Millions of families may now face a lack of child care following the recent expiration of pandemic-era federal funding.

The child care “stabilization” funds included in the American Rescue Plan Act were just that — emergency funding to stabilize the sector amid a pandemic.

As vital as that funding was, it was insufficient to address the many systemic problems impacting early childhood education and its workforce, including inequitable wages.

Wages for early childhood workers already lag far behind those of their K-8 colleagues who have similar credentials. These workers, disproportionately Black, Latina and indigenous, face poverty rates an average of 7.7 times higher than other teachers.

This financial condition perpetuates economic inequality and reflects systemic racism, with early childhood education programs continuing to be subsidized through the long hours that Black, Latina and indigenous women work for unjust wages and limited benefits.

Related: Early education coalition searches for answers to raise teacher pay, even as budgets are cratering

This inequity and the end of the crucial pandemic-era federal lifeline for early childhood educators will negatively impact families and workers, The Century Foundation estimates. Some 70,000 child care programs are likely to close; millions of families will struggle to get access to child care; 232,000 jobs could soon be lost; and states will lose $10.6 billion in tax and business revenue every year.

There is one bright note: State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope in the face of such a dire challenge.

In late 2022, New Mexico became the first state in the nation to create a permanent child care fund, making child care free or affordable for many families and increasing early educator wages.

State and local governments are offering models of innovation and glimmers of hope.

Washington, D.C., recently established the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, which aims to achieve pay parity between early childhood educators and their K-12 counterparts. Since 2022, almost $70 million has been distributed to nearly 3,000 early childhood educators. The district is also expanding health insurance for early childhood educators.

In Louisiana, a coalition of state and local government partners is working with a nonprofit to test the impact of projects that increase child care workers’ wages in key communities; if positive, they intend to scale the programs across the state.

Minnesota last year signed into law the Great Start Compensation Support Payment Program to fill the gap following the ending of the federal child care stabilization grants. The program will provide $316 million this fiscal year, and $260 million every two years ongoing, to directly increase child care workers’ pay.

These solutions are critical, because it is our nation’s youngest students who will ultimately suffer the consequences of high teacher turnover and an unstable learning environment at a key time in their development.

Early childhood education directly impacts their future learning outcomes and lifelong success; it deserves our attention and investment.

Building on these efforts, the Early Educator Investment Collaborative — a group of funders that has come together to accelerate progress in the early childhood education profession — recently announced grants for state and local partnerships in Colorado, Louisiana and Washington, D.C.

These grants will bolster innovative approaches to increasing early childhood education workforce pay, including the creation of dedicated revenue streams and pilot demonstration projects to evaluate the impacts of salary increases.

They will also promote greater collaboration between agencies to improve workforce compensation — aimed at increasing the capacity of financial and data systems to support long-term wage and benefits increases.

Related: OPINION: School district leaders must make early education a priority, so children enter school prepared

I’m excited for the solutions these grants will amplify and hope they can provide useful models and encouragement for other states to explore ways to better compensate early childhood educators.

But we also need state and federal legislators to step up for their constituents on this issue. It’s critical for legislators to reflect the majority of voters’ interest in early childhood education reform by increasing investment, enacting legislation to boost compensation and advocating for broader support of early childhood educators.

Philanthropy also has a big role to play. By supporting governments with the funding needed to explore unique solutions, philanthropic organizations can help find what works, scale successful models and support sustainable change.

Along with boosting the rallying cry for increased federal investment in early childhood education and its workers, this moment is an opportunity for states, communities and philanthropists to find truly long-term solutions to fully support early childhood education workers and the families they serve.

Ola J. Friday is the director of the Early Educator Investment Collaborative.

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Mississippi child care workers are strained by low pay and lack of training — but an additional $5 an hour in salary would prompt around half of those workers to stay in their jobs and to seek additional education, according to a new survey by state child care advocates.

The coalition Mississippi Forum for the Future surveyed nearly 700 child care workers, most of whom provide care in centers, to draw attention to the precariousness of the child care sector in the state. Early childhood educators are facing strain across the nation, but Mississippi is in a particularly difficult position: Workers reported an average hourly wage of $10.93 and typically have no benefits. In contrast, a “survival wage” in the state for a single adult is $12.28 an hour, according to the report.

Nationally, child care workers earn $14.22 on average, according to federal labor statistics.

Additional information gathered from the survey:

• Just under 70 percent of child care workers said they worked 40 or more hours a week.

• More highly educated workers earned more, but the differences were not large: Child care employees with a high school diploma reported earning $10.22 an hour on average, but those with a bachelor’s degree or higher said their salary averaged $12.79 an hour.

• Close to half, or 48 percent of the workers surveyed, said they did not have training beyond high school. A similar percentage of child care workers — 47 percent — reported that they are working with children who have mental, physical, or emotional disabilities.

• About 36 percent said they relied on public support programs such as Medicaid or the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

• A little more than a third reported they had looked for a new job, and of that group, most of them were looking for jobs out of the child care sector.

In the midst of these stresses, demand for child care in the state is still quite high.

Lesia Daniel-Hollingshead has provided child care services in her community of Clinton, Mississippi, a suburb west of Jackson, for nearly 25 years. After she taught children in public schools, her passion prompted her to open several child care centers. Since the inception of her child care ventures in 2000, more than 7,000 children have received child care at My First Funtime, Funtime Pre-School and Funtime After-School.

