B.A. Van Sise/NurPhoto via AP
Students return for their first day of in-class schooling following the pandemic at New York City’s Preschool of the Arts, September 15, 2020.
On November 3, Multnomah County, Oregon, voters decisively approved the creation of a free, year-round, full-day universal preschool program that will be available to all three- and four-year-olds in the county within ten years. The program offers a wide range of choices for families and will pay living wages to all classroom staff, including teaching assistants. Funded by a tax on high-income households, the program will serve children who have not traditionally had access to preschool opportunities, who will get first dibs for spaces in the new schools. The program promotes the recruitment of preschool providers who are Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.
Boosted by an 81 percent turnout—most registered voters in the county live in the city of Portland—the proposal passed by 64 percent to 36 percent. The landmark measure, the result of a compromise proposal between two local campaigns that had independently worked for years on the issue, promises to set a national standard for quality preschool education and care.
Nationwide, parents, providers, and family policy advocates are well aware of the crisis in child care, and in Oregon that crisis is acute: Oregon is among the ten least-affordable states in the country for child care. However, the pandemic demonstrated that child care is an essential industry, and, like K-12 education, is an important service that the private sector cannot adequately provide. Child care providers operate on such slim margins that nearly half are at risk of permanent closure due to COVID-19, given the high cost of operating a safe program for many fewer children while the coronavirus rages.
Multnomah County appears poised to be the first universal program in the country to offer a wide range of options for families, including a choice of language, schedules, and settings. Programs may focus on an individual linguistic group or culture, but must be open to all. Oregon’s tiny Preschool Promise program is currently offered in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Burmese in Multnomah County, and local family child care providers are already organized in language and cultural networks, including an African American group, as well as five language groups: Spanish, Somali, Slavic, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Multigenerational classrooms designed to include parents or other relatives will also be available.
Home-based providers, child care centers, and public schools may all participate. Schedule options will include both school year and full year, part-time and full-time, up to five days a week, including weekend days. All children will be able to attend for up to six hours a day, and families in the lower half of the income spectrum will have the option of up to ten hours a day of care.
Multnomah County’s universal preschool program will also be the first to pay all classroom staff wages high enough to stop the continuous loss of skilled child care workers. Nationally, four of five employed people with college degrees in early-childhood education are working in other occupations; most leave the field by the age of 30, according to labor economist Catherine Weinberger, an independent researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Assistant teachers and aides will earn at least 135 percent of the local minimum wage, or $19.91 an hour, when the program launches in the fall of 2022. Child care workers in Oregon were paid a median wage of $12.46 an hour in 2019. Under the new program, Oregon preschool teachers’ annual salaries will be more in line with local kindergarten teachers’, which averaged $74,700 in 2019, well more than double that of preschool teachers, which averaged $32,430. Classroom staff and providers will have free professional development, including on-site coaching; their pay will increase with skill, experience, and education; and all staff and providers will have access to union representation.
Financing for the program will come from a county income tax levied on the highest-income 8 percent or so of households. It’s a two-tier tax structure that begins at 1.5 percent of income above $125,000 (after deductions) for individuals and $200,000 for couples. The highest rate will be 3.8 percent on incomes (after deductions) over $250,000 for individuals and over $400,000 for couples, starting in 2026, to fund the program’s continued expansion.
Multnomah County’s program wasn’t the only big win for young children this November. Colorado voters also approved a paid family and medical leave program, after the failure of several attempts to pass it in the state legislature. The measure passed comfortably, 53 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed. Colorado joins eight other states and Washington, D.C., with paid leave policies. A 2019 report by the National Partnership for Women and Families has shown that these policies have little to no impact on businesses.
The pandemic demonstrated that child care is an essential industry, and, like K-12 education, is an important service that the private sector cannot adequately provide.
Of the two coalitions supporting a new preschool program for Multnomah County, the more ambitious proposal was put forward by Universal Preschool NOW, a citizens’ initiative led by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. It called for a year-round and universal program, fair wages, and a tax on high-income households. The coalition submitted more than 32,000 signatures to put a measure on the ballot, despite the pandemic and legal challenges by Portland’s largest and most conservative business association.
A more modest effort, led by a local philanthropy and a county commissioner, originally suggested a school-year program for about one-half of the county’s children, a wage floor for two-thirds of classroom staff that would be just 25 cents above the local minimum wage at implementation, with no identified funding source. However, their strong working relationship with several organizations of color led to a ban on expulsions in the final version of the program.
The specter of two preschool measures going head-to-head on the ballot brought about the merger, creating a coalition that included labor, especially teachers and other education unions; Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; civic organizations like the League of Women Voters; and environmental groups.
A high-quality, age-appropriate preschool experience dramatically improves the odds that children will thrive in kindergarten and the critical early years of elementary school. The programs reduce racial disparities and lead to higher high school graduation rates and future incomes. In universal programs, the least-advantaged children gain the most, and more than they do in programs including only children from families with low incomes. Universal programs bring communities together, and enjoy significantly more support than efforts targeted at low-income children, like Head Start, which has been underfunded throughout its 55-year history.
A full-day program is a two-generation anti-poverty program: Not only do children benefit, but in many cases, parents are freed up to pursue additional schooling and better jobs. Universal preschool programs are also a powerful economic development strategy; preeminent regional economist Timothy Bartik estimated a return of $9.45 to state or local economies for each dollar spent on care.
President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on a care agenda that would be a big improvement over the existing care landscape, but doesn’t go far enough. It promises to “ensure access to high-quality, affordable child care and offer universal preschool to three- and four-year-olds through greater investment, expanded tax credits, and sliding-scale subsidies,” but the country would be far better off with a fully funded, cost-effective, free universal program. The Biden plan includes a measure to pay teachers comparably with elementary school teachers, but disregards other classroom staff—often two-thirds in preschools—who earn poverty wages in our schools.
The Biden plan would be a big step forward, but it could look a lot like the Affordable Care Act, with a complicated administrative apparatus that gets us only part of the way to the universal program that American families desperately need. The Multnomah County model offers another way forward and should set the standard in the years ahead for the kind of comprehensive, national preschool and child care programs that American children, families, and communities deserve.
This article was produced in conjunction with the Scholars Strategy Network.
