After all, her dad said, her true passion is social justice.  

McChristian said the explanation was simple: A lack of access and opportunity in mathematics for all students means many children, particularly kids of color and those living in impoverished communities, are forced to take educational pathways that leave them unqualified for lucrative STEM careers. 

“The role of math in educational equity is really a civil rights — and a social justice and racial justice — issue,” she recalled telling him. 

Broken down that way, friends and family quickly understood why the national policy director role at made sense for the Yale University and Columbia Law School graduate. 

And, its focus on education conjures an old love: McChristian, who holds a master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Nevada, was once a member of which recruits college graduates to work in high-need schools for two years. McChristian was a Head Start teacher in the Las Vegas Valley. 

But it was an even earlier experience that drew her to the field, she said. Her father, also a Yale grad, worked for IBM and moved his family frequently when McChristian was a child, allowing her to attend schools in several locations, including Japan. 

McChristian, who was born in California but lived all over the East Coast, said the constant relocation created a unique opportunity to observe educational inequity firsthand, both here and abroad. 

“In Tokyo, I was trying to catch up with students at my expat school,” she said. “And then, a year later, I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, reading a textbook to another student in the 7th grade who didn’t know how to read. So that spurred me to want to understand why there are these disparities.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

What do you see as the purpose of your new position? 

There’s a disconnect between the people who live and breathe this work and everyday community members. My entire career has been about breaking down these concepts and these ideas that really impact people’s lives into actionable steps that they can take to change their communities. I’m excited to bring that kind of perspective to the math equity landscape.

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges that we as a nation face in moving kids forward in math?

A lot of times when you just say the word math, people’s minds shut off. They go quickly to, “Oh, I’m not a math person,” or “Math isn’t relevant to me.” They don’t even want to talk about the ideas around why that might be. Maybe they didn’t have access to math coursework that was relevant to their experience, that was culturally responsive. Did they have all the options for the coursework that would get them to the career or the path they wanted to have?

It’s been difficult, but it’s also been invigorating in many ways because it shows me the opportunities for me to add value. I can list why this is a racial and social justice issue. I can show what this means for the average high school student if they don’t have access to math that speaks to them and how that sets them up for their future career.

Historically, what have we been doing wrong in terms of math instruction?

For many, many years, we’ve had this traditional math sequencing without fail, where you go from Algebra I all the way up to calculus — if you’re able to. And that is still an extremely important pathway as calculus is kind of a soft requirement for highly selective colleges. 

But we know some students want computer science or data science instead. These kinds of courses may be more relevant to what they want to do in college — and for their future careers. 

We’re not saying do away with any certain model. We’re saying, make sure students have as many options as possible in terms of math coursework they need to succeed. It’s about adding more to the plate, giving students more resources. 

What would you like to change about how mathematics is taught today? 

First is the traditional sequence, the ending point of calculus for those students who want to go into STEM. We need more options there, additional pathways that can include data science and stats.

Then, once we get to the college admissions stage, we want to make sure colleges — including the more highly selective institutions — reflect this change. Because it’s not helpful if a high school can say, “Oh, now our students can take data science to complete their graduation requirement,” but the university those students want to attend does not factor that into the admissions process.

And then, once students get to college, we want to make sure they have access to other coursework — just as they did in high school — that may be more relevant to their experience. 

How will the Trump administration’s plans for NAEP impact the information we collect regarding student achievement? 

We are a nonpartisan . But I will say we have been very intentional about the push for the continuation of data. Data such as the Nation’s Report Card provides us with an assessment of where our kids are.

How will the defunding of Head Start impact students’ later achievement in mathematics?

At Just Equations, we focus primarily on the high school to college pathway. But as a former Head Start teacher, I feel very passionately about the work that can be done to support students’ social-emotional, literacy and math needs at the early childhood education level.

Why is it important to solve this issue? To bring more students into mathematics? 

For me, it’s informed by my family experience. My dad grew up in South Central Los Angeles and through a program called , he was able to attend a high- performing high school and then go on to Yale University. He had so many opportunities presented to him that he never would if it had not been for this.

My dad always told me, “There’s not a lack of talent, there’s a lack of opportunity.” And so that’s what really fortifies me in this space to ensure that every student, that Black student, that Latinx student, has access to the coursework they need to go into a STEM career. 

So that’s why I go back to it being a racial and social justice issue. We can’t afford for people to tune out of the math conversation as we have these new digital technologies emerge, as we see more of our world go online, as we see technologies to target communities of color.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation provides financial support to Just Equations and to ����Ӱ��.

National test results released in September 2022 show in since the pandemic disrupted schooling for millions of children.

In response, educational leaders and policymakers across the country are and catch these students back up to where they would have been.

But this renewed concern seems to overlook a crucial fact: Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools were failing to adequately serve children of color. As a in K-12 education, I see an opportunity to go beyond getting students caught up. Rather than focus only on trying to close pandemic-related gaps, schools could seek to more substantially improve the quality of education they offer, particularly for students of color, if they want to achieve equitable and sustainable results.

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Studying schools

For more than a decade, I’ve been conducting research on how schools can successfully serve Black and Latino students. Most of this work has focused on New York City, but what I have learned is critical for any school.

In one long-term targeted at improving outcomes for Black and Latino boys, my colleagues and I collected data across more than 100 schools and through interviews with over 500 school leaders, teachers and students.

Based on this work, I’d like to highlight four critical conditions to improve the success and well-being of students of color.

1. Classrooms that reflect the students they serve

Research shows when their teachers and reflect their race, ethnicity and cultures. Yet statistics show that seldom happens.

Children’s books , like dogs and bears, almost three times as often as they , four times as often than Asian characters, five times as often than Hispanic characters, and nearly 30 times as often than Indigenous characters.

Moreover, while the teacher workforce remains nearly , research shows that students who had had better chances of graduating from high school and enrolling in college.

2. Connection, not control

Students of color are more than twice as likely to be as their white counterparts. And Black children who behave in the same ways as white children are to be suspended for the same actions.

Many schools have established , which emphasize repairing harm versus doling out punishment. These efforts can help from controlling student behavior to forming connections with young people.