During the pandemic, Hollingshead’s facilities suffered a 50 percent decline in enrollment. But by 2021, an overwhelming number of families with infants sought her child care services. In October 2021, to meet demand, she opened My First Funtime, a center for infants and toddlers 6 weeks to 18 months old.

“We opened My First Funtime in October of 2021, by December we had enrolled 66 infants,” Hollingshead said. “My program is currently full — and not because of the number of enrollments but because I have the number of children for the staff that I can maintain.”

The survey findings did not surprise Daniel-Hollingshead, who said she pays her lead teachers $14 to $20 an hour, based on education and experience. Her less-experienced employees are paid $9 to $10 an hour. Families of infants up through 5 year olds pay $184 a week for her center; the rate is among the most expensive in her area, she said.

Biz Harris, the executive director of the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance, said that the state has recently launched an initiative meant to provide extra money to teachers and to provide scholarships for those who engage in additional training.

However, that program is funded through emergency funds that came from the federal government during the pandemic, and thus will sunset when the money is exhausted.

“We would love to see a program like this have the funds to continue, and worry about what will happen to the already struggling child care workforce when it ends,” Harris said. “Other states do provide these kinds of programs for their child care teachers as a workforce investment.”

Daniel-Hollingshead said while that money is appreciated, she still struggles to hold on to employees and has waiting lists at every age level.

“Currently it is extremely difficult to retain staff,” she said. “Due to the pay rates that I have had to increase to keep my best people, we are operating over budget about $25,000 a month which obviously is not sustainable long-term.”

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In some states, child care can cost as much as college tuition. But those costs don’t translate into higher wages for those who work in the industry; child care staff aren’t paid like college professors.

On average, child care employees and early educators earn less than half as much as K-12 teachers. They are more likely than other educators to live in poverty and less likely to have health insurance.

Billions in federal aid propped up the industry during the pandemic, but those funds ran out this fall. As a result, child care centers have already started reporting decreased wages and benefits.

In the midst of this crisis, some states are trying to come up with their own creative solutions. The Early Educator Investment Collaborative, a coalition of philanthropies that provide grants to support early childhood programs, is sending about $9 million in grants to Louisiana, Colorado and D.C. to find long-term answers for raising early educators’ pay.

“We knew that the federal investment was coming to a close,” said Ola Friday, director of the collaborative. “So, we turned our attention to what was happening at the state and local levels and thought that this was now a really ripe opportunity to support those states and localities that were trying to be innovative and creative and think outside the box.”

As one example, a $2.4 million grant to the District of Columbia will go toward improving work the district already started on boosting wages and benefits. Two years ago, D.C. started an Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund, one of the first large-scale programs in the nation to put child care and early educator pay on par with K-12 teacher starting wages.

That program, which the D.C. Council paid for with a wealth tax, uses between $53 million and $73 million annually to raise early educator pay by up to $14,000 a year so that it aligns with the minimum salary received by D.C. public school teachers with a similar education.

But the cost of this program will increase as minimum teacher wages rise, and the city must come up with a way to fund those additional costs.

Additionally, District of Columbia public school teachers are paid more based on experience, and they also receive a pay bump, or a salary step increase, each year. Currently, the early ed pay equity fund does not account for experience or annual step increases.

Sara Mead, deputy superintendent of early learning for the D.C. district, said it will use part of the Early Education Investment Collaborative grant on researching ways to fix those problems. And, she added, “part of what we’re doing with the grant money is also documenting what we’re doing so that other states can learn from us.”

Because child care is not primarily funded by the federal government, the quality and cost vary by state. A solution to raising child care wages in one state may not be feasible in another, but without significant federal investment, states will need to find their own funding sources to prop up an industry that has been collapsing for a while, said Annie Dade, a policy analyst with the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

“It is a shift, hopefully, that early education is a public good and should be funded as such,” said Dade. “And then looking for the public funding to do so is the next logical step.”

The collaborative is also sending Louisiana about $3 million; another $3.8 million in grant funding will go to Colorado. One step of Colorado’s grant proposal includes having a liaison dedicated to early ed compensation in various state agencies so that each department can contribute to finding solutions for low pay among child care staff. In Louisiana, part of the grant will be used to help local parishes come up with ways to raise money for early ed pay.

Friday, the collaborative’s leader, said the point of the grants is to help states “put into place the infrastructure, the capacity, the resources, the funding, so that we can get to the ultimate goal of increased long-term compensation for the workforce.”

This story about early childhood education salaries was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Transportation to centers is one of the biggest barriers for families accessing Head Start programs, according to a survey from the National Head Start Association — distances that might be manageable for adults on their own can be insurmountable with a baby or toddler in tow.

A new awareness campaign sponsored by the association, which represents Head Start providers, and a philanthropic group called the Civic Mapping Initiative, is hoping to ease that burden by encouraging local transit agencies to add bus stops closer to Head Start centers.

As a kickoff to the effort, the Memphis Area Transit Authority added three bus stops to its existing routes to bring them closer to Head Start programs in the community.

A lot of parents who send their children to the Porter-Leath Early Head Start programs in Memphis rely on families and friends to help them get there, said Sheronda Smith, director of Early Head Start at Porter-Leath and president of the Tennessee Head Start Association.

Often when families can’t get a ride, their children simply don’t attend that day.

“We have had families who we’ve had to place back on the waiting list because they make the decision that it’s too hard to get to the center,” Smith said.

