THE CHILDCARE CRISIS, SACRAMENTO, & THE CASE FOR TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE
By: Helen Petersen
Tags: California, Early Childhood Education, Local Government, Sacramento, Childcare

How investing in our childcare system can create a more resilient and equitable local economy while setting Sacramento apart.

As we consider how Sacramento can build back stronger (if by stronger we mean more equitable, resilient, and community-focused) from the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the biggest opportunities we have as a City is to completely rethink our approach to and relationship with early childcare. This means reimagining everything from how we fund and subsidize childcare, how we pay our childcare providers, and how we strategically locate childcare centers to better fit our lives.

While we have seen recent momentum in this space – including President Biden’s American Jobs Plan – it is not enough to address a decades-long childcare crisis that is harmful for childcare providers, children, and parents alike with a wildly disproportionate impact falling on communities of color.

The Economic Policy Institute and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment estimate an improved childcare system would cost between $30,000 to $39,000 per child annually once phased in. While this number might seem high, consider that this isn’t just accounting for the up to 2 million children that would benefit but also up to 826 thousand childcare providers who would begin making a fair wage. With major investment, we can improve the lives of our community members in a relatively short amount of time with a high level of impact.

As a recent Urban Planning graduate student, inclusive economic development intern at Alchemist Community Development Corporation, and humble newbie to this topic area, I have spent the last month seeking to understand the ways in which childcare, community development, economic development, and workforce development intertwine.

The following article captures much of what I have learned about the childcare crisis in the hopes of reaching folks (like me) who may not have had childcare at the forefront of their policy agenda. I will be covering:

Why you should care about the childcare crisis (even if, like me, you have little personal skin in the game)

(even if, like me, you have little personal skin in the game) How we can rethink economic development efforts to include the ECE workforce

What the childcare crisis can tell us about the future of workforce development

And finally, a list of resources directing you to the experts in this field who have been doing this research, work, and advocacy for decades.

WHY WE SHOULD ALL CARE ABOUT THE CHILD CARE CRISIS

Let’s first level-set by identifying what we mean by early care and education (or ECE) and the gap that we are highlighting. When we talk about the childcare crisis, we are talking about the care a child needs from birth to around their 5th birthday when they begin kindergarten. It is also worth mentioning here that a lot of the data and work I will be talking about comes from the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Child Care Employment and the Economic Policy Institute. I highly recommend exploring their content for more research.

Across the U.S., parents pay for about 60% of childcare while the government foots the rest of the bill through vouchers and tax credits. In Sacramento, a child care center costs $14,240 per year until they hit four years old when it drops down to $9,913. Today, 24.3 % of a family’s income is spent on childcare. That number can be double for single parents. It is worth noting that is just childcare and does not include food, clothes and all of the other things children need.

Now let’s talk about childcare professionals.

So since child care costs families this much, you would think that child care providers were raking in the dough, right? Absolutely not. In fact, early educators with Bachelor’s degrees are paid 37.8% less than teachers in the K-8 system. As the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Child Care Employment points out, these childcare workers are essentially being punished for teaching younger students. 17% of these educators live below the poverty rate. And on top of that, a large percentage of these educators are women of color. In California in 2019, the average childcare worker with a bachelor’s degree makes just $13.43 and this doesn’t even include self-employed folks who we know can make even less.

Source: UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Child Care Employment

So our current system costs a very large percentage of a families’ income and produces low wage jobs. It isn’t working for the families or the child care workers. Even beyond that, there is more reasons to care about this.

The ECE workforce is an example of where our policies have created racist systems. If you take nothing else away from this article, I would highly encourage reading the UC Berkeley Center of Child Care Employment’s paper on Racial Wage Gaps in Early Education. Some highlights include:

The ECE workforce is made up of almost exclusively women, 40% of which are women of color. It is the most diverse of the education system and has the lowest wages.

African Americans working with infants and toddlers (not preschool) earn $.77 less per hour on average than their counterparts.

African American ECE educators in California are 50% more likely to live in poverty than white peers.

We also know that childcare is a major barrier for parents, notably women, entering or remaining in the workforce. 59.5% of families in California have a woman as the sole, primary or co-breadwinners. At the same time, women are still taking on the majority of the childcare and household responsibilities. This tension was highlighted by the pandemic during which dual-career couples saw women twice as likely to spend 5+ hours a day on chores. We also saw women leave the workforce in droves and for those who stayed, express high level of burn out and stress. Even post pandemic, however, we must center affordable childcare in our discussions about economic development and workforce development in an effort to remove barriers to employment.

This is an economic opportunity we can all feel good about. What I am asking us as Sacramentans to consider is how these jobs could and should be invested in like the economic development opportunity that they are. Creating a fair wage career pipeline for early childcare workers would infuse Sacramento with a wave of higher paying jobs, improve outcomes for children and remove barriers to entering the workforce – popular outcomes that are addressable without having to attract some big corporate headquarters.

