WASHINGTON (AP) — The high cost of caring for children and the elderly has forced women out of the workforce, devastated family finances and left professional caretakers in low-wage jobs — all while slowing economic growth.
That families are suffering is not up for debate. As the economy emerges as a theme in this presidential election, the Democratic and Republican candidates have sketched out ideas for easing costs that reveal their divergent views about family.
On this topic, the two tickets have one main commonality: Both of the presidential candidates — and their running mates — have, at one point or another, backed an expanded child tax credit.
Delaney Griffin, center, plays with toddlers at the child care center where she works, March 13, 2024, in Lexington, Ky. (AP Photo/Dylan Lovan, File)
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican, has declined to answer questions about how he would make child care more affordable, even though it was an issue he tackled during his own administration. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, has a long history of pushing policies that would encourage Americans to have families, floating ideas like giving parents votes for their children. Just this month, Vance said he wants to raise the child tax credit to $5,000. But Vance has opposed government spending on child care, arguing that many children benefit from having one parent at home as caretaker.
The candidates’ care agendas could figure prominently into their appeal to suburban women in swing states, a coveted demographic seen as key to victory in November. Women provide two-thirds of unpaid care work — valued at $1 trillion annually — and are disproportionately impacted when families can’t find affordable care for their children or aging parents. And the cost of care is an urgent problem: Child care prices are rising faster than inflation.
Kamala Harris: Increase the child tax credit
When Harris addressed the Democratic National Convention, she talked first about her own experience with child care. She was raised mostly by a single mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who worked long hours as a breast cancer researcher. Among the people who formed her family’s support network was “Mrs. Shelton, who ran the day care below us and became a second mother.”
As vice president, Harris worked behind the scenes in Congress on Biden’s proposals to establish national paid family leave, make prekindergarten universal and invest billions in child care so families wouldn’t pay more than 7% of their income. She announced, too, the administration’s actions to lower copays for families using federal child care vouchers, and to raise wages for Medicaid-funded home health aides. Before that, her track record as a senator included pressing for greater labor rights for domestic workers, including nannies and home health aides who may be vulnerable to exploitation.
What to know about the 2024 Election
This month at a community college in North Carolina, Harris outlined her campaign’s economic agenda, which includes raising the child tax credit to as much as $3,600 and giving families of newborns even more — $6,000 for the child’s first year.
This combination photo shows Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at an event, Aug. 15, 2024, in Bedminster, N.J., left, and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Raleigh, N.C., Aug. 16, 2024. (AP Photo)
“That is a vital — vital year of critical development of a child, and the costs can really add up, especially for young parents who need to buy diapers and clothes and a car seat and so much else,” she told the audience. Her running mate selection of Tim Walz, who established paid leave and a child tax credit as governor of Minnesota, has also buoyed optimism among supporters.
Donald Trump: Few specifics, but some past support
For voters grappling with the high cost of child care, Trump has offered little in the way of solutions. During the June presidential debate, CNN moderator Jake Tapper twice asked Trump what he would do to lower child care costs. Both times, he failed to answer, instead pivoting to other topics. His campaign platform is similarly silent. It does tackle the cost of long-term care for the elderly, writing that Republicans would “support unpaid Family Caregivers through Tax Credits and reduced red tape.”
The silence marks a shift from his first campaign, when he pitched paid parental leave, though it was panned by critics because his proposal excluded fathers. When he reached the White House, the former president sought $1 billion for child care, plus a parental leave policy at the urging of his daughter and policy adviser, Ivanka Trump. Congress rejected both proposals, but Trump succeeded in doubling the child tax credit and establishing paid leave for federal employees.
In his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump said he was “proud to be the first president to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave, so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child.”
This year, there are signs that his administration might not pursue the same agenda, including his selection of Vance as a running mate. In 2021, before he joined the Senate, Vance co-authored an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal opposing a proposal to invest billions in child care to make it more affordable for families. He and his co-author said expanding child care subsidies would lead to “unhappier, unhealthier children” and that having fewer mothers contributing to the economy might be a worthwhile trade-off.
Vance has floated policies that would make it easier for a family to live off of a single income, making it possible for some parents to stay home while their partners work. Along with his embrace of policies he calls pro-family, he has tagged people who do not have or want children as “sociopaths.” He once derided Harris and other rising Democratic stars as “childless cat ladies,” even though Harris has two stepchildren — they call her “Momala” — and no cats.
Even without details about new care policies, Trump believes that families would ultimately get a better deal under his administration.
The Trump-Vance campaign has attacked Harris’ record on the economy and said the Biden administration’s policies have only made things tougher for families, pointing to recent inflation.
“Harris … has proudly and repeatedly celebrated her role as Joe Biden’s co-pilot on Bidenomics,” said Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokeswoman. “The basic necessities of food, gas and housing are less affordable, unemployment is rising, and Kamala doesn’t seem to care.”
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Education vaulted to the forefront of conversations about the presidential race when Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked for roughly two decades in public schools, as a geography teacher and football coach. He has championed investments in public education: For example, in March 2023, he signed a bill to make school meals free to all students in public schools.
Harris, a former U.S. senator and attorney general in California, has less experience in education than her running mate. But her record suggests that she would back policies to make child care more affordable, protect immigrant and LGBTQ+ students and promote broader access to higher education through free community college and loan forgiveness. Like Walz, she has defended schools and teachers against Republican charges that they are “indoctrinating” young people; she has also spoken about her own experience of being bused in Berkeley, California, as part of a program to desegregate the city’s schools.
Harris and Walz have been endorsed by both the country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which tend to support Democratic candidates.
We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Republican ticket’s education ideas.
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Early childhood
Child care
Harris has been a vocal supporter of child care legislation during her time in the Biden administration, though the proposals have had a mixed record of success.
During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided $39 billion in child care aid to help keep programs afloat.
The administration lowered the cost of child care for some military families and supported raising pay for federally funded Head Start teachers to create parity with public school teachers.
Earlier this year, Harris announced a new federal rule that would reduce lower child care costs for low-income families that receive child care assistance through a federally funded program. That same rule also requires states to pay child care providers on a more reliable basis.
Walz has also supported child care programs as governor of Minnesota. Earlier this year, he announced a new $6 million child care grant program aimed at expanding child care capacity, which followed a 2023 grant program that cemented pandemic-era support so programs could increase wages for child care workers. — Jackie Mader
Family leave and tax benefits
As soon as she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July, Harris reaffirmed her support for paid family leave, which also was part of the platform she proposed as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Harris provided the tie-breaking Senate vote that temporarily increased the child tax credit during the pandemic and has proposed making that tax credit permanent.
In 2021, the Biden administration proposed a universal preschool program as part of a multi-trillion-dollar social spending plan called Build Back Better. The plan ultimately failed to win backing from the Senate.
Harris has played a key role in leading the Biden administration’s AI initiatives, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT. Biden signed an executive order on AI in October 2023, which directed the Education Department to develop within a year resources, policies and guidance on AI and to create an “AI toolkit” for schools.
While Harris hasn’t specifically addressed education technology, in the Biden administration, the Education Department earlier this year released the National Education Technology Plan to serve as a blueprint for schools on how to implement technology in education, how to address inequities in the use and design of ed tech and how to offer ways to bridge the country’s digital divide.
In 2023, the current administration announced several new initiatives to tackle cybersecurity threats in K-12 schools, including a three-year pilot program through the Federal Communications Commission thatwill provide up to $200 million to help school districts that are eligible for FCC’s E-Rate program cover the cost of cybersecurity services and equipment. — Javeria Salman
Immigrant students
Harris has vowed to protect those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which delays deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The Biden administration has also used its bully pulpit to remind states and school districts that all children regardless of immigration status have a constitutional right to a free public education. As a senator in 2018, Harris sponsored legislation designed to reunite migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, although family separation has continued on a much smaller scale in the Biden administration. In Minnesota, Walz signed legislation that starting next year will provide free public college tuition to undocumented students from low-income families. — Neal Morton
LGBTQ+ students and Title IX
Harris and Walz have both expressed support for LGBTQ+ students and teachers. As a senator, Harris supported the Equality Act in 2019, which would have expanded protections in the Civil Rights Act on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in education, among other areas. In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Harris decried the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws passed by Florida and other states in recent years. Walz has a long history of supporting LGBTQ+ students in Minnesota, where he was the faculty adviser of Mankato West High School’s first Gay-Straight Alliance club in the 1990s. In 2021, Walz signed an executive order restricting insurance coverage for so-called conversion therapy for minors and directing a state agency to investigate potential “discriminatory practice related to conversion therapy.” Walz signed an executive order in 2023 protecting gender-affirming health care. Earlier this year, he signed a law barring libraries from banning books based on ideology; book bans nationwide have largely targeted LGTBQ+-themed books.
The Biden administration announced significant rule changes to Title IX in 2024 that undid some of the changes the Trump administration made, including removing a mandate for colleges to have live hearings and cross-examinations when investigating sexual assaults on campus. The current administration also expanded protections for students based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which had been temporarily blocked in more than two dozen states and in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. — Ariel Gilreath
Native students
As vice president, Harris worked in an administration that promised to improve education for Native Americans, including a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages. The president’s infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, created a $3 billion program to broaden access to high-speed internet on tribal lands — a major barrier for students trying to learn at home during the pandemic. During his time as governor, Walz signed legislation last year to make college tuition-free for Native American students in Minnesota and required K-12 teachers to complete training on Native American history. Walz also required every state agency, including the department of education, to appoint tribal-state liaisons and formally consult with tribal governments.
Walz spent part of his early career teaching in small rural schools, including on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. — N.M.
School choice
Harris, who was endorsed by the nation’s largest public school teachers unions, has voiced support for public schools, but has said little about school vouchers or school choice. Walz does not support private-school vouchers, opposing statewide private-school voucher legislation introduced in 2021 by Republicans in Minnesota. — A.G.
School meals
One of Walz’s signature legislative achievements was supporting a bill that provides free school breakfasts and lunches to public and charter school students in Minnesota, regardless of household income. Walz, who signed the law in 2023, made Minnesota one of only eight states to have a universal school meal policy. The new law is expected to cost about $480 million over the next two years.
The Biden administration also expanded access to free school lunch by making it easier for schools to provide food without collecting eligibility information on every child’s family. — Christina A. Samuels
School prayer
The Biden administration has sought to protect students from feeling pressured into praying in schools. Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal Education Department published updated guidance saying that while the Constitution permits school employees to pray during the workday, they may not “compel, coerce, persuade, or encourage students to join in the employee’s prayer or other religious activity.” — Caroline Preston
Special education
As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris released a “children’s agenda” in 2019 that, among other provisions, called for a large boost in special education spending.
When Congress first passed the federal law that is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it authorized spending to cover up to 40 percent of the “excess costs” of educating students with disabilities compared to their peers. But Congress has never come close to meeting that goal, and today the federal government distributes only about 15 percent of the total cost of educating students with disabilities. The shortfall is “immoral,” Harris told members of the National Education Association at a 2019 candidates forum.
The Biden administration also has proposed large increases in special education spending, but proposals for full funding of special education have not made it through Congress. — C.A.S.
Student mental health, school safety
As California attorney general, Harris created a Bureau of Children’s Justice to address childhood trauma, among other issues. She has spoken out about the mental health toll of trauma, including from poverty, and the need for more resources and “culturally competent” mental health providers. But a 2011 law she pushed for as attorney general allowing parents of chronically absent students to be criminally charged later drew criticism for its toll on families, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic. Harris has said she regrets the law’s “unintended consequences.”
As vice president, Harris leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was created after lobbying by survivors of school shootings to support gun safety regulations. She has touted the administration’s efforts to prevent school shootings, including a grant program that has awarded roughly $500 million to schools for “evidence-based solutions,” including anonymous reporting systems for threats and training for school employees on preventing school violence.
In Minnesota, Walz’s 2022 budget called for $210 million in spending to help schools support students experiencing mental health challenges. “As a former classroom teacher, I know that students carry everything that happens outside the classroom into the classroom every day, and this is why it is imperative that our students get the resources they deserve,” he said. — C.P.
Teachers unions, pandemic recovery
The Biden administration has close ties to the nations’ largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the latter of which is the largest labor union of any kind in the country. First lady Jill Biden, who teaches community college courses, is a member of the NEA. Walz, a former teacher, is also an NEA member.
The administration was criticized for discussing with the AFT what kinds of safety measures should accompany the reopening of public schools after the pandemic.
Since 2021, the Biden administration has poured billions into helping public schools recover from the pandemic in various ways: to pay for more staff and tutors and upgrade facilities to improve air conditioning and ventilation, among other things. However, academic performance has yet to rebound, and the recovery has been uneven, with wealthier white students more likely to have made up ground lost during remote classes and Black and Latino students less likely to have done so.
The two unions, which had supported reelecting Biden, quickly threw their support to Harris and Walz. “Educators are fired up and united to get out and elect the Harris-Walz ticket,” NEA President Becky Pringle said after Harris named Walz as her running mate. “We know we can count on a continued and real partnership to expand access to free school meals for students, invest in student mental health, ensure no educator has to carry the weight of crushing student debt and do everything possible to keep our communities and schools safe.” — Nirvi Shah
Teaching about U.S. history and race
Both Harris and Walz have pushed back against Republican-led attacks on K-12 history instruction and efforts to minimize classroom conversations around slavery and race. Shortly after taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration dissolved President Donald Trump’s 1776 commission. In July 2023, Harris criticized a new history standard in Florida that said the experience of being enslaved had given people skills “for their personal benefit.”
As governor, Walz released an education plan calling for more “inclusive” instruction that is “reflective of students of color and Indigenous students.” It also called for anti-bias training for school staff, the establishment of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion center at the Minnesota Department of Education, and the expansion of efforts to recruit Indigenous teachers and teachers of color. Walz also has advocated for educating students about the Holocaust and other genocides; state bans on teaching about “divisive concepts” in some Republican-led states have chilled such instruction. — C.P.
Title I
Harris’ 2019 “children’s agenda,” from when she was angling to be the Democratic nominee for president, proposed “significantly increasing” Title I, the federal program aimed at educating children from low-income families. The Biden administration also has proposed major increases to Title I spending, but Congress has not enacted those proposals. — C.A.S.
Higher Education
Accreditation
As California attorney general, Harrisurged the federal government in 2016 to revoke federal recognition for the accrediting agency of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, which she hadsuccessfully sued for misleading students and using predatory recruiting practices. The accreditor’s recognition ultimately was removed in 2022.
As vice president, Harris has said little about the accreditation system, which is independently run and federally regulated and acts as a gatekeeper to billions of dollars in federal student aid. But the Biden administration has sought to require accreditors to createminimum standards on student outcomes such as graduation rates and licensure-exam pass rates. —Sarah Butrymowicz
Affirmative action
Harris has long supported affirmative action in college admissions. As California attorney general, she criticized the impact of the state’s 1996 ban at its public colleges. She also filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy when the Supreme Court heard challenges to it in 2012 and 2015.
Last June, Harris criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action the same day it was handed down, calling the decision a “denial of opportunity.” Walz, referring to the decision, wrote on X, “In Minnesota, we know that diversity in our schools and businesses reflects a strong and diverse state.” — Meredith Kolodner
DEI
Harris has not shied away from supporting DEI initiatives, even as they became a focus of attack for Republicans. “Extremist so-called leaders are trying to erase America’s history and dare suggest that studying and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion is a bad thing. They’re wrong,” she wrote on X.
As governor, Walz has taken steps to increase access to higher education across racial groups, including offering tuition-free enrollment at state colleges for residents who are members of a tribal nation. This spring, Walz signed a budget that increased funding for scholarships for students from underrepresented racial groups to teach in Minnesota schools. — M.K.
For-profit colleges
Harris has long been a critic of for-profit colleges. In 2013, as California state attorney general, she sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., eventually obtaining a more than $1.1 billion settlement against the defunct company. “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” she said in a press release. As senator, she signed a letter in the summer of 2020 calling for the exclusion of for-profit colleges from Covid-era emergency funding. — M.K.
Free college
The Biden administration repeatedly has proposed making community college free for students regardless of family income. The administration also proposed making college free for students whose families make less than $125,000 per year if the students attend a historically Black college, tribal college or another minority-serving institution.
In 2023, Walz signed a bill that made two- and four-year public colleges in Minnesota free for students whose families make less than $80,000 per year. The North Star Promise Program works by paying the remaining tuition after scholarships and grants have been applied, so that students don’t have to take out loans to pay for school. — Olivia Sanchez
Free/hate speech
Following nationwide campus protests against the war in Gaza, Biden said, “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, where it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.” His Education Department is investigating dozens of complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia on K-12 and college campuses, a number that has spiraled since the start of the war. — O.S.
