EdCast Fixing Childcare in America Child and family policy expert Elliot Haspel, Ed.M.'09, discusses the challenges and potential solutions for universal childcare in the United States Posted October 17, 2024 By Jill Anderson Early Education Education Policy Families and Community Elliot Haspel believes universal childcare can happen in America, especially because it affects everyone across red and blue lines. Haspel, Ed.M.’09, senior fellow at Capita, says part of the challenge is recognizing that childcare is something Americans see as a public good. Reflecting on the history of childcare in America, Haspel points out how certain policy failures, particularly the Comprehensive Child Development Act in the 1970s, have led to where we are today. “We've never gotten to this point in the country of really reckoning with, what is childcare and individual responsibility? Is it actually something that should be more of a right, that should be more seen akin to public education, or libraries, or parks, or roads, where society has a vested interest in supporting the family?” he says.He highlights two key obstacles: inclusivity (recognizing informal caregivers and stay-at-home parents) and funding, with a necessary budget estimated at over $150 billion annually. “Fundamentally, if you want a functional childcare system in this country that works for families, and works for children, that works for the educators, and it ultimately works for communities, and the economy, and society at large — it has to start with robust, permanent, dedicated amounts of public funding,” Haspel says. “And we've never done anything like that in this country without first deciding, as a nation, that it is a value that we hold.”He advocates for a large, sustained public investment. He points to other countries, like Canada and Germany, that have successfully reformed their childcare systems, showing that change is possible. Haspel emphasizes the need for a cultural shift to prioritize childcare, which he believes will lead to broader societal benefits.In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Haspel discusses the challenges and potential solutions for universal childcare in the United States.TranscriptJILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. Elliot Haspel says childcare is a public good, just like public education. But in America, we don't treat it like one. He's an expert in early childhood education policy and the author of “Crawling Behind, America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It.” Childcare is one of the largest expenses facing families. And childcare workers earn some of the lowest wages. The US Treasury has even called childcare a market failure. I wanted to understand how America got to this place where having a child means going broke, and what it's going to take to change it. First, I ask what the pandemic exposed about childcare, and why we keep hearing about a childcare cliff. Elliot Haspel ELLIOT HASPEL: Over the course of the pandemic and the various relief bills, about $50 billion were pumped into the childcare system to help stabilize it. Because we treat childcare in this country much more like a private good, kind of pay to play, like a gym or a restaurant, and not like a public good, like a public school, or a library, or a fire department. When the world shut down and everyone took their kids out of childcare, that was an existential threat to these programs' ability to stay solvent, just like it was for restaurants. And so, stabilization funds came in to help keep the sector alive.So as that money got ready to expire, most of it expired last year, some of it, kind of depending on how states allocated it, kind of drifted over in 2024. The challenge is that there have been real shifts in the economy and in the labor market. And so, it's always been very difficult to run a childcare program. The economics are not good. The US Treasury Department says it's a market failure. Childcare educators get paid around $15 an hour.Because, again, there's not much public money in the system. But we've seen all these other kind of low wage industries, fast food, retail, had really raised their base rates. And so, the status quo before COVID was broken, but there was no going back, even to that broken status quo. And so, the idea of the childcare cliff was like, as this pandemic era relief funding goes away, and programs are no longer getting these grants to fill the gap, are we going to see them all face, essentially, disaster? What sort of turned out is that cliff might not be the best analogy. It's more of a childcare slowly rolling down the mountain towards a bog. Because it hasn't all gone off just like that. But we have seen, overall, and especially in states that did not choose to step up with their own state money, we have seen numerous closures of childcare programs. We see real issues of staffing, high turnover of staff, as well, which isn’t good for the kids. So as we've seen all of these negative consequences, and the expectation is, without more public money coming in, it's only going to get worse and worse.JILL ANDERSON: What are the long-term effects that we're going to anticipate out of this, as we don't have this sort of Band-Aid funding that exists, and some states have put money into it, some states have ignored it, and it's just a very uneven landscape, I imagine?ELLIOT HASPEL: That's a good word for it. We're going to start seeing, and I think we've already started to see, increasingly childcare haves and have nots. So that question of state funding is really important. Because until the federal government comes in with really robust public funding, that is what is often the difference between whether programs are having to raise fees.There are lots of programs that are sitting with empty classrooms, not because there aren't a bunch of families on the waiting list, and not because they don't want to have them open, because they can't staff those