Amy O’Leary

Last month, early education was the star of Public Hearing, a podcast that streams online and airs on WICN, the public radio station in Worcester, Mass. The podcast’s theme is talking “about imagining and materializing equitable and just systems for cities and communities.”

The podcast put early education in the spotlight in the first of its mini-seasons – in this case five podcast episodes — featuring early childhood advocates.

During the first episode, podcast host Joshua Croke interviewed Kim Davenport, the Managing Director for Birth to 3rd Grade Alignment at Edward Street, a Worcester nonprofit that promotes early childhood success.

“I really do believe that the future lies in each child, and reaching their full potential is my mission,” Davenport said, opening a conversation that covered a range of topics, including young children’s brain development, the importance of nurturing relationships, the challenges that existed before the pandemic, and the impact of the pandemic, which has made it tough to identify and meet young children’s needs, such as behavioral concerns and delays in speech skills.

“We have a chronically underpaid workforce… the pay is poverty-level wages in many cases,” Davenport says, calling this situation “unconscionable.”

The second episode features Amy O’Leary, executive director of Strategies for Children.

O’Leary recalled her days working as a preschool teacher and, later, as preschool director.

“And now as an advocate, it’s really important to me that we highlight the voice of people who are doing this work every day,” O’Leary says. 

One question, Croke, the podcast host, asks is: “Why is it so difficult to get traction and investment for early education?”

“We as a society have really believed that caring for young children is typically a family responsibility,” O’Leary says, adding, “We have made a collective agreement that when children start kindergarten, we all should support and invest in that. We often hear that public school is free and we know that’s not true, that we all are paying for it. But when we look toward earlier ages, the legacy of parents trying to figure it out on their own is very strong.”

O’Leary says that when brain science revealed how much activity goes on in young children’s brains, there was an opportunity to rethink how early education is funded. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. And now policy solutions lag behind the needs that children and families have.

Finally, because of the pandemic, early childhood education is being, as O’Leary says, “seen.”

“We saw babies joining Zoom calls for work. We saw mostly mothers having on blazers while they had their pajama pants on underneath with the babies sitting next to them in a highchair.”

Income didn’t matter. Suddenly it was clear how much working parents from all backgrounds relied on child care. And parents grew more concerned about opportunities for their children to participate in socialization.

What needs to change?

The funding model, O’Leary says: the mix of parent fees and public subsidies that has been broken since it began and results in abysmally low salaries. Policymakers need to understand the costs of high-quality child care and commit to funding them, including higher salaries. This is particularly important as an equity issue because so many early educators and providers are women of color.

“We want to start thinking about this a public good,” O’Leary says of programs that keep young children safe, providing them with long-term benefits such as being more likely to be employed, and helping employers who want to hire young children’s parents.

Early education needs to be seen as infrastructure, and it needs the same public support and financial investment as, for example, the T, the Boston area’s public transportation system. 

As the pandemic progresses, Massachusetts and the country have to commit to revolutionizing early education and care.

“We can’t go back to the way things were before,” O’Leary says.

Please check out the podcast. It’s available wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to the podcast’s webpage.