Excerpts
Earlier this month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled the initial stages of a plan for universal childcare. To discuss the recent history of childcare policy in New York City, and the lessons it may hold for the Mamdani administration, Nathan Gusdorf spoke with Josh Wallack, an early childhood policy expert who served as legislative director to then New York City Council member Bill de Blasio from 2002 to 2006 and later as the city’s deputy chancellor for early childhood, where he helped implement de Blasio’s signature “Pre-K for All” program.
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Nathan Gusdorf
Thank you for doing this. When you were de Blasio’s legislative director in the City Council in the mid-2000s, were people thinking about universal childcare?
Josh Wallack
Universal childcare was considered to be the longest of long shots and maybe beyond the horizon. Instead, the discussion focused on improving access for the lowest-income New Yorkers. At the federal level, we were still in the throes of the discussions about welfare reform, so childcare was seen mostly as a support for low-income working people to help them stay in the labor force. We tried to shift that discussion in the City Council toward universal childcare, but that was very much a new way of talking about it.
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Nathan Gusdorf
Considering that the policy was motivated by concerns about inequality, was there a debate about doing it more as a welfare program rather than as a universal program? How did de Blasio settle on the strong commitment to universality?
Josh Wallack
As far as I know, he never entertained making this a targeted program. He always framed it as a universal program. And I think part of that was Bill de Blasio’s orientation. Substantively, he felt that one program and a unified set of services sent the signal that we were all in it together. And practically, he felt it would prove more politically sustainable if it served everybody and brought together a unified constituency, which I think turned out to be right.
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Josh Wallack
I think when people talk about universal childcare, what they mean can vary on a few different dimensions.
First, how is it provided? Is it provided through a market-based intervention like a tax credit or voucher that enables families to go out into the market, so to speak, to purchase childcare on their own — or is it a supply-side intervention where government takes an active role in creating new childcare seats and provides those either directly or through contracts with third parties to families?
Second, who is providing it? In some cases, public schools do; in other cases, not-for-profit community-based organizations. We also have private businesses providing childcare as well as home-based providers, which can be either not-for-profit or for-profit.
The third dimension is: Who is helped? Some people believe that we should just provide subsidies for the lowest-income families, on the theory that people who have enough money to purchase childcare themselves will — and so by giving some help to lower-income families you’ll get to universality. Some people mean what Mayor Mamdani means: provision for all, like public schools, as a way to achieve universal coverage.
Within that issue of “who is helped,” there is the question of how much help is actually provided — is it free or just subsidized? We’ve seen some federal plans for universal childcare that say things like, “No one will pay more than X percent of their income.” So it will be public, everyone will receive some assistance, but it will be different amounts for different families and not completely free.
Finally, within a program that’s universal, is there targeting for students with disabilities and those who require different services or are you providing exactly the same thing for every child no matter what?
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As we were implementing the Pre-K for All, we wanted to ensure that every family would get a free, full-day, high-quality seat. So we were in constant communication with families to make sure that we were living up to our promise. “High quality” meant that we did a lot to ensure that all providers had the support that they needed to create excellent developmental experiences for kids; it meant we developed curriculum support in collaboration with educators in our system.
Coaches visited every program and met program leaders and teachers to offer them professional learning. Excellent social workers worked with families and kids to make sure children were developing socially and emotionally. We knew that because this was a publicly provided service, the city was responsible for assuring the quality level.
I think that when you take a demand-based approach and you issue the vouchers, you’re buying into the logic that the market will “punish those that don’t provide high-quality service” and that “people will vote with their feet.” That approach was never consistent with our values, but I also think that it does not bear out. We were only able to provide that assurance of quality when the public sector showed its willingness to step in.
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