Pell grants
The Pell grant individual maximum award has increased by $900 to $7,395 since the beginning of the Biden administration, part of its goal to double the maximum award by 2029. Education experts say that when the Pell grant program began in the 1970s, it covered roughly 75 percent of the average tuition bill but today covers only about one-third. They say doubling the Pell grant would make it easier for low-income students to earn a degree. The administration tried several times to make Pell grants available to undocumented students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but has been unsuccessful. — O.S.
Student loan forgiveness
In 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harrisproposed forgiving loans for Pell grant recipients who operated businesses in disadvantaged communities for a minimum of three years. As vice president, she was reportedly instrumental in pushing Biden to announce a sweeping debt cancelation policy.
The policy, which would have eliminated up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers under a certain income level, ultimately was blocked by the Supreme Court. Since then, the Biden administration has used other existing programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, to cancel more than $168 billion in federal student debt.
Harris has regularly championed these moves. In April, for instance, she participated in a round-table discussion on debt relief, touting what the administration had done. “That’s more money in their pocket to pay for things like child care, more money in their pocket to get through the month in terms of rent or a mortgage,” she said of those who had loans forgiven.
But challenges remain. In August, a federal appeals court issued a stay on a Biden plan, known as the SAVE plan, which aimed to allow enrolled borrowers to cut their monthly payments and have their debts forgiven more quickly than they currently can. — S.B.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Sarah Butrymowicz, Ariel Gilreath, Meredith Kolodner, Jackie Mader, Neal Morton, Caroline Preston, Javeria Salman, Christina A. Samuels, Olivia Sanchez and Nirvi Shah
Hello! I’m excited to be back at Hechinger after spending the past academic year as a Spencer Fellow at the Columbia Journalism School. This past year was eye-opening and invigorating. I spent the bulk of my time researching and reporting a child care policy investigation, which will be published this fall. I also spent time digging into child care quality and systems, including visits around the country and to Scandinavia.
Some highlights:
In November, I visited Birmingham, Alabama, with the nonprofit Small Magic, to learn about local efforts to improve staff-to-child interactions in child care programs. This visit will be the subject of one of my next newsletters.
In February, I spent an abnormally warm few days in Des Moines, Iowa, to discern the needs of providers amidst debate over controversial child care legislation that would allow teen child care employees to work unsupervised. This child care policy investigation will publish later this year.
In what has been a highlight of my reporting career, I spent a week in April visiting child care programs in Oslo, Norway. These outdoor-focused, play-based programs are organized around a Norwegian law that requires that child care programs “acknowledge the intrinsic value of childhood” and “contribute to well-being and joy.” I can’t wait to share that story with you, which will publish this fall with the Christian Science Monitor.
Lastly, this spring, two mothers in New York City showed me how stringent and inflexible child care subsidy rules affect families. That story will be published later this year as well.
As I finish up those fellowship stories, I have a long list of additional early childhood stories I’m jumping into, including a look at kindergarten readiness, access to field trips and enrichment for elementary students and deep dives into specific aspects of child care quality. I’ll be keeping an eye on the implications of the election and policy proposals from both parties. I also want to know what you would like to see from me during the next year. Please feel free to reply here—it will go directly to my inbox—to share any tips or story ideas.
Finally, I’d like to extend a huge thank you to my colleagues Ariel Gilreath and Sarah Carr for the thoughtful, detailed early ed stories they published while I was gone, as well as for the support of Hechinger’s editors, which allowed me to take advantage of this unique opportunity. I look forward to hearing from you, our readers, and thank you, as always, for following our work!
This story about child care policy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish.
Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage and its lobbying arm, Heritage Action, said in an interview with USA TODAY that Project 2025 should be seen “like a menu from the Cheesecake Factory.” No one president could take on all these changes, he said. “It’s a manual for conservative policy thought.”
The fast-changing political landscape makes it difficult to say which of these proposals might be taken up by Trump if he wins reelection. He has claimed to know nothing about it, though many of his allies were involved in drafting it. The exit of President Joe Biden from the presidential race may have an impact on Project 2025 that is still unknown. Finally, many of the broadest proposals in the document, such as changes to Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, would require congressional action, not just an order from the White House.
However, it remains a useful document for outlining the priorities of those who would likely play a part in a new Trump administration. The Hechinger Report created this reference guide that digs into the Project 2025 wishlist for education.
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Early childhood
Child care for military families
Project 2025 calls for expanding child care for military families, who have access to programs that are often upheld as premier examples of high-quality care in America. – Jackie Mader
Head Start and child care
Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year. Most Head Start children are served in center-based programs, which have an outsized role in rural areas and prioritize enrolling a certain percentage of young children with disabilities who often struggle to find child care elsewhere. Head Start also provides a critical funding and resource stream to other private child care programs that meet Head Start standards, including home-based programs. – J. M.
Home-based child care
A conservative administration should also prioritize funding for home-based child care rather than “universal day care” in programs outside the home, Project 2025 says. That funding would include money for parents to stay home with a child or to pay for “familial, in-home” care, proposals that could be appealing to some early childhood advocates who have long called for more resources for informal care and stay-at-home parents. – J. M.
On-site child care
If out-of-home child care is necessary, Congress should offer incentives for on-site child care, Project 2025 says, because it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.” Early childhood advocates have been wary of such proposals because they tie child care access to a specific job. It also calls on Congress to clarify within the Fair Labor Standards Act that an employer’s expenses for providing such care are not part of the employee’s pay.– J. M.
K-12 education
Data collection
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” should release student performance data based on “family structure” — in addition to existing categories such as race and socioeconomic status — Project 2025 argues. Family structure, the document says, is “one of the most important — if not the most important — factor influencing student educational achievement and attainment.” The document goes on to endorse “natural family structure” of a heterosexual, two-parent household, “because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” — Sarah Butrymowicz
LGBTQ students
Project 2025 advocates a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It calls for agencies to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’”
The plan also calls on Congress and state lawmakers to require schools to refer to students by the names on their birth certificates and the pronouns associated with their biological sex, unless they have written permission from parents to refer to them otherwise.
The plan also equates transgender issues with child abuse and pornography, and proposes that school libraries with books deemed offensive be punished. — Ariel Gilreath
Privatization
In place of a federal Education Department, the blueprint calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of “advancing education freedom.”
The document specifically highlights the education savings account program in Arizona, the first state to open school vouchers up to all families. Programs like Arizona’s have few, if any, restrictions on who can access the funding. Project 2025 also calls for education savings accounts for schools under federal jurisdiction, such as those run by the Department of Defense or the Bureau of Indian Education.
In addition, Project 2025 calls on Congress to look into creating a federal scholarship tax credit to “incentivize donors to contribute” to nonprofit groups that grant scholarships for private school tuition or education materials. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton
School meals
The federal school meals program should be scaled back to ensure that only children from low-income families are receiving the benefit, the document says. Policy changes under the Obama administration have made it easier for entire schools or districts to provide free meals to students without families needing to submit individual eligibility paperwork. — Christina A. Samuels
Special education
Project 2025 says that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides $14.2 billion in federal money for the education of school-aged children with disabilities, should be mostly converted to “no-strings” block grants to individual states. Lawmakers should also consider making a portion of the federal money payable directly to parents of children with disabilities, it says, so they can use it for tutoring, therapies or other educational materials. This would be similar to education savings accounts in place in Arizona and Florida.
The blueprint also calls for rescinding a policy called “Equity in IDEA.” Under that policy, districts are required to evaluate if schools are disproportionately enrolling Black, Native American and other ethnic minority students in special education. Districts must also track how these students are disciplined, and if they are more likely than other students in special education to be placed in classrooms separate from their general education peers. Current rules, which Project 2025 would eliminate, require that districts that have significant disparities in this area must use 15 percent of their federal funding to address those problems. — C.A.S.
Teaching about race
Project 2025 elevates concerns among members of the political right that educating students about race and racism risks promoting bias against white people. The document discusses the legal concept of critical race theory, and argues that when it is used in teacher training and school activities such as “mandatory affinity groups,” it disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.”
The document calls for legislation requiring schools to adopt proposals “that say no individual should receive punishment or benefits based on the color of their skin,” among other recommendations. It also calls for a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that would give families a “fair hearing in court” if they believed the federal government had enforced policies undermining their right to raise their children. — Caroline Preston
Title I
This program, funded at a little over $18 billion for fiscal 2024, is the largest federal program for K-12 schools and is designed to help children from low-income families. The conservative blueprint would encourage lawmakers to make the program a block grant to states, with few restrictions on how it can be used — and, over 10 years, to phase it out entirely. Additionally, it says, lawmakers should allow parents in Title I schools to use part of that funding for educational savings accounts that could be spent on private tutoring or other services. — C.A.S.
Higher education
Affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion
The document calls for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that maintain affirmative action or DEI policies. That position matches the views expressed by Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, about the use of race in college admissions and beyond. — Liz Willen
Data collection
In higher education, the proposal argues that college graduation and earnings data need a “risk adjustment” that factors in the types of students served by a particular institution. While selective colleges tend to post the highest graduation rates and student earnings, they also tend to enroll the least-“risky” students. A risk adjustment methodology could benefit community colleges, which often have low graduation rates but enroll many nontraditional students who face obstacles to earning a degree. It would also likely benefit for-profit colleges, which similarly tend to accept most applicants. Historically, for-profit schools have received scrutiny under Democratic administrations for poor outcomes and for allegedly misleading students about the value of the education they provide. Republican administrations typically have supported less regulation of for-profit institutions. — S.B.
Parent PLUS loans and Pell grants
The blueprint calls for the elimination of the Parent PLUS loan program, arguing that it is redundant “because there are many privately provided alternatives available.” Originally created for relatively affluent families, the PLUS loan program has become a crucial way for lower- and middle-income families to pay for college. In recent years, it has sparked criticism due to rising default rates and fewer protections than are afforded to otherstudent loan borrowers.
At present, interest rates for private loans are significantly lower than Parent PLUS rates, but they come with fewer protections, and it is more difficult to get approved for a private-bank loan. Project 2025 would also get rid of PLUS loans for graduate students.
If the federal PLUS programs were eliminated, it could stem one portion of the rising tide of families’ education debt, but it would also make the path to paying for college more difficult for some families.
Project 2025 does not call for a change to the Pell grant program, which provides federal funding for students from low-income families to attend college. Some advocates have called for doubling the annual maximum allotment, which is $7,395 for the 2024-25 school year, far below the cost to attend many colleges. — Meredith Kolodner and Olivia Sanchez
Student loan forgiveness
Project 2025 would end the prospect of student loan forgiveness, which has already been largely blocked by federal courts; the Biden administration, in a sort of game of Whac-a-Mole, has proposed still more forgiveness programs that are being fought by Republican state attorneys general and others. Project 2025 would also dramatically restrict what’s known as “borrower defense to repayment,” which forgives loans borrowed to pay for colleges that closed or have been found to use illegal or deceptive marketing. Largely restricting the Education Department to collecting statistics, Project 2025 would shift responsibility for student loans to the Treasury Department. — Jon Marcus
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Jackie Mader, Christina A. Samuels, Sarah Butrymowicz, Ariel Gilreath, Neal Morton, Caroline Preston, Liz Willen, Olivia Sanchez, Meredith Kolodner and Jon Marcus
Understanding the tax impact of more affordable care
Here’s the problem: your child-care expense deduction will decrease if you pay less to your child-care provider. As a result, your taxes payable will likely increase, depending on your income level. A reduced child-care expense deduction will also increase the net income on your tax return. This is the figure your refundable tax credits, like the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) are based on. These important monthly benefits, therefore, could shrink.
To understand this fully, take a look your tax return from last year. The child-care expense used as a deduction is found on line 21400 after being calculated on form T778. Net income is at line 23600. That important line is used for government “income testing” for a number of provisions on the return, including refundable tax credits like the Canada Child Benefit, the Canada Worker’s Benefit and the GST/HST Credit. It will also determine how much OAS (Old Age Security) seniors will get, or whether employment insurance (EI) benefits will be clawed back. Just as important, non-refundable tax credits, like the spousal amount, may be affected.
When your net income goes up because of your lower child-care expenses, these benefits are reduced, unfortunately.
Invest to offset a reduced net income
There is some good news for astute investors, howeve,. To keep your family’s net income low despite the reduction in your child-care expense deduction, make an RRSP (registered retirement savings plan) contribution. The resulting RRSP tax deduction reduces your net income and your taxable income and, in the process, works to increase income-tested refundable and non-refundable tax credits too! Check out how much RRSP room you have on your notice of assessment from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to make the contribution.
The same effect occurs if you can claim a deduction for contributions made to the first home savings account (FHSA). An annual deduction of up to $8,000 may be claimable.
Maximize your child-care claim
The final way to shore up the tax benefits from your child-care expenses is to make sure you claim all of them and to your best tax advantage.
Child-care expenses are often missed entirely by parents. If this has happened to you, did you know you can go back and adjust prior filed returns to make that claim and receive the tax-credit benefits and tax refunds you missed? Especially if you are a first-time filer, be warned, however, that the claim for child care is complex and often audited. Be prepared to provide receipts to justify your claim.
It’s also important to know that the spouse with the lower income is the one that must claim child-care expenses, except in certain defined circumstances: when the lower earner is unable to care for the children due to a mental or physical infirmity, is in full time attendance at a qualifying school, or in hospital or incarcerated for at least two weeks, for example. Another exception is when there is a breakdown in the conjugal relationship for at least 90 days, but a reconciliation takes place within the first 60 days of the year. The usual $5,000, $8,000 or $11,000 maximum amounts claimable by the higher earner may be reduced, however, with a maximum weekly calculation.
Last week, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked me to moderate what he called “The Real Debate.”
Kennedy was angry with CNN because it wouldn’t let him join its Trump-Biden debate.
His people persuaded Elon Musk to carry his Real Debate on X, formerly Twitter. They asked me to give RFK Jr. the same questions, with the same time limits.
I agreed, hoping to hear some good new ideas.
I didn’t.
As you know, President Joe Biden slept, and former President Donald Trump lied. Well, OK, Biden lied at least nine times, too, even by CNN’s count.
Kennedy was better.
But not much.
He did acknowledge that our government’s deficit spending binge is horrible. He said he’d cut military spending. He criticized unscientific COVID-19 lockdowns and said nice words about school choice.
But he, too, dodged questions, blathered on past time limits, and pushed big government nonsense like, “Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs.”
Give me a break.
Independence Day is this week.
As presidential candidates promise to subsidize flying cars (Trump), free community college tuition (Biden), and “affordable” housing via 3 percent government-backed bonds (Kennedy), I think about how bewildered and horrified the Founding Fathers would be by such promises.
On the Fourth of July almost 250 years ago, they signed the Declaration of Independence, marking the birth of our nation.
They did not want life dominated by politicians. They wanted a society made up of free individuals. They believed every human being has “unalienable rights” to life, liberty, and (justly acquired) property.
The blueprints created by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution gradually created the freest and most prosperous nation in the history of the world.
Before 1776, people thought there was a “divine right” of kings and nobles to rule over them.
America succeeded because the Founders rejected that belief.
In the Virginia Declaration of Rights, George Mason wrote, “All power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.”
By contrast, Kennedy and Biden make promises that resemble the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” U.N. bureaucrats say every person deserves “holidays with pay…clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”
The Founders made it clear that governments should be limited. They didn’t think we had a claim on our neighbor’s money. We shouldn’t try to force them to pay for our food, clothing, housing, prescription drugs, college tuition.
They believe you have the right to be left alone to pursue happiness as you see fit.
For a while, the U.S. government stayed modest. Politicians mostly let citizens decide our own paths, choose where to live, what jobs to take, and what to say.
There were a small number of “public servants.” But they weren’t our bosses.
Patrick Henry declared: “The governing persons are the servants of the people.”
Yet now there are 23 million government employees. Some think they are in charge of everything.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), pushing her Green New Deal, declared herself “the boss.”
The Biden administration wants to decide what kind of car you should drive.
During the pandemic, politicians ordered people to stay home, schools to shut down and businesses to close.
Then, as often happens in “Big Government World,” people harmed by government edicts ask politicians to compensate them.
After governments banned Fourth of July fireworks, the American Pyrotechnics Association requested “relief in the next Senate Covid package to address the unique and specific costs to this industry,” reportedThe New York Times. “The industry hopes Congress will earmark $175 million for it in another stimulus bill.”
