The Political Evolution of the Child Care and Development Block Grant: From Childcare to Preschool

Valerie Taing, University of California, Davis

In the US, federal childcare policy is sometimes highlighted as “work support for parents” and sometimes as “educational benefits for young kids.” While existing research examines how policy ideas shape federal lawmaking and how states implement federal programs, studies have overlooked how state-level advocacy can influence federal policy through reauthorization and appropriations processes under the indirect and devolved welfare state. Using the case of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the nation’s largest federal childcare funding source assisting low-income families, I demonstrate how the welfare reform law of 1996 created new opportunities for state-level actors to influence federal childcare policy definitions. Drawing on ethnographic research including archives, expenditure data, and interviews with Illinois bureaucrats and advocates, I show how state actors navigated shifting federal contexts by constructing new symbolic structures—bureaucratic offices, cultural categories of worth, and metrics of success—to reflect changing ideas about the purposes of childcare subsidies. During the 1990s, Illinois actors framed the CCDBG program as “work support for parents,” prioritizing voucher payments to disadvantaged families through a household care model. By the 2000s, they reconceptualized subsidies as “educational benefits for young kids,” favoring provider payments through center-based care models during the 2010s. This transformation had concrete distributional effects: CCDBG spending shifted from prioritizing family caregivers toward center-based providers, altering the wages of providers and which children and families received which types of childcare assistance. These state-level innovations, framed as symbols of government effectiveness, became institutionalized into the CCDBG reauthorization of 2014. These findings reveal how cultural contexts vary advocacy influence and bureaucratic conceptions of what’s politically possible, while documenting important distributional consequences of shifts in policy meanings.

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 Presented in Session 34. Sustained Interventions in Schooling: Case Studies from Around the World