IV. Key Innovation Findings

Disclaimer: This is not an exhaustive list of notable innovations in the U.S. child care system. This report is meant to describe innovative solutions to various pain points in the child care delivery system, and promising efforts to improve it, absent the serious federal investment in care infrastructure advocates have called for. Nor is New America attempting to rank such innovations based on merit, scalability, or worthiness of investment. These innovations are just examples of the creativity and level of change required to move the current system toward universal care.

Read the full piece at Early Learning Nation here.

Becca Balint remembers arriving at the Vermont State Senate in 2014 and looking around the room at her middle-aged colleagues, many of whom were well into their 60s. “Child care wasn’t even on their minds,” she said. When the topic of increasing access to affordable child care came up, it was met with shrugs. “It was considered a women’s issue, a private issue, a ‘stay-at-home until they’re older’ issue,” recalled Balint, now the State Senate Leader, in an earlier conversation with Early Learning Nation.

But in the past decade, demographics in the state house and attitudes around child care have drastically shifted, and Vermont is one of the first states to seize on that opportunity to push for universal child care. There are now state laws codifying a study on implementation and financing (likely paid for by an income tax for the workforce). Innovators in the child care space are watching Vermont closely because their efforts have gotten so far in codifying universal child care into law through the state legislature. New Mexico, by comparison, is using executive action and giving voters a chance to vote on an amendment to accomplish something similar.

Research shows that treating early care and education as a public good will benefit families, children, democracy and society. According to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, early childhood education also plays a role in combating structural inequalities in family and education that may already be impacting a child’s well-being before they enter K–12 schooling.

Vermont’s promising goals notwithstanding, our current national patchwork system still relies on an individualistic approach, where families are left to fend for themselves in finding and paying for expensive child care, early educators earn poverty wages, providers are underpaid and operate on razor-thin margins, and the quality of care suffers for young children at a time when research shows their developing brains need it most.

While we have a way to go for the kind of public investment and public-private partnerships to make quality early care and education truly affordable and workable for all families, there is ample innovation in the field that stands to improve different facets of our child care delivery system. It’s a complicated problem with neither substantive federal investment nor a robust care infrastructure, building a high quality, universal early care and education system will require innovative and creative solutions. Right now, states are lone actors in making sweeping changes with little federal support or public investment. While private sector solutions are useful, they are not sufficient for widespread change.

The following is not an exhaustive list of innovations underway across the country, nor does it capture all of the many barriers that stand between our current reality and a future in which all children have access to high-quality care and learning It is meant to illustrate select innovations for various pain points in the child care delivery system, absent further federal investment, and to inspire more action.

Building the Public Case for Child Care Investment

Vermont’s Push for Universal Child Care

In May 2021, after years of coalition-building, Vermont passed H.171 legislation to lay the blueprint for universal child care. Vermont still faces a major hurdle in funding the universal child care program. H.171 puts in place two studies: the first on how to make the program accountable and efficient, and to decide which agency will regulate it and how. The second is a revenue study, designed to map out the costs and payments. Yet this is the furthest a state has come to adopting universal child care into law. For states looking for an innovative way forward on child care, Vermont can serve as a blueprint.

Read more about Vermont’s Push for Universal Child Care in this ELN feature.

New Mexico’s Year of Free Child Care

In April 2022, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state will cover the costs of child care for the majority of its residents, up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, through June 2023. According to estimates from the Washington Post, this new benefit will make child care free for 30,000 families. This makes New Mexico the first state to offer no-cost care over such a broad range of incomes. New Mexico has also expanded their subsidy program in innovative ways, to be discussed more in Part 5 of this series. Until then, read Bryce Covert’s ELN article: “New Mexico Just Became the First State to Make Child Care Free for Nearly All Families.”

Build Up San Mateo

Build Up San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay Area is a multi-stakeholder public and private partnership led by San Mateo County’s Child Care Partnership Council and Office of Education, as well as philanthropic partners like the Silicon Valley Community and Heising-Simons Foundations. The goal of this initiative is to solve the county’s child care shortage by prioritizing evaluation of the community’s unmet child care needs, the barriers to increasing the supply of care, and working with business leaders and developers to make planning for and realization of an improved child care supply a deliberate part of the county’s development moving forward. In one example of Build Up’s success thus far, the county tapped the private development firm Greystar to engage the community and study best practices for building sustainable and affordable onsite child care into a mixed-use project on Redwood City’s South Main, currently under construction.

Supporting and Encouraging Private Investment in Child Care

Promise Venture Studio serves as a nonprofit accelerator for entrepreneurs in the early childhood space. It has created a Venture Index to showcase these innovations with the hope of drawing investment and attracting attention from policymakers, funders and journalists. The group also can collaborate and work with one another via a Slack channel. The goal is to get the early education and child care field to look like most other ones in terms of private investment, explained founder Matt Glickman.

Springbank Collective is a private investment company that provides early investment to companies that fit within one of the three themes to support women and working families: career, care and consumer. Two examples of this are Little Otter Health, which supports whole family mental health, and Wellthy, which offers care coordination for caregivers provided through employers for managing child care and complex illness needs.

Key Question: Is It Enough?

These innovations can help spur funding and they can help individual states improve their child care options. But the national child care crisis is too large for a silver bullet solution, even one that has passed state legislatures or received generous Series A funding. (Series A financing refers to an investment in a company after it has shown progress in building its business model and demonstrates the potential to grow and generate revenue. It is considered seed capital since it’s designed to help new companies grow.)

“We cannot out-innovate our way out of paying workers $12 an hour,” said Elana Berkowitz, a founding partner of Springbank Collective. “We need every kind of investment and we need more of it: private investment, government investment, employer benefits. No one should have to shoulder the entire burden of this sector, which is utterly strapped.”

Investment helps. Even as fields such as health care and education have seen a thriving market for private funds for innovation, early child care has lagged behind. Groups like Promise Venture Studio and Springbank Collective, among others, aim to close that gap, create a thriving ecosystem for innovators, spur investment and use the accelerator process to make it happen quickly.

Private sector solutions require less political will and can be scaled to encourage more change nationwide. But private innovation cannot be the only answer. Research by Better Life Lab found that child care is too fragmented and complicated to be solved by a single innovation, no matter how well funded. Reliable, stable funding is crucial to keep child care operations open. This is true of both center-based and home-based care. The margins within the child care market are too thin for most providers to offer basic benefits, including paid family leave and paid sick days. For the majority of Americans who live in states that do not provide such benefits, the burden falls to the families who pay tuition and the care workers who go without.

Absent federal investment for universal child care, it will be up to states to lead the way, like Vermont and New Mexico, which have already acknowledged that quality, affordable and accessible child care is essential for their workforce and economy. Other states such as New York, have drastically increased their budgetary spending on child care, and Connecticut lawmakers have advanced a state budget to include a one-time rebate of $250 per child, up to $750 per household. States that can demonstrate an effective universal child care system may become the blueprints for future state efforts, similar to the paid family leave model which started in a handful of states and has since grown to 11 states plus D.C.

But states can struggle to maintain funding streams to allow for universal child care, as states are required to balance their budgets and not take on a deficit, unlike the federal government. One of the first steps in creating a state-supported child care system is identifying the sustainable funding streams, said Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind, and a top voice in child care and early education. “The states can’t just rely on American Rescue Plan Act money or the state having ‘a good budget year.’”

Haspel added, “States have traditionally been these laboratories of democracy, they serve that role well. With the political realities at the federal level, states have more of the burden to bear.”

Read the full piece at Early Learning Nation here.

