $120,000. Also an expansion to child care subsidies for low-income families, actually by $82 billion over 10 years, which is particularly significant. And I, you know, the one thing, and I know we'll get into this a little bit later, but, you know, this is funding for slots and accessibility for families, which is especially important, but we also want to make sure that those settings are high-quality. And so I know that the administration has put some funding into helping, you know, child care centers and states to think about quality and think about how to expand, you know, slots for families in high-quality settings. Just, you know, there's a lot of proposals. Home visiting is another one that the president, you know, put additional funds into, which, you know, is a program that has a lot of success. Behind it, it's actually a program that is set unless something happened this morning to expire by the end of this month. So it's an area for Congress to take some action on that sooner than later. And then just the final program that I'll mention is Promise Neighborhoods. And this is, you know, it's modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, but really taking a neighborhood focus and looking at both, you know, developing local partnerships around services that are already serving, you know, children and their families in that neighborhood and thinking about how to bring those together and build those partnerships out to better, you know, essentially better do what they're doing and better connect those. So we can talk a little bit more about that later. Great. Thank you. And now Justin King is going to talk about changes to the earned income tax credit and other tax policies that profoundly affect families and behavior. Thanks, Liza. You know, our work in the Asset Building Program is really driven by a desire to broaden access to economic resources. We think about sort of increased savings. We think about sort of increased ownership as key goals. And we think about that not just because, you know, having more money is nice, but families that are more economically secure, that are more financially stable, they do better. They have a better shot at moving up the economic ladder in the long run. They have a greater stake in our society. And we just, we see this really consistently across the research. They grow up in families that are low income, but their savers have a much better chance of moving up the economic ladder than the same kid from the same household with the same income level, but the family's not able to save. Kids that have savings for college are four, five, six times more likely to go to college than the same kid with the same expectations but who doesn't have that savings account. So there's really a critical role for government to play in supporting household economic stability and supporting the ability to save across the long, the big picture. And I think we've had a lot of talk about programs so far. I'm really glad that Johann mentioned one of his key areas for the administration in this focus is tax credits. Because really tax credits play the biggest role, I think, in supporting that development of family assets in the long run. There's about a half a trillion dollars that goes out the door every year through the tax code to support families buying and owning a home, support their retirement savings, support their education savings. The unfortunate thing is is that distribution of funds is really skewed and the vast majority of that money is 10, 20% of the income distribution. And there's really very little of this pro-saving support that goes to families in the bottom 50, 60% of the income distribution. So the effort is there, the will is there, the resources are there. It's just not always applied with care and it's not always targeted to the families that need the most help that are striving really for a better life. But there are some key proposals that I think are moving us in the right direction and that are really closely related to the idea of promoting the financial stability of families along with a more modern understanding of what a family is. As you and Shelley I think both eloquently said earlier. The first one, one of the big sort of family supports that's out there is the Earned Income Tax Credit which is often called anti-poverty program because of the sheer size of the dollars that are involved in the EITC. And it really is. It's really become as we've seen other income supports and programs really wither away over the course of the last 20 years or so. The EITC has really assumed a primary role in terms of where our policy for supporting families is. The EITC is it's tied to work. It's a substantial amount of money. What's bad about the EITC is that it only happens once a year and you get this sort of balloon drop of money. But also that it excludes a lot of people who are working, working hard and who have really significant needs and are also connected to in a part of families. The policy works now is that if you're a non-custodial parent or you're childless you're essentially not eligible for the EITC. There's a policy there and you can access it but it maxes out at $500 and it fades out really quickly so you don't have to make very much money to not be eligible for the EITC if you're technically not in care of children. But we've come to know and we've come to understand that a lot of people that we term to be non-custodial parents are deeply involved in the lives of their kids. They're a part of that village that Shelley talked about earlier. They may not be physically in the household from where the mail gets sent perspective but they are an integral part of the lives of this next generation and they play a key role in determining how well those kids are going to do going forward and so the administration put on the table a proposal to double the size of that tax credit and make it more accessible for non-custodial parents and for childless workers at the bottom end of the income spectrum. The other thing that's sort of incredible about current policy is there's an age exclusion. If you're age 21 to 24 you're just sort of simply not eligible for the childless portion of the EITC and the administration has put on the table a proposal to end that exclusion and I think really what you see there is it just reflects a more holistic understanding of what a family is who's in a family and also this idea that Shelley said earlier for our kids to do well our families have to do well. Non-custodial parents and I'll fall into the trap of saying dads have to pay child support have to make ends meet they have to be financially stable and secure in order to do that excluding them from the nation's largest anti-poverty program is a penny wise pound foolish I think is probably the key way to put that. The second part of that conversation that I think is closely related we've expanded the EITC and the child tax credit pretty significantly since the crash in 2008 this is a major part of money that's been spent through the tax code to help low and moderate income families over the course of the last six, seven years that's we would like to think that that's sort of the new normal these larger amounts of funds that are out there to support families and the administration has proposed making those changes permanent so you reach more families with more money there's no guarantee that that's going to happen we could easily see a slide back to a smaller reach for those key supports both in terms of who they reach and the amount of money that's delivered I think the administration is really on the right track in trying to make those changes permanent folks have come to expect the EITC is going to be about a certain amount of money for them life has knocked out a lot cheaper over the course of the last seven, eight years if you let that those expansions go away it'll be a long time until we get back to the level of support that we've come to expect the last couple years and then the last thing is a little bit different but I think really critical one of the things that we've seen out of the crash I see Jean Hogarth from CFSI is here today CFSI has done some tremendous work along with a lot of other people we've seen an explosion of research into what does the financial picture look like for ordinary American families and we've learned a lot I think about this and it's time to start applying those lessons what we've learned about American families is there's not a lot of liquid assets sloshing around nobody has bags of money right if you're a middle upper middle income family the vast majority of your net worth is tied up in your home and you're very unlikely to have really significant amounts of resources that you can just easily move around when you need to don't even begin to talk about the bottom end of the income spectrum and what where debt is the thing that characterizes those households much more so than any significant amount of net worth after the house the next thing that shows up on ordinary families balance sheets is the retirement savings account but we have a huge access problem when it comes to retirement savings about half of families have no access to retirement a retirement plan through their employer that's something we can fix the administration has proposed something called the automatic IRA to fix that that's a proposal that has bipartisan roots roots they've also proposed making it easier for part time workers to get into the company plan which I think is a really positive change and then the last thing that's happening is states see this retirement access gap and are starting to develop their own plans to bring you know half to a third to a quarter of their workforce into the game on retirement savings and the administration has proposed a pot of money to support the development of those kind of plans across the country and so I think we're really seeing some interesting and some innovative proposals that take a look at you know who the family is let's support all the members of the family and then also let's diversify the balance sheet a little bit so that we're not so dependent on having all our eggs in one basket I'll stop there that's great that's so helpful and I'm glad that you brought in fathers and sort of non-custodial parents and the various subtle and inexplicit ways in which sometimes fathers are kept at bay from their children and families that they are or want to be a part of and just quickly from a work family perspective I think we've covered almost everything that I would have talked about the only other aspect that I think is important is the paid leave proposal that was mentioned in the State of the Union address and is in the President's budget we are not only one of the few developed countries but one of the few countries that doesn't have a national paid leave policy for parents but also for people who have caregiving obligations to siblings or elderly parents or anybody in their family who needs caregiving as everybody in a family will at some point in their life we currently have three states that have paid leave programs whereby where by workers can pay into can make a small payroll tax contribution into a fund that they can then draw upon in order to take six weeks of leave to care for a child or any other family member notably men also qualify for this program so it is both a maternity leave and a paternity leave policy which is important and I think there are measures in the budget too at this point I think the approach is to try to find ways to encourage more states to pass these sorts of policies we do have a federal family a medical leave act that is a national federal law that workers can take unpaid leave but that only applies to certain workers in larger corporations so there is a big gap between qualifying for unpaid leave and actually having guaranteed access to paid leave and the question I have going forward is will this ever really become a national effort or is it something that is going to be available to certain lucky people in certain states where there are fiscal mechanisms that make it possible and what would it take to ever get an actual national paid leave policy in this country so that is one thing on my mind I did appreciate also the fact that the president took pains to say that all of these concerns about families and work are not just a woman's issue that they are a men's issue and everybody's concern and obviously ultimately a concern about children and the welfare of children and the environments that they're raised in and the supports that families have so to facilitate our conversation I would just like to ask you you've been taking a lot of notes so you may have a lot to say about what we've talked about two questions I have are you know what when you hear our sort of analyses and reflections about the budget what does it reflect you know the discussions that you were part of but also given sort of the political climate and the hurdles that the budget is going to encounter or face when you and everybody involved is fashioning a budget to put forward and you know that it's going to be a tough political climate what is the thinking then that goes into it like what is a win in this situation or what is the hope for a budget going forward in a political climate like this one any part of that that you'd like to address I mean I think the budget advances a number of ideas and policies that are necessary right and it's an important vehicle for doing that but there are other things that we can do and need to do to advance some some of these ideas and that we have done historically I may give a couple of examples in terms of how the use of the bullet pulpit and good communications can actually begin to advance some of the ideas that are also reflected in the budget I think if I were to look at America's college promise as an example we see now that there is a conversation happening in the United States of America about community colleges and the costs associated with going into a community college that is a significant conversation that is taking place right now and I believe that in addition to the budget proposal and the use of the good communication and the bullet pulpit I think this will advance our thinking around how we feel about creating affordable high quality opportunities for responsible individuals I think there are a number of other strategies that are complementary that we have I believe have used successfully in the past at the area of career and technical education for instance we had budget proposals and continue to have budget proposals but we also had a very powerful blueprint document that advanced the number of principles for rethinking how we can make our high schools more relevant and create more options for students and as we have had a chance to travel around the country we actually see that many of these ideas are being put into practice even though we have not yet had the opportunity to take full advantage of the enactment of some of the budget proposals and the reauthorization of the of the act I think the development of smart partnerships is another way to to think about this and advance these ideas the most recent effort that I am very excited about is the involvement of a large number of employers and labor management initiatives in advancing opportunities for frontline workers to improve their skills and then take that opportunity as these individuals move to that next level job that puts them on a path to then work with employers to backfill those opportunities for the most vulnerable populations including our disconnected youth returning citizens and so forth so I think taking advantage of the opportunity that we can provide both regulatory and non-regulatory guidance around key programs that we are responsible for is yet another vehicle I just have a sort of a related question I think this administration really has stood out for the amount of emphasis that's placed on cross-agency relationships and collaboration and a lot of that has come out of the White House a lot of that has come out of the departments themselves but there's been a lot of joint communication, a lot of joint technical assistance I'm wondering you know you've been involved in a lot of that as we think about stitching together all of these policies again we've probably been talked about things from four or five different agencies what is the administration doing first of all what does it mean to build a shared vision across these agencies can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like and what is the administration thinking about in terms of how it's going to what's going to happen after it leaves are these relationships among political staff, are these relationships among criminal how do we embed this kind of ongoing dialogue and relationship building across these different agencies that there's a number of good good questions and topics in your in your question one is I think from from from the beginning we I think we have committed to not looking at certain aspects of a particular issue but actually try to look at issues more holistically so and and from that from that perspective it it's just good common sense to work together across agencies and and I think we've done that increasingly in in in a number of areas whether that's in education workforce development or in other areas and and I think that that is necessary if we look at many of the statutes that authorize sort of domestic spending on on these issues that affect families they they were designed for very good reasons to address a specific problem or the needs of a specific sub-population now over time we now end up with so many different types of statutes statutes that address issues of families that it becomes really challenging to if you're a local practitioner or a practitioner at the state level to sort of figure out how all of this comes together so in addition to interagency communication coordination I think the interest in creating or pursuing various forms of flexibility I think has been significant I want to use the illustration of the performance partnership pilot authority that Congress granted us where we can actually use the resources of the agencies involved that are non-mandatory resources and grant flexibility to tribal governments city governments and state governments to actually pool all these resources and be exempt from the specific performance expectations that come with all these funding streams and really put together a holistic strategy with an evidence building expectation that we think will result in better outcomes for this population that type of policy innovation is really important and we hope we can have opportunities to expand that not just to the area of working with this connected youth but to really expand this to many other areas of sort of policy making whether that is in the workforce development space in areas of human services whatever they may be there's an enormous potential now to the sustainability question that is a critical question but I think considering sustainability at the early stages of design will result in engaging of specific stakeholder groups and I think if one misses that opportunity at the early stages to really think about how will this be sustained and who do we need to involve to make that happen then I think the likelihood that an initiative will continue is very very low you know in terms of who to engage clearly it is essential that leaders in the career service or partners in this and I believe that we've demonstrated that we can do that successfully in a number of areas whether it's career pathways or career pathways work or disconnected youth work or our promised neighborhood and other place based strategies work so I think that's a key consideration the other one really is to engage external stakeholders from the get go so that the continuation of critical policy innovations is not exclusively dependent on whether there is the political leadership that is present to advance them Do other of you have questions or comments or interjections I want to emphasize I've seen this cross sector approach in a lot of different areas and I think of in our space there's a thing called the Financial Literacy and Education Commission which brings together FDIC and Treasury and now the CFPB and it's a new experience to see joint communications from those organizations there was recently a guidance that came out on rules surrounding when and how savings accounts can be open for children and it came from seven parts of the government at the same time and it was really it's a new experience but also a very very clear and sort of enjoyable one so I do think that we're seeing sort of that level of collaboration in some different spaces and I think that's exciting I think the note about external stakeholders being involved early in the process to help give life in the longer term to initiatives is also a key point for us and for folks in the room I'll just add you know we're seeing some similar collaboration between HHS Department of Ed with programs being jointly administered by those two agencies so the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge and you know the recent preschool development grants were jointly administered so it's initiative of both you know both agencies at the end of the day someone has to ultimately be responsible but it is fostering that collaboration and there's an interagency policy board that's set up to continue those regular meetings and regular collaboration at least the intention and do you have any insight into how it happened that the same sort of message was coming from seven different places at once I think there you know somebody else would answer this question better than I would but the sense that I have is that that there is a commitment and there's more than one vehicle and opportunity for those folks to come together I actually think that the creation of the consumer financial protection bureau which brought authority and staff together from a lot of different agencies may have created some easier pathways where you don't have these sort of you took parts out of all the siloed bureaucracies and brought them together so I think the question in the long run what I've posited there is correct is that sustainable are those pathways going to be long lasting or are they based off of this sort of one time thing but setting that vision up front and getting everybody on board with it as Johann said is critical and also very very difficult it's not like other administrations haven't tried this stuff before and had some success on certain initiatives in the past they have but I do think we are seeing maybe more of a focus on it than we've seen in the past that's interesting I mean one question I have is how do you coordinating all these efforts and shaping policies that will help and support families how do you do it without privileging one kind of family without in the 1930s businesses explicitly paid husbands and fathers more so they were supporting families by paying men more than they were paying women so that was sort of supporting families but privileging one kind of family it seems to me a real challenge when you have families with single mothers and you want to support single mothers and enable women to support their households but but support two parent families as well I suppose it's just an observation that it is really challenging not only to bring together different agencies but to support all kinds of families I mean if our long-term objective is to restore opportunity for all then we most certainly in the process need to pay attention to the groups for which the opportunity gaps today are the greatest you know that to illustrate that we want all youth to have incredible opportunities that's why we have a number of policies and investments all along the cradle to career continuum from early learning to reforms and investments in post-secondary education but when we actually look at the youth who have the least opportunities right now then that begins to explain why we're doing this work with disconnected youth why within that group we pay particular attention to the needs of crossover youth particularly those between the foster care systems and the juvenile justice systems pay attention to JJ kids who are trying to make their way pay particular attention to the groups that the data reveal are facing the greater challenges of color and marginalized girls so I think paying attention under the broader framework of really committing to opportunity for all paying particular attention to the sub-populations for whom the opportunity gaps are the greatest seems like a good way of organizing the various agencies and initiatives if that makes sense absolutely makes sense if I may comment on how does this level of interagency collaboration come about I think there are a number of illustrations one is based on the merit of the issue when we look at employment and training and education programs for older youth and adults for instance we look at a system in our country that has 40 plus statutes that actually authorize investments in that but there was something lacking that sort of tied this all together on the supply side that was also very responsive to what our businesses said they needed and then I think it was in 2009 that we started the acknowledging that there was incredible work happening in individual agencies around career pathways, labor and Mary Alice was still at labor at that point in time was doing some work health and human services was doing some work our office the department of education was doing some work but other than sort of informal staff level of exchanges there hadn't been really sort of a leadership conversation about this so we pursued that leadership conversation at I would say at the suggestion of many of the staff we said we should have conversations about this and I remember distinctly the Thursday afternoon where we had the four way leadership conversation about how we were going to address this and it resulted in a commitment by labor health and human services and education to go down this path together this past November Secretary Perez took that level I mean took this work to a whole new level and said okay let's now involve 13 agencies and the National Economic Council in this work so now we have started this work to really creating these pathway opportunities across the administration and there was no resistance the only thing I have experienced is enthusiasm from the other agency so once I think you sort of get to this point where there is real leadership buy-in into a construct that seemed to solve a set of real issues then things become possible the second thing that matters a lot is the use of a presidential memorandum I think the driven training I think is almost a textbook example of what is possible using that vehicle in terms of bringing together not just the federal agency community but people who represent critical external stakeholder groups I think the current one on immigrant integration is another example of that I'll open it up for questions we have time for a couple of questions we'd love to hear them Hi my name is Betty Krupa I'm with KC Family Programs for the largest foundation helping children in the foster care system so thank you for mentioning recognizing the children in the foster care system I wanted to know if you can comment a little bit more on the new proposal in the administration's budget to all states to use federal foster care funding to evidence-based or evidence-informed programs for prevention and permanency for programs to improve the outcomes of foster youth I would not I'm going to be very honest here I know of the proposal I am not intimately familiar with the specifics but I would be more than happy to follow up with you Okay, thank you I'll just