Photo: Alessandra Hartkopf for Strategies for Children

 
The headline of a new Boston Globe article asks an important question: “Parents pay a small fortune for child care. So why are so many providers struggling?”

This is a problem that needs smart public policy solutions.

Even before the pandemic, early education and care programs struggled. As the Globe explains in its extensive article:

“It’s never easy to achieve financial stability in the early childhood field — particularly for caregivers who don’t own or run programs. Well before the pandemic, a national survey found that the families of nearly half of child-care workers received public assistance. Nationally, preschool teachers working in community-based programs earn only about half as much as similarly qualified teachers in public schools. In Massachusetts, the median preschool teacher salary across settings was just $38,563 in 2020, according to federal data.”

“The cause is simple: lack of government funding.”

Once the pandemic hit, early childhood programs had to shut down. This was a harsh blow for people like Roxana Contreras who is featured in the article:

“…in the early spring of 2020, her business in shambles and bills to pay, she decided that she had no choice but to sell her house. The building was also the site of Contreras’s business: a small in-home child-care program called Gummy Bears that she had painstakingly nurtured for 14 years. ‘I was so worried,’ Contreras recalls, ‘we were running out of money . . . and there were no kids.’ ”

Contreras’ story is part of a much longer history.

“Unlike most developed nations,” the Globe says, “America has never treated care of its youngest children as a public good worthy of significant public investment, especially in relation to K-12 public education. That’s to the detriment of children, their families, and the hundreds of thousands of (mostly) women who work in the field.”

“The average European Union country spends $4,700 per child from infancy to age 5 — a number that climbs to $7,400 in France — compared with just $2,400 in the United States, according to a new US Department of the Treasury report.”

Now during the pandemic, women have left the workforce, and early education and care programs are closing.

Fortunately, there are policy solutions.

Federal Covid relief funds have helped programs in Massachusetts, and advocates hope the state will extend temporary grants into permanent funding solutions.

On the state level, Massachusetts’ Common Start bill “would increase pay for early education teachers, including home-based programs, and cut costs for families, [it] has momentum in the Legislature, with 126 lawmakers signing on as co-sponsors.”

And on the federal level, President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would invest hundreds of billions of dollars in child care.

“In the meantime,” the Globe says, “the financial peril persists for many of the state’s child-care providers.”

Please share the Globe story with your networks and your elected officials. It’s a thorough summary of the early education and care challenges that the country faces.

The pandemic has been a global disaster, but it has also shown how the country can invest in being stronger than it ever has been.