Building the Child Care Infrastructure of the Future
“We have failed to adequately build and maintain an infrastructure worthy of our future, and the care infrastructure we do have neither adequately delivers quality care at a reasonable cost nor treats those who operate it with justice, equity, and humanity.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has acted as an X-ray revealing the fractures and fragilities of our global and national systems. Here in the United States, the X-ray has revealed an especially depressing image of our broken child care system. According to one estimate, 4.5 million child care places could be permanently lost as a result of the pandemic. This is a classic example of infrastructure that our society takes for granted until it is gone, and right now it is rapidly slipping away.
I am a regular reader of the newsletter Metafoundry, written by the systems engineer Debbie Chachra. In this periodic newsletter, Dr. Chachra makes visible the invisible structures and systems that underpin everything from our connections with the rest of the world (the post office, cell phone signals) to our health (clean water, safe food, sewers). In her work, she helps show us that infrastructure, the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of society, is one way “that we take care of each other at scale.” When our infrastructure fails, it becomes immediately visible. When it works, we don’t pay any attention. I hardly think about the safety of the bridges that pass high above the ravines and gorges of the Blue Ridge Mountains near my home in northwestern North Carolina. But we would all pay dearly--perhaps even with our lives--if one of those bridges were to fail. The investments that we make in infrastructure are not immediately efficient or productive. There is no short-term ROI that we can point to to justify investing in the sometimes massive and expensive systems that support the operation of society. But building, maintaining, and paying for infrastructure is one way in which we exercise responsible citizenship--as a people through our governments for and by us, the people--and care for one another despite the distances and size of our country.
For some beneficiaries, like businesses, child care is an invisible structure that helps ensure that our employees show up for work, much like a road. Yet, as a society, we have chosen, through deliberate economic and political choices, to not bear the costs of this infrastructure together. Parents, with little help from the government or from employers, pay for child care while individual businesses and the economy as a whole reap the benefits. In 35 states the cost of child care is more than an average mortgage. It is nearly impossible for many families who might otherwise choose to have one parent stay home with the kids to do so because even living wages aren’t family-supporting wages. Out-of-home child care thus becomes an economic imperative for our families. Businesses benefit while paying stagnant wages.
The “functioning” of this dysfunctional system depends on the availability of low-wage, mostly women and minority, child care workers. Eighty-six percent of these workers make less than $15 an hour, half of them rely on public assistance, and only 15% receive employer-sponsored health care.
“To begin building a different future for our child care workforce, we must start by paying them—the people who maintain this critical infrastructure that helps families get to work and build the brains that are the foundation for our future—a living wage. ”
In short, we have failed to adequately build and maintain an infrastructure worthy of our future, and the care infrastructure we do have neither adequately delivers quality care at a reasonable cost nor treats those who operate it with justice, equity, and humanity. It is time to do something about it.
We recently joined our colleagues at the Bank Street College of Education to convene a high-level roundtable discussion about one place to begin building the child care-human capital infrastructure of the future: compensation. To begin building a different future for our child care workforce, we must start by paying them--the people who maintain this critical infrastructure that helps families get to work and build the brains that are the foundation for our future--a living wage.
A living wage affirms the dignity of this work and the people who do it. This is the place to start. However, raising wages is not possible through parent fees alone. We must have a massive investment of public funds to build a child care system worthy of our future.
Recently I heard a story about a business in Ohio that built airplanes during the Second World War. This was work of critical national importance. The company, of course, had a contract from the federal government to build a particular quota of planes before the Nazi and Japanese militaries could attack the homeland. This task required employees to work hard and long hours throughout 1942. In exchange, the company provided on-site health care, free meals, and even massage therapists to tend to sore muscles. As a country, we recognized that these plane builders were doing their duty, but that they were also deserving of benefits that signaled the valuable contribution they were making to build the tools by which we would win the war. Our child care workforce is making an equally important contribution to the economy of today and to educating the children who will secure our future. They are, at the very least, deserving of a wage that does not leave them dependent upon food stamps.
The task of building an infrastructure to support families in caring for their children is no different than building airports, roads, and bridges and paying the people who build them fairly and from the public purse. These are long-term investments and the reward will not be immediately visible, but our failure to invest in this infrastructure is now made obvious by Covid-19. Our economy and our people are weaker because of it. The future can be different.
“The task of building an infrastructure to support families in caring for their children is no different than building airports, roads, and bridges and paying the people who build them fairly and from the public purse.”
This week, our colleagues at Bank Street published a new brief that provides a roadmap for equitably compensating the early care and education workforce. From this roadmap, the next administration can cull meaningful, actionable insights to begin building the child care-human capital infrastructure that our future needs.