These connections can also be built outside formal classroom environments. Activities such as peer mentoring groups and student-led clubs are good opportunities for cultivating student-faculty connections. In those environments, students are more likely to and expressing their feelings about both learning and other issues relevant to their lives.

3. Equitable access to academic challenge

Teachers than they do of white and Asian classmates. Black and Latino students are also underrepresented in and less likely to be placed in such advanced coursework as or in high school.

When students have less access to rigorous learning opportunities, it can limit their progress in other areas as well. Students are when they have taken four years of math and science. Yet Black and Latino students are less likely to be exposed to .

4. Teacher preparation and support

Teachers need strong preparation to serve an diverse student population. But many teacher education programs to meet the needs of the students they teach, particularly in schools that primarily serve students of color.

Teachers are required to have ongoing training to keep their . Similarly, school districts could provide ongoing support for teachers to present broader depictions of history and society as part of developing , which draw on students’ backgrounds, identities and experiences.

The current political climate has become who broach topics of race and racism. Teachers may call on principals and other education leaders to shield them from against exposing students to historical or current examples of racial injustice.

As schools seek to address pandemic-related gaps, there is now a unique opportunity to reimagine public education. For many students of color, business as usual wasn’t enough. Let’s learn from where we’ve been and aim for better than a return to normal.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the . University of California, Irvine provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

Every parent on some level wants what’s best for their children. Only a privileged few have the means to pursue that goal — frequently at the expense of less-privileged children, though they may never be aware of the price that’s been extracted. That’s the hard news in this kind-hearted book. The thing left unsaid when privileged parents say they want what’s best for their child, Jaffe writes, is “and not for other children.”

Jaffe doesn’t blame parents of privilege — a category to which she belongs — for the terrible circumstances of other children’s lives, but she does make clear that we all have a responsibility and a role in creating and perpetuating that disparity. Her book is directed primarily at parents of privilege, which she defines as “any family who writes down six or more figures on the ‘total household income’ line of their tax return,” and it is both an unflinching invitation for them to do better and a roadmap for how they can use their privilege to see to it that all children have what’s healthy and what’s best.

In interviews with child care and policy experts, parents, labor activists, attorneys, nannies, educators and others, Jaffe methodically lays out the reality of inequity that saturates every molecule of the U.S. child care and education system, starting before a child even comes into this world. (In Seattle, she writes, families trying to get on waiting lists for day care may see an option for “trying to conceive.”) The conversation she has with her readers isn’t accusatory or scolding, but there’s no softening of the fact that it’s a hard conversation to have — and one we all must engage in if we have any hope of our children living in a just and equitable world.

Jaffe starts her story with the birth of her daughter in September 2017 when she joined a listserv for parents in her Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. The daily meetups for these women and the occasional man were friendly, calm affairs dotted with small talk about babies’ sleep schedules and other minutiae of day-to-day life with an infant.

The listserv was an entirely different kettle of fish, with 30-part threads dissecting the many and varied ways the parents could get it wrong. The abiding theme was “worried” — If you skip the iron-fortified cereal, do you worry about your baby getting enough iron? Every conversation presented a new variation on the theme, things Jaffe had never even considered worrying about. Iron? Do I need to worry about that now? But worry was in strong competition with the listserv’s other theme: getting the best for their child — the best waffles, the best teething necklaces, pediatrician or strollers, the best pre-K. The best life.

The conversation gave her a sense of whiplash, Jaffe writes. She was working as an attorney for a nonprofit law firm that brought lawsuits on behalf of children in foster care; one of her responsibilities was to read fatality reports of children who died in foster care after their state’s government already knew they were in danger. Finishing her workday immersed in questions of abuse and neglect, opening her computer to the litany of worries from the privileged parents of Park Slope felt like a “fable about the children in the city I lived in.”

Acknowledging how hard it is for just about anyone to be a parent in the U.S. — the only high-income country in the world without paid leave for new parents, where child care costs more than the average mortgage payment, schools are chronically underfunded and “our college admission process is reminiscent of “The Hunger Games” — Jaffe is sympathetic to the challenges. But the point of her book is not to comfort the comfortable; It is to paint a clear picture of the country’s two-tiered system between the top 10 to 20 percent of income earners and everybody else. Outcomes for children not born into one of those top brackets are vastly different from the privileged few: Racism is at the root of that inequity. The practical outcome of parents with privilege relentlessly pursuing their own child’s interests — hoarding resources within the public school system, for instance, or maneuvering to keep their children (and their resources) out of majority low-income, majority Black and Latino schools — leaves other children behind.

Beginning with early childhood, Jaffe looks at the child care system’s deep segregation by race and class. Because the U.S. has no child care infrastructure, she writes, most parents have little choice when finding their young child’s care, but parents of privilege have the option of touring various programs and finding the best among choices. Low-income families are relegated to publicly funded programs in a fractured system. Families in the middle struggle to make the “least bad” choice among limited options. No one asks about the wages and benefits of the child care workers and pre-K teachers in any of those choices, and few of us ask about the structural forces that have created this impossible situation.

It would matter if we did, Jaffe writes, and then offers a list of questions to prompt that conversation, a format she follows in each chapter with takeaways detailing individual choices, collective action and further reading for readers wanting to act or to find out more about that chapter’s issues. You can’t read “Wanting What’s Best” without gaining a clearer understanding of the inequity baked into everything concerning children’s lives in the U.S. and without seeing at least some way to take action precisely where you are.

Throughout “Wanting What’s Best” Jaffe reiterates the fact that even though individual choices matter, the solution to fixing our broken system doesn’t lie with any individual. The U.S. has no cultural understanding of child-rearing as a communal activity and doesn’t acknowledge the commonsense reality that everyone in our society benefits when every child has enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, loving adults to care for them and good schools to educate them — the best, in other words.

“But collective action,” she writes, “particularly when it’s undertaken by people with privilege, creates change. Decisions about child care, schools, and how we use our time and money may not feel like political decisions, but they are.”

What would it look like, she asks, if we fought for other people’s children as if our own children’s future depended on it?

