Despite the historic funding that was funneled into the field in the wake of the pandemic, early care and education continues to be one of the most beleaguered occupations in the United States.

Early childhood educators earn, on average, $13.07 per hour, a wage that puts them in the bottom 3 percent of workers nationally. (Elementary and middle school teachers, by comparison, earn an average of $31.80 per hour, and U.S. workers, across occupations, earn about $23 an hour.)

That’s according to findings from the 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index, a report that typically comes out every two years and is produced and authored by a team of researchers at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley.

The U.S. early care and education system was broken long before the pandemic, thanks to a dynamic where families can’t afford to pay more while providers can’t afford to charge less. Those costs are, in effect, subsidized by the paltry wages earned by early childhood educators — the teachers and staff in these programs, about 98 percent of whom are women and half of whom are women of color — even though they are entrusted with one of the most important jobs that exists, said Caitlin McLean, lead author of the report and director of multi-state programs at CSCCE.

“Our child care workforce — the majority of whom have some higher education — are building our children’s brains in the most critical period of their development,” McLean said during a press call last week. “[Yet] early educators are paid so little that many worry where their next meal will come from.”

In early care and education programs, employer-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans are rare. Close to half (43 percent) of early educators rely on public assistance, such as Medicaid and food stamps, to make ends meet, which the report estimates is costing taxpayers $4.7 billion a year.

The billions of federal dollars pumped into the field in recent years — including $39 billion from the American Rescue Plan Act — are widely seen as having been successful in helping stabilize programs and prevent massive waves of closures. However, most of those dollars expired in September 2023, while the remainder expired about two weeks ago.

Absent ongoing funding and a more permanent solution for the field, ARPA dollars seem not to have meaningfully moved the needle. New data in the Workforce Index underscores that reality.

“The funding was not about making the ideal child care system,” McLean said. “It was about preventing the utter collapse of the system we had.”

Corrine Hendrickson’s situation illustrates why the funding stopped short of transforming the field and the lives of those who work in it.

Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career, and it really isn’t.

Direct-to-provider payments from ARPA allowed Hendrickson to make changes to her licensed home-based child care program in rural Wisconsin and spend money that she’d never had. She hired an employee for the first time, allowing her to step away for personal appointments. She made repairs and improvements to the building. She increased her own wages from $8 an hour to $12, which she said gave her enough extra money to buy her own kids clothes and pay monthly bills on time.

“Without the ARPA funding, I would’ve closed and never reopened,” she said, adding that as a home-based provider, “if I closed, I would’ve lost my home.”

But then ARPA funding expired last year, and she was forced to make hard decisions just to maintain her new hourly rate of $12. She has raised tuition rates on families three times in the past year, she shared, for a total increase of $70 per week. Some families, she added, have reached out to inquire about her program but then backed off when they learn she charges $259 to $281 per week, depending on the child’s age. It’s just too expensive, they tell her.

“Right now, it does not feel like a sustainable career,” Hendrickson said, “and it really isn’t.”

Nationally, wages for early childhood educators have increased by 4.6 percent in the last few years, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Index. That’s still less than the overall workforce, whose wages have increased by an average of 4.9 percent, as well as those of fast food workers (5.2 percent) and retail workers (6.8 percent). The latter two occupations are relevant because many educators have left their positions in recent years for jobs in food and retail, where wages are similar or higher and stress is much lower.

The national average, though, is just an average. About a dozen states have stepped in with their own investments in early care and education since ARPA dollars expired, helping programs and staff to avoid the so-called “child care cliff” that others have endured.

Some states have seen much bigger wage increases for early educators; in nine states, plus Washington, D.C., early educators experienced wage increases of more than 10 percent. The highest gains were in D.C., with an average 27.1 percent wage increase for educators.

‘This Is a Serious Job’

Lida Barthol is an infant and toddler teacher in Washington, D.C., where her salary has soared in the last few years.

Barthol entered the field in 2016, when she was earning about $11 an hour. Now a lead teacher with a bachelor’s degree, and with help from the District of Columbia’s targeted compensation program for early childhood educators, she is making the equivalent of about $36 an hour.

In 2021, after the DC Council approved a tax increase on the city’s highest-income residents, the District launched the Pay Equity Fund, an effort to increase the compensation of early childhood educators so that it better aligned with that of K-12 teachers with similar qualifications and experience.

“Which is insane,” Barthol said. “It’s unheard of.”

In the program’s first year, educators received one-time payments of up to $14,000. Barthol remembers calling her friend, another early childhood educator, in disbelief over the state of her bank account. “We just sat there and cried,” she said. “It was a really big moment.”

Now, the District funnels Barthol’s wage supplement through her employer, so it is reflected in her regular paychecks. The program — which has led to higher recruitment and retention in the field — shows what is possible if early childhood educators are paid a livable wage.

“It really changed everything about my life,” Barthol said. It gave her and her partner of seven years the financial security to get engaged and plan a small wedding, which is set to take place next month. It’s a “cultural milestone,” she said, that she didn’t feel stable enough to have before.

It has also made her feel that her work — her career path — is valued.

“I used to say, ‘There’s no reason to get a master’s degree in early education because you’ll never earn that money back.’ But really, I love this field. I love learning. I love thinking deeply about the work I’m doing,” said Barthol, who graduated in the spring with her master’s degree in human development.

“It gave me the confidence to be like, ‘This is a serious job,’” she said. “You don’t need a degree to do an amazing job, but it is just that affirmation that this is serious work, and [with] young children, there’s complexity there.”

With federal pandemic relief now gone and a new presidential administration set to begin in a few months, the field is at a “crossroads,” the authors of the report wrote.

Barthol has been attuned to the candidates this election cycle, she said. The nominees of both major parties have mentioned child care at a number of campaign events and even during the recent vice presidential debate.

