In 2025, the Texas Legislature approved HB 117, creating the Governor’s Task Force on Governance of Early Childhood Education and Care to develop policy and budget recommendations for improving the way the state oversees pre-k, child care, and other early childhood programs.
The Task Force is considering various options to improve the governance of early childhood programs, including consolidating all early childhood programs into one agency, transferring governance of select programs from one agency to another, creating a new early childhood governing body or cabinet, strengthening the Texas Early Learning Council, or maintaining our current governance system with targeted improvements in coordination and accountability.
They are also discussing ways to align program goals and standards, coordinate enrollment systems so families don’t have to apply through multiple websites and application forms, ensure state data systems are more integrated, and improve administrative efficiency across programs.
To help inform these conversations, we asked the following three national experts to address key questions facing the Task Force and share lessons from other states:
- Dr. Cynthia Osborne, Professor of Early Childhood Education and Policy at Vanderbilt University and the Executive Director of the national Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center. The Center recently published a web-based analysis of early childhood governance systems with state case studies. Dr. Osborne previously served as Professor at UT-Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs and directed multiple Texas-focused child and family initiatives, providing her a keen understanding of Texas early childhood policy and governance.
- Elliot Haspel, a Senior Fellow at the think tank Capita and a nationally-recognized child and family policy expert. He has published two books on child care policy: Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It and Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All.
- Elliot Regenstein, a partner at Foresight Law + Policy based in Chicago. His national work focuses on how decision-making occurs in state education and early education systems: who is responsible for which decisions, what information they have to support those decisions, and what incentives are acting on key stakeholders. He authored Wyoming’s Early Childhood Governance Transition Report, a book on improving early childhood systems and other publications on early childhood governance.
The three experts provided the following responses:
Elliot Haspel pointed out:
“Adequate funding is important, and consolidation can be more costly than a state may expect: the reorganization of roles and responsibilities can lead to staff turnover or the need for new staff with different skill sets, and nickel-and-diming an already capacity-strained system will reliably result in problems.”
His full response is available here.
“Historically the seniormost state government positions in early childhood have not been systems development jobs, they’ve been programmatic oversight jobs. Those programmatic oversight jobs are critical, to be sure, but the problems facing Texas’s early childhood community will only be solved by empowered leaders using systems-level approaches and sophisticated business analysis of timely data. Until those roles exist, the ceiling for what can be accomplished will remain artificially low.”
The entirety of his comments are available here.
We recently delivered these three responses to the Task Force. We’re hopeful these insights are helpful to the Task Force as they development their recommendations for early learning governance in Texas.
Texans Care for Children gratefully acknowledges Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc., for their financial support of this publication. The opinions expressed in this document are those of Texans Care for Children and do not necessarily reflect the views of Methodist Healthcare Ministries.