classrooms-- and in childcare have necessarily low child adult ratios you have to meet, if you're going to have a classroom open. So, we see real capacity decreases in those states that haven't stepped up. And that's again, that's bad for parents who are having to deal with wait lists.They can't find care, if the turnover of staff is not great for the kids and the programs have strain on the teachers that remain. A few states, and actually, Massachusetts, is a shining example of this, have really stepped up. So, Massachusetts has put into place a $475 million annual fund. They call it Commonwealth Cares for Children, or C3, which provides, essentially, ongoing operational grants. So more similar to how a state gives base aid to an institution of higher education, or kind of a per-pupil expenditure for K-12. It's this idea of just a steady flow of public money that is intended to help programs keep their doors open, not have to raise fees, be able to pay their staff well, and things like that. So, states that have stepped up are doing better. But again, it is, to your point, it's uneven. It's far and few between. It's about a dozen states that have really done anything significant. So, it tells you about 2/3 of the country, you've got families that are still struggling with a crumbling sector.JILL ANDERSON: So, paint the picture for me. Because when we look around the world, a lot of developed countries have childcare policies in place. They've had them for several decades. And the US has lagged behind in this. What is keeping the US from making policy that would really support families and children that need it?ELLIOT HASPEL: Yeah, you're right. I mean, just to put that in context, the OECD says the target should be countries spending about 1% of their GDP on early care and education. The US is down at about 0.3%, and we are really bottom of the league table. There's only one or two countries that put in less than we do. A lot of this tracks back to 1971. So, did a quick history diversion. So, 1971, President Nixon is in office, and Congress, on a bipartisan basis, passes something called the Comprehensive Child Development Act.And this would have begun to fund a nationally-funded, locally-run network of childcare programs is envisioned as a broad based support, so almost every family would see some kind of benefit. This was the era when Head Start was going, so it was also envisioned to really be tied in with child development outcomes is a strong piece of legislation. It gets to Nixon's desk. And as the story goes, he basically is hemming and hawing about whether or not to veto this thing. At the time, he's facing some blowback from his right wing around his closeness to China. He's kind of looking to burnish his conservative credentials. And Pat Buchanan, the sort of arch-conservative advisor, ends up writing him the veto statement, which he goes with. His veto statement is extremely strong in its language. It says, basically to do this would be to commit the moral authority of the federal government over that of the family. By the way, this Bill required nothing of anyone. It does-- nothing was mandatory. That really starts this sort of shift of childcare into more of a culture war issue. And we really are still dealing with the consequences of that. This was the time when lots of mothers of young children were flooding into the workforce.Many other countries, in this period, are, to your point, starting to really step up with more public funding. But this gets bad. By the mid 70s, when they try to bring these bills back, there's this pamphlet that goes around. And to this day, no one knows exactly where it came from. But it guts all this place-- this pamphlet goes around saying things like, the Comprehensive Child Development Act is going to let children unionize and sue their parents. So, there was full-on Red Scare going on. There was this political cartoon that said, you don't have to go to the USSR to see the Iron Curtain. And you see these kids like behind government childcare like jail. I mean, it got really bad in the 70s. And so we've never gotten to this point in the country of really reckoning with, what is childcare and individual responsibility? Is it actually something that should be more of a right, that should be more seen akin to public education, or libraries, or parks, or roads, where society has a vested interest in supporting the family?So, a lot of that sort of underlies why we've never gotten that far. And then, after the 70s, really both parties, and even the advocates involved, sort of cede ground into the welfare sort of mindset and framework. And so, a lot of the debates over the rest of the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s, are not about should we have universal childcare, it's what kind of welfare-based childcare support should we have, how do we support of low income families, ideally for shorter time as possible?It's only for the past few years, and some of the pandemic has, I think, shown a light on this, started to reckon again with this: What is childcare for? Who is it for? How do we think about it in society? But really, there's some pretty core first principles, values-level questions that we've never resolved as a country. Makes it really, really hard to build the kind of political will and coalition that you need to pass major pieces of childcare legislation, which are necessarily expensive.JILL ANDERSON: Many, many years ago-- we'll see if you remember this, you did state that universal childcare was a solution, and it is a bipartisan issue. And you mentioned this bit about culture. And we live in such a polarized time. I'm wondering, do you feel like that's still true today, that it can be a bipartisan issue and get support?ELLIOT HASPEL: I actually do. And maybe it's Pollyanna of me, but the fact is, it is a pain point across lines of difference. There childcare pain points in the reddest areas in the country and the bluest areas in the