A Wake-Up Call for Child Care: From provider 'deserts' to low worker pay, the pandemic exposed longstanding troubles in a vital system.

• Author: Griffin, Kelley
• Position: THE MONEY ISSUE

When the pandemic forced many child care providers across the country to close or scale back operations, parents were left scrambling--and businesses got a clear view of how much they rely on the child care system.

Billions in productivity were lost, according to the Harvard Business Review, as parents--mostly moms--dealt with the daily challenge of managing work and child care, a challenge greatly amplified for parents who didn't have the option of working at home. And millions of women couldn't sustain their jobs and left the workforce altogether.

This shock to the child care system prompted a massive federal investment, one that child care advocates say has the possibility to transform a broken system. Congress approved $50 billion in emergency funding for states, territories and tribes. And the House passed the Build Back Better plan to spend $1.7 trillion over 10 years, with $109 billion to expand preschool, support parents with tax credits and improve pay and benefits for child care workers. The Senate was expected to vote in late December.

"It's a complete reimagining of the way our country invests in child care and early learning," says Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware, a national nonprofit group whose goal is to ensure all families have access to high-quality, affordable child care. "There's going to be a lot of good faith efforts by the states to make these systems better. I'm optimistic, I'm hopeful that folks are going to be doing their darndest to make this work."

As states are finding out, this isn't a system that will snap back to normal when the pandemic abates. And in any case, advocates say, "normal" wasn't good enough.

"The critical thing we learned in COVID is the child care business model doesn't work," says Linda Smith, director of the Early Childhood Center at the Bipartisan Policy Center. "Because when it costs more to produce a quality product than the people who need it could pay, then it's broken."

What's Broken

It's not that the issues in the child care system aren't clear. Ask anyone involved in the field, and they can rattle off the list of problems:

* Pay is so low, it's hard to find workers. More than 126,000 lost or left their jobs during the pandemic; the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley found in September that the workforce was at 88% of capacity. Allyx Schiavone, who runs the Friends Center for Children in New Haven, Conn., says she has not been able to reopen to full capacity because she can't find staff. "In the last 18 months of COVID, I've done more interviews than I did in my previous 10-plus years," she says, adding that people with the education and experience to work in child care are finding better pay elsewhere.

* Workers often lack training, even though they are dealing with children at crucial developmental stages; chalk that up to the low pay.

* Huge swaths of the country are "child care deserts" where...