From The 74: After Years of Small Fixes, Big Ideas for Childcare Are Emerging

For decades, teachers, leaders and supporters of early care and education have been trying to make do with a broken system, advocating for a little extra funding here, proposing a program improvement there and settling for stopgap solutions in the absence of broad federal investment.

It hasn’t worked. Despite incremental progress over the years, many children still lack access to high-quality early care and education, while families face prohibitively high costs for the care that is available and educators endure poor working conditions.  

Increasingly, these groups are saying enough is enough. Rather than continuing to patch holes in a crumbling system that only serves a fraction of families, many advocates are calling for a complete overhaul.

Already, some bold new visions have begun to emerge.

One such idea comes from Project 2029, a policy initiative intended to provide a forward-looking, Democratic counterweight to Project 2025, the conservative agenda that has guided much of the Trump administration’s decisions during this term, including recent efforts to dramatically weaken Head Start.

Project 2029’s childcare proposal, called the Child Care Choice Guarantee, lays out an ambitious plan for a free, universal childcare system. It is intended to recognize that families don’t all want the same thing, and that care preferences change over time. The childcare arrangement a family wants when their child is an infant often differs from what they want when that child is 3 years old.

The proposal, as its name suggests, is designed to offer families flexibility.

A family can choose to take advantage of a free, publicly funded childcare slot across a range of high-quality options, including community-based centers, schools, Head Start programs, faith-based settings and family childcare providers. Or they can choose a “CareCredit,” a financial stipend of $1,000 per month that can be used to compensate a stay-at-home parent or other trusted caregiver such as a grandparent, nanny or neighbor. The childcare slot would not be income limited. The CareCredit would be available to families earning less than $400,000.

Families with a parent who works part-time can choose a hybrid option with a part-time childcare slot and a partial CareCredit. Families earning less than 100% of the poverty level could gain access to both the childcare slot and the financial stipend.

The plan emerged after Project 2029 put out a call for childcare policy proposals. A team of four co-authors — Tara McGuinness, Katie Hamm, Alyson Silkowski and Mario Cardona — put their heads together, combining their many years of collective experience as public servants, as well as a mix of backgrounds in data science, design, policy, parenthood and more.

“We went into this knowing we need something at scale … a large, sustainable federal investment,” said Silkowski, senior policy adviser at New America’s New Practice Lab, a team focused on improving economic outcomes for American families with young children.

They also wanted something simple and approachable for families.

“You don’t need to present three months of pay stubs. You don’t have to fill out a 40-page application. There would be a guaranteed seat for you,” Silkowski added.

The proposal offers a comprehensive vision for childcare, with some explanation — but not a lot — of how to implement it. The internal planning process involved discussions on implementation and cost planning, but the plan released to the public was intentionally written to be “short and accessible,” said Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden.

The proposal does say — and Silkowski confirmed — that the authors believe the plan could be fully implemented for about $200 billion annually and that it could be funded through tax code reforms, such as an increase of the corporate tax rate or a change to the estate tax. That’s many multiples more than the U.S. government currently spends each year on childcare and early education programs (with funding mainly split between the Child Care and Development Fund, which helps low-income families across the country pay for childcare, and Head Start). Yet it’s in line with what childcare challenges are costing the economy each year already, through a combination of foregone earnings, productivity declines and uncaptured tax revenue, according to ReadyNation.

“We spend a lot of money on a lot of things in this country,” Silkowski said. “We spend very little on little kids, even relative to what we spend on kids in K-12.”

The true total cost of the plan would depend on how many families choose the childcare slot versus the financial stipend, since the slot is expected to be more expensive, Silkowski said.

The concept isn’t novel. The authors essentially want to fund childcare like a public good, much the same way the government funds K-12 education. They also want families to experience the same ease during their kids’ early years as is expected once children start school.

“You should be able to take your child to a childcare slot just as people drop their child off for first grade,” said Hamm. That doesn’t mean there would be no paperwork involved, she added, but families wouldn’t have to prove their incomes and working hours like those receiving childcare subsidies do now.

Julie Kashen, founder of a new policy initiative called Women’s Economic Futures that is focused on policy and research on issues including childcare, thinks there is a lot to like about the Project 2029 childcare proposal, including that it gives families flexibility as their priorities and preferences change. She’s not bothered by the price tag.

“We know that doing this well and checking all the boxes requires a lot of funding. We know that right now we are paying a price for not doing it. It’s just mostly on the parents and early childhood educators that are not paid well,” Kashen said. “I think the fact that it anticipates a robust investment is a good thing, not a bad thing.”

The proposal has generated buzz among the early care and education community, particularly policy experts.

You can read the full article from The 74 here.