Today the politically connected routinely lobby passionately to get bigger chunks of your money.
For some of you, the last straw was when the administration demanded you inject a chemical into your body.
When some resisted vaccinations, Biden warned, “Our patience is wearing thin.”
His patience? Who does he think he is? My father? My king?
At least Kennedy doesn’t say things like that. But he does say absurd things. In a few weeks I’ll release my sit-down interview with him, and you can decide for yourself whether he’s a good candidate.
This Fourth of July, remember Milton Friedman’s question: “How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?”
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
Watch The Real Debate as it was meant to be with all three candidates — Kennedy, Biden, Trump.#TheRealDebate has already been seen more than 11 million times. pic.twitter.com/W27pXIOLkd
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 30, 2024
What happened: The D.C. Council maintained funding for the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, the nation’s first publicly funded program intended to raise the pay of child care workers in the district and provide them with free or low-cost health insurance.
The back story: In the face of a $700 million budget shortfall, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed cutting the $87 million program to replenish the city’s diminished reserve fund. The final budget passed by the council in June keeps the $70 million of the funding in place. The budget was unanimously approved by the 13-member council on June 12.
What’s next: Several proposed rule changes are also expected to pass that could save money for the fund, including capping participants at 4,100 and limiting the program to workers with a child development credential or higher, said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC, which operates two centers in the city. Advocates are pushing to keep the salary increases and health benefits for child care workers in place, but expect to learn more about how the cuts will impact the program by September 3, when a task force is set to present its recommendations.
“We know some things are going to be cut, we just don’t know exactly what. We’re trying to keep it as whole as possible,” said LaDon Love, executive director of SPACEs in Action, a nonprofit organization that supported the fund.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
LEXINGTON, Neb. — Naidid Aguilera was feeling stuck.
Stuck at her job at a Tyson meatpacking plant. Stuck in a central Nebraska town after emigrating from Mexico roughly 15 years earlier with her husband. Instead of working in her dream role as an elementary school teacher, she spent her days hauling cow organs for inspection.
Then she learned about one group’s effort to expand access to high-quality child care here, specifically for families who speak little English, through free training and help navigating state licensing laws. The classes would be entirely in Spanish, eliminating one of the single-biggest hurdles for expanding care in this town of 11,000, where 2 out of 3 residents are Hispanic. For years, it had just one Spanish-speaking child care provider.
As Aguilera dialed the phone to sign up for classes, she recalled feeling overcome with emotion because she had believed her goal of working with children was left back in Mexico.
“The only question they really asked me was why I would want to pursue a child care license,” Aguilera said through a Spanish interpreter. “My response was, ‘I want to do more than where I’m at right now at Tyson and move further in life. I’m looking for another opportunity.’”
Through the local advocacy of several organizations, the community will have nine Spanish-speaking providers by this summer — including Aguilera. Although Lexington still has a waiting list of 550 children in need of care, the town’s child care gap has been cut by nearly 100 children with the addition of new providers, according to local data.
A nonprofit group called Communities for Kids, partnering with other organizations, began training providers after community surveys revealed the town’s need for Spanish-language child care. The group, founded in 2017, helps develop quality early care and education programs in Nebraska communities that don’t have enough of them.
“If you can’t communicate, or your culture is different, trusting a white English-speaking woman with your child — that’s a lot of trust,” said Shonna Werth, Communities for Kids’ assistant vice president of early childhood programs.
Shonna Werth, left, talks to Miriam Guedes’ husband, Alberto, along with Maricela Novoa, right, and Stephanie Novoa, far right, at Blooming Daycare. Credit: Lauren Wagner for The Hechinger Report
At the time, with only one bilingual provider, most Hispanic families were shuffling their children among neighbors or family members for care. It was the only way for Spanish-speaking parents to communicate with a provider directly.
Some parents employed by the local meatpacking plants worked split shifts to ensure their children were with someone they could communicate with.
“You wonder, ‘Where are those kids? What experiences are they having?’” Werth said.
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There’s a lack of Spanish-speaking or bilingual early childhood education providers across the nation, said Tania Villarroel, early childhood senior policy analyst for UnidosUS, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization. One of the barriers to growing the child care workforce is the process of getting certified.
“It’s a resource to speak Spanish, but if you don’t have good English skills, it can also be really hard to get those degrees,” Villarroel said. “It benefits Latino children to have a Latino provider because they have the same lived experience, same heritage — it’s easier for them to connect to families, to get more family engagement.”
Recent research from the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families found that Latino families across the United States consider multiple factors when trying to find child care, like schedule flexibility and whether the provider offers culturally responsive care for their children.
“Some [places] serve only Hispanic children, and they have Hispanic providers. But then other sites have no Hispanic children, and probably no Hispanic representation. So we see this sort of segregation going on,” said Julia Mendez, a researcher for the center. “There’s the families who are seeking the care and the families can’t find what they need, because it’s not available.”
Mendez said it’s common for home-based care to be of lower quality for Hispanic families, becauseif their providers don’t speak English, they have fewer opportunities for professional development or credentialing.
Boosting the quality of Lexington’s child care — not just its accessibility — was crucial, Werth said. She joined two local child care advocates, sisters Stephanie and Maricela Novoa, to implement the free training. Maricela Novoa is an early learning bilingual specialist providing assistance to early childhood educators through the Nebraska Department of Education. Stephanie Novoa, a realtor, also works with Communities for Kids and volunteers as a special advocate with the courts.
Maricela Novoa, left, stands with Shonna Werth, center, and Stephanie Novoa, right, outside Naidid Aguilera’s child care center. The three women have been key in increasing child care access for Spanish-speaking families in Lexington, Neb. Credit: Lauren Wagner for The Hechinger Report
The training in Lexington began in 2021 with a program called the “Professional Learning Series,” which included 55 hours of classes on the licensing process or required skills for high-quality early childhood education. The series was taught exclusively in English – and did not attract Spanish-speakers.
Another series followed in 2022, and this time, there was a professional interpreter and headsets available for translation. The class was held every Tuesday night from August through November at the local YMCA, with free child care and food available.
“We were kind of building that foundation of [making] sure there are things that if they want to get licensed, this will be useful for them if and when they ever get there,” Werth said. “Like, let’s not just do training for the sake of training, but training that has a dual purpose. They’re building their education and their skills so that they can have better interactions with the kids they are caring for or as parents, because not all of them are on that trajectory of being a child care provider.”
Werth said when the classes first opened, the goal was to reach five or six participants. Twenty showed up.
“Midway through the classes, participants would bring a neighbor or a friend. And so we had to close the class because it was a small room,” said Maricela Novoa. “It was just that word of mouth, that trust piece — this is safe, this is good. This is something that you’ll value.”
Next was a 10-week business class in 2023, followed by courses on parenting and safety that were provided in English with a Spanish interpreter.
Aguilera said she remembers many long days last spring working at the meatpacking plant, then attending classes in the evening.
“The classes were one after another, but at the same time that was nice because it was just all over at once,” Aguilera said. “I was tired, but it was very worth it.”
Werth said it was slow-going to license the nine women, especially when they ran into language barriers.
“Stephanie and I met with six or eight participants one night. They all brought their licensing packets, and we sat down with them to help them just try to work through that. And [it] took hours to do, which should not be the case,” Werth said.
It took several hours more to help participants navigate an online class. Most of them had little experience working with technology other than their phones. Werth recalled the library closing around them one evening as they helped participants use computers for the first time.
Naidid Aguilera displays many Spanish materials in her new child care center, El Niño Del Tambor Daycare. She recently received her license to operate the center from her home in Lexington, Neb. Credit: Lauren Wagner for The Hechinger Report
Maricela Novoa said the lack of Spanish materials or Spanish-speaking representatives is a constant hurdle for future providers. Even now, a Lexington resident could call a state agency for help but not get anyone on the phone who can speak Spanish.
“It does get tiring, because you’re the only person in the room saying, ‘Hey, is this available in Spanish?’ when there’s a new resource available,” Maricela Novoa said.
Mendez, of the National Research Center on Hispanic Children & Families, said her organization calls these obstacles “administrative burden.”
“It’s true across the board that any barrier, like a language barrier, can keep people out,” Mendez said. “With administrative burden, you have to learn what the resources are, but first, you have to know about them. And then you have to navigate the systems to try to figure out how to get the credential or the support that you’re looking for.”
Just a few years ago, Miriam Guedes was the only Spanish-speaking child care provider in Lexington. She started a daycare on her own after being a paraprofessional at the public school district’s preschool for 19 years.
She obtained her license by herself — an uphill battle, she said, with all the paperwork in English — but soon wanted to do more, although she didn’t know how.
Guedes, whose business is attached to her house, said people started knocking on her door asking if she had room for more kids, but she could take only eight at a time.
“People were coming in, asking for more and more and more,” she said.
She learned about the free training being offered through Communities for Kids and signed up. The training gave her business experience and the skills to expand her certification, allowing her to care for 12 children at once at her center, “Blooming Daycare.” Now she’s a mentor to Aguilera and the other women who are getting licenses.
Children at Miriam Guedes’ child care center, Blooming Daycare, provided family photos and copied them into drawings for her picture wall. Credit: Lauren Wagner for The Hechinger Report
Aguilera opened her own child care business, “El Niño Del Tambor Daycare” early this spring. The name means “little drummer boy.” It’s in her basement, recently renovated to include cribs, small chairs and a table, organizers filled with colorful books and crafts, an alphabet rug and more. Her new license is taped to a marker board at the entrance.
She enrolled her first child mid-March and now has four children in her care, in addition to two of her own children. Aguilera said she could easily see herself hiring an assistant and taking on more children in the near future.
It’s something that changed her life for the better, she said.
“When I first started taking in kids, I kind of broke down a little bit because it came full circle,” Aguilera said. “I didn’t have the opportunity to stay home with my kids. And now I get to do this. I’m so happy.”
This story about child care solutions was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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During the pandemic shutdown, daycare owner Roxana Contreras sold her house when her income evaporated overnight. Maria Teresa Manrique nearly lost her business, and her life, when a family brought Covid into her home daycare.
As an education reporter and editor in Boston during the pandemic, I was struck by the starkly disparate treatment of the state’s strongly unionized K-12 teacher workforce and the less-organized child care workforce, which includes Contreras and Manrique. Those caring for the youngest children frequently had no guaranteed income when their businesses closed; far less access to protective equipment and supplies, like air filtration devices and free, regular Covid testing; and they were pressed to return to in-person work — the kind of hands-on work where social distancing was impossible — many months before the first vaccines were available.
“We were asking those with very low pay … to do these extraordinary things,” Martha Christenson Lees, former director of the Smith College Center for Early Childhood Education, told me at the time.
Nearly all of the half dozen women I interviewed for my 2021 story had been seriously debilitated by Covid in some way: financially, emotionally, medically. And this spring, three years later, with a new report from the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood showing that child care providers are suffering from record rates of anxiety and depression, I decided to check in with this dedicated group of caregivers. Nationally, an estimated 1 million paid caregivers provide child care out of their homes to about 3 million children.
The two I reached, Contreras and Manrique, both immigrants living and working in the Boston area, have had mixed experiences trying to rebuild their businesses over the last four years. The women, who speak Spanish, were interviewed with the help of interpreter Iris Amador.
‘We have learned to value life’
For Contreras, business has slowly but steadily improved over the last three years. With no money coming in from families after mid-March 2020, she was forced to sell her house in Medford, Massachusetts, also home to her daycare, Gummy Bears, to support her family. She began rebuilding Gummy Bears from the basement of a nearby rental in the summer of 2020, yet struggled for over a year to recruit families reluctant to return to group care, and to hire assistants, many of whom, she says, switched in the pandemic to more highly paid jobs as nannies.
A turning point came in late 2021, when she and other Massachusetts child care providers started receiving monthly operations grants distributed by the state. Contreras used the money to increase pay for assistants, making it easier to hire them; and with the worst danger of the pandemic past, more families returned to group care.
Contreras had enough interest from families by early 2023 that she made plans to add a second site, Gummy Bears 2. It opened in another Medford rental space last September. Across the two locations, Gummy Bears serves 16 children. Although someday she hopes to be licensed for 20 across the two sites, “I am content and I am happy with the number we care for now, and I provide employment to other people who need it,” Contreras said. The continuation of the monthly grants since the fall of 2021 has been crucial to rebuilding and growth, she said.
Contreras has a new problem: turning away families. Gummy Bears’ current wait list stretches out to 2026, with families offering deposits on future spots. (Contreras doesn’t accept them.) There’s an increased demand from pre-pandemic days, possibly as a result of fewer child care spots overall, she said.
The pandemic’s major effect on Contreras was giving up home ownership; high interest rates and housing prices have put reclaiming that goal out of reach for now. But there have been gains, too. She is grateful every day for her health. “We have learned to value life,” she said.
Elusive road to stability
For Maria Teresa Manrique, Covid’s devastating effects lingered, repeatedly upsetting her financial stability — and her health. She was hospitalized in late 2020 with a severe case of Covid and never fully regained her strength. “I am vulnerable now to infections in a way that I wasn’t before,” she said.
Manrique, a single mother of a teenage daughter, reopened in February 2021, spurred by financial duress. Twice since, she picked up Covid from a child or parent at her daycare. Most recently, in December, Manrique closed for a little over a week after contracting Covid. She not only ran out of the sick day allotment for providers who serve lower-income children on vouchers — meaning she got no pay for some of the time — but lost two students whose families were impatient about the closure. She now enrolls a total of five children.
“Whenever I achieve some balance, I am still behind,” she said. All of her income goes to cover rent and the family’s basic needs, Manrique added, making it impossible to fully pay off taxes she has owed for the last three years. Two months ago, one of her sisters, who also runs an in-home daycare, was diagnosed with a serious illness, and Manrique helps care for her.
She wanted to close the daycare to support her sister full time, but financially it was impossible.
The whole situation feels untenable — and intractable.
“This has been my work for 20 years and I am used to it,” she said. “It has allowed me to care for my own daughter, as I have been both Mom and Dad to her. But when you have been doing this work for 20 years, there is definitely some exhaustion. … There should be more consideration, I believe, for workers like us.”
This story about child care providers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jacqueline Strickland has spent nearly her entire life caring for children in Washington, D.C., starting at age 7, when she began babysitting her siblings after school, and then more formally at 14, when she began working at a daycare center.
Despite the low pay, Strickland, 59, has stuck with her career, even as colleagues left child care for better-paying jobs at the post office or driving school buses.
“People look at child care providers as, you know, babysitters,” Strickland said. “But early childhood is the foundation. It’s the most important part of a child’s life because of the brain development that takes place.”
Three years ago, the financial landscape changed. Her salary jumped from $57,000 to $75,000 a year, thanks to a massive experiment underway in the nation’s capital, which seeks to solve one of the major drivers of the child care crisis: Most educators don’t make a livable wage.
The city-funded $80 million Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund has been transformational for district child care providers like Strickland; they’ve been able to pay down credit cards, move into new apartments, buy or pay off cars, schedule overdue dental procedures, help care for family members and even buy first homes.
But earlier this year, the roughly 4,000 early educators who have benefited from the pay equity program were dealt a blow by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s 2025 budget proposal. Bowser is suggesting eliminating funding for the program — along with cuts to other agencies — because of a requirement from the District of Columbia’s chief financial officer that the city replenish its depleted reserve fund, she said. That would mean a pay cut for the people who have already received a salary bump.
Educare DC, which provides daycare and Pre-K programs to 240 children in the nation’s capital, has been able to raise the salaries of its employees thanks to the city’s pay equity fund. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
The budget is scheduled to be approved by the D.C. Council in June. The mayor’s office did not return a request for comment about her proposal.
Strickland, who had started the process of buying a home, has now put it on hold. She said that, before the equity fund, she had been waiting for the city to do right by child care providers like her.
“Just to be able to know that you can meet your monthly bills on time and not juggle money. To know that you can buy groceries and buy medication. To be able to afford healthcare and go to the doctor. To be able to put a little aside for retirement. I feel like I’m healthier because I don’t have to stress as much,” said Strickland, who works at an Educare center in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood.
If the mayor’s budget proposal comes to fruition, Strickland will go back to waiting.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic toppled the country’s long-eroding child care system, policymakers in Washington had a vision for tackling the sector’s most intractable challenges, including access, recruitment, retention and pay.