They’re not always getting it right, Barthol noted. She cited a recent interview with Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance, who argued that the solution to sky-high child care costs for families was, first, to lean more on “grandma and grandpa” for care, and then, if that option isn’t available, to reduce regulations and lower qualifications for entering the workforce.

Vance suggested that the problem with the field is that the barrier to entry is too high, Barthol said, and that plenty of people want to work in early childhood education but can’t get a degree.

“What barrier to entry? You don’t need a degree,” Barthol said. “The issue is the pay being so low and the unpredictability of benefits.”

She’s seen many young people enter the field, enthusiastic about working with kids, only to realize how “physically, mentally and emotionally demanding it is,” then receive that first paycheck and decide, nope, this isn’t going to work for them.

“It’s not that the barrier to entry is so high,” Barthol reiterated. “It’s that the system is not built to support young families and the people who care for their children.”

When Eve, a mother in Colorado, received a legal settlement, she found herself suddenly flush.

She drove over to the office of Eric Dearing, who was working with her as a family advocate for Head Start, and she gave him a shirt. Even though the shirt wasn’t his style, and he never wore it, he kept it in the closet. That was one of the few times that he’d seen a family, through “pure luck,” get a spike in income.

The change in Eve, when she went from receiving help to giving gifts, was palpable. “She was so excited and proud and suddenly full of this hope,” says Dearing, who is now a professor at Boston College.

Moments like that are rare these days. Social mobility in the U.S. is stagnant, with income inequality rising. Plus, the ability of people to move up in the world seems to decline with age, as their status gets set. It can cast doubt on the idea that schools prepare students to have good lives and raise questions about whether the country is a poverty-sustaining machine.

This may be getting worse, according to one researcher, whose recent study found that what matters for student outcomes isn’t so much money itself, but the number of supportive learning chances that a person gets.

But rare or not, that experience with Eve stuck with Dearing like it was pinned somewhere in his brain. How much does it matter when families gain income if they've been living in poverty, Dearing wondered. And why do all the high-quality programs out there seem to make such a little dent in boosting education achievement for students from low-income backgrounds?

It Adds Up

Years later, Dearing tried to tackle these questions. His answer? Some students just receive much fewer chances to thrive.

That’s what a new study, published in the journal Educational Researcher, suggests. The study aimed to figure out how access to opportunities accrued over time for students, and whether they explain the link between how much money their parents made — when the students were in early childhood — and how their lives turned out. To do this, the researchers pulled federal data that followed 814 students from birth until the age of 26. Those students lived in 10 cities from around the U.S.

What did they find? It’s about “opportunity gaps.” For example, from birth through the end of high school, children from high-income families had six-to-seven times as many chances to learn than those from low-income families. Middle-income families had four times as many chances as low-income families.

According to an author of the study, that means family income is indirectly related to how far a student pursues education or how much money they make in their mid-20s. What really matters is access to “educational opportunities,” or how often they find themselves in supportive learning environments, whether that’s in high-quality child care when they are young, in a home that has toys, puzzles and caregivers to support learning, or in high-quality school and after-school programs. So income helps, but primarily because it leads to greater access to good learning opportunities.

The study was descriptive, Dearing notes, so it can’t technically prove that the accumulation of opportunities “caused” higher educational achievement. But that story is consistent with their research, he adds. The paper also didn’t look into how the timing of learning opportunities — say, whether they occurred in early childhood or in high school — might make a difference.

But from the perspective of the researchers, what matters is the cumulative effect of those chances over time.

Some children are experiencing opportunities throughout their lives, in each of the settings in which they're living and growing — at home, in child care, at the school — and other children are, if they're lucky, experiencing an opportunity to be in a highly enriching context in one of those settings, Dearing says. And that has tremendous implications for solving achievement differences between children growing up poor and children growing up in higher-income families, he adds.

Given this, it shouldn’t be surprising that positively powerful programs such as high-quality preschool make only a small dent in how those children's lives turn out, Dearing says.

Translating these insights into more chances for students to thrive is tough.

“The inequity is extreme, and so it's going to take extreme measures to end that,” Dearing adds. And by extreme, he means structural. Success in education requires high-quality instruction, but that alone is not enough, he says. What matters when it comes to changing students’ lives is sustained quality. The sum is greater than the parts.

A consequence: Teachers alone, while crucial, can’t control all the factors here. The answer may lie more in support systems for students, Dearing says, pointing toward the community school model and support programs such as City Connects at Boston College. These models claim to support the “whole child” by building a network that can assist with needs outside of the classroom, such as connecting families to food banks when a child might be hungry or to a free eyeglasses clinic. In some sense, these models use the schools as “hubs” for supportive learning environments while letting teachers focus on the education component, Dearing says.

The Land of Opportunity?

Efforts to staunch inequality could also soon see a political push: Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has outlined a plan for “economic opportunity,” including expansions of earned income tax credits, which it argues will breathe new life into the American middle class.

But in the meantime, circumstances may be getting starker.

Since 1991, when the students trailed by the study were born, the country has seen rising inequality and, in some sectors, stagnant wages. This may have accelerated or exaggerated the effects noted in the study. It’s entirely possible that we have underestimated how big the opportunity gaps are today, Dearing says. Had the children been born a decade later, it’s possible the students they studied would have had a wider chasm between opportunities, even between middle-class and upper-income families, he says.

There have also been some positive developments, though. There’s more public preschool these days, and there’s been an increase in the earned income tax credit, he says.

What’s more, there are still research questions to answer.

A previous study authored by Dearing showed that early childhood “opportunities” could compensate for poverty, lifting students’ educational attainment.

But if the research were being conducted today, Dearing says he would pay closer attention to cultural differences that might boost students’ life outcomes in the absence of money. For instance, in some Black communities caregiver roles often extend beyond the parents, with other family members like grandmothers playing a big role in childrens’ home lives and what learning opportunities they have there. But researchers have overfocused on “nuclear family” roles, and therefore may have a slightly misleading picture, Dearing says.

This story was originally published by The 19th.

As efforts to expand the child tax credit and provide paid family leave have stalled at the federal level, states are increasingly incentivizing private employers to step in and fill one of the other most painful gaps for working parents: child care.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 17 states offer child care tax credits to “employers that operate or contract out child care services for their employees.” These states are Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

Eric Syverson, a senior policy specialist in the National Conference of State Legislatures’ fiscal affairs program, said the conversation about a child tax credit at the federal level is driving a bipartisan consensus around finding ways in the tax code to help parents and families in need of child care services.

“I think states have now realized, ‘Oh, the federal government temporarily and now is considering again another increase in these tax credits — child tax credit, child and dependent care tax credit, the EITC [Earned Income Tax Credit]. We could also benefit from that increase if we enact our own.’ And that’s what we’re seeing a lot of states now considering,” Syverson said.

He added that the biggest beneficiaries of state tax credits are large corporations that can afford child care costs. Even with the credit’s growing popularity, a relatively small percentage of companies take advantage of it. Syverson attributes that to the high costs of establishing a child care facility and a general lack of awareness among larger businesses about the tax credit. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 12 percent of all workers had access to child care benefits through their employer in 2023.

Jessica Chang is the co-founder and CEO of Upwards, a child care marketplace that connects families to child care providers, assists child care providers with business needs, and helps businesses and government entities create child care benefits programs for their employees. Chang said her company operates among the key stakeholders in child care: employers, government, families and child care providers.

Initially, Upwards may collaborate with employers by matching employees with nearby child care providers, a more feasible and cost-efficient option than building an on-site facility. The company can also use data from employees to help customize child care benefits. For example, if Upwards notices employees are calling off work to care for their children, they may recommend providing backup care credits to allow families to find providers at non-traditional hours.

“By partnering with Upwards, we have been able to help our [employees] find trusted providers who are able to accommodate the varying work schedules found at our properties,” Susan Loveday, the vice president of human resources at Dollywood Parks and Resorts, told The 19th. “Additionally, to help with the cost of child care, we provide a monthly stipend to those [employees] whose children are cared for by an Upwards provider.”

To Chang, child care as an employee benefit could resemble health insurance — or become even more important.

“That’s why you actually need to have participation between both employers and government in order to really normalize it and say, ‘This is not a social issue. This is actually an economic issue. This isn’t a mom issue. This is a family issue,’” Chang said. “We’re hearing from employers, for example, they’re not trying to say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna try this, and if it doesn’t work, we’re backing out.’ They’re actually saying, ‘How do we make this successful so there’s no longer an issue? How do we do this for two and three years because we want to make sure that it’s done correctly?’ And that is a significant shift from, say, just checking the box.”

Federal action on child care and other family policies has been slow to advance. Last month, the Senate voted against a bigger child tax credit. Also, federal law does not guarantee workers paid days off for parental, medical and family caregiving responsibilities.

But there have been efforts at the federal level to encourage companies to aid employees with child care, a move that has support from both Democrats and Republicans.

In 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act, legislation that allocated $50 billion to companies expanding semiconductor manufacturing and research and offering child care to their employees.

When President Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, in a debate with former President Donald Trump, he said, “We should significantly increase the child care tax credit. We should significantly increase the availability of women and men, or single parents, to be able to go back to work. And we should encourage businesses to hold, to have child care facilities,” as ways to deal with the child care crisis.

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative group that crafted Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for former President Donald Trump’s potential second term in office, calls for Congress to encourage on-site employee child care, saying it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.”

Some experts argue, however, that employer-sponsored child care is only a temporary solution to the child care crisis — and one that poses equity concerns.

For Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the family policy think tank Capita and the author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” employer-sponsored health insurance and its “uneven results” being mirrored in child care is something people should scrutinize. Haspel writes, “The only real solution to America’s child care needs is a system of choice that is funded by a permanent stream of public dollars,” and employer-based taxes is a way to start collecting those funds.

“We have a lot of precedents now at the state and local level of fair ways to fund more affordable, accessible, high-quality child care,” Haspel said, “In Vermont, they are funding a major child care reform bill via a small payroll tax, 0.44 percent, 75 percent of which is borne by the employer, and business owner after business owners went to the legislature and essentially said, ‘Tax us. This is important, this is worth it.’ That’s the kind of employer activity we need.”

Similarly, he said, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and Portland have all levied taxes on high-income households to help pay for child care.

“When we care about something and decide it has enough societal value — whether public schools or roads or parks — we find the money,” Haspel said.

Casey Peeks, the senior director of early childhood policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP), believes employers should be more active as child care funding advocates, citing from the Council for Strong America’s report that the child care crisis costs the United States $122 billion every year in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue. She sees child care as both an economic and social issue.

“I describe it as a public good because I am not a parent, but I still benefit from child care. Every day I take the Metro to work, I benefit from the fact that my Metro driver, my bus driver, has their child in a safe, high-quality child care program so that they can go to work, and I can get to work,” Peeks said. “I definitely think there’s a role for businesses to play, and it’s in their best interest that we don’t have a child care crisis. … I think that whatever employers offer should, hopefully, be on top of whatever is provided through public investment.”

Another aspect of the child care crisis is supply. A June 2024 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that, despite the increasing cost of child care, child care workers earn an average of $14.60 per hour. The Chicago Fed attributes decreasing supply to the low pay and high responsibility of the job; child care employment in the fourth quarter of 2023 was 9 percent below pre-pandemic levels.