country, it's an existential threat to many rural communities, if they're having young families having kids and they're leaving because there's no childcare.The more sober minds are willing to have these conversations. So we've seen, especially in the Senate Republican Caucus, actually, they're putting forth Bill proposals and ideas that do some of what most experts would agree you need to do, think about how do you actually fund programs that there actually true cost of care, how do you support the workforce so that they're not making poverty wages, things like that.I think the real rub comes down to two things. One, it's making sure that the policy being proposed is comprehensive enough. And what I mean by that is, it needs to be inclusive, not just of licensed childcare programs, like centers and family childcare, but also family, friends and neighbor caregivers. This idea of grandparents, everyone laughs at it, but they are actually an important part of the childcare system. We just need to make sure they're supported, so that if they want to do that, they can do that, and not have to choose between, ‘I want to take care of my grandkid,’ but I actually have to work as a Walmart greeter, or something, because I need some income.So that's one piece. And then, also the question of stay-at-home parents, who also provide a tremendous amount of childcare in this country, particularly for infants and toddlers, have often been ignored in these conversations. That's the easy part. You could advance a more pluralistic, inclusive idea of what is childcare?The more difficult part is, how are you going to pay for it? So, by the estimation of National Academies of Sciences, and most other people, the price tag for a truly good, high quality, universal childcare system, where you have well-paid educators, lots of choices, lots of supply, is probably north of $150 billion a year. I'll immediately put that in context by saying that if you add up all of the public money we spend on K-12 education in this country, it's about $800 billion.So, it's not that wild of a number, actually. But it's a big number. And that question of, how are you going to pay for it, and particularly how are you going to pay for it in an era where we do have lots of an increasing national debt, where we're facing down, within the next 10 years, or so, issues around entitlement programs-- that does seem to me to be one that we are going to need to hash out. But again, that all starts by coming to some agreement on some of these fundamentals about, what is childcare? Who is it for? What is it the role of society, vis a vis, parents-- in supporting parents.Because if we can solve the first principles issue and can be in agreement on that, pay-fors are just like, that's a matter of compromise and a legislative process. And it's not always clean, but usually if sufficiently motivated, we do see politicians tend to come to some kind of compromise on that.JILL ANDERSON: You see a lot of emphasis on universal pre-K, especially on some candidates' platforms. But it does leave off, kind of, birth to age three, pretty much, is kind of a lost piece of that, which I think you just indicated. And we could probably do a whole episode on universal pre-K alone. But-- ELLIOT HASPEL: Yeah. And interestingly, my view, and this is not a consensus view, I will say, but my view on this is that, actually, we have made a big mistake in separating out pre-K from childcare, as if they were two separate things. And there's a history to this. There's a history of this going back to the earliest kind of childcare programs in the country, which were very reluctantly provided for the children of poor families, and immigrant families, families where the mother was widowed and had to work. They were very low quality. They were very poorly funded. You would have one adult for 30, 35, 40 kids. It was bad. So of course, it had a bad reputation. And then you have the nursery school movement coming in and the 1910s, 1920s, specifically targeting middle class families, often attached to universities, and very much trying to be like, we're not that. And nursery schools are the forerunners to today's preschools. And so, we've had this sort of artificial divide. But if you-- I just would like to say, I could take someone, like, I could take you and we could say, close your eyes, and I could take you to a really high quality pre-K classroom, and I could take you to a really high quality four-year-old classroom in a childcare center. You wouldn't be able to know the difference. We treat them as if they're completely separate things. They're not. If it's high quality, care and education are happening in both situations. To the point that, oftentimes-- because universal pre-K attached to the public schools is on a school year, school day calendar. So many times you have a kid who goes to the universal pre-K system. And then, school ends at 2:00 PM. And guess where they go? To a childcare program.This idea that they're separate things, to me, is a little silly. But it has been an effective way to get some public buy-in, and some buy-in from policymakers by basically saying, we're just going to take the public school system, and we're going to march it back a year. And so there have been trade-offs. But there's a reason. And this was very deliberately done, if you ever go back and look at the history of the pre-K now campaign, and in the 2000s, this was a very deliberate choice, responding to some polling, honestly, that said childcare is a bad brand. And preschool is a good brand.What that tells you is, you need to build up the brand of care, because it goes beyond just education. And, quite frankly, elementary school is middle childhood care and education, and high school, adolescent care and education. We just lop the care part off of the school.JILL ANDERSON: It seems like people know how expensive childcare is. There's no surprises, I think, for, even folks who maybe don't have