If You Support Public Schools, You Should Support Universal Child Care

Child care is unaffordable for everyone but the wealthiest families. We can create an early learning system that works for everyone.

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Civic Skunk Works

9 min readMay 29, 2019

This week, Vox asked nine dads who are running for president what they do for child care. Their answers boiled down to this: The moms, usually while working full-time, are holding it down at home. And although my eyes needed a minute to return to Earth from their massive roll to outer space (“When I’m at home, I… try to handle some of the responsibilities” was a real answer from Rep. Tim Ryan), I have to cut them some slack. Almost every parent understands the difficulty of cobbling together a child care plan from available resources. And parents everywhere (yes, even presidential hopefuls) have been bamboozled by the way child care works in our country﹣which is to say that it doesn’t work at all.

In more colorful terms, child care in America is a smoldering train wreck. The existing system does not work for most families﹣in fact, it actively works against them, making lives miserable and schedules explode across the entire country. For the childless among us, like myself, it’s difficult to truly understand how bad the situation is﹣but to try, think of the three child care C’s: Capacity, Cost, and Compensation. National data on this issue is severely lacking, but statewide data is abundant﹣when necessary, I’ll use my state, Washington, as an example.

First, there is not enough capacity to serve all of the children who need care. Sixty percent of children in the U.S. live in a child care desert — a place where there is no licensed child care available. In Washington state, 59 percent of the 450,000-ish children younger than six live in households where all available parents are in the labor force, but according to Child Care Aware of Washington we only have the provider capacity to care for 169,464 kids. Families spend years on waiting lists and are told to add themselves to one before they even become pregnant. And these numbers don’t even account for families that have chosen to keep one parent out of the workforce due to an inability to access care.

For families who do manage to find a spot for their child, the cost of care is prohibitively expensive for almost everyone. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services considers a family cost-burdened by child care if the cost of care exceeds 7 percent of their total annual family income, but monthly child care costs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers in Washington can range from 10–21 percent of median state income (that’s $63,000 annually, according to the most recent data), and reach 90.6 percent of income for a single-parent household with two children at the state median income level. Yes, you read that right: child care costs in Washington state have risen to more than 90 percent of the average single parent’s annual income. Full-time care for one infant in a licensed center in Washington can range from $10,560 to $16,200﹣more than annual tuition at a public university. Relatively high-income families don’t fare well, either: a family with a household income of $95,882 spends 30 percent of their income on child care for their two children during the work day.

And finally, child care providers are compensated for their difficult and important work with poverty-level wages. The average wage in 2017 for Washington’s child care workers was $13.37/hour, and 50 percent of low-wage child care workers (particularly those who are working in unlicensed care environments) rely on public assistance. As a result, the turnover rate for child care assistant teachers is over 40 percent. Child care providers need a huge raise, but business owners struggle to balance paying living wages against affordability issues﹣and there’s no good market-based solution.

There’s also one more bonus, imposter C: Quality. Many people don’t realize that child care is actually synonymous with something called early learning. That’s because when a kid is in a high-quality child care environment, they aren’t just being supervised as the phrase ‘child care’ would lead you to believe. Instead, they’re being engaged with by highly educated teachers and specialists who are carefully leading each child through a curriculum that will expand their brain as much as possible. High-quality early learning is the single most important indicator of success in school and in life. And because high-quality early learning is only available for purchase in this country at a steep price, it’s the sleeper ingredient to creating an elite educated class.

High-quality early learning is the single most important indicator of success in school and in life. And because high-quality early learning is only available for purchase in this country at a steep price, it’s the sleeper ingredient to creating an elite educated class.

The long-term benefits of quality early childhood education are clear. The benefits to children (increased test scores, higher graduation rates, and developing the skills necessary to succeed in school and life) and to society (reduced crime rate, less welfare dependence, reduction in wealth and racial gaps) are well-researched. In fact, every dollar invested in high-quality preschool for disadvantaged children from birth-to-five delivers a 13 percent annual return on investment. But because child care is so difficult to access, children are missing out on the opportunity to learn and develop the necessary skills to succeed in school and life﹣and only 46.7 percent of children in Washington are considered kindergarten-ready on their first day of school (the percentage is much lower for African-American, Hispanic, low-income, limited English-speaking, and immigrant students). This has negative impacts throughout their entire school career.

