Families and Providers Can’t Wait for the Early Care and Education System They Deserve

In an effort to recruit workers, companies are increasingly providing on-site or near-site child care or tuition stipends for employees with children. Such benefits can be enticing to workers given the U.S.’s lack of affordable early care and education (ECE). A new report examines these employer-sponsored child care benefits. The author, Elliot Haspel, cautions against these benefits: “The argument in this report…is not that employees do not need or deserve benefits such as on-site child care programs, but that the benefits currently delivered by employers can be delivered—in a far more effective and fair fashion—by a fully publicly funded system into which employers contribute.” He fears that “today’s stopgap feature becomes tomorrow’s status quo,” as he said in a recent webinar.

It is certainly true that a fully publicly funded ECE system would be much more effective and fair than employee-sponsored child care benefits. But while we push toward that goal we owe it to families to devise strategies to scrape by in the meantime, knowing that we face a gridlocked Congress with a long history of ECE inaction. To understand the tension between ideal and current ECE policy, it is helpful to rewind to early 2022, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was driving ECE to the brink of collapse.

The words “Build Back Better” (BBB) still sting in the ECE advocacy community. They are a reminder of the seismic shift we nearly achieved in the nation’s approach to supporting ECE. Families and advocates were devastated when the Senate failed to pass BBB in early 2022. On a policy level, its failure shut the door on a significant increase in federal funding and resources that families and providers desperately needed. On a human level, it represented lawmakers doubling down on their collective lack of respect for the stress families and providers had endured from inadequate ECE policies. Early childhood educators were deemed “essential” in the throes of the pandemic, yet not so essential when it came to meaningful nationwide policy change.

Since Congress would not use its power to help families and providers in crisis, the Biden administration used the tools at its disposal to issue an executive order directing federal agencies to take steps to make child care more accessible and affordable. The executive order ended up being “the most comprehensive set of executive actions any president has taken to improve the country’s care infrastructure,” as my colleague Aaron Loewenberg put it. Part of the order expanded requirements from the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which provided billions of dollars to semiconductor manufacturers to build plants in the U.S., with the stipulation that manufacturers present a plan for providing child care for their workers through on-site child care or subsidized center- or home-based care. This expansion of the CHIPS Act wasn’t BBB, and it wasn’t the ultimate goal of free, universal, high-quality ECE that every family deserves, but it was something to keep some families and providers afloat.

Now that emergency pandemic funding has expired, ECE is back into full crisis mode, with providers struggling to stay open and families struggling to pay tuition. We should not need employer-sponsored benefits in order to help families through this crisis. Families deserve better, but they cannot wait for an ideal, publicly funded system to emerge. Parents have to go to work tomorrow and leave their babies somewhere safe and nurturing. Providers cannot wait for an ideal system either when they are supplementing their low incomes by doing gig work and giving blood, as Erica Phillips of the National Association for Family Child Care said on a recent webinar. Haspel suggests that we cannot get to the ECE policy ideal and also accept employer-sponsored child care benefits. However, supporting such benefits and advocating for a fully publicly funded ECE system are not mutually exclusive. We can and must keep driving toward the ideal, and we don’t have the privilege of being able to reject anything less than ideal along the way.

It is critical for employer-provided ECE to be high-quality, and there are ways to increase its quality while we continue to push for the ideal public system. Several experts offer guidance and toolkits to employers. They emphasize the importance of employers working to understand their region’s ECE landscape, for instance by conducting a landscape analysis. They recommend that employers offer off-site provider sponsorship to support existing community-based programs and increase local supply across the mixed delivery system. Recommendations highlight partnering with local nonprofits, child care resource and referral agencies, child care providers, and community-based organizations, some of which employers can find through the CHIPS Program Office. Employers who appreciate the expertise of local providers and partner with them (whether on- or off-site) are more likely to provide high-quality, culturally-responsive ECE.

When employers build their own ECE programs, they should open them to the community. New York’s Corning, Inc. supports five child care centers and offers access not only to employees but to other community members. Haspel called this approach imperfect but “a good incremental step.” He noted on a recent webinar that offering access to unaffiliated community members offered “no-strings-attached capacity-building” that avoids job lock and other concerns.

The Biden administration continues to take executive action for stronger nationwide ECE policies, most recently through a new rule for child care subsidies, guidance on supporting access to high-quality preschool, and a Dear Colleague Letter emphasizing the importance of incorporating an array of ECE settings into preschool expansion. These incremental actions can make things easier for families and providers until the U.S. is able to give them the fully publicly funded, high-quality ECE system they deserve.