V. Conclusion

Our reporting on nascent and ongoing innovations in the child care sector is just the beginning. There is much to explore to better understand both the challenges and opportunities for improvement that exist in the U.S. child care system, and the great distance between our current infrastructure and a system designed to be equitable, just, and universal. We have identified the following key areas for future innovation in the child care system and reported on some examples of innovations already underway.

1 – Increase both public and private investment into early childhood education. In the absence of substantial public investment – including the temporary pandemic-era spending aimed at keeping the broken system somewhat afload – child care innovations are stepping into the void and taking place in the public and private sector. States like Vermont and New Mexico are currently lone actors in making sweeping changes with little federal support. Private sector solutions, such as Promise Venture Solutions and Springbank Collective are useful and can be built upon, but, alone, are not sufficient for widespread change.

2 – Incentivize and support a wide variety of settings for early learning and care that meet families’ needs and preferences, including that given by family, friend, and neighbor caregivers. Families’ child care needs and preferences vary widely and are largely specific to the family unit. Families want different kinds of child care arrangements, and they change as children age. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to child care needs. Innovation surrounding family child care, unlicensed child care can better meet the needs of families with nontraditional schedules and who live in and child care deserts—as well as ensuring access and quality in a variety of settings, from small family home settings—are needed to increase supply and meet demand. Groups like Home Grown Child Care and All Our Kin work to increase supply and success of family child care providers.

3 – Centralize and subsidize administration and program management of diverse child care providers in order to ease the burden on providers, both large and small. Some of the most promising, scalable innovations, like Winnie, Wonderschool and Wee Care, seek to centralize administrative roles and allow child care centers to focus on providing quality care, not back office functions. This can help lower costs for parents and overhead, keep centers sustainable, and raise the low wages of child care workers. Others, like Neighborhood Villages, work as a nonprofit entity to provide those support services. Groups like Neighborschools aim to make the licensing process less burdensome for child care providers. Mirza is a startup that works with employers to subsidize the cost of child care, providing limited relief for some parents.

4a – Rethink and restructure all early education settings to be accountable to the needs of an increasingly diverse U.S. child care population and their families. The first step of accountability and equity is offering seats to marginalized children through:

• Data collection, which is necessary in order to understand and allocate resources to underserved communities, such as Head Start’s routine community needs assessments
• Helping families with multi-step enrollment processes, like New Orlean’s two-way text message community verification reminders
• Reducing structural barriers that prevent families from completing applications, like partnering with health mobile clinic to offer vaccinations at enrollment center

4b – Provide holistic care that centers both academic and social-emotional needs. In order to create positive learning environment for all students, ECE stakeholders must:

• Develop and support a diverse early childhood education workforce, like Colorado’s Pamoja Early Childhood Education Workforce Program, which offers free college-accredited courses in four languages: Swahili, Arabic, Farsi, and Karen
• Invest in Family, Friend, and Neighbor Care, by training immigrant and refugee parents to become child care providers
• Promote whole family solutions and resources, such as home visiting, inside and outside of the classroom, to help the many children who have experienced trauma, like Washington D.C.’s Briya Public Charter School and Mary’s Center and Chicago’s RefugeeOne.

5 – Expand, reform, and increase public subsidies as well as reform the subsidy model to make quality early education more accessible and affordable to families across income and citizenship and work status. While this paper supports a universal framework for child care, such targeted approaches have value and can be more easily implemented in many cases. Innovations are still needed around subsidies and making the process more accessible and understandable for families, including making more subsidies available at higher dollar amounts, like New Mexico, regardless of parents’ work or citizenship status, , and for different types of care, like California, including home-based and Family, Friend, and Neighbor care (FFN).

We hope this report, as well as the series of articles we published leading up to it, will inspire other reporters and researchers to continue the work of not only detailing the system’s failures but also highlighting the work being done to improve it.

Some of our questions for future child care reporting include:

• How can a universal early education system support children of all gender identities and children from households with gender nonconforming parents?
• What must a universal child care program provide for and do to be accountable to children with disabilities, both cognitive and physical?
• How can the United States better integrate early learning classrooms so that children from diverse backgrounds interact, play, and learn from one another?
• Is a licensing system necessary for subsidizing and ensuring high-quality care and learning for children in a variety of settings, such as Family, Friend, and Neighbor (FFN) providers?
• What can we learn from child care providers who have left the child care workforce in recent years?
• What political lessons can we take from state and local campaigns to increase public child care funding that might be applied in other locations or at the federal level?
• How is a changing and unpredictable climate impacting young children’s well-being and what resources and infrastructure do child care providers require to meet the challenges and threats of these realities?

This solutions reporting project highlights both the promise and glaring needs of the struggling child care sector. In each story included here, we provide real, tangible examples of emerging campaigns, organizations, technologies, platforms, programs, and policies that demonstrate a realistic and achievable path toward a better system for U.S. children and their families. Though each one has specific limitations, all these innovations as a whole are limited by the lack of public investment to implement them at scale and build the high-quality, accessible, and affordable care infrastructure that children, families, businesses, and society requires. The vast majority of child care innovators interviewed for this report recognize they cannot succeed without public support, and that no single solution will be able to overcome the many barriers to universal child care in a society that has long been indifferent to the value of early childhood education and the struggles of families with young children to combine work and care responsibilities in order to survive.

The central challenge that emerged again and again in our reporting: How do we overcome that apathy and transform U.S. culture and politics so that early childhood is a public priority? Journalists play a role in shaping the national narrative and determining the limits of public discussion and debate, as they choose which stories to focus on and how to frame the stakes, causes, and consequences of each challenge.

The pandemic has created a hunger for child care coverage unlike any other time in U.S. history. This report represents just the start of what could be a golden age in early childhood reporting. By telling stories to the general public about the full scope of the problems that exist in the current child care system and the efforts underway to solve those problems, we hope this report might pave the way for a nationwide mindset and behavior shift. Universal child care is not just a goal that every country should seek to achieve and be willing to invest in, but one that is highly achievable here and now in the United States.