Dispatches From the Field: Child Care in Crisis

“With K-12 education, while there are plenty of problems and it is highly inequitable, there are a few positive things. It’s accessible to everyone. It’s free for everyone. There’s a slot for everyone and teachers are paid a reasonable wage with benefits. With early childhood, all that’s changed is the age of the kid, yet this system is radically different. It is incredibly hard to access. Navigating it is a huge burden on parents. And the practitioners are paid barely minimum wage.” – Elliot Haspel

Interview with Elliot Haspel

Tell us about the work you do and the path you took to get where you are today.

I work in philanthropy. At the Robins Foundation I oversee our work in early childhood, as well as our statewide advocacy and policy work. With my trajectory to get here, I actually started my career in K-12 education. I was a fourth-grade teacher to begin with and was really focused on educational equity throughout the first half of my career, thinking about why is it that the ZIP code is so deterministic of a child’s odds of graduating college or graduating high school and graduating college.

But after doing that work for quite a while, I started to bang my head up against a wall because it seemed like — despite all the great work and talent and effort that was going on — no one, nowhere was creating systemic change for kids. Some places could beat the odds once in a while, but no one was changing the odds altogether.

I started asking myself, “What’s going on? What else is happening in this milieu that’s causing this to not go the way we want it to?” And that led me down the path of child development research — and early childhood, family supports, and the family ecosystem. I realized that so much of what impacts a child’s trajectory doesn’t happen within the walls of the school. That’s certainly one piece of the puzzle, but so much happens from birth to five years, before and after school, related to family stability or lack thereof. It’s those experiences that really shape the brain and the outcomes of the child. That’s when I transitioned into work around early childhood policy. And when the opportunity to work in philanthropy opened up, I grabbed it because it gave me the ability to still work with the field, but also to think systemically at the local, state, and even national level.

You wrote the book Crawling Behind that came out in 2019 on how to fix the child care crisis in America. What led you to write it and what are some conclusions you came to in the book?

With K-12 education, while there are plenty of problems and it is highly inequitable, there are a few positive things. It’s accessible to everyone. It’s free for everyone. There’s a slot for everyone and teachers are paid a reasonable wage with benefits. With early childhood, all that’s changed is the age of the kid, yet this system is radically different. It is incredibly hard to access. Navigating it is a huge burden on parents. And the practitioners are paid barely minimum wage. I wrote the book because I was trying to answer the question of why we treat ages five through 17 one way and ages zero to five another way?

I found when writing the book that the number one reason for this dichotomy, honestly, is sexism. It’s really hard to pull away from this sense that mothers should be home with young children. If you look at polls, you see this isn’t some antiquated idea that we left back in the 1950s. It’s still very much alive and well today. So if you literally think that you’re going to harm the mothers and harm the children by separating them, then you’d never invest in a public child care system because that would actually incentivize the thing you don’t want.

You’re vocal about the divide in how people view child care programs and school programs, using a frame of “care” versus “education.” Can you speak more about this divide and why you view it as problematic?

Care, generally, in America is devalued. This isn’t unique to child care. We see this with elder care as well, where there’s a sense that families should take care of their own problems, issues, and challenges. Care is seen as a familial responsibility, not a societal one. Somehow, it’s seen as transgressive if we keep society involved — that something’s gone wrong. So that’s where the care frame is. On the other hand, there’s an acknowledgment that when you publicly invest in education, the value is greater. You’re getting an educated populace, able to engage either democratically in your process or be productive economically. Today, you see how even the business community by and large supports childhood education; business leaders talk about how this is skill-building for the workforce of tomorrow.

But it’s actually during the early years that the foundation is developed for everything else to build upon. This is the foundation for executive functioning or for learning how to read or how to do math. It’s happening from birth. But we still don’t treat it like it’s the first length of the education continuum, so we continue to devalue it.

This translates to funding. The US puts an average-to-above-average percentage of our GDP into K-12. We put in the third lowest percent of GDP of all developed nations into early childhood care. The tension is that you could do one of two things: You could just start calling all early childhood programs “education,” but there are downsides to that. The public school system is very standardized and is not historically great at meeting a diverse set of parent needs and preferences. And it is, by nature, academic, and there’s a real question about whether very young kids need that much direct academic instruction or actually need play. But the other option is that you have to convince the country that devalues caregiving for the entirety of its history that it should suddenly start caring about caregivers. That’s a steeper hill to climb. There’s an internal debate within the field today about which position to take.

How did the pandemic affect the child care industry?

The effects of the pandemic occurred in essentially three phases. The first, in March and April of last year, was closure. Most child care programs shut down, with the exception of a handful that remained open to serve the children of essential workers. Centers went from bringing in revenue to bringing in none, but still having to pay rent, mortgages, and electric bills. Phase two started around June and lasted through the winter, when programs started to reopen but with group-size restrictions. Where, before, you could have 20 four-year-olds in a room, centers would be limited to eight. And this crunched the budgets. Without being able to keep your enrollment numbers high enough, you can’t make the budget work.

Now we’ve entered phase three, where 90% of the programs are open again. Group-size restrictions in all but a few states have been removed. We’re basically back to February 2020, but, now, we have a worker shortage. It’s incredibly hard for centers because they don’t have enough child care workers to keep themselves staffed. Demand for child care is starting to rise as the economy opens up but there aren’t enough slots and we’re seeing wait-lists as a result.

All of a sudden, we’re in this crisis because child care programs, unlike a Chipotle or McDonald’s or Walmart, can’t raise wages and just make a little bit less profit. It’s not an option. Parents are tapped out, so you can’t ask them to pay more and there’s nowhere else to go for the money. This is not an issue where there’s a whole lot of “out of the box” solutions, because there’s only one box. And that box is: You have to pay people enough money for them to do the job. You have a median wage of $11.65 an hour, and half of the programs are offering less than that, half don’t provide health benefits and many of those that do, don’t have good health insurance benefits. You become quickly aware that we’re not going to innovate our way out of this one.

Given this crisis, will the child care funding bundled in the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan be an important part of the solution?

The American Rescue Plan provides a bucket-load more money than child care has ever received from the federal government — somewhere around $25 billion — $30 billion a year. The child care development block grant is the single largest source of money and it was raised to around $10 billion a year during the last administration. To end up with nearly $50 billion is truly astounding. I think ultimately the case was made that parents must have child care if they’re going to work.

This was a big win, and it was a long road of advocacy to get there. In the short term, the challenge now is around how the funding from the American Rescue Plan will be used to compensate workers. Over the next couple of years, the funding can be used to offer bonuses or wage increases to attract child care workers. For the longer term, a big question is whether we can we use this money to stabilize the industry, start to innovate, and jumpstart the conversation to where this funding is viewed as a down payment on very large permanent investments.

There has been a spotlight on racial inequities in our country in the past year. Do you think this will translate into greater commitment to equity in education or early child care?

It’s not like racial inequities have gone unrecognized or unmentioned in the past. But I do think we’ve seen a shift to getting those who are most affected actually more involved and sharing power with them as we develop the solutions, not just tokenizing them. An example is a county in Oregon when they worked on a universal pre-K measure. They had a parent council at the core of the effort, made up of a racially diverse group of parents and they vetted everything. They were able to provide critical input around suspension or expulsion of children in preschool that hadn’t been part of the discussion before. They raised issues specific to their concerns: “What hours can I drop off and pick up my kids? Because I’m working a shift and I need to know what will happen if the bus is late.” Those voices need to be at the table and respected as they determine what will and won’t work.

I think there’s also some recognition that the child care workforce is 40%-plus women of color, a high proportion of immigrants, and a large percentage of non-English speakers. These are the women who’ve been basically subsidizing the rest of the system on their backs. This is different than K-12, where a large percentage of the workforce is white.

I wish I could say I’ve seen racial equity be an animating force as to why there’s more attention to child care right now. But the attention this past year was almost purely because of middle-class working parents, and the ability of these parents to do their jobs and for companies to have those employees available to do their work. You’d like to think it’s their better angels, but I think there’s a lot of self-interest. But if that’s what it takes to move the needle, then, okay, that’s what it takes to move the needle.

If you had a superpower of some kind or could wave a magic wand to improve the early child care system, what would you do?

I would make child care a legally guaranteed right for every family. Our child care system is built on a welfare frame. Every generation of federal child care policy is built on this idea of child care as welfare. We don’t really want to give it to you if you’re a parent, but we’ll reluctantly do it. But you have to prove you’re worthy.

And then basically the second we can, we’re going to pull it away from you. And we contrast that with an affirmative system, like the public schools, where everyone has a right to it. And it doesn’t matter who you are — if you’re the poorest American or if you’re Jeff Bezos, if you want to send your kid to the public school for free, you can do it because you have a right to it. And if that right is abrogated, you have legal recourse. The right to public education is in all 50 state constitutions, but the right to early child care education isn’t there. We need to start talking about this as a right—and that’s a really huge philosophical switch. If I could wave a magic wand, I would say we need a constitutional right to child care.

What would you say is philanthropy’s role when it comes to early child care?

I think philanthropy has multiple roles in this space. I think philanthropy over the past few decades has done a good job of investing in local systems-building work so most states have hub organizations at this point. There is also a role for philanthropy of thinking across the movement, for example, thinking about elder care and child care in the same breath. Families manage both kinds of care, neither exists in a vacuum. Philanthropy can spark those coalitional movements as well and lead the charge of thinking about care more broadly.

One area that I want to lift up is for philanthropy to be more engaged in advocacy and organizing efforts. The early childhood space has historically done its advocacy work on extreme breadcrumbs; it’s very hard to raise money to do this work. We don’t have large national unions like in teaching or other industries; our advocacy organizations work on shoestrings. And we know the way our system works, you need a war chest with a distributed model. You have to be able to cut ads, do polling, and organize constituents. And on the 501c4 side of things, you have to talk about donating to candidates and getting engaged in ballot measures. This is the meat and potatoes of making policy change happen.

I think there’s been something of an epiphany in the past 5-10 years and certainly in the past year that it’s necessary to invest in these things. But it’s pushing on the idea of supporting advocacy and organizing in an unrestricted way. It’s saying we’re going to trust you and the capacity of these organizations to do this—particularly the organizing groups that work with parents and practitioners — those who are closest to the problem, or historically disenfranchised. Historically philanthropy has liked to put barriers between us but we’re starting to see those walls come down to some extent.

What are some priorities for the child care field going forward?

This work will take a long time. Everything we’re talking about will require significant revenue, and new revenue. We have to discuss things like taxes that no one wants to talk about. It’s not going to happen overnight. So I think we need to have a decade-long view on this. By 2030, where do we want to be? What’s going to happen now to set us up for success? How are we going to take advantage of the right opportunities?

What advice would you give parents who had their children home in the past year and are still navigating a return to child care in the fall?

I think the biggest piece of advice for parents is just to consider now what they’ll need in the fall, or whenever they’re heading back to work and to not delay their planning. Staffing shortages will get a lot worse before they get better and slots will be even more scarce. But almost all of them are back and they’re being incredibly smart around COVID. It’s one of the places where child care really shines. Someone I know suggested that if you want to find people who are really good at doing health and safety protocols, bring in the child care teachers!