“It’s built on having parents working—not on child development—so with the Childcare Assistance Fund, kids keep getting pulled out of centers if their parents have lost their work, or they’re changing work, or they haven’t met all the criteria,” Boyer says. She thinks it may be difficult to combine MELF scholarships with Childcare Assistance Fund money because the latter program emphasizes eligibility over quality of care.
Boyer adds that the present system of funding for at-risk children is confusing. “Instead of having all these different tax credits, I think without too much more money, we could have a universally affordable, high-quality child-care system that has a sliding fee scale for families,” Boyer says. “And they could put the MELF [scholarship] on top of that for those kids who need an extra boost to get to a higher-quality place.”
There also are concerns about the MELF program’s quality rating system. Dunkley says that’s because some educators were left with bad feelings about testing and assessing children. “The people who hate this the most are [in] the K-through-12 system, because they’ve hated their experience with No Child Left Behind,” Dunkley says. Still, he adds, “There’s no other way to justify putting more resources in an area unless you can prove that you are worth it. At some point, you’re going to have to swallow some of those challenges and accept that if you’re good at what you do, it will show in the [assessment] results for your kids.”
Indeed, Dunkley believes that the MELF early-childhood plan offers a chance for Minnesota to move ahead in education, much like it did in the 1970s.
“Why did Minnesota move way ahead of the pack? Why was it the wealthiest state in the middle of the country? They decided it was the Minnesota miracle,” he says, referring to the 1971 education-funding reform that resulted from a 10-year effort to improve the way schools were funded in Minnesota. “We at one point decided to invest in education.”
And that means an investment in the future, and the future
economy.
| K-12 General Fund Spending | FY 2006 |
| General Education | $5,867,503 |
| Education Excellence | $118,856 |
| Special Education | $677,899 |
| Facilities and Technology | $55,984 |
| Early Childhood and Family Support | $46,138 |
| Miscellaneous Programs | $106,149 |
| K-12 Education Total | $6,872,529 |
Doing the Math: The Return on At-Risk Kids In researching early-childhood development, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Vice President Art Rolnick sought to show how increased funds for at-risk kids could pay off in later life—for them and for the public. One set of data he consulted was gathered by the Highscope/Perry Preschool Study in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The ongoing project has been tracking 123 low-income African-Americans over 40 years, beginning when the subjects were three- and four-years old. For five years in the mid-1960s, teachers worked with the children closely and visited them once each week in their homes. The kids who received extra attention were more likely to graduate, had lower crime rates, and had a higher income than their peers who didn’t participate in the program. The Highscope/Perry study’s 2005 summary report shows that for every dollar invested in the program, $17 was returned on the investment. This figure was calculated as money saved because the public didn’t have to incarcerate or remediate these formerly at-risk people, and money earned because they were able to get jobs and pay taxes. Breaking down that $17 figure further in a paper he co-authored, A Proposal for Achieving High Returns on Early Childhood Development, Rolnick writes that “the benefit-cost ratio in respect to benefits that went to the general public is almost $13 to $1.” The remaining $4 went to the at-risk kids as adults, in the form of income and benefits. |
