The Faces of ECE series is designed to raise awareness of the many early care and education professionals who are supporting one of the most important fields in America today. From the people on the front lines working with children to those working behind the scenes to prop the system up from within, everybody has a role to play and a story to tell. Child Care Matters is committed to sharing those stories.

I try to seize any opportunity I can in this space to see, hear, and absorb things from an insider’s perspective. The real gems come from closed-door conversations between state administrators, the off-handed insights from career advocates, and the sidebar text and email threads that provide a glimpse into how and why the sausage does (or doesn’t) get made. Those teaching moments happening two or three layers beneath the public discourse provide the clearest window into what’s really going on. 

When a colleague recommended Elliot Regenstein’s new book, Readiness: Preparing State Early Childhood Systems for a Brighter Future, I knew I had to have it. The anticipation proved to be well-founded; what I found between the covers was a gold mine of inside baseball about this very complex topic that has such far-reaching implications for our society as a whole. I frankly want to carry this book around with me and give it to everyone who may just be entering the field, or is looking to grow within it.

Long before I finished Readiness, I knew I wanted to interview Elliot for this series, but I assumed he wouldn’t have time amidst his dozens of speaking engagements in the wake of the book’s release. I was pleasantly surprised when he responded almost immediately with an enthusiastic “Yes.” 

I didn’t know about Elliot’s background in radio prior to this interview, but it only took a couple minutes of conversation for me to realize I was talking to a pro’s pro. He’s engaging, he’s funny, and he’s as real as they come. If you ever get a chance to hear Elliot speak in person, I can’t provide a strong enough endorsement. Enjoy!

Introduction and Background

John Jennings: Hello and welcome to this episode of Faces of ECE, Elliot! Can you start by giving us some background on who you are, what you do, and your experience in the early care and education (ECE) space?

Elliot Regenstein: Thank you so much for having me here. I am Elliot Regenstein. I'm a partner at Foresight Law and Policy, which is a law firm that specializes in education policy. The vast majority of my work is in early education and the systems around it. I've been working in the field for a little over 20 years. I find that in early education policy, most people either came to it through early education or through policy. And in my case, it was the latter. I got hired into the Illinois governor's office as part of an education initiative and ended up taking on the early ed portfolio. That turned out to be my great passion, and I've been doing it ever since. 

John: Today, we’re largely going to be talking about your new book, Readiness: Preparing State Early Childhood Systems for a Brighter Future. Before we get to what’s in the book, can you provide a little context around why the topic appealed to you and how it came about? 

Public Positioning and Funding Dynamics

John: Early on in the book, you make some comparisons between early childhood and K-12 systems. I especially liked your synopsis of the widely held belief that “education” and “care” are distinct concepts, with the former being largely viewed as a public good and the latter often seen as a private one, despite the distinction having “no basis in research or experience.” How do you think we got here, and what will it take to shift the narrative?  

John: You highlighted a few examples of states “building downward,” with early childhood investments starting with four-year-olds and working their way down from there. We’ve recently seen multiple states refer to kindergarten readiness as the ultimate goal of their early care and education systems. Does that feel right to you? Do you think there’s a need to reframe that talking point, or should advocates be leaning into it because it’s such a popular objective?

Elliot: It’s an interesting question, and I’ve heard people argue it both ways. This may be coming from the fact that I joined the field as a policy person, not as an early childhood person, but it’s never bothered me—and, in fact, I’ve seen it be very valuable—in part because the advocacy campaign and the actual practices can mean two different things. If kindergarten readiness is the framing that is politically useful to get more resources and leadership for the field, then I am all for it. If there are states where that framing would be counterproductive, then I’m all for using something completely different.

The messaging campaign of kindergarten readiness has been successful in many places. The question then is, what are the practices being attached to that? And if those practices are providing resources to families in developmentally appropriate ways, providing high-quality experiences for children that take into account the needs for both care and education, then I support it. If it’s an excuse to impose K-12 practices that are not developmentally appropriate, then I think it’s a bad idea.

I think it’s important to think in terms of both messaging and policy, and that those things are clearly related, but they can be handled separately. As long as they’re leading to good policy, I’m in favor of whatever messaging is gonna get people to buy into the issue.  
 

John: On the topic of child care subsidies, you mention the looming threat of a “death spiral,” in which administrative burden and lack of support for families leads to lower enrollment numbers, which subsequently leads to reduced funding for the program. In your experience, what are some of the steps state lead agencies can take to avoid that outcome? 

