Last month, the House passed the Build Back Better bill, which includes $380 billion in funding for early education and care, the largest amount for that purpose in U.S. history. If the bill can pass the Senate with that funding intact, child care — a household expense that in some cities can surpass the cost of rent — could become affordable for the majority of American families.
But as written, the bill might include policy blind spots that could result in mass child-care center closures in disadvantaged communities. That’s because, in its current version, states will have flexibility in how to enact these provisions. And cherry-picking could have disastrous consequences.
I have spent the past five years studying how parents access child care, and what happens when they cannot. Part of this study has involved mapping changes over time in the number of child-care centers across Boston communities by racial and socioeconomic makeup. In forthcoming research, I describe how Boston Public Schools’ expansion of prekindergarten offerings in the early 2000s and 2010s led private child-care centers to close in the city’s majority-Black and lower- and middle-income communities.
50 states of care
The United States does not have a federal child-care system. As with other social welfare services, funding for child care is shared among federal, state and sometimes local governments. Rules and regulations vary, too. The federal government issues mandates, but states have a great deal of discretion over regulations and enforcement.
Build Back Better includes this kind of state discretion. The bill splits funding for early education and care into two categories. One creates a system of free prekindergarten classrooms for 3- and 4-year-olds. Another directly subsidizes child care for children younger than 6 and helps fund child-care providers.
As written, states will have flexibility in opting in to or out of these provisions, whether accepting or forgoing the funding entirely or for a particular program. For instance, a state could choose the funding for universal pre-K but skip accepting funding to subsidize child care. In fact, that’s quite possible. Most Americans now support public investment in prekindergarten, but they are warier about child care.
Why? Long-standing cultural ideals about motherhood, or more accurately White motherhood, have historically prevented large-scale investments into infant and toddler care. As recently as 2016, 59 percent of Americans said children were better off with a parent in the home.
Policymakers may well reflect their constituents’ opinions. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), for example, recently stated that he was “all in” for universal pre-K. But he has expressed less enthusiasm for child-care subsidies and paid family leave, the two policies that would arguably do most for working parents.
How the Boston school system unwittingly undercut child-care centers
Child-care providers operate on tight budgets. They rely on larger preschool classrooms to offset the costs of labor-intensive and more costly toddler and infant rooms.
In infant rooms, Massachusetts state regulations require two staff members to oversee no more than seven babies. Because of these ratios, most providers cannot charge the true cost of paying the overhead and staffing costs for these age groups, which Boston providers estimated to be up to $3,000 a month. To make up for this, the child-care providers I interviewed artificially reduced tuition for infants and toddlers and made it up in their slightly more lucrative preschool classrooms, where two staff members could oversee 20 children.
But in 2005, Boston Public Schools began expanding prekindergarten programs. Preschoolers left child-care centers for public schools. Unable to subsidize their infant and toddler rooms any longer, many centers closed. But those closures were concentrated among publicly subsidized providers, those that accepted state-issued vouchers as payment from low-wage working parents.
The unequal closures can be traced back to chronic underfunding for the public child-care system. Across the country, reimbursement rates — the amount that the state pays the provider — fall significantly below market rate, what providers charge parents. As of 2020, reimbursement for four weeks of center-based infant care in Boston was $1,545, about half of what providers told me they needed. Even before the schools’ pre-K expansion, these centers were financially vulnerable.
When preschoolers started moving into the public school system, many subsidized providers could no longer afford to operate. And because subsidized centers are most likely to be located in non-White, non-wealthy communities, Boston’s child-care centers have closed disproportionately in racially and socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. My analyses reveal that by 2019, majority-Black communities in Boston had on average fewer than half the child-care centers they had in 2005.
Why haven’t U.S. mothers returned to work? The child-care infrastructure they need is still missing.
What does this mean for the future of U.S. child care?
If Build Back Better’s pre-K and child-care provisions are enacted, two possible futures lie ahead. In one, working families may have widespread access to affordable, high-quality and well-regulated care.
This future would offer significant benefits. Child development researchers have spent years showing that stable and high-quality care can contribute to a child’s brain development and social and behavioral skills, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Such care would also support mothers, for whom inaccessible and unaffordable child care can mean unemployment or underemployment and a higher lifelong risk of poverty. Even those without children are likely to benefit. Child-care costs prevent many families from purchasing homes and having more children, major life decisions that reduce economic growth. Child care is an investment in our economic future, too. Children who attend high-quality early-learning environments tend to have better health outcomes and are more likely to graduate from high school, to be employed and to have stable marriages — household conditions that support intergenerational well-being.
But that future would come only if the Senate — and, subsequently, the states — adopt both universal prekindergarten and affordable child care, the whole $380 billion package.
Boston’s history, a story that is unfolding in other cities as well, shows that if not, another possible future awaits. In states that accept pre-K support but not infant- and toddler-care funding, a program intended to reduce inequality for families with young children — and specifically mothers, who handled most child care even before the coronavirus pandemic left them disproportionately unable to work — could do the opposite.
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Jennifer Bouek is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Delaware.