Early Learning Nation interviewed the co-authors, Chrishana Lloyd and Julianna Carlson, research scholar and research scientist, respectively, with . Lis Stevens from the Bezos Family Foundation, which belongs to the collaborative, joined our conversation.

Mark Swartz: How did “Mary Pauper” initially come about?

Chrishana Lloyd: The collaborative sought a firm foundation for their work, focusing on early care and education and compensation issues. Today’s poor wages and lack of respect all stem from patriarchal, racist and capitalistic roots. 

Swartz: It seems to be generating considerably more attention than the standard research paper. What do you think accounts for that?

Lloyd: A lot of ECE people have been challenging themselves to think about what they do as practitioners, researchers, academics and policy makers. Given the history, what is their role? How can they push towards more equitable compensation, treatment and opportunities?

At the same time, there are people who are not comfortable with the framing, who wonder, “Why do you have to talk about race? Why do you have to talk about equity? Why do you have to talk about sexism?”

Julianna Carlson: White folks have had the benefit of not having to think about these issues, about the why and how behind the system that we’re a part of.

Lis Stevens: You can certainly talk about the ECE workforce without addressing the history of racism and sexism, but I don’t think the conversation will be as meaningful or sustainable. Our work might end up in the wrong place.

Carlson: If we aren’t taking into account this vast context behind it, we’ll come up with Band-Aid solutions that don’t address the structures and the systems.

Stevens: You don’t want to reproduce the challenges that already exist. You can’t repair trauma. You can’t really move forward, unless you have some sort of reconciliation, or at least enough respect to square up with the history.

Swartz: How does this research fit in with the rest of ?

Lloyd: Child Trends draws on a mix of disciplines and perspectives. We have sociologists, social workers, family studies specialists, psychologists, statisticians. The idea is to do research in the service of strengthening the lives and the opportunities and the communities where children grow up, whether it be education or family systems or other systems.

A lot of our work focuses on people and communities who have been marginalized; that tends to be people who are of color. In that sense, “Mary Pauper” fits squarely into work that we have been doing for years, especially our .

Carlson: Applied research, sometimes called translation of research, is about making sure that research gets back to communities, gets into the hands of policy makers and the people who have the ability to make decisions and direct funds. We get to meet some really incredible ECE professionals. Elevating their voice in a meaningful and authentic way is part of our work.

Swartz: What makes this project right for the present moment?

Lloyd: COVID and the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought these issues to the forefront. COVID illustrated some of these inequities that exist in the country, and in particular if we’re thinking about ECE, what that means for the workforce.

Swartz: And there’s been a renewed attention paid to history.

Lloyd: It’s been a little over 400 years since the first African people were brought over to Virginia, which is my home state. That’s about 75% of the time this country as many describe it has been in existence. You can see the legacy of that in the archival images we included in the report. That front cover of the Black woman with the white infant little girl was taken in New York. And there’s another picture that’s similar that was taken in the South. And we deliberately wanted both of those pictures, to illustrate the point that these issues were prevalent in the North as well as in the South. Some people have referred to the North as the engine behind slavery.

Carlson: We feel there’s a window of opportunity now, with widespread awareness and thinking more deeply about the value and importance of child care. These moments generally come from the ground up, and they generally happen where there’s a significant need.

Lloyd: There’s awareness now that the existing model has never worked for Black people. We can no longer consider this a private issue.

Swartz: Do you consider Mary Pauper to be an extension of the New York Times’ ?

Lloyd: In a sense, yes. The 1619 Project sheds light on some of the ways that people have been marginalized in this country. As [1619 Project creator] Nikole Hannah-Jones points out, this is a country that values individualism. We believe individuals should be respected and that each vote should count, but we’ve been so hypocritical. Chattel slavery was an institution that didn’t count people, and later we counted people as three-fifths of a person, out of economic reasons. History really does force you to grapple with some of those issues.

Swartz: Who else has inspired your work?

Lloyd: One person is Marcy Whitebook, founder and co-director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been grappling with issues related to ECE compensation since before the 1970s. I sat on a panel with her a couple months ago, and I was tickled pink that she had our cover on her blackboard. And then, there are all these unnamed people who have been fighting for years and years, the women who were forced to wet nurse and to care for others and take people’s laundry in and not care for their own children. I’m inspired by Black women working for white women children and by immigrant women who do that to this day.

Disclosure: The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support to Early Learning Nation.

The Montessori method arose across the Atlantic and more than a century ago. How is it rising to the challenges set in motion by the global pandemic and national reckoning over racism? A new generation of Montessori leaders is infusing the approach with a heavier dose of equity.

Since this can be a slippery concept, for our purposes, let’s use this : “To approach education through the lens of equity is to acknowledge the disenfranchisement and discrimination faced by children, families and teachers, and to create schools and systems that eradicate barriers to success, empower children and families, and inspire a more just society.”

Here are some insights from Montessori experts and practitioners Early Learning Nation interviewed about equity.

Montessori Originated During a Social Crisis

Major disruptions have a way of compelling societies to seek new answers. The cause of educating the masses took on added urgency at the end of the 19th century after Italian anarchists assassinated King Umberto I of Italy, Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and Empress Elisabeth of Austria — in separate incidents but in rapid succession.

Newspapers demanded, “What are we teaching in our schools? Are we educating killers?” Maria Montessori gave a speech to the National Congress of Italian Educators and, as educator Larry Schaefer writes, “transformed a national disaster into a civic opportunity that inspired the nation.”

Perhaps this history lesson says something about our own time. Trust for Learning’s Ellen Roche points out that the and the similarly sprung from social crisis.

Maria Montessori’s Example Continues to Inspire Today’s Leaders

Casa dei Bambini, the very first Montessori school, welcomed children living in tenement housing in Rome and embraced a new approach that built upon the work of Édouard Séguin and others who studied ways of teaching those with intellectual disabilities. According to Ayize Sabater, executive director of and cofounder of the  (BMEF), “Montessori used her medical background, particularly observation and experimentation, to design materials and methods that would enable those children to advance in their human development.”

