In July 2024, EdNC hosted the annual conference of the Governmental Research Association (GRA) in Asheville. The GRA consists of 28 member organizations in 17 states that conduct public policy, governmental, and civic research into issues facing municipalities, regions, and states.

At this year’s conference, researchers came together to talk about economic prosperity through the lenses of climate change, housing, workforce development, and early childhood care and education. 

Why early education policy

Doug Howgate, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation (MTF), kicked off the discussion of early childhood with a presentation explaining how and why his organization decided to get involved in the issue of child care in Massachusetts.

Howgate described MTF’s budget and tax policy work as their “bread and butter,” but pointed out that their mission as a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization is to look at “public policy issues that relate to the sustainable and equitable economic growth of Massachusetts.”

That’s what made early childhood care and education a natural fit. Following the federal government’s pandemic-era investment in child care, MTF saw an opportunity in 2021 to use the credibility and relationships they’d built to make the case that state investment in early childhood policies would have long-term benefits for Massachusetts taxpayers. 

When federal stabilization funds expired, Massachusetts adopted several of MTF’s recommendations, preventing the state’s early childhood system from going over the funding cliff that North Carolina is tumbling down. 

Supporting investment in early childhood care and education

After Howgate’s presentation, I shared EdNC’s recent work on the topic of early childhood. 

I started with some key points about why the issue is so critical to North Carolina’s future:

• The vast majority of human brain development occurs in the first three years of life. Strengthening neural connections during this critical period leads to improved health, lower incarceration rates, better educational outcomes, and greater workforce readiness. 
• Lack of public investment in early childhood care and education results in a gap between what parents can afford to pay in the early stages of their careers, and what it costs to provide high-quality care and education. The market is kept afloat by high tuition and low teacher wages.
• The state’s economy is stronger when parents can participate in the workforce knowing their children are safe and cared for. 

I told the GRA members that in early 2023, EdNC asked a team of students from Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy to help us identify states that were leading the way in early childhood policy and investment — the way North Carolina did in the 1990s. We identified Oregon, Vermont, Michigan, New Mexico, and Massachusetts as new leaders.

My reporting colleague, Liz Bell, and I visited all five states toward the end of 2023 to learn more about how they were prioritizing early childhood policy, and how they were coping with the federal funding cliff. 

EdNC published articles about each state, analyzed what we learned, and identified four successful strategies. Then we wrote about how those strategies might help N.C. reclaim our leadership position in early childhood care and education. 

The strategies are: advocacy from the business community, grassroots organizing, streamlining governance, and identifying/creating new funding streams.

I also updated the GRA members on the current state of affairs for child care in North Carolina.

Unlike Massachusetts, North Carolina has not chosen to capitalize on the investment that was made by the federal government during the pandemic in terms of these stabilization grants to child care providers… What we have done is kind of drag out the child care funding cliff. The various funds that we’ve been pulling from have been drying up, and while the legislature has decided to put a little bit more in, a little bit more in, a little bit more in, to make it instead of going off a cliff, kind of rolling down a hill, the outcome is ultimately going to be the same — especially for children, their educators, and their families.

I invited three local experts to participate in a panel discussion of how the strategies EdNC identified as successful in other states might apply to North Carolina. Those Western North Carolina panelists were:

• Dr. Ereka Williams, vice president of education for Dogwood Health Trust
• Greg Borom, director of the Western North Carolina Early Childhood Coalition
• Dr. Amieris Lavender, chief program officer of YWCA-Asheville and Western NC

Doug Howgate also joined the panel to provide additional perspective from one of the states EdNC identified as leading the way on early childhood policy and investment. 

You can view Howgate’s slides and mine here.

Advocacy from the business community

In a discussion about how advocacy from the business community can help expand access to high-quality early childhood care and education, Ereka Williams pointed to the work of not only the Dogwood Health Trust, but also Invest Early NC and the NC Chamber’s Child Care Coalition. 

With Invest Early NC, Williams said, “We worked with the Department of Commerce and the Department of Health and Human Services, and we created a three-year grant to put into place our state’s first child care liaison.” 

Samantha Cole was hired for that role in early 2024, and is based in the Department of Commerce.

“We always come in number one, number two in the country for business, but we won’t retain those rankings if child care is not improved in our state,” Williams said. 

Amieris Lavender highlighted the importance of businesses having “family friendly” policies, such as paid parental and sick leave, and flexible work hours.

“During the pandemic, we had families coming in and compromising the health of the entire center because their employer had policies that didn’t allow them to miss more than two days, or didn’t allow them to be late, or was following the keystrokes on their computers such that they couldn’t come and pick up their [sick] child,” Lavender said. 

