Jandos Rothstein
Access to affordable child care and early learning is an urgent practical concern to millions of American families. Voter support for investing public resources in the education and care of young children routinely polls at 70 percent or higher, cutting across ideological and partisan lines. And popular sentiment is backed by science; there is abundant evidence that providing high-quality care early in life pays large dividends for society as a whole.
Nonetheless, for more than 40 years the issue languished in the political wilderness. Since the Nixon administration spiked the creation of a national child care system in 1971, indicative of the lost possibilities of that ill-starred decade, Washington has accomplished very little to remedy what has become a broken system. The Child Care and Development Block Grant provides vouchers to low-income parents, but only 1 in 6 eligible families get it. Programs like Head Start and TANF also subsidize care, but this patchwork fails to address the dearth of affordable care across America, the scandalously underpaid labor force doing critical work, and the severe stresses this causes, only magnified by the pandemic.
If Social Security was the third rail of American politics, then child care was a sleepy branch line, receiving little attention from candidates and only fitful notice from policymakers. Even in the progressive community, the conventional wisdom was that child care was a worthy cause but one that few voters really cared about, a second-tier issue at best.
Rather suddenly, the wheel has turned. Universal child care legislation is getting traction in Congress. Governors and presidential candidates have made it a major theme in their campaigns. Media attention has exploded, and recent polling suggests that voters not only favor public action but view it as a political priority. Even the Trump family has joined the debate, offering proposals with little substance but which are symptomatic of the new climate. Child care, in short, has moved from branch status to the main line.
The story of how this transformation occurred is worth unraveling. It tells us something about how issues acquire salience and momentum in the current political environment. It speaks to the role of community organizing in creating effective constituencies for change. And it illuminates the opportunity to make family care a defining issue in the coming era, as voters feel growing apprehension about the intensifying stresses on American families, the lack of progress on racial and gender equality, and the future of care in a market-driven economy.
From Stepchild to Poster Child
Five years ago, our organization, Community Change, convened a cohort of organizers and asked what it would take to fix those flaws and create a genuinely comprehensive and equitable early-learning and child care system. No one doubted that it would be a heavy lift.
Despite the high social value placed on caring for young children, many Americans view care as a private responsibility rather than a public good. Resistance to government spending on child care is amplified by sentiment among many white Americans that these are “other people’s children,” and the low earnings of early educators and child care providers are clearly tied to the gender, race, and class composition of the workforce. Unlike health care, there is little waste or profit that can be wrung out of the child care sector to pay for improvements in access, quality, and compensation, meaning that the cost will be borne by the larger public.
But the biggest challenge organizers identified was the absence of a broad-based constituency that could mobilize the public will. The fragmentation of child care providers, not just between public and private or in-home and center-based care but including informal and uncompensated caregivers, often creates competition for limited resources rather than expanding the pie. And the different perspectives of advocates for children, parents, and providers made it difficult to engage the larger community.
But these organizers were also hearing a torrent of concerns about child care from their members. The problem of affordability and access was reaching a crisis in communities across class lines. Related family care policies like paid family leave and earned sick time were also getting traction, and the Fight for $15 was generating a national debate about the exploitation of low-wage workers. Even in some deep-red cities and states, bipartisan coalitions were mobilizing a broad range of civic elites to expand preschool and early learning. The seeds of a national child care movement were discernible, but they had to be cultivated in order to grow.
That cultivation began in earnest in 2015, when community organizations in New Mexico, Minnesota, California, Michigan, and other states launched new efforts to engage those most directly affected by the child care crisis. These local projects were supported by a growing network of national organizations, including grassroots parent groups like MomsRising and ParentsTogether; unions like SEIU and the American Federation of Teachers; policy centers like the National Women’s Law Center and the Center for American Progress; and organizing hubs like Community Change. In response to agitation, early-childhood funders that had historically focused on research and demonstration projects began to provide some grants for base-building and community-organizing strategies.
Most Americans agree, in principle, that the government should invest more resources in families, and give peace of mind to those who need care.