More important than her credentials, however, were her ideals. Sabater cites her advocacy for women’s rights and the rights of the child, especially evident in her fiery :

“Remember that people do not start at the age of 20, at 10 or at 6, but at birth. In your efforts at solving problems, do not forget that children and young people make up a vast population, a population without rights which is being crucified on school benches everywhere, which—for all that we talk about democracy, freedom and human rights—is enslaved by a school order, by intellectual rules which we impose on it.”

“She was shouting from the rooftops!” Sabater says. “She verbally dragged these people over hot coals for not upholding the rights of the child! For me, applying these ideals today to racial justice seems like a natural extension of that speech.”

Montessori is in the Same Boat as the Rest of the Field

As with most other sectors of our economy, early education in the United States has undergone one shock after another in the past three years. Montessori early-learning practitioners face the same challenges that other educators face: insufficient funding, inequitable distribution of assets, families in crisis and an overburdened, underpaid workforce.

Robust public investment can help, says recent Charlotte Petty. “Montessori pedagogy in the U.S.,” she elaborates, “has become a mostly privatized experience available to highly resourced families, which is far from its original vision and population.” She cites the work of Yale University’s , and in St. Louis as demonstrations of “the power and reach that Montessori can have when accessibility and racial justice are woven into the fabric of how the method is carried out.”

Montessori’s Relationship with Black Educators Goes Back Several Decades

“In the Black community,” says Sabater, “educators had an eye toward Montessori early on,” adding that admired Montessori and her philosophy. He’s continuing this tradition with BMEF, which aims to get more Black people engaged as Montessori teachers, more Black Montessori schools started and more Black children in Montessori settings, as well as supporting research into the Black Montessori experience.

Montessori Thrives in a Range of Settings

Montessori education exists in private centers, public and charter schools—even homes. Sabater is a founding group member for , a public charter school in Washington, D.C. and says the public sector is a critical area of focus for Montessori’s growth, particularly if the approach hopes to serve children from all backgrounds.

Roche concurs: “Organizations like and are working to overcome policy barriers and to expand Montessori’s presence in publicly funded programs.”

Marion Geiger, cofounder with Séverine B. Meunier of in Cambridge, Mass., credits the (formerly Birth to 3rd Grade Partnership) for its flexible funding structure. Her school belongs to the , founded in 2014 by Sep Kamvar, a professor at MIT’s Media Lab.

According to Geiger, Montessori teachers start every Wildflower school. “They’re purposefully small micro-schools,” she explains, “so that we can manage doing the administrative piece as well as serve families and children.”

“What’s really beautiful about it,” she continues, “is that every community is different, and every community’s needs are going to be different.

Montessori’s Insights Anticipated Contemporary Brain Science

Education researchers continue to find parallels to Montessori’s vision in today’s classrooms. According to , for example, “Her work is even more relevant today in the context of adversity and trauma research, and that her methods, principles and approaches may be harnessed and used in ways that promote trauma-informed practice in contemporary education settings.”

Geiger grew up in Brazil, where her mother currently trains Montessori teachers. “I didn’t always think I’d follow in her footsteps,” she reflects, “but the more I learned, the more I realized it was what I was looking for.” During her Saul Zaentz fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, she found that while the program was not necessarily promoting the method, the research confirmed its validity. Geiger notes that when Montessori is done right, it encompasses such best practices as responsive relationships, sensory exploration of your environment, scientific observation of the child, mastery-based progression, and developing autonomy and executive function skills. Earlier this year, came to the same conclusion: Montessori is based on key principles of ideal early learning environments for young children.”

Geiger says her perspective on adapting Montessori for the present moment is:
“If you are going to make a change, be thoughtful about it. Everything Maria Montessori created was in response to observations. And so I don’t think, if she were here today, she would say, ‘Don’t change anything.’ She’d say, ‘The world has changed, and we need to be responsive to the community that we’re serving’.”

This story is the third part of a 3-part series. Check out and .

The is an 18-month “personal and collective leadership journey.” Five provided their impressions of the experience so far, sharing their stories and their visions for change. (Early Learning Nation also another 2022 Fellow, Jovanna Archuleta, assistant secretary for Native American Early Education & Care with the New Mexico Early Childhood & Care Department.)

Walking Side by Side to Build a Pro-Immigrant Electorate

“It truly was transformative,” says Roxana Norouzi of the Aspen Ascend Fellows convening that took place in August. As the leader of , an immigrant advocacy organization in Washington State, she credits Aspen’s commitment to equity and its extensive and vibrant network. “The other fellows and I took part in a thoughtful interrogation into leadership, with the added luxury of internal reflection.” Norouzi singled out a storytelling session led by Lori Severens, Ascend’s associate director for leadership and design, as particularly meaningful.

OneAmerica was founded by Pramila Jayapal (now a U.S. Representative) in the wake of 9/11 as immigrant and refugee communities were being targeted by anti-immigrant hate crimes, surveillance and government targeting, and the organization has now advocated for immigrant rights and immigration reform for two decades. After nine years with OneAmerica, Norouzi moved into the role of executive director in the middle of last year. Recognizing that little progress had been made on building pathways to citizenship for undocumented community members who came seeking a better life and who deserve the safety, security and belonging that legal status provides, she decided to embark on a new strategy.

“We’re building grassroots power, political power,” she says, “so we can see a different world in 10-20 years.”

“Our early learning campaign is a big part of that,” she continues. “How can we build the child care workforce and increase their earning power without displacing the current workforce?” For Norouzi and One America, the answer lies in organizing parents, workers and other organizations. This fieldwork requires patience, determination and, above all, a willingness to walk side by side with the people in her state most affected by policy failures. “Immigration status is their number one issue,” she reports. “The second most important issue is education. They want to build a better life.” These priorities hold true for the Latino immigrants living in the eastern part of the state as well as the African and Southeast Asian immigrants living in and around Seattle.

The daughter of Iranian immigrants, Narouzi grew up in suburban Seattle and remembers teachers treating her bilingual skills as a deficit to be overcome instead of a brain-building asset. Because her mother worked in child care, she’s always been conscious of how society undervalues the profession and the people who practice it.

“We’re building a pro-immigrant electorate,” she asserts.