Anna Lovejoy, director of early childhood policy at CAP, acknowledges the effort being made by states to address the child care crisis, but isn’t convinced incentivizing businesses to provide care helps with the supply issue and may potentially create equity issues.

“When you do tie child care to employment, if someone loses their job or chooses to step away from their job, then they don’t have child care in the interim while they’re looking for work,” Lovejoy said. “And so that causes a disadvantage to families. I think, also, it just creates sort of an equity issue for those who have jobs versus don’t have jobs, have child care versus don’t have child care.”

This essay was adapted from a piece posted on Medium.

About nine months ago, Dara told me she was interested in bringing her mother and nephew from Syria to the United States, and she needed assistance. She had immigrated to Evanston, Illinois from Syria five years ago, along with her husband and five children and had a goal of reuniting with her family.

I wanted to help but had no idea where to start. As a home visitor with the federally funded Head Start/Early Head Start program, my goal is to help families create and achieve goals related to parenting their young children. I work with Dara’s 4-year-old daughter, Naya, but I support her whole family. (I have changed their names in this essay to protect their privacy and they’ve agreed to have their story shared.) As their home visitor, I provide resources, connection and experiences to her family and the other families I serve.

Over the years, in addition to bringing lessons and activities for the children I work with, I’ve supported families in accessing food and diapers, filling out school enrollment forms and securing affordable housing — but this was a new request for me.

I decided to start by doing some research on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website. I learned a bit about the process, then I printed out the necessary documents and contacted my organization’s Arabic interpreter to get translation support.

Dara needed to fill out an I-730, Refugee/Asylee Relative Petition form. I looked at the form myself, and even as a native English speaker, it felt daunting. I knew that Dara was even more in the dark. We worked for months, assembling the information she needed. A few weeks ago, when we had finally completed the extensive document, I handed Dara two huge envelopes and explained that she would need to take them to the post office, have them weighed for postage and sent.

“I don’t know how to do that,” she told me.

Dara had never been to the U.S. post office. We decided that we’d plan a trip together, along with her children, so they could learn about the experience of sending mail. I prepared them as best I could by sharing what we would encounter. I couldn’t anticipate everything, but that conversation helped set us up for success. On the day of the trip, Dara and her children shared a new experience — one that helped them all grow. It takes a lot of courage to go outside your comfort zone, and the best part was that her children were there to see their mother trying something new as she was advocating for her family.

I’ve been an early childhood educator for 25 years. In that time, I’ve been a teacher, the owner and director of a preschool and, now, a home visitor. My professional background in early childhood has given me insight into the critical nature of this work. So, too, does my personal experience as a mother who navigated a difficult entry into parenthood, breastfeeding an infant with colic and settling into the reality that taking maternity leave reduced our family’s income. Reflecting back, I would have loved to have the reassurance and support of a home visitor.

How Home Visiting Programs Support Families

Through my work as a home visitor, I serve 11 children and their families, including Naya’s. All of these families speak a language other than English in their home, and eight of the families are immigrants to the U.S. During my weekly visits with each family, I provide parents with resources as well as opportunities to learn and practice skills that will help their young children thrive. The idea is that parents and caregivers are a child’s first teacher and I support them in being the best teachers they can be. Participation in home visiting programs can support families with health and well-being, and based on my experience, these programs are especially effective with immigrant families.

During my visits, I bring developmentally appropriate lessons for Naya, who is fluent in Arabic and English. Just like many kids who are learning two languages, she is a little behind on learning the names of letters and numbers, but as I have assured many parents, being bilingual is so beneficial to brain development, and she will catch up with her monolingual classmates.

Over the past year, in addition to bringing these activities for Naya and moving forward on the travel documents, I have helped Dara and her family make a lot of progress on other goals. By working with one of our partner resource groups, the family of seven was able to secure new housing, moving out of a two-bedroom apartment and into a five-bedroom house. Once they moved, I was able to help Dara in registering her older children in a new school system. The process was almost as difficult as completing the I-730 form, but together, we got through it.

Every family has their own unique goals and needs, so my work differs depending on who I’m supporting. Sometimes I educate parents on child development and safety; other times I provide resources for engaging with their children. And in some cases, I help them navigate challenges they’re facing as a family, whether it’s finding emergency funding when their SNAP benefits are delayed, learning a new bus route to school or, most recently, visiting the post office.

Expanding Access Is Key

Research has shown that investing in early childhood education has significant benefits for children and families. And there’s evidence that home visiting programs are invaluable for parents like Dara. Yet these programs are perpetually underfunded and understaffed. The impact that home visitors make on a child’s development and a family’s well-being is huge, but access is limited. There’s not enough funding to make them available to every child that needs and qualifies for them.

We can increase access for children and their families by developing a stronger awareness of the benefits these programs offer to children, families and society. We can advocate for more federal dollars and consistent funding to enable every family that wants to benefit from this service to have immediate access, rather than being put on a wait list, which can be years long.

In the vein of empowering families, a solution was suggested during a focus group I recently participated in for home visitors in Illinois. The idea was to create a pathway for parents who participate in home visiting programs to receive training in child development, goal setting and documentation skills, so they could become home visitors themselves. This kind of approach would require supervision, support and funding, but it’s something that could boost the original family’s well-being by providing training, improving financial stability and increasing connections throughout the community — and it could exponentially help others.

Imagine Dara guiding people through the process of registering children for school or taking children to the post office. Would she need some guidance and support in doing this? Of course, we all do. But she would offer families, especially those who are new to this country, her invaluable experience, and it would bring her closer to her own personal goals.

This story was originally published by The Daily Yonder.

Chris Nelson teaches preschool in rural Vermont, just a few miles from the Canadian border, but not in the school or child care center most people think of when they imagine state or locally funded pre-K. Instead, her 3- and 4-year-old students are integrated into her five-star-rated home-based child care program, where she also cares for younger children and a few kids who come after school until their working parents pick them up.

Many of those parents would have to drive more than an hour to reach a center- or school-based pre-K program where the state covers tuition for just 10 hours a week. In contrast, Nelson’s program is open 12 hours a day to cover parents’ commutes, the nontraditional hours of shift workers and those who do seasonal work.

Nelson would like to continue teaching pre-K, and parents of those children would like to receive the state’s $3,800 free tuition for enrolling in Nelson’s program. However, new recommendations from Vermont’s School Board Insurance Trust (VSBIT), which insures schools and preschool programs, effectively exclude home-based providers from participation, because the $2 million insurance policy they recommend (based on school district needs) isn’t even available to home-based child care providers, sometimes also called family child care providers or FCCs. Nelson brought the problem to the attention of state child care regulators. In a memo released in mid-June to school district superintendents, Vermont Agencies of Education and Human Services indicate that local departments of education can waive the insurance requirement for home-based pre-K programs that are unable or cannot afford to secure the policy recommended by VSBIT. Because this policy change has come so late, just two months before the 2024 school year begins, when most districts have already made decisions about partnerships with private pre-K providers, it remains to be seen how many home-based child care providers will be able to offer pre-K this year.

Vermont, like many states, is committed to a mixed-delivery model for pre-K education, allowing the state’s pre-K tuition subsidy to be applied for programs in a variety of existing settings, including those based in homes. Nevertheless, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) State of Preschool 2023 Yearbook, in 2022-2023, more than 60 percent of pre-K children served were in public school settings, not private programs or home-based child care options. Together, all of those programs served just 44 percent of eligible 4-year-olds and 17 percent of 3-year-olds. More than half of all 3- and 4-year-old children still do not attend preschool. For many rural families especially, the barriers of paying for and getting their children to a pre-K program are just too great.

Creating “universal” access to high-quality pre-K will require a massive, long-term public investment (as much as $33 billion, according to NIEER). In the near term, states can increase access by leveraging the existing infrastructure for providing pre-K in the home-based programs that already serve many rural families. Policy experts like The Erikson Institute and NIEER recommend “meaningfully” including and supporting home-based child care providers in the expansion and implementation of publicly funded pre-K as a promising first step to increasing access, especially in states where more than 50 percent of the population lives in a child care desert. A new initiative led by Home Grown, a national funder collaborative focused on improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, in partnership with NIEER, would support state, city, county and tribal government leaders to include home-based child care in their pre-K programs.

States’ commitment to a mixed-delivery model often falters in part because many, like Vermont, have a governance structure that reinforces a tendency to see pre-K as just an additional grade before kindergarten, with regulations and funding that follow the template of elementary education. These include layers of requirements for teacher licensure, classroom environments and administrative oversight. Meanwhile, home-based child care is overseen by the department of social services, with different parameters for licensure and oversight. Former state Rep. Ashton Clemmons, who co-chaired the early childhood caucus in North Carolina’s General Assembly, notes that this “disalignment” works to segregate infant-toddler caregivers from those who teach pre-K.

“If you give parents a voucher and let them go where they want to, many parents would choose FCCs for pre-K as well as care for their infants and toddlers,” says Rachel Bymun, a licensed home-based child care provider in Bay Point, California, a low-income, primarily immigrant community an hour from San Francisco. She notes that although California also subscribes to a mixed-delivery model, her county does not have the Family Child Care Home Education Network that would enable home-based child care providers like her to participate in California’s subsidized pre-K program. As a result, families in her county who wish to access publicly funded pre-K have to leave her program and enroll in another setting.

The families who prefer a home-based child care environment often are the most underserved and hard to reach, including families of color, those in rural communities, those who speak languages other than English, and those who work nontraditional hours, according to Alexandra Patterson, director of policy and strategy at Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders supporting home-based child care: “Excluding these providers from the formal pre-K system further marginalizes the families and providers who most need those resources.”

Another significant barrier to access is that working parents need more than two to six hours of care per day for 180 days a year, which is the typical pre-K school year. Many eligible working parents struggle to get multiple children of different ages to different schools or can’t find a preschool with an open slot that is also within commuting distance from their work and home. Home-based pre-K, on the other hand, is typically integrated into a comprehensive child care program serving multiple children of mixed ages that is open all day and year-round. This family-like setting, according to this report from The Erikson Institute, provides continuity and stability for children, culturally and linguistically responsive care, individualized education, and fosters the community connections and relationships that families rely on for support from each other and their child’s teacher.

Nelson’s nature-based, play-based approach to learning in a small, mixed-age group is a strength of home-based pre-K that many parents prefer to hectic classrooms full of 20 or 30 4-year-olds.

“Schools mandate 275 days a year for learning,” she says, “but I believe every single minute is a teachable moment. On a typical day, we might visit the pond to collect tadpoles and bring them back so that children can learn about life cycles. The two-year-olds might want to feel the little jelly eggs, and the older ones will see that the eggs grow legs and tails and grow into frogs.”

This approach is also endorsed by the National Academies New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum. The “Magic 8” preschool classroom practices, according to child development researchers, include precisely the practices FCCs implement daily in their homes: lots of listening to children, holistic sequential activities, cooperative interactions between kids, and minimal time spent in transition from one space to another or between lessons. These videos from Home Grown feature home-based child care providers demonstrating these practices as they teach and care for mixed-age groups of children.

How could publicly funded pre-K programs enroll more children and accommodate the needs of more families? NIEER’s recent report and recommendations from the Erikson Institute on pay equity and support for providers detail strategies for setting pre-K reimbursement rates to reflect the true cost of providing high-quality pre-K services in a home-based child care setting. These include supporting home-based providers with educational, coaching and evaluation programs specific to preschool standards, setting environmental recommendations and the ratio of infants to toddlers allowed under a caregiver’s license appropriately for home-based settings. Changes like these would allow Nelson and other home-based child care providers to sustain their programs and open their doors to 3- and 4-year-olds who are waiting in the wings for school to start. This solution also builds on and strengthens the existing capacity of FCC educators, buttressing states’ workforces and economies in both the short and long terms.

What’s more, this solution doesn’t require building new preschool wings onto aging school buildings or training up a new cadre of preschool teachers. What it does require, says Patterson, is an “innovative and inclusive view of family child care homes as centers of learning, and of qualified caregivers who operate them as early childhood educators,” that is, pre-K teachers deserving of all the same support and salary afforded to school- or center-based pre-K programs.

This story was originally published by The 19th.

During her nearly eight years in business, Dawn Kelly watched again and again as staff left their jobs at The Nourish Spot, the smoothie joints she owns in Queens and Brooklyn, because they couldn’t find good child care.

Sometimes it was because the care was too expensive, or parents thought there were no quality options for their kids. Whatever the reason, it created retention issues for the small business — issues that Kelly has had to ponder as she considers expanding.

“We’ve not necessarily been able to hire all of the people that we want to hire, because their [child care] hours don’t allow them to work when we need them to work,” Kelly said.

Most of her staff of 10 are single parents who are managing the chaos of a child care system in disrepair, where costs are too high for most. Kelly empathizes: Years ago she was a single mom in corporate America, grateful for an employer that provided care on-site. But as a small business owner, it’s not something she has the capital to afford.

“I feel for them. I try to work around their schedules because I’ve been in their shoes before,” Kelly said. “It’s important that our legislators understand that and make it easier for us to do business and make it easier for us to hire community residents, no matter what their station is.”

In a new survey published Thursday, more than a third of small business owners say that the lack of child care in their communities is preventing them from operating or expanding their business. The survey was produced by Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses Voices program, which advocates for small business owners. The data was first shared exclusively with The 19th.

Goldman Sachs polled 1,259 business owners in 47 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. in mid-April about their thoughts on child care and its effect on their companies. Nearly 60 percent said there aren’t sufficient high-quality and affordable options in their communities, which is affecting their workforce. About 35 percent of those owners said that a lack of day care slots, as well as their high cost, is forcing employees to cut hours or forgo work entirely.

Another poll earlier this year by the Small Business Majority, an advocacy organization with 85,000 members, had similar findings: A third have lost revenue and earnings because of employees’ child care challenges. About half have seen lower productivity. A quarter of owners said they had to shut down their business because of their own child care challenges.

Particularly since the start of the pandemic, there has been a “groundswell” of employees talking more openly about their struggles with child care, and of employers being more actively engaged on the issue, said Sarah Rittling, the executive director of the First Five Years Fund, an early childhood education advocacy group.

The cost of child care has been rising for years — typically outpacing inflation annually. In 2023, child care cost families $11,582 on average, according to Child Care Aware, a national advocacy organization. That is roughly 10 percent of a married couple’s median income and 32 percent of the median income of a single parent.

Small business owners told Goldman Sachs they’d like to see government support for improving their options. As many as 77 percent would support an increase in federal funding for child care. Past polling has led to similar findings, with small business owners across the political spectrum calling for more federal funding.

Many day cares and home-based child cares are also small businesses that typically operate on microscopic profit margins. Federal funding that could improve their sustainability would support other businesses, said Jen Legere, founder and owner of A Place to Grow, a child care center with three locations in New Hampshire and one in North Carolina. Legere has been working with the Department of Labor to establish the first child care director apprenticeship program.

“Child care is the workforce behind the workforce,” Legere said. “Until we really start to support that child care workforce and increase the level of professionalism across our workforce and create career pathways for them, we are not going to be able to grow more child care centers and to increase capacity across the United States — and then support our businesses.”

Some small business owners are willing to be part of the solution. According to the survey, 62 percent said that if they were able to provide a child care benefit at work, it would have a positive effect on talent recruitment and retention. To help do that, 70 percent said they would support legislation to increase the business tax credit designed to help small businesses that provide care.

Currently, the federal government allows businesses to get up to $150,000 back on their taxes for providing child care for their employees. But owners surveyed said they’d support increasing that amount to $500,000 — a proposal currently on the table in Congress. That bipartisan bill, known as the Child Care Investment Act, would expand the tax credit for the first time since 2001.

The way the credit currently works, a business has to spend $1 million to get the maximum $150,000 tax credit. Under the new bill, the refund would rise as high as $500,000. A small business would get back even more — up to $600,000. Businesses that spend less than $1 million would get more money back as well, a refund of up to 60 percent instead of 25 percent.

Rep. Salud Carbajal, the California Democrat who co-sponsored the legislation with Oregon Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, said the idea came out of roundtables with small business owners conducted in 2022. When asked what the top issue affecting the future of their business was, many said child care.

“I came back with my team and we scoured the child care tax policy area and it became abundantly clear early on that the child care [business] tax credit framework that already exists is a good one, it just needs to be modernized and updated,” Carbajal said.

The bill will also allow small business owners to jointly create child care centers — and still benefit from the credit, a provision not in the current law.

Setting up a new provider could take hundreds of thousands of dollars, something difficult for a single mom-and-pop business. But if all the shops in an area — like a strip mall or a business development district — worked together, that could be a community solution, Carbajal said.

Legere has already benefited from partnering with businesses to provide care. For the past three years, A Place To Grow has partnered with Harmony Home, an assisted-living facility for senior citizens in New Hampshire. Legere’s company manages a small child care center on the property. Harmony Home’s employees can put their children in care on site, and it’s also open to members of the community.