That vision resulted in the pay equity fund, passed by the D.C. Council in 2021. It provides supplemental payments to teachers in licensed child development centers and homes, with the goal of bumping up their pay to match the minimum salaries of D.C. public school teachers with the same credentials. The program has been funded through a tax on residents earning more than $250,000 a year.
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“It’s one piece of a larger law and larger suite of investments meant to support the whole child,” said Anne Gunderson, a senior policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “Specifically, it’s a compensation program meant to disrupt pervasive and centuries-long undervaluing of caregiving, where, due to structural racism and sexism, that’s really disproportionately harming Black and brown women.”
The pay equity program requires teachers to earn more advanced certificates and degrees if they want their salaries to increase. The costs of their tuition and books are covered almost entirely by a child care scholarship from the district in tandem with the pay equity program.
Although the mandate to earn more credentials can be taxing and eats into the time early educators can spend caring for their own families, more than a dozen teachers interviewed for this story said it’s well worth the effort.
Children play on the campus of Educare DC, which has two schools in Washington D.C. northeast quadrant. The program also offers free meals and medical and dental screenings to its students. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
Artia Brown, who has been working at the Educare center in Washington’s Parkside neighborhood for 10 years, graduated with her associate degree this year from Trinity Washington University and is already enrolled in classes in the bachelor’s degree program. She plans to get her master’s degree and doctorate as well.
“I have a long journey ahead of me, but the pay equity really motivated me to go back to school and to make sure I get as much credentialing as I can,” Brown said. “It will pay a livable wage, and people are starting to understand how important early education is.”
The 41-year-old, who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, with her college student son, saw her salary increase from $27,000 before the pay equity program to roughly $37,000 with the supplemental funding. It’s allowed her to pay off her car, start saving and support her two nieces.
Artia Brown, who has worked at Educare DC for 10 years, has seen her salary rise from $27,000 to $37,000 due to supplemental funding from a city pay equity fund. The program is now under threat due to proposed budget cuts. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
The pay equity program also provides funding for child care facilities to offer free or low-cost health insurance to educators and other staff.
“Really what we’re seeing for the first time is an appropriate level of compensation and benefits for a workforce that has really been ignored for far too many years,” Gunderson said.
Early data suggests that the pay equity program has helped the city hire, recruit and retain child care employees.
The research firm Mathematica found that, by the end of 2022, the program’s initial payments had increased child care employment levels in Washington by about 100 additional educators, or 3 percent. Moreover, nearly 2 in 3 educators said that, because of the program, they intend to work in the sector longer than they’d previously planned.
Three “feelings and emotions” dolls on a shelf in a classroom at Educare DC, a daycare center in northeast Washington, D.C. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
And the program’s impact has continued to grow. Comparing child care employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics between 2019 and 2023, Mathematica associated the program with an increase of 219 educators, or nearly 7 percent.
Child care center directors said that they believed the program’s payments were not only influencing their “best” educators’ decisions to stay at their centers, but helping them recruit qualified educators.
Early anecdotal data from the Urban institute shows that quality has increased alongside educator pay. When researchers asked early educators about the statement “Because of the Pay Equity Fund payments, I can better focus on the needs and development of children I work with,” 71 percent somewhat or strongly agreed.
Washington’s efforts to tackle pay equity in the child care sector are unique. While several states began experimenting with increasing the pay of child care employees following the pandemic, they’ve mostly focused on one-time bonuses, with funding from federal pandemic aid, rather than long-term solutions. Maine’s $30 million program, which provides an average monthly stipend of $400 to educators, is one of the largest responses from other states or cities, but doesn’t come close to matching the reach of Washington’s pay equity fund.
“It is really systems reform in a way that I don’t think other states have approached,” said Erica Greenberg, senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy.
Because of the unique nature of the program, Greenberg says that there’s been deep interest from the federal government, states, cities, counties, philanthropists and advocates — all of whom are trying to keep the child care sector afloat.
“They all want to understand how to do something like this,” she says. “D.C. has really been a beacon in that way.”
Yet, as with the rollout of any major new policy, the equity fund has had its share of implementation hiccups.
Chief among them — at least from the educators’ perspective — is that it has sometimes been a hassle to get the money they are due. In 2024, for example, the program switched from making direct payments to teachers to disbursing the money to child care providers, who were then in charge of getting the money to their employees. And the requirements to opt into the program can pose major financial hurdles for smaller centers and home-based providers.
Beyond the particular operating challenges, however, is the program’s solvency.
As educators earn more advanced credentials, the District of Columbia must pay them more — as much as $114,000 for the highest degree earners. As child care centers recruit more teachers, the costs will continue to rise. The mayor considers the natural growth of the program unsustainable, advocates say they’ve been told.
“What I would say is cutting the program or eliminating the program is what’s unsustainable,” said Adam Barragan-Smith, advocacy manager at Educare DC. “The early childhood system in this country is a market failure. Families can’t pay any more. Programs cannot pay teachers any less. The fund has been a really important and game-changing investment so that we don’t have to pass any costs on to families, and we are able to pay teachers what they deserve.”
Artia Brown, a lead teacher at Educare DC, works with one of the children in her class. Brown said the city’s pay equity program will allow providers a livable wage. The program is on the chopping block due to city budget cuts. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
Amber Hodges, 36, is a lead teacher at Bright Beginnings, a center in the southeast quadrant of the city. When her salary went from roughly $43,000 to $52,000 annually, she used the money to buy a car, move into a nicer apartment building closer to work and take her five nieces and nephews back-to-school shopping.
The supplemental funding makes her feel like, finally, after so many years in the industry, the work of early childhood educators is getting the respect it deserves.
“We have the most important age group, and a lot of people just look at us and say, ‘Oh, you’re daycare teachers or babysitters,’” she said. “There is nothing worse for me when you say that to me. What? I am not a babysitter. Not a babysitter. At all.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Across the country, the story for families is virtually the same: Child care is unaffordable for many, hard to find for those who can pay, and financially precarious for day care operators and their employees.
The Biden administration and Congress tried to alleviate some of these problems when the pandemic crippled the child care industry. But as the record $52.5 billion in relief winds down, many states have stepped in with their own solutions.
States have expanded free preschool and early education and helped more families pay for child care, making it low-cost or even free for many. Recognizing that a federal solution is unlikely to materialize anytime soon, policymakers have come up with novel ways to pay for their plans, creating permanent funding sources that will make new programs sustainable.
New Mexico, for instance, has tapped into its petroleum revenue, Washington state put a new tax on investment profits, and Kentucky is incentivizing parents to become child care workers.
And while the largest investments in child care have come from Democrats, Republican state lawmakers across the country are embracing plans to support child care — citing the importance to the economy.
After she gave birth, Marisshia Sigala put on hold plans to start her real estate career. She and her husband — a personal trainer — lived on one paycheck for about two years and realized the cost of child care would be out of reach even if both were working.
Then, in 2022, New Mexico made child care free for nearly all the state’s families, amending the constitution to fund early childhood initiatives with money from leasing state land to oil and gas companies.
The change will bring in an estimated $150 million a year for the early education of children like Mateo. Sigala and her husband qualify because they earn less than 400% of the federal poverty rate, currently about $120,000 a year for a family of four. Mateo is one of more than 21,000 children now benefitting from the subsidies.
Now Sigala, 32, is back at work while Mateo attends Koala Children’s Academy, which specializes in bilingual education.
“Being entrepreneurs, it’s a lot more challenging, and we have to rely on ourselves. We don’t have a paycheck coming in every week,” Sigala said. “It’s been a blessing for us.”
Expanding free child care for families is “making a difference for families in such a profound way,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, New Mexico’s early childhood education secretary. And, she said, it’s helping the people who care for and educate young kids, too.
Groginsky and other state leaders are hoping the massive investment will help blunt the effects of poverty.
“It’s just a really incredible opportunity we have here,” she said.
Washington state is aiming to offer free preschool to all low-income families, and child care vouchers to all low- and moderate-income families by the end of the decade, along with high-quality care for infants and toddlers with developmental concerns.
The state is expanding its programs with help from a new 7% tax on profits made from residents’ financial investments — a levy intended to fall on wealthier people.
When Zaneta Billyzone-Jatta’s daughter Zakiah was born prematurely in 2021, her mother hired a nanny to watch the baby three days a week. A clinical manager for a hospital network, Billyzone-Jatta, 42, had to work while keeping an eye on her daughter the other two days. She felt like she couldn’t give her toddler enough attention, much less address the girl’s developmental concerns like a professional could.
Through a state program for low-income families and kids with challenges like Zakiah, she now sends her daughter to a child care center near her Seattle-area home, free of cost. There, three teachers supervise seven children in Zakiah’s class and diligently document her progress. Occupational and speech therapists see Zakiah at the school and work closely with the teachers.
Billyzone-Jatta said Zakiah has made huge strides at the school. She talks about her days in detail and refers to classmates by name. She has learned to interact with other students, drink from an open cup and share.
“Being a working mother and being able to know that you’re bringing your child to an environment where they’re loved and cared for gives you so much peace,” she said.
But the program helping infants and toddlers like Zakiah is still small, serving fewer than 200 kids statewide. And in November, Washington voters will have a chance to weigh in on the tax in a referendum that could lead to its repeal, endangering the progress the state has made, child care advocates say.
“It would be catastrophic,” said Jon Gould, of Akin, the nonprofit that operates Zakiah’s state-supported child care center.
Rylee Monn, 24, was working at Baptist Health Child Development Center in Lexington when she had her second child, doubling what she paid for her children to attend the same center.
She thought about quitting and getting a night-shift job so she could stay home and care for her children during the day.
“All of my paycheck was going to child care,” Monn said.
Then, in 2023, Kentucky started a program to cover or reduce the cost of day care for parents who work in the child care industry. The program was meant to tackle two challenges at once. Policymakers hoped it would draw more workers into the child care industry, addressing a shortage. And they wanted to provide more low-cost child care for all families.
Now, more than a dozen states are considering or have already adopted policies modeled after the one in Kentucky, according to EdSurge, a publication that focuses on education.
The program has helped the state’s child care industry recruit workers who might otherwise be working in service jobs.
Delaney Griffin, 30, was working in a pizza restaurant last year and pondering her next move with her young family. Her child care costs consumed all but $100 of her biweekly check.
After learning about the child care benefit, she took a job in December with Baptist Health Child Development Center. She now pays about $5 a week. Her older child is in a preschool program.
“The free child care part was like the biggest reason that I actually got to start in child care,” Griffin said.
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This series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions — is produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, including AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post & Courier, and The Seattle Times.
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When Christina Zimmerman returned to teaching last year after maternity leave, she grappled with postpartum depression that she says could have led to quitting her job.
But her school’s onsite day care made all the difference, as she knew her daughter was just a few classrooms away.
“I can be mom and teacher in the same breath,” said Zimmerman, who teaches fourth grade at Endeavor Elementary in Nampa, Idaho. “I’ve dreamed of teaching since second grade. Truthfully, it’s all I’ve wanted to do, but I also want to be there for my child.”
In states such as Idaho and Texas, where funding for early childhood education is limited, some schools are spearheading initiatives to provide quality, affordable child care. It’s a teacher retention tool as much as it is a way to ensure youngsters are prepared when they enter kindergarten.
Caregiver Aline Assis plays with children outside at Little Mustangs Child Learning Academy, in Richardson, Texas. Credit: Elías Valverde II /The Dallas Morning News
Fixing the Child Care Crisis
This story is part of a series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions. It was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
Some districts are transforming donated spaces — a former recycling center or house — into day cares for staff and, in some cases, for first responders in the area as well. Others are incorporating child care on their campuses.
The schools hope parenting teachers don’t have to choose between career and motherhood, as the education workforce remains predominantly female.
Dropping out of the workforce can be an attractive option for educators with young children, which adds to retention challenges already facing schools.
“If we’re going to support our community, … we need the very best teachers in the classroom,” said Tabitha Branum, superintendent of Richardson schools, north of Dallas. Her district runs two day cares, with goals of opening more.
“This is one of the strategies that we have in place to attract and retain the very best of the best,” Branum said.
Richardson school district superintendent Tabitha Branum sings “Baby Shark” with children at Little Mustangs Child Learning Academy, in Richardson, Texas. Credit: Elías Valverde II /The Dallas Morning News
In 2022, district leaders nationwide reported increased staff vacancies; most administrators — 63 percent — cited the pandemic as a cause. Last school year, nearly 1 in 4 teachers said they were likely to quit their job due to stress, disillusionment, low salaries and heavy workloads, according to a RAND survey.
School-sponsored child care can mitigate that stress.
The devastating feeling of dropping off her three-month-old daughter, Gracee, with a caregiver each day still haunts Heather Yarbrough, even 14 years later.
She cried every day for weeks, but didn’t have the option to quit her job as an elementary reading specialist in Nampa.
Yarbrough and her husband, both educators, needed two incomes to get by financially. Over time, she realized having a career was healthy for her and her family.
That brought her to a eureka moment: “Why do we have to choose? There’s got to be a better way,” she said.
Heather Yarbrough, the principal at Endeavor Elementary, in Nampa, Idaho, started an onsite daycare at the school to help retain teachers. Four years in, she says it’s working. Credit: Carly Flandro/Idaho Education News
Now Endeavor’s principal, she spearheaded an on-campus day care. Funded through a combination of grants and parent fees, the program is in its fourth year. It’s become a recruitment and retention tool for the district, which doesn’t pay teachers as much as neighboring districts.
A dozen of the school’s 30 teachers use the day care.
Child care for school employees has trickle-down benefits for students, said Van-Kim Lin, an early childhood development researcher at nonprofit Child Trends.
The kids can build stronger relationships with educators, counselors or other staff members because turnover is minimized and children are on campus at younger ages.
“This is a great strategy by which you can … support both children, families and then also on the flip side, districts and their workforce,” she said.
As Molly Hillier, an instructional coach at Endeavor and mother of a child in the day care, put it: “It benefits students because if you have happier teachers, … they can pour that into the kids.”
Molly Hillier, an instructional coach at Endeavor Elementary, in Nampa, Idaho, greets her son Riggins, 4. Hillier is able to pop in to the onsite daycare and check on him throughout the day. Hillier said the daycare ultimately benefits students because “if you have happier teachers … they can pour that into the kids.” Credit: Carly Flandro/Idaho Education News
The school’s teaching staff is predominantly young and female, and it had become routine for teachers to drop out of the workforce to care for their infants or to move on to less stressful or higher-paying jobs. In Nampa, teachers start out earning about $44,000 and top out at about $69,000, compared with a range of about $47,000 to $86,000 in the nearby Boise School District.
But now, “Nampa School District right now can offer me something nobody else can,” Zimmerman said. “That time with my child is invaluable — it’s worth its weight in gold.”
When Texas school counselor Kelly Mountjoy decided she wanted to start a family, she wondered if she could handle working and being a mother.
Three children later, she and her husband considered expanding their family by one more. However, the costs would add up: She was already paying more than $1,200 a month to send one of her kids to day care. So they hesitated.
“It’s just so impossible to pay child care with that many kiddos,” said Mountjoy, who works at Parkhill Junior High in Richardson.
Ashlie Monroe stops in at Endeavor’s onsite daycare during her lunch hour to see daughter Carlie, 3. Monroe teaches second grade. Credit: Carly Flandro/Idaho Education News
Texas school officials, frustrated with failed legislative attempts to fund teachers raises, recently began unfolding strategies to recruit and retain teachers. Large districts with bigger budgets offered higher pay, while others experimented with four-day school weeks or other benefits to sweeten the job.
“We may not be able to pay every teacher what we should be able to,” said Branum, the Richardson superintendent. “But what if we could create a compensation package that took a little stress off of them?”
A row of cubbies hold backpacks for children at Little Mustangs Child Learning Academy, in Richardson, Texas. Credit: Elías Valverde II /The Dallas Morning News
Richardson has a starting salary of $60,000 — above the state average of about $53,300 — but is also in the highly competitive Dallas-area market. So now RISD offers employees a health clinic for acute care with a $10 copay, no insurance required, and free counseling — plus the help with child care.
The district runs two child learning academies, Little Eagles and Little Mustangs, that serve more than 120 children starting at 6 weeks old until age 3, when they become eligible for the district’s pre-K program.
With more than 134 children on the district’s wait list as of the end of April, Branum said they’re considering at least one more center that could open as soon as next year.
A volunteer at Endeavor Elementary’s onsite daycare plays with an infant, whose mom teaches second grade, in Nampa, Idaho. Credit: Carly Flandro/Idaho Education News
Mountjoy said the perk gives her peace of mind because she knows her children receive high-quality attention.