Chasing Big, Bold Ideas to Build High-Quality, Equitable, Culturally Responsive Systems

Erin Arango-Escalante’s title at the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families is administrator of the Division of Early Care and Education, but she describes herself as a “dot connector.” “Supporting young learners,” she says, “requires a multigenerational approach and every sector.” The state’s , which Arango-Escalante helped form, fosters collaboration at the cabinet level among such unlikely partners as Economic Development, Transportation, Revenue and Corrections. This work also involves engaging with and listening to parents and caregivers from urban, rural and Native American communities.

If there is a silver lining to the pandemic, Arango-Escalante says, it’s the way business has started paying more attention to early care and education. The infusion of federal dollars has supported new efforts in Wisconsin to leverage this spirit, including the program, which supports businesses to offer child care as a benefit, and the program, which supports the creation of new child care businesses and helps existing providers to expand. “We all need to work together,” she says, “just to keep the child care industry intact.”

Although the Wisconsin official grew up in the Dairy State, Arango-Escalante had formative career experience in New York City, working with neurodivergent children and their families. She recalls providing in-home care for twin boys in the Bronx, modeling tips and tricks for their single mom. Community members got used to seeing her visit. They saved her a parking spot, and they even washed her car while she was up in the apartment with the boys. “I’ll never forget that love and respect,” says Arango-Escalante, who remains in touch with the mother.

If complex families and family histories make her work more difficult, they also make it more personal. Until her teenage years, she didn’t know that she had Puerto Rican roots. (Her maiden name was Pedersen-McCann.) This discovery, her marriage to a Colombian immigrant and the birth of her two children, form part of what she calls “an identity journey” that energizes her commitment to equity.

The Ascend Fellowship is challenging Arango-Escalante to reflect on who she is as a leader. Gathering with the other fellows for the first time in Aspen, Colo., inspired her to chase big, bold ideas. “This is a moment,” she says, “to build high-quality, equitable, culturally responsive systems.”

Battling the Black Maternal Health Crisis with Solutions

“We don’t have time for this madness,” says Twylla Dillion, the executive director of . She’s talking about the Black maternal health crisis that’s keeping her up at night. Black, American Indian and Alaska Native women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, .

Personal experience has shaped her determination, as well as an MBA and Ph.D. in Health Services Research, Policy and Outcomes. When she had her first baby at 18, the experience of childbirth was traumatizing even though she had the support of her mother and her grandmother, a trained midwife.  “It was awful,” she says. “The process was broken.” When she had babies later in life, she was better informed and took steps to take more control of the situation.

Dillion notes that birth doulas have existed informally for a long time. Now that studies , she wants to ensure that legislators don’t add hurdles like licensure. “Some people want to make it fit into a ‘colonizer’ model,” she says. “They want to impose a clinical mentality, when what’s needed most is mutual trust and understanding.”

Dillion describes the gathering in Aspen as simultaneously grounding and propelling. “We saw ways we fit together,” she said. “It wasn’t always what any of us expected, but it was always mind-opening.”

The Fellowship is already motivating her to embrace a more liberated way of working nationwide and in her hometown of Rochester, New York, which has some of the worst infant outcomes in the nation. (.) Her ambitious to-do list includes determining new ways to measure success, empowering doulas and birth workers to own their data, and somehow compelling the health care sector to stop identifying race as a risk factor. (As Dorothy Roberts writes in “Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.”)

“That’s a battle I’ll still be fighting when I am an old woman,” Dillion says.

Learning a New Language.  “Liberatory,” Anyone?

There are many kinds of diversity. Chris Bennett, founder of , is the only for-profit professional in the current crop of Ascend Fellows. “I felt like an alien,” he jokes about the August convening.

Although he grew up in Miami, Bennett has spent his entire adult life in Silicon Valley and says that he and his startup embody the ethos of the technology sector. The nonprofit leaders, he says, are opening his mind to different ways of thinking, and he is even learning new vocabulary. Liberatory design, for example, as , is a process and practice to

• Create designs that help interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression
• Transform power by shifting the relationships between those who hold power to design and those impacted by these designs
• Generate critical learning and increased agency for those involved in the design work

Bennett states, “That gave me a new word to use when we talk about what we do, which is helping people help themselves and their communities.” The Wonderschool platform matches parents with child care providers around the country. The company also contracts with businesses interested in providing a valuable perk to their employees, and with cities, states and counties around the country.

“We’re seeing a lot of demand these days,” he says.

Although Bennett is unashamed to claim profit as a motive, he underscores Wonderschool’s community benefits, pointing out that children with access to high-quality early education today have higher rates of college admission and lower rates of incarceration tomorrow.

“Adding value to the community,” he says, “is like planting a tree.”

Building Young Leaders = Multiplier Effect

Layla Zaidane, president and CEO of the (MAP), didn’t always think of young children as a focus of her organization. Designed to promote bipartisanship and to engage young policymakers in solutions to make government work, MAP addresses a range of issues, from climate to justice to workers’ rights. “When you think about it,” she reflects, “who does dysfunction harm most? It’s the youngest Americans.”

In Aspen, Ascend fellows took part in Socratic dialogues that compelled them to question motivations and rethink long-held assumptions. The introspective, sometimes uncomfortable, process mirrors the ordeal our country needs to go through in order to restore democracy. “Separating style from substance isn’t always quick or easy,” Zaidane notes, “but it’s something we need to do.”

Zaidane grew up in the New York suburbs in a family of Moroccan immigrants. She initially planned a career in international relations, and shifting to the domestic landscape with MAP is calling upon her to engage multiple layers of her identity — not just as an Arab American woman but as a self-described chameleon and as a Millennial, which like any generational handle contains a bundle of contradictions.

Are they tolerant and empathetic, or impatient and cynical? All of the above? “MAP aims to make our institutions function better,” she says, and it starts with hearing each other out. “We’re not solving problems if we’re not listening,” she asserts.

One of Zaidane’s chief goals in the coming year is launching an innovation lab—a collaborative and inclusive space within MAP to equip young people with the tools to be successful at the state level, where some of the nastiest partisanship has taken root. “Becoming a better leader is one thing,” she says. “Helping build up other leaders is where the multiplier effect comes in.”

