We’re building a nationwide movement, a campaign to expand access to affordable, quality child care. Every week, nearly 11 million children are in some type of child care setting – on average for about 35 hours. Our studies show that the quality of child care varies greatly, not just between states but also within states—among different types of child care settings. Children should be safe while their parents work. Child care should offer an environment that promotes the healthy development of children. Policymakers at the state and federal levels call for all children to start school ready to learn. They call for reducing the achievement gap among low income and other children as well as between children of different races. They call for strategies to better meet the challenges faced by children with special needs. Most also call for increasing the high school graduation rate.

Child Care Aware®of America’s quality child care campaign kicks off another year today on the journey for affordable, safe, quality child care for all children. How are we doing? What markers have we achieved to date?

Child Care Aware® of America is partnering with Parents magazine to urge Congress to focus on the child care crisis. Click here to see the article in the December issue of Parents. The federal law that allocates funds to states for child care is the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG). It has very few rules to ensure that children are safe in child care and that the settings that children are in promote their healthy development. The law has not been updated since 1996.

Last week in Washington, D.C., David Gray and Lisa Guernsey from the New America Foundation’s Workforce and Family Program and Early Education Initiative, led a panel discussion entitled, “Speaking Up: What the Presidential Candidates Should be Saying about Child Care and Early Learning.”

How important is it that child care providers have a background check? On August 1, the Washington State Auditor's Office released a report, "Protecting Children from Sex Offenders in Child Care, Foster Care, and Schools." They conducted an audit within the state to determine if matching the state's sex offender registry to information on child care and foster care providers and school employees would reveal results similar to Inspector General reports in other states like Illinois and Kentucky.

Background checks for child care providers are essential to ensure that individuals who have a history of violent offenses are not licensed to provide child care or hired to work in a child care center.