Considerations for The Next President’s Child Care Agenda
By Theresa Hawley
For decades, early care and learning advocates fought for any acknowledgment of child-care issues in a national conversation. A brief mention during a State of the Union Address. A moderator’s question during a campaign debate. A national reporter’s story. A footnote in a presidential campaign platform. Until COVID, crickets. But during this current presidential campaign, the issue has entered the national stage, competing for attention with the economy, the Middle East crisis, the war in Ukraine, and immigration. Democrat Kamala Harris talks about child-care as a key component of her proposed “care economy.” Republican Donald Trump promises to pay for increased investments in child-care by imposing tariffs on companies that move jobs overseas. During Oct. 1’s vice presidential debate, CBS News Moderator Margaret Brennan asked repeated questions about family leave and the child-care crisis of candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance, and both spoke of the importance of better supporting families with young children.
Child care stands apart as an issue on which candidates seem to find some common ground. This recognition of the need for greater investment tracks years of polling showing bipartisan support for making child care more affordable to families, sustainable for providers, and stable for employers.
Where the candidates diverge is how to pay for it.
Harris has proposed increasing the child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $6,000 per newborn, and at least $3,000 for children older than six. She also has proposed investing directly in child care to help cap parents’ co-payment to no more than 7 percent of family income, borrowing an idea from President Joe Biden’s 2021 Build Back Better proposed package. Harris’s “Children’s Agenda” also includes federally-supported paid family leave, catching up to most other developed countries. Former President Trump did significantly increase the Child Care Development Block Grant while in office.
These ideas are all fine as far as they go, but the next presidential administration would do well to consider additional measures if the goal is to truly strengthen how we care for our youngest learners. That means balancing our traditional over-reliance on demand-side measures (tax credits, subsidies, and other per-child slot allocations) with a few supply-side ones. Such supply-side strategies include minimum, foundational funding to cover programs’ base operational expenses, and targeted improvements in worker wages.
Next, our new president must also reconsider the hassle factor for parents who seek help to afford child care. Imagine if families were expected to fill out a 25-page form each year, then await word of income verification before they learned that their child could enter, say, the 4th grade. We wouldn’t think of it, because K-12 education is accepted as a public good. We’ve built a funding system that stably (if not always adequately) funds school districts to ensure a spot is available for every child. But such administrative burdens remain embedded throughout our early childhood system.
If the next administration wants to strengthen our early childhood system, it must start by shoring up its shaky financing model that relies too heavily on reimbursements to providers on a per-child basis. Such an approach could work if only a few families needed help affording child care. But quality child care is financially out of reach for nearly all families with young children.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the system’s fragility and cracks in ways that hadn’t before been seen or felt by so many. Many working families found child care to be so unaffordable that one parent opted to stay home. Employers lost workers. Teachers making poverty wages in child care left for better-paying jobs, often at Lyft or Target. Many programs closed for good.
But the pandemic also provided reasons for optimism, and new practices upon which to build in order to move to a more stable, equitable funding system for early childhood. Many feared a total collapse of the system, but all 50 states managed to quickly get federal relief money out the door to prevent an implosion. The experience also demonstrated that our nation’s child-care system could be funded at scale, where only five years ago, that seemed inconceivable to those within the field. The money that was distributed exemplified foundational funding, and the success of the experience should guide how child care could be financed moving forward.
Given what economic, brain, and educational research tells us about the importance of early care and education to a child’s educational and life success, and how important quality care is to their families’ ability to work, it’s time we rethink the underlying financing system for early care and education. With all we have learned in recent years, we can build a system that works better for providers, parents, and, most importantly, America’s youngest children.
Theresa Hawley is Executive Director of the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity at Northern Illinois University