Child Care Again Got Scraps. The Sector Needs a Power-Building Strategy

“COVID-19 is an inflection point for the early care and education field. Our best case scenario cannot be a return to the precarious, failed system with which we entered this crisis. ”

Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash

By Elliot Haspel

There were many winners in the recently-passed Coronavirus relief bill. Child care providers were not one of them. While advocates asked for $50 billion in targeted assistance to save a critical infrastructure sector, the final bill offered just $3.5 billion. This disappointment is not new:  despite bipartisan paeans to the importance of early care and education, time and time again, the child care sector is forced to do with scraps. It’s important to both understand why child care is so politically weak, and what can be done to build its power moving forward -- especially right now, when parents have been shoved face-to-face with the realities of our vital yet dangerously fragile family support systems.

The answers lie on three parallel tracks: money power, people power, and messaging power.

Diagnosing the Problem

First, it’s worth dispensing with the convenient but incorrect idea that the problem is just that American politicians don’t care about kids. American public education is certainly underfunded, but the nation spends over $700 billion a year on K-12 schooling. That puts the U.S. above-average among 34 developed nations in spending as a percentage of GDP. Meanwhile, the U.S. comes in a miserable third-to-last in spending on early care and education. 

There are a few key differences between K-12 and child care, of course. Public education is a right in all 50 state constitutions; child care, thanks to a legacy of laying it at women’s unpaid feet, is a right in zero. From a political standpoint, public education can claim the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association (NEA), with over 3 million members. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), while smaller at 1.7 million members, also packs a political punch. Both of these organizations have hefty war chests: for instance, in the 2016 election cycle, the AFT contributed over $16 million to candidates and causes, making it the 19th-largest benefactor in the nation according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The NEA ranked 35th.

The contrast with early care and education is stark. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), which is not a union but is arguably the leading early childhood interest group, has 60,000 members and cannot make political contributions. National advocacy groups like NAEYC, while striving heroically against stacked odds -- and managing to make valuable progress -- are not equipped to stand in the gap: they simply do not have enough financial firepower. 

Indeed, despite more than two million practitioners, early care and education (except pre-K teachers employed by a school district) has no national union, much less two. This does not imply that a large national union is necessarily the answer, but some form of institutional collectivist power must be put on the table. The main challenge to date in creating national union-like muscle for early care and education has been the extreme stratification in the field. Children in the early years are served by providers including private centers, private family child care homes, nonprofit and community-based providers, religiously-based providers, nannies, state pre-K programs, and Head Start/Early Head Start. These providers can at times be in direct competition with one another for parent ‘clients’, fraying relationships. Similarly, there’s a somewhat jagged edge between pre-K programs and programs that serve infants and toddlers. 

All this makes collective bargaining and collective advocacy rather difficult -- in fact, in more than half of U.S. states, child care workers have no legal right to unionize (California last year became only the 12th state to allow family care providers to do so). When child care practitioners have unionized, they have most often partnered with local affiliates of groups like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). In this way, early childhood sits in an odd no-man’s-land: the field wants to be considered on par with K-12 education, yet frequently has either no organizing outlet or an awkward alliance with other low-wage professions like home health aides and fast food workers. The field is thus simultaneously left with little financial oomph and, at times, butter-soft bonds of solidarity.

The only way to make up for a lack of monetary power is with a surge of voting power. Yet here again, early childhood struggles. The primary constituency for child care is parents of young children. Parents of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are not exactly notorious for their free time -- there’s a reason they tend to vote at somewhat lower rates than the general public -- and the period of self-interest is relatively short: once a child turns five, the personal impact of early childhood policies dwindles. With no armada of voters looking over their shoulders, politicians simply aren’t scared of incurring electoral blowback if they shortchange the early care and education sector.

A Path Forward

This state of affairs suggests a two-pronged approach to power building, and unlike most things during the COVID-19 pandemic, the time to strike on these strategies is now. 

