Dive Brief:
- While Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career focusing on issues relating to child health and education, some say her fully formed ideas about what is best could hurt her early childhood efforts if elected president.
- The Hechinger Report writes Clinton added an extra year to her law school education to study child development, worked as an attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund, created a home visiting program in Arkansas and fought for the State Child Health Insurance Program as First Lady of the United States, and pushed for an Early Head Start program while also writing her first book about how the nation should invest in children.
- Even though all of Clinton’s early childhood proposals are tame compared to European models and voters across the political spectrum agree about the importance of early childhood education, she will have to work with a split Congress — and some believe her commitment to individual proposals could hamper a broader policy discussion.
Dive Insight:
According to her website, Clinton wants to make preschool universal for all four-year-olds in the country, limit child care costs to 10% of family income, pay child care workers more, double investment in Early Head Start, expand home visiting programs, offer scholarship support for child care costs and expand on-campus child care services for college students.
Boston is one of the cities offering free public preschool to four- and five-year-olds, and it is recognized as a national model. The city school district is taking responsibility for early childhood education and realizing the benefits of helping prepare students for kindergarten directly. The Learning Policy Institute also highlighted programs recently in Michigan, West Virginia, Washington and North Carolina that are doing particularly good work.