That has solved some of the big challenges she faced with establishing new day care centers. Each time, it has taken her about two years to amass the capital and find the real estate. The promise of business partnerships is that they could increase the overall supply of day cares, instead of trying to find more room in an overcrowded system. Day care closures in the past four years have limited the number of slots available to kids across the country. Waitlists are often years long. Businesses that have tried to offer child care benefits have typically either created an in-house provider or contracted with a local day care. But because there are not enough spots to begin with, other members of the community may lose out. Creating new options helps both groups.

“We need to build partnerships that bring us all together to solve this problem collaboratively,” Legere said. “Businesses keep pointing at child care and [saying], ‘You need to grow.’ We can’t grow without you. You have to help us and support us.”

The Child Care Investment Act has more than three dozen co-sponsors — 31 Democrats and six Republicans — and the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The bill was introduced last July and likely won’t pass this year, but Carbajal said it has been picking up support and could be included in a tax package expected to go before Congress in 2025.

“It’s an economic issue for our economy, for businesses to be able to thrive. They can’t hire. They can’t retain. They can’t expand,” he said. “I think what this does is really provide some really important tools to be able to succeed more and address a major challenge that now everybody recognizes.”

For years, child care was treated as a fringe topic that was rarely part of the national economic discourse. But its impact on the ability of parents, especially mothers, to participate in the labor force has finally received more attention.

In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, more women exited the labor force than men, a phenomenon that had never occurred in American history. Part of the reason was that child care options disappeared. Many women were forced to quit their jobs to care for their children.

Today, lost work, productivity and tax revenue due to child care challenges costs the U.S. economy an estimated $122 billion a year, according to the Council for a Stronger America, a bipartisan nonprofit of law enforcement and business leaders focused on family policy. Businesses lose $23 billion annually because of lost revenue or hiring costs caused by losing working parents over insufficient care. The U.S. government loses about $21 billion in income and sales tax because parents without child care access typically earn less — and spend less.

It’s an issue small business owners want candidates to discuss this election year. About 55 percent of those surveyed by Goldman Sachs said it has not been sufficiently addressed on the campaign trail. A May poll by the First Five Years Fund found that a whopping 89 percent of voters want candidates to have a plan for helping parents afford high-quality child care, including 80 percent of Republicans, 88 percent of Independents and 99 percent of Democrats.

A presidential debate next week will offer a first test as to whether candidates are listening.

Moms First, an advocacy organization that pushes for child care and other family policies, is circulating a petition asking CNN to ask President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump about child care at the June 27 debate. “It’s time for our leaders to make bold commitments to moms across the country, and fixing the broken child care system is just the beginning,” the organization wrote.

Kelly, however, is skeptical. “I really haven’t heard any candidates talking about child care at all,” she said. “Child care is inherently important to the fabric of our nation, and it’s not just for small businesses. We should want our families to be protected and covered and placed in environments where they will excel — and that starts with our babies.”

This story was originally published by The 19th.

Last year, the Department of Commerce announced a historic first: Companies applying for a federal grant program had to provide a plan for offering child care to their workers. The grant money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which passed in 2022 and includes $50 billion to expand semiconductor manufacturing and research in the United States.

Also known as microchips, semiconductors are small wafers of circuitry used in computers and smartphones, as well as clean energy technologies like solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. The United States is racing to develop its chip manufacturing capabilities in a bid to create jobs, reduce dependency on imports and prevent the supply chain issues that were laid bare during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the government’s push to quickly build out semiconductor production can work only if there are enough people to fill those jobs. The semiconductor industry is projecting a shortage of around 90,000 workers, and the construction industry is already having trouble filling over 400,000 positions.

One way to do that is increase the number of women trained in these jobs. Around 4 percent of the construction workforce and 29 percent of the manufacturing workforce in the United States is made up of women. It’s why Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has focused on addressing barriers they have historically faced in these industries — and the most obvious barrier is child care.

“This issue is not a social issue, it’s an economic issue and frankly, it’s a simple question of math,” Raimondo wrote in an emailed statement to The 19th. “If we are going to meet the national and economic security imperatives of the CHIPS for America Program, we are going to have to figure out how to fill the hundreds of thousands of jobs we are creating and we know that reliable and affordable child care is critical to getting more women into the workforce.”

A year later, the promise of child care is beginning to bear fruit. So far seven companies have been announced as grant winners, with five receiving over $150 million — which triggers the need for a child care plan. Each announcement has come with new details about how the companies will meet the child care requirement.

In April, the White House announced that Micron would receive $6.1 billion in funding and that it had already started building a new center that could accommodate 124 children directly across from the company’s Idaho headquarters and the site of a soon-to-be constructed fabrication facility. Micron also plans to build a new child care facility in New York as part of an expansion there.

“We recognize that there are systemic barriers to workforce entry and re-entry, including childcare services, which is why we are focused on providing childcare options that support and expand the workforce, and benefits the broader community,” Micron senior vice president April Arnzen said in a news release.

Intel, which was named a grant recipient in March for over $8 billion, already offers a discount at local child care centers and priority enrollment for employees and has committed to increasing discounted access to more providers. The company also plans to pilot a reimbursement program for hourly workers.

“As part of its commitment to fostering diversity and attracting top talent, Intel has doubled its primary and backup childcare programs, providing affordable, accessible, high-quality childcare for its workers across sites,” a company spokesperson told The 19th in an email. “We believe people should not have to choose between advancing their careers and managing the high cost of child care.”

Other companies, including Samsung, have provided fewer details in their funding announcements, stating that they are exploring options with the Department of Commerce as these contracts are finalized.