There are more than 16,400 Head Start centers across the United States that provide federally funded pre-K and school readiness programs for low-income families. About 42 percent of those programs are within 0.2 miles of public transit, or what the National Head Start Association considers a walkable distance for families with toddlers.

Another 29 percent of centers are not near any public transit, or more than five miles away. It makes sense that some centers are far from transit because many Head Start programs serve rural areas, said Abigail Seldin, co-founder of the Civic Mapping Initiative.

The rest of the nation’s centers, nearly 30 percent, fall somewhere in the middle: between 0.2 and five miles away from public transportation.

The Head Start association and the mapping initiative are focusing their efforts on a smaller subset of those centers –- the 19 percent that have a bus stop within a mile of their location. Simply adding a bus stop can make the distance walkable for families with toddlers, Seldin said.

“In those cases, the ask of a transit agency is to move a stop perhaps 2,000 feet,” Seldin said. “Anyone who has walked 1,000 feet with a toddler understands viscerally why this concept is so important and why these changes are essential.”

In some of these areas, local transit authorities can add bus stops without significantly changing routes or adding to their costs. In Memphis, buses were driving right past the Head Start centers before the transit agency added three stops as part of this mapping campaign.

“It’s a low-cost solution that makes a big difference for families and for early childcare workers who are commuting,” Seldin said.

Smith, with the Porter-Leath program in Memphis, hopes the added stops will help stabilize attendance for students whose families don’t have reliable transportation.

“Moving this closer to the centers and making it more accessible to them is important because now they don’t have to depend on someone else,” Smith said.

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About 20 years ago, I had a transformative reporting experience when I was assigned to “shadow” a 4-year-old named Jaylen at a Milwaukee preschool. I mistakenly assumed the day would bring mostly cuteness and little substance, and I remember being struck by how much these young students learned, virtually every second of the school day. And because I could not interview the kids in quite the same way as older ones, I was forced to be a much closer observer of how that learning, and associated teaching, happened, from the way the children explored blocks of different geometric shapes to the way the teacher habitually explained the meaning of different words as she spoke.

Over the years, I’ve gravitated back to early childhood stories again and again: writing a magazine feature on the power of a holistic model of early childhood care that considers the families’ needs as much as the children’s; editing and contributing to a project on the critical, often neglected 2-year-old year; and, most recently, probing racial disparities in access to reading help in the early elementary years. This academic year, I’m thrilled to be contributing regularly to Hechinger’s early childhood newsletter and coverage.

If you take all the vast human potential and the vast inequities endemic to the K-12 education system and magnify them, you have the stuff of the early childhood education beat. Ninety percent of a child’s brain develops by the age of 5, yet in many communities we pay and treat those entrusted with their care and development like fast food workers (and I’m not defending the low pay and poor treatment of fast food workers here).

Over the last three years, most of my reporting for Hechinger has focused on racial inequities in our “system” of care and education for infants, toddlers and early elementary students. In Boston, I reported on how the racist and sexist roots of the child care system, stretching back to free child care provided by enslaved people since 1619, continue to shape the deplorable conditions workers face today. And earlier this year, I spent several months investigating why Black and Latino infants and toddlers are so severely under enrolled in early intervention in some communities.

I’ll be continuing to look into these and related issues, and would love to hear from you. Some topics I know I’ll likely be reporting on include: challenges and innovations in early childhood education math instruction; the latest data and trends on exclusionary discipline of pre-K children; strategies for addressing the therapist shortage in early intervention; the child care crisis and potential solutions being explored at the state level; the use, and misuse, of cognitive testing in the early years; and forms of academic tracking in elementary school.

Please reach out about any of these topics – and more. My email is sec2002@columbia.edu. I look forward to hearing from you!

This story about Sarah Carr was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Dora Ramos is a family child care provider in Stamford, Connecticut, where the temperature climbed above 90 degrees for a few days in July. She takes care of children in her home, which has a large backyard, and was able to adapt, still getting the children outside, even on the hottest days.

“Our parents bring the children at 7:10 a.m., so we bring them outside very early — first thing,” she said. “We have sprinklers; they use the hose to fill up pots with water and ‘cook.’”

But in Dallas, where the high hit 110 degrees on August 18, it wasn’t safe or possible to play outside for weeks-long stretches this summer, said Cori Berg, the director of Hope Day School, a preschool there. “It was cranky weather for sure,” she said. “What most people don’t really think about is what it’s like for a child in a center. They’re cooped up in one room for hours and hours and hours.”

Much research supports young children’s need for movement, outdoor play and time in nature. Regulations in many places require kids in child care facilities to have access to outdoor play space, weather permitting.

But increasingly, the weather does not permit. And leaders in the world of early childhood development are starting to call attention to the imperative to design and upgrade child care centers — and the cities where they are located — for our climate-altered world, with the needs of the youngest in mind.

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside. And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.”

Jessica Sager, who runs the network All Our Kin

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it,” said Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, which has just issued its first set of recommendations. (Full disclosure, I’m an advisor to This Is Planet Ed, which convened the task force in collaboration with the think tank Capita.)

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education,” said Garling. But while children under 5 have a developmental need to spend time outside, extreme weather — whether heat, wildfire smoke or other air pollution — is particularly dangerous for this age group. Young children breathe twice as much air per pound of body weight, Garling pointed out.

Related: OPINION: We must help our youngest learners navigate enormous risks from climate change

Ankita Chachra is a designer, architect and new mother working on the issue of climate-resilient cities for children at the think tank Capita. She recently blogged about choices made in cities around the world, from Copenhagen to her native Delhi, that can help preserve outdoor play. These can sometimes be simple adaptations. When it’s very hot, Ramos, for example, takes her children outside first thing in the morning.

