It’s Time to Fund Childcare as a Public Good
By Michelle Wu
The first free, publicly-funded elementary school in America opened in 1639 with six students, funded through a levy on cattle grazing in what would later become the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Today the Mather School serves more than 600 Boston Public Schools students, reflecting our city’s racial and ethnic diversity with regular multilingual programming in Spanish, Vietnamese, and Cape Verdean Creole. But nearly four centuries after this first commitment to public education as a public good, families of our youngest learners in Boston and across the country are still struggling to fill in the gap without a public option for early education and childcare.
The devastation of COVID-19 has revealed the invisible costs borne by so many in our failed status quo: underpaid workers who are in fact essential to everyone’s health and well-being; schools supporting so many community needs that families have been pushed to the limit without in-person learning; the burden falling on moms and caregivers pushed out of the workforce without supports.
Now is the moment for transformative federal action not just to stabilize our families and care providers, but to reimagine what’s possible for our communities and economy.
President Biden has proposed a $40 billion relief package to stabilize childcare centers, offset the additional costs of operating during the pandemic, and expand federally subsidized slots for low-income families. These are critical investments, but to build a truly resilient recovery, we must remove barriers for all families to access childcare, a prospect that voters overwhelmingly support.
We can’t afford merely to stabilize and return to what was already a broken system. In Massachusetts, the average cost of childcare is nearly $21,000 per year, more than the average mortgage or tuition at a state university. Low-income families qualifying for federally subsidized slots join a waiting list of 26,000 families across the state. And for parents working non-traditional hours, families experiencing homelessness, or living in childcare deserts, early education can be entirely out of reach. Four out of five Boston families are paying an unsustainable proportion of their income to childcare, unable to save for and having to delay home ownership or higher education, or pushed out of the workforce entirely during critical years to advance their career.
The crisis is just as deep for our early education and care workforce—mostly women of color who can barely make ends meet on an average salary of less than $25,000 per year, roughly one-third of an elementary school teacher’s earnings. Without sustainable career pathways for providers to support their own children and families, high staff turnover drives costs, instability, and the racial wealth gap.
Most of all, our children lose out on the most important days and months of their development when the gaps in our childcare system create exhausting, expensive barriers for families across every community in our city. To prepare our students for success in our public schools and to stabilize families and workforce, we must invest in universal access.
As a country, we have taken on this scale of investment before. In 1940, to empower full mobilization of the workforce during WWII, Congress passed the Lanham Act—paying for high-quality, affordable childcare in communities contributing to defense production. For a brief moment in history, the United States implemented this publicly funded option for early education and childcare, eventually serving families in every state except New Mexico. The program ended in 1946.
In the decades since then, working parents have had to fight through a near-impossible juggle until kids are old enough for public school. Both of my kids took their first steps in Boston City Hall. In 2014, I became the first sitting City Councilor to have a baby, and my second son was born while I served as Council President. For several years we commuted to work together with a double stroller by bus and subway, dropping off the little guys at the childcare center for municipal employees on the 4th floor of City Hall, before running to the Council offices on the 5th floor. Even with the benefit of on-site childcare, these years were a blur of diapers, snacks, and stress.
I’m determined to close these gaps for families in Boston, with the urgency of a mother. This week my mayoral campaign released a plan for Universal Pre-K and quality, affordable early education and care for infants and toddlers. Our plan will harness the full power of city government across all departments to make Boston the most family-friendly city in the country. We will streamline enrollment and outreach for families, develop sustainable career pathways for care providers, and expand geographic access and on-site childcare at workplaces as commercial office buildings see vacancies from continued remote work.
At the state level, legislators have introduced groundbreaking legislation in partnership with the Common Start Coalition to phase in a cap on the costs of early education and care at 7% of household income in Massachusetts and invest in our early education and care workforce. We need federal investment to urgently expand the possibilities to every family.
Now is the moment to move beyond one-time tax credits and regulatory tweaks––we’re ready to make history once again in investing in our shared future by making early education and care a public good, accessible to all.
Michelle Wu (@WuTrain) is a member of the Boston City Council and a candidate for Mayor of Boston.