Howgate shared that MTF wrote a report based on methodology from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and several local Chambers titled “The Untold Cost of Inadequate Child Care.” This research was based solely on people who were employed and looked at the costs of lost wages due to non-family friendly policies, the cost to employers due to high turnover and lost productivity, and the cost to the state in lost tax revenue. The total economic impact was a loss of $2.7 billion annually. 

“And we’re not even considering folks who aren’t in the game, who aren’t working because of insufficient child care,” Howgate noted. 

He said MTF’s goal was to give employers, public officials, advocates, and grassroots organizers a “standard language about the economic impact” of inadequate early childhood care and education.

Grassroots organizing

On the role of grassroots organizing as a strategy in our state, Greg Borom said research can be an important tool but isn’t enough to change policy. 

“We’re really working on building relationships with legislators, building a network of all the [people] in this space — teachers, parents, providers, advocates — to come together in Western North Carolina to really raise a loud voice and organize that voice for passing meaningful policy change,” Borom said. 

As an example, Lavender spoke about her role as facilitator for the education operations group of the Asheville-Buncombe Community Reparations Commission since 2022. 

“We have this systemic analysis and policy making that absolutely have to happen because of systemic divestment,” Lavender said. “You have the opportunity to do better, and people are actively deciding not to.”

Lavender pointed to declining literacy rates among Black students in her community as one effect of systemic divestment in early childhood education.

Ninety percent of Black students in Asheville City Schools are not grade level proficient. I’m going to say that again: 90% of Black students in this region are not grade level proficient. That is a failing of everything. Of everything. So while there’s certain policy levers that have to take place, and I have energy for that all day, on the community-based level, like what are we going to do now?… Because it’s not coming from other places. So it has to come from us.

Streamlining governance

When it came to streamlining governance across our early childhood care and education systems, Williams shared her experience working for one of North Carolina’s Smart Start partnerships when the program was new.

At that particular point in the ’90s, our governor and the legislature made a choice to invest, and for the first time in our nation — because, if I’m not mistaken, SmartStart was the first of its kind in the nation — we had a statewide initiative that sat at the intersection of state government, local partnerships, and nonprofits working in tandem and together to support providers, families, communities, etcetera, to invest in those first 2,000 days. 

Williams added, “As somebody who started with it 30-some years ago as an employee […] it’s sad to see what’s happened over time.”

She said that when she and other members of Invest Early NC read EdNC’s article about the five states leading the way, “we saw that other states took this model and ran with it; all the while we have defunded it.” 

Williams believes the Smart Start model is a strong one that can serve as the basis for North Carolina once again taking the lead on early education policy. 

Howgate shared that even though Massachusetts created a department for early education 20 years ago, it didn’t mean that the silos that characterized early childhood policymaking disappeared. 

He saw the federal stabilization grants as an opportunity to “start fresh” and “shine a light on the idea that the existing childcare financial assistance system is a dinosaur.” 

Howgate said this isn’t because anyone has done anything wrong or had bad intentions, but because “like any state or local or public endeavor, you’ve got people who are worried about administering the program today, and can’t devote all their time to system redesign and how to do all those things.”

Identifying new funding streams

Wrapping up with a discussion of identifying new funding streams, I invited Greg Borom to share some of his research with the GRA members. 

He told us that because child care subsidy reimbursement rates in North Carolina are calculated by county, program type, and star-rating level, “North Carolina apparently has over 2,000 different reimbursement rates, a crazy grid that will make your eyes blur.”

Borom and his team, alongside the NC Budget & Tax Center, calculated the reimbursement gaps between counties. 

“For really a lot of counties, mainly rural counties, across North Carolina, it was actually widening,” Borom said. “This gap between the higher reimbursement rates and the lower ones was just getting wider, making it harder and harder to cover.”

They also showed that the way the reimbursement rates were calculated didn’t capture the true cost of providing early childhood care and education, but simply measured what parents could afford to pay in a given area.

“We really wanted to push the state of North Carolina to start moving towards thinking about: How do we reimburse for cost?” Borom said. 

Borom said he’s excited that DCDEE has now taken the first steps toward this goal. 

Lavender reminded researchers that funding is not the only challenge of policy initiatives such as child care subsidies — some regulations can undermine the intended outcomes of new investment.

 “You can’t get a child care voucher without a job, and you can’t get to your job without child care,” Lavender said, as one example.

“We are going to have to reimagine the system,” Lavender said. “And reimagine it by not making something that’s already hard, harder.”

Big thanks from EdNC to Doug Howgate, Ereka Williams, Greg Borom, and Amieris Lavender for sharing their time, energy, and insights with our GRA guests from across the nation.