This week in Washington, President Obama shared his vision for strengthening early learning throughout America.  In the President’s State of the Union address and also in a visit to a preschool program in Decatur, Georgia, the President talked about the importance of early learning settings and the reality that there is a direct relationship between early learning settings and school readiness, school performance, and increasing high school graduation rates.  Ultimately, this leads to stronger families, better paying jobs, and stronger communities.

Last week, for the fifth year, Rep. Jill Schupp (D-Creve Coeur) in Missouri introduced a bill to save children’s lives. The bill is called “Nathan’s Law,” after a 3-month-old infant in Missouri who died in a child care program.

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.”