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The Common Good: Social Welfare and the American Future
be paid to improving its basic management techniques. If ways
can be found to economize on the use of resources, any given level
of funding can be stretched to cover more people in need. Consider
recent management innovations in the state of Texas. Instead of
working with just one provider of food under
wic, the Texas state
Board of Health opened the bidding and discovered that bringing a
second bidder into the process saved $70 million over two years, as
the second bidder offered the government a deeper discount. The
state estimates that this will allow an additional 95,000 women,
infants, and children to be served. Most states are now moving in
the direction of competitive bidding.
wic
offers one more example of how children's good health and
development require that different services be connected and made
more accessible to parents and children together. For many
low-income women, the main contact with government programs occurs
when they enter a public hospital for labor and delivery. At this
point they should have access to a system of referral to allied
services, but by then their health and nutritional status is
already seamlessly interwoven with that of their newborn. Pregnancy
testing services should be linked to the food supplementation and
nutrition system, which in turn must be connected to prenatal
health care. And these strands of child-welfare policy must in turn
be tied into what is happening to children with respect to day care
and early child development. As we shall see, this is a challenging
but not impossible set of connections to make.
More and
Better Preschool Programs
Evidence
accumulating during the last twenty years points strongly to the
conclusion that high-quality development programs for disadvantaged
preschoolers are among the soundest human investments. One does not
have to be a certified child development expert to understand why.
The early years of life are a critical period of development and
learning, laying the groundwork for subsequent patterns of
personality and intellect. Babies raised in a skilled, caring
environment will generally differ from babies raised in a
desensitizing, mind-numbing atmosphere. By the same token, three-,
four-, and five-year-olds can be socially and intellectually
deprived in a way that programs them for failure in the transition
to school. Those early failures can then easily lead to a host of
negative expectations and subsequent troubles. It should be
emphasized that these circumstances are not the automatic result of
living below a poverty income line or in a certain kind of family
structure. Some single mothers with meager income are doing as much
as one could ask of any parent, while some two-parent families with
abundant resources are guilty of neglect.