The Ascend Fellowship is helping her realize this vision. “Anne Mosle asks us, ‘What’s holding you back from making that quantum leap?’”

“We’re all taking a step back from our day-to-day challenges and thinking more about the long term.”

“,” Dr. Josiah Rector’s dense, deeply researched history of Detroit’s water disasters, lays out the origin story of this most recent catastrophe. Beginning with the mid nineteenth century, Rector meticulously layers fact upon fact to detail how politics, policy and societal changes ebbed and flowed in Michigan’s largest city over multiple generations to create a witches’ brew of race, class and gender inequalities that translated into polluted water and scandalous policies. If Rector’s cataloguing of these events has a certain here-we-go-again, rinse-and-repeat quality, it’s because since the late 19^th century through present day, Detroit’s history has seen incessant waves of income inequality, unregulated mass-produced industry, lackadaisical or non-existent financial regulation, environmental degradation and unrelenting racial segregation.

Along with this history of metastatic industrial development, staggering pollution, relentless corruption and breathtakingly bad policy, Rector presents the other side of the coin: the fierce, courageous, dogged commitment of activists pushing back decade after decade, demanding cleaner air, better working conditions and water that wouldn’t poison their children. Rector draws on dozens of oral history interviews and extensive archival research to tell in relatable terms what is likely the most comprehensive history of Detroit’s environmental justice movement to date.

At the heart of the issues raised in “Toxic Debt” is the question of whether access to water should be considered a human right available to all, or a commodity available to whoever can pony up sufficient money to pay a water bill. The irony baked into this question since Detroit’s earliest days is the fact that what Rector calls the “dehydration of Detroit” has occurred in an urban area surrounded by the largest freshwater system in the world.

Throughout the Rust Belt in the 1990s and 2000s, union busting, cuts to welfare programs and neoliberal trade policies that sent thousands of jobs to Mexico took a toll on America’s working class. For Michigan’s Black-majority cities, like Detroit and Flint, the toll was even more profound as decades of racist housing policies, white flight, and industrial and commercial disinvestment hollowed out the cities’ economic core.

Rector doesn’t mince words in laying the water disasters of both Flint and Detroit solidly at the feet of neoliberal policies of austerity, deregulation and privatization throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Wall Street shares a sizable part of the blame as legislation during President Bill Clinton’s tenure removed the firewall between commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies, supercharging Wall Street’s affection for mergers and acquisitions and enabling commercial banks to make increasingly risky investments. Investment banks marketed high-risk “swaps” to cities and Detroit, among many others, took the bait.

In 2013-2014, Detroit declared bankruptcy, resulting in Republican Gov. Rick Snyder suspending democracy via Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws, which gave the state the power to impose economically and environmentally disastrous policies without any accountability to the residents. Snyder put Detroit under an emergency manager and imposed radical austerity measures that shut off or poisoned the water of hundreds of thousands of Americans — largely African American families — living there. (For a look at how these decisions created the public health catastrophe of Flint’s water system, see our review of Dr Hanna Attisha’s “.” Different calamity, same players and policies.)

During this time, Detroit’s poor and working-class African Americans became a lucrative market for subprime loans, which treated home mortgages as a casino. Balloon fees led to out-of-control mortgage payments and as the families struggled to make these mortgage payments, they fell behind on their water bills. Rather than come up with ways to mitigate these payments, as had been done during the Great Depression, the city just cut off the spigot. As the city handled its bankruptcy — the largest in U.S. history — it made a bargain with its creditors and bondholders. Unsecured creditors — pension funds representing thousands of active and retired municipal workers and their families — had to take what the financial wizards called a “haircut,” meaning they paid for the city’s bankruptcy while the banks and insurance companies came out fine.

Two-thirds of the water cutoffs involved children. In a cruel Catch-22, child welfare authorities removed children from their homes because of a state requirement that all homes housing children have working utilities. On June 25, 2014, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights released a statement calling Detroit’s policy for shutting off people who couldn’t pay “an affront to human rights.” Protesters took to the streets demonstrating against the shutoffs and blockaded the dispatch facility to stop the trucks leaving to perform shutoffs.

U.N. officials visiting Detroit at the invitation of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights found examples of the indignities families suffered from the shutoffs, such as the mothers whose daughters had to wash themselves with bottled water during their periods, parents with asthmatic children who couldn’t operate nebulizers without water, families unable to adequately bathe themselves and clean their homes. The U.N. experts said the shutoffs violated international human rights laws including the right to water and sanitation, and the right to non-discrimination.

Even as the infamous unfolded, Gov. Snyder’s policies were contributing directly to increased lead poisoning among Detroit’s children as well. Austerity cuts to the Department of Health and Wellness led to the department ending its lead abatement program, despite evidence of “pervasive exposure” to lead among the children of Detroit — nearly twice the level in Flint. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no safe blood level of lead in children has been identified and even low levels of lead have been shown to negatively affect a child’s intelligence, academic achievement and ability to pay attention.

Austerity measures and outsourcing also led to a toxic water disaster in Detroit’s schools, as hundreds of the district’s unionized maintenance workers were laid off, accelerating the physical decay of its buildings. In 2016, Detroit Public Schools officials discovered toxic levels of lead and copper in 19 out of the district’s 62 tested schools. As Rector writes, “Far from fixing DPS, austerity policies had transformed centers of learning into sources of permanent brain damage for unknown numbers of children.”

It would be satisfying to report that these matters are all safely in the past and Detroit residents have finally gotten a fair shake and fresh water. Sadly, that is not the case. In March 2020, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer responded to activists’ demands for action by issuing an Executive Order requiring that all public water utilities restore water service to any residence where water had been shut off due to non-payment. The policy would only last through the end of the pandemic. Detroit has extended the shutoff moratorium through 2022 but has shown little support for progressive water rate structures.

Rector writes that the water disasters of Detroit and Flint demonstrate the “horrific human costs of sacrificing basic environmental health protections to the short-term financial interests of bond-holders and private contractors.” A major takeaway of “Toxic Debt” is how misguided the free-market approach to public services is. Privatizing has an incredible allure to investors, but “efficiencies” most often lead to underfunding the resources necessary for the long-term health and viability of an economy and a society. Public systems should be accountable to the public.