Elliot: I do think this ties to some of the broader themes in the book about leadership in the field. When you run into trouble with a program, and there’s some bureaucratic obstacle that gets in the way, it becomes a leadership problem. One of the things that the field has really grown in over the last couple of decades is the number of agency head-level or near-agency head-level who are involved in early childhood. 

When I got started in 2004, there were a couple of states that had early childhood agencies that were pretty brand new. Now, we’ve got a bunch of others that have come online more recently, –and even in states that don’t have their own agency, they have high-level units within agencies. When systemic problems occur in early education and care, having these new roles at least increases the odds that the people in charge of solving the problem are going to be able to do so. 

Many child care administrators in different states are very skilled people, but in general they were hired for their skill in administering a program. In many cases, they haven’t been able to work with legislators, let alone develop a legislative agenda and move it. There are times when a crisis in the child care program that requires a legislative solution is entirely at the mercy of some other larger Health and Human Services agency where they have five other fires that seem like a bigger deal. Having empowered leaders who really understand early childhood and can recognize the bureaucratic obstacles and are in a position to actually solve them is something that we haven’t always had in the field. Having that kind of capacity reduces the number of times that we will run into this problem. 

Now, I think there is a greater awareness that if you are starting to see enrollment decline, people understand that it is probably because of some sort of bureaucratic problem or outreach failure, not because there aren’t a lot of families that actually need it. 

John: When talking about state Pre-K, you raise awareness of the negative impact public Pre-K can have on child care, where the exodus of three- and four-year olds in some states has left providers holding the bag on far more expensive—often prohibitively so— infant and toddler care, resulting in widespread closures. Is that just a necessary evil, or have states found ways to successfully mitigate that tension? 

John: Let’s talk about the workforce. In the book, you say, “At this time, no state can claim an early childhood workforce that is adequately supported to meet the needs of children and families.” In just the past few years, we’ve seen the end of Covid-era stabilization measures, child care supply remains a critical challenge throughout the country, and even the popular and successful D.C. Pay Equity Fund is fighting for its life. What is it going to take to garner the necessary support for a sustained increase in government funding for our “workforce behind the workforce”? 

Elliot: I wish I had really good, easy answers to this, because it’s a tough, tough thing. I do think that public advocacy is making a difference, but we haven’t gotten there yet. There’s a huge problem in government of getting past initial expectations. When you think about child care, some histories trace the roots back to slavery, when slave-owning families got their child care for free. In more recent times, you see the expectations in the post-war economy that when the men came home from war they were gonna go get a job that paid for their family, and their wife was gonna stay home with the kids, and that’s just not the reality anymore.

There is this built-in expectation of someone—usually the mom—staying home with the children and taking care of them for free. Look, I’m in favor of paid family leave; if the government or employers are willing to pay a parent to stay home, that’s terrific. That’s unlikely to happen at the scale it would need to, and even then there are a lot of households where both parents want to be in the workforce and just need somewhere to make sure their kid is having a great experience. It is really challenging to get people’s heads around that. I do think that is something that each generation is going to get better at.

We don’t have time to wait for today’s 20-somethings to be in charge. But, there have been some positive changes, and as leadership structures continue to grow, and as advocacy continues to increase, we’ve just got to keep chipping away at it, knowing that we’re fighting a lot of really difficult history. 
 

Governance and Data

John: As someone who has spent over a decade navigating government procurement, your overview of the contracting barriers that get in the way of systems modernization really resonated with me. I especially appreciated your callout of scenarios in which “competitive bidding” ends up favoring whichever vendor has the best relationship with the right decision maker, rather than the vendor that might actually be the best fit. Combine that with the horror stories of projects gone wrong, and it’s easy to understand how one bad decision can result in state infrastructure falling years behind where it should be, to say nothing of wasted taxpayer dollars. How are states solving for these longstanding issues?

Elliot: This is a section of the book that really hit close to home for a lot of people. I’m based in Illinois and the history of public corruption in Illinois is deep and wide, so there have been a number of really important reforms to procurement systems. Those reforms are solving a real problem, except that they’re then creating a different set of problems where just getting a contract out the door can be almost impossible. When the state gets one-year grants, it’s lucky to have contracts in place by six-seven months into the grant period.

This is a problem that goes well beyond the early childhood community. We’re just one of the many functions of state government that struggles to do procurement well given a larger framework of laws that is set up to prevent bad behavior, but isn’t actually set up to get high-quality contracts out the door.

Within the confines of state government, I have seen some practices that I was enthusiastic about. There was one state that did a two-phase RFP, where the first phase was looking just at your substantive proposal and not your budget, and asking “are you capable of doing the work?” and scoring you accordingly. That was followed by a second phase, where if you met the minimum threshold for ability to do the work, now we’re going to look at budget and judge you on price. Sometimes what ends up happening is when RFPs over-weight the budget, you end up with the lowest bidder who is cheap, but can’t actually do the work.