Joan Morgan had developed an unusual morning routine. With her two kids, ages 4 and 6, buckled in the car, she leaves her house in the Portland, Oregon area around 6:40 a.m. to drive to her child care center, where she arrives promptly at 7:00 a.m. All three of them wait in the car while Morgan dials into her first conference call of the day.

“I bribe them within an inch of their life in order for them to keep quiet,” Morgan says. Morgan is a bone marrow transplant coordinator, her husband also works in health care, and she has the later workday start at 7:00 am. The daycare, however, doesn’t open for another half hour. And this is the earliest option available anywhere close to where they work and live.

Tari Brodsky, a nurse practitioner in Long Island, New York, said that every mom she knows who works at the hospital has had this same struggle. Daycares tend to run between 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., but Brodsky, who works 12 hour shifts, has to be at work at 7:00 a.m. and isn’t finished until 7:00 p.m. When her twins were young, she worked the overnight shift, hiring a babysitter to come in the afternoon for four hours while she slept. Now, she works on Sundays, so that her husband can be home with the kids and she doesn’t have to struggle to find coverage.

Morgan and Brodsky both recounted these stories in an interview with Better Life Lab. But they aren’t alone in having this predicament. Traditional child care hours don’t work for all families, including families who have sporadic or inconsistent work. Nationally, only 8 percent of child care centers are open during nontraditional hours, which can mean anything from starting early, long shifts, overnights or weekends.

Families are different. They work different schedules. They need and want different things. And that changes over time as jobs change, life circumstances change or children grow up. In researching child care innovations on the state and local level, and echoed by a report from the Urban Institute, we found there is not a one-size-fits-all or “silver bullet” solution for how child care delivery should operate. But we do know that innovation surrounding nontraditional schedules and child care deserts are needed to increase supply and meet demand.

To improve supply, meet demand, and provide support for a wider variety of families, innovators in the child care space are doing more to support home-based, family-based or Family, Friend and Neighbor care (FFN child care). Currently, informal care settings serve more families than center-based care, can be more easily set up and can be a better match for families who work non-traditional schedules or who are seeking a specific cultural match. Some studies also suggest that families of color may prefer these arrangements to center-based care, including Black and Latinx families and those living in homes with low incomes. It remains to be seen, though, whether that preference would hold if the child care system included culturally responsive, affordable, and accessible center-based care close to their homes. A 2016 report by Child Care Aware of America found that “both African American and Hispanic children are more likely to be in cared for by a relative in the home, while white and Asian children are more likely to be cared for in a home by a non-relative.”

Additionally, as one author of this report demonstrated in a prior publication, many immigrant parents believe that FFN care provides more personal attention for their children. Indeed, research shows that FNN providers often have low adult-to-child ratios, suggesting that these providers are able to spend more individual, quality time with each child.

These “informal care providers” as many are referred to, can be licensed or unregulated, depending on state and local business regulations. Many have not received formal business and marketing training, yet are tasked with running a business as part of their child care. They may lack splashy marketing materials and brand-name recognition of center-based care. And several innovators spoke of a bias in home-based care, that it is perceived as less worthy or less valuable than center-based care. Innovators in this space are working to change that perception and show that home-based care plays a crucial role in child care delivery.

Other benefits to the family child care centers include:

• Children of multiple ages from one family can stay together throughout the day
• Children and the provider may have a shared cultural or linguistic connection
• Both family child cares and FFN providers can be more easily set up in traditional child care deserts, which over 50 percent of the country falls into, and when quality child care for many people just doesn’t exist. In many cases, this model can be a better fit for a family, depending on their needs and priorities.

Supporting Informal Care as a Quality Child Care Option

“There is a bias around home-based child care,” explains Natalie Renew, director of Home Grown Child Care, which connects funders with child care providers, provides resources to home-based child care, and advocates for providers to policy makers. Home-based child cares are typically less resourced and less visible than center-based child care centers, especially those centers connected to existing institutions, like a school system. They also receive fewer funds under the state subsidy systems, even for doing the same work as child care centers.

The current child care system uses quality metrics as part of a process to calculate reimbursement rates for providers who accept subsidies. These systems, too, disadvantage family child cares. “The typical framework for quality is based on teacher qualifications, room arrangement and indoor environments,” said Renew. “When we talk to families who use home-based care, we learn that they are defining quality differently: intergenerational relationships between parents and families; flexibility; small groups; consistent routines; feeling of safety. These perceptions of qualities—while valued in the literature—are not present in the quality metrics.”

Research, too, supports what Renew says regarding families’ preference for unregulated home-based care. “A lot of prior thinking is that this was a second choice, but it’s not what families want. But now families are saying we want unregulated home-based care,” said Renew. They want kids to sleep in their own beds and eat meals with people in their immediate community.

“Because our framework is so oriented around the activities, and the way we define quality in the context of centers, a narrative has developed that this is a lower quality of care,” said Renew. “The standards as written are modeled on school and center-based operations. It looks different in home-based care. There is a routine: the natural routine of the family. And that is what builds stability for learning and curiosity. The desire to superimpose that center-based model creates unfair and unjustified burdens on the providers, and they don’t get appreciated for the incredible assets that exist in home-based care.”

Another problem with the existing subsidy system is the paperwork required for providers to accept funds. For a small child care provider, the administrative burden can be too great. Ashli Carlock, a home-based provider in Nebraska wrote about the process in a Home Grown blog post: “It’s nerve wracking. You know you’re going to get paid something, but you don’t know what that will be exactly… You’re trying to calculate in your mind paying bills, keeping food stocked for kids, meeting your own personal needs, and paying a part-time employee.”

Supporting Family Child Care Providers as Educators

Another group working to expand the role of family child educators is the Connecticut-based All Our Kin, a nonprofit that trains, supports and sustains family child care providers. “We built this organization to recognize that family child cares are left out of conversations and devalued,” said Jessica Sager, founder of All Our Kin.

Because family child care centers tend to be used by families of color, and are often run by women of color, Sanger believes they have been devalued by systemic racism, which has rendered family child labor as worthless. “Children can succeed in any setting with stable, nurturing care,” said Sanger. That stable, nurturing environment isn’t restricted to the domain of child care centers, which can benefit from having more resources for reaching families.

Because family child care centers tend to be used by families of color, and are often run by women of color, Sager believes they have been devalued by systemic racism, which has rendered family child labor as worthless. “Children can succeed in any setting with stable, nurturing care,” said Sanger. That stable, nurturing environment isn’t restricted to the domain of child care centers, which can benefit from having more resources for reaching families.

Easing the Licensing Process for Spanish-Speaking Providers

Note: This section appeared in the May 2022 report by Ai Binh Ho, From Trauma to Development.

Half of all immigrant caregivers in the early education workforce are providing home or family-based care. A quarter of family-based providers in the United States identify as Latinx.

The Child Care and Development Block Grant biennial state plans found that only three states report that they have policies in place to make their child care licensing regulations more accessible to providers from language minority or immigrant communities. Moreover, many immigrant FFN do not know that these subsidies are available. Spanish-speaking FFN care workers were half as likely to access subsidies as their English-speaking peers. Some states, including Florida and North Carolina, prohibit unauthorized immigrants from collecting any subsidies. Unsurprisingly, only 38 percent indicated that they received subsidies or other financial support other than payments from parents, compared to 74 percent of English-speaking FFN providers.

Most states require household-wide background checks to receive payments, which experts say can make it less likely that undocumented providers or providers in mixed-status households will apply for assistance. Immigrant providers, specifically, are often discouraged from becoming licensed due to costs, language barriers, and real or perceived barriers related to their immigration status.