“Copenhagen has parks that do flood with extreme rain,” Chachra said, but permeable surfaces, like grass, allow the water to drain away quickly. “Asphalt, rubber, and metal get extremely heated when you don’t have shade to protect those surfaces. Grass, mulch, and wood absorb heat differently. A shaded street or area is 4 degrees Celsius cooler than those that don’t have shade,” she added. And when cities make room for parks over cars, there is more equitable access to safe, cooler outdoor space.

Cori Berg, in Dallas, is grateful for her yard’s “two giant pecan trees — those giant shade structures are really expensive.”

When children just can’t go outside, early child care educators said they have to improvise. Jessica Sager, whose network All Our Kin supports in-home family child care providers in 25 states, did an informal survey at The Hechinger Report’s request to ask providers how they are coping with extreme weather.

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

“I heard a lot of stories about the wildfires in particular,” she said — the smoke from Canadian fires affected at least 120 million Americans this summer. “Our educators had air purifiers — we had gotten them during Covid. Our coaches had already worked with educators about doing indoor gross motor play — obstacle courses, scavenger hunts. Balls, scarves, parachutes. Putting a mattress on the floor and letting kids jump up and down. A lot of song and dance activities. Or putting colored tape on the floor and pretending it’s a balance beam. ”

On a city-wide level, some have proposed bringing back free or cheap indoor playspaces, such as the McDonald’s ball pit, perhaps repurposing disused shopping malls.*

But despite all this creativity, it’s emotionally difficult for both providers and children when children can’t play outside because of severe weather and other hazards — Berg’s “cranky weather.”

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside,” said All Our Kin’s Sager. “And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.” There’s a “real parallel to what caregivers had to do during Covid,” to make a scary reality understandable for little kids, she said.

Garling and other policymakers are conscious that they are bringing up climate threats at a time when the early childhood sector already feels besieged.

The United States government spends much less than the average of its peer countries on early child development in a good year, and supplemental funds provided during the pandemic have just fallen off a cliff, leaving the sector even more cash starved. Group child care in private homes is often parents’ most affordable solution: The National Center for Education Statistics says 1 in 5 children under 5 spend time in these settings.

Related: COLUMN: Want teachers to teach about climate change? You’ve got to train them

But these home-based programs pose a major infrastructure challenge. Garling’s organization recently released a new interactive map showing that in New York City, these centers often — 37.2 percent of the time — include basement space. And 1,638 centers, serving 22,000 children, are at risk of flooding in storms such as the one that hit the city with more than 8 inches of rain on September 29.

“At times it feels overwhelming. There’s so many things early care and education professionals have to worry about,” Garling said. But on the other hand, she argued, there are federal funds the sector can and should claim for retrofitting and upgrades now.

“I feel like there are current opportunities through [the Inflation Reduction Act] that are creating more urgency — in a good way,” she said. “This is not something I was talking about two years ago and now it is 80 percent of what I talk about all the time. “

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

In the meantime, early childhood educators are working hard to instill a love of nature in the children they care for, in all kinds of weather. Berg has been taking her teachers on nature walks, and introduced a curriculum about Texas’s many state parks. 

The Connecticut child care owner, Ramos, who grew up visiting a farm in her native Peru, sees empathy blooming in her toddlers as they encounter the natural world. “One day a one year old was walking and saw a little slug on the ground,” she recounted. “He points — ‘Oh no, oh no!’ He was so sad. The father immediately went down, picked it up and put it on the grass. It made my day.”

*Clarification: This sentence has been updated to clarify the support for indoor play spaces.

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Early childhood care and education before pre-K or kindergarten has not traditionally been considered a public school system priority. But as school leaders tighten their budgets, they would be wise to invest money earlier, when the return on investment is highest.

After all, children who receive high-quality early childhood care and education services are more likely to enter school prepared for academic and social success in kindergarten and beyond.

When children are not ready for kindergarten, schools must use their limited resources on remediation efforts, too often with limited success. School district leaders are facing difficult spending choices, but early childhood care and education is an area to sustain and grow investment, not cut.

Building true school readiness among the youngest learners, when done right, will save school district leaders money and result in stronger outcomes later.

We are seeing this play out now across the nation with literacy rates. With our current, porous early education system, just one in three students achieve key reading benchmarks by fourth grade. State leaders are now redesigning literacy instruction in early grades to address this issue, but we know the foundation for strong reading and writing should begin earlier.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

The pandemic ravaged an already-fragile early childhood care and education industry. Child care businesses all over the country shut their doors or limited their seats, and teachers fled in droves. Working families, in a desperate search for affordable child care, were forced to settle for low-quality services, leave the labor market entirely or juggle working at home and caring for their children. Their children missed valuable opportunities for learning and development.

Congress helped relieve some of these negative effects with historic investments, including relief dollars to stabilize existing services and expand service access for the families who needed it most, including frontline workers. Louisiana, for example, used their dollars to serve an additional 16,000 children from birth to age three.

But the time to use those dollars is quickly running out. The nation now faces a potential $48 billion child care fiscal cliff, and its impacts could be even more detrimental to children and families. Without this funding, states will be forced to scale back efforts that gave working families access to child care — or scrap those efforts entirely.

As school leaders tighten their budgets, they would be wise to invest money earlier, when the return on investment is highest.

