Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Yesterday I shared Obama's early education plan... Today we'll look at another candidate..
Part of the newly proposed plan by Hillary to improve the working families in our country is to provide better access to high quality child care.
My thought is that these are fine and worthy goals, but where is the benefit to child care providers? Providers who will be dealing with tighter licensing and safety standards and their enforcement. Providers who will take more training and work towards quality rating systems. It sounds like this proposal is geared more towards appeasing parents than the child care profession.Hillary has worked on expanding access and improving the quality of child care in our country for decades. The Bush Administration has essentially frozen the level of child care funding for the last eight years. As a result, the real purchasing power of child care subsidies has fallen significantly. According to the Bush Administration’s own estimates, 300,000 children will lose child care assistance by 2010, and 150,000 have already lost child care assistance since 2000.
Hillary believes we need to increase child care funding through the Child Care and Development Block Grant and return the program to it’s original intent: to serve working families. She will also work with Congress to reform the Dependent Care Tax Credit to address its shortcomings. And she will improve the quality of child care by investing in:
- Helping states improve and enforce licensing and safety standards;
- Supporting innovative public-private partnerships that increase the supply
of affordable, high quality child care for working families;- Promoting and supporting quality rating systems that help families evaluate
programs; and- Supporting workforce initiatives that help child care providers get the
right training.