An official for the Department of Commerce told The 19th that while she expects companies to reveal more details in the coming months, this requirement is tricky for employers that don’t have an existing child care infrastructure to tap into. “Companies are actually quite willing to offer support for their employees when it comes to child care. … They are generally aware of it as a hindrance to maximum labor participation,” she said. But, she continued, “employers are kind of on their own.”

Child care advocates say that it’s important to get these initiatives right. Without thoughtful implementation, companies risk exacerbating the child care crisis. Some states plan to bring thousands of workers into communities that are already struggling to meet the needs of residents, where parents already have to wait months and even years for day cares.

“We are tentatively optimistic just because we see areas where things could be moving in the right direction,” Woods said. But, she continued, “a number of companies are really unsure about next steps because child care isn’t necessarily their number one priority.”

And child care is rarely a one-size-fits-all system, experts told the 19th. For some parents, having care at a job site is a convenient benefit, but for others it might make more sense to keep their kids at their current child care centers or to use a home-based provider. And different programs can be better fits for different kids, like for those with special needs or who don’t speak English as a first language.

But states can help employers meet these requirements in a way that is tailored to local communities. Oregon and New York, for example, are taking their own actions to address the impact manufacturing jobs will have on the child care crisis — and to position their states for CHIPS funding.

New York in 2022 passed the Green CHIPS Act, which provides tax incentives for companies to expand semiconductor manufacturing there. Like the federal law, it has a child care requirement. As a result, the state has been working with Micron to create child care options that meet the needs of the local community, in addition to Micron’s employees. It’s investing in a program that trains in-home care providers, as well as supplying a half-million dollars to the YMCA for expanding regional child care offerings. The company has also announced that it plans to partner with local child care centers to subsidize costs for employees who need an option outside of work-based care.

In Oregon, legislators took a different approach when they passed the CHIPS Child Care Fund in March. Companies that receive CHIPS money can contribute to the fund to fulfill their child care requirement, instead of having to come up with solutions themselves.Regan Gray, child care policy adviser with Family Forward Oregon, an advocacy group that helped work on the law, said it gives control to community partners who already know local child care needs best. It’s a way to say: “Let the child care experts take this, and you be the experts on building semiconductors,” she said.

Oregon’s fund does two things: It builds on an existing program that uses federal highway assistance funds to offer child care assistance for workers in trade apprenticeship programs, and extends the payments for up to five years after an apprenticeship. The funds can also be used to help child care providers expand their facilities, train staff, create additional slots and extend hours to meet the needs of construction workers who will be building semiconductor facilities.

Advocates are now planning to move forward on other legislation to expand the fund to meet the needs of parents who will be working in those fabrication plants.

This model solves a couple of problems, says Gray: It takes the burden off of employers, and it moves federal dollars into the public sphere, where they have a better chance of having a long-term effect on child care.

“The concern I have with giving the money to the semiconductor businesses to open up child care is: They’re not in the business of child care. They’re not in the business of sustaining this beyond their grant from the federal government,” she said. “This could be a huge loss of millions and millions of dollars, where we’re investing into these companies that in a couple years realize this is a real headache, rather than giving it to the child care providers that are in the business of doing child care.”

For experts like Gray, the elephant in the room is that the CHIPS fund is trying to compensate for failures at the federal level to pass comprehensive child care legislation.“How do we get more money into child care since Build Back Better didn’t pass?” Gray asks. For the Department of Commerce, she says, it was like: “Let’s stick it in here.”

For that reason, Gray wishes more states would follow Oregon’s lead in addressing the broader need for care. “I do feel like the intent of this requirement in CHIPS was to build out the child care marketplace, not to build out employer-sponsored child care,” Gray said.

But child care is not the only barrier that women face, either at the fabrication plants or in their construction, said Ariane Hegewisch, program director of employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “If you talk to tradeswomen [about these initiatives] there are kind of two reactions. One is that everybody thinks it’s great that there is this emphasis on child care.” But there are others who say child care is not the biggest problem women in the trades face, she continued: “They say yes, child care matters, but nondiscrimination matters, non-harassment matters, proper outreach matters.”

If companies solely focus on subsidizing child care or providing priority enrollment, their employees could be taking slots from the existing child care pool. “We’ve been pretty adamant that any sort of demand-side solution — so making child care more affordable for families — has to be partnered with a plan to build supply,” said Lea Woods, a senior policy associate at The Century Foundation, a left-of-center think tank that works on public policy issues like child care.

For that reason, the department also recently announced a voluntary “women in construction framework” that companies receiving these grants can commit to in order to achieve Raimondo’s goal of doubling the number of women in construction by the year 2030. The framework is basically a series of best practices that tradeswomen have said are needed to boost their workforce numbers, said Hegewisch.

It includes setting goals on CHIPS-funded projects to increase the number of women on site, building partnerships with community organizations that already work to recruit and train women, investing in career pathways for women in the trades, and making sure that workplaces are free of discrimination.

Hegewisch, who has been researching women in construction and workforce development for nearly two decades, said there is something exciting about the present moment. Other federal agencies, including the departments of Transportation and Energy, which have billions in funding to dole out for infrastructure and clean energy projects, are also finding ways to bring more women into the workforce. And the staff making it happen, she said, “are mostly women who really want to make a difference.”

But being able to hold companies accountable will be essential for progress. Hegewisch is feeling hopeful that another federal development could help: The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs plans to reinstate a requirement for construction companies to report employee demographic data each month. Federal contractors are supposed to ensure that women perform 6.9 percent of construction project hours for any given project — but without tracking it’s impossible to hold them accountable. Creating this rule is one way to give the government more oversight, she said.

“What is new now is there is so much money around,” said Hegewisch. “It’s public money and that money really comes with expectations.”