FLIPPING ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT INCENTIVES ON THEIR HEAD – WITH CHILDCARE AT THE CENTER

Our traditional approach to economic development has focused on business attraction, expansion, and retention with strategies ranging from tax breaks to subsidized workforce readiness pipelines. With few exceptions, these incentives have been aimed at corporations (like Centene) to encourage them to relocate or stay in Sacramento.

But what if our economic development incentives went directly to the workforce, rather than their employer?

Rather than giving our economic development funds to organizations and hoping that trickles down to the Sacramento community, we could redirect that money to the existing workforce in the form of investing in childcare and other foundational elements of a successful and inclusive workforce.

Picture a Sacramento where:

Remote or more flexible workers remain or relocate to Sacramento because they know they will have affordable and universal childcare if they live here

Bottom line-oriented companies have access to a ready-made workforce with a large barrier already addressed

Socially minded organizations see a match between the values of Sacramento and their company values

Sacramento attracts the best and brightest of early childcare workers and invests in those who have worked here, underpaid, for decades by paying more than other areas

Startups, small businesses, and other entrepreneurship organizations, who often can’t provide the same childcare benefits as Fortune 500s due to cost, have that covered from the start, energizing localized entrepreneurship (notably for women) in the area

By flipping economic development incentives on their head in this way, we focus on the community member rather than the employer. We have more control in how economic development funds are dispersed. We build a name for Sacramento as the best place for working parents. We pay early childcare workers what they deserve. And mostly, we address a broken, inequitable system that is holding us back.

WHAT THE CHILDCARE CRISIS CAN TELL US ABOUT THE FUTURE OF WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

We have two trends converging that I want to highlight:

Trend #1: Automation and technology will change the way we work. Our workforce needs have shifted time and again — from the industrial revolution to the transition from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy — and will continue to change. In this century, we can expect that artificial intelligence and technology will have a large impact on the kind and amount of jobs that will be available. We need to be thinking about what the jobs of the future will be as the economy as we know it today will require less and less jobs.

Trend #2: We need people-centered social services now more than ever yet these are low paying & high stress jobs. In a similar vein to the childcare crisis, the U.S. is also facing a plethora of other acute issues in our communities: we don’t have enough folks in elder care to care for the Boomers who are living longer than any other generation, we have a widely discussed opioid crisis, we have divested from mental health for decades, and climate change is creating a demand for disaster response preparedness in our communities like we have never seen. All of these pain points disproportionately impact communities of color. These roles in senior care, as social workers, mental health counselors and emergency management professionals are exhausting (emotionally and physically), see high rates of turnover due to burn out, and are severely underpaid.

At a local level, we have an opportunity to use this upcoming economic shift to invest in these people-centered careers. It would mean increasing wages for these roles, getting more people into the workforce to lessen the load, and providing accessible professional development pathways. Doing so would reduce ratios for roles like social workers, address inequitable systems, improves outcomes for communities, and bring high paying wages to Sacramento. This is an economic development investment that can’t pick up and move to jobs to Texas or be at the whim of an eccentric CEO.

If you are reading this, odds are you generally agree that services like early childcare, mental health services, and social work are necessary and underprovided in the U.S. Many of us, including myself, have spent years calling the ECE workforce, social workers and mental health professionals “saints” and treating them like martyrs. It is time for us to flip the script and prioritize investing in these people and services. Not only is it the right thing to do in addressing sources of systemic racism and classism, but it also meets the needs of our economic shifts.

ULTIMATELY, I CHALLENGE US ALL TO START BY RETHINKING OUR LOCAL CHILDCARE SYSTEM AND TRUST THAT IT CAN UNDERGO TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE IF WE ARE WILLING TO EXPECT MORE.

We know that this kind of transformational change is possible; in March of 2020, few of us could imagine that we could quickly adapt to mask mandates, have a significant amount of the workforce transition to a remote environment, and shut down entire streets to accommodate outdoor dining. But with the threat and omnipresence of the pandemic, we moved relatively swiftly and urgently to make these changes. We can do the same thing in the face of this crisis.

We can also do this in the name of economic opportunity and the reputation of our city. As Sacramento grows, we are at a point where we are deciding what our “thing” will be. San Francisco has technology, Los Angeles has the entertainment industry — I would push us to think about what it would be like if Sacramento’s “thing” was being the best place in the U.S. to be a working parent or a childcare provider? What if it was the best place to be a child, regardless of socioeconomic status?

Someone will be in the leader in addressing the childcare crisis. Why not Sacramento?

Resources:

One of the reasons I wanted to write this article is because I wanted to appeal to those, like me, who are newer to the space and maybe don’t have an obvious connection to the topic. However, there are hundreds of researchers, policy experts, and advocates who have been working on this topic for decades, much of which I have relied on throughout my research. Below please find a list of some of these resources which I highly encourage you check out.

Childcare Employment

Childcare Access & Quality

www.kidsdata.org

https://www.sacramentocountyearlylearning.org/programitem.cfm?id=153

COVID 19 Impact

https://calmatters.org/children-and-youth/2021/03/child-care-centers-close/

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article249552283.html

Women in the Workplace

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/08/08/473366/fast-facts-economic-security-women-families-california/

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace