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Growing family on one income?
By John Waggoner, USA TODAY

With every new arrival in your family come lots of dizzying choices. Cloth or plastic diapers? Pink or blue layette? But the toughest decision is whether one of you should leave your job to care for your child.

If one spouse stops working, can you live with a lower income and, if possible, continue to stash money into a retirement account? It's often not easy. But if you're willing to cut your budget, staying home with your child might not be as financially painful as you think.

The big question... If you want to stay home with your baby, are you willing to put your career on hold? The question isn't hard if you don't like your job, or if you can take time off easily and return five years later. If you're on the brink of rediscovering Atlantis or if you simply love your job, the choice is much harder.

Even if you hate your job, you will suffer some financial setbacks by leaving it. You stop accruing credits toward Social Security benefits, for example. You forgo several years' work experience — years that generally translate into higher pay over time. And you lose pension benefits, as well as the opportunity to contribute to a corporate 401(k) savings plan.

The impact of losing one income might not be as huge as you imagine. "There's a myth out there about how much income a second job is producing," says James David Ashby, a financial planner in Magnolia, Ark.

There are also downsides to dual incomes. A second job might lift your family into a higher tax bracket. If you commute a long distance, the cost of gas and car repair can be considerable. A daily coffee at Starbucks on the way to work will set you back $60 a month.

And if you continue to work, you'll have to pay for day care. The average cost of infant day care is 10.6% of household income, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, a trade group.

For low-income families, that can soar to nearly a quarter of household income. The cost of child care depends on where you live. In New York state, the average cost of putting a 4-year-old in full-time preschool is $8,530 a year, or 11.5% of the median income of two-parent families in the state. (Median means half are higher, half lower.)

And even if you live in an area with low-cost day care, you might still have to pay a big chunk of the family income for child care. In Mississippi, for example, you can expect to pay an average of $3,904 a year for day care. But that's still 27% of the median single-parent income in the state.

Of course, the more money you make, the less trouble you'll have paying for day care.

// posted by Tammy Wachter @ 4:21 PM 0 comments

A Call to Action on the Education of Young Children
By The Alliance For Childhood

We are dedeply concerned that current trends in early education, fueled by political pressure, are leading to an emphasis on unproven methods of academic instruction and unreliable standardized testing that can undermine learning and damage young children’s healthy development.

Many states are moving toward universal preschool so that all children can benefit from early education. We strongly support these efforts, provided that preschool programs are based on well-established knowledge of how children learn and how to lay a foundation for lifelong learning — not on educational fads. We call for early education that emphasizes experiential, hands-on activities, open-ended creative play, and caring human relationships.

Preschool education must not follow the same path that has led kindergartens toward intense academic instruction with little or no time for child-initiated learning. If such practices were effective for five-year-olds, we would have seen better long-term results by now. We call for a reversal of the pushing down of the curriculum that has transformed kindergarten into de facto first grade.

Education is not a race where the prize goes to the one who finishes first. To help young children develop literacy and a lifelong love of learning we need to respect and, when needed, to strengthen their individual abilities and drive to learn. Instead, current trends in early education policy and practice heighten pressure and stress in children’s lives, which can contribute to behavioral and learning problems. We call for research on the causes of increased levels of anger, misbehavior, and school expulsion among young children.

Justified concern for low-income children, who often lag academically, has been a powerful force behind the current overemphasis on early instruction in literacy and math. This well-intentioned but misguided policy may actually put children at increased risk of school failure by denying them positive early learning experiences. We call for additional research that examines the long-term impact of different preschool and kindergarten practices on children from diverse backgrounds.

Creative play that children can control is central to their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth. It contributes greatly to their language development, social skills, and problem-solving capacities, and lays an essential foundation for later academic learning. Yet many children do not have the opportunity to develop their capacity for socio-dramatic play. Preschool is the place to intervene and restore childhood play. We call for teacher education that emphasizes the full development of the child including the importance of play, nurtures children’s innate love of learning, and supports teachers’ own capacities for creativity, autonomy, and integrity.

Note: Complete list of Call to Action signers is posted at www.allianceforchildhood.org.

Do you need a college degree to teach preschool?
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Monday, Oct. 16, 2006, at 6:46 AM ET

In the current issue of the Atlantic, Clive Crook argues against the encroachment of the college degree as a job-entry requirement. "Failing to go to college did not always mark people out as rejects, unfit for any kind of well-paid employment," he points out, and comes up with a list of occupations in which employers now look for degrees for no good reason. His list includes preschool teachers. My mind flashed to the unfailing smile and wraparound hugs of one of my son's past teachers. Crook is right: She didn't learn that in college.

So, do you need a degree to teach preschool? Study after study shows that 3- and 4-year-olds are better served by more-educated teachers in myriad ways. As you might expect, these teachers tend to offer superior curricula and formal teaching. But they're also, on average, "more stimulating, warm, and supportive" and "provide more age-appropriate experiences." That finding is from a 2004 overview of the relevant research by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and it represents the consensus view. The experts disagree over how much college coursework preschool teachers should have—a two-year associate degree vs. a four-year baccalaureate. The more vexing question is how to take what is now an underpaid, low-skilled workforce and magically restock it with college-educated professionals.

The current preschool market rarely rewards teachers for getting additional credentials. Salaries are as low as $16,000 a year and rarely more than $26,000. One teacher pointed out to me that you can make that much money parking cars, which helps explains why the field often doesn't attract the most qualified people.

Traditionally, if you were 18, didn't have a communicable disease, and loved kids or could fake it, you were hired. Preschool teachers still sometimes have to put up with being thought of as glorified babysitters (the retort of choice at one of my sons' former schools is that no one ever sits on babies there).

But this attitude may begin to change. States are putting more emphasis on "school readiness" programs designed to prepare children (especially low-income children) for kindergarten. With state involvement comes degree requirements for teachers—the lawmakers and regulators see them as a proxy for quality. Given the low wages paid to teachers, states that move in this direction have a choice. They can pay to send teachers to school now by footing their college bills and hiking their pay after graduation. Or they can gradually phase in higher-education requirements in hopes that teachers will take on the training expense themselves.

New Jersey is an example of the first approach. In 31 school districts with 48,000 preschoolers, the state employs more than 2,600 teachers at public-school-scale salaries. Ninety-two percent of the teachers had a bachelor's degree in 2004. This was four years after a court ruling established this as a requirement for the 31 districts, which serve the bulk of the state's poor children. The state didn't track the money it spent on sending the teachers to college, according to Ellen Frede, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. But the starting state salary for a preschool teacher increased from an average of $18,000 to $40,000. It's too soon to know what the long-term effects for kids will be, but Frede thinks New Jersey's degree requirements are entirely necessary if preschool is to be truly educational.

Connecticut, by contrast, is taking the slower route. The state now requires 12 college credits (three courses) in child development for head teachers in state-funded programs; the bar will move up to a bachelor's degree in 2015, according to Carla Horwitz, director of the Calvin Hill Day Care Center in New Haven, Conn. Head Start, the preschool program for poor kids founded in the 1960s, has opted for the gradual approach, too: It recently began requiring that half its head teachers have two-year degrees and has debated raising the requirement to a four-year degree.

It's one thing to tell child-care centers to hire teachers with more education; it's another to make sure people with those credentials are lining up for the job. The best bet for higher salaries is probably to fold preschool into the existing public-education system, as New Jersey has done. That has a potential downside—lots of bureaucracy, standardization, and the other problems that beset public schools.

If your child has gone to a preschool where the majority of teachers have gone to college, though, it's hard to overlook the benefits. My son Eli attended Calvin Hill for two years and loved it. Almost all his teachers had gone to college. Still, a few teachers who were the exceptions to the college norm could light up a classroom—three years later, an assistant who was not long out of high school is the teacher Eli most often asks after.

Horwitz, the day-care director, worries about squeezing out this kind of talent. Doing so could hurt the kids as well as those teachers.

"Some of the people who go into child-care tend not to be great at school, the reading and the writing," Horwitz says. Which is OK, because it's possible to thrive in the field without those skills. But it shouldn't be the rule, in light of the research about the benefits of educated teachers for kids. The National Association for the Education of Young Children, an accrediting organization for preschools, recommends a two-year associate program that includes learning about child development, observing and assessing kids, dealing with parents, and teaching a preschool curriculum. That seems like a pretty sound list.

Some child-care centers compromise by requiring degrees of head teachers but not of their assistants. This makes sense—except when it's the assistant who really knows how to soothe the kids and make the day run smoothly, and who will face an institutional barrier for promotion and better pay. The hard-nosed response to this injustice is, essentially, tough. Or maybe, follow New Jersey's lead and send those valuable undertrained teachers back to school.

W. Steven Barnett, a professor of education economics at Rutgers and author of a recent article on preschool and social mobility for the Brookings Institution, argues that college-educated teachers are particularly important for disadvantaged kids, who often can't rely on their parents for the broad exposure that college-educated adults can offer. He also thinks that babies and toddlers would also probably be better off with college-educated caregivers. There's little research on 1- to 2-year-olds to back this up. But if going to college correlates with greater warmth, you'd want it for the little guys, too.

How to possibly pay for all of this? Sending preschool teachers back to school is relatively cheap, Barnett says. It's raising their salaries afterward that drains budgets. But then you look at the benefits associated with excellent preschool—higher reading and math skills throughout school, better high-school graduation rates, and richer lifetime earnings—and it sounds like a good front-end investment. The states are already spending more on their youngest students. Perhaps their youngest teachers (or the older ones willing to head back to college) deserve the same treatment.

California Governor Vetoes Family Child Care Union Bill SB 697 (Kuehl)
– Vetoed 9/29/06

Allows family child care providers to choose representation by a single provider organization. Authorizes the provider organization to operate child care provider pools if not provided by the community, market family child care programs, offer business development programs for family child care providers, meet with regulatory agencies and engage in negotiation with public and private entities that administer subsidies for child care services. Relates to minimum school funding obligations. Prohibits strikes.

Veto message: “I am returning Senate Bill 697 without my signature. I support efforts to improve the quality of child care and to increase the availability of child care. Unfortunately, collective bargaining would inappropriately limit the state's flexibility to determine reimbursement rates for state-subsidized child care. To the extent that family child care provider reimbursement rates for state-subsidized child care are increased, funding for child care programs would need to be increased. Such increases could come at the expense of the number of available child care slots or other child care services being reduced. I am concerned that this bill results in providers caring for subsidized children being reimbursed at rates much higher than those which non-subsidized families can afford, state reimbursement payments would drive the market and make child care too costly for low-income families that are not receiving child care subsidies. This bill has the potential to add significant fiscal pressure to the state's structural budget deficit and/or reduce the number working families for which subsidized child care slots could be provided by authorizing family child care providers to select a provider organization for the purpose of negotiating increased child care reimbursement rates and benefits with state entities that administer state-funded public subsidies for child care services. In light of the current structural budget deficit, it is imperative that we balance our fiscal reality and the need to provide services to working families. In addition, I do not believe this bill is necessary because family child care homes currently receive prevailing market rates for their services. They are reimbursed for the state subsidized families they serve at same rate as that paid by the non-subsidized families they serve. For these reasons, I am unable to sign this bill.

Choosing Child Care
Veteran child development professionals at the University of Arkansas offer four keys to choosing good child care.
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.

How to choose good child care?

Investigating four key factors, say University of Arkansas child development professionals, can give parents the information they need to select a good facility for their child.

Start by visiting the center and asking plenty of questions, advised Sue Martin, professor of child development, and Vernoice Baldwin, director of the UA Infant Development Center and Nursery School. The four key areas parents need to examine are quality, health and safety, learning environment, and relationships.

