Inside Hillary Clinton’s Latest Push to Improve Early Childhood Education: Home Visits

As presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders continue to suck up oxygen with promises for revolution, strategies to promote high-quality K-12 schools have received little attention on the campaign trail. (Do we sound like a broken record yet?)

But during a campaign stop in Kentucky on Tuesday, leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton announced a big plan to help America’s youngest learners — continuing her commitment to early childhood education and to making sure the neediest children don’t start school far behind their more-advantaged peers.

Ahead of Kentucky’s May 17 Democratic primary, Clinton announced a plan to double down on a home visitation program for low-income families, the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Initiative. Under the widely praised program, interested pregnant women and new parents receive regular, planned home visits from nurses and social workers with a goal to improve maternal and child health, prevent child abuse, encourage positive parenting practices, and better prepare at-risk children for school.

Clinton said she hopes to extend the program to more than 2 million parents and children in the next decade.

Implemented in 2010 through a provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the federal home visiting program has bipartisan support and is backed by decades of research showing home visits improve child and family outcomes. It was the first national push to expand home visiting, with the federal government investing $1.5 billion in the program’s first five years.

A report by Mathematica Policy Research, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, showed home visits can reduce the need for remedial education and increase family self-sufficiency.

This is Clinton’s latest effort to tie her education policy positions to those of President Obama. In February, as she worked to harness votes from the African-American community, Clinton proposed a plan to dismantle the “school-to-prison pipeline,” empower black entrepreneurs, and create jobs for black youth — all positions that mirror the sitting president.

Although Clinton has largely been quiet about her plans for America’s K-12 education system, she’s long been an advocate for early childhood education — including promoting universal preschool. During her visit Tuesday to a Kentucky social services center that provides subsidized child care, Clinton went deeper by proposing a pay raise for child-care workers, and tax credits and other subsidies that would free families from having to pay more than 10 percent of their income on child care.

During her time as the first lady of Arkansas, she also championed the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), a similar home visiting program that has been shown to boost test scores, attendance, and academic self-esteem in young children, and increase parental involvement in education.

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Hillary Clinton Champions In Early Childhood Education

An Education Week headline reads: "Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton Makes Early-Childhood Education Campaign Centerpiece"

Okay, fine, we don't really have a crystal ball here at Politics K-12. And it's an open question whether the former first-lady-turned-senator-turned-secretary-of-state is even running for president. (Plus, you know, we've still got three years of the Obama administration left.) But it's hard to deny that since leaving the Obama administration, Clinton has turned back to a longheld interest of hers: early-childhood education.

The latest effort? Back in June, the Clinton Foundation (a.k.a. the "Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation") announced it was collaborating with Next Generation, a nonpartisan strategic policy and communications organization, to launch "Too Small to Fail," a new initiative to improve the health and well-being of children ages zero to five. Too Small to Fail is  headed up by Ann O'Leary, a former Clinton White House aide and Clinton legislative director—and the wife of Goodwin Liu, a judge who has some pretty interesting education policy ties of his own.

Hillary Clinton recently wrote an op-ed for Too Small to Fail's website. The letter goes over well-trodden territory, explaining that kids from disadvantaged families begin school already behind their more advantaged peers:

We know that children build their vocabulary by listening to and interacting with their parents and caregivers. But millions of American parents, especially those struggling to make ends meet or without strong support networks, end up talking and reading to their babies much less frequently than in more affluent families. Many parents just don't have time, between multiple jobs and significant economic pressures, or don't realize how important this really is.

Studies have found that by age four, children in middle and upper class families hear 15 million more words than children in working-class families, and 30 million more words than children in families on welfare. This disparity in hearing words from parents and caregivers translates directly into a disparity in learning words. And that puts our children born with the fewest advantages even further behind. Among those born in 2001, only 48 percent of poor children started school ready to learn, compared to 75 percent of children from middle-income families.

The letter doesn't lay out any earth-shattering policy initiatives—instead it focuses on more-targeted, practical solutions. Too Small to Fail will start a public outreach campaign to help parents become more aware of what Clinton calls "the word gap" and push businesses to allow parents to work more flexible schedules.  She doesn't explicitly endorse President Barack Obama's early-childhood expansion plan. Nice analysis of the letter from the Huffington Post's Joy Resmovits.

Early-childhood education isn't a new area of interest for Clinton. Early in her career, she worked at the Children's Defense Fund, which advocates for early-childhood education (among other policies). During her 2008 bid for the White House, Clinton's education platform also put an emphasis on the littlest learners. (She spoke about it when she addressed the National Education Association way back in July of 2007, for instance.)

So what's happening on Obama's early-childhood education plan? Of course, Obama has his own multi-year, multi-billion proposal to expand prekindergarten, as well as programs for younger children (such as expanded home-visiting). But that seems unlikely to go anywhere in a Congress bent on trimming spending.

Still, the plan continues to have its champions: Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate education committee, announced at the Committee for Education Funding's annual gala that expanding preschool is his top priority during his final term in Congress, and that he'll be introducing a bill based on the president's proposal soon. Just a few weeks ago, Harkin told me he was still looking for a GOP lawmaker to co-sponsor the legislation—which could be tough sledding if it truly is similar to the president's plan.

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