Governing American Early Care and Education: Shifting From Government to Governance and From Form to Function

Early care and education has a foot in both the social service and education worlds, but the question of government responsibility in ECE is still fuzzy.

The question of whether government had a responsibility for children's well-being has always beein prevalent. Early on, the government's role remained marginal in the private sector of early childhood education.

In the 1960s, federal government (and some state) stepped in to provide programs for economically disadvantaged children.

In the 1990s, the National Education Goals Panel made its first goal for the nation to prepare its young children for school.

Since the 1990s, states have expanded their policies and programs that serve young children, in addition to the federal investment and involvement. Many states now have state-funded preschools, home visiting, family support, child nutrition, and other programs (in 2006, 38 states had state-funded preschools)

Governments have established quality standards for both the programs and the teachers, eligibility requirements, and expectations for what children will experience and learn as a result of initiatives.

The amount of programs that exists has led to confusion among parents and policy makers. This confusion exists because parents have trouble accessing and understanding the differences among program offerings and plicy makers are not sure of the comparative quality of their programs and the comparative value of their investments.

This confusion emerged because there was no single agency of government, no single committee of Congress or state legislatures, and no single state board around which people and policies could come together.

The amount of early care and education programs that exist also leads to inefficiency. This results from different institutions, authorities, and programs acting independently while providing, and many times duplicating, tasks and services for families and children.

Today's relevant question surrounding governance is: How can the multitude of federal, state, local, and nongovernmental ECE programs be governed together?

Governance has broadly been defined as the means by which actors use purposeful efforts to guide, steer, control, or manage sectors or facets of society.

It has been defined as the process where a collective group makes important decisions, determines who is involved in decision-making processes, and establishes how it will account for its efforts.

In the public, it has been defined as the process by which nations allocate responsibility for decision making.

Governance is different from government in that government stresses hierarchial decision-making structures and the centrality of public actors, while governance denotes the participation of public and private actors as well as non-hierarchial forms of decision making.

Contemporary governance theories stress several fundamental principles:
1. Decision making is more often that not done collaboratively; top-down approaches of the past have given way to shared or even bottom-up policy making.
2. Legitimacy is derived from the democratic process and the rule of law, not the forct of a dominant individual.
3. The autonomy of individual entities is preotected as collaborative policies are developed.

Some states have created entities that have mixed governance authorities and accountabilities. It's important to align the accountability with the authorities. For example, if fiscal authority is granted it should be accompanied by fiscal accountability.

Governance entities cannot be dependent on a small number of visionary and dedicated individuals. During the initial stages of new governance structures, their creation and dissolution must have stakeholder input, bipartisan agreement, and official action by a political institution.

Governance entities need and deserve funding. This funding should be regarded as an investment that yields more effective, efficient, and equitable utilization of money.

Governance is not an easy topic to talk about. It is both important and a challenge to build public support that accepts governance entitities as necessary for the ECE system.

If the United States values young children the way it professes, we must ensure that the programs that serve those children are of high quality, are efficiently managed and monitored, and are easily accessible to all.

Authory empowers entities to implement policy change. It allows them to develop and enforce regulations; budget, allocate, and manage fiscal resources; and collect, interpret, and release data

Governance includes accountability to someone or some entity and accountability for something.

There are four types of accountabilty in the governance system:
1. Fiscal accountability
2. Program accountability
3. Workforce accountability
4. Child/Student accountability

Initially, the field of early care and education took a very narrow approach to governance, focusing only on the governance of individual programs (Phase I)

The field later recognized a need for cooperation and collaboration across programs and funding streams, leading to the establishment of loosely configured entities (Phase II)

As demands for equity and efficiency have grown, the field has begun to explore broad new governance model structures (Phase III)

Prior to the 1960s, governance was limited to program and sometimes fiscal oversight by boards of nonprofit programs or the religious or community based programs that housed them.

Public funded child care had its own regulations that were handled through state regulators, who were many times legally compelled to monitor programs.

In Phase I, other ECE programs emerged, each with its own approach to governance.

With each programs adhering to its own standards, no early childhood "whole" could emerge. Programs competed with each other for resources, personnel, and even children.

Phase II began in the 1980s and aimed to bring sponsors and providers from different programs together to achieve common goals.

These collaboartive efforts took on many forms:
1. within-government cabinets
2. within-government management teams
3. state-level collaborations
4. managing partnerships
5. state-local partnerships

These five approaches characterized governance in the 1980s and 1990s. However, these efforts are not really governance. They lack the durability, authority, and accountability associated with true governance.

States have been motivated by the need to increase equity, efficiency, and accountability and have begun to examine the nature of governance, while developing new ideas.

Governance has been suggested to have three dimesnsions: administrative integration, decentralization, and privatization.

Administrative integration has been broken into three parts: stand-alone administrative integration, blended administrative integration, and subsumed administrative integration.
-Stand-alone administrative integration is when one lead agency is given authority for ECE
-Blended administrative integration is when a new entity that has authority to link existing agencie oversees ECE
-Subsumed administrative integration is when a subunit (a division or department) of a single agency is given authority for ECE

Decentralization involves states empowering local communities to initiate and implement efforts that integrate care and education. These efforts reflect the theories of federalism that argue local governments are best equipped to design programs that meet the needs of local residents.

Privatization involves the state transferring provision, financial, and/or regulatory responsibility to actors outside the public sector, including nonprofit and for-profit organizations. This occurs in partnership, rather then competition, with the state.

There are many questions to be considered when discussing governance.
-How does a state know which, if any, of these governance approaches to use?
-What issues must states consider as they craft new approaches to governance?
-What guidance can be rendered to ease the development of new and effective governance structures?

The form of the governance structure should be in line with the functions a state hopes to institute and/or strengthen by creating a new governing entity.