On the surface, Janice M. Gruendel seems an unlikely choice to join Gov. M. Jodi Rell's administration as the top adviser on what is arguably the state government's most pressing economic concern.

Gruendel is co-president of Connecticut Voices for Children, the state's highest-profile policy group pushing more spending on a variety of social programs. Voices is not shy about how the state should raise the money: By ending tax loopholes for businesses and raising the rates for wealthy residents.

Voices often targeted Rell's old boss, Gov. John Rowland. And Gruendel herself, a Democrat, was a deputy commissioner under Gov. Bill O'Neill, in three state departments dealing with health and social services.

And so Rell, still Republican and a self-described fiscal conservative, has turned a few heads by appointing Gruendel as her chief of early childhood education initiatives.

The title and the pay are details being worked out.

But as it turns out, Rell and Gruendel, who holds a doctorate from Yale in developmental psychology, have quietly had something of a coming-together of the minds on the topic in frequent meetings over the last two years.

For starters, both believe the best way the state can head off a pending worker-training crisis, and the best way the state can cut into its massive welfare and criminal justice costs, is by looking upstream, to the source. If children are ready for kindergarten when the bell rings at age 5, everything flows more smoothly from there.

The evidence of this nascent economic view of early childhood investment is irrefutable. The answers are not hard to figure out. Twenty-five percent of kindergartners are not ready to learn how to read, or even count to 10. Mostly, it's because they had inadequate pre-K care, or none at all.

Making it happen is another matter altogether. That's where Rell's appointment of Gruendel may represent a triumphant melding of economic pragmatism with costly, complex social reform. It isn't that Rell represents one piece of the puzzle and Gruendel the other; rather, both seem to take a wide view.

"My goal is to provide for the governor a computer model that lays out all of the factors as it relates to cost and all of the factors as it relates to financing," Gruendel said. "We have an opportunity to do public policy right."

Do it right, in contrast to much of what Connecticut has seen over the last few years. The state's centerpiece program helping working-poor families pay for early child-care, Care 4 Kids, has shrunk from $122 million to $68 million since 2001-02.

Head Start, the federally run pre-school in low-performing school districts, enjoys stable funding but serves 20 percent of eligible children, at best.

School Readiness, a grant program for pre-school providers in targeted cities, was a national landmark when Connecticut launched it in 1997. Its funding remained flat at about $37 million for years, and it served about 6,500 children. This year, it finally jumped to $46 million.

All of these programs still leave an estimated 18,000 kids age 3 and 4 without adequate care, according to the state Department of Education.

Eighteen thousand. That's about the number of Connecticut residents now in prison. It's also the number of new jobs the state's economy would create in a decent year.

Anyone need more help connecting the dots?

Gruendel, 58, of Branford, is about as connected as anyone in this field.

Rell may have recruited a person, but what she'll get is an interconnected network of groups and alliances, several of which Gruendel founded. Rell saw it firsthand in January, when she spoke at a forum co-directed by Gruendel that featured Arthur Rolnick, a senior vice president and head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a leading proponent of the economic view of early-childhood education.

Rell, governor-in-waiting at the time, talked about her skittishness along with her commitment.

"Now, as a fiscal conservative - I know that doesn't come as a surprise to many of you - I'm scared. I'm scared of the price tag. I'm scared of what we want to put on the table and say: 'This is what it's going to cost the state of Connecticut.' I have to tell you also that as we think in terms of assuring that all of our children can start school ready for success, you can well imagine that during these budget difficult times that the price tag is not far from my mind."

No one knows exactly how much the state and its residents spend on early child care - most of it borne by families. Certainly, no one knows how much it should cost, done right.

Rell, back in January, asked one of Gruendel's groups to report back in a year with some hard numbers. Last week, when she became Gruendel's boss, Rell pushed up the due date to November - the better to deploy the numbers in next year's budget.

Gruendel, who spent four years as vice president of a children's educational technology firm between stints in government and policy advocacy, could be the one to help make things happen. She'll work with the state Board of Education, among many other agencies.

She intends to include Rolnick's idea that demand-side, marketplace answers are best; that is, give money to consumers with the caveat that they choose certified providers. That would tend to build a viable, if subsidized, industry for the care and education of little kids. That approach, of course, needs to be balanced with the traditional approach of building up government programs.

Teaching parents how to act responsibly is part of any strategy.

Gruendel, stressing the future, spurned my invitation to bash the Rowland administration, key members of which are still in their old jobs - including Marc S. Ryan, the budget director. Finally, under duress, she said, "If I had been governor at a time when we had billion-dollar surpluses, we would have invested in early childhood education."

Invested more, that is. We'll see what happens now, in tougher times.

Connecticut won't remain the nation's richest state if this ends with a dust-gathering report and a series of meetings. The state Department of Higher Education will soon release a consultant's report showing that in 2020, 50 percent of new entrants to the labor force will be racial or ethnic minority group members.

Right now many of those future workers are pre-school kids in low-income families. They're here. Right now.

Dan Haar can be reached at dhaar@courant.com.