Key Question: Is It Enough?

We need better reimbursement rates, quality metrics, and availability. Improving the current child care delivery system to meet the needs of more families and in more places will require improving the current reimbursement rates and availability of all child cares – including family, home-based and informal child care. Currently, informal care can vary widely from state to state with myriad licensing standards and subsidy reimbursement rates. For example, in Massachusetts, anyone watching a single, non-relative child in their own home requires a child-care license. In South Dakota, a caregiver can watch up to 12 children without requiring a license.

Additionally, both the quality metrics and subsidy reimbursements among states and informal care can vary widely. Renew has been outspoken for efforts to encourage decision-makers and others to recognize the value that home-based child care brings to children’s development, families and communities overall. A key way to support that care, she says, is to improve compensation for it.

There has been an influx of venture capital funding for innovations that make child care delivery more manageable and affordable, such as Wonderschool, Wee Care and Winnie, which connect families looking for child care with a provider. But while some may take into account licensed family-care providers, most are still concentrated on traditional child care delivery systems, particularly child care centers. While child care centers are an effective child care option for many families, they do not work for all families, especially those in child care deserts or those who work nontraditional hours. In addition, daycare centers often charge a set rate regardless of the number of hours used. For families that require only part- time or sporadic child care (such as those working unpredictable hours), the center-based care is not an ideal fit and often more than they can afford.

But please note: even an influx of home-based child care providers will not be enough without the shift in perceptions, quality standards and subsidy reimbursements that put such providers at a disadvantage. Expanding the role of subsidies is explained more in this report in section 5. Elevating home-based providers requires a change in our country’s way of thinking about child-care delivery, and one that is immediately needed to support a growing workforce.

Read the full piece at Early Learning Nation here.

Tiffany Gale has a fervent wish – to offer paid leave to her employees. But Gale (no relation to the author) runs a home-based child care center out of her home in Weirton, West Virginia, and doesn’t have the profit margins to pay for an employee to take a paid leave and hire a temporary replacement. Nearly all the money she makes, she explains, goes back into the business: for supplies, playground equipment, toys and staff. After expenses, she estimates she took home $30,000 last year. “Not much for a small business owner,” she said. One of her two employees is her sister-in-law, who has spina bifida and limited feeling in her lower limbs, which makes her prone to infections and occasional hospitalization. When she is out, Gale can’t afford to pay her, nor does she have the staff and paperwork capabilities to apply for disability or job assistance. “I care about her, and she genuinely cares about the children,” Gale said. [link to story here]

What Gale faces, like so many other child care providers, are the demands of running a small business with high labor costs, strapped tuition-paying parents, slim profit margins and many moving pieces. Roughly 30 percent of infants and toddlers go to a home-based program, and estimates from Home Grown show that 1.2 million paid carers work inside their home, like Gale. And research shows that the childcare industry is highly fragmented, with nearly 90 percent of the establishments being single proprietorship child care providers and educational professionals – like Gale herself. Unlike other peer competitive countries, most of this country’s child care is unsubsidized, so it’s up to parents to pay the full cost while transferring some of the high-cost burden to the employees, many of whom make poverty wages. On top of that, the owner of the child care center is expected to manage the staffing, payroll, marketing, communication and benefits on top of everything else.

One of the most promising innovation areas we found in our on-going child care research is the growing number of technological and financial tools available to help the business side of the child care industry run more smoothly and efficiently – which can ease the time burden on owner/providers and potentially lower costs for parents and providers. While such innovative efficiency fixes can be very useful to individual child care centers, they are not a substitute for substantial public investment. Full enrollment, better marketing or payroll assistance can boost market efficiencies, but it will take real federal investment, year over year, to help families cover costs and boost child care educator wages, or robust family-supportive and safety net policies that would allow home-based providers like Gale to have her employees take paid sick leave without hurting her bottom line.

Solutions to Increase Pay for Child Care Without Adding Costs to Parents

Mirza is a fintech company that works with employers to subsidize the cost of child care so their employees aren’t forced to drop out of the workforce. The employers give a zero-interest loan, between $5,000-$7,000 per year, that an employee puts toward child care and can repay over three years, or get chunks of it forgiven with retention and attendance incentives. This program allows parents to afford quality child care without taking income away from the providers. Mirza integrates with an employee’s payroll provider so that monthly loan payouts and repayments happen automatically.

“It’s actually a care subsidy disguised as a loan,” said Siran Cao, the company co-founder. Since many parents are having children during some of the peak career-building years, stepping away from work comes at a much higher cost. “That is a period where the opportunity cost of leaving the workforce is missing some of that career acceleration.”

Mirza is in the process of launching with U.S. companies and Cao expects to do so in the summer and fall of 2022.

Solutions to Match Families with Providers and Provide Back-End Office Supports

Probably one of the most talked about solutions for making child care more accessible and affordable without the addition of a significant federal or state investment are those that work with existing child care centers to centralize administrative costs, and take on some of the administrative burdens, including personnel, placement, covid-19 mitigation, and external communications and marketing.

Winnie, Wee Care and Wonderschool offer such administrative support. All three conduct an online marketplace for child cares—connecting families with open spots—with the goal of allowing providers to operate at peak capacity and spend less time on administrative tasks. The low-margin industry of child care operates most effectively when all spots are filled, so these companies are doing a service to improve access and lower operating costs for the providers.

Innovations at a Glance

Wonderschool

Wonderschool is a two-sided marketplace meant to help parents find child care options and offers a child care management system (CCMS) for day-to-day operations. This CCMS provides online enrollment and enrollment management, tuition processing, financial recordkeeping tools, a CACFP (food program) solution, daily attendance tracking, a parent communication and engagement tool, and an online community for providers.

The child care providers—80 percent of which run home-based child cares—can self-select which level of Wonderschool access they want and need, with prices ranging from $2 a month per child to access the Wonderschool child care management system, to up to a 10 percent revenue share for opting into a higher tier of service with marketing and enrollment support. In some cases, a sponsoring agency like a government agency or child care network will purchase Wonderschool access and make it available to the child care providers within their communities. Two examples include the Elevate New Mexico Child Care program and the Maryland Child Care Boost program. Wonderschool also offers a New Supply solution, in which new child care programs are supported in setting up, getting licensed and onward into operations.

“Technology solutions provided by the Wonderschool platform help keep administrative costs low, efficiency high, and programs fully enrolled and profitable; these are all key components of running a sustainable child care business,” said Mia Pritts, Wonderschool’s VP of Strategic Partnerships.

Winnie

Winnie matches families looking for child care spots with licensed providers using publicly-available state data. While Winnie is free for any provider to use (the founder Sara Mauskopf gives the analogy of Yelp, where anyone can claim a page), subscribers of Winnie Pro pay $199 per month and receive prominent placement, lead generation and a better web presence with more customizable features.

By keeping the centers at capacity, or close to capacity, they are helping to increase the profit margins. Mauskopf’s own research estimates that if the average cost of child care is $844 per month (with some locations being much higher) Winnie Pro subscribers net a return on their investment by keeping spaces filled just two weeks faster.

“With this audience, we are able to help child care businesses fill their open spaces on average 2 weeks faster than if they did not use Winnie to list their open spaces,” said Mauskopf. “Given the average cost of [child care] in the U.S. is $10,174 per year, or $844 per month, when Winnie helps a center fill a space 2 weeks faster that’s $424 they’ve made, or $225 after the cost of the subscription.”

WeeCare

WeeCare also serves as a marketplace for parents and child care centers – both home-based and childcare centers. Participating providers are considered “Wee Care Directors” and by participating, are better able to fill their child care centers to capacity.