their kids in a childcare center. But I think about what that means for women, what that means for marginalized communities. I think I saw that families below the poverty line spent 27% of their income on childcare, when the recommended amount is 7% -- 7% is more affordable. And I don't think there's a lot of folks out there spending 7% of their income on childcare.ELLIOT HASPEL: Yeah.JILL ANDERSON: Tell me how this affects women, and marginalized communities, in particular.ELLIOT HASPEL: I mean, there are huge equity issues here. And that is the stat. And, at the same time, you can imagine, just like if you think about it for a minute, there aren't a lot of families that are paying 27%, because they're just choosing something else. They're figuring out a way to make it work. Because if you're making $30,000 a year, are you actually paying $10,000 of that for childcare?You need every dollar you've got just to make ends meet. So, you're making sacrifices to make that work. Either you're finding some sort of family, friend, neighbor, caregiver situation. You're cobbling things together. Books, like "Getting us Cheap," which is a sociologist, Amanda Freeman-- she interviews a lot of low-income women. I remember very clearly one story of woman who would bring her four-year-old to work with her, and they would like hide her in the-- she worked at a grocery store. She's a grocery store stocker. And she'd like, hide the little girl, in the bread racks. This is what we are consigning families to do when we don't have adequate childcare is-- families are going to make things work, because that's what they do. But the damage it causes, the stress damage to family well-being. The other thing we see a lot of low-income families do is what's called working staggered schedules. So, if you're both working shift work, and one of you works the day shift, one of you works the night shift, and so someone's always home with the young kids. Imagine having a marriage like that. It's really cascading effects. And then, yes, there's huge opportunity costs here. Having a young child in this country is a cause of poverty. It's not correlated with it, it is a cause of poverty. The leading group in this country, with the highest probability of being evicted from their homes, are Black children under the age of five. And a lot of this is a childcare story. It isn't a housing story. It's really hard for those families to get it. And then, when there are inevitably breakdowns in childcare situations, particularly informal childcare situations, it can be really problematic. I see these families thrust into poverty, thrust into homelessness. Or on the flip side, just not able to get ahead, despite working incredibly hard, because childcare costs and availability is sort of an anchor. We should also say, the childcare workforce is disproportionately made up of women of color, disproportionately made up of immigrant women.They're, again, paid in among the lowest 5% of all occupations. And so there's also a racial inequity, gender equity piece there, where the more we keep that workforce stuck in poverty wages, again, the harder it is for those folks to get ahead. So, yes, there's any number of ways in which the broken childcare system, and our failure to adequately fund a childcare system, has disproportionate impacts on communities of color and otherwise historically disenfranchised communities.JILL ANDERSON: So what's your vision for a better childcare system in America? And what is it going to take to get there? Can we get there? ELLIOT HASPEL: Yeah. I do think we can get there. And you're right. We've seen countries, peer nations, that have made huge changes in their childcare systems over just a couple of decades. So, Germany is another example, a country with very strong, traditional, quote, unquote, gender norms. We see, after reunification, really huge shifts, to the point that now every German family has a legal right to a slot in childcare, from the time the child's 1 to the time the child enters school. It's not perfect. Don't get me wrong.Ireland has done major reforms, Australia. Canada, I look to a lot. They're implementing what they're calling a $10-a-day system, that's backed by billions and billions of public money. So yes, change is possible. We've seen it happen. We've seen it happen in countries that are not super dissimilar from the US. We don't have to just look at Finland, or whatever, to get hope.My vision starts from the idea that every family has access to the care that they want and need, and that care is of high quality. And you gotta start from the family, not from the program. So that means a system is going to be inclusive of all different kinds of care. That means that there's enough public money flowing. I mean, ideally, you're talking about-- if I get to wave a magic wand, it should be universal and free. It shouldn't cost a dime to anyone. And we should get it back from folks who are richer and wealthier, on the back end, in taxes.So that's my ideal system, having a system that is deeply affordable, and that has enough public money flowing also that you're seeing early childhood educators paid a family sustaining salary with good benefits. We should have childcare facilities that are palaces. We should be proud every day that the places that we're dropping our kids off, if that's what we choose to do. And again, then there's support for family caregivers, support for stay-at-home parents, support for all these different kinds of care. And that it goes up through, does not stop at school entry. Because anyone who has kids in school knows that summer childcare is miserable. After school childcare is not particularly fun. Childcare needs do not end at the water's edge of kindergarten. They make it slightly less acute. That's the vision. An abundant vision of, really, where we stop trying to treat childcare as this scarce thing, or this thing that we reluctantly provide, but that we are proud to say, we're