Fighting Chance.

• Author: ESKENAZI, MICHAEL
• Position: The need for better childcare policies and programs

Why we need enriching childcare to give our kids a fair start

IF YOU HAVE EVER WONDERED HOW important decent childcare is to poor families in the United States, consider the following two stories--one sad, one hopeful--from the beginning of the present school year:

Jewel Foster was a single mother in Chicago's South Side. She'd been scraping by without working for several years, but when her sixth child arrived and her boyfriend left her high and dry, she knew she'd need to make some extra money. She lined up a promising job--working as a cashier at Chicago's high-end Marshall Fields department store--and what's more managed to find a precious daycare spot for her baby at a soon-to-open center run by a local non-profit. She also enrolled in a course to get her high school equivalency diploma. But when Foster learned that the Center had to delay opening indefinitely, things quickly fell apart. She tried to line up another daycare center but had no luck--in part because there are only 900 subsidized daycare slots in all of Chicago. A social worker offered state-funded vouchers to pay for "informal" care--meaning too many loosely supervised kids crammed into a too small neighborhood apartment. "I didn't want that for my child," says Foster. She quit her job to care for her baby during the day and took a dead-end job packaging boxes at a shipping company at night, when a neighbor could look in on the kids. She also dropped her course.

In New York a happier story was unfolding. At the end of the first day of a federally funded "Head Start" pre-school program in Manhattan's P.S. 5, the teachers discussed a 3-year-old named Brenda Uraga. She was so outgoing, thoughtful, inquisitive--so promising--they couldn't help but pick her out of the crowd. Candida Uraga, Brenda's mother, smiled as she recalled that only a year ago Brenda had started out at a federally-funded "Early Head Start" program as a sheepish, disinterested toddler who didn't speak to anyone. Mrs. Uraga said that since then Early Head Start had "transformed" her relationship with Brenda and her other children. Following a year of working with the program's family workers, she has a more active role in the children's education, and says: "Now when my daughter wants to read a book, I take the time to read with her. I used to believe it made no difference"

And that, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of the American educational system: Despite all of our resources and all of the know-how we have about giving kids a leg up in life, we wind up helping only a handful of the children who need it. Perhaps we confuse ourselves with the bewildering range of labels that we use when we talk about the services that we provide or should be providing for the young: Head Start, Early Head Start, childcare, daycare, early childhood education, and so on. So let's be clear: What we need to emphasize, and what all of these programs need to focus on, is educational enrichment--an experience that blends seamlessly with the American educational process and will set the child up for a productive career in the public schools.

With 75 percent of American families now using daycare for their preschool-aged kids, there's certainly a critical mass of consumers for this sort of "quality" care. Yet studies have shown that only 25 percent of American daycare centers offer quality services--and those are the 25 percent most expensive. For the well-to-do, America offers state-of-the-art pre-school "campuses" like Denver's Creme de la Creme, which boasts 32-foot vaulted ceilings, a line of faux Victorian shopfronts, a mini-television station, and all the other bells and whistles you'd expect for $14,000 per year. But even a family making $60,000 a year would have to stretch awfully hard to pay that kind of tuition. For kids from impoverished families--precisely the kids who need educationally-enriching daycare the most--it's simply not an option. For them, America's ad hoc and underfunded childcare system is a highstakes crap shoot. The lucky ones, like Brenda Uraga, hit big. But the rest are all too likely to get to kindergarten unprepared and unready to learn. These are the kids who will soon be tagged for dead-end special ed classes, waste their few years at school, and find themselves sunk right back into the poverty cycle when they graduate. Why can't we give them a ladder out?

Breaking the Poverty Cycle

Let's talk about that ladder for a moment. American meritocrats like to think of themselves as believing in equality of opportunity. But how can we kid ourselves that Americans have anything approaching equality of opportunity when we live in a country where children born into poverty have only the slimmest chances of reaching kindergarten ready to learn? If we can't address that problem, then isn't the meritocracy effectively hoarding the goods the education system has to offer for its own families? Consider the fact that in California, childcare subsidies can only be spent on daycare centers that fall at or below the 75th cost percentile--even though studies have demonstrated that you're only likely to get quality care above that percentile. That kind of policy signals only one message: We've climbed...