In America, we consider child care to be a family’s individual burden to bear﹣and if a parent has to make sacrifices to make ends meet, then so be it. Of course, it’s most often the mother that ends up leaving her career to care for children﹣more than one-third of unemployed women in the U.S. left the workforce because of caregiving responsibilities, with each woman losing an estimated $324,044 in wages and benefits over her lifetime. And it’s not just families who pay the price for unreliable child care: U.S. businesses lose approximately $4.4 billion annually due to employee absenteeism because of child care breakdowns.

So here’s what we have: a high-quality elite system that almost no one can access or afford, and a mad scramble among the unluckier families to figure out a schedule of cobbled-together solutions that will offer their child the best start possible in life while still allowing both parents to work. Because that’s what’s basically necessary for economic security in this country﹣dual-income households. A family’s economic security is predicated upon both parents being able to work, and for that to happen, they need access to reliable and affordable child care.

That was a lot of information. It takes a long time to explain just how backwards the child care system is, and I’ve barely scratched the surface. But it doesn’t have to be this way﹣there’s an elegant solution to this crisis.

We should include all kids in an expanded public school system that encompasses children from birth to five years old.

Public school exists because we decided that everyone deserves a good education. But it’s totally arbitrary that kids enter the public school system when they start kindergarten. Everyone, regardless of their background, deserves a good education from the moment they start to learn﹣which we know is in the first year of a child’s life. Learning begins at birth.

Everyone, regardless of their background, deserves a good education from the moment they start to learn﹣which we know is in the first year of a child’s life. Learning begins at birth.

Although this would certainly require a Herculean expansion effort, we already have the basic public school infrastructure. And it would just make sense for families and communities﹣child care and early learning would be in every neighborhood, available to every child, regardless of their family’s income. Families would know that their kids had a reliable place to go, all day every day﹣and would enjoy the ease of dropping their 1-year-old off at the same place as their 6-year-old. It might even give school districts a sense of upcoming capacity needs for its K-12 student populations, helping them to do thoughtful long-term planning.

If we decide as a society that every child should have access to the best start possible, we won’t be starting from scratch! There is actually precedent for government-funded child care in the U.S. During World War II, the federal government established emergency nursery schools in every state except New Mexico through a war-related grant called the Lanham Act (I have no idea why New Mexico didn’t make the cut). Although the daycares closed at the end of the war, the program is notable as the first and only time in U.S. history when federally-subsidized child care was available to families regardless of income.

Another, more current example: Today’s military child care system serves as a model that could be emulated by the civilian population. Every military base has child care available to all enlisted parents. Families never pay more than 10 percent of their income for tuition, the amount and quality of care is consistent regardless of how much parents can pay, and care workers are paid and promoted according to the same military wage system that enlisted people adhere to. Government funding covers about two-thirds of the cost. Public early learning could look like this, too﹣with parents paying an adjusted, affordable percentage of their income to help defer some of the costs.

Legislators, most notably Elizabeth Warren, have recently floated universal child care proposals. We should be watching closely in upcoming elections to ensure our favorite candidates have plans to expand access to child care for everyone. The ideal 2020 presidential candidate would understand that every person should have access to the best education that our country can provide, regardless of the conditions of their birth﹣and that our economy needs to be structured around the reality of the working parent. We can build on existing public infrastructure to achieve this. Leaving child care largely to the mother is, in the 21st century, no longer an acceptable solution. And voters should know this: If you support public schools, you should support universal child care.

If you’re interested in knowing more, here’s some resources to check out, not in any particular order:

2019 Public Policy Agenda (Child Care Aware Washington)

The Old Rules of the Workplace Aren’t Working. At Least Not for Women. (NYT, 9/30/18)

Results Review: Accessible and affordable child care (Results WA, 10/24/18)

The Work That Makes Work Possible (The Atlantic, 3/23/16)

America’s Child Care Deserts in 2018 (CAP, 12/6/18)

2 Million Parents Forced to Make Career Sacrifices Due to Problems with Child Care (CAP, 9/13/17)

‘You should get on a waiting list’: Seattle’s child-care crunch takes toll on parents, providers (Seattle Times, 12/9/18)

A Blueprint for Child Care Reform (CAP, 9/7/17)

Child Care is Fundamental to America’s Children, Families, and Economy (NWLC, 5/18/18)

The Cost of Inaction on Universal Preschool (CAP, 10/31/17)

Persistent Gaps: State Child Care Assistance Policies 2017 (NWLC, 10/21/17)