Saving Preschool Education

21-52 Saving Preschool Education

[00:00:00] Reed Pence: This is Radio Health Journal. I'm Reed Pence. This week. How the collapse of preschools staffing is undermining the economy

[00:00:08] Lauren Hogan: We're seeing women, in particular, but all parents who are unable to go back into the workforce because they cannot find childcare for their kids.

[00:00:19] Reed Pence: But is there hope ahead, when Radio Health Journal returns...

[00:00:26] Reed Pence: It's been a puzzle the last few months to look at workforce statistics and see the number of jobs that are still open. At the same time, so many Americans are still out of work. It's not over abundant unemployment benefits. For most people, those extras have run out. It's really, probably more basic than that. When life is so tenuous, millions of people are thinking hard about what they want from it, and deciding the jobs they had or the ones that are available aren't as attractive as they used to be. And some vitally important industries are struggling as a result. Young childhood education is one of them. Literally hundreds of thousands of teachers in preschools who once were attracted by meaningful work, have left the classroom in the pandemic and haven't come back. Schools are having a tough time staying open as a result.

[00:01:21] Lauren Hogan: It's tremendously difficult, and centers and family childcare homes are struggling deeply with the ability right now to recruit and retain staff in early childhood programs. Enormous drops in the early days that we saw with folks really, like 360,000 jobs lost in the early days of the pandemic.

[00:01:45] Reed Pence: That's Lauren Hogan, Managing Director for Policy and Professional Advancement at the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

[00:01:53] Lauren Hogan: Some of that has risen back as childcare has reemerged and been supported through, again, some of the federal and state relief dollars. But it is a demanding, and through lots of history, a low wage field, although not low skill, nor low value. And that has made staffing challenges exacerbated. Although many of these existed, even prior to the pandemic.

[00:02:25] Reed Pence: Hogan says the lack of staff at preschools has escalated into a national crisis. It's one of the reasons the economy remains much more stalled than it might be otherwise.

[00:02:35] Lauren Hogan: We're seeing women, in particular, but all parents who are unable to go back into the workforce because they cannot find childcare for their kids. And that is impacting the supply chain, that is impacting the workforce at large, and business's ability to help, you know, rebuild the economy, in the short term, and really seeing those challenges ripple across other workforces. Other impacts. I have worked with and, you know, and talking with a childcare center who did a graphic of her childcare center and how many other jobs she supports, just by existing for her community. And really demonstrating how many industries rely on a stable and successful early childhood market.

[00:03:30] Reed Pence: Hogan has done a number of surveys of preschools during the pandemic, and the most recent shows that 80% of them are suffering from staff shortages. So, many of them are turning away kids, or they've closed completely. Millions of parents can't go back to work because they can't find care for their children.

[00:03:50] Lauren Hogan: Fifty percent of programs that are experiencing staffing challenges are serving fewer children. A third, have a long wait list or they're unable to open classrooms. So even if the program itself hasn't closed, there are just fewer spaces available to families and their community, as the program is sort of hanging on by its fingernails. But, it's not as able to provide the kind of space and support for families that are needed. And another about one in four have reduced their operating hours. And that, again, it's just rippling out the effects. We hear stories every day about a program that can't stay open, can't keep its classroom open, can't stay open. Each time that happens, you know, it's another twenty or fifty or a hundred families who suddenly lost their care, and are now going to either scramble — potentially have to find unsafe care for their kids. Or choose to, you know, not re-enter the workforce. And none of those options are good ones.

[00:04:51] Reed Pence: Many preschool teachers haven't had great options, either. Nobody ever goes into the field to make a fortune, but after many preschools closed in [00:05:00] the pandemic, teachers had the chance to look around a little, and compare their economics with the rest of the world.

[00:05:07] Lauren Hogan: Nearly fifty percent of early childhood educators nationwide rely on public assistance to make ends meet, because they themselves make so little. And when there are other options available to them, in a job market where across the street the retail, you know, center is offering $2 more an hour plus benefits. It's very hard for them to make their family economic decision to stay in childcare, even though that's where they would like to be. If they could stay, they would. And the kids, who really benefit from having the stability of early childhood educators who can stay and support them over the years. Turnover doesn't just hurt the sort of bottom line of the program. It hurts the kids too. And the families who want that stability. When they're dropping their kids off every day, they want to know that they're taking them to a safe and trusted place where our kids are going to be loved and cared for. And, the kind of turnover that we're seeing right now, which has always been high in early childhood education — you know, somewhere between thirty and forty percent is not unusual — has just grown.