From a money power standpoint, this pandemic has laid bare the need for common cause. With the exception of government programs like Head Start, child care providers of all types are getting hammered; up to two-thirds may not survive without assistance. Early care and education leaders should be considering ways to leverage and activate the collective strength (and funds) of two million practitioners eager, if not desperate, for a voice -- and philanthropy should be considering ways to support such efforts. This may not necessarily look like a traditional collective bargaining entity, but there are creative ways to build organized power even in the absence of a classic union. For instance, practitioners could be encouraged to make annual contributions to a Political Action Committee-type organization that is free to throw its political weight around. 

We are also facing a rare opportunity to rally parents together. There’s an interesting research literature showing that parents often act and vote just like nonparents, except for when their parental identity is activated. For instance, parents tend to be more supportive of tax increases for public schools than nonparents, and, when prompted to think about their children, more supportive of measures to fight climate change. Well, parents these days are marinating in their parental identity -- and appreciation for their child care educators -- which means they may be primed for activation. What’s more, this crisis has put a spotlight on the key role grandparents play in child care. Grandparents, despite having much more time capacity and belonging to a much higher-propensity voting group, have rarely been wrapped into advocacy campaigns. That should forever change.

Bringing parents together could look like signal boosting existing organizations. For instance, groups like MomsRising, United Parent Leaders Action Network, and ParentsTogether have already been laying groundwork. There are also relatively new organizations emerging like VoteMama dedicated to getting more parents to run for office, and Care For All Children dedicated to building a grassroots movement. This is a great time for parents to flock to these groups. There may also be room for new efforts to arise, or for existing efforts to better align. Either way, the more we can build a cohesive base of parents and grandparents who will engage with their elected officials and show that children’s issues are a critical voting determinant, the better.

Yet none of these efforts will make the necessary leap without a reframing in how we talk about early childhood and family life, and herein lies the third type of power: messaging. For too long, early childhood advocates have relied on the (correct) argument about return on investment: helping young children develop healthily pays dividends for both the current workforce and future workforce. I use these talking points on a regular basis myself. Yet this language is inherently economic and dehumanizing: it treats children and their caregivers as leverage points for productivity, not persons imbued with fundamental rights and dignity.

“For too long, early childhood advocates have relied on the (correct) argument about return on investment: helping young children develop healthily pays dividends for both the current workforce and future workforce. I use these talking points on a regular basis myself. Yet this language is inherently economic and dehumanizing: it treats children and their caregivers as leverage points for productivity, not persons imbued with fundamental rights and dignity.”

What the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is children in all their messy, joyous, interruptive glory. It’s a rare window for all to witness the day-to-day evolution we call child development, the infinitesimally small moments that roll up into sweeping growth, like the time-lapse of a flower blooming. It has also shown us that our child care workforce does stunningly difficult human work, and that we cannot function as a society without them. It’s notable that the tradition of organized labor is steeped in language around human rights, a philosophy underlying why labor has long been central to a progressive agenda spanning issues from child labor laws to the civil rights movement.

Envision a child care organization or coalition with the strength of the NEA or AFT, backed by millions of parents and grandparents ready to flood their elected officials’ phone lines at a moment’s notice. Envision iron bars of solidarity linking home health care workers, early care and education practitioners, K-12 educators, and others -- and a common agenda that transcends any one field and instead embraces the common good: a magnetic pole of thriving families and thriving children. Envision a world in which Congress and state legislatures can no longer shrug off the concerns of young children knowing there will be little meaningful consequence, where electeds can no longer expect to be praised for doing anything at all. 

COVID-19 is an inflection point for the early care and education field. Our best case scenario cannot be a return to the precarious, failed system with which we entered this crisis. We can choose to reflect on how even in the face of naked disaster -- when major political figures are declaring child care “essential” -- the sector continues to get little political traction. Or, we can choose to continue down a path of barely keeping our heads above water. These are hard conversations to have, but this is a hard season: if any good is to come of the storm, we should try to emerge on the other side with fresh eyes and fresh power-building strategies.

Elliot Haspel is a former elementary school teacher and early childhood policy analyst who writes about early childhood and K-12 education policy. He holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Elliot’s work has been featured on The Washington Post, The New Republic, Romper, The 74 Million, and other sites. He resides in Richmond, VA with his wife and two young daughters. Elliot’s book, “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” was published in November 2019.