States also are of varying skills at pricing the amount of work they want. I’ve seen numerous RFPs where they’re asking for what amounts to several hundred thousand dollars worth of work for 50 thousand dollars, and others where they’re spending millions of dollars when they’d actually be better off doing a 200 thousand dollar contract and figuring out what else to spend their millions on. One of the things some states do is essentially outsource it and create some sort of public-private partnership where state-related contracts are placed so someone other than state government is managing the procurement and they can just have grants funnel through intermediaries who have the ability to contract more effectively. That doesn’t solve the problem of preferred vendors, and in some ways makes it worse, but it does mean that the work actually gets done to some degree.

I don’t have any easy solutions, and the book just raises the questions, but I do think higher leadership can at least raise that conversation and say “here are some things we are struggling with, is there a way to balance competing values of protecting against corruption and actually getting the work done?” That’s a hard conversation to have, but it’s a conversation that’s absolutely essential. 
 

John: We’ve witnessed the ongoing trend of states consolidating early childhood programs under one agency, most recently in Illinois and Kansas. You talk about many of the perceived benefits of unified governance, but it seems that the most impactful aspect of that approach is getting a strong leader who can represent the interests of the early care and education space in a cabinet-level position. How much of a difference does that direct line to the governor make, in your experience? 

John: One of the points that stood out to me in the back half of the book was your identification of the disadvantages faced by states that have opted to build data systems in-house rather than contracting with vendors to implement cloud-based solutions. Why do you think there is still such a bias in some states toward rebuilding the wheel rather than buying something that has already been proven to work elsewhere?

Elliot: There’s been some survey data showing that the states that have bought technology are often ahead of the states that are doing it themselves. That’s not a blanket endorsement—there have certainly been times when states have bought the wrong thing, or bought the right thing and vendors just didn’t execute—but one of the things that has happened is states have in some instances sought to build their capacity in-house to develop and maintain bespoke systems.

None of this is a knock on the people who are actually doing the work, who are almost always doing the best with the situation they’ve been given, but there are a couple of problems with that setup. One is that state governments are never going to be resourced at a level where their tech people can keep up with the for-profit entities that are developing cutting-edge new tech every day. Undoubtedly, somewhere while we’ve been doing this interview, someone has come up with a new breakthrough that all of us will be feeling in the next months.

Another problem is that when state government staff are trained in the ways of state government technology, there’s no market for it outside of that agency or department. So whoever’s in charge knows that if the state upgrades its technology, that might be more effective for the state as a whole and for its constituents – but for the staff in that department, it might mean the end of not only this job, but their careers as they know them, unless they get major retraining, which is not always readily available.

I have definitely heard stories of states saying that the only reason they updated their tech was that the person who originally built the system in the ‘80s or ‘90s was finally retiring. Those are hard choices. If you’re in charge of an IT unit and you know that upgrading tech is going to cost your team their jobs, that’s a lot for someone to take on. I am deeply sympathetic to that problem, but in the end the right answer is to implement the technology that works best for your constituency, and—in the vast majority of instances—smart contracting is going to get you pretty far ahead of building your own systems. 
 

The Road Ahead

John: You mention in the book that we still don’t really have a clear model of what early childhood investment, governance, and infrastructure should look like. Based on everything you’ve seen and all the research you’ve done, what are the common threads among those who are doing early childhood well? Are there any repeatable, concrete steps state leaders can take to move their systems in the right direction? 

Closing/Additional Resources

John: How can your readers find and purchase Readiness for themselves?

Elliot: The book was published by Harvard Education Press and it is on their website, along with links to various other large booksellers. Also, my law firm’s website has a landing page that includes both links to purchase the book and a summary of some of the events and interviews I’ve been doing related to it.  

John: And how can people connect with you and stay up to date on your latest projects? 

Elliot: The great news is that as a book author, I am not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling or one of the celebrities who require multiple levels to get to. I answer my email within 24 hours, so my email at my law firm, elliot.regenstein@flpadvisors.com is always a great way to get in touch with me. I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, and I love hearing from folks. 

I’m the type of person who, when I read something I like, I just email the author and say “Hey, I thought this was great.” I haven’t gotten a flood of those emails, but I always welcome them and if folks have comments, whether they liked the book or not, I want to hear from them. There’s a lot I still don’t know, and I appreciate learning from others. Obviously, if there are projects where I can be helpful, I would love to hear from them particularly about that.