Similar to Wonderschool, WeeCare offers back-end support, including accounting, marketing and a web presence. WeeCare estimates that such administrative tasks being outsourced saves 20 hours per week for the child care provider. The company collects a percentage of the enrollment feeds from any leads generated, though a spokesperson for the company said they’ve been reducing that fee as the majority of their growth revenue comes from creating an employee child care benefits program.

Solutions to Centralize Administrative Costs and Services for Multiple Centers

Neighborhood Villages

Neighborhood Villages serves as a de-facto school district for five child care centers in the Boston area. This nonprofit operates as the back-end support for the centers, providing a family coordinator on the ground to help with wrap-around services, such as housing or food support for a family in crisis, and a central office function to assist with personnel, administrative functions and issues as they arise, such as creating a comprehensive Covid testing system. (Read more about Neighborhood Villages in Early Learning Nation.)

Solutions to Make Licensing Easier

Questions of licensing currently vary widely across states. The process can be onerous, though it can matter a great deal when it comes to the quality metrics and subsidy reimbursement rates. Licensing too, gives a record of the child care space, which can in turn make it easier for families to find available care options. But for many families who rely on non-traditional child care—particularly home-based child care or Family, Friend and Neighbor care—the licensing process can be too much of an administrative hassle without enough upside.

Neighborschools

Groups like Neighborschools, based in Massachusetts—a state with strict licensing requirements for child care—will help a child care provider navigate the licensing process free of charge for two years, then collect a referral fee for any placements made after those two years are up.

Key Question: Is It Enough?

Innovations in this area focus on using the same forces that make private companies and services profitable and efficient—technology, data management, systems design—to improve affordability of child care. Each of these innovations is designed to improve upon the existing system, in which each child care provider is going it alone, and represent an infrastructure improvement rather than a total overhaul. There is a logic to this: substantial change is far more difficult and requires a great deal of political will and public investment.

It’s important to be cautious about developing or perpetuating false optimism that if only a child care center had a better website, or backend payroll system or full enrollment, the child care crisis would be over, that child care would be a more equitable and affordable good.

These innovations help, and they should be applauded in their efforts for making improvements, but by no means should they be considered a substitute for robust public investment and child care infrastructure, the same way our country’s policies and tax dollars support K-12 education. Until the day comes when early care and education receives the investment and support as a public good like K-12 education, these new technologies are making providers’ jobs easier, one improvement at a time.

Read the full piece at Early Learning Nation here.

Justine Barawigira, 26, does not want to send her children to a child care center: “My bus can be late and [the center] can call [the] police and take my child. Yeah, I cannot agree with that.” While public transportation can be unreliable and her job can let her out late, Barawigira’s decision to not use center-based care reflects cultural preference (many refugees are unfamiliar with the U.S. early education system) and a deep need for her children to be with someone she trusts. At the root of her fear is mistrust of the U.S. care system to sympathize with her as a Black refugee mother and protect her children.

Among young children with immigrant parents without a high school diploma, like Barawigira’s children, only 5 percent use center-based care. Lower levels of parental education are associated with lower income and with less full-time work. Parents’ immigration and education status is strongly associated with the use of center-based care: the higher the education status, the higher the likelihood parents will send their children to the often more formal center-based care.

Many immigrant parents express fear around Early Childhood Education (ECE) centers. They worry that their child rearing practices, which may be historically rooted and culturally normative, may be viewed as abuse in the U.S. They also fear being tracked, monitored, or reported. As an example cited in Helping in Child Protective Services, a Diné family was distraught and invested significant effort to find advocates when a health inspector cited a child care center and named their child’s use of a cradleboard, a traditional sleeping and carrying apparatus, as “child abuse” during a visit to a ECE center.

Barawigira and her children are a part of the fast changing Black population: one-in-10, approximately 4.6 million Black people living in the U.S., were immigrants as of 2019. And Black children are far overrepresented in Child Protective Services cases, in which the state attempts or completes exactly what Barawigira fears—the removal of one’s children from one’s care. Black children also face the most difficulties in accessing high quality early education and have the highest likelihood of losing their access due to expulsion and suspensions, wrote W. Steven Barnett, co-director and founder of the National Institute for Early Education Research, and his colleagues.

Barawigira’s story reflects the U.S. history of exclusion and discrimination that weigh heavily on marginalizedd parents’ minds as they consider ECE options. In its 2020 Early Learning Needs Assessment, Washington State found that some marginalized parents chose not to access ECE because of fear or distrust of the system or concerns that their children may be unfairly treated or inaccurately assessed because of their race or cultural differences.

Despite growing findings on the importance of early childhood education, access has been slow and inequitable, with vulnerable populations often the last to benefit. The Urban Institute found that early childhood programs are among the most racially and ethnically segregated educational spaces in our country. Some state policies promote segregation. For example, Park Slope North–Helen Owen Carey, a community-based universal pre-K providers that offers universal pre-K seats open to any child as well as seats specifically reserved for low-income children whose families qualify for additional services, was financially punished when it refused to follow New York City’s policy of keeping the income-qualifying children and the general universal pre-K children in separate classrooms.

Young children of immigrants, the fastest growing population of young children in the U.S. is not being reached by the existing publicly subsidized system ostensibly designed to help them. The child care system in the U.S is a woefully inadequate and inequitable patchwork built around a private market of those parents who can pay and public programs for those financially struggling parents who meet income thresholds and other eligibility criteria. So creating an inclusive and equitable child care system will demand deliberate design and policy considerations.

For easier reading, this innovation area is broken into two parts: the first focuses on the reaching and promoting access to drastically underserved communities, and the second, on program design that centers marginalized students and their families across the country.

The first step to mitigating these inequities is reaching all populations of young children and building trust with their families in order to understand their wants and needs for a future child care program, and then to enroll them in the programs that meet those needs. Some promising programs show how early education can simplify enrollment, initiate culturally competent outreach, advance staff recruitment and ongoing training, and develop trusting relationships with parents.

Data Collection

You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know how big a problem it is. Yet, many states cannot answer questions on the quality of ECE programs, which children have access to ECE services, how effectively these services promote school readiness and positive health outcomes, or if the workforce is adequately trained to meet the needs of diverse children.

Data on young children are too often siloed, disconnected, and uncoordinated, preventing policymakers from understanding and responding efficiently and reliably to families’ needs, observed ChildTrends. For decades, more than half of the states have lacked comprehensive data needed to assess early childhood policies and outcomes, according to a 2018 ChildTrends survey. Adequate data collection would support rapid response planning to vulnerable populations during crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as improve accessibility to ECE.

Effective data collection depends on partnership with families, early learning professionals, and community leaders, and local organizations–without these connections, the data risks excluding marginalized populations, and thus, fails to address discrimination and systemic barriers. These partners should be included at every step of data collection, from the creation of the survey to the analysis of data. This type of community-centered data collection builds trust within a community, and as a result, increases new enrollments of vulnerable young children to ECE programs. Building positive parents-teacher partnerships will enhance children’s development and even recruit diverse teachers.

Head Start’s Community Needs Assessments

The first step toward increasing the accessibility of ECE is to learn who the families are, where they are, the extent to which they enroll in early education programs, and the issues they face that affect their willingness to access these programs.

Head Start, a 1965 federally funded program that offers comprehensive ECE, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income families, provides a model of data gathering the nation, states, and ECE programs need. All Head Start grantees are required to conduct community needs assessments every five years to determine the number of eligible infants, toddlers, preschool age children, and expectant mothers, including their geographic location, race, ethnicity, and languages they speak.