going to come alongside families, and we're going to support them in their flourishing, which means they need access to the high quality care that they need, whatever they define as need and prefer, so that they can thrive.What's it going to take? First thing it's going to take is that repositioning of childcare in society. I think, if we start seeing it a lot more as a right, a lot less as a personal obligation to figure it out, that's the first step to cultural change. So, this is the EdCast we have lots of debates over lots of things in education. At the same time, very few people question that education is a right. It is a right in all 50 state constitutions. There is an argument whether it should be at the federal level. It is just an assumed part of the social fabric of this country. And everyone pays into it, whether or not you have kids, whether or not you have kids in school, you pay into it.Because it provides enough social benefit that is categorized as that kind of a good. And again, the same thing. We could go through libraries, fire departments, parks, roads. There's a whole set of things. Until childcare gets into that bucket, it's going to be really hard to pull out the funding that we need to create the system that I'm describing. So, I think a lot of the work is actually cultural, and how do we change the way care is portrayed in popular media?Like, we see little glimmers of this. Allyson Felix at the Olympics, like being really vocal about the need for childcare, and helping set up the nursery there in Paris. That was pretty good, good quality. But we need a lot more of that from every segment of society to say, this isn't a "nice to have". This isn't something that, you chose to have a kid, deal with a kid. No, this is actually important.And I don't think it has to be partisan either. Because we could talk about the effects on public health and safety. If police department or hospital can't stay staffed up because of childcare, we can talk about rural communities, or faith communities and their ability to keep themselves vibrant as a result of having families with young children. You can talk about families in this country having the ability to have the number of kids that they want. Because many of them tell us that they're not having more kids for no other reason than that they don't think they can afford or deal with childcare. And that's a problem. So, I think there's a values-based argument to be made, actually. My next book is coming out this spring. And this is a lot of the case that I'm making is we gotta start from a place of values, and the very broad idea of how we position childcare in society.And then, we need to go out and we need to draw down a good couple hundred billion dollars a year of public money to make the whole thing work. It will never work without it. There's a journalist, Annie Laurie, and she has this line that quote all the time and I say that I wish that every politician had it emblazoned somewhere in their office, which is, “The math does not work when it comes to childcare. The math will never work.” And no country has ever made it work, without a large investment from the government. And so, we can nibble around the edges, and we can try to quote, unquote, innovate, and we can try to find ways. And then, sure, there are little things we can do on the margins. But fundamentally, if you want a functional childcare system in this country that works for families, and works for children, that works for the educators, and it ultimately works for communities, and the economy, and society at large, it has to start with robust, permanent, dedicated amounts of public funding. And we've never done anything like that in this country without first deciding, as a nation, that it is a value that we hold.JILL ANDERSON: Well, I hope I get to see this happen. Because it feels like the value piece is a challenge, given the current climate in our country, where we're not able to come to some kind of consensus on a lot of things.ELLIOT HASPEL: I am more hopeful. I think this is a place where I think we could come together. Everyone In this country with a family needs care. And they know it on some level. And so, if we can help them see themselves in and everyone relies on somebody who needs care. It's like the healthcare debates. Everyone's going to need it, at some point, even if you think you're invincible, 20-years-old and healthy. You're going to need it, or you're going to need somebody who needs it. And so how do we think about it?The last thing about that. You do see different education systems in different states, but even the most conservative state in the country isn't trying to say that there shouldn't be schools. One of the states with the best rated pre-K systems is Alabama. If we're able to step away from the culture war, it scrambles the partisanship. If we get stuck in the culture war, then, yes, it is going to be very partisan, and is going to be very polarized, and it's going to be very hard to make progress.JILL ANDERSON: Elliot Haspel is a senior fellow with the family policy think tank Capita. He's the author of “Crawling Behind, America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It” and also the forthcoming “Raising a Nation:10 Reasons Every American has a Stake in Childcare for All.” I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening. EdCast An education podcast that keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and communities Explore All Articles Related Articles News Navigator Tool Announced By Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative The new tool will help policymakers and leaders improve early education through shared strategies and innovations Education Now Hope and Resilience in Childhood A discussion of concrete ways to support children and adults in developing their capacities to weather the challenges brought on by the pandemic. Ed. 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