New data, no new funding: What Arkansas LEARNS means for early childhood education

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New data, no new funding: What Arkansas LEARNS means for early childhood education

Arkansas is home to an estimated 180,000 children under the age of 5. About two-thirds of them, or 120,000, are considered “economically disadvantaged” and qualify for publicly funded child care or education. Of those eligible children, fewer than 40,000 — about one in three — are actually participating in early childhood programs like Head Start or Arkansas Better Chance, the state’s preschool program.

That’s according to an Arkansas Department of Education report on the state’s early childhood system published after the passage of the 2023 Arkansas LEARNS Act. LEARNS aimed mainly at K-12 education, putting hundreds of millions of dollars toward school vouchers for private school and homeschool students, raising the state’s minimum teacher salaries, and more. The new law put no new direct funding toward programs for children under 5.

But LEARNS did give some attention to early childhood. It called for the creation of a “simple, unified accountability system” to rate the quality of early childhood programs, and it set up a single “Office of Early Childhood” under the education department to oversee the fragmented system. It also enlists “local lead” organizations around the state to find gaps and duplications in the child care landscape, and to identify opportunities for collaboration and the sharing of resources.

Planning ahead is especially tricky right now because federal funding for such programs is potentially on the chopping block. Head Start, a program that covers early childhood education costs for low-income families, was cut from federal budget proposals in April. By May, it was back. Early childhood education experts say they remain concerned that such funding flip-flops could put thousands of low-income children at risk for losing care, mental health screenings and reliable meals. 

Even so, Nicole Carey, education policy director with Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said she hopes a “generation of momentum” at the state level will lead to more reliable, local funding.

“I guess my hope is that if there’s less reliability, or unreliability, on the federal funding side and enough advocacy and data on the state size, then maybe all of that can be used to generate some additional state funding,” she said.

Carey said the federal Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has slowed some education- and literacy-related reimbursements, and canceled others. She said she worries especially about Project 2025, a conservative policy plan that calls for eliminating Head Start.

“I think advocates, especially national advocates, have seen that cutting Head Start is in Project 2025, and because many of the other recommendations in Project 2025 have been pushed forward, there is still that concern [for lost funding] in addition to the actions that have already been taken,” Carey said.

 Arkansas boasts more than 7,500 federally funded Head Start slots and deploys state and federal funds for other programs, including Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) and the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), to provide free or subsidized care and education before kindergarten. 

While not all families with young children are in the market for care, evidence suggests demand is there. In February a child care waitlist opened up after the state reached its funding limit for its School Readiness Assistance program. On June 20, that list had grown to 615 children.

What LEARNS says about early childhood programs

While it’s common to lump child care and early childhood education together, experts in the field emphasize they’re not always the same. Child care offers a safe place for children while their parents are working or otherwise busy, while early childhood education provides more structure and curriculum to foster cognitive, social and emotional development. The LEARNS Act calls for inventorying both options, with the goal of making them better and more accessible.

The LEARNS Act calls for a period of “pilot learning years” during which organizations chosen to act as “local leads” assess how to improve child care regionally. The process is being overseen by the Arkansas education department’s new Office of Early Childhood, which was formerly part of the Department of Human Services and known as the Division of Child Care & Early Childhood Education.

Jennifer Glasgow, chief education officer for the city of Little Rock, is one of the local leads in this endeavor. The city is being paid $150,000 annually for three years of the pilot learning experience, Glasgow said.

Since the fall of 2023, Glasgow said she has helped map 113 licensed child care providers in Little Rock, assessed the quality of services based on the state’s Better Beginnings star rating system, tracked the number of births in the city per ZIP code and trained providers on how to improve their quality ratings.

“For every child in child care, there’s four children that are not,” Glasgow said. “[That’s] understanding not everybody’s going to be in care — some people are home with mom, some home with dad. If we wanted every child to be placed in a quality center — a Better Beginnings rating of three or higher — we would be short.”

The state is launching a new assessment called CLASS, an acronym for Classroom Assessment Scoring System, to measure the quality of teacher-child interactions. The assessment is being tested out during the pilot phase and is supposed to be fully implemented in 2026-27.

“[The Office of Early Childhood] is doing this pilot to collect the baseline scores, so that they can determine how to convert a CLASS score into a Better Beginnings rating,” Glasgow said. 

Glasgow said she doesn’t know exactly how CLASS will impact providers, but the existing Better Beginnings rating determines how much funding a child care center receives per child. A lower rating means lower reimbursement. 

The CLASS scores would, in theory, help parents gauge what providers offer the best care.

According to data from the Arkansas Department of Education, 194 CLASS observations across pre-K, toddler and infant classes resulted in an average score of 5.21 out of a possible 7. Observations of toddler groups reported the lowest average score of 4.64.

“These results support the fact that while there is still work left to do to improve student learning across all ages, there are several facilities that are already providing quality learning opportunities for early learners,” education department spokesperson Kimberly Mundell said.

Wanted: Investments

The question is whether better data and assessments can transform the early childhood system without the state committing significant new funding.

Child care in Arkansas is expensive. According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, infant care averages about $8,873 annually, and only one in four families can afford it when compared to a federal standard that says a family shouldn’t spend more than 7% of its yearly income on care. The average cost comes in just shy of in-state tuition at a four-year public college.

As of October, the Arkansas Department of Education reported that almost 40,000 Arkansas children were being served with state and federal early childhood funds. Most of the children were age 4, which the Economic Policy Institute estimated costs an average of $7,670 per student per year. The count does not include families who don’t receive public funds for care.

The LEARNS Act doesn’t put new money toward early childhood education programs, but  Mundell said streamlining and moving “some functions in-house” has helped the education department save millions that are “reprioritized for early learning programs.”

Data shared by the education department shows a $3.3 million savings from the 2023-24 school year to the 2024-25 school year. Asked several times, Mundell declined to explain how the savings are being used to make investments in early childhood programs.

Paul Lazenby is head of the nonpartisan nonprofit Arkansas Early Childhood Association, which advocates for early childhood programs through workforce development and supporting policy. He said that while LEARNS does address the quality of early education, the state needs a new law to fund the child care industry.

“We certainly want the federal dollars to keep flowing, and we want the state appropriation to keep flowing to Arkansas Better Chance, [the state preschool program],” Lazenby said. “We know that can’t be everything; we have to do a better job of forging partnerships with private industry.”

Investments in the industry would attract and retain a skilled workforce, and having additional funds would mean more children could get quality child care, Lazenby said. Regardless of where the money comes from, he said, more is needed. 

“There’s no other time in a child’s life where the brain is growing faster than when they’re in the birth to 5 ages, so why wouldn’t we put the same amount of emphasis, if not more, on early childhood [than K-12]?” Lazenby said.  

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