All data collection should document eligible children to reach families like Barawigira's, who did not apply with a statewide provider. Programs are also required to track children’s experiences with homelessness, foster care, and disabilities; their education, health, nutrition and social service needs; the typical work, school, and training schedules of parents; other child development, child care centers, and family child care programs that serve eligible children; resources that are available in the community to address the needs of eligible children and their families; and, the strengths of the community. These assessments paint a picture of the community, capturing the historical, economic, and political scene in order to maximize benefits for even the most underserved and hardest to reach families, such as mixed-citizenship status families who have low education attainment and limited English proficiency.

Each program must annually review and update the community assessment to reflect any significant changes, such as rates of family and child homelessness and shifts in community demographics. As a result, the program can quickly meet the needs of a new population, such as the 2021 influx of Afghan families. Preferring to speak over the phone rather than in email's written form, a Head Start program in Minnesota, which asked not to be named due to fear of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim acts that have been occuring in the state, reached a large number of Afghan families within weeks of their arrival. The program’s deep community engagement through strong relationships with parents and partnerships with local organizations means that families’ trust in the local organizations gets extended to the ECE program, effectively mitigating the mentioned anxieties around ECE.

While data collection may not sound like an innovation, adopting Head Start’s guidelines and focus areas could be the most critical step towards equity and accountability in ECE. The shift intentionally centers marginalized young children and begins to account for the U.S. history of ableism, white supremacy, anti-immgiration, anti-LGBTQ+, and other systemic violence because the data helps capture the effects of this violence and helps make visible barriers to ECE , and thus, enables ECE providers and programs to more directly respond to and meet families’ needs.

Adopting a Head Start-style community assessment is also an opportunity to be more inclusive. For example, new assessments can also ask about different family structures and a child’s gender identity.

Despite Head Start’s successes, it serves less than 40 percent of the 3- and 4-year-olds in poverty and less than 5 percent of the children living in poverty under age 3, according to State(s) of Head Start, the first report to comprehensively analyze Head Start’s enrollment, funding, quality, and duration by individual states. The report shows that Head Start is under-funded and is administered so differently from state to state that children do not benefit equally. For example, at age 4, enrollment by state varies from 17 percent (Nevada) to 100 percent (North Dakota) of eligible children.

Local and State Needs Assessments

Other non-Head Start programs also collect meaningful data that serves as a model for further efforts. Some school districts in New Jersey are likewise required to conduct community needs assessments. In other states, regional governing bodies determine the characteristics and needs of children in their service area. North Carolina's Statewide Birth-5 Needs Assessment collects data on a range of issues, including infant mortality, food and housing security, emergency room visits, child health, foster care, early learning and early literacy for all 100 counties as a part of its Early Childhood Action Plan. Additionally, it recently reestablished the Early Childhood Data Advisory Council to focus on improving the quality and scope of early childhood data collection.

Rapid Assessment of Pandemic Impact on Development–Early Childhood project (RAPID-EC)

In times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, data collection needs to be fast and adaptable to guide advocates, policymakers, and other stakeholders. The RAPID-EC project, based in Stanford University Graduate School of Education, collected information on early childhood and family well-being in response to the pandemic through a survey in April 2020 and March 2021 in order to provide actionable data, particularly to legislators, as it provided regular reports and policy briefs.

While RAPID-EC recruited participants through Facebook advertising, its success comes from its partnership with parent- and child care provider-facing organizations, including ParentsTogether, HomeGrown, Child Care Aware of America, Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors, and the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.

Additionally, it employed data from the U.S. Census, Pew Research Center, Urban Institute, National Survey of Early Care and Education, National Health Interview Survey, among others to create its own integrated data system. The surveys are offered in English and Spanish. According to program manager, Cristi Carman, RAPID-EC has a large pool of participants, and invites potential respondents, whose “race/ethnicity, income, and geographic location . . . are proportional to the population of households with children under age 6 in the US.”

ChildTrends’ Early Childhood Data Collaborative: Data Sharing and Linking

While Head Start’s data collection ensures it will reach vulnerable populations, its programs are least likely to be linked to other databases on children and families compared to other ECE programs, such as subsidized child care or state pre-kindergarten (33 percent versus 71-81 percent). The lack of data sharing between ECE programs requires unnecessary re-assessment when a child moves from one program to another and creates a significant knowledge gap in ECE programs within a state or nation.

In response to the lack of data sharing and integration, ChildTrends established the Early Childhood Data Collaborative to help state policymakers’ development and use of coordinated state ECE data systems to make policy decisions. The collaborative encourages data sharing and integration from two or more sources to answer policy, program, and research questions about children and families and the services they receive. For example, linking data between licensed child care facilities and children receiving subsidized child care helps providers identify supply and demand of child care. It can also help providers determine which services reach the greatest number of (or most vulnerable) children and families to create coordinated and rapid outreach strategies when needed during the pandemic.

Simplifying Enrollment

Enrollment remains an obstacle for many families despite the growing public investments in ECE over the past two decades. Enrolling in publicly funded early childhood education involves many time-consuming steps: the search for programs; applying to express interest in these programs; supplying documentation to verify family eligibility, and registering to confirm enrollment. With so many hurdles, many low-income families particularly struggle to navigate the existing options, which is further elaborated in Ai Binh T. Ho’s From Trauma to Development, and identity and income verification. Documents required for verification can include birth certificate, parent ID, proof of guardianship (if not parent), two proofs of residency, four current and consecutive pay stubs for each parent, W-2 forms, income tax forms, and an official letter from the employer. Parents must include a recent unemployment compensation statement if they do not work. Head Start also requires in-person interviews with each family.

New Orleans: Enrollment Reminders Via Text Message

The most frequently mentioned barrier to verification is confusion over the steps required to verify family income; about 20 percent of parents indicated some logistical barrier to completing the process; approximately 15 percent expressed difficulty finding or accessing at least one of the required documents; and 9 percent expressed that work schedule conflicts prevented them from verifying during the available hours.

Starting in 2012, New Orleans began using a common application, OneApp, to simplify the ECE application process and encourage families to consider multiple programs, allowing the vast majority (86 percent) of 2017–2018 ECE applicants to choose more than one program. The OneAPP is available in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Still, only about 65 percent of families in 2016–2017 completed the verification step after applying.

In an experiment to increase verification rates through text messages that permit two-way communication to remind parents and answer questions about verification, researchers Lindsay Weizler et. al found that the intervention increased verification rates by 13 to 15 percentage points and the speed with which applicants verified. Researchers concluded that barriers rather than a lack of motivation prevented families from completing verification since nearly 90 percent of parents, who received a personalized message, replied at least once with follow-up questions.

Solving Capacity Limitations

Two-way communication of texting cannot eliminate structural barriers to verification, such as inflexible work schedules, lack of transportation options (which prevents families from taking their children for up-to-date vaccinations and in-person interview required by Head Start), or difficulty in accessing required documents. Combining the low-cost texting intervention with innovations adopted by other cities could reduce application confusion and structural barriers that ultimately bar children from publicly funded ECE.

Flexibility in Enrollment Strategies

Expanding Preschool Access for Children of Immigrants, an Urban Institute study by Erica Greenberg et. al in 2018, synthesizes the strategies of four communities with unusually high rates of enrollment among low-income immigrant families and negligible (or nonexistent) gaps in enrollment between children of immigrants and children of U.S.-born parents. The report found that these locations in Dearborn, MI; Atlanta, GA; King County, WA; and Houston, TX offer simplified application, enrollment assistance, and flexible times and locations for enrollment. Additionally, they facilitated immigrant inclusion by not asking for parents’ or children’s Social Security numbers; by translating forms, related websites, and informational materials into popular languages; allowing flexibility in the types of proof of residence and other documentations; and by not requiring proof of income unless necessary.

