Excerpts
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The fact that we’re even debating what universal child care means is massive progress! The idea that governmental child care policies might go beyond welfare-style aid for the poor wasn’t even on the table 30 years ago. The idea that we would try to make child care free for families regardless of income was laughable as recently as a decade ago. The ground has shifted in a positive direction, and that’s the result of years and years and years of hard work by organizers, advocates, providers, parents, policy wonks, and elected officials who champion the cause, both in New Mexico and many states across the nation.
Now that we’ve (at least notionally, and increasingly in practice) reached the next stage in the development of child care policy, however, means we have to marshal a new set of constructs and wrestle with a new set of hard questions. Few are more pressing than this: what is universal child care?
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A working definition of universality
One thing that I hope is clear already: you can call lots of different things “universal” and be technically correct. The ambiguity of the term is both what lends it rhetorical power and what can present a major weakness. Putting the dimensions above all together, I would submit a working if clunky definition of an effective universal system would be: A guaranteed service that encompasses the broadest possible population needed to advance a particular goal, with maximal true access and good offerings that maximally match the target population’s preferences.
Now, look, that’s an ideal, and no service is ever going to hit 100% on all three dimensions. Look at USPS again. They absolutely include the broadest possible population to advance the goal of widespread communication and commerce. People’s access to the postal service is pretty darn good, though not perfect (for instance, you’ll occasionally see an article about ‘postal deserts’ popping up). And on the matter of meeting people’s preferences, I think it’s fair to say that the post offices has lots of options people want but not always the experience they want.
Public schools are another interesting example. Public schools are sky-high on universality in terms of the circumscribed population of school-aged children — however, we have chosen as a nation to draw a line that says if you choose not to use them for your kids, you choose to step outside of government support.1 They’re high on true access, to the point that you can sue the state if they deny you access. They match a fair but certainly not overwhelming amount of parent preference, and their quality is… mixed?
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Back to child care
Alright, what’s universal child care?
The first step is figuring out what the broadest possible population is that advances our goals. Well, it would help to know what those goals are! For instance, if the goal is “the highest possible maternal labor force participation rate,” that will lead us in a different direction than if the goal is “thriving families and children.” Y’all are in my house, and in this house we believe the goal of a child care system is to support thriving families and children, which means that we want both parents working outside the home and stay-at-home parents included.
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Universal child care means that all families can easily secure the type of care they want, where and when they want it, paying no fees while all providers are paid enough to ensure a high-quality setting.
Again, this is an ideal, but I think it hits on broad population inclusion, true access, and preference matching.
OK, so what do I want people to do, then?
I worry sometimes that I’m coming across as a naysayer, as if I’m holding leaders and advocates to an impossible standard rather than celebrating their vision and progress. In truth, I try to embrace a role as a friendly gadfly because I desperately want universal child care to work. And I worry, deeply, that if we are making promises we can’t keep or suggesting policies which exclude huge swaths of families are universal (even if that’s a plausible usage of the term), we aren’t actually heading toward the child care system American kids and families and early educators need and deserve, and may actually make the road yet rockier.
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