Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

COVID-19 has exposed long-term weaknesses in Massachusetts’ early education and care system – and made them worse, Joan Wasser Gish explains in a new CommonWealth Magazine article, “An early education system for a post-pandemic world.”

“If we are going to restore our economy, now and in the future,” the article says, “it will require a functioning system of affordable, accessible, high quality early education and care.”

Wasser Gish is a member of the Massachusetts Board of Early Education and Care – and a former director of research and policy at Strategies for Children.

Long before COVID-19, she notes, families and early childhood programs have struggled with costs.

“Massachusetts has the second highest cost of child care in the nation, swallowing 39 percent of earnings in a typical Massachusetts family. For parents who work odd or unpredictable hours, or plan around the agrarian school calendar, child care is a decades-long, fraught, expensive patchwork.”

There are public subsidies for child care, largely drawn from federal Child Care Development Block Grant funds, but as Wasser Gish explains, this does not cover “the cost of quality early learning or the coordination of comprehensive supports like food, clothing, diapers, or health and mental services that growing numbers of Massachusetts families need.”

What happens when small nonprofit programs accept subsidized payments that don’t cover all their bills? They have to “fundraise to fill gaps.” And “even for-profit programs that rely exclusively on family fees struggle with operating costs and retaining qualified staff, paying notoriously low wages.”

The Department of Early Education and Care is working hard to address these needs.

It licenses “236,000 early education and after school program slots for the Commonwealth’s children” and “subsidizes access for about 54,000 of the state’s most vulnerable – children who are in the foster care system, homeless, in families receiving temporary financial assistance, and a small number who receive subsidized care based on family income alone.”

However, with its devastating economic impact, “The COVID-19 crisis will swell these ranks with more children experiencing abuse, homelessness, and poverty, making access to high-quality early education and care programs more important, and more difficult.”

In addition, “The sudden and uneven impacts of COVID-19 – layoffs, homeschooling, family stress, disease – are deepening existing inequalities due to poverty and racism, and broadening the number of children experiencing risks.”

“Early education and care programs counter these harms by strengthening families and supporting children’s healthy social and educational development through relationships, learning experiences, resources, and opportunities.”

Now that the pandemic has clarified these challenges, Massachusetts can address them.

“What we need now is a child- and family-centered approach that makes early education and care a part of the social safety net that gets people back to work and increases the resiliency of our current and future workforce,” Wasser Gish writes. “It will take partnership between government, employers, programs, and families; it will take investment in professional development and wages for educators; it will have to combine high quality education with the structures and comprehensive supports necessary for families getting back on their feet, or back into the workplace.”

“Massachusetts can do this. Despite decades of underinvestment, we have many exemplary programs, educators with expertise and dedication to cultivate our next generation, a record of effective high quality pre-kindergarten in some of our highest needs communities, and growing momentum from leaders in the philanthropic, business, and innovation communities.”

Massachusetts can turn today’s challenges into tomorrow’s progress.