The local campaigns aimed at a variety of goals: expanded pre-K programs, more child care subsidies for low-income families, higher wages and benefits for early educators, and new sources of revenue for early learning and care. These ideas had been discussed in policy circles for decades. But this time, the choices were being framed not just by civic elites and professional advocates, but by leaders from directly affected constituencies, primarily women of color. For these emerging leaders, debates over policy design—sources of revenue, allocation of subsidies, the definition of “quality care”—were not wonky technical disputes but fights about values, tests of whether government was truly committed to helping their struggling families and advancing gender and racial equality.
Political leaders took notice. In the 2016 presidential primaries, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders embraced universal child care programs. Although neither lifted it to a major theme, it was the most explicit advocacy by presidential candidates in many years. Early in 2017, community organizations made a concerted push to increase funding for child care in state budgets. Running bare-bones campaigns in a challenging fiscal environment, they won budget increases in a half-dozen states with support from both Democratic and Republican leaders.
These gains, tenuous as they were, encouraged local organizations and their national partners to launch new state and municipal policy campaigns, and to increase the presence and visibility of grassroots leaders at the national level. Those efforts have borne fruit. Over the past two years, the child care issue has gotten political traction through a number of pathways.
In 2018, Congress doubled discretionary funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant, the largest increase in the history of the program. With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the White House, Democrats had few cards to play in budget negotiations, but they chose to make child care a priority at the urging of Sanders, Patty Murray, Elizabeth Warren, and other progressive senators.
The same year, gubernatorial candidates from a disparate set of states—including Gavin Newsom (CA), Michelle Lujan Grisham (NM), Stacey Abrams (GA), Tim Walz (MN), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), and J.B. Pritzker (IL)—made early care and learning a major theme in their campaigns. After the election, this continued to be a political priority. A study by the Center for American Progress showed that nearly two-thirds of the nation’s governors were proposing increases in funding for early care and education in their 2019 budgets.
The seeds of a national child care movement were discernible, but they had to be cultivated in order to grow.
California led the way this year, allocating more than $600 million in new funding for child care and early-learning programs. New Mexico raised the eligibility ceiling for child care subsidies; Illinois raised wages for 14,000 child care providers; and Oregon and Washington created high-level task forces to find solutions to the child care crisis. Even the deep-red Ohio legislature coughed up $10 million to fund wage incentives and other measures to enhance the quality of early-childhood education.
As Marcia Brown has noted in this issue, our affiliated grassroots organizations OLÉ in New Mexico and SPACES in Action in D.C. have won emergency COVID-related funding for child care. Parent Voices Action, another partner, was the driving force behind a successful ballot measure in Alameda County, California, generating $150 million each year that will increase access to child care, raise wages for providers, and fund Northern California’s only level-one pediatric trauma center. More than 6 out of 10 voters chose to raise their taxes so East Bay kids can get the best start possible.
Arguably the highlight of the past year was the attention given in the presidential campaign to an advanced solution, a universal child care proposal. Elizabeth Warren’s rollout was striking not only for the ambitious substance of the plan, but because she was candid about the $70 billion annual price tag, tied directly to her signature tax on wealth, and explicitly framed as a critical tool for gender and racial justice. She would tell crowds that, with revenue from the wealth tax, “we can provide universal child care for every baby in this country and raise the wages of every child care worker and preschool teacher in America.” Other presidential candidates, like Sanders, echoed Warren’s call for a universal program, and most recently, Democratic nominee Joe Biden has made greater investment in early learning and care a pillar of his Build Back Better agenda. Child care is now a central element of the progressive agenda.
Taking Stock
Creating a universal entitlement on child care, and even expanding it to a full family care agenda where paid family leave and long-term elder care are combined in a social-insurance program, may seem like a long shot in the next few years. But a post-2020 Congress could make a significant down payment through the existing patchwork of programs, by increasing access to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, by joining the community of nations in mandating paid leave, and by using health care programs to benefit access to and compensation for long-term care. That would improve the lives of millions of Americans, and lay the foundation for a comprehensive solution to the care crisis.