When you look at a toddler, what do you see? The young child gleefully caroming around a room, grabbing at every object that looks like it might go in her mouth, stacking and restacking blocks like a pint-sized Sisyphus? Or do you see who that child may be as she ages, the elementary schooler studiously following along with her teacher’s instruction, the high school graduate, the future doctor? While it may be natural to superimpose our envisioned futures over that child, there is harm in doing so: increasingly, the early childhood education field has embraced ideas of competitive, meritocratic sorting — and nowhere is this more evident than the pervasive concept of school readiness.

Linking the benefits of early care and education to later life success is such an article of faith that I don’t think we even realize it’s happening. Here is President Obama in his 2013 State of the Union , calling for a major expansion in preschool funding:

“These initiatives in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, housing – all these things will help entrepreneurs and small business owners expand and create new jobs. But none of it will matter unless we also equip our citizens with the skills and training to fill those jobs.

And that has to start at the earliest possible age. Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four-year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program. Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives. So tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America. That’s something we should be able to do.

Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than seven dollars later on – by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime. In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, form more stable families of their own. We know this works. So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.”

This rhetoric is echoed by governors of both parties. In 2019, of governors mentioned early childhood education in their State of the State addresses, with many riffing on the sentiments of Alabama’s Kay Ivey (R), “For a child to reach their fullest potential later in life, they must first build a strong educational foundation,” or New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham (D), “To truly and meaningfully transform public education, we must be proactive, and we must begin at the beginning. The research is unanimous and unequivocal: Children who attend preschool are far better prepared than those who don’t. It’s really as simple as that.”

These may seem like generally unobjectionable statements until you dig a little deeper.

Children as the Unit of Change

First and foremost, the current school readiness rhetoric puts the onus to change on young children. The question is about what the child is learning, what skills he is gaining, what he is prepared to do at the next stage. Little to no attention is paid to the surrounding conditions.

I’ve touched on this before, but now want to extend and deepen the ideas. I that

Modern ideas of school readiness first emerged in 1989 as part of the National Education Goals Panel. Convened by President George H.W. Bush amid growing fervor for educational improvement spurred by the , the panel’s first goal stated simply: “All children in America will start school ready to learn.” This brief sentence led to much controversy. Early learning luminary Samuel J. Meisels, founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute and someone deeply involved in these first conversations, wrote in 1998 of the types of questions which arose:

“Some pointed out that all children are ready to learn from birth. They need not wait until they are five years of age to be ‘ready to learn.’ Others pointed out that the goal ignores individual differences in learning. It will never be the case that all children will attain the same level of performance at a single culturally defined point in time. Individual differences and variations in development associated with both endogenous and exogenous factors make a mockery of our chronological benchmarks when we try to apply them across the board to all children.

Moreover, the term ‘readiness’ is conceptually confusing. Is ‘readiness’ something we wait for? Is it something we impose? Is it a within-the-child phenomenon or something outside the child? Finally, the simplistic or mechanistic interpretation of readiness that can be derived from the goal contains within it the potential for encouraging policies harmful to young children. In an educational world that is oriented toward efficiency and accountability, it is easy to imagine that someone will be penalized if we … find that some children are not ready for school. Often, the least advantaged in our society are blamed when public policies intended to assist them go wrong.”

Meisels was prescient. We have largely lost the essential truth that the great American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner taught us: children develop not in vacuums but in ecosystems. In , child development occurs as a dynamic process between the child “and the changing environments in which it actually lives and grows. The latter include not only the immediate settings containing the developing person but also the larger social contexts, both formal and informal, in which these settings are embedded.” These contexts include everything from the parents’ financial and relational stability to the broader socio-political stability of the child’s nation.

The narrow view of school readiness, which is now dominant, blinkers our thinking. To use an extreme example, helping parents avoid eviction and homelessness will reliably have more influence on a child’s academic and psychological development than ensuring that child attends a high-quality preschool program. Yet today, we do not think of an eviction prevention program as a school readiness intervention.

I say “today” because, ironically, the initial development of school readiness measures was far more holistic. We forget, but in the early 2000s there was a major effort between 17 states and several philanthropic foundations called the National School Readiness Indicators Initiative. The Initiative’s , released in 2005, bears little resemblance to our current school readiness discourse. It is worth quoting the introduction at length:

“Families and communities play critical roles in helping children get ready for school. Children from families that are economically secure and have healthy relationships are more likely to succeed in school. Infants and young children thrive when parents and families are able to surround them with love and support and opportunities to learn and explore their world.

Communities are vibrant when they provide social support for parents, learning opportunities for children, and services for families in need. Schools can improve the readiness of young children by making connections with local child care providers and preschools and by creating policies that ensure smooth transitions to kindergarten.

Children entering kindergarten vary in their early experiences, skills, knowledge, language, culture and family background. Schools must be ready to address the diverse needs of the children and families in their community and be committed to the success of every child.

Children will not enter school ready to learn unless families, schools and communities provide the environments and experiences that support the physical, social, emotional, language, literacy, and cognitive development of infants, toddlers and preschool children.”

The report authors go on to posit a “ready child equation”: Ready Families + Ready Communities + Ready Services + Ready Schools = Children Ready for School

Sit with that for a moment. The child’s development here is now the output of the equation, not the input. Instead of demanding that children clear a certain bar—and implicitly or explicitly declaring those who do so “ready” and those who do not “unready”— this equation demands the ecosystem surrounding children be set up to succeed. It still accepts that children will need the building blocks for important advances like learning to read, but their clumsy fine motor skills no longer have to set up the tower.

As a first step, then, we should reclaim this broader view of school readiness and take the load-bearing weight off toddlers and preschoolers. Yet, even so, the concept is still haunted by the specter of meritocracy.

The “Race of Life”

“So let’s do what works and make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind. Let’s give our kids that chance.”