The rise in children’s uninsured rates and widened racial disparities during the COVID-19 pandemic makes it urgent for programs to help families with health screenings and immunizations requirements by connecting families to partners who provide low-cost or free healthcare to young children. Millions–one out of three–of children fell behind on their vaccinations in 2021. Parents In Community Action, Inc. (PICA), a federally designated grantee that operates Head Start programs in Hennepin County in Minnesota partnered with Hennepin Health Mobile Clinic to offer vaccinations at one of its centers, where parents are already doing drop-offs and pick-ups. Siblings can get vaccinated together so families do not need to make multiple doctor visits. Sheyanga Beecher, Hennepin Healthcare nurse practitioner, explains that parents extend their trust in the teachers and school nurses to the vaccination pop-up since it's promoted by ECE programs.

Houston Independent School District’s Enrollment Fair

Expanding Preschool Access shows the effectiveness of a centralized registration that includes interpreters, health providers who can complete required health screenings, and representatives from social service agencies who can respond to any broader family issues to simplify enrollment. The Houston Independent School District, for example, hosts a district-wide application fair to assist families with the ECE application process. They provide help, in English and Spanish, to families who cannot attend the event by connecting with them virtually or over the phone.

Flexibility is the answer that stakeholders found after years of different innovations, emphasizes Expanding Preschool Access. Pre-school administrators in these locations constantly adapt to family needs. The report offers quotations from these administrators, showing the approaches they take:

• “We’ve purchased handheld scanners [to upload documents on the go] and everything to support families…we had the whole staff become notaries so [the need for notarized signatures] wouldn’t be a barrier”
• “When families are really struggling . . .sometimes they will come to us with the empty forms and we’ll help them fill out those forms”
• “Even if they miss [the deadline], we still have chances for them to make up enrollment. …There’s always an opportunity to not miss out.”

The emphasis here is to get every child in a program by meeting parents' needs. This level of flexibility that prioritizes young children enrollment over rules and procedures requires resources, cultural competency training, and time in order to trial and error different techniques and shifting family needs.

Researchers at Education for Research Alliance recommend removing the barrier of the enrollment process altogether. Policymakers, for example, could align ECE income eligibility requirements with requirements for other social services to pre-approve ECE applicants who qualify for these services.

By understanding that immigrants, like Barawigira, who fear ECE, and thus, cannot reap its benefits of reducing educational inequalities and improving the overall health for children, programs can focus on targeted outreach in order to mitigate fear and highlight benefits. These children, like every young child, offer their personality, intelligence, compassion, and experiences to their teachers and peers as they learn and play together. These rich daily interactions are the very best part of education and make up the foundation of our nation. That is, the absence of Barawigira’s children in ECE programs not only disadvantages them, but deprives all children by taking away opportunities for children to interact with a truer representation of the U.S. population.

For the majority of her motherhood, Zahra Hasmi’s biggest concern has been whether her children will return home each day: “When they went to the school, I was thinking, like, I don't know [if] my son or my daughter come alive in the house or no.” Before moving to Tucson, Arizona three years ago, Hasmi, who is originally from Afghanistan, witnessed multiple family members murdered. She mourns others she left behind. After her father and uncle were burned alive in front of her, she married a man who worked at the U.S. embassy. Now 41, she doesn't know how old she was when she got married; she only knows that marriage might have helped her stay alive. Four of her cousins were also burned alive in their house. Her mother still carries a bullet left by a member of the Taliban.

Now she is in the U.S., far from that violence, but ever-connected to her original home. Her first priority is to help the family members she has left behind, rather than focus on her daughter’s education, which might look like a luxury in a life and death context.

Though she speaks some English, Hasmi is illiterate in all languages. Her daughter recently started school when Hasmi learned about the school from a friend. She does not know the name of the school nor if it’s kindergarten or preschool. She is also unsure of her daughter’s age, and assumed that the school placed her daughter in an appropriate class when she presented her daughter’s green card.

Hasmi’s story reflects a common reality in a nation as diverse as the U.S., particularly among the youngest population: young children do not arrive at early education and care (ECE) programs equally ready to absorb knowledge. Research finds that parents’ economic hardship and psychological distress, such as feelings of depression, anxiety, and worry, lower children’s cognitive skills at as early as twenty-four months. Hasmi’s uncertainty, feelings of helplessness, witnessing of atrocities against her family members, and prolonged sadness have a cumulative effect on the family and the parent-child relationship.

Her family is not alone as 34.8 million children (ages 0-17)—nearly half of American children—are exposed to adverse childhood experiences. Trauma is rooted in geopolitics, race, gender, and economic disparity. Young children who live in poverty are more vulnerable to the negative effects of trauma than are children living in higher-income families.

Centering equity in ECE requires programs to intentionally mitigate the effects of trauma. Young children are the most vulnerable to long-term negative effects of trauma. Trauma during the early years can damage the cortex, the hippocampus, and the amygdala of the brain and can disrupt healthy development by interfering with a child’s ability to develop positive relationships with adults and peers, to learn and play, and to self-regulate their emotions, attention, and behavior. There is significant evidence on the importance of demographic similarities between teachers and caregivers in ECE settings and young children. The state and federal government must intentionally recruit and train more teachers who look like their students and direct resources to existing informal caregivers like the Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) providers many families prefer for various reasons.

Bilingual Early Childhood Teachers and Pamoja

The University of the District of Columbia Community College designed and implemented a Spanish-English bilingual associate degree program after Washington, D.C. passed regulations that sought to increase the education and credentials of the early educator workforce in 2016. This program aimed to address academic, bureaucratic, linguistic, and other barriers to obtaining degrees by providing early childhood educators with the opportunity to take courses in Spanish at close to no cost to participants. Colorado’s Pamoja Early Childhood Education Workforce Program offers free college-accredited courses in four languages, Swahili, Arabic, Farsi, and Karen, and connects providers and teachers with mentors to help with homework and technology skills—all of which helps increase the likelihood that each woman completes her certificate.

Programs need to intervene in the discrimination experienced by marginalized teachers. National Survey of Early Care and Education from 2019 data shows that wages for early childhood teachers differ by race: Black women earned 76.3 percent and Latinx 85.2 earned percent of what white teachers were earning. Perhaps even more troubling is that the wage disparities worsened for both blacks and Latinx teachers from 2012 and 2019. While inflation-unadjusted hourly wages for white women increased 92 cents, they decreased for Black and Latinx women by 40 cents and $1.05, respectively.

Soad Altaai, a Muslim teacher assistant and translator for Pamoja, says “The discrimination . . . was normal.” As an example, she recalls being blamed when a non-verbal child began acting aggressive. The mother told the ECE director that the aggressive behavior began when Soad was hired. Lauren Dorn, Pamoja program director, explains it is not enough for the program to build a diverse workforce. Pamoja had to offer implicit bias training to an ECE center when Pamoja recognized that the center repeatedly rejected Pamoja’s Muslims teachers.

