Child-Care Centers at Risk

I took a good deal o’ pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was wery young, and shift for hisself. It’s the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.

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The speaker above, the elder Mr. Weller in Charles Dickens’ 1837 novel “The Pickwick Papers,” was a true hard-knocks educator. These days, society tries to do better by the “wery young.”

In the 1990s, California legislators created hundreds of early-childhood development centers supervised by the state Department of Education and serving more than 700,000 children. They were aimed at helping welfare recipients who were required by the 1996 federal welfare reform to start working. The centers offered much more than TV cartoon shows and helped children from low-income families get ready to go to school.

Today, Mr. Weller’s ghost is skulking again in the background.

Gov. Gray Davis proposes to slash state funding for these same child-care and child development programs by nearly half, from $2.4 billion in the current budget year to $1.3 billion in 2004. That could threaten child-care slots for a quarter of a million children in Los Angeles County alone.

Davis says he would compensate for the cuts with his proposals to increase sales, cigarette and income taxes. State GOP leaders say they will never agree to tax hikes, but the image of toddlers stashed with incompetent baby-sitters -- or home alone -- should give them pause, as Davis no doubt intends.

Another danger inherent in Davis’ plan is that it would shift responsibility for the programs from the state, which has experience and standards to ensure basic quality, to counties. The state’s nonpartisan legislative analyst, however, supports the governor’s transfer proposal and suggests that the preschools be overseen by California’s Proposition 10 commissions, established after voters in 1998 approved a tax on cigarettes to fund early-childhood development programs.

The Proposition 10 commissions have not exactly been a house afire. Many are still in the planning stages. Los Angeles’ commission has funded an effective home-visitation program for new mothers, but it has also issued a “kit for new parents” with “celebrity-hosted videos on the early years.”

Even so, the commissions are likely to do better than county welfare departments because of their expertise in early-childhood development.

State leaders can increase the chance of success by requiring that county programs meet the state’s teacher credential requirements and student-teacher ratios.

Last week, just days after the governor proposed his latest program cuts, the Assembly Education Committee voted 8 to 0 to create a universal preschool system in the state. Not until 2014, of course, by which time everyone in the Legislature now will be termed out and not responsible for the cost. The Legislature would make better use of its time by scrambling to preserve the state’s existing preschool quality and availability.