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EXCERPTS
It sounds like a joke, but some people are getting extremely rich providing child care services.
To New Brunswickers who have ever purchased or provided childcare &emdash; even those who have owned one of this province's many for-profit daycares &emdash; that sounds incredible, even suspicious. How could you ever make a real profit, let alone get rich?
How large corporations are doing it is by cutting costs and (according to some studies) cutting corners, and by subsidy milking &emdash; concentrating on regions where governments provide subsidies.
Many governments have immunized themselves against the practice. They say children's interests don't mix with profit making and so, they limit expansion of childcare services to the non-profit sector.
After all, if for-profit services to children made sense, we would let businesses organize our education system.
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Canadian economists and early childhood experts have contributed to what the world knows about the benefits of community non-profit child care services and why for-profit child care usually produce a lower quality of care. When these experts point out that investment in childcare gives an excellent return, they mean in children's development and in productive societies &emdash; not in corporate bottom line.
Last year, the think tank, Australia Institute, also linked quality to the type of ownership. Most telling was the fact that 21 percent of workers in corporate chain childcare said they would not send their own children to the centre where they worked because of quality concerns. This compared with 4 percent of workers in non-profit centres.
One of Australia's richest persons, Eddy Groves, a Canadian who started out as a milkman and whose father was born in Saint John, is head of the largest childcare corporation in the world. One quarter of Australia's childcare centers are owned by his ABC Learning Centres. At least 40 percent of the revenues of ABC come from public money.
His business &emdash; a highly profitable one for his shareholders &emdash; has gained a reputation for suing governments, parents and unions, and challenging regulations and monitoring. Australian media and the Australia Institute have dogged ABC with unfavourable comparisons to community childcare and reports about poor staff: child ratios, and poor quality food and staff. It also helps that the corporation buys its curriculum and equipment from sister companies and trains its staff in its own college.
Such conglomerates are now in Canada buying out childcare centres.
Taxpayers, not just parents, should hope Canada does not go the way of Australia. In that country, parent fees and government spending on childcare have soared, but services have not improved. The "corporatization" of childcare has led to rapidly rising parent fees, which has led the government to increase the subsidies to parents so they could afford childcare. Government subsidies end up as corporate profits, instead of improved quality programs for children.
If more public spending on childcare does not produce better child care services &emdash; then why spend more? Before going the road of for-profit child care, we need to ask governments, what's in it for the children, for parents, for taxpayers?
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Childcare is an excellent investment in our children. Do we want childcare services whose first priority is to the shareholder, not the child?
- reprinted from Straight Goods