Quality: What makes a quality program? To begin with, Martin said, parents should look for a child care facility that is licensed by the state. That is a minimum indication of a quality program. Next, she said, "Ask whether the facility has accreditation or plans to gain accreditation. Seeking accreditation shows a commitment to providing the best quality of care."

Two kinds of national accreditation are available, from either the National Association for the Education of Young Children or the National Association for Family Child Care. Some states offer other ways for child care centers to show quality above and beyond licensure, such as the Arkansas Child Care Approval System.

"The best indicator of quality care for children is the educational background and training of the providers," Baldwin said. "Ask how long the teachers or caregivers have been with the center.

Attachment is so important for young children as they learn to develop trust, so
you want the caregiver to be stable." Ask how many caregivers and children are in the center. Licensing agencies set limits on the ratio of children to staff. Typically there should be no more than four babies or young toddlers to each caregiver and up to eight children aged three to four years per caregiver.

Health and Safety: Ask what kinds of meals and snacks are being served to the children, Martin said. A menu should be posted; ask to see it. Meals and snacks should include a good selection of healthy foods and only limited sweet snacks. The programs that Baldwin directs have procedures in place to protect children with food allergies - another important question to ask staff.

When you look around the center, notice how clean it is. Are the pillows and curtains easily washable? Are dress-up costumes or other toys washed regularly? Toys that go into little mouths should be washed after each child's use. Do changing tables have cleaning supplies close at hand, and are the tables cleaned between each diaper change? Have staff members been trained to wash their hands properly or use fresh disposable gloves for each baby? Ask about the maintenance and cleaning schedules.

What about the playground? If it is not directly outside the center, do staff members have a safe system to get children to the playground? Children should never be left alone outside, and Baldwin says that caregivers should make sure that each child is engaged in some type of activity during outdoor playtime.

Learning Environment: While each age group has its own particular developmental needs, Martin and Baldwin noted that there are several features a parent should see in a good child care center.

"Children of all ages need a balance of restful and more vigorous activities during the day, and they should spend part of their day outdoors," Martin said. "Ask to see the posted daily schedule, and talk to the child care providers about what happens on a typical day."

"A child care center should be a rich environment, with a variety of opportunities for children," Baldwin added. "In our facilities we don't use television at all. Even on rainy days, we involve the children in indoor activities. Parents should definitely ask about television use. Babies and toddlers should not be watching TV, and it should only be used minimally with pre-school children."

While parents should see children engaged in a variety of play when they visit a center, Baldwin cautioned that children also need quiet places.

"All centers should have a get-away place so children have a comfortable corner to go to when they need to be by themselves," she said.

Babies should not spend the entire day being held or in a crib. As soon as they are able to move around, they should have a safe space in which to crawl and access to appropriate toys. Even little babies should be in a position where they can see what is going on while they are awake.

Toddlers are ready for sensory toys like Playdoh and puzzles, and they need toys like dump trucks, chalk and dolls that they can pick up and put down. Toddlers need lots of playground time to run, climb and slide.

Preschool children need large chunks of free playtime, Baldwin said. "They need options to make choices with opportunities for music, art or exploring simple science," she said. "They are ready for small group times where a caregiver might read a book to the children or lead singing."

Relationships: When parents visit a child care center, they should see staff showing care and respect for children. Caregivers should listen to children and show them how to listen to their friends and treat others with respect.

The other important relationship is between parents and teachers. Martin said parents should ask if parent-teacher conferences are scheduled regularly. "Children's needs are best served with their caregivers and parents meet regularly to discuss progress and understand any challenges that may occur," she said.

In the centers that Baldwin supervises, parents are welcome to visit at any time and are encouraged to talk with staff between formal meetings.

For further information, Martin and Baldwin recommend that parents visit the Web sites for the national accrediting agencies: http://www.naeyc.org or http://www.nafcc.org.

// posted by Tammy Wachter @ 5:24 PM 0 comments