Heidi Alexander: “I thank the Senators from Iowa and North Carolina. I also thank the Senator from Wyoming for his leadership. For a…”

“I thank the Senators from Iowa and North Carolina. I also thank the Senator from Wyoming for his leadership. For a number of years he was the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee, and while he was there he focused on trying to help us spend our money more efficiently--which all of us want to do. Sometimes we forget that Head Start is not the only early learning program we have in the country. It is the most famous. It is best known. It is very popular with most people. It is about $8.6 billion, but the bill we are debating today, the child care and development block grant, is another $5.3 billion. It is two-thirds the size of Head Start and affects 1.5 million children. And then there is another of $5 billion or so of Federal funding for early learning and early childhood. Without getting into a debate about whether we should have new programs, I think there is a consensus among most of us that we should at least start by taking the money we are spending for early childhood and spend it wisely. One step we took a few years ago was to create centers of excellence for Head Start. This was, I believe, in 2007. The idea there was that the Governor of each State would be permitted to pick at least two communities or cities where they were doing the best job of spending money in a coordinated way for early learning and childhood development.…”