Parents in Community Action (PICA)

Programs can create a sustainable and diverse early education workforce by establishing relationships with parents. Parents In Community Action, Inc. (PICA), a federally designated grantee that operates Head Start programs in Hennepin County in Minnesota, has staff members who have been there for decades. As a part of its efforts to improve families’ economic trajectories, PICA trains and hires staff directly from the families they serve. In fact, PICA is the number one trainer of teachers of color in the state of Minnesota. According to PICA’s director Monshari Chandler, over 70 percent of its staff are parents whose children are in the program or have graduated from the program. It is because of their deep engagement with parents that PICA knew and quickly responded to parents’ struggle to vaccinate their children during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to a diverse staff, ECE programs need to provide comprehensive training for all staff members–including bus drivers and janitors– to create safe and supportive early learning environments. Adopting a trauma-informed philosophy requires a paradigm shift that begins with understanding that challenging behaviors are normal reactions to trauma and not intentional misbehavior. Programs such as Early Head Start and Head Start with access to infant/early childhood mental health consultation report less expulsion. These professionalization and additional aids require substantial government funding and initiatives.

Whole-Family Solutions

Families (including chosen families) are young children’s first and most important teachers. Developmentally appropriate practices for young children should be informed by knowledge of young children’s social and cultural contexts, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Strong partnership between parents and providers enhance children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. All solutions need meaningful community outreach and make a real commitment to language access that includes investments in translation of informational materials and bilingual staff and interpreters.

The best growing conditions for young children depend on comprehensive support services for families because the stresses, work conditions, and overall wellbeing of caregivers profoundly impact young children's cognitive and emotional development.

Despite knowing this, the U.S. engages with the family in fragmented ways, according to Deborah Young, founder of Empowering Communities Globally: For the Care of Children and a Pamoja organizer. Young explains, as an example, Pamoja’s Early Childhood Education and Workforce Pathway Program, FFN Family Home Training Program, and Fatherhood Program come from disparate grants. In the Fatherhood program, the grant stipulated a focus on a single ethnicity.

As a result, teaching and caring for young children include investments and work towards a range of social and political changes. As examples, these changes can be pathway towards permanent residency and citizenship, which reduces the chronic stress on the entire family, and work authorization and labor protection to prevent exploitation of undocumented and documented immigrants, allowing them to earn more wages and more time with their children.

Briya Public Charter School and Mary’s Center

Briya Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., as an example, provides a whole-family approach by offering free high-quality early education to children as well as a tuition-free high school diploma program, Medical Assistant program, Child Development Associate program, and English as a second language program to immigrant parents, all at the same location. Additionally, three of the four locations also offer health services through Mary’s Center, a community health center. Recognizing the trauma experienced by many immigrants and refugees, Christie McKay, Briya’s executive director, explains that Briya has mental health and behavioral health counselors within their schools, allowing any adult and child student access to counseling, which is often inaccessible for financial reasons and its foreignness for many immigrants. In order to reduce stigma and unfamiliarity, counselors join classes and lunch to normalize talking about trauma and allow students to request individual sessions when they’re ready.

Invest in More Home Visiting Programs

Home visiting has been shown to benefit the whole family, strengthening children’s linguistic and cognitive development and their school readiness, increasing parents income, employment rates, and school enrollment. However, home visiting is incredibly underfunded. A North Carolina 2020 statewide report found that home visiting programs serve fewer than 1 percent of eligible children, and 72 percent of home visiting programs maintain a waitlist. The nation’s data reflects similar information: home visiting serves 1.6 percent of the 18 million pregnant women and parenting families who could benefit from home visiting, according to a 2019 Home Visiting Yearbook. Aimee Hilado, academic researcher, clinician, and Program Senior Manager of RefugeeOne, calls for leveraging early childhood education systems, particularly home visiting to mitigate trauma and promote developmental and healthy outcomes for the entire family. She explains that home visiting can build trust and remove several access barriers, such as transportation and reduce the anxiety of encountering federal agents at a public service venue. Staff can better see the family’s needs since members are more comfortable at home and can target their specific needs through providing information, training, screenings, and connections and referrals to services for parents expecting or caring for young children.

RefugeeOne Wellness Program

As mentioned above, because these visits happen in individual families, they can be an opportunity to address trauma in a way that does not feel foreign or stigmatizing for immigrant families. RefugeeOne Wellness Program, a mental health program in Illinois that started in 2016, integrates a home visiting program for trauma-exposed pregnant mothers and families with children under age three of refugee/immigrant status. The program sends a team of clinicians, psychiatrists, and interpreters to immigrant homes, regarding the parent as an expert in their own right, through a partnership to support both child and parent goals.

In addition to strengthening the parent-child relationship and promoting child development, staff can introduce immigrant families to additional support programs. Hilado and her team found that children receiving these home visits showed gains in social emotional and language development. Parents expressed fewer stress symptoms, were more likely to identify needs and navigate community resources, and also were more likely to be employed with either part time or full time employment.

Key Question: Is It Enough?

Race, immigration status, parental language, parental education, and income are predictors of children's participation in ECE. The current market-based system, in which only families who can afford the care they prefer have the flexibility to procure it, leaves children of color and children from low-income families at a profound disadvantage. Professor Mariana Souto-Manning argues that early childhood education “centers white interest, promotes white supremacy, upholds inferiority and deficit beliefs pertaining to children and communities of colors, and sees the language practices of communities of color as needing remedy. As such, early childhood education in the U.S. systematically and continuously inflicts harm on children, families, and communities of color."

On the contrary, culturally inclusive programs, such as those described above, respond to systematic disenfranchisement, and benefit all students, who learn by interacting with their peers. Children in diverse preschool settings show increased learning outcomes and learn to empathize and coexist with people from other races and classes.

However, it is clear that the best models of inclusive early education today are far too limited, confined to highly motivated organizations and programs that receive federal funding and have a mandate to serve all children equally. Future child care policy at the federal and state levels must make cultural responsiveness on an ongoing basis a requirement for increased funding to child care providers.

Read the full piece at Early Learning Nation here.

Zonia Sanchez works a long day. She begins at 6 a.m. and remains on the clock until 5 p.m., taking care of her four grandchildren, aged 2 months, 3, 5 and 11 years old. She logs her hours into a notebook, and submits the total each month to the Child Care Resource Center (CCRC) in Palmdale, California, where she lives. She’s paid different hourly rates for each child – $3.61 per hour for the 3 year old, $3.34 for the 5 year old, and $2.63 for the 11 year old. For the infant, she receives nothing; his paperwork has not yet been processed into the CCRC system.

“These are my grandkids and my daughter has to work,” she explained in an interview with Better Life Lab, published in the Washington Post. “If it wasn’t for me, who would take care of my [grand]baby for no pay?”

The complicated, bureaucratic process around child care subsidies and payments is something many child care experts believe must be addressed for the system to work for more families. In better news, innovations surrounding the subsidy model are showing great promise for correcting some of these problems – including changing the way rates are set.

“For years, subsidies were set by a market rate,” explained Simon Workman, principal of Prenatal – Five Fiscal Strategies, a consulting group focused on early education. States determine the “market rate” via a survey of what parents are willing to pay for care.

But in 2016, federal regulations changed and states were allowed to explore alternative models for setting subsidy rates. Instead of looking at market rates (what families are willing to pay), innovative states began to look at true cost (how much actual care costs to deliver). What followed was a burst of innovations across the states focused on the way subsidies are determined, delivered and at what amount to a variety of providers.

Understanding the Flaws of the Current Subsidy System

Currently, only a small fraction of families that qualify for child care subsidies actually receive them, and the vast majority of children receiving subsidized care (75 percent) attend licensed child care centers. Only two percent of federal subsidies go to families who use informal, Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) caregivers like Sanchez in the child’s own home.

Much of the funding for child care assistance comes from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), established by Congress in 1990. The CCDBG gives states flexibility in how they develop their child care programs and policies, and distribute funds given to them annually by the federal government. Under federal regulations, the block grants subsidize child care for families with incomes up to 75 percent of state median income (and some proposals would limit child care costs to no more than seven percent of income) and also provide funds for activities to improve the overall quality and supply of child care, including quality programs in subsidized care, and creating health and safety standards.