Earlier this year, a handful of governors asked the federal government for more funding, but it’s uncertain whether Congress will step up. If it does not, it will be the responsibility of states and localities to prevent the worst for young learners, working families and the early childhood education workforce.

School district leaders must find dollars in their existing budgets to address the greatest needs and prioritize money for younger students. This task may feel impossible, but school district leaders should not be afraid to get creative: Title I, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Rural Education Achievement Program dollars can all be used for pre-K.

Leaders may also be able to redirect flexible state funding to improve early childhood programs’ quality and access. And locally raised funds could be used to serve more children in early childhood settings.

Summit County in Colorado is doing this well. School district leaders there say they have combined local, state and federal funding to pay for high-quality early childhood care and education services. They have a customer service focus that ensures they are meeting the needs of families.

Without this local commitment, children in Summit would start school behind, requiring the district to work extra hard to catch them up.

But school districts can’t fix school readiness with school-run pre-K alone: They must build and strengthen local partnerships, including with public and nonpublic child care sites, local businesses and foundations.

Related: OPINION: Five lessons on how states can invest in high-quality child care and early education

In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, school district leaders built a strong network of local partners around a vision for a high quality continuum of care and education for children from birth to age 5.

They established a clear picture of the needs of their community, and the way they can change year after year, so they are ready to meet them. If there is an influx of English language learners, for example, they are prepared to quickly open more classrooms to serve these children and their families.

The district equipped classrooms with high-quality instructional materials and provided meaningful coaching and professional development to teachers in all early childhood education settings: As a result, they’ve seen the quality ratings of their local sites increase over time.

Once funding is found and community partnerships are forged, school districts can spend money on what matters most for young learners. High-quality instructional materials and adult-child interactions play a critical role in improving academic and social outcomes.

The Dallas Independent School District, for example, invested in a suite of tools to focus, measure and improve interactions between teachers and children in their youngest classrooms. They are now seeing a climb in literacy results.

School districts have a vested interest in making sure the youngest learners have experiences that prepare them to start kindergarten, achieve key reading and writing benchmarks by third grade and progress through the rest of their academic journeys.

Nasha Patel is a managing director at Watershed Advisors, a consulting firm that helps governments design, implement and scale transformative education plans.

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Just over 50 years ago, long before a global pandemic knocked 100,000 Canadian women out of the work force and left child care providers reeling, a national commission urged the Canadian government to underwrite the costs for a nationwide child care system that would also lower fees for families.

Now, an offshoot of that recommendation has come to fruition. In 2021, Canada’s leaders committed $30 billion (about $24 billion in U.S. dollars) over five years to the country’s first federally-funded child care system. The new system aims to provide child care for an average of $10 a day in licensed settings, with plans to create an additional 250,000 spots for children by 2026.

Canadian experts say a host of factors contributed to the country’s eventual success in taking large-scale federal action on early learning. Ultimately, though, it took a pandemic, shutting down businesses and schools, for Canada to invest such a large amount of funds.

This movement came after decades of structured, organized advocacy, much of which started after the commission’s report. Child care has been a cornerstone of the feminist movement in Canada, and parents and various nonprofit groups have partnered to champion the cause. Canadian labor groups have also supported the efforts, something that has recently become a more prominent strategy in the United States, especially after efforts to pass child care legislation faltered in 2022.

More recently, advocates have presented child care as a public good and a right, similar to K-12 education. That argument has helped build support, said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, an advocacy association in Canada. “It’s always been understood that it is good for kids, and it’s good for the economy, and it’s good for society, to have a public led, funded and organized public education system. Why not the same for younger children, especially when we know that early childhood education is as important, if not more important, to the long-term well-being of children?”

Having women in positions of power — including Chrystia Freeland, the nation’s first female minister of finance — was crucial to ushering the proposed program through Parliament in 2021, experts say, despite continued opposition from some conservative lawmakers. Similarly, in Quebec, education minister Pauline Marois helped usher in the province’s child care system two decades ago. “The fact that we had a strong woman in power really, really made the difference both for Quebec in the late 1990s and for Canada in 2021,” said Sophie Mathieu, senior program specialist at the Vanier Institute of the Family, an organization focused on family wellbeing in Canada.

For many years, the province of Quebec has shown the potential benefits of government funding for child care. In 1997, Quebec began offering low-cost, flat-fee child care. While quality can be uneven, the program has contributed to an increase in the number of women in the workforce and a higher domestic income. Quebec also stood out from the rest of the country during the pandemic. “Canada saw that the [child care] system was not really affected by the pandemic in Quebec,” said Mathieu. “Childcare in Quebec is heavily subsidized, so the fact that they didn’t get the parents’ money didn’t really affect them.”

The nationwide child care initiative has embraced some key aspects of Quebec’s flat-fee plan, as well as messaging from British Columbia’s “$10 a Day” child care initiative, which rolled out in 2018 to bring low-cost child care to families in the province. That messaging is easy to grasp and well-liked by parents — more so, experts say, than American proposals to link child care costs to a percentage of a family’s income.

“Our federal government realized the popular success of the ‘$10 a Day’ branding,” said Sharon Gregson, provincial spokesperson for the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC. “I think the federal politicians were smart enough to pay attention and realize not only was this necessary, it’s also something people will vote for.”