[00:06:15] Reed Pence: As treasury secretary Janet Yellen has said the market for early childhood teachers is broken. It's a textbook market failure. Hogan agrees.

[00:06:26] Lauren Hogan: What it costs to provide quality childcare is more than what any individual family can afford. It's why we don't have families pay one at a time for fourth grade. That's not how our system functions. But it is how we function in childcare. And so, a substantial portion of the cost of providing childcare has actually been subsidized by the low wages of really childhood educators, for a very long time. Even as it is simultaneously unaffordable for families. I mean, that's what we know. It's extremely expensive for families. And yet, early childhood educators are making poverty level wages.

[00:07:01] Reed Pence: And that's in good times. With the pandemic, the entire economy was thrown into disarray. At daycare centers, enrollments plummeted. Schools closed. Later on school operators couldn't predict how many families would want to send their kids back to class again, or how many teachers they'd need. It was a nightmare.

[00:07:21] Lauren Hogan: When that happens, programs just cannot stay alive. Their margins are so thin to begin with, that when there is this kind of massive disruption happens, recovering is very difficult. And that does bring us back to some of the relief funding that had been provided to stabilize programs. And those have helped tremendously. We know there would have been massive amounts of closures in the absence of federal and state support for childcare.

[00:07:53] Reed Pence: But Hogan says the preschool staff shortage isn't just a short term labor crisis. It's also a long-term challenge to the economy if we don't provide quality early childhood education across the nation.

[00:08:06] Lauren Hogan: What we know about the brain development in the early years, about how important it is for children to have access to high quality early childhood education in those early years, we are sacrificing our nation's economy in the long-term, for the investments that we're not making. And the shoring up of early childhood education that we are not currently doing. In a way that, again, other countries are really able to see and make those investments — and will reap those benefits in ways that we could too. But we don't.

[00:08:40] Reed Pence: However, that might change. The congressional Build Back Better Act calls for spending nearly four-hundred billion for free universal preschool for three and four year olds, and a cut in childcare costs for most families. Hogan calls it transformational.

[00:08:58] Lauren Hogan: That is in part because it really looks holistically and comprehensively at some of the challenges within our field. And again, we have been dealing with the challenges of both affordability and quality and compensation, all at the same time — you know, some folks call it the three legged stool or the trilemma — there's these challenges that unless you address them at the same time, you run the risk of really creating additional problems, that are unintended, but easily foreseen. One of the things that this particular bill does is it really addresses the question of how to keep costs down for families, while also increasing compensation for educators. Because that is really where we drive both the supply of childcare, and the quality of childcare. That's really the nexus, is at this workforce question.

[00:10:00] Reed Pence: Hogan says that school funding for young children isn't really a partisan issue. Some people are surprised to learn that Republican states, where budgets are often honed down, have been among the national leaders. So Hogan is excited about the future.

[00:10:15] Reed Pence: This is very much an issue of public health, and of the literal health of our children and families. And thinking about early childhood as a way to support long-term health outcomes. There's tons of research indicating the importance of early childhood education in managing the long-term health, and into supporting, you know, broadly speaking, obviously individual and public health as well. This is really an issue that I think unites us across disciplines and we just, you know, encourage the support and engagement of folks who, are not just parents of children, zero to five, at the time that they need it, but really understanding the ways that this benefits our whole community and our whole nation, as well.

[00:10:58] Reed Pence: But without that [00:11:00] kind of ongoing help, Hogan says the current hole will only get bigger, and the crisis deeper. Better to take care of it now.

[00:11:07] Lauren Hogan: More programs close, parents are then unable to find the care that they need. They leave the workforce, or they scramble to find places where their kids are not necessarily in places that are safe. And, that is something that weighs heavily on all of us.

[00:11:26] Reed Pence: You can find out more about Lauren Hogan and about all of our guests on our website, radiohealthjournal.org. I'm Reed Pence.