Today, approximately 1.8 million children receive CCDBG-funded child care in an average month, but that includes just one in nine eligible children. It is through these funds that a provider like Sanchez can get paid, in a state like California which allows FFN providers, who are unlicensed, to receive child care subsidies. (Eight states and D.C. require providers to be licensed to receive subsidies). FFN care is especially crucial for marginalized communities, who may seek a cultural connection or relation for their preferred caregiver, as in Sanchez’s case where the preference is for a grandmother to care for her grandchildren.

In addition to subsidies going to too few children, another major flaw is the way subsidies are calculated that makes quality care out of reach for families. Until recently, the subsidy reimbursement amount set forth in the rules of the CCDBG was pegged to the 75th percentile of that market rate. That means if a state finds the market rate for child care is $419 per week (as it is in D.C. – the most expensive in the country), then families who qualify for child care subsidies will receive three-fourths of that price to send their child to a qualifying provider. In most instances, it is up to families to pay the differences or for providers to absorb the cost difference.

But this model often doesn’t work well, explains Workman. In practice, most states can’t afford to set the subsidy rate at the 85th percentile. Even with the federal block grants and any additional state revenue earmarked for child care (only some states contribute; others rely solely on federal funds), there often isn’t enough.

Further, in rural areas, the subsidy rate is even lower. The market rate of child care established in surveys could be very low, and yet the cost of providing care still remains high. For example, rural providers must still pay for educators, facilities, supplies, equipment, food and all other expenses, even if their clientele are more dispersed and live farther from the provider. Finally, the low rates from subsidies mean providers take in less money per child, and then are forced to cut costs even further. “What it really means is that providers who cannot get much money from parents get very little from the government. Inequities from the market continue into the subsidy system,” said Workman.

Washington, D.C.’s Cost Estimation Model

In 2016, the Office of the State Superintendent (OSSE) developed and conducted a cost-estimation model methodology to further understand the actual costs of care. This model, which was later revised in 2018 and 2021, took into account different types of child care, at different ages, in both home-based and center-based offerings.

This was the first locality to set rates based on true cost, not market rates. True cost is defined as how much care costs to provide; market rate is the sticker price a family is willing to pay.

According to Workman, this cost modeling has helped inform other improvements surrounding child care: reforming licensing rules, improving ratio and group size requirement, updated quality rating and improvement systems, and including additional support staff (coaches, health consultant etc.) in calculating the base rate of what constitutes quality care.

New Mexico’s Cost-Modeling

As reported earlier in this child care innovation series, New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, made creating a universal early childhood education system a big part of her platform. The state built a cost model, similar to that done in D.C., to find the true cost of quality care, and then set reimbursement rates based on costs, not market rate. Under this new approach, centers are incentivized to accept the subsidies and better compensation to provide high-quality care.

New Mexico also drastically increased the income level of families who qualify for subsidies, raising it to 300 percent of the poverty line. As of May 1, 2022, New Mexico has since waived all co-payments, the only place in the country to do so.

Higher Subsidy Reimbursement for FFN in California

Traditionally, non-center-based care models—including home-based or family-care, or Family, Friend and Neighbor Care—are paid less money per subsidy for the same work. And in eight states and D.C., unlicensed providers, like FFN, are not eligible for subsidies at all.

California is an example of a state that provides subsidy reimbursement for unlicensed Family, Friend and Neighbor Care providers like Sanchez, and California recently negotiated an increase for those providers’ pay.

Some of this support can be attributed to the new union: California’s Child Care Providers United (CCPU). The union has successfully negotiated better reimbursement rates both for FFN and family-care providers. Licensed family caregivers who accept families on child care subsidies receive up to 75 percentile of the regional market rate (RMR) survey (from 2018), and FFN caregivers get 70 percent of the licensed caregiver rates – a 40 percent increase in their previous pay.

The CCPU also negotiated with the state to provide one-time supplemental payments to family child care providers as a bonus during Covid. For one time payments in spring and summer 2022, large family child care providers (over 6 children) received $10,000, and small family child care providers (under 6 children, though with certain requirements, can be under 8 children) received $8000. And FFN providers each received $1500. Additional payments will be forthcoming in FY 22-23.

“What we hear from our members is that this [stipend] allowed them to pay off credit cards and expenses from COVID,” said Dion Aroner, a consultant with the union who was involved in its formation. “It was these providers that carried the ball during the pandemic. They were the ones that stayed open and put themselves at risk.” And if the money runs out? Nationally this continues to be a problem, as sixteen thousand child care providers closed during the pandemic, due in large part to operating costs.

Georgia’s Quality Rated Subsidy Grant Program

To address the shortage of licensed high-quality infant and toddler care, Georgia’s Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL) began its Quality Rated Subsidy Grant program in 2015 to change the way providers and families interacted with child care subsidies. Rather than using a traditional child care voucher, in which a voucher is paid to a child care center when an eligible child enrolls and attends, Georgia’s new program relied on grants to pay providers directly and to contract a select number of slots. Using this “contracted spots” modeling, the state guaranteed the providers a level of income that allowed them to pay staff and stay open, even as a child’s circumstances changed and enrollment dipped.

Participating centers received reimbursement that was 50 percent higher than the base subsidy rates, a strong incentive to participate in the program. The providers were trained by DECAL staff in how to recruit families, and verify and recertify family eligibility. Families in the program did not owe copayments, unlike in Georgia’s traditional subsidy program.

This process achieved several goals.

• It kept a certain number of slots in high quality programs for low-income children.
• It allowed the child care providers to maintain some stability even as families and children changed child care centers.
• It allowed participating centers to receive more money for accepting children with subsidies, rather than less.

Katrina Coburn, Senior Manager of State Policy at Zero to Three, who provides technical assistance to state advocates and policy makers, says that more states are beginning to explore this model as a way to stabilize child care programs and to increase access to high quality programs. The infusion of funds through ARPA has given some states the means to pilot this approach.

Unfortunately, Georgia cut funding for the program in 2020, which Coburn attributed to the political landscape. Mindy Binderman, the executive director of the nonprofit Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students (GEEARS), and child care advocate, explained that each state department was directed by the governor to come up with a 4 percent across-the-board cut. “In the context of the budget cuts mandated by the Governor, it was the least worst option,” said Binderman in an email.

Key Question: Is It Enough?

Georgia’s break with a successful program exposes the limits of state innovations, even successful ones. Coburn says that the contracted spots model of Georgia is “starting to be recognized as the norm,” with the funding for ARPA being used for similar programs underway in Pennsylvania and Illinois.

“The issue is that subsidies can only do so much,” explained Workman, the early education consultant. Unless a program runs on 100 percent subsidies, there isn’t going to be a guarantee that the teachers and staff can get a salary. Even improvements in the level and availability of subsidies will not fully solve the fragmentation as only dedicated funding streams create stable jobs at affordable salaries. Under our current system, subsidies reach only one in seven eligible children, and many more families who are not eligible for subsidies still struggle to afford quality care.

Even the states that have worked to institute such significant public investment — like Vermont and New Mexico, discussed in part 1 of this series, will face other limitations.

“The problem with relying on states for child care innovations is that at some point, states will run out of money,” explains Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind, and a top voice in child care and early education.

“States have traditionally been these laboratories of democracy, they serve that role well. With the political realities at the federal level, states have more of the burden to bear. States can help lead the way, to help inform and have a two way dialogue. There is no way we are going to get a fair system until we get federal funding flowing.”