Found via The New York Times: There’s news of the Early Learning Challenge Fund, a new initiative that would send $8 billion dollars over an eight year period to states who improve their programs for early childhood education. This new initiative is part of the higher education funding bill that recently passed through the House of Representatives and is expected to pass the Senate by the end of the year.
How do states qualify for this new funding? From the Times story:
To qualify for grants, states would have to demonstrate that they have established or improved what the bill calls a “governance structure” for their networks of child care centers and prekindergarten programs.
The structure would include quality standards; a curriculum of sorts, appropriate for young children; a mechanism for reviewing programs and assigning quality ratings; minimum training requirements for providers; a plan for reaching out to parents; and a system for collecting data on children and families. The Departments of Education and Health and Human Services would jointly administer the Challenge Fund.
