Day-care disgrace.

• Author: Baker, Linda

It's about 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and inside My School, a child-care center in Portland, Oregon, seventeen children between the ages of two-and-a-half and four are wandering aimlessly in a large, empty room. There are few books or toys in sight, and the carpet is dirty and frayed. Most of the electrical outlets are uncovered, and there is only one teacher in the area - two direct violations of state day-care regulations. (Oregon, like most states, requires a staff-to-child ratio of one to ten for groups of children under five years of age.)

"We just don't have enough resources," says Joyce McClendon, the director of My School. McClendon, who also serves as teacher, cook, and janitor, says she would like to have an aide for each classroom. But the center, which enrolls fifty children from low-income families, can't afford to hire more workers.

"As it is, we have a very high turnover," she says. "Every six months the whole staff leaves, mostly because of the pay. And I wish we could get people who wanted to work with children. A lot of people just come in because it's a job, and they don't need many qualifications."

Ruth Mena, the teacher who is watching over the children, shows little enthusiasm. A former hotel housekeeper, Mena says she became a child-care worker "because I don't know how to do anything else."

The uninspired and haphazard care at My School is typical of this country's shoddy, patchwork day-care system. There are no national standards for day-care centers, and most states fail to enforce even minimum health and safety regulations. Media accounts of day-care centers tend to focus - misguidedly - on child abuse. The real story is less sensational but more prevalent: child-care staff tend to be inexperienced and overloaded, and children suffer from constant, low-level neglect.

"It's not just that we're not doing anything," says Edward Zigler, director of the Bush Center on Child Development at Yale University. "It's that we're perfectly satisfied in this country to every day put children in settings that compromise their growth and development. It's a tragedy, and the cost to this country down the track is going to be immense."

Seventy per cent of all child-care settings were "barely adequate" in 1988, according to the National Child Care Staffing Survey, the most comprehensive study of its kind conducted during the last decade. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that licensed day-care...