 Good morning, everyone. We're going to start in just a minute here. Take your seats, please. So hello, everybody. My name is Lisa Guernsey. I'm the director of the Early Education Initiative here at the New America Foundation. And we are thrilled today to have this event. We're co-hosting it with the Workforce and Family Program, which is directed by David Gray, who you'll be hearing from in just a few moments. And it just seems to be a critical time to be starting to have deeper conversations about many of these issues. And so we hope that this will be the start of that, both among practitioners and policymakers, especially here in Washington, DC. I want to start by situating us a bit in time and place as to why this is going to be such a critical conversation. Right now, obviously, the question really is how do we ensure that young children cross their country, no matter what their family's income level, are being cared for and learning in the best possible environments, and at the same time, ensuring that their parents are able to go to work and support their families and build a sustainable future for them. And we right now, as of even an hour ago, are very much in the news in that the Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge is in the air. And as of 11 o'clock this morning, it was announced by the Departments of Ed and HHS that 37 applicants have come forward. 35 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have put in applications for that competition, which is designed to shine a spotlight on the kind of infrastructure changes that may be required to build quality and to improve coordination among programs, particularly for children at risk. Meanwhile, states and localities are coping with huge strains in their budgets. This is affecting pre-K programs and child care subsidies. Some states are trying to do more with less by cramming more children into their classrooms. Others are cutting programs. As the National Women's Law Center has determined in a report just out a week or two ago, families in 37 states who rely on assistance for child care are worse off than they were last year. And in fact, they're worse off than they were a decade ago. Questions now bound about the federal government's priorities in a time of political strife and recession, debt, and deficits. What should the federal government continue to fund? What will be cut? These are looming questions. And then we can't forget the research findings, which is going to where my heart always lies in a lot of this. Studies continually show us over and over again how much the early years matter, how much a parent's ability to provide for their children matters, and how much the environment matters, enabling them to have really rich, stimulating conversations with the people who are taking care of them. So all of these pieces are coming together right now and right here. And I think it's an excellent time to start going deeper on a lot of these questions that arise when we talk about what's missing in early education and child care in this country and eventually what hope we have for making some changes. I'm going to turn it over now to David Gray, my counterpart. And we will get the ball rolling for us. Thanks, Stephen. Thank you, Lisa. As Lisa mentioned, yes, welcome to our discussion, what's missing in child care and early education in America. New America are quite interested in the dual-generational child care policies that work for both children and for their parents. And from our strong attendance today, I see that this is an attractive topic to many. So thank you all for joining us today. Thank you for all who are watching over the internet. And many thanks to the Annie E. Casey Foundation for making this event possible. With so many American children spending so much time in non-parental care each day and lacking in quality with current situations failing too many parents, the cost of care being too high and the quality being too low, this obviously is a critical topic. And yet despite the challenges that Lisa has outlined and that we all have read and know about, hope remains. And so that's what we're here to talk about today. We have a very strong group of speakers here today with great depth of experience and insights into policy questions that I know are on your minds. Their information bios are outside. But let me just briefly introduce our speakers for you today. First, Joe Lombardi, who among other titles is the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Childhood Development at HHS. Barbara Galtz, who is the Executive Director and Vice President of the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Eric Karolak, Executive Director of Early Care and Education Consortium. And Danielle Ewan, the Director for Child Care and Early Education at Class. Friends, thank you all for being here today. This is a terrific panel. I've asked them to talk just a bit about the biggest problems that they see in holes in the system. Why haven't we made headway? As many of these challenges have been problems for a long time. What is needed to move the policy makers to action? And what should be done about the problems to ensure dual generational quality, early education and care that supports both children and their parents? Each of these questions can obviously take all afternoon for each one of our speakers given their experience and there won't be time in their opening statements to cover every aspect. But fortunately, we'll have a Q&A session that follows and an opportunity for your insights, ideas and questions. So thank you all very much for being here and we'll begin with Joan Lombardi. Joan? Good morning. Good afternoon, I guess. It's really a pleasure to be here today. As many of you know, I recently made a transition. So let me start this by thanking all of you for the support that you've given the work over the last three years. And I've, as many of you know, have been in and out of government several times and that has made me aware of the importance of leadership both inside and outside government. So I wanna make sure I especially thank the national organizations, the foundations and the advocates across the country that may be listening for your willingness to continue to stand up for young children. I think together we've had tremendous accomplishments but there is really still a lot more to do. I also of course wanna congratulate the states and DC and Puerto Rico turned in their proposals for the early learning challenge. As far as I'm concerned, you're all winners and we're lucky to have such a fantastic team in place that will be working across the two agencies to make this the historic event that it really deserves to be. I wanna just thank Lisa and David for coming together around this issue. I think you are coming together is critical. Lisa asked me to do two things, to reflect on the childcare and development fund and to share some initial thoughts about a vision and I'll say their initial thoughts because I really do wanna spend some time going across the country in the next few months thinking and listening to what people think should be the next steps in the whole early childhood and after school agenda. Just first a reflection, it's been more than 20 years now, about 21 years since the passage of the childcare and development fund, the childcare and development block grant and recently I've been reading stories about Steve Jobs as many of you have and many of the articles had timelines and about Apple products over the last few decades and what I was struck with is that as we were debating CCDBG back in the late 80s was when Apple came out with their first portable which was about 16 pounds so you can imagine and right after it passed they came out with the Quadra, I don't know if any of you remember that. So this was a period pre-iMac, pre-iPhone, pre-iPad, yet I believe that we're still using an operating system in the field that has not reflected the changes that have occurred. Now we've gone beyond carbon paper but we're not into the future yet. It's 10 years since we, more than 20 years actually since the National Child Care Study came out which was 10 years before Norance to Neighborhoods which talked about the importance of quality clearly and the importance of the adults in children's lives. It's more than 13 years since the White House Conference since we put a $20 billion proposal on the table. It's more than 10 years since I released Time to Care which was a book to promote a new way of thinking about childcare that it would promote education, support families and build communities. That book to me was very important because it framed this issue of childcare not as a deficit but as an opportunity and it's within that spirit that I wanna talk about kind of the good news that's happened since then, the challenges and what a vision is. On the good news side, since those early years tens of millions of parents have been served, have gotten support, that 4,000 average subsidy has made a huge difference for families. They're often able to lift themselves out of poverty because of that so we can't, I can't underscore enough the importance that that has meant for tens of millions of families across the country. The same time a billion dollars of it has been going to quality and an innovation that I think we're still building on now whether it be the quality rating systems, the early learning standards, the professional development planning, all of that came out of the childcare and development fund and so we need to recognize that good news as we move more aggressively into the future and changes. To me the challenges have been that the original goal of the program which was to give parents real choice was never really fulfilled because of the constraints on funding and the way the program has evolved over the years. If you read, I was glad the National Women's Law Center report was mentioned, if you read that report you'll see the trilemma that's been affecting the program from the very beginning and that is that we're still, although the program can serve up to 185% of median, we're still only serving one out of six children. We've in 21 states the income limit as a percentage of parent income is lower in 2011 than it was in 2001, wrong direction. Reimbursement rates, the core to quality, the thing we all talk about, yet only three states are at the 75th percentile according to the National Women's Law Center, a dramatic change in the wrong direction since 2001 and if you look at copayments which are also going up as a percentage of income, families in more than two out of five states are paying more as a percentage of