“If you look at how pre-k has grown, you see a range of different governors supporting it,” said Helen Blank, the director of child care and early learning for the National Women’s Law Center. “We should be able to come together on something that we have clear research on.”
“We know learning begins early, and it’s good common sense that you can’t start at 5 and expect children to catch up,” said Helen Blank, director of Child Care and Early Education at the National Women’s Law Center. “We’ve taken some steps, but we’ve got a long way to go to close the gap.”
“Since the health care law was passed, because there is language in the law that says specifically that states can do this, states have taken it up,” says Gretchen Borchelt, who heads state reproductive health policy at the National Women’s Law Center.
The law was a reminder, Borchelt says. “They said, ‘hey we can do this?’”
The Times then quotes an earnest liberal with one of those what-conservative-could-object observations: “‘If you look at how pre-K has grown, you can see a range of different governors supporting it,’ said Helen Blank, the director of childcare and early learning for the National Women’s Law Center.
No doubt Krueger and the president will have more to say on the matter as well. In his State of the Union address the president proposed gradually raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00 by the year 2015, and indexing the future figure to the cost of living index. The president first backed an increased in the minimum wage in his 2008 run for the White House.
Joan Entmacher, a vice president at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), says in a statement: “Women make up two out of every three adult minimum-wage workers – and the concentration of women in such low-paying jobs is one of the reasons we still see such a large wage gap.”
The sequester would again make this worse: Helen Blank of the National Women’s Law Center estimates that 30,000 to 50,000 children would lose subsidized care after cuts to the Child Care and Development Block Grant to states.
The answer is that it's good politics for Obama and the Democrats to put the GOP in the position of opposing a popular economic measure that has particular appeal to Hispanics and women ("nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers," according to the National Women's Law Center), two groups the GOP is increasingly trying to woo.
Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, noted, "Our overriding concern is that women have meaningful access to essential preventive health care services, like birth control, without co-pays or deductibles.
