By Beth Hawkins | Published Tue, Jun 21, 2011 9:34 am
Sometime later this year, a successful nonprofit with a star-studded board will quietly put itself out of business.
The business, philanthropic and civic leaders behind the effort will thank its three staffers and dozens of donors who gave generously.
Its unprecedented work will find a permanent home at the University of Minnesota, where scholars and policymakers can draw on it for years to come.
And with the exception of one glaring detail, it will all be exactly what the people who conceived the Minnesota Early Learning Foundation (MELF) envisioned.
Bits of MELF’s story have made their way into this space over the last few months, but always as tangents to stories about its cause — defining and nurturing quality in early childhood education — and about that glaring detail: the Legislature’s failure to pass a revenue-neutral initiative that would steer the most fragile families to the best programs.
As the group begins the process of “sunsetting,” it’s time to tell MELF’s life story, and to catalog the body of work it will leave behind.
t began with day care
The story starts about a decade ago, back when we talked not about early ed but about day care, popularly envisioned as something that allowed parents to work. In part because we were doing away with welfare, Minnesota subsidized the cost for low-income families.
Having overseen changes to the state’s tax system as House majority leader, Tim Pawlenty began his governorship by shearing low-income kids off of Minnesota’s child-care subsidy program, among other things.
When the early-ed folks protested, he talked of accountability. How do we know we’re not just throwing good money after bad? A political dodge, to be sure, but also a good question.
And one that economists Art Rolnick and Rob Grunewald, then at the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis, had begun to answer. Looking at things like a child’s lifetime earning potential, the costs to taxpayers if that future was dim, and the value of the industry, the two concluded that early education’s return on investment was a hefty $16 for every $1 invested.
That 16-to-1 “ROI” got a lot of people’s attention — particularly among those who were frustrated with the diminishing quality of the state’s workforce. Gradually, executives with a number of Minnesota’s blue-chip employers joined truck with the early-ed people and — yes — Republicans and began considering Pawlenty’s question in earnest.
The birth of MELF
Five years ago, the discussions gave birth to MELF, which has been guided from the start by former GOP Senate Minority Leader Duane Benson. The mission: nothing less than defining precisely what high quality in early childhood education looks like at the classroom level, figuring out which strategies position a child to succeed in school and how to guide the most fragile families to the best programs — in a free market.
MELF raised $20 million, which it spent to design and evaluate a two-pronged approach tested in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Wayzata and Nicollet and Blue Earth Counties: Rate programs that volunteer to participate for quality and provide scholarships to low-income families who use the best.
Then it hired outside evaluators, who declared the pilot program a success. Kids in top programs made big strides — most notably poor kids; given the means to enroll their kids to good programs and help distinguishing the best, parents were thrilled; and lower-rated providers noticed, and started chasing better ratings. Making grants available increased the number of programs willing to invest in quality.
“For parents, ratings serve as a sort of Consumer Reports-type resource to inform their child care shopping,” MELF’s literature explained. ”For providers, the rating system serves as a clear quality improvement blueprint. For taxpayers, ratings could serve as a warrantee to ensure tax dollars don’t flow providers who may not be using school readiness best practices.”
A bonus: Four years into MELF’s planned five-year life, its pilot programs readied some 22,000 kids for school. Family-based day cares moved up an average of a whole star on the Parent Aware rating system’s four-star scale during the trial; center-based programs gained half a star on average.
'An infrastructure'
“Unlike most advocates, we’re not selling a particular program. We’re interested in an approach that we feel works,” explained Policy Director Laurie Davis. “What we’re talking about here is really more of an infrastructure.”
If all of this sounds ridiculously commonsensical and simple, know that MELF had to evaluate everything from how teachers are best taught to which tactics would actually make a measureable difference come kindergarten.
When Benson & Co. lock up for good, the data gleaned at every step of the way will live on at the University of Minnesota, whose Center for Early Education and Development (CEED) was one of MELF’s research partners, along with Child Trends, SRI International and Wilder Research.
The next time someone protests that we know nothing about outcomes and accountability in early ed, advocates can lock them in a vault with the reams of data and refuse to let them out until they concede that the ROI, in dollars and in human potential, has been well established.
Beth Hawkins writes about education — from preschool through college and beyond — in Learning Curve. Hawkins has covered a variety of subjects for MinnPost since its launch in 2007, but has a particular passion for reporting on education. In addition to her conviction that education is one of today's most pressing issues on a policy level, she's motivated by her experience advocating for her two sons in great schools and not-so-great ones. Hawkins is the recipient of numerous national and regional awards, including several first-place Society of Professional Journalists Page One awards for investigative reporting and feature writing. Her work has appeared in More, Mother Jones, Minnesota Monthly and many other publications. She can be reached at bhawkins@minnpost.com.
2011 MinnPost.com