What lessons can we take from the journey on child care to apply to family care?
First, organizing can transform a social problem into a political issue. Child care has been a perpetual topic of research and analysis, but it only became a focus of public debate when a broad-based constituency pushed it to the fore. The women’s movement and welfare rights movement provided much of that base during their heydays in the late ’60s and ’70s. Now a new movement is emerging, spearheaded by women of color, rooted in Black, Brown, immigrant, low-income, and faith communities. The rise of this “mother’s movement” did not occur spontaneously. It is the product of decisions by community leaders, organizers, national institutions, and funders who committed time and resources to the hard labor of base-building.
While an energized constituency is essential to change, it is not sufficient. Major advances in public policy don’t happen without the support of voters and elected officials. Child care, and family care in general, was ripe for that coalition-building, because it speaks to both mainstream “persuadable” voters and to constituencies at the heart of the progressive base. The issue is not highly polarized like health care or immigration; most Americans agree, in principle, that the government should invest more resources in families, and give peace of mind to those who need care. In addition, for many women, especially women of color, our failure to help those struggling with care needs or provide living wages to caregivers is not just callous and foolish, but emblematic of a system that devalues their work and their lives.
Political leaders who have embraced early care and learning—Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Patty Murray, Stacey Abrams, Gavin Newsom—recognize that support for child care spans the divide between universalistic economics and identity-based politics that is a recurring fracture point in the Democratic coalition. Like child care in isolation, family care is an issue that can unite the base and serve as a stepping stone to an electoral majority.
We shouldn’t underestimate the challenges of converting political momentum into substantive change. Family care is a complex ecosystem that doesn’t compress readily into sound bites. The optimal policy solutions—an integrated, universal program with sliding-scale contributions, a wage floor and training ladder for providers, local management with national standards—are difficult to express in a succinct way. The new coalition must make room for and build a coherent narrative out of all of the disparate benefits of family care: educational development, improved health outcomes, job growth, racial and gender justice.
Finally, as policy proposals become more concrete and the price tag comes into focus, opposition will crystallize, as it did with Nixon in 1971. Among progressives, there is likely to be sentiment—some is already surfacing—that scarce resources and scarce political capital should be spent on other priorities like health care or climate change.
The danger is that leaders will respond to this resistance by retreating to an incremental posture, tinkering at the edges of the system while adding small bits of cash to the pot. It’s the wrong move from both a policy and political standpoint. This is the moment to go big, not small. It will take a powerful social movement to overcome the compound of structural racism, sexism, and privatism that is the root of our family care crisis. Only a generous vision of change—a narrative of hope and aspiration anchored in shared values—can inspire people to join such a movement. And only an ample investment in organizing and political mobilization can sustain it over the long haul.
This type of transformative, bold vision is only possible when we organize and work together, just like when we won better wages, safer workplaces, and civil rights. This is how we passed the Social Security Act in 1935—with a social movement powering it via “Townsend clubs,” through millions of people signing petitions in the pre-internet age and organizing to demand a response from the political system. Over the last few years, women—providers, early-childhood educators, and mothers—have fought across the nation for a new child care system that could become the heart of the Third Reconstruction in America. The family care coalition mirrors that movement in terms of race and gender. Led by women of color, this is an intersectional social movement in action—with real, tangible wins beneath its wings and a bold vision for the future.
Family care is more than an issue of deep practical concern to millions of Americans; it is a point of entry for debate about some of the most fundamental questions we face as a society. Why is care so devalued in our economy? What is the line between private responsibility and public good? What do we owe to every child as a birthright, and to everyone for dignity in their working lives and their final years? What will it take—and how long can we wait—to achieve genuine equality? The emergence of family care as a salient political issue reflects the growing urgency of these questions, a collective recognition that they can no longer be deferred but need to be addressed head-on. We hold the high ground right now. It would be a historic mistake to abandon that opportunity for another generation.