These isolated efforts by provinces to pay for child care with public money helped inspire larger change, and could be a strategy for child care advocates in the United States, said Martha Friendly, executive director of the Canadian-based nonprofit Childcare Resource and Research Unit, who previously worked on child care policy in the United States. While a bottom-up approach can’t be the only strategy to ease the challenges in the child care industry, “You can do things incrementally to push things forward locally, on a state level or on a regional level, and sometimes that does have a way of pushing the envelope on something [larger],” she said.

Canada’s example of a federally-supported child care system may be of particular interest in the United States, and one many child care advocates hope to see here. But although the two countries are close — both geographically and in terms of having diverse populations spread out over a sprawling country — there is a key, social difference that Canadian experts point to that helped pave the way for this type of investment in child care. Long before the pandemic, far more Canadians than Americans embraced the idea that the government should offer extensive, universal support to families. Canada provides annual family allowances to support child rearing and the country offers universal health care. It boasts a comparatively generous paid parental leave policy: Young infants are rare in Canadian child care centers because parents can stay home with their children and receive part of their income for a year or more, depending on province.

“We expect government to step up,” said Susan Prentice, Duff Roblin Professor of Government at the University of Manitoba. “There remains, still, a Canadian tradition in believing that government is part of the solution.”

This is my last Early Childhood newsletter before I head out on leave as a fellow with the Spencer Education Journalism Fellowship at the Columbia Journalism School, where I will focus on researching and reporting on the consequences of a lack of high quality child care. If you’d like to chat about that topic, feel free to email me at jem2231@columbia.edu. In the meantime, my colleagues Ariel Gilreath and Sarah Carr will be your go-to sources for early childhood coverage. I’ll see you in 2024!

This story about child care in Canada was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post Inside Canada’s 50-year fight for national child care appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Millions of working parents will face a child care emergency after pandemic-era federal funding ends Sept. 30, just two days from now. 

Whether you are one of the affected parents or not, you will feel the impact on our nation’s workforce and economy. 

According to estimates, up to 70,000 daycare facilities could close, causing three million child care slots to vanish. This is a loss of educational opportunity for children, but also a devastating loss of support for millions of working parents who may have to leave their jobs. 

All of us will surely feel the resulting blow to our economy if a projected $9 billion-plus in earnings is lost.

Related: What American can learn from Canada’s new $10 a day childcare

Sadly, this is just the latest failure in a child care system that has been broken for decades. 

As The Casey Foundation recently highlighted in our 2023 KIDS COUNT^® Data Book, shortcomings of the child care system already cost the country $122 billion a year in lost wages, tax revenue and productivity. 

We cannot allow these cascading consequences to continue.

Every other country with an economy comparable to ours has created a sustainable system that better meets the needs of families, employers and child care workers.

It’s time for policymakers to explore immediate solutions. We know they exist: Every other country with an economy comparable to ours has created a sustainable system that better meets the needs of families, employers and child care workers. 

Moreover, we already have evidence in our own economy of what can work. For example, home-based providers are more likely to operate during non-traditional hours, when shift workers, single parents and student parents need them. One thing we can do right away is to increase access to affordable startup and expansion capital for new and existing home-based centers. 

A robust, reliable care system requires investment. Average public spending on child care among the comparatively wealthy Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations is $16,000 a year per child. 

The United States invests a mere $500 per child. How can we invest so little in our future workforce? In the leaders of tomorrow? 

Related: A wave of childcare closures is coming as funding dries up

Families are working hard to meet their needs but costs continue to rise, putting quality care beyond their reach. Child care costs in the U.S. averaged $10,600 a year in 2021, according to an analysis by the advocacy organization Child Care Aware. That’s 10 percent of a couple’s average income — or 35 percent of a single parent’s income. 

In at least 34 states, care for the youngest children is more expensive than in-state college tuition. 

What support does exist for families is difficult to get and insufficient. As a result, only one out of every six U.S. children eligible for public subsidies receives them. 

Women, single parents, parents in poverty, families of color and immigrant families carry the heaviest burden of this crisis: An analysis of 2017 data indicated center-based care for two children absorbed 26 percent of a white working mother’s median household income. For Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Black working mothers, those figures were 42 percent, 51 percent and 56 percent, respectively. 

These figures demonstrate how the cost of care can make it almost impossible for a household to meet other basic needs like housing, food and transportation — which all continue to escalate in cost.

In spite of this, providers themselves, almost all women and disproportionately women of color, are barely staying afloat, operating on one percent margins. 

No wonder so many are expected to close their doors starting next month.

In August, more than 1,500 state lawmakers from across the country gathered in Indianapolis for the annual National Conference of State Legislatures summit. 

We heard Republicans and Democrats agree that something must be done to address the child care crisis. 

They know the fallout will keep us from moving forward, from filling jobs and from ensuring that children are safe and thriving while their parents are working or completing their own education. 

It’s time to channel that consensus into urgent action and real solutions.  

This is a time for creativity and thinking big among both the private and public sector. The Casey Foundation urges lawmakers to invest in the child care sector, starting with these steps:

• Congress should reauthorize and strengthen the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act. The main reason we didn’t lose 75,000 child care centers and 3 million slots during the pandemic was the $40 billion allocated to strengthen the child care sector in the American Rescue Plan Act. We now have evidence that these investments work.

• Public and private leaders should work together specifically to improve infrastructure for home-based child care providers. Start by increasing access to affordable startup and expansion capital. 

• Governors and legislators should encourage the higher education and business communities to take steps such as co-locating child care at work and learning sites to reduce transportation challenges. 