“I know that my kids are taken care of really well,” Mountjoy said. “They know the kids individually and know their strengths and where they struggle.”
This story was written by Carly Flandro of Idaho Education News and Valeria Olivares of the Dallas Morning News. Idaho Education News data analyst Randy Schrader contributed to the story.
This story is part of a series on how the child care crisis affects working parents — with a focus on solutions. It was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
More than a decade ago, Celia Sims sat in a room with parents whose precious children had died while at day care. Most had been neglected by their caregivers. Some died from injuries, others in their sleep.
Most of the children attended licensed facilities, and at the time, their parents believed that licensing meant providers were safe, that unqualified workers were screened out. But they weren’t.
In the early 2010s, there was no federal requirement that child care providers undergo background checks. Fewer than a dozen states required a comprehensive check of criminal, child abuse and sex offender registries — most of the others only checked one, if that. Once these children died, police investigations revealed that providers at their care centers had past convictions for crimes like manslaughter and sexual abuse, Sims said. These people, the parents said, should not have been working in child care, period.
The parents were outraged—and rightly so, Sims remembers thinking. It seemed so unnecessary. So preventable.
“After that, you can’t just close your eyes and walk away,” said Sims, who was then a senior staffer for former Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican. She got to work.
Burr and then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, worked with members of the child care advocacy community to draft bipartisan legislation that would, for the first time, establish national safety standards for child care. It would ultimately make its way into the 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the national funding mechanism. States use the money they receive from the grant to reduce the cost of care for low-income children and improve that care by implementing safety and licensing requirements. But to get the money — at least in theory — states must abide by CCDBG rules.
And those rules would be stricter than ever. The reauthorization introduced eight background check requirements that state agencies must run on child care job applicants: two federal checks, of the FBI fingerprint and sex offender registries. Three state ones, of the criminal history, sex offender and child abuse registries. And three more interstate checks of the same state registries in any state where a provider lived during the previous five years. All of these checks were meant to screen out people with a history of crimes like child abuse, assault or endangerment. As part of the new CCDBG rules, states would also be required to post inspection reports online and collect data on serious incidents. It was a statement of values: The government was saying that this was the nation’s standard for child care, no matter where a program was located.
States had until 2018 to come into compliance.
But 10 years after the law took effect, many states are still failing to uphold at least one of its components.
According to a 2022 report to Congress analyzing the issue, at that time 27 states failed to conduct at least some, if not all, of the checks and hiring practices required by the law. Nineteen allowed staff to start working with children before background checks were completed. Nearly all of the states had been hampered by old technology systems, state bureaucracy and databases that range from incomplete to downright inaccurate.
It’s unclear where states stand today. The federal Office of Child Care, the regulatory agency that is meant to oversee states’ progress on fixing these problems, told The 19th that only three states had updated some of their policies since the report was published (New Hampshire, for example, no longer allows staff to start work before checks clear), but all 27 remain out of compliance because they do not yet conduct every required check. Yet several states disputed the agency’s determination and provided detailed documentation on their background check procedures, opening the possibility that even the regulatory agency can’t say for certain where states are falling short.
The winding, chaotic path towards fixing these issues has baffled child care advocates. “I have not been able to understand why, in some states, this hasn’t been a big deal,” said Sims, who went on to found The Abecedarian Group, a child care and education consulting agency.
But it is a big deal.
Background checks are a critical safety requirement in most jobs, but especially when it comes to safeguarding small children who may not be able to express when something has gone wrong. Yet the haphazard enforcement of these rules means that, in some states, barriers to child care jobs are too high, while in others they are not high enough. States with the most stringent requirements have made it more difficult for day care providers to hire workers, and for people to join a workforce of much-needed caregivers. That’s creating additional barriers for in-home care providers, who are disproportionately women of color and are often the most accessible caregivers in low-income communities.
In states where the systems to run the checks are still not meeting federal standards, difficult questions remain about whether the screening mechanism meant to shield kids from injury, abuse and even death is functioning as it should.
A decade later, no one can yet quite say what the right balance is between protecting children and protecting the child care sector.
“You never want a child to be hurt on your dime — it is a terrible, terrible thing. If we didn’t do everything possible to protect every child, we have fallen down on our job,” said child care expert Danielle Ewen. “If you don’t have the systems in place to keep kids safe, who are you actually protecting and who are you hurting?”
At the root of this snarl is the reality that while the federal government made the rule, 50 different states have to carry it out. Each does it in their own way, with procedures that are often incompatible.
For example, in 2014, interstate checks were added as a commonsense safeguard. Policymakers wanted to ensure caregivers didn’t hop from job to job in different states, evading screening along the way, particularly in areas like Washington D.C. and Virginia, where workers may live in one state but work in another. But over time, those checks have come to illustrate why the system itself is broken.
Eleven states didn’t run interstate checks at all, the 2022 report found. Nine didn’t respond to other states’ requests. Some checks can’t be run because of simple — and mystifying — bureaucratic reasons: One state accepts credit card payments and the other doesn’t, for example.
States also have differing laws about what information they can share across state lines, and with what agencies. After a request is submitted, states can decide whether to provide all the records they hold on a person, only conviction information, or simply to give a “yes” or “no” determination as to whether that person is eligible to work in child care based on their local laws.
That matters because states have different thresholds for what constitutes an offense that would prohibit someone from working with children. For example, a teenager who gets arrested for urinating in public might be considered a sex offender in one state, but not another. When that teenager applies for a job in a new state, their background check might indicate that yes, they have been arrested for a sex offense — but not give any context about what it was.
Tribes are also subject to the requirements of CCDBG, but none of them were given legal authority through the 2014 law — or any other, for that matter — to independently run federal background checks. To get around that, some tribes have had to ask states to submit requests on their behalf, creating the same problem: Child care workers may be disqualified based on state rules instead of tribe rules.
Much of the information in the abuse registries is also incomplete or unreliable. The 2022 report to Congress, which was put together by an interagency task force, found that some states include unsubstantiated abuse cases as well as substantiated ones. That means people could be disqualified from working even if the allegations against them were found to have had no merit.
Domestic violence survivors have particularly suffered as a result. In some states, they show up in registries not because they caused the abuse, but because an investigator determined that they failed to protect a child from the perpetrator or from witnessing the violence.
“Consequently, victims of domestic violence can remain on [abuse] registries for years, regardless of whether the individual themselves would be unsafe to provide care in a child care program,” the report found.
Experts have also questioned the racial and economic biases of the registry system, especially when it comes to flagging child neglect. About 75 percent of all child welfare cases are the result of neglect, not violence, and about half of states define neglect as a failure to provide basic needs. Caregivers living in poverty, the majority of whom are people of color, may get flagged simply because they’re unable to find affordable housing, for example.
“How much do we trust the gatekeeping mechanism to be fair and equitable?” asks Gina Adams, a child care expert at the Urban Institute who has studied the racial disparities inherent in background checks for child care. “The challenge is that, to the extent that it finds true situations of child abuse or child risk, it is an important mechanism to protect children — so I strongly support that.”
“However,” Adams continued. “I worry that because of inequitable policing, it may be also keeping out a whole bunch of people who should not be kept out.”
These inefficiencies have put a heavy burden on child care providers, who have seen how time consuming and burdensome it can be to run background checks, and how the wait can mean they lose staff to other employers. And they’ve also wondered: How much are the background checks keeping out people who want to — and should — work in care? How often are they letting the wrong people through?
Just last year in New York City, a 1-year-old died of a fentanyl overdose at a day care that was a front for a drug operation. The providers had passed background checks. Reports also revealed the city had a backlog of 140 child care background checks at the time.
In Washington state, provider Susan Brown has been wrestling with this question after 35 years in the child care business. As part of the federal law, prospective staff who pass a fingerprint check — either of the federal FBI registry or the state criminal history registry — are allowed to start working while their other checks are being completed. But Washington is more restrictive: Nobody can work until they pass the five federal and state checks. For Brown’s employees, the drive to just get their fingerprints taken can take hours roundtrip. The entire background check process can take up to a month, she said. Why would a worker wait that long when they can get a job tomorrow at a fast food restaurant and get paid about the same wages?
“Child care providers can’t afford to pay them until they’re in the classroom,” said Brown, the president and CEO of Kids Co., a chain that provides child care services across Seattle. And she pointed to another problem: Day cares have been short-staffed since the pandemic, and that’s limiting how many classrooms can be open and how many students can be enrolled. “Now with the crisis being what it is, because no one has any extra staff, you can’t even enroll kids to cover the wages of the person.”
Brown also questions why so many requirements have been imposed on child care providers, and not people in similar professions, like teachers. “We’ve had, over the years, the situation where we tried to hire public school teachers and they didn’t pass the background check,” Brown said. (In Washington, teachers need to only pass two checks — an FBI check and a state patrol check.)
The racial disparity is undeniable, Brown said. Women of color are overrepresented in the child care workforce and also face more scrutiny to enter jobs that are among the lowest paid in the country. Meanwhile, the majority of the teaching workforce is White women.
In a January letter to the state, signed by more than 300 child care providers, Brown wrote: “This disparity is not only unjust, but perpetuates systemic racism within our regulatory framework. Washington State’s current background check process magnifies the inequity by removing the possibility of beginning supervised work after completing a fingerprint background check, as outlined in federal requirements.”
In Washington, the state performs the five federal and in-state background checks together. Changing the process to do just the fingerprint checks first, so workers can start sooner, “would take a lot of resources and time to develop,” because all the results are currently submitted as one package, said a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Children, Youth, and Families. “We made the decision to comply with federal regulations by requiring the completion of all background check components for this reason.” It takes about eight days on average to complete the checks once fingerprints are submitted, according to Washington state’s most recent 2024 data.
Home-based providers feel the inequity of these checks most directly, because not only do these workers need to be background checked, but so does every adult who lives in the home.
In-home child care is for many low-income families the only viable option, and it’s often run by women of color — women whose families are more likely to live intergenerationally and to come into contact with the criminal justice system or the immigration system.
“It deters folks from becoming licensed,” said Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, which works to improve home-based child care. “They perceive risk.”
But what happens when states are also too accommodating? The risk is that children could be put in the care of harmful or negligent people — the exact situations the federal requirements were designed to eradicate.
That was the problem the Congressional task force was meant to help solve. Previous reports from 2022 and 2021 had concluded that numerous states fell short of requirements. But the task force’s version, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, was the first to try to quantify which states were out of compliance, and why. The Office of Child Care then took on studying each state’s individual challenges and creating a plan to fix them.
Some states do seem to be lagging. Mississippi, for example, doesn’t check the national sex offender registry, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health told The 19th. Still, the state refutes the 2022 report, which noted that Mississippi did not have policies in place to conduct any of the checks as required by the 2014 law. The Mississippi spokesperson said that the information was dated.
When The 19th asked the Office of Child Care whether any of the information in the 2022 report was outdated, it listed only three states as having made improvements since the report was published, though it considers all 27 to still be out of compliance. Mississippi was not on the list. (The states were New Hampshire, Alabama and Washington.)
In fact, several states disputed the Office of Child Care’s determinations. The 19th reached out to officials in five states that had significant issues flagged in the 2022 report, and which the federal agency still considers to be out of compliance. Many said those issues had either been partially or completely rectified.
For example, according to the report, West Virginia only runs one of eight required checks. But Whitney Wetzel, a spokesperson for the West Virginia Department of Human Services, told The 19th that determination “should not be considered current.”
Wetzel said the department “is confident that it is compliant with all statutory and regulatory background check requirements,” and provided a list of the checks performed, including the FBI fingerprint check and national sex offender check, as well as the in-state criminal, sex offender and abuse registries.
New Jersey was flagged in the report for failing to run checks on a sub-group of providers, those who are license-exempt, but a spokesperson for the state Department of Human Services confirmed to The 19th that it has been running checks on those providers since mid-2021.
Other states are in more of a gray area. According to the agency, Alabama only recently created policies to run in-state, federal and interstate checks, and remains out of compliance with other aspects of the background check law. However, a spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Human Services told The 19th: “All checks required under the Child Care and Development Fund rules are performed,” and the discrepancy is only in how the federal office would like the state to structure the process. Alabama is in the process of updating its background check procedures, but the current system “still covers all the required checks,” the spokesperson wrote.
Vermont was the only state flagged in the 2022 report for allowing staff to start working with children unsupervised before fingerprint background checks were cleared. But the deputy commissioner for the state’s child development division, Janet McLaughlin, told The 19th that while the state does allow new staff to start working before those checks are finalized, that work is supervised. That is, however, still out of compliance with the federal rule.
The Office of Child Care did not respond to The 19th’s requests to clarify the discrepancies between its records and the states’ assertions. But an official from the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the agency, told The 19th that the agency worked with state child care agencies and their partners to create plans to identify what staffing, technology and infrastructure investments they’d need to come into compliance.
The agency went through an intensive process to document each state’s background check policies, the official said, and that study revealed gaps.
But now, because of the disagreements between states and the agency, it is hard to say how close each has come to filling them.
All of this begs the question: If the regulatory agency that oversees the states could be wrong, how will the problem ever get fixed?
The more time that goes by, and the longer states have been out of compliance, the more states have also started to question whether what is being asked of them is even doable, Ewen said. She was the director of the Child Care and Early Education team at the Center for Law and Social Policy when the CCDBG rules were being crafted.
“If you have a system where people start to believe that you can’t achieve the end goals, they are not incentivized to try. They’re more incentivized to try and go to Congress and say, ‘This doesn’t work’ instead of going to their state leaders and saying, ‘We’re gonna get dinged for this in an audit,’” Ewen said.
Linda Smith, the former executive director of Child Care Aware, the advocacy organization whose research was critical to the creation of the safety standards, said the federal government has long been too lenient with the states. In her view, it’s past time that the issue be resolved.
“These are some of these things that if you want to do it — you do it,” Smith said. “I don’t think there was ever any excuse for not doing them. We are talking about the basic safety of children who can’t talk.”
Yet the 2022 report — and the fact that the Office of Child Care has not credited any state with coming into full compliance since it was issued — pointed out some uncomfortable truths. Yes, some states have delayed compliance. And yes, some tried but faced truly significant challenges. It’s also clear by now, a decade later, Sims said, that “we got some things wrong in the statute.”
The abuse registries were a “mess,” she said. And some of the things that seemed commonsense, like interstate background checks, turned out to be much more complicated than anyone had realized.
Grace Reef, then the chief of policy at Child Care Aware who conducted the initial research on the issues with background checks, said the intention behind the law was sound: “to help protect kids and give parents some peace of mind,” she said.
But they were operating with limited information about the quality of the data in the registries and the state laws that would make it difficult, in practice, to conduct all the checks they felt were important. “We had trouble trying to figure out how to structure language,” she recalled. “You do the best you can.”
Advocates insist there has to be a middle ground. And changes are coming.
This year, for the first time, states will be required to answer detailed questions in their state child care plans regarding the remaining obstacles they face with background checks. Each state needs to submit their plan, a roughly 300-page document that outlines how its system works, by July 1.
At the state level, advocates like Lorena Garcia, the CEO of the Colorado Statewide Parent Coalition, are working to ensure that her state narrows the list of offenses that would disqualify someone from working. Garcia works with what are known as family, friend and neighbor providers: registered but unlicensed in-home providers who also need to undergo checks, but might be hesitant to do so because they live with people who have some kind of criminal record or because they are in mixed immigration status households. She wants to make sure only offenses that would affect the safety of children are counted.
To address the interstate checks, Cindy Mall, the senior program director of the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, sees the National Fingerprint File (NFF) as the most obvious solution. Twenty-four states participate in the FBI-maintained fingerprint database, which makes performing interstate checks a relatively simple experience. If all states were a part of it, more could come into compliance, Mall said — including California, which the report currently lists as out of compliance on performing the national sex offender registry check and the three interstate checks.
For her, the issue comes down to a question of resources. It’s not enough to say something is a priority without the support to make it happen. In 2022, President Joe Biden tried to pass a $400 billion child care plan that would have given states funding they could have used to improve their systems and increase staffing. But that effort ultimately failed after Sen. Joe Manchin, the Democrat from West Virginia, withdrew support from the package saying it was too costly and expansive.
The task force that studied the background checks came to a similar conclusion. Even if the states followed every recommendation the group laid out, they wrote, “full implementation of the current array of checks is unlikely without major additional fiscal investment and changes to state laws not addressed in this report.”
“It comes down to money,” Mall said. “Money is staffing, money is resources, money is databases.”
