EXCERPTS:
It's hard to argue with a state initiative that's improving child care.
But while YoungStar - the state's two-year-old ratings and incentives program for state-subsidized child care centers - is getting good reviews, the sad fact is that it's no sea change in America's under-funded, disrespected afterthought of a child care system.
That system was evident even in a two-day series in this newspaper earlier this week on YoungStar's successes.
There were the long-successful, if financially strapped, centers that saw their state funding cut.
There's the child care worker going back to school while holding down a second job and child care wages averaging about $11 an hour with no benefits.
There are the parents who, yes, get better care for their children, but also bigger bills for that care as the cost of a more educated child care workforce trickles down. This as child care for a 4-year-old in Wisconsin costs about $10,000 a year.
YoungStar is "a major step in the right direction," said Dave Edie, early education policy analyst at the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, but the under-funding of the state program that subsidizes child care for low-income families, called Wisconsin Shares, is undermining YoungStar's mission.
Rates paid to providers through Wisconsin Shares - which Edie estimated covers maybe 20 percent of the 245,000 children enrolled in the state's regulated child care centers - have been frozen since 2006.
The biennial budget signed into law on Sunday includes a less than 1 percent increase in rates in the budget's second year, but Edie said if the state was keeping up with inflation, that increase would need to be about 20 percent.
But the problems with child care are rooted in more than just one state's budget and child care programs.
They have to do with how stagnant middle-class wages have made for the necessity of two-income households, how two-income households have made child care a necessity and how child care has to be cheap because middle class wages are stagnant.
Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley, called incentives- and ratings-driven child care reforms "a market-driven solution to a broken market."
They don't, for example, adequately address the problem of how to pay child care workers once they get more education and deserve better pay, she said.
For comparison's sake, consider child care in Western Europe, where government support for child care is common, and in return for a living wage, child care workers are expected to be well educated, according to Edie.
Does this increase taxes? Probably. But it's probably worth it for a child care system that, according to Edie - who in 1989 was part of a delegation that studied French child care - is better for kids and cheaper for parents.
It might be politically incorrect on Independence Day to suggest that countries such as France could be the source for answers to a major American social welfare shortcoming.
Then again, the French gave us the Statue of Liberty, and that turned out OK.
-reprinted from the Wisconsin State Journal