income. Why is this happening? Mainly because the funding has been flat with the exception, a wonderful exception of the recovery of ARA which made a huge difference but we didn't hold on to it and I think that those are the reasons that we're seeing this dilemma. On the good news side, since the child care and development block grant passed, we've had a slew of accomplishments, 21st century community learning centers, the early head start program, pre-K growing in the states. The problem is that each one of those by itself doesn't fill the holes that we need. 21st century is an important program, often doesn't go in the summer so it doesn't help. Help working families the way it should. Early head start serves 5% of the eligible population. We can do better than that. Pre-K programs often are part day. Again, don't meet the needs of working families. So although we've made progress, we haven't put these two pictures together. Obviously, I think that the early learning challenge, the early learning challenge that we're celebrating today and we'll continue, it gives us renewed hope. I think it will go down in history as one of the most historic steps that has happened in early childhood policy because it provides a framework for new thinking. And it's that framework that I wanna build on. Turning from reflections to kind of where I think we should go, particularly with the child care and development fund. I first of all think we've gotta continue to frame it both as education and work, but also as a critical support for the economy. Everyone's talking about the economy. This, we provide millions of jobs across the country. We buy goods, we contract with services. This industry is a key part of the American economy and we've gotta start talking about that more. So I think that's part of the framing. Secondly, we've got a lot of pieces of legislation moving forward, elementary and secondary education act. The child care and development block grant should be part of that picture. I think these two pieces should go hand in hand. And for many reasons, but mostly because child care are environments where children are learning every day. And so you have to put it together with the education agenda. In addition, both the child care and development fund and ESEA have provisions around after school. 40% of the children funded in the child care fund are school-aged children. In ESEA, we have very important provisions around 21st century. We've gotta put those pictures together. So of course, I think the approach should be that these things go hand in hand and that no new piece of legislation should move forward without thinking about the ramifications for the other pieces. So if it was up to me, I'd move forward in four ways for moving forward with the child care and development fund. Right now, about 90% of the funds are going out to parents in the form of vouchers. There is very little provisions in the law that structures the quality. And we've had what I think is a artificial conversation about access versus quality. I'd like to change that and start us thinking about access to quality rather than one versus the other. So in an emerging vision, I see it this way. First of all, I think in thinking about the child care and development fund, we should build on what we're learning in the Early Learning Challenge Fund. That that framework, that infrastructure, should be the required framework in every state, not just in a few states, but in every state, especially around standards, the quality rating and improvement systems in every state tied to licensing, credentialing systems and data systems. Those are key infrastructure pieces that I think were put on the table through the Early Learning Challenge Fund but should be required in every state. Secondly, I think we should build beyond that and really focus more attention at the local level. We're seeing great movement at the state level in building infrastructure across program types. But we still have a long way to go to tie that to something at the local level that can support programs, that network programs, we're not connected. And so I would like to see a local quality assurance system that supports the way military has for their bases, the way Head Start has for their programs, but a place-based strategy that has a hub in a community that supports the people that are caring for children, that supports the provision of health and family support integrated into those early childhood programs and are tied to that state infrastructure. So that's the second component. Third, as I said, most of the funding goes out in the form of vouchers with very limited reimbursement rates. You can assure quality that way. I think we have to dust off an old idea that was put on the table more than 10 years ago about a mixture of direct assistance to programs and portable assistance to parents and shift the balance so that more funding, and we need more of it, of course, goes to programs, a network of programs in a community that are identified as early learning programs or after-school programs, regardless of their funding stream. And so we're creating, maybe they're chartered by the local hub. I mean, we need to think new ways about that, but ways to put those together. And finally, I think that we do have to continue to provide vouchers for parents. I call them scholarships. I would not have most of the money going to that. We need more of a balance. But I think we have to assure that they're used, not only in unregulated care, but provide enough incentive so the scholarships that parents receive can buy good quality care in the market. So in summary, I think we have to tie this issue to work, to education, and to the economy. We have to have a new way of thinking, a bold new way. We need a new dialogue. I'm throwing out a few ideas, they're initial ideas, but I think we need a new dialogue about how do we move our next pieces of legislation together, ESCA, the Child Care and Development Fund, other provisions in a way that makes them fit together and not that the local providers have to fit them together. We've got to build off what we're learning in the Challenge Fund, encourage more innovation at the local level, and create real choices for families. I think obviously all of that needs new resources. We've got to continue to fight for additional resources. It shouldn't be that the recovery funds were only for a few years. We need to, the country is still in recovery. We need to make a bold new step to increase resources in that direction. I want to reflect in closing David's line that hope remains. I believe that, I have great expectations for children, I have great expectations for all of us and for all of these issues despite the difficult times. So thank you for letting me be here. Good afternoon, I'm Barbara Galt with the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and it's a great honor for me to be on this panel and to be able to follow Joan, who is one of my heroes. I wanted to just start, as Joan did, with a little bit of discussion about what I see as progress in the early childhood system, and I'm often actually pretty amazed by the progress that we do make in this context and this economy, and I think a large part of it is due to the champions that we have in the Child Care Bureau and the Department of Education, people like Joan, who have dedicated their whole careers toward building a comprehensive integrated system where all families can have access to quality care. I'm also really amazed by the work of advocates, like at the National Women's Law Center and Class, and Zero to Three, who have gotten us things like a big allotment for childcare and the RF funds, and who have been able to maintain childcare funding as a top priority even in this atmosphere where everyone's trying to cut. So I was also going to mention the expansion of preschool, though there are caveats, the early learning challenge grants, quality rating and improvement systems. I think that about covers it, but despite this, I would say that the overarching problem is that we really need a seismic shift in the way that we think about early care and education. We need to think about it as a crucial and enormous economic sector, as absolutely critical toward achieving our human capital development goals as sort of not optional for reducing poverty. And that takes a really different mindset, and the way I tend to think about it, childcare, unlike people who devote their lives to this particular issue, is within a set of important family supports that other high income, highly developed nations have managed to set up and sustain as an important part of thriving economies. So unlike every other developed nation, we don't have paid parental leave, we don't have a comprehensive system of early care and education, and I think we need to keep our mindset toward a much greater and enormous infusion in the future of public dollars toward this system, and I know it can sound a little silly or a little unrealistic at this moment in time with the economic situation as it is, but sometimes when I talk to funders, there's a lot of movement, one thing I wanted to mention in the discussion of progress is a lot of interesting market-based solutions, efforts to develop shared services programs to help small businesses do group purchasing and to work together to create efficiencies, but I think that ultimately a market-based solution or a system that is primarily market-based where we rely primarily on parent fees as the system is that we have now is really not tenable if we are to reach the kind of expansion that we need to really give parents the choices that some higher income people have. Right now we rely much too much on unpaid labor of family, friends, neighbors, we rely on underpaid providers. Many people are really being exploited in our current system, they don't receive benefits, they don't receive social security benefits. There are many who are taking a big, making huge economic and social sacrifices to fill in the gaps where we currently are not able to provide them because something about our society makes it hard for us to see this as a public good. Now, were we to try to think about building a whole K through 12 system solely on parent fees? It would seem like a ludicrous idea, impossible, yet with the early childhood system you still see people trying to say, well, their business model must not be effective if they're not making a profit on it. It's just, it isn't tenable with the current model and ultimately we're gonna need something like the European countries have. So, to get to a few more immediate areas that I think we have for improvement