It also comes down to political will. Burr and Mirkulski have since left the Senate and few champions remain. But the problems linger. Since the pandemic, child care as an industry has been on life support, kept alive through a one-time federal investment that allowed states and programs to get the resources they needed to improve their systems.
But that money was temporary — the needs aren’t. Safety remains as important as ever.
“Ten years into this,” Reef said, “we ought to have sufficient information in a bipartisan way, not to make it a partisan issue, but to make sure the law works as intended by commonsense approaches. I think that’s what’s needed.”
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Early Childhood newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning.
Last week the Massachusetts Senate unanimously passed a child care bill that would significantly expand state investment in child care.
Less publicized: The bill also includes provisions that could make it harder for private equity-owned child care providers to expand significantly in the state.
Specifically, the bill takes steps to ensure that any given for-profit provider operating more than 10 programs in the state consume no more than 1 percent of the $475 millions in grants being proposed.
Investor-backed chains now manage an estimated one in 10 child care centers in the country. That figure is likely to grow, according to several child care researchers, as states — and potentially the federal government — put new funding into the area, attracting investors interested in low start-up costs and access to public money.
As a result, advocates and experts are pushing for more extensive and widespread regulations of the kind that are moving forward in Massachusetts. “We need to make sure there are real guardrails,” said Melissa Boteach, the vice president overseeing child care and early learning at the National Women’s Law Center. Along with colleagues, she plans this June to release a report outlining recommended regulations and safeguards.
In making the push, Boteach and others cite private equity’s troubling record in managing other government-backed social services, including nursing homes and autism services. “Private equity’s track record in other sectors supported by public dollars – including home care, hospice care, and housing – foreshadows challenges the child care sector could face,” Boteach wrote in an email. In child care, profit-driven companies will take “money out rather than using that public funding to pay child care providers and teachers a living wage, upgrading facilities, [and] expanding into under-served communities,” she said.
In a written statement, Mark Bierley, CEO of the Learning Care Group, one of the largest for-profit child care operators in the U.S., offered a very different take, calling it “our duty to prepare children socially, emotionally and developmentally for their transition into K-12 education.”
“We have the resources to upgrade facilities, equipment and technology to ensure we fulfill that commitment,” he added. (More from his statement is below.)
Hot takes on the issue
“Private equity has no business in childcare centers. Its business model is completely contrary to the goals of providing quality childcare at affordable prices. It promises its investors ‘outsized returns’ in a short 5-year window – returns that considerably beat the stock market. It can only deliver on this promise by substantially increasing revenues or decreasing costs to the detriment of children, parents, and taxpayers.” – Rosemary Batt, co-author of Private Equity at Work and numerous other studies of private equity’s impact on different professions and industries
“Private providers bring decades of know-how and a tried-and-true approach to curriculum development. Our existing infrastructure is designed to meet the needs of specific age groups and is nimble enough to accommodate the ever-evolving needs of working families. It’s our duty to prepare children socially, emotionally and developmentally for their transition into K-12 education, and we have the resources to upgrade facilities, equipment and technology to ensure we fulfill that commitment.” – Mark Bierley, CEO of the Learning Care Group, one of the largest for-profit child care operators in the U.S.
The proposed regulations in Massachusetts follow a couple other related state efforts. Vermont recently put ownership disclosure requirements into its package expanding funding for child care, and also capped tuition hikes by providers. New Jersey limits for-profit programs that participate in its public pre-K system to a 2.5 percent profit margin.
But Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the think tank Capita, who has been tracking private equity expansion in child care closely, described the proposed Massachusetts measures as “the most targeted guardrails we’ve seen to date” against investor-backed companies consuming the lion’s share of new public investment.
Haspel points out that there’s been similar momentum internationally, with British Columbia specifying that priority for public funding goes to public and nonprofit programs, and Australia requiring larger providers that manage more than 25 sites to submit more extensive financial reports.
Last year, President Biden’s administration pushed for greater transparency and accountability in nursing home ownership after research showed that private-equity owned facilities on average had worse outcomes, including more patient deaths. But there’s not much information that compares the quality of for-profit and nonprofit child care programs, which could hinder efforts to put restrictions and regulations on the companies.
Haspel said “the first step for the federal government is trying to get a lot more information” in a landscape where the quality can vary dramatically within all ownership types — investor backed or not. That said, he added that there’s no reason not to take such steps as ensuring a certain percentage of public funding is used to pay educators and requiring centers to disclose financial and ownership information.
“Some of the potential guardrails are common-sense,” he said.
This story about private equity and child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
DERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. — On a bright fall morning last year, a shimmering, human-sized Hershey’s Kiss with bright blue eyes greeted delighted children and their parents outside of the first early childhood education center launched by the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning.
Inside the new nearly 51,000-square-foot facility, built to accommodate 150 students, children funneled into their bright, well-stocked classrooms. They were welcomed by teachers who had spent 12 months in paid professional development, unusual in a field where teacher training varies greatly. The young students, ranging in age from 6 weeks to 5 years, went about their day in well-stocked, spacious classrooms, playing and learning in small groups. The ample staff provided low student-to-teacher ratios and allowed for large amounts of individual attention.
The day featured visits to the center’s “STEM Garden,” where children could learn about gardening, nature and animals from several interactive displays that offer child-appropriate introduction to science, technology, engineering and math. The kids had abundant time to run, climb and pedal bikes in one of several outdoor play spaces. And they gathered with their classmates to enjoy several family-style meals and snacks, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, Southwest turkey chili and tuna casserole.
On paper, this child care program seems like it would cost parents tens of thousands of dollars a year, rivaling college tuition, as many early learning programs do. But here in picturesque Hershey, Derry Township’s best known community, it’s all free: the first brick and mortar of a new initiative cooked up by stewards of the Hershey billions.
The early learning center, located in a town that engenders Willy Wonka vibes with street names like “Chocolate Avenue,” street lights shaped like Hershey’s Kisses and a faint scent of sweetness that wafts through the air, is one of the most recent examples of billionaires launching child care programs.
Similar efforts to provide free early care and learning are sprinkled throughout the country, including “Montessori-inspired” preschools in six states funded by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, as well as several programs sponsored by hotel magnate Harris Rosen in Orlando, Florida. In Pennsylvania, the Hershey early learning program is one of what will ultimately be six free early childhood education centers around Pennsylvania, at a cost of $350 million, funded by the Milton Hershey School Trust. (Catherine Hershey Schools are a subsidiary of the Hershey-based residential Milton Hershey School.)
In a country with exorbitantly priced child care and a lack of available, high-quality options, initiatives like these provide a new opportunity to see the effect that free or heavily subsidized high-quality child care — something that is already the norm in many other wealthy, developed nations — could have in America. The fact that robust federal child care funding legislation has repeatedly been killed by legislators means that foundation funding may be among the few — and the fastest — ways to launch and test certain programs or approaches to the early years.
The hope is that ultimately, private investment will help a community “invest in something and push it forward and … help it move to the point where it gets public attention,” as well as public funds, said Rena Large, program manager at the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative (ECFC), an organization that helps philanthropists invest in the early years.
Allyson Anderson’s daughter, Lilah, shows her class an “alligator breath” that she made up. Credit: Jackie Mader for The Hechinger Report
In the past few years, private foundations have taken on an outsized role in early learning programs and systems, funding initiatives that raise staff compensation, support existing or new programs and provide emergency funds. Nationwide, the amount of grants aimed at early childhood has increased significantly, from $720.8 million between 2013 and 2015, to $1 billion between 2021 and 2023, according to data compiled by the collaborative from the nonprofit Candid’s philanthropy database. (Data is self-reported and categorized by funders.)
Within the early childhood collaborative, membership numbers have tripled since 2016. “The pandemic brought more people to the table,” said Shannon Rudisill, executive director of the funders collaborative. “There’s been a real blossoming of innovation.” Many of those funders are hopeful that their efforts will lead to federal investment, as well as “policy and systems change,” she added.
At the same time, philanthropic involvement in education overall, including in early learning, raises questions around best practices. Are philanthropists adequately considering the needs of communities? How can and should a philanthropy involve community and existing efforts in the field? Are philanthropies listening to research and experts as they go forth and create? Should philanthropies reinvent the wheel or invest in what already exists?
Supplies sit on a shelf at the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning in the community of Hershey, Pa. Credit: Jackie Mader for The Hechinger Report
Some in the early childhood community have criticized Bezos’ efforts, for example, arguing the billionaire should have supported existing, research-backed early learning programs and systems rather than creating “Montessori-inspired” schools based on what he thought children needed. And there could be unintended downstream effects of philanthropic programming or influence. For example, Hershey’s salary and benefits package is comparable to that offered by local school district, which may draw child care employees away from local programs that pay less.
Hershey’s latest endeavor came from a clear community need identified by officials at the early childhood center. In Hershey — a community about 95 miles west of Philadelphia — and surrounding areas, child care is scarce and poverty is high. Over the past decade, teachers at the nearby Milton Hershey School, a private K-12 boarding school, noticed their youngest students were coming in markedly behind previous cohorts.
“The needs of the children enrolling at 4 and 5 and 6 were more pronounced than they ever were before,” said Pete Gurt, president of the Milton Hershey School and Catherine Hershey Schools. They needed more support with social and emotional, academic, language and even life skills, like potty training.
“When you look at the landscape [of child care] in Pennsylvania, it’s no different than anywhere else. You’ve got high demand, short supply, and of the supply, not as many organizations would be identified as high quality,” he added.
The Hershey, Pa., location of the Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning is the first of what will eventually be six early childhood education centers across Pennsylvania. Credit: Jackie Mader for The Hechinger Report
When I visited the Hershey school in October, friends and colleagues delighted in the idea of chocolate billionaires funding child care:
“Do they give them chocolate all day long?” (No, they do not.)
“I hope they give them dental screenings, ha.” (They do, for free.)
“Is it secretly a training pipeline for future Hershey employees?” (Not that I could tell, although officials from Hershey’s hospitality division were in the school’s lobby one morning to provide career information for parents.)
In addition to the trained educators, low ratios and research-based curricula, the Catherine Hershey Schools offer free transportation to its building, free diapers and wipes in classrooms, occupational and speech therapy, an in-house nurse, community partnerships, a parent resource center with individual parent coaches, external evaluators and an in-house researcher from the University of Pittsburgh who is tracking the school’s outcomes to see if all of this is working.
I was mostly curious to see if free child care is as life-changing as many early childhood experts think it could be in America, especially for low-income families — Hershey sets income limits for families at 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or $77,460 for a family of three.
The Family Success Center at the Catherine Hershey School, where parents receive individual coaching toward goals and can access resources like books and educational materials. Credit: Jackie Mader for The Hechinger Report
Nearly two weeks after the first center launched, I met with Tracey Orellana, the mother of two toddlers at the school. Orellana was delivering packages for Amazon one day when she saw the early learning center, then under construction. She had been considering putting her two youngest children in child care so her husband, who works nights, could rest during the day while she was out working. The potential to get free child care made the decision a no-brainer.
“We were juggling. We were juggling so much,” said Orellana, who also has two school-age daughters. At the time, the family had incurred a mountain of debt and was struggling to afford basic needs like groceries. Now that the toddlers are in child care at no cost to their family, Orellana has been able to increase her work hours to full time, adding to her income and stability. The family is now able to afford food and has almost caught up with bills.
The school “provides the opportunity to build a life for our kids and keep them out of whatever the situation may be, streets, poverty, keep them clothed, keep them fed, keep the electric on, the heat on,” she said. Her daughters also have opportunities they wouldn’t have at home, Orellana added, such as getting to ride bikes, play games and make new friends.
Other parents say they’ve been able to access a higher quality of care for their children now that money isn’t a factor. Allyson Anderson, the single mother of a preschooler, had to return to her job as a therapist at a rehabilitation center a year after giving birth to her daughter, Lilah. When Anderson went back to work, she chose child care using a method familiar to many American parents: “Honestly, just an open space.”
The programs her daughter ended up in were mediocre, Anderson said. While caregivers generally kept Lilah safe, classrooms lacked structure and Anderson was disappointed with the low level of attention Lilah received during the day.
Tracey Orellana watches one of her daughters from outside an observation window. Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning provide free child care for children from age 6 weeks to 5-years-old. Credit: Jackie Mader for The Hechinger Report
But she had few other options. During Lilah’s first few years, money was tight and Anderson was struggling to cover her mortgage, bills and child care, which cost “the same as a mortgage payment” each month.
At Hershey, Anderson is most impressed by the experience and training of teachers, as well as by the fact that there are three teachers in a classroom capped at 17 children, far lower than the state mandated ratio. “They have more teachers in the classroom. They can pay more individual attention to each kid,” Anderson said. She is no longer concerned about the level of care Lilah receives. “I don’t really have to worry. I know she’s in good hands.”
Downstairs in a classroom for preschoolers, I watched 3-year-old Lilah, who was hard to miss in a bright red jumpsuit featuring one of her favorite characters (at that moment), the Grinch.
“Did you hear what happened to me this morning?” one of the teachers asked the children who sat, riveted, in front of her for morning circle time. “I woke up and I came downstairs and guess what?”
“What?” a child asked.
“My dog had chewed one of my shoes!”
Several children gasped.
“I was so upset because they’re my favorite shoes. So, I started crying. Then I was so mad at my dog, and I started yelling. Do you think I made a very good choice?”
“No,” the children said in low, disappointed voices.
“What do you think I should have done?”
“Take a deep breath,” one child suggested. The teacher nodded.
While philanthropically-funded programs can benefit those lucky enough to access them, without receiving public funds or partnering with others to expand, experts caution that the reach of these programs will be limited and exist only in areas with willing funders.
Some philanthropically funded early childhood programs, like Educare, have developed a model of launching centers using philanthropic dollars, then pulling in public funding later, a more sustainable model for allowing replication, said Rudisill from the early childhood funders collaborative. Funding sources need to “fit together to solve the problem,” she said. “You could scoop up all the private philanthropy in America … and you cannot make up for the fact that in our country, we don’t fund an early care and education system.”
Books sit in a library inside the Family Success Center at the Hershey-based Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning. Inside the center, caregivers can access coaching and other resources. Credit: Jackie Mader for The Hechinger Report
Senate Alexander, executive director of Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning, said he hopes the centers will ultimately become a model that can be replicated — once the program has the data to show it’s working to improve kindergarten readiness skills and outcomes for families.
“We thought about not wanting to fan out too far and too fast, we’re just starting this,” he said. “We want to get it right … we want to perfect the model.” In the meantime, the program’s first school has invited other local child care programs to attend training with Hershey staff in an effort to share resources and possibly expand their reach.
While Hershey’s funding is limited in scope to programs within the state of Pennsylvania, Alexander said replicating the model in its entirety in other parts of the country is not out of the question. That could bring free childcare and extensive resources to more children. All it will take are a few more willing billionaires.
This story was produced with support by the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said Monday that the government intends to provide $1.5 billion to the computer chip company GlobalFoundries to expand its domestic production in New York and Vermont.
The announcement is the third award of direct financial support for a semiconductor company under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. The law enables the government to invest more than $52 billion to revitalize the manufacturing of computer chips in the United States as well as advance research and development.
“The chips that GlobalFoundries will make in these new facilities are essential,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters. “They power sophisticated military equipment, electric vehicles. They assure smartphones have the latest features, enable faster Internet connections for Americans.”
In addition to the direct funding, the government would also provide loans worth up to $1.6 billion, with a total combination of public and private investment expected to equal roughly $12.5 billion.
GlobalFoundries intends to use the funding to help pay for the construction of a new advanced chip factory in Malta, New York, increase production at its existing plant in Malta as part of a strategic agreement with General Motors, and revitalize its plant in Burlington, Vermont.
The projects are expected to create 1,500 manufacturing jobs and 9,000 construction jobs over the next decade. As part of the terms of the deal, $10 million would be dedicated to training workers and GlobalFoundries will extend its existing $1,000 annual subsidy for child care and child care support services to construction workers.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schume r, D-N.Y., was an architect of the law that enables the funding of chips factories, a technology that he said was as essential to the U.S. economy and national security as food. He said in an interview with The Associated Press that the United States could be vulnerable to disruptions as it was during the coronavirus pandemic when auto plants lacked enough chips to keep making vehicles.
“The Democrats are going to do what it takes to see that other countries — China, Russia and others — don’t gain economic advantage over all of us,” Schumer said.
With a major election this year that puts control of the White House and Congress on the line, the health of the U.S. economy has been a serious concern. Republican lawmakers have stressed that inflation rates that peaked in 2022 have hurt family’s buying power, an immediate pressure point that has hurt President Joe Biden’s approval.