Obama’s line, applied there directly to early childhood education, embraces an inherently competitive view of American society. It is part and parcel of what philosopher Michael Sandel calls the “.” Sandel writes that “Morally, it is unclear why the talented deserve the outsize rewards the market-driven societies lavish on the successful,” given that many skills (such as raw cognitive processing power or working memory) are mainly inborn as opposed to earned. Yet, he continues, our society makes winners of those who can navigate our education system versus “those who may be equally hardworking but less endowed with the gifts a market society happens to prize.”

Sandel further suggests that those who put education and so-called merit on a pedestal not only miss this key point, they “also ignore something more politically potent: the morally unattractive attitudes the meritocratic ethic promotes, among the winners and also among the losers. Among the winners, it generates hubris; among the losers, humiliation and resentment.” Merit is even tyrannical for the winners, because it fuels a relentless need to prove one’s worthiness through achievement.

While we see the tyranny of merit most active in K-12 and higher education, school readiness is the Trojan horse through which it has breached the world of early childhood.

Consider again the very concept that a child either has or does not have the skills, knowledge and behavioral foundations to be “ready” for kindergarten. As Samuel Meisels suggests, any early childhood educator—or parent who has watched multiple children develop on radically different timelines—can tell you this is a continuum and not a binary. Yet it is presented all too often as exactly that.

For instance, in 2019 data was released in Florida showing that 42 percent of the state’s pre-K students were “not ready” for kindergarten. Governor Ron DeSantis declaring that “a 42% failure rate is simply not defendable and certainly not good enough for Florida’s youngest learners,” while the state’s education commissioner pledged “we must have a real accountability measure for all our school readiness programs.” This is not partisan; similar stories can be found in many blue states.

Already, then, by the time children are five years old, they are being sorted in categories of failure and success. A race, after all, has winners and losers.

It is worth noting that these ideas have been lurking beneath—and at times above—the surface for some time, at least when it comes to poor children and children of color (one cannot go far in a discussion about early childhood within reckoning with classism and racism). When President Johnson announced the Head Start program in 1965, :

“Five- and six-year-old children are inheritors of poverty’s curse and not its creators. Unless we act these children will pass it on to the next generation, like a family birthmark.

This program this year means that 30 million man-years—the combined life span of these youngsters—will be spent productively and rewardingly, rather than wasted in tax-supported institutions or in welfare-supported lethargy.”

This tyranny of merit drives a vicious cycle. If children are “failing” to be ready for kindergarten and already headed for the abyss, then surely the solution is more academics, more “accountability.” The downward pressure from a hypercompetitive college admissions process— with a bachelor’s degree increasingly seen as the only reliable path to prosperity—has arrived. Contrast this again with the Indicators Initiative comment that “Children entering kindergarten vary in their early experiences, skills, knowledge, language, culture and family background. Schools must be ready to address the diverse needs of the children and families in their community and be committed to the success of every child.”

We have already seen tremendous changes in kindergarten itself. that by the 2010s kindergarten had become “the new first grade,” with teachers devoting “more time to advanced literacy and math content, teacher-directed instruction and assessment, and substantially less time to art, music, science and child-selected activities.” For children who tend to struggle more with academics, they thus encounter a higher and higher wall earlier and earlier.

I want to be clear here that I am not suggesting there is no place for assessment. Assessments are useful tools for educators, and from a policy standpoint some commentators rightly warn of an “honesty gap” in not wanting to acknowledge that some children perform at different levels than others. My point is that the tyranny of merit twists that fact into a logic where the answer is merely to try and boost as many kids as possible over the wall, regardless of the fact that some significant number will remain trapped, waiting for someone to open a door instead, for years and years, often until they simply give up on thinking they are worth anyone coming to fetch.

A question, too, remains hanging over all of this: what’s on the other side of that wall?

Continue reading this column in Part 2.

“I bribe them within an inch of their life in order for them to keep quiet,” Morgan said. Morgan is a bone marrow transplant coordinator, her husband also works in health care, and she has the later workday start at 7:00 am. The daycare, however, doesn’t open for another half hour. And this is the earliest option available anywhere close to where they work and live.

Tari Brodsky, a nurse practitioner in Long Island, New York, said that every mom she knows who works at the hospital has had this same struggle. Daycares tend to run between 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., but Brodsky, who works 12 hour shifts, has to be at work at 7:00 a.m. and isn’t finished until 7:00 p.m. When her twins were young, she worked the overnight shift, hiring a babysitter to come in the afternoon for four hours while she slept. Now, she works on Sundays, so that her husband can be home with the kids and she doesn’t have to struggle to find coverage.

Morgan and Brodsky both recounted these stories in an interview with Better Life Lab. But they aren’t alone in having this predicament. Traditional child care hours don’t work for all families, including families who have sporadic or inconsistent work. Nationally, only are open during nontraditional hours, which can mean anything from starting early, long shifts, overnights or weekends.

Families are different. They work different schedules. They need and want different things. And that changes over time as jobs change, life circumstances change or children grow up. In researching child care innovations on the state and local level, and echoed by a report from the , we found there is not a one-size-fits-all or “silver bullet” solution for how child care delivery should operate. But we do know that innovation surrounding nontraditional schedules and child care deserts are needed to increase supply and meet demand.

Key Finding: There is no one-size-fits-all solution to child care needs. Innovation surrounding nontraditional schedules and child care deserts are needed to increase supply and meet demand.

To improve supply, meet demand and provide support for a wider variety of families, innovators in the child care space are doing more to support home-based, family-based or Family, Friend and Neighbor care. Currently, such informal care settings , can be more easily set up and can be a better match for families who work non-traditional schedules or who are seeking a specific cultural match.

These “informal care providers” as many are referred to, can be licensed or unregulated, depending on state and local business regulations. Many have not received formal business and marketing training, yet are tasked with running a business as part of their child care. They may lack splashy marketing materials and brand-name recognition of center-based care. And several innovators spoke of a bias in home-based care, that it is perceived as less worthy or less valuable than center-based care. Innovators in this space are working to change that perception and show that home-based care plays a crucial role in child care delivery.

Other benefits to the family child care centers include:

• Children of multiple ages can stay together
• There can be a shared cultural or linguistic connection
• They can be more easily set up in traditional child care