The underpinnings of our families and our economy are too important for our elected officials to continue to ignore what is happening. The pandemic sharpened our understanding of the issues. There are good models to follow. 

Now is the moment for generational action to ensure children, parents and guardians, providers and employers are never again standing at the edge of a cliff, looking for a bridge to safety, and wondering whose kids will make it to the other side and whose will be left behind.

Lisa M. Hamilton is president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. 

This story about the child care funding cliff was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post OPINION: Our economy is about to meet the child care cliff — and it will be devastating  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

GIBSONS, British Columbia — Two years ago, Marisol Petersen’s family was paying more than $1,200 a month for her son to attend child care in this small, coastal town about 20 miles across the Howe Sound from Vancouver. Despite the cost, which made it hard to put any money in savings, she felt lucky to even have a spot.

Then, in September 2022, the family experienced a dramatic shift in fortune. They were notified that there was a spot for them in a nearby child care center that had recently signed on to a government-led initiative to lower parent fees to just $10 a day. “It’s like I won the lottery,” Petersen said. “I got into child care and a ‘$10 a Day’ site.”

At the new center, the Huckleberry Coast Child Care Society, Petersen’s fees are capped at $200 a month. Without that reduction in fees, Petersen, who works as a social planner for the city of Vancouver, said her family would “be in massive trouble.”

The “$10 a Day” child care initiative, as it’s known in British Columbia, has been life-changing for parents. In the five years since it launched, it has also provided some financial stability for child care programs in the province, which now receive operating funds directly from the government instead of relying solely on family-paid tuition.

This idea — that parents should pay an average of $10 a day for child care and that public funds should underwrite child care programs — is now a cornerstone of a new national child care system rolling out across the country.

During the pandemic, Canada, like the United States, was forced to grapple with the fact that its already unsustainable child care system was on the brink of collapse. In 2021, the country’s leaders committed $30 billion (about $24 billion in U.S. dollars) over five years to the country’s first federally-funded child care system — borrowing ideas from a longstanding government-funded program in the province of Quebec as well as from British Columbia’s $10 a Day program. The new Canada-wide system was “very much situated in the context of economic recovery,” said Morna Ballantyne, executive director of Child Care Now, an advocacy association in Canada.

Canada’s national system is nowhere near finished and is hardly perfect; there are staffing shortages in many parts of the country and still far too few seats available for children. But the new national initiative, known as “Canada-wide,” will bring Canada closer to joining the ranks of countries like Finland, Sweden and Iceland, long lauded for providing robust federal support for child care.

As American child care experts call for more federal investment to salvage a struggling industry, Canada’s experience may hold the most relevant lessons on how to make universal child care palatable to politicians and how to design a program to meet the needs of a diverse, geographically sprawling nation. With its new system, Canada has had to strike a balance between upholding the federal vision and allowing local autonomy over details, and between addressing the financial burden for parents while determining how to directly fund child care programs to ensure their stability.

“Canada shows that transformative child care reform is possible,” said Elliot Haspel, director of climate and young children at Capita, an international think tank, and the author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It.” “I don’t think we can copy and paste what the advocates up there did. But I think there’s some real lessons in thinking about messaging of child care and what’s the actual policy.”

Related: With little federal support for families, states are stepping up

Any way you look at it, America’s child care system is in crisis. After years of underinvestment, and an end to pandemic-era aid, the industry is struggling. Child care teachers have fled for higher paying jobs; parents face years-long wait lists; and families face insurmountable costs even for mediocre care. 

The last major effort to significantly expand federal funding of child care in the U.S. — a proposal in President Joseph Biden’s Build Back Better legislation in 2021 — was dropped from the final version of the act. Legislation introduced earlier this year that would have provided $10-a-day child care to many American families failed to progress. Although greater investment in child care has some bipartisan support in the U.S., many lawmakers have balked at the cost. Some continue to say the government should have no place in child care, arguing that it is a private responsibility. Others suggest that universal access to child care is a communist policy, or that mothers should always stay home with their children. That’s in spite of the fact that America relies on working parents to keep schools and many services open.

In Canada, experts and advocates were “very effective at conveying the idea that child care is an important part of the overall well-being of the province and the nation,” Haspel added. “They hammered it home over and over and over again.”

The new national system passed Parliament as part of the nation’s budget in June 2021 and has been rolling out over the past two years. Participation is voluntary for provinces and territories. But all have signed on to access the federal dollars, which are presently given with no requirement that provinces invest their own money. Eventually, Canadian officials hope to achieve a 50/50 cost share with provinces and territories, but no money was required at the onset of the initiative. (America, in contrast, requires states to match funds for its current federal program aimed at lowering costs for low-income families.)

Each province or territory has control over many of the details of the Canada-wide program, like setting annual goals for expanding child care spots and early educator pay scales, as well as deciding whether for-profit centers are included in their system. Money flows to the provincial governments, which then have their own systems for providing funding directly to the child care programs. By 2026, the country intends for Canada-wide to be universal in fact as well as name — with 250,000 new spots and parents paying no more than an average of $10 a day for care.

While the system’s biggest effects likely won’t be seen until it expands, there are signs of progress. Nationwide, nearly half of the provinces and territories offer regulated child care for an average of $10 a day, or less. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the federal funds have also supported the creation of a new, full-day, year-round pre-K pilot program. In New Brunswick, the province upped early childhood educator wages. In British Columbia the federal infusion of funds has bolstered the work the province was already doing to bring more public funding into the child care industry. The province used the federal money it received to pay for 1,271 child care spaces between 2021 and 2022.

