The United States Chronically Underinvests in Young Children. Decades of research show that children develop long-lasting social-emotional, gross motor, and learning skills during their first five years of life. As Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman’s work demonstrates, dollars spent on children in their youngest years are the most cost-effective human capital investment available. Yet those are the very years in the United States when federal, state, and local governments spend the least on children’s education and development, mere fractions of what they’ll expend the moment a child enters kindergarten. The American underinvestment in early childhood is unique in the world: Early care and education investments and enrollment trail all but four developed countries.

Early care and education (ECE) cannot be high quality, affordable, and equitably accessible without significant further public investment. It also cannot adequately meet the needs of children and families without funding mechanisms that work together as a coherent system. The Shortchanged Project aims to analyze all early learning funding streams together and chronicle how much – or little – we spend on the care and education of children before they enter elementary school nationally, state-by-state, and over time.