add that my colleagues and I have reviewed it a little bit and have noticed that the administration included a new proposal this year that I invested over 500 million over 10 years to allow states to see for evidence-based and evidence-informed programs and most recently the senate finance hearing on the health and human services budget both chairman hatch and ranking member Wyden mentioned this issue as a common ground area so as you guys discussed you know across agencies and collaborating together under the administration we're all working together to address this issue so just wanted to bring that to your attention thank you I do want to mention that first of all we're very grateful that we've had an opportunity to have a Casey Family Services fellow in our office for some time now who has really helped us better understand issues of child welfare from the education perspective and that we are working very closely with health and human services to highlight in the next couple of months some true policy and practice innovations that deal with issues of transition for those who are emancipating from the system or one of our interests to highlight some emerging or effective practices and hopefully that can be useful information if we were to be so fortunate to be able to move forward with that implementation of that particular budget proposal hi how are you Charlotte Johnson from IBM I'm wondering you mentioned the Perkins reauthorization I'm wondering how you think that new legislation could affect new nascent programming and what you see as some of the most promising programming that's connecting CTE with workforce development and education we are extremely excited about recent developments in the area of career and technical education that seem to illustrate four principles and two cross cutting themes that we're interested in one is alignment with the needs of business and industry I think your firm has taking a leadership role in working with a number of school districts in designing a new model called PTECH that is a good illustration of how that can be done second one is around collaboration sort of the acknowledgement that whatever the specifics of a new law would be you do need the secondary partner the post secondary partner and the business partner and perhaps even some type of non profit intermediary sort of to be part of the conversation otherwise it's not possible to create pathways that would start at the secondary level and continue on at the post secondary level and ultimately will result in jobs that are the beginnings of rewarding careers the third principle is like we need a lot more meaningful accountability in career and technical education one way to get there is to agree on definitions for outcomes and the second way is to introduce some demand side ways of thinking about outcomes and we believe that the use of industry certification and licenses as a consideration in performance accountability framework can make the system move more into a demand driven direction as well and then finally innovation I mean the work that your firm has done the work that so many other companies are beginning to do in conjunction with either school districts and community colleges is all about innovation there are so many unbelievable models emerging that I think it would be wise if we would continue to create opportunities for people to innovate in terms of the two moving themes one is quality I think quality is job number one for the reauthorization of the Perkins Act the 2006 reauthorization introduced this notion of programs of study which was a way of getting at quality issues and that was fantastic we are hopeful that we would not have a set of minimalist expectations around quality that we would actually have quality representations for every institution that receives these types of funds and then equity is a critical cross cutting theme we want to get more specifically at the issues that we see over representation of certain sub populations in low quality programs and under representation of those same populations in high quality programs so I think one more question if there are any yes there's a microphone on its way thank you very much I apologize to take the time I'm from Norway I'm involved with the European Commission so we try to conduct surveys so that we can launch by September or October policies in particular regarding families and young generation jobs and one of the specific issues that we face is what we call cultural divide even those who have money I mean there are not too many in Europe but there are assets what you mentioned this cultural divide is almost a matter of European security problems so how do you is there anything in the budget to prepare its early education I'm aware of that how about local communities like libraries, museums how to mobilize those resources to mitigate the problem of cultural divide is there anything in the budget or in your thinking about it let me maybe share an initial response and then if others want to I'm going to use the example of the skills challenges that we have the significant economic and social consequences if we don't address those issues because they have implications for so many policies we looked at the data from the survey of adult skills when they became available in 2013 and really came to the conclusion that we're not in a very good place when we look at the foundational skills of our adult population and we need to do something about this it's not just sort of a social or moral imperative it's actually an economic imperative for us and I'm using this example to share with you that we ended up thinking about this issue as one that would require everyone to make this issue to require everyone to make skills their business so this whole idea of acting on the principle of shared responsibility around that particular issue might also apply to the issue that you mentioned I don't know if you want to or the only thing that I would add is just your comment to museums and libraries certainly using community resources and computer labs and things of that nature to be meeting places but be places that families are potentially going to to provide both educational but other services are something that I think is being explored in a lot of communities and should continue to be I feel to mention that just a couple of months ago actually signed an agreement with our colleagues in the library and museum world to leverage their 15,000 points of access to get at issues of digital literacy and providing access to free learning opportunities Well that's great. I want to thank you so much for coming and fielding questions within your specific area of expertise but also a whole range of other policies having to do with the family and economic well-being it's a really impressive range of questions that you've responded to and we are very grateful to you for making the time and I've learned a lot. I'm grateful for the opportunity thank you Thank you