Related: The child care crisis is reaching crisis proportions nationally. Could Milwaukee provide the answer?

Child care programs say there are benefits to having access to more public funds. At Huckleberry, the program Marisol Petersen’s son attends in Gibsons, the board of directors saw signing onto the province’s $10 a Day plan as an opportunity to lower fees for parents without having to also lower wages for teachers. Huckleberry was also able to get $32,000 in additional funding from the province to hire a program manager to oversee budgets and support daily operations.

About 68 miles east of Gibsons in Mission, a town of about 39,000 in Canada’s bucolic Fraser Valley, child care provider Lorraine Trulsen said $10 a Day has provided much-needed stability. Before joining the provincial initiative, she was begging families to refer others to her program, the Heritage Park Childcare Centre, even offering half off a month of care. Although her tuition, which cost between $650 and $850 a month, was lower than that of centers closer to Vancouver, “it was a struggle to get full,” Trulsen said. Five years after becoming a pilot program for $10 a Day, Trulsen has a three-year wait list. Many of her parents cried when Trulsen announced her new, lower rate. Some couples decided they could have more children, she added, knowing they could now afford care. 

The publicly-supported initiative in British Columbia, “has given us a feeling of security,” Trulsen said. “We’ve actually never been more financially stable than we are right now.”

Despite Canada’s progress and growing support for the national, low-cost child care plan, the country’s pain points in Canada-wide’s rollout show there’s no quick way to make child care a public, federally-funded service, especially for countries that are late to the game. For example, in Canada, non-licensed, home-based providers have been left out of the system, as have other, more informal kinds of care.

About one-third of Canada’s children are cared for by either a relative other than their parent or by a non-relative in a home, for example. Some provinces plan to tweak their versions of Canada-wide to include more forms of child care in the future, but that is not the case across the country. “We are very concerned that the current plan is not equitable,” said Andrea Mrozek, a senior fellow with the Ottawa-based think tank, Cardus. “Billions and billions are being poured into a system that really helps the few,” she added.

And even some of the programs that have been the biggest beneficiaries of the child care expansion are still struggling with funding. Provinces and territories are financially supporting the budgets of child care programs at levels the programs say are too low. In many cases, the governments subsidize families’ costs, but fail to approve enough new money for child care programs that would allow them to raise teacher salaries. For example, earlier this year, British Columbia rejected a request from Huckleberry for a funding increase that would have raised teacher wages and provided employment benefits for the center’s small staff of two full-time and two part-time teachers.

The Esprit Daycare Centre near Huckleberry also asked program officials in British Columbia for additional funds so it could raise wages. The request was denied. Last year Esprit lost several staff members to a public early learning program that pays more. “The staffing has been the issue,” said Jennifer Braun, manager of Esprit. “Finding enough coverage here is like a unicorn.” 

Related: Finding child care is still impossible for many parents

In some provinces, families’ costs were cut dramatically long before many programs had the stability and staffing to handle the subsequent enrollment surge. And while some provinces have upped educator wages in an attempt to attract and keep teachers, others have been slower to make progress.

“I feel like the government is doing things in the wrong order,” said Trulsen, in Mission. “We’re creating spaces and we can’t find staff. We can’t find staff because we can’t offer decent living wages. So round and round you go.”

Canadian experts say their country’s experience has shown what to do, as well as what not to do, to create transformational change in the child care industry. Some American policy makers have proposed addressing the child care crisis here by sending more money to parents or upping tax benefits, rather than providing direct funding to child care programs. Canadian experts who have seen their system’s roll out are wary of such methods. “It’s absolutely clear that if you want to have a childcare system, you can’t do it only by giving money to the parents, you have to make sure that you have the supply,” said Martha Friendly, executive director of the Canadian-based nonprofit Childcare Resource and Research Unit, who previously worked on child care policy in the United States.

 “If you look at other countries, that’s the way they do it, they fund the operations.” Of most importance, said Friendly, is that countries address affordability, workforce and supply at the same time. “If you want to have a child care system that’s stable … You need to do all these things at the same time, because they’re interlinked,” she said.

In the U.S., some states are likely to balk at the idea of following in the steps of Canada and Scandinavia and setting up a federal “system” of care. Allowing autonomy at a state level is an aspect of Canada’s model America might adopt, said Gordon Cleveland, associate professor emeritus at the University of Toronto Scarborough. “But there also has to be a very strong overall concept,” he said, such as setting goals for parent rates, program expansion or educator wages.

Such a system would be costly: one proposal for a universal child care system by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has also proposed $10 a day child care, estimated the price at $700 billion over 10 years. In Canada, some child care programs have opted out due, in part, due to concern that they won’t have as much autonomy over their operations. And because unlicensed, informal care is popular in America, and the majority of the country’s young children are in non-center-based care, a system focused on formal programs, like Canada’s, could be a point of contention here as well.

Messaging in support of universal child care in the United States will likely need to differ from Canada’s. While it might seem counterintuitive, Haspel believes expanded government spending on child care should be tied to giving American families flexibility to choose and pursue their own destinies. “It’s about family freedom,” he said. “The number of children you can have, where you choose to live. The time you get to spend with your children should not be determined by the availability or lack thereof of affordable child care, yet for far too many families, it is.”

This story about subsidized child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post What America can learn from Canada’s new ‘$10 a Day’ child care system appeared first on The Hechinger Report.