Event Summary: The Hell of American Day Care

The Asset Building Program and New America’s Early Education Initiative co-hosted an event yesterday on “The Hell of American Daycare,” so titled after a recent piece by Jonathan Cohn for The New Republic. Cohn and a panel of experts explored this controversial issue at the intersection between early education and the American workforce. Asset Building Program director Reid Cramer introduced the subject of child care as an “issue at the heart of the social contract.” The event made clear that today’s workforce cannot succeed without adequate, affordable child care to which it can entrust its children; that those children cannot succeed without safe, stimulating experiences in their earliest years; and that tomorrow’s workforce will not thrive without the formative educational experiences only pre-kindergarten learning can provide.

Jonathan Cohn began the event by discussing his piece and recounting some of the most horrendous stories about how bad child care abuses can be. He made sure to point out that these were not isolated incidents; rather, what is so shocking about this whole subject is that we truly have a “system” of negligent (even felonious) child care in this country, not just a set of “scandals.” His examples demonstrate that not only are certain irresponsible child care workers offering services without regulatory oversight, but that the regulatory system itself is unable to enforce even the states’ own lax standards. Either the states’ regulatory agencies lack the statutory authority to conduct thorough inspections and deliver meaningful penalties, or they lack the funding to do so effectively. Either way, Cohn and the other panelists agree that a national set of standards and regulations would be one way to limit the occurrences of such tragedies. Unlike health care, child care is not that complicated, he argued. To provide good child care, we merely need good care givers. Yet since the average provider earns just $19,000 per year (which, he notes, is less than janitors, parking lot attendants, and retail workers), we get what we pay for. Still, raising prices would not necessarily solve the problem when so many working families cannot afford child care as it is.

Karen Kornbluh, the former Ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, suggested a few solutions to this current state of affairs. In particular, she pointed to the experiences of countries like France and Sweden that have robust child care systems that provide affordable and safe child care for all families. By comparison, the United States is very often a low outlier, or at least embarrassingly far down on the list, on measures of child poverty, early education spending, and quality of child care. The United States is the only country in the OECD in which the public school system exacerbates income inequality rather than improves it, Kornbluh stated. A big part of that, she says, is due to a lack of quality early education.

Brigid Schulte, a Schwartz Fellow at New America and a reporter for the Washington Post, spoke next about her work reporting on child care in Virginia and alerted the audience to the astounding fact that one half of all children in child care in Virginia Beach are receiving unregulated care. Child care providers affiliated with a religious institution are exempt from regulatory oversight in Virginia, a fact which Schulte blames in part for the death of an infant who suffocated while not being watched by a child care provider. Some of the regulatory holes evident in Virginia were supposed to be filled by federal legislation passed by Congress during the Nixon administration that would have allowed for universal access to child care. The bill was vetoed by that president, however, because of fears that it advanced “Soviet Union-style totalitarianism.”

According to Lisa Guernsey, the director of New America’s Early Education Initiative, the issue of access to child care is so important that the conversation surrounding it deserves to be reframed as one not around facilitating work for adults, but around education for children. Child care workers must be treated and educated first and foremost as teachers, not merely babysitters who respond to the basic needs of their charges. Even in infancy, she argued, children learn from their surroundings and daily experiences, so poor quality child care in which the child receives low stimulation is a lost opportunity to provide essential early education.

The Obama administration’s recent push for universal pre-K is a step in the right direction, according to Guernsey, though Cohn is doubtful about the possibility of its passage. Because of recent research showing the importance of early education for later outcomes, and because of the Obama administration’s famous evidence-based approach to policymaking, Cohn and Guernsey are both optimistic about the education community’s support for better child care. Such an alliance could bring together important voices in the push to reform our current, broken system.  Accessible and affordable high-quality child care remains central to fulfilling the social contract. The panelists agree that the issue is one that demands a more rigorous national conversation for the sake of our workers, our children, and our future.

You can see a full-length video of the event here and check out tweets from the event here.