and where I think there is a lot of interesting work going on, one is the need to continue a strong focus on improving the quality of childcare jobs. Now, with the quality rating systems, many of them have built-in credentials linked to increases in wages. Yet, I think we need to make sure that we're thinking about a broader comprehensive system of benefits. Now, it appears and it might surprise you that a very large proportion of childcare workers don't have access to a single paid sick day and you can imagine what the public health consequences of that are. I'm sure that has many costs for us in terms of the spread of illness and disease, teacher absences, et cetera, that could be prevented were sick leave more widely available to the childcare workforce. So, there's a huge disconnect between the importance of this job for our economy, for fulfilling our economic goals and the quality of life that we one day hope to achieve and how we treat the workers that are carrying out this important function. Childcare workers, as of 2010, we're still making 928 per hour. That's around $19,000 a year, which is hovering right around the poverty line and people like to kind of almost amuse themselves by talking about what other professions like parking attendant, bicycle repair person get paid more than childcare workers. It's really pretty silly and again, connected to this idea that we're operating in an economic model that just isn't going to allow for real expansion. The second area I think we need to pay more attention to is looking at system integration, not just between elements of the early childhood system, but more integration with other institutions and systems within our society, such as the higher education system, such as with housing, transportation, economic development. I do think that there's some interesting work going on in these areas, but there are many, like in my casual conversations with people doing work on sustainable communities, when you ask, is childcare a piece of that or family benefits a piece of that? Almost inevitably the sustainability conversations do not have childcare and education as a central part of those conversations. And please correct me if I'm missing something. We have a program called the Student Parents Success Initiative that's funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that's focusing on trying to build supports for students who have children within the community college system. And we recently released a report that looks at childcare access on community college campuses. And one thing that we're finding in relating to other post-secondary education grantees who are trying to pursue this national goal of dramatically increasing the number of low-income adults with post-secondary credentials is that the reality that a large proportion of these folks are parents and have kids is not really centrally on the radar screen. Childcare is also not making it into those conversations in the way that it should. There's been a lot of discussion about coordinated data collection systems. Well, are they asking if people are parents? I don't think so. We're not hearing that that's a big part of the conversation. So, and what we found in our study is that I was really surprised at how few community colleges have childcare centers on their campus. It's about 49% of community colleges and a slightly higher percentage of four-year institutions, 57% have childcare on campus. But even within those centers, only about 40% of the slots are available for students, the rest go to parents or to faculty, staff, and even other members of the community. So we calculated that in terms of on-campus care, those slots are providing about 5% of the childcare that student parents are using. So, and what we know anecdotally is that childcare for a student parent and student parents make up about 29% of the community college population. So it's bigger than you might think or it was bigger than I thought anyway. Childcare is anecdotally an essential part of being able to go to college in the first place and to stay in college. And what I've learned from talking to a lot of student parents as a part of this project is that almost invariably the ones who are able to do it, who are in school and have kids, have a mom who's providing a huge amount of the childcare. So these are the ones that are able to make it work now. But if we really want to invite more parents to come into college, to get those credentials that will allow them to support their families and encourage their children to get a higher education, we're gonna have to provide a lot more than what's offered now because not everyone has those intensive family supports. The third area I wanted to mention was just that we don't seem, we are not, as I think Joan was alluding to, taking advantage of technology to make it easier for people to access childcare subsidies and make it less likely that those who are getting subsidies will lose them for ridiculous reasons like they can't get off work to fill out the paperwork or they're spent a screw up with their eligibility or things like that. We have a lot of technology at our disposal and we could be doing a lot better. So we were asked to answer, why haven't we made more progress? And I do think that in general it's a mindset. I think we need to mainstream childcare into a lot of all of our public institutions. We need to get thought leaders to understand that every conversation about city planning, et cetera, is lacking if it doesn't have childcare in the mix. So what should we do? I think the dual generation frame that we were asked to address is a really promising one and I know at Ascend, which is located at the Aspen Institute, they have a large initiative around collecting examples of programs that serve adults, two generations at the same time, adults and children together. And some of the programs that they've been talking about do things like are proposing inserting on-site childcare into workforce development programs or vice versa. And we've seen as a part of our project a number of programs that one, for example, in Texas called Buckner Family Village, it has a number of sites that uses HUD funding to create residential programs for single mothers and their children where they provide high quality childcare right on site. So that's interesting to me because it's making an innovative use of dollars that are not often, or not often enough, accessed for the purposes of childcare. There is a federal program that funds campus childcare, something that we're focusing on now. It was funded in 2010 at only a level of $16 million, which by our calculations amounts to $7 per family that has a student parent with children. So that's a program that I think that we need to prioritize more. I think that community colleges need to be integrated more centrally into the state early learning councils, not just because they're the ones training the workforce of the future, but also because they could be, at the same time, doing more to provide early learning opportunities for students on their campuses. So there's something for them to gain in that. I also, I'm excited about opportunities within the Affordable Care Act that gives states incentives a 90% match to develop as a part of their medical information technology systems, links to other social service programs of which I think childcare should be a central part. So thanks very much for the opportunity to be here. Good afternoon, everybody. So I've been talking about childcare for a long time, not as long as some of the people in this room, but feels like for most of my adult life. And one of the things I've come to understand is those of us who think about childcare, not just the advocates, the policy makers, but the moms and the dads, every single day we do six impossible things before breakfast. How many of you who are working parents did six impossible things this morning? Those of you out on the internet, raise your hands. I had my son's child-led parent-teacher conference this morning. I'm not sure who was more nervous, him or me. And I also had to write my talking points for this presentation. So my brain had a lot of splits about what was going on in the world and what's important, but I think it's helpful to think about how much we look like Alice in Wonderland when we think about the childcare system. And how we are often staring through the looking glass at our reflections improperly reflected back at us. And I think when I think about our system and where we're going and what we need to do, we're actually asking the wrong questions. The questions are pretty basic. Who are we? What are we trying to do and what do our families actually need? It's not about solely third grade test scores on reading. It's not about solely how we get families into the workforce. It's about creating a system of care where every child and every family, regardless of who they are and what they do, gets what they need every day. That's a pretty simple charge, frankly. But we have not to date had the political will, the resources, or the understanding of what our communities look like to actually put that in place. So I think when we look to the future, we can look to some of the models we already have. But when I look down the road to somebody standing here in 20 years saying she's been doing this most of her adult life and if it's still me, God help me. Sadly, I think it will be. But when I look at that person, I hope that she will tell a very different story that we have created through this variety of initiatives, a sense that childcare as much as K-12 education is a public good as defined in basic economics. That is that from birth, we care about what happens to our children and their families and we invest in them. No child, no teacher, no school building, no school community has ever been penalized because a child has a cold for a week. And yet childcare centers who rely on funding often lose five days of cost reimbursement if that child is on subsidy because that child has a cold. We create a disincentive to providers to provide high quality just without one example. We tell families, bring your sick kids so I can get paid. We tell providers, your entire funding system depends on the physical health of our families. We tell providers, you have to do really high quality but if kids are sick, just ignore it, right? We don't have a system that really thinks about the needs of our children and families. And if we had a system that was based on public, childcare as a public good we would and I'm gonna talk more about that in a minute. I talk a lot when I do these presentations about the cliches that we are not. I'm gonna give you some of them. Joan started one of them many years ago. We don't care for days, we care for children. And there's a reason why she says that. We have to be intentional in what we're talking about when we lay out the future of childcare and the vision we have. It's not about getting through the day. It's about knowing that children are part of families, that children are in families that have a variety of needs and that our care situations for them have to meet all of those needs. I say a lot, children are not born at four because many of these conversations start with discussions of the research as Lisa talked about. They talk about the economic impact and yet pretty soon because the issues of parental leave because issues related to the care for infants and toddlers because issues related to children with special needs are so very difficult. Pretty soon we're talking about how to serve four-year-olds. Children are not born at four. I'm gonna add a new one which is that children do not end their childhood when they become five and a half. And in fact at the meeting that Barbara talked about last week sponsored by the Aspen Institute's Ascend Project we heard that families are mostly concerned about their preteen and teenagers. And childcare is a part of caring about that system. We are not just about children from birth to five and then there's somebody else's problem. But when we hear some of the solutions that are put out there, we tend to look at one piece of the puzzle and say, okay, I've got it. I've paid for the four-year-olds, childcare's fine. Everybody go on their way, we're all good. And that's what we have to stop thinking about. We have to stop breaking out the system. We have to think about children and families and what they need. The other thing that has become painfully clear, I think is the recession drags on and on in many of these communities, is that most families no longer work nine to five. They don't work during daylight hours. They cannot predict their schedules. And we have a childcare system that is situated in policymakers' ideas, as it minds, as some platonic ideal of childcare. We have these beautiful buildings, or we should. And families show up at 8.45 every morning in their shiny new cars. And they put their kids in with teachers who have been to college and have all these wonderful resources at their disposal. And they spend their day with beautiful things in their heads and they have every two and a half hours of snack and every two and a half hours they go outside and play and they come back in. And then at 5.30, all the parents show up and they take their children home and they give them a well-balanced meal. And at 7.30, they put their children to bed. For many, many, many of the families that we serve through childcare subsidy and Head Start, that reality is so far away from their lives as to be a fantasy show on TV. They work shift work. They don't know when their next shift is gonna be. They need care Monday through Friday, Saturday and Sunday. They have needs for care before 8 a.m. and after 6 p.m. And we have to think about a childcare system that meets those needs. Eric's gonna talk about the provider side, but we have just as many gaps on that side. We talk a lot right now about quality and how quality should lead to a set of outcomes for children. What we don't talk about is who the providers really are. Who are we and what do we wanna do? Most, many of our providers don't have a college degree. They have to show up at work every day to know what they need. Many of them need to be 18 and have had a TB test. That's all they need. But we're gonna hold those providers accountable for making sure that those third grade test scores get passed. So what can we do? We have this incredible dysfunctional system. I've depressed you all. That's not my job. But we have to look to the future and think about how to bring these disparate ideas, these disparate needs, and these disparate goals together into one system. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. But I think what we can do to build on the ideas that have already been put out there by Joan and Barbara are to think differently about what we need as a system. To really start with, how do we serve the full range of developmental needs of children across the continuum? It's not just about cognitive needs. It's about health outcomes as well. How do we look at communities using mechanisms like the EDI that a number of communities are now using to measure the health of the children in a community and their families? What access do they have to services and where does childcare fit into that? So rather than seeing childcare as the place where we're going to educate our children, we're going to hold them accountable for passing those third grade test scores. Seeing childcare instead as part of a community of service to children and families. We need to start wrapping services around the children in those programs. So if children are in childcare centers, we bring healthcare to them. We bring measures of health success to them. We make sure that we understand what is in their communities. If they're in family childcare, we make sure that they're in communities of care where we can help them access services. This will require a different way of looking at all of our different benefits systems. Medicaid should be part of our early childhood system. Early intervention should be part of our childcare system. Teaching parents in language minority communities, English and how to work with their children in a variety of languages should be part of our childcare and early education system. It's not about looking at those different things and saying, okay, this is a Department of Ed service. This is a HHS service. Over here, I have my special needs. It's about going to where the children are and putting those services there. And a number of states are starting to think about this. They're thinking about it at the state level in terms of how to integrate public benefits, making sure that families have access to nutrition services through SNAP, that they have access to Medicaid and they have access to a childcare subsidy or to TANF if that's what they need. They do that by changing their applications, by changing how they reach out to families and by changing what they require of families. At the local level, we see communities measuring their success. How many of our children, regardless of their income level, regardless of what their families need in terms of childcare, are getting immunizations on an annual basis? And how can we make sure that they get those? They're looking at where their employers in a given community have paid sick leave. They're looking at how they can start to pay for maternity leave in their community. We're starting to see those kind of integrated services. The Early Learning Challenge has given us some pointers for how to start doing that, but it needs to help us go further as well. The challenge is very much about bringing together childcare and education. We hope that many of the states will think more about health and special needs and early intervention. I think when we look at where states are, this is a real vision of the future. Most states don't have the capacity or the resources to talk in this way. But if you look at what school districts are doing, where we have local communities like Appleton, Wisconsin that were clasp did a small study, you find that when people have this common frame, this common vision of good outcomes for children across the developmental domains, that people come to the table and they put their money on the table first. So what happened in Appleton, I think I have a minute, is that what I have left? Oh, I'm just talking so quickly. What happened in Appleton was they identified their children were falling behind on a range of measures. So the school district joined with an existing early childhood collaborative to say, what can we do? What is already being done? What services are missing? What needs to be added on? And so they created a comprehensive and integrated system where families have access to home visiting, where there's a strong literacy component with professional development for all providers working with children birth to five, where the school district curriculum is used with childcare providers in the community, where children are assessed to see whether they have developmental and other delays from an early age. And on a regular basis, all those people in the community, health providers, childcare providers, the school district sit down at a table together and talk about the health of the children in their communities. They use Title I dollars, they use former early reading first dollars from the Department of Education, subsidy dollars go into the mix, local state dollars for pre-kindergarten go into the mix, everybody puts their dollars on the table, we're helping them think about or in other communities we're helping them think about how to put Medicaid dollars into the mix to do assessment and diagnosis of young children. It's not about what can you do for me, it's about how we can think about where the children and families are and what we need to do for them. So as I look to the future and think to give Eric some of my time back, as I look to the future and think about what our vision is, we have outlined a national vision for childcare. This is not a new conversation, you can go online and see a number of organizations led by the National Women's Law Center and others that have a vision for childcare. Our vision needs to be bigger than that. We need to really start asking the right questions about what children and families have and what they need and stop giving answers that are about this child, this family and the needs of me, the adult as the policymaker. I think if we start to look at communities, if we start to look at sources of dollars and bring them together around these desired outcomes for healthy children, we will do much better than we are right now, thank you. Well, thank you David, thank you everyone for being here and David and the New America team for the invitation, I greatly appreciate it and especially the opportunity to talk to you about something that is so important to my members, the members of the Early Care and Education Consortium, who together operate more than 7,500 centers in every state in the District of Columbia, serve about a million children every day and try to meet the increasing expectations of public and private funders, parents and governments in delivering high quality programs. I would say, your comments Daniel were great and I especially like the who we are and who we are not, what we do currently, what is out there currently and what we might look to going forward and I think it's helpful for me to be reminded of that as well, my members, the consortium centers are not your typical centers, they have multiple sites in many cases operate in multiple states, they are in some ways in the richest position in terms of resources and expertise, doesn't mean there aren't excellent programs outside of the consortium but they do not represent the members of the consortium, the average childcare program. We only have licensed centers, not family childcare homes and all of the delivery system extends to a wide variety of types of programs and levels of quality and so when we have the conversation about what is and what should be, it's important to keep in mind the great diversity of both program types and the diversity of quality and the diversity of resources supporting and I think in the background, Barbara I believe you made reference to this, the degree to which families and our society as a whole think about early childhood education and childcare in particular as a valuable support, a critical investment in the community and as a priority in their lives and sometimes, and I think more especially recently, we've not made some of the right prioritizations as a country as a whole. I wanna make three general comments and move us to questions because I think it's in the interplay of the question and answers that we'll really get to tease out some of these subjects. But batting last I run the risk of not repeating or just repeating and I'm trying to modify what I jotted down to be mindful of that so I hope you'll give me a little bit of leeway and I'll try very hard not to impose on you with repetitious comments. One comment I wanna make is something about where we are and the market nature of childcare in particular and then I also wanna talk a little bit about the impact of our connection between the market and public policy and what the condition of our childcare delivery system looks like, I'll make very general comments relative to that. And then lastly, I'd like to offer a suggestion, a marker, a light to go by as we think down the road at whatever things need to be addressed. Many great ideas were mentioned earlier. Whatever path we choose to take, a bellwether kind of frame or idea of guidance around that. So three things, the first, childcare, not early care and education, all those other programs but childcare, which is itself a child development and a work support, an education and a care program. Childcare is everywhere a market-based activity. Some families enter that market with many resources. Danielle did an excellent job of sort of describing that in some cases and others with not anything like those resources. And in some communities, there are excellent programs that families can have access to, some families. In other cases, there aren't choices. The childcare deserts, an advocate was describing to me, a provider was describing to me earlier this week that occur in some places to borrow a phrase that's usually used around grocery stores. Or the lack of care, Danielle also referenced this, at three o'clock in the morning where there's increasing demand for it. And everywhere that market interaction occurs, there are stress, there is stress. Even well-resourced and well-educated families seek out programs that meet their needs and often just aren't 100% sure that I do the right thing by Johnny or Sally. And of course, for those families without those kinds of benefits, it's even harder. The choices are almost always, are always fewer and the ability to divine what that marketplace looks like and to enter in a, the most beneficial way is much less significant. That said, that's why we have the block grant. It's a tool to leverage to the extent possible the access of families to higher quality programs and to access programs at all where they otherwise might not have the option and where they need that economic lifeline that childcare is, childcare is for everyone who seeks to work outside the home with a child. And in many cases, there are good stories. I think we don't tell the good stories enough and there are all sorts of flavors. The employer-sponsored reference earlier, fantastic things going on in the world of employer-sponsored care. There are also wonderful stories around really entrepreneurial leaders who are providers, often in urban areas who are figuring out the very complicated ways to bring together multiple funding streams that the government doesn't help us coordinate very well, figuring out how to do that with real entrepreneurial gusto, even if they are non-profit or for-profit. And there are also good stories around are being responsive to the needs of parents. Most childcare programs, they begin not with a funding stream or a directive from the government, they begin with really committed individuals who know what they're doing with children and who are trying to meet the needs of a family. And great stories around how those needs are being met in many cases. It can't be overstated, though. We all know some of the grim realities. In essence, what I'd like to suggest in terms of moving to that second subject is that over the last 10 years, we have made policy and funding decisions, sometimes I think very inadvertently, definitely not with this intent, that have resulted in the hollowing out of the childcare delivery system, a system that has in some places and for some families and hope you're one of them, a good set of alternatives, an excellent opportunity for your child, but also a system where in many places and in many communities, no family has an option that works for them, that is of the level of quality. We'd like, certainly, that we would demand with public dollars. A hollowing out of the childcare system that has often pitted the ability to, the access and affordability versus quality, the trilemma that Joan mentioned that is given reference to in the National Women's Law Center report from earlier this week. Those two can't be, or those three, can't be pitted against one another. They're all part of the same problem. The emphasis on, or the lack of emphasis on reimbursement rates, the vehicle, the metric by which the voucher operates in all 50 states that Joan mentioned, you know, that only 22, that only three states now where there were 22 pay at the federally recommended level means that the buying power of the block grant has diminished tremendously over the last decade. The ability of a family to have the access to the assistance that childcare and development block grant provides, get them the kind of quality that their child needs and that they need for their work lives and to move their families forwards, is greatly limited. It's been hollowed out also by the difficulty to connect with other parts of the early childhood delivery system and with other parts of the human services delivery system. And that tension that has risen between access and quality is sometimes even present where we think we're making all of the right moves. And our focus really ought to be about quelching that tension, reducing it, addressing it. I'm thinking of quality rating and improvement systems, which have done such an excellent job at giving us a framework for how public dollars can intersect with the private marketplace. Yet in many cases where states have quality rating systems, the rates even at the highest level of the system don't pay at that federally recommended level. I think the Law Center report has the data. It's something like eight out of 10 states that have a higher reimbursement for higher levels of quality don't meet that bar. And that tension is something we've got to grapple if we're to see the promise of an excellent idea like quality rating systems working its way into the market for public dollars to be achieved. I think there have been other positive developments. But where they appear is also a function of that hollowing out of the delivery system that I've referenced. Shared services, which I was going to talk actually a little bit about, just to make a reference since it's already come up, has come up in a number of communities. And it offers a way for the typically isolated, atomized individual provider to be able to share resources, to be able to leverage some of the benefits that, for example, the consortium's members who operate in multiple locations have. And that is an innovative way to be thinking about moving forward. We haven't seen how well it can be scaled up, but it offers promise for a business practice. And business practices underlie everything that goes on in a program. I think there have also been positive developments around industry supports as opposed to Joan reference the voucher and other forms of ways of delivering dollars to programs. And we see those typically connected with quality rating systems, sometimes also with state funded pre-kindergarten. And those offer some additional ways of thinking about how resources can be put into programs to provide the kind of quality that's necessary so that hollowing out can be addressed and we can move forward in a very positive way. The danger, of course, of the hollowing out phenomenon is that you end up with some families, maybe office assistants, maybe just a handful of those with the assistance of the block grant, able to access good quality care and others not, and that's a recipe for disaster for our natural future. With the investment we need to make in our future should be not one that's stratified by the luck of location or of family birth and circumstance. I've heard some dramatic things in my travels here, especially lately, that underscore how serious this is. Last week I was in a center, I thought a pretty simple center visit, I love doing those, it's a way of learning what's actually happening on the ground. And I was floored when the center director described how parents were telling the director that they were having family members turn their family in to child protective services in order to qualify for the block grant. Now that is not right and it's a function of the lack of resources that state, and I would say our nation overall in the last decade have been providing to this critical area. And I can give you other examples, I'm sure you all know from your own lines of work, the kinds of challenges that families face and that providers face, and we've already heard some of those. The hollowing out is a real challenge to our moving forward on childcare and our moving forward broadly in terms of early care and education policy writ large. The last thing I wanna leave you with is a marker about thinking going forward. My head is a little bit reeling, we had such a wide array of ideas presented earlier, some of them very big thinking. Whatever the pathway forward is, whether it's some small incremental improvement or some large dramatic seismic shift kind of improvement or change, we have to remember that as much as quality counts, it also costs and that reform without resources is doomed to not meet the objective that we are seeking. You know, it won't do honor and to the millions of childcare providers and the programs they work in to increase expectations without the resources to make it possible for them to achieve the results we're all looking for. To add demands is not a bad thing, but to add demands without resources dooms only adds to the problems that the childcare delivery system has. That's a hard thing to keep in mind. It's such an obvious thing. It's hard to keep in mind because the politics today really make it swimming up against stream to be, but we have to keep that first and foremost in our minds because to not do so leaves us in a position where we're looking to make improvements, we're saying the right things, but we end up not really achieving what we are trying to get at and possibly making things worse. Well, some thoughts. I'm looking forward to the conversation with my colleagues and the questions from the audience. Thank you. Thank you very much. Barbara and Danielle and Joan, thank you for those provocative insights and for laying out some terrific thoughts. My wife and I, as many of you know, have four kids, five and under. In fact, this morning is my three-year-old's birthday, so I delivered cupcakes to the, we helped get cupcakes ready for the childcare piece this morning. And so I'm very interested in this space just out of my own personal context. And there's so many things that come to mind from what you have all shared, particularly around the way systems interact today. I'd love to chat around the childcare system and ESEA. It'd be better coordinated how it focuses with the workforce investment system, maybe putting childcare centers at the whips. And then the work-life balance connection is just very real to me, too, as we think about the changes of the structure of the family. But I wanted to just, as we open it up here, just ask you, just picking up something that Eric really ended with, which has to do with really the broader question, you sort of inspired me to think about what it would really take to elevate this conversation to a level such as it was in the late 80s, for instance, or for the level of really attention with the presidential campaign coming on, to take on some of the changes that you've talked about today, really require a level, and this is what you were ending with, and inspired me at least, that requires a level of attention, which we don't currently see, but we've certainly seen it at points within our history in the last generation. Anyone wanna tackle that, Joan, or anyone wanna, thought on what it would take to really elevate that to the point that any of these changes that are systemic could be had? Well, it's a good question. I think that we continue to keep trying to tie the issue to whatever issue is in front of us right now. That's why I keep coming back to the economy, because I think that's what people are talking about, and I think continuing to tie it to the big issues of the day, which are education and the economy, and I think when Eric said childcare deserts, it really got to me, because I think that's what we're seeing out there, and one of the reasons why I wanna see us invest in the supply of programs, because in many communities, we had more in the past than we have now. So I think continuing to raise the issues, talk about the realities out there, put parents out there to talk about it instead of us, and tie it to the big issues. I mean, I think when you look back at what happened in the 80s and the huge number of newspapers that ran stories about how women couldn't go to work because they couldn't find adequate childcare, it's actually, from a sociological perspective, it's really fascinating, it's never happened again, and I think there's a couple of reasons why we lost that momentum. One is people find childcare. People don't make a big deal about it. Moms don't think it's okay to talk about their childcare needs. We have to create a space where it's okay for women to say, you know what, I actually can't work a full day because I don't have full day childcare, and that has gone missing for lots of reasons that you could probably write a PhD about feminism and lots of other things about, but we have to get back on the pages of the Newspapers of America in ways that are about the basic issues for families. So rather than having a USA Today pro and con about is childcare education, which happened, is Head Start working, we need to have something on the front page of USA Today, on the front page of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the LA Times, that says, hey, a significant portion of our workforce, women, are having trouble staying in the workforce because there's no childcare out there, and it's particularly hard in these kinds of communities where we have these deserts where childcare is completely unaffordable. In Washington, DC, most of our infants and toddlers are not in center-based care because we simply don't have enough slots, and yet you don't see the Washington Post talking about that, except occasionally in the parenting blog, which by the way, it drives me insane. It's not just a parenting issue that people can't find childcare, it's a workforce issue, and we have to figure out how to talk about that in the day to day, how you get folks successful, how you get people in the workforce, how you make sure employers are successful, and get it out there in the media in a very different way. I appreciate it, yeah. When Eric was talking about resources there, any of those systemic changes, resource structures require a broader framing, so thank you. Why don't we, we can jump into that as well, but let's just, let's, in the 20 minutes we have here, let's see where the questions line, where the conversation takes us. All right, I see a hand there in the back. Maggie, please, as the microphone comes, you might just state your name and affiliation real briefly and keep your question to a single question so that we have an opportunity for all to speak. I'll apologize for two questions, but totally related. My name's Toby Prince-Platnick. I'm sorry, I'm with the Morrison-Gwendolyn Capers Foundation. I've seen research around the economic benefits to employers for on-site health wellness centers or gyms. I've never seen data around the economic benefits for on-site childcare. Does that research exist? The corollary is, are there any tax benefits or incentives for real estate developers or employers to build in on-site childcare? Thank you. It does exist. The Families and Work Institute, Ellen Glinski, has done a lot of research on this back in the 90s. There's some research that shows pretty significant benefits to employers. The issue, though, goes to one of the things that Barbara raised about who actually gets served by on-site childcare centers. And whether it's the higher level white-collar workers or the lower paid blue-collar or receptionist administrative level staff. And that makes a really big difference in terms of productivity and benefits to the employer and why they're doing it. Then there's all these kinds of issues about, how do I say, subsidized. Some of Eric's members are employers and he might want to say more. Yeah, it's quite well documented. And many of them have also done their own evaluations of how parents react to having that care and the benefits that provides them in terms of being able to focus at work and that sort of thing. And so I don't think there's really any question about whether that occurs. You know, Danielle's right. There is, when employer-sponsored care occurs, there's a contractual relationship. There's a problem that's defined in a service that's offered for it. Often, in many settings, employer-sponsored care is also then opened up to the community. Here in DC, for example, we have a number of very powerful law firms. They can't, on their own stock, a center with children. But they need that care desperately for those high-end workers. And they will then make available, in some cases, a large number of slots for folks in the community or other employers in the area. And so it's a lot more complicated. It also tends to be in some of the better companies, the Fortune 500 companies, and in some of the very targeted public areas, hospitals, fire and emergency services in some cities have dedicated services like that. So, but it is, of course, one of the flavors, and it's not the only solution. And it's hard to see, it's hard to see a systemic approach to child care through the employer-sponsored option. Okay. And our second question was, I think, a little bit about tax subsidies for real estate. Anyone have a, to build them? No? Go on once. Go on, Barbara. Go on, Barbara. Thank you. But I know there are some towns that require developments of a certain size and certain characteristics to include a child care center as a part of their development. And for a resource on those kind of economic development strategies for promoting child care, such as trying to require transportation hubs to include child care centers nearby and to create that, or create incentives for those co-locations. There's a website, if you just Google Child Care and Economic Development. The city of, the department of city and regional planning at Cornell University coordinates a list of those programs. I think in both those cases, what is exciting about employer-supported and all these other options is that we're creating programs. The problem is having parents be able to pay for them. And that's where we fall down, particularly for low-income families, because you can build a beautiful program, but they can't afford to go there. You can have a five-star program, but you can't have the low-income family be able to attend. So I think the dilemma continues to come back to needing supports directly into programs so that they can be accessed by the broad array of families that need them. Great. Let's see other questions. Let's see if we have any other hands here. Yes, over here, and then we'll take a question here. Hi, Nisha Patel with Ascend at the Aspen Institute, which was referenced in a couple of the speaker's remarks. And so, as was mentioned, our focus really is on