But Democrats have stressed their efforts to ease inflation and the long-term investments that they say will drive growth forward, such as the investments in computer chip production and infrastructure.
Schumer also said that these investments — which had a degree of bipartisan support — reflected the Democrats’ emphasis on investing in the country’s in ways that could potentially pay off in the coming decades.
“People want to see we have a future,” Schumer said. “It makes a huge impression on the American people.”
This story was produced by The 19th and republished with permission.
Doubts swirled from the start.
After Cynthia King’s baby Wiley Muir died suddenly at a home-based day care in Honolulu, she fixated on the things that seemed off. The medical examiner said he died of pneumonia, but Wiley hadn’t been sick that morning. King wondered how sickness could take him so suddenly — how they could have missed that.
But most of all, there was the notebook, which King began keeping just four days earlier, when Wiley started at the day care. On the morning of February 6, 2014, King had jotted down what time her 4-month-old had woken up and what he’d eaten. That notebook had gone with Wiley to day care that morning and was returned to King at the police department days after his death.
The page she’d started the day he died was gone, ripped out. Instead, there was a new page rewritten in the day care owner’s handwriting.
“That freaked me out. Why on Earth, on the day he died, would the day care provider rip out the page and rewrite what I had already started writing?” King said.
A year and a half later, on what would have been Wiley’s second birthday, King and her husband ran into Therese Manu-Lee, the provider caring for Wiley when he died. She was wearing scrubs and appeared to be working with an elderly person. King wondered what happened to the day care.
Later, King looked her up online. The day care had been shut down by the state.
Right away, King called the Department of Human Services, which oversees the state’s child care office. Manu-Lee’s license was suspended while police investigated Wiley’s case but reinstated when the case was closed. It was shut down again a year later in 2015 when a surprise inspection of Manu-Lee’s home found her with 14 children in her care, eight of them infants — four times the legal number of infants for a home-based provider.
“That sort of overwhelming feeling of, ‘Oh my God, I knew she was lying to us about something, but I didn’t know what’” took over, King said.
That revelation set in motion years of battles: first with the police department to reopen Wiley’s case, and then with the state’s child care agency and the Hawaii legislature to push for new legislation that could make child care safer.
Beginning in 2016, King, an entomologist, sat on a Hawaii child care working group in the legislature and advocated for about a dozen regulation bills. But she could get only one new law through — an update requiring day cares to take on liability insurance. The Wiley Kaikou Muir Act passed in 2017.
Cynthia King’s first child, Wiley Muir, died suddenly at a home-based day care in Honolulu. Credit: Image provided by Cynthia KingAfter her son’s untimely death, King focused on legislation. Credit: Image provided by Cynthia King
Among King’s larger priorities was passing a law requiring Hawaii to post child care inspection violations online and track serious incidents, creating a window into the state’s child care safety efforts. But King was told at the time by state officials that Hawaii didn’t need that law — a child care safety movement at the federal level was about to do just that.
In 2014, the same year Wiley died, the country’s central funding mechanism for child care, the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), was reauthorized by Congress with new requirements. CCDBG sends money to states to subsidize care for low-income children, and because every state takes CCDBG money, they all have to comply with its rules.
Until 2014, the block grant had paltry health and safety requirements. States didn’t have to run background checks on child care providers or collect data on deaths or serious incidents.
So no one knew, really, how many kids were getting hurt at child care across the country — how many were dying.
Cynthia King reads to her son Dexter Muir at their home in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 2016. Credit: Cory Lum/Civil Beat
Although child care was and still is very safe, cases of children dying in day cares from preventable causes started to gain national attention in the early 2000s. That helped advocates launch what would become a nearly decade-long campaign in Congress to weave better health and safety guidelines into CCDBG.
New requirements passed into law with broad bipartisan support in 2014. Among them: For the first time, states would be required to start collecting and posting data around the numbers of deaths, serious injuries and substantiated abuse cases at day cares. Databases also needed to go online, allowing parents to search providers and see inspection reports and violations in their state. A series of federal, state and interstate background checks were also made mandatory. States had until October 2018 to come into compliance.
Ten years after those rules around health and safety were put in place, over a dozen states are failing to fulfill all the reporting requirements, an in-depth analysis from The 19th found.
After an inquiry from The 19th, the Office of Child Care, the federal regulatory agency that oversees states’ child care systems, confirmed that eight states are out of compliance. The 19th found an additional nine states that are missing data or have outdated information online. Six states updated their reports when The 19th pointed out errors or missing data.
In the process of reporting this story, The 19th reached out to more than 40 advocates, experts and organizations in the child care and child welfare space. Few knew anything about where the states stood on the reporting requirements in CCDBG. Some didn’t know about the requirements at all.
Linda Smith, a child care expert who was instrumental in getting the regulations passed, said states have been given too much latitude to comply. Neither the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services nor the Government Accountability Office have audited the states to ensure they were following the reporting provisions, both offices confirmed.
“For the most part, they are sort of operating outside of the traditional system and accountability,” said Smith, now the director of the early childhood development initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
Systems like background checks and data tracking are key safety mechanisms in any industry. Food service inspection violations are posted online and in restaurants. Accidents with airlines are also posted online, even though, like in child care, they are also fairly rare.
Overall, the number of deaths at day cares is very low, often in the single digits annually in each state, and some states haven’t had any at all for the past several years. Among the 30 states and Washington, D.C., that published 2023 data, California had the highest number of deaths last year: 10; one child died at a child care center and nine died at in-home day cares. The two states with the next highest numbers last year were Texas at six deaths and Montana with five.
Data on injuries and abuse is murkier. States can decide how they define these cases — some count any instance that requires medical attention, others count only injuries that cause permanent damage — leading to widely different numbers. Georgia, for example, had zero serious injuries in 2022; Ohio, which also counts serious “incidents,” had nearly 19,000.
There is also no federal reporting requirement, meaning the data lives at the state level, in reports that are difficult to find and, in some cases, difficult to understand.
Celia Sims, a former senior staffer for Sen. Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who spearheaded the changes to CCDBG, said they took on the issue more than 10 years ago because tallying cases is one of the only ways to ensure safety for really young kids.
“You can’t count on your 6-month-old to tell you that something is wrong when you pick them up in the evening,” Sims said. “That’s why it’s even more important that things, when they are substantiated, get reported.”
The intent behind the requirements was also to create transparency for parents. But Sims said she’s been surprised to discover just how hard it is to even find the information. Most reports are buried in state websites, under titles like “aggregate report” or “federal reporting,” and hyperlinked in the middle of a paragraph. It’s not the easily accessible, plain language vision that was laid out in CCDBG.
“I was a little taken aback,” said Sims, who went on to found The Abecedarian Group, a child care and education consulting agency. “Wow, I couldn’t find any of them.”
The reporting requirements aren’t the only issue. More than half of states are also out of compliance with the law’s new background check requirements, which called for five checks and three interstate checks that have to be completed within 45 days for all child care staff. For home-based day cares, that also includes adults living in the house who may come in contact with children. According to a 2022 report to Congress from an interagency task force convened to study the issue, 11 states are not conducting any interstate checks and 19 states are allowing child care staff to be hired before background checks were completed. Those numbers remain current, the Office of Child Care confirmed.
The 19th also analyzed if states had fulfilled a third requirement of creating online databases of all the state’s child care providers with inspection and violation data.
Only one state was out of compliance on all three categories: Hawaii.
A recent photo of Cynthia King and her family in Hawaii. Credit: Image provided by Cynthia King
Hawaii hasn’t posted any data at all from the past seven years on serious injuries and abuse at day cares. The last year it reported was 2016, making it the only state with a reporting gap that wide. The online database of violations King advocated for a decade ago — the one she was told was coming soon in 2016 — is still not up. Hawaii is also one of the states not running interstate background checks on child care providers.
The reasons why are various, but underpinning Hawaii and the other states’ compliance issues is a difficult reality. The child care system in the United States has been described by the Treasury Department as a “textbook example of a broken market.” It is losing day cares to financial constraints and a lack of federal investment. To ensure safety, day cares have to stick to strict ratios of children to teachers. That means staffing costs make up a huge portion of the budget, but that also means the staff is paid close to minimum wage, leading to high turnover. Raising wages would mean raising fees for parents, many of whom are paying more than their rent or mortgage on child care.
But when CCDBG was reauthorized, Congress did not substantially increase the program’s budget to help states implement the new safety requirements. Some of what ultimately happened was that states didn’t make safety improvements right away, Smith said. And now a decade later, some still haven’t.
None of the states have been penalized for it, the federal Office of Child Care confirmed. In Hawaii, where an extraordinarily high cost of living meets an extraordinarily low child care supply, parents don’t always report all the red flags they see at a center for fear it’ll close down and they’ll have nowhere to take their kids, King said.
That is a challenge that needs a solution, but it shouldn’t mean accountability is lost, King said. And it shouldn’t now be up to the parents whose children have already been lost to push for a better system.
“It’s so inappropriate that the onus is on the families of victims, when this should be coming from the state or federal level,” King said. “There’s something that’s really very difficult about being a group of people where everybody is not whole. That’s why nothing is happening. Because everyone is hurting tremendously.”
***
Until the early 2000s, very little was known at a national level about incidents at child care centers. A 2005 report by researchers at the City University of New York Graduate Center put together the first — and so far only — comprehensive national study of deaths in child care, cobbling together reports published in media outlets, legal cases and some state records.
They found 1,362 fatalities in child care from 1985 through 2003, 75 percent of them in home-based care, both licensed and unlicensed.
“Key to any effort aimed at reducing risks is gathering consistent, reliable data on fatalities, serious injuries, and near misses in child care,” they wrote.
Child Care Aware, a national child care advocacy group, then took the issue on, releasing an analysis of state rules and regulations around safety every year from 2007 to 2013. Their work paved the way for Congress to act in the 2014 reauthorization — the new rules all came from the organization’s recommendations.
Smith was the executive director of Child Care Aware at the time, and she and Grace Reef, the chief of public policy, led that effort.
“You think that licensing means something, but what we were exposing at the time was: not really,” Reef said. “There were states that did an inspection once every 10 years — are you kidding me?”
The CCDBG requirement ultimately shaped up like this: States must produce data every year on the number of deaths, serious injuries and cases of substantiated abuse at child care. The numbers for death and serious injury were to be broken down by the type of program incidents took place in — center-based or home-based, for example— and the data had to be published online and easily accessible.
Here’s where we stand, 10 years later.
As of 2024, California is the only state that still doesn’t post serious injury or abuse data online at all.
Alaska and Wisconsin don’t provide breakdowns by the type of child care facility serious injuries took place in. Vermont didn’t either for serious injuries and deaths until The 19th asked about it and, realizing an error that occurred with a change of staff, the state updated its website the next day.
Wisconsin, which failed to include data on four deaths in its 2021 report, updated it after The 19th’s questions. Wyoming, which wasn’t posting data on substantiated abuse cases, added the figures when The 19th inquired. Alaska provided additional data to The 19th via email, though it hasn’t yet made it public.
The 19th also found one state with outdated statistics: South Dakota’s most recent data is from 2021. New Hampshire hadn’t published data since 2020, but after The 19th inquired, the state posted 2023 data in January.
Delaware, Kansas and New Jersey have all been flagged by the Office of Child Care for not posting complete data on license-exempt providers. The 19th’s own analysis found that Arkansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma are not reporting data on those providers. Delaware, Kansas, Missouri and Oregon have also failed to include totals for the number of kids in child care, another required part of the regulation. Illinois was also missing that data point but added it after The 19th asked about it.
The federal office marked Mississippi and New York as out of compliance as of the end of 2023, but both states updated most of their data online, though Mississippi still appears to be missing annual data. The federal office also flagged West Virginia for posting incomplete data on in-home providers, but the state said it hadn’t received such a notice and that it would be updating its data this month.
Even in states that are reporting data, some of it is confusing and contradictory. In Nevada, the child care division is in the process of changing departments, and that has led to two different reports online: In one published by the welfare division, the abuse cases in 2020 numbered above 3,000. In the 2020 report from the licensing department, the number of abuse case referrals is 48.
When The 19th asked about the discrepancy in Nevada’s data, Karissa Loper Machado, the state’s agency manager for child care, said she wasn’t sure how the first report was calculated. After the state looked into it, it said the data it had been publishing as its child care numbers also included cases in private homes and foster care, leading to the higher figures. The state expects to have its data updated in the next six months to a year.
Nevada also doesn’t report how many of its abuse cases turn out to be substantiated. The licensing department doesn’t keep track of it, so the state doesn’t report it.
“We are working to come into compliance,” Loper Machado said.
In the 10 years since the CCDBG reporting requirements were created, states have been given a lot of autonomy in deciding what gets counted as serious injury and abuse and what doesn’t. In 2018, the Office of Child Care told state child care agencies to consider changing their definitions so that only programs with the most egregious cases were penalized. Some states changed their definitions, and others did not.
In Georgia, cases are put on a scale — low, medium, high or extreme harm or risk — and only extreme cases now get reported, said April Rogers, the child care services director of policy and enforcement at the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning.
Georgia lists two serious injuries in 2023, and both of those programs lost CCDBG and state funding as a result of that determination, said Ira Sudman, the department’s general counsel, and programs with “high”-level injuries can still potentially incur penalties.
By contrast, in Ohio, the state counts all serious injuries and incidents, covering everything from deaths (which get double counted) to COVID-19 cases. There were 18,788 serious injuries or incidents in Ohio in 2022, the most recent year for which there is data. Even without including COVID cases, the number is still 4,762 — at least 10 times what many other states are reporting. In early 2017, the state put in an automated reporting system that allowed day care owners to report serious incidents quickly online.
Reef said that over the years, state legislatures have battled over what they should count in the numbers. But for the data to be tracked well, there need to be requirements of day care owners, too, state child care agencies said.
All of the data on deaths, serious injuries and abuse is self-reported by the day care providers themselves typically through forms they submit to the states. The states do inspections of the providers to make sure they are following safety requirements, but several states, including Georgia and Missouri, told The 19th they don’t know how accurate those reports are because they’re relying on the day cares to submit them.
What’s missing is “political will around forcing private business to give us data they clearly do not want to give us,” said Pam Stevens, Georgia’s deputy commissioner for child care. “We would love to know everything because it would help everybody.”
In Missouri, Nancy Scherer, the administrator of the state’s Office of Childhood, said getting day cares to report is the highest hurdle they face.
“I think they’re afraid: ‘If I report that, I’m going to have a violation, they’re going to shut me down,’” Scherer said.
And those are the providers the state knows about.
In 2021, eight children died in Missouri day cares. Seven of those deaths took place in unlicensed child care, which the office isn’t tracking because it doesn’t license them. Deaths are tallied instead through tips that come in.
“We don’t know about it, until we know about it,” Scherer said.
***
After King learned that her son’s provider had been shut down by the state of Hawaii, she asked to see his full police case file. For the first time, she also brought herself to read his autopsy in its entirety.
Those files contained numerous inconsistencies — vindication that King had been right to have her doubts.
Manu-Lee told police Wiley was in her arms when he died, but she told the ambulance crew that she’d put him down for a nap and later found him unresponsive. And in the autopsy, Wiley’s cause of death was not pneumonia, but bronchiolitis, which affects a different part of the lungs than pneumonia.
The autopsy findings helped King push the police to reopen the case, but ultimately prosecutors told her there wasn’t really an avenue to pursue. Detectives didn’t have any evidence of abuse or trauma.
The 19th reached out to Manu-Lee via phone and email, but she did not respond to requests for comment. In 2016, she told Civil Beat that, “the child was ill. It was not my fault.”
King was, however, able to have other pediatric forensic pathologists examine Wiley’s autopsy, who determined he could not have died from bronchiolitis or pneumonia. In Honolulu, the medical examiner admitted to King, she said, that he’d put that cause of death to give her a sense of closure.
The cause of death was ultimately changed to “undetermined.”
“It was hard emotionally to have to justify to people again and again why having an incorrect cause of death provided to us was so damaging and counterproductive toward finding out what really happened,” King said. “When the cause of death was changed, in some ways it was sort of a relief.”
King refocused on legislation, but while she waited for Hawaii to implement the requirements of the federal law, she became disheartened. By 2017, the new requirements were still not in place, and King, still pushing for new laws, pleaded with the state.
“I am asking you to change this shockingly broken system and instill real accountability,” she testified at a hearing for what would go on to be another failed child care accountability bill.
In 2019, past the deadline for states to come into compliance with federal regulations, Hawaii still hadn’t implemented the changes. King still hadn’t had more luck with legislation. And she was pregnant. By the time COVID-19 shut the world down, King realized there was no hope in pushing for changes in an industry that was being decimated by the pandemic. Nothing would pass. So she moved on.
She hadn’t looked back into whether the state had kept its promise of publishing data and creating its day care database until The 19th called her near the end of 2023.
Hawaii is now the state most behind in implementing the federal child care safety requirements.
The state told The 19th it is struggling to do so with a licensing department made up of only three people. The entire Human Services Department has a vacancy rate of about 25 percent.
Dayna Luka, the child care regulation program administrator in the Hawaii Department of Human Services, told The 19th that the state isn’t posting recent data because it has not finalized its definitions of serious injury and abuse. Without a definition, Hawaii can’t track the data, and it’s not posting it online. It’s the only state that doesn’t have its definitions finalized, The 19th’s analysis of the states’ child care plans found.
The process of creating definitions is long and requires public hearings and comments, Luka said. The last time Hawaii had a public hearing for child care regulations was in 2021, she said.
“We may not be reporting that data because we don’t have the definition, but we are definitely investigating any kind of allegation of injury, any kind of violation of our licensing rules,” Luka said.
The state said it is asking the federal office for technical assistance to begin reporting serious injuries and abuse, but it didn’t provide a timeline for when it will begin doing so. It hopes to have its day care provider dashboard, as well as inspection reports, online by the summer. For now, it contracts with the state’s child care resource and referral agency for its child care provider database, but that dashboard doesn’t include inspection reports.
On a national level, it is impossible to know how many cases are not getting reported or investigated in child care because there is so much that falls into a gray area, said Christopher Greeley, a professor of pediatrics at the Baylor College of Medicine who has spent more than two decades studying pediatric abuse and neglect. And those investigations are further complicated because of their charged, emotional nature, leading to inaccurate recollections, as well as witnesses who may not be verbal.
“The narrower question of, ‘Is this injury abuse versus not?’ becomes quite fraught with difficulty because we all may agree the child has a broken bone, but now I’m adding a value judgment of whether that was done intentionally or not and some of that information may not be available,” Greeley said. That’s in part because some states don’t even have the capacity to thoroughly investigate those cases.
Advocates have been calling for more funding for the child care system, which could help states finally meet all of the safety requirements in CCDBG. A national effort to inject $400 billion over 10 years into child care failed in 2022, and other proposals haven’t found traction. It’s a hard truth in child care: A system that has been under-resourced for its entire existence can’t solve the big problems if it’s fighting to exist in the first place.
“One of the reasons that we talk about the need for a comprehensive system is that we understand then that the data would also be easier to track,” said Nina Perez, the early childhood national campaign director at MomsRising, a national network of moms pushing for child care and other family policies. “Any parent would tell you that they absolutely want reporting and transparency, particularly in instances of neglect and harm. This is a situation where the government needs to step up and resource that, including state governments.”
Anne Hedgepeth, the current chief of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware, said states and child care providers “understand the seriousness or importance of the work they’re doing.” But “ultimately, licensing is complex and not every state system is sufficiently funded to do this work. Until we fix that problem, reporting won’t be as robust or transparent as it needs to be.”
When the country considers what another reauthorization of CCDBG might look like in the coming years, more support for compliance on health and safety could be areas marked for improvement, said Smith, who crafted the 2014 reauthorization. She wants to see the Government Accountability Office audit the states. And it could be a time to revisit whether the data needs to be reported at the federal level.
Through her own work, King understands the complexities of data collection. She worked at a state agency and knows what it means to be under-resourced, for things to take time. But she also carries the burden of being a parent who has lived through the death of a child that happened — at least in part, she feels — because the accountability wasn’t there.
A decade after her son’s death, she is still often struck by how many of the systems that are in place for other industries aren’t yet standard in child care. King, who this week marked the 10-year anniversary of her son’s death, said she was shocked to learn Hawaii was still so behind.
“I have been chronically disappointed in the level of response,” King said. “I understand that everybody is overtasked and under-resourced but I do think it’s such an important issue. It’s been devastating to not see progress made.”
Since Wiley died, King has had two more children, a boy and a girl — children she’s had to leave at the door of a provider after her trust was shattered.
“My husband and I are both lucky that we came out on the other side of Wiley’s passing away,” King said, but when it came time to decide where to put their children, they put their trust somewhere else.
They found a day care provider who they felt was taking all the safety precautions necessary, who was keeping the number of children they cared for low and who let the families into their space. A person who did everything possible to ensure they weren’t reported.
Ultimately, King turned away from the system that was built to ensure safety. The system that failed her.
Instead, she put her children in unlicensed care.
This story was produced by The 19th and republished with permission.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Early Childhood newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning.
The pandemic underscored the stark differences in pay, working conditions, and respect between K-12 educators and child care teachers in many communities. The disparity is rooted in race, class and gender: Child care teachers are more likely to be female, less likely to be white, and more likely to come from lower-income backgrounds than public school teachers.
In spite of historically poor treatment and low pay, child care workers have been exceptionally hard to unionize, due to high turnover rates, the geographic spread and isolation of the workforce, labor laws, and other factors.
Yet there have been union victories in recent years. In California, Child Care Providers United, which represents more than 40,000 home-based providers, won the right to collective bargaining in 2019, and last year secured a second substantial reimbursement increase from the state for many home child care providers. In New Mexico, where it’s harder for employees to unionize, organizers have taken a different tack: Through the leadership of an organization called OLÉ, parents and child care teachers joined forces to organize a public awareness campaign which contributed to voters approving a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to free child care for most of the state’s families.
I spoke earlier this month with Alexa Frankenberg, executive director of California’s Child Care Providers United, and Brenda Parra, senior digital strategist for OLÉ about how to effectively organize child care workers and the importance of diverse strategies for doing so. The interviews have been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell me about your personal background and how you became involved in the field?
PARRA: It’s been maybe six or seven years. I used to be a child care worker. I was in a classroom with 3-year-olds and I had to leave my position, unfortunately. I really loved doing the work, but the pay was very low and it was not supporting my family anymore. Somebody told me about OLÉ, which was doing child care organizing at the time. So I started joining these meetings. And I stuck around for a while until I decided to become an organizer.
What have you learned about what makes organizing effective in the child care space?
FRANKENBERG: One of the things that makes it uniquely challenging is just how dispersed the family child care providers are. They obviously work in their own homes so there are tens of thousands of work sites around the state for the members that are represented by CCPU (Child Care Providers United). That means you need to figure out how to have conversations with people spread over [many] work sites about how organizing together to build power through a union can make a difference in their lives.
Another challenge relates to the low pay. Many child care providers and staff have to hold multiple jobs to be able to make ends meet and support their families. So it’s a challenge for them to find the time to have the conversations, do the organizing work, and work together to make change. That takes time.
Thinking about the success that you’ve had in California, what were some specific strategies that you used there to try to overcome some of these challenges?
PARRA: There’s work you can do in terms of systematically identifying and recruiting leaders, equipping them to do the work. You’re never going to be able to have the resources to staff a campaign to go to 50,000 work sites to talk to folks. That requires you to think early on about individuals leading and owning this work, including talking to their coworkers.
When OLÉ first started its work, what was its strategy?
PARRA: From what I am aware, OLÉ started door knocking and organizers used to go to centers and, once there, they would talk to the director and ask if they could talk to their teachers and their parents.
How did strategies evolve over time?
PARRA: The digital work ramped up during COVID.
It was super hard to be able to find child care because of the circumstances of COVID and everyone getting sick. There were a lot of centers closing down. We were running ads on social media. We were able to get further out there and get people more informed. When we started doing online organizing, we would get maybe a week’s worth of work visiting centers done in one day.
Thinking of New Mexico, and OLÉ’s success at making inroads for child care teachers outside unionization, how important is it to think about other strategies apart from traditional organizing?
FRANKENBERG: I don’t think it has to be either-or. We have worked side by side with allies, such as parent advocates and others, here in California. And that has been part of what has allowed us to be successful, both at the state level as well as local level. We worked super closely with parent voices in Alameda County to win passage of a local measure to fund additional child care slots, higher pay and other supports that are needed. We continue to look to New Mexico for the work they’ve done to move to alternative methods. We obviously think that there’s some really critical and important guarantees that a union contract allows providers to have, but organizing and collective power take a lot of different shapes.
How have you been able to translate online organizing in New Mexico into concrete victories for child care workers?
PARRA: My work is to put up the online ad and collect the phone number and name of the person who responds. After that, I will put it into either a phone bank or a text bank so one of the organizers from the early education campaign can send them a text or get more information from them.
Do you feel the pandemic made it easier or harder to organize in the child care space?
FRANKENBERG: That’s a hard question to answer because there’s nothing about the pandemic that was easy. What these individuals went through — financially, physically, mentally, emotionally — all these things are still being felt. So it would be really hard to say it made things easy. What it did was make consequences very stark. It was very clear that there was work that was needed to ensure basic health and safety of individuals. We had to fight for Covid closure days so that people could close down and not lose money because they had Covid or someone in their child care had Covid.
The pandemic shone a spotlight on the value of child care to allow people that needed to go to work to go to work in those first few months, particularly when schools closed. Child care workers were holding up our economy for a long time. And they’ve never had a break, really.
What do you feel the future holds for child care organizing?
FRANKENBERG: We’re in the middle of moving to cost-of-care reimbursement, which is something they’ve achieved in New Mexico. That’s a big thing on the horizon for us. There are a lot of short-term gains we’ve been able to make on pay. And it’s critical that we don’t continue to just go short-term to short-term to short-term, but really move towards a system. We’re glad to have the governor’s partnership on this. And we’re working toward ensuring people are receiving more than pennies on the dollar.
We need to make sure that the child care system that we have is one that really reflects who California is in the year 2024, not a system that was set up 50 years ago and may have some of those biases. We need to root out the racism, the sexism, that’s inherent in the system. It’s baked into the pay and compensation, but it’s also baked into really unjust policies that have negative impacts on families and providers.
This story about child care advocacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Millions of families may now face a lack of child care following the recent expiration of pandemic-era federal funding.
The child care “stabilization” funds included in the American Rescue Plan Act were just that — emergency funding to stabilize the sector amid a pandemic.
As vital as that funding was, it was insufficient to address the many systemic problems impacting early childhood education and its workforce, including inequitable wages.
Wages for early childhood workers already lag far behind those of their K-8 colleagues who have similar credentials. These workers, disproportionately Black, Latina and indigenous, face poverty rates an average of 7.7 times higher than other teachers.
This financial condition perpetuates economic inequality and reflects systemic racism, with early childhood education programs continuing to be subsidized through the long hours that Black, Latina and indigenous women work for unjust wages and limited benefits.
This inequity and the end of the crucial pandemic-era federal lifeline for early childhood educators will negatively impact families and workers, The Century Foundation estimates. Some 70,000 child care programs are likely to close; millions of families will struggle to get access to child care; 232,000 jobs could soon be lost; and states will lose $10.6 billion in tax and business revenue every year.
There is one bright note: State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope in the face of such a dire challenge.
In late 2022, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to create a permanent child care fund, making child care free or affordable for many families and increasing early educator wages.
State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope.
Washington, D.C., recently established the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, which aims to achieve pay parity between early childhood educators and their K-12 counterparts. Since 2022, almost $70 million has been distributed to nearly 3,000 early childhood educators. The district is also expanding health insurance for early childhood educators.
In Louisiana, a coalition of state and local government partners is working with a nonprofit to test the impact of projects that increase child care workers’ wages in key communities; if positive, they intend to scale the programs across the state.
Minnesota last year signed into law the Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program to fill the gap following the ending of the federal child care stabilization grants. The program will provide $316 million this fiscal year, and $260 million every two years ongoing, to directly increase child care workers’ pay.
These solutions are critical, because it is our nation’s youngest students who will ultimately suffer the consequences of high teacher turnover and an unstable learning environment at a key time in their development.
Early childhood education directly impacts their future learning outcomes and lifelong success; it deserves our attention and investment.
Building on these efforts, the Early Educator Investment Collaborative — a group of funders that has come together to accelerate progress in the early childhood education profession — recently announced grants for state and local partnerships in Colorado, Louisiana and Washington, D.C.
These grants will bolster innovative approaches to increasing early childhood education workforce pay, including the creation of dedicated revenue streams and pilot demonstration projects to evaluate the impacts of salary increases.
They will also promote greater collaboration between agencies to improve workforce compensation — aimed at increasing the capacity of financial and data systems to support long-term wage and benefits increases.
I’m excited for the solutions these grants will amplify and hope they can provide useful models and encouragement for other states to explore ways to better compensate early childhood educators.
But we also need state and federal legislators to step up for their constituents on this issue. It’s critical for legislators to reflect the majority of voters’ interest in early childhood education reform by increasing investment, enacting legislation to boost compensation and advocating for broader support of early childhood educators.
Philanthropy also has a big role to play. By supporting governments with the funding needed to explore unique solutions, philanthropic organizations can help find what works, scale successful models and support sustainable change.
Along with boosting the rallying cry for increased federal investment in early childhood education and its workers, this moment is an opportunity for states, communities and philanthropists to find truly long-term solutions to fully support early childhood education workers and the families they serve.
Ola J. Friday is the director of the Early Educator Investment Collaborative.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Early Childhood newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about early learning.
Mississippi child care workers are strained by low pay and lack of training — but an additional $5 an hour in salary would prompt around half of those workers to stay in their jobs and to seek additional education, according to a new survey by state child care advocates.
The coalition Mississippi Forum for the Future surveyed nearly 700 child care workers, most of whom provide care in centers, to draw attention to the precariousness of the child care sector in the state. Early childhood educators are facing strain across the nation, but Mississippi is in a particularly difficult position: Workers reported an average hourly wage of $10.93 and typically have no benefits. In contrast, a “survival wage” in the state for a single adult is $12.28 an hour, according to the report.
Just under 70 percent of child care workers said they worked 40 or more hours a week.
More highly educated workers earned more, but the differences were not large: Child care employees with a high school diploma reported earning $10.22 an hour on average, but those with a bachelor’s degree or higher said their salary averaged $12.79 an hour.
Close to half, or 48 percent of the workers surveyed, said they did not have training beyond high school. A similar percentage of child care workers — 47 percent — reported that they are working with children who have mental, physical, or emotional disabilities.
About 36 percent said they relied on public support programs such as Medicaid or the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.
A little more than a third reported they had looked for a new job, and of that group, most of them were looking for jobs out of the child care sector.
In the midst of these stresses, demand for child care in the state is still quite high.
Lesia Daniel-Hollingshead has provided child care services in her community of Clinton, Mississippi, a suburb west of Jackson, for nearly 25 years. After she taught children in public schools, her passion prompted her to open several child care centers. Since the inception of her child care ventures in 2000, more than 7,000 children have received child care at My First Funtime, Funtime Pre-School and Funtime After-School.
During the pandemic, Hollingshead’s facilities suffered a 50 percent decline in enrollment. But by 2021, an overwhelming number of families with infants sought her child care services. In October 2021, to meet demand, she opened My First Funtime, a center for infants and toddlers 6 weeks to 18 months old.
“We opened My First Funtime in October of 2021, by December we had enrolled 66 infants,” Hollingshead said. “My program is currently full — and not because of the number of enrollments but because I have the number of children for the staff that I can maintain.”
The survey findings did not surprise Daniel-Hollingshead, who said she pays her lead teachers $14 to $20 an hour, based on education and experience. Her less-experienced employees are paid $9 to $10 an hour. Families of infants up through 5 year olds pay $184 a week for her center; the rate is among the most expensive in her area, she said.
Biz Harris, the executive director of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance, said that the state has recently launched an initiative meant to provide extra money to teachers and to provide scholarships for those who engage in additional training.
However, that program is funded through emergency funds that came from the federal government during the pandemic, and thus will sunset when the money is exhausted.
“We would love to see a program like this have the funds to continue, and worry about what will happen to the already struggling child care workforce when it ends,” Harris said. “Other states do provide these kinds of programs for their child care teachers as a workforce investment.”
Daniel-Hollingshead said while that money is appreciated, she still struggles to hold on to employees and has waiting lists at every age level.
“Currently it is extremely difficult to retain staff,” she said. “Due to the pay rates that I have had to increase to keep my best people, we are operating over budget about $25,000 a month which obviously is not sustainable long-term.”
This story about child care wages was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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