two-generation strategies to move parents, especially women and their children, beyond poverty, by focusing on educational success and economic security. And I was curious, you know, that I was really interested. I know, I'm fortunate to know Danielle and Barbara and Joan really well, and I haven't heard Eric speak before. And so I was actually really interested in your framing around the market. And, you know, like I've spent my whole career working on poverty issues. And the thing about the programs that families, low-income families or families in poverty need, there's a market they just don't have the finances. And that's what I really appreciated about your framing. And what I heard various of you saying with the Child Care and Development Fund is that it helps provide the financing for some of that market. And so thinking about a two-generation approach, a lot of the conversation today, as it often is, is about parents who need to go to work and therefore they need quality child care where their children can be learning, which is great, I think, as an interim. But if you're taking the long view, you know, at least from our perspective, the goal would be for those parents, those mothers, those fathers, to be able to further their own opportunities on their own education. And Barbara touched on it, you know, with their study looking at students, particularly at community colleges, sort of how do we begin, and just thoughts from anyone, begin to build the political will and the understanding that, yes, that's great. For this family, it might make sense for them to do that work right now, and that's the job they have, particularly in this economy. But over the long term, you know, if a subsidy for a family, or for families as an interim kind of measure, how do we begin to build the political will to say that there is also return on the investment, you know, early education for the kid, but for the parents to say, if they get that education, they will have that better job, and then they will no longer need that subsidy. And in fact, they're part of that private market with their own financing. So I hope that makes sense, that was a long. Yes, and I very much, that's very well said. You know, I think the connection between maternal education and its maternal, because that's what the data has given us, mother's education background, and readiness for school is very clear, and that we don't make that connection enough, and that if we care about children being better prepared, then we've got to focus on the education of their parents as a key element of that, asset development in the education of their parents, and those two things go together. For me, the beauty of childcare, and I use that word broadly to mean all kinds of programs, is that they're portals of entry for supporting families around those issues. I think that's been the wonder of Head Start, that it's supported parents' development and education and leadership potential, and that has a relationship to how well the child does in the long run. So making those connections in Nisha, your work has been so critical is really important. Yeah, Nisha, this won't, I don't think this exactly addresses what you brought up, but what you were saying reminded me of, you know, in some respects, I'm not saying we shouldn't look to Europe, we should look elsewhere, period, but we should be also looking west to the Pacific Rim countries. They have a, not that I'm an expert on this, but I have been doing some reading, and this issue about parent buy-in to the value of education generally, and especially in the early years, is something they've not, they're not struggling with. In fact, they are far exceeding us, and I can see lots of nodding heads, so you know some of the dollar figures of additional dollars beyond what public resources make available in places like Singapore that parents are ponying up because what they get is that we are in an economic competition for our national life, and they're not backing down, and they see the experience of young children as central to that, and too many of us in America haven't figured that out yet. You know, the other thing I would say that struck me when you were talking is that sometimes you're connected to an institution that can help you divine quality, or maybe. So if you're connected to a community college and hopefully that's got a credited center, or it's otherwise a good quality center, you can gravitate in that direction. But other times as a parent, too many parents are a float without good indicators of what is quality. Of course you want someone who maybe looks like you and is gonna love your kid, right? Those are sort of basic elemental things, but that's not enough to give you quality. And you may have some sense that education is important, so maybe you wanna look for a person with a degree or a credential, but that alone is also not important. And being able to figure out what makes for a good quality program is very hard. And even in terms of how we look to different types of settings, I've heard some remarkable assumptions about family child care, or for that matter, center-based care that really aren't about quality, their prejudices and so forth. So how we can educate parents is essential to this question that you raise, I think. Quality rating systems offer one potential, but that's just another funding demand for those types of programs. But we really have to figure out how to help parents' divine quality, seek it out, as well as be able to afford it to address what you asked about. Nisha, I think you go to the heart of one of our problems as a country, right? How do we move public policy to the goals we think are important for children and families? And to be really honest, I'm not sure that policymakers are gonna buy, oh, dual generation has a higher ROI than anything else, and so we have to buy that. Just as much as they have in early education has an incredibly high ROI, and so let's put all of our dollars there. So my real concern is, again, are we asking the right question, and that we're not pitting programs against each other? What I think has been successful in some places is for the community to identify what its strengths and weaknesses are and what is available to families. So to the community college question, we have entire communities who don't have access to the most basic community college that families, we have early childhood providers, just as an example, who drive 100 miles after they've worked a 10 hour day to attend classes so that in six or eight years, they can get an AA degree. That's a gap in the system that affects that family, that affects the children that woman serves, and affects the college system in her community because there's no apparent need because how many people are gonna drive 100 miles to get a two year degree in eight years? So we have to really start talking differently about these problems, and I think, and you and I talked about this a little bit, that the language matters, that when you say dual generation, you have family, people glaze over it, when you say ROI, they're like, yeah, yeah, in 50 years we'll get pay off, but I have to get elected tomorrow. We have to really start thinking about how to make these things immediate and necessary for public policy, and I think talking at the community level, the 525,000 people who elect you don't have X, Y, and Z, and what are you gonna do about that? And one of my real fears is that it's gonna take us falling out of our recession into a real great depression for this to truly change, and I hope that's not true, but I think we have to start driving home what communities truly look like and connect policymakers to those gaps. I have a question here, and then let's ask them, Barbara, why don't you? Oh, okay. Yeah, she's getting the microphone. Yeah, go ahead. Good afternoon, my name is Valerie Young, and I'm with the National Association of Mother Centers, and from that position, I take a much more gendered look at the work that you've talked about. I think as a country, everyone would agree that we value innovation, we value business, we value making a lot of money, we don't value care work, we don't value caregiving, and that's patently obvious by the fact that we have no paid sick days legislation, we have no paid parental or more to the point maternity leave legislation, there's no part-time worker parity legislation. It's also, I think, accepted as truth that the welfare of the child is directly linked to the welfare of the mother. To that extent, the continuing disparity of women at all levels of society is one of the major reasons that this issue hasn't gotten more attention, isn't better funded, and because it can be categorized as quote unquote, a woman's issue, which is an appellation which I love, because it's so inaccurate, but to the extent that people call it that, it gets immediately diminished and dismissed. None of you have talked about women's enhanced political participation or pay equity efforts, or any of the other moves that we could make to put women on more of an equal footing in society as being a means of launching or catapulting or dragging the condition of childcare and early education. Have you given up on that as a tactic? Do you just think it's not going to play to the issues of the moment, the way you linked it to the economy, or is it a calculated move that you've made to talk to it in terms of workforce development, in terms of parental needs, and in terms of family economic security, when the argument could be made that it is profoundly a woman's issue? Great. We'll start with Barbara if we could, because she was going to issue, if she wouldn't because she was about to speak to the last one. She's also at an institution that has the word women in it, so I feel just on that we ought to give her the story. Yeah, well I just, I'm going to go back to another point I wanted to make about building the political will, and what keeps coming to mind in building what Danielle said before is just, what is the state of grassroots advocacy for childcare? I mean, we have incredible national organizations that are powerful in advocating for us, and what we're shooting for, but there doesn't seem to really beat one grassroots organization that's focused explicitly on childcare unless I'm missing something. I mean, there's Moms Rising, which is kind of a very, I think it's a great organization. It works largely through social networking or through meetups, but what about organizing childcare workers? I know some of the unions are making attempts at that, but I think a fundamental problem kind of goes to a sense of complacency. Every day I've been thinking about this meeting I had with a journalist from The Economist who's doing a special feature on women in the economy that's coming out in November, and she's British, and we were talking about the lack of paid leave and pay inequity and how women are doing. And finally, she said, it's a very brutal country you live in, isn't it? I just, I can't imagine what working women here go through on a daily basis. How do they do it? I just can't imagine it. And it's just, we've gotten accustomed to a certain level of stress and impossibility in our day-to-day lives, and we just need a certain amount of consciousness raising and someone to say, isn't that supposed to be like this? It could be different. And to do some agitating is what I think. Jonas, shopping at the bit to you. I'm really glad your rates paid leave because it is related to this issue and it's critically important and we certainly haven't come far enough at all in that direction. It's an interesting question about how you frame it and certainly for my generation, it was framed as a women's issue. For my daughter's generation, it's not. I mean, it's framed as an issue that even if one party is feeling most of the burden and I think that I see that happen and we all see that happen, it's really in this generation being framed as a parenting issue, as an education issue. I mean, I had this interesting conversation with my new grandmother and with my daughter about he's now over a year, so I'm not so new, but we were talking about his child care arrangements and what her options were and she said to me, I said, what about this place down the street? And she said, well, you know, it's just a child care program. And I said, how can you say that to your mother? Yeah. All these years and this is a real conversation. And she was looking for something that felt more like an education program and something had changed in the years between her and I. And so I don't think people are walking away from that, the tying it to a women's issue and I do think women feel a lot of the burden here, but I think that there is change happening. And so that's kind of what I'm after is new thinking. I mean, one of the things that worries me in listening to this whole conversation this morning, it's been interesting for me, is that I still think we're kind of stuck in an old thinking and what I'm looking for is kind of how do we move this in a new direction in a much more bigger and bolder way? I do hope that it becomes an issue in the conversations over the next 12 months as the country talks about policy. I can't imagine it won't, but it will probably be framed as early education and after school or extended learning because that's where we are. I'm quite interested, but Daniel, before you, let me take one more question. I'll let you have the first word here. I think that is just a really interesting piece is how it's gonna come up in the next 12 months and where that takes us and how we impact it. Let's see if there's any other questions here and I wanna make sure each, as we come to the end of our time here. I see one hand, we'll take the one final question here and then we'll start with Daniel. We'll just come down and end with Joan and have an opportunity for anyone to either answer the question directly. If there is a question, if not, we'll... Karen, raise your hand. We'll have Karen's question and we'll start with Daniel. We'll come back and have our speakers to give us a brief comment on anything that they think could elevate the conversation or be a critical thought that hasn't been shared yet. Karen? Hi, I'm Karen Chulman, National Women's Law Center. Thanks for all the free advertising. I just was wondering, I heard a lot from you about on one hand sort of the basic policies and the need to strengthen those and on the other hand, thinking more broadly about bigger systems or zero to five and zero to eight and comprehensive systems and dual generation and I was just wondering if you think we need to fix the sort of look at the basics first before we go beyond that or the only way to fix the basics is to go first to thinking broader. All right, so you can answer that or the one before or anything else, you all are just coming down the line. I'll give a combined answer. I actually think that framing childcare as a women's issue sets us back and apart and isn't helpful and I'll just be really honest about that. I think if we're ever gonna get to the point where we have complete public financing for children from birth through the entire schooling experience, we have to frame what happens in the earliest years as a set of outcomes that matter to the country at its core, which is why we started talking about education at such a high level as part of what we do for young children and so I think as we think about moving to the future and what we have to say, we cannot simply talk about work and educational outcomes. We have to talk about making sure that children are healthy and able to thrive in their lives and I think that that means that we have to bring in the systems of care that we never look to for young children. We have to see childcare as a health issue. We have to make sure we're providing mental health supports to families and their providers and the infants and toddlers and preschool-aged children and school-aged children in their care. We have to make sure that communities have enough pediatricians and dentists to take care of our young children because all those outcomes we now talk about third grade test scores, other educational outcomes are dependent on those things happening and if we don't create systems of care for kids that address their real needs, cognitive, social, emotional, physical, preventive health, we don't really get to the core issue and ways of financing the system that we want. Right now we rely, as Eric said, on providers and families to be entrepreneurs to piece these things together. We have to go to a place where these things are paid for for families so that children thrive and that's, I think that we just have to start talking about it differently and if we only talk about it as one part of the population's problem, I'm a working mom, it's my problem to find childcare, then it allows everybody else to say, dude, figure it out, not my problem. Danielle, thank you, Eric. I won't add anything to the first part of your comment, Danielle, but I do want to go on record as saying this is not just a women's issue and thank goodness it's not because it means we have a much bigger base of support to tap in terms of addressing it. You know, Karen, you said, if I can sort of rephrase, go big, think big, right? Or do something more incremental and targeted, let's say. My words, but that's sort of the options. And I think the challenge right now is that given our current political and fiscal environment, whatever direction we have so few opportunities for large infusions of resources, I think, that we need to keep that in mind. You know, Joan, I feel a little bad because I didn't have a bold thought, right? But you're right, we should be taking this moment where maybe we're not likely to get the kind of investment we saw in the beginning of the Obama administration continued in the near future to take this moment to think through, what is the bold? We have a vision for the reauthorization of the block grant that was created by consensus in a process led by the National Lunes Law Center a few years ago. That's bold thinking, and maybe it needs to be connected in some other ways to other pieces. The time to plan for when we will have resources is now. My worry is that in the desire to do something, to do something with nothing, and you know, the sides on the Hill especially are so perpendicular to one another. Absolutely no new resources and absolutely must move quality and so forth. In this moment where there is such opposite desires, that we end up making things even worse. I'm not saying that's what will happen. I just worry that we have already eroded the foundation of so many of our early care and education programs that to do more without those added resources is to make things worse in some respects. May. Barbara? I think if we say looking at dual generation, it's not just a new set of strategies, but it's also a different frame. And I think that it's important to try to capture our imagination in a different way and to take advantage of some new opportunities like the sustainability conversations that are going on in our country. I think that's a moment of opportunity to say, what is a sustainable community? What is a healthy community? Child care and work, the ability to balance work and life is a part of that. So I see those not in opposition necessarily. And I think that you can just to address your point again about should this be framed as a women's issue or not. I think that we can talk about the gender inequity and the lack of value for care that underlies a lot of the problems that we have today without making it a women's issue. Because ultimately we need everyone to be involved. We need men to step up a little more in the home and take responsibility for care. We need men in the workplace to understand that women maintain a disproportionate share of caregiving still. So I think that gender analysis needs to be included, but that doesn't mean it's a women's only issue. Barbara, thank you. And Joan, the last word. Well, thank you. I think these are difficult times, but in darkness, I think some light can come. And I really believe that we... You're just watching Harry Potter this summer. I am. It's my new persona. I feel like there's a number of opportunities. We've got major reauthorizations that affect this issue on the horizon being debated today, right? And we can't look at them as pieces. They all go together. We've got to be thinking of an agenda that pulls these pieces together. I actually want to look to communities because I think there's communities all across the country that are putting this stuff, the pieces together and creating kind of some of the pieces that I talked about earlier. And perhaps in looking at what's going on in communities, we can redesign federal policy because I think the answers are out there. We have a terrific article, positive article about Early Child in the New York Times today. I remain hopeful. There you go. It's always good to end on a hopeful note. Will you please join me in thanking Joan and Danielle and Barbara and Eric? Thank you all very, very much. Thank you again all for being there. Thank you for your support and thanks all for watching. Thanks to the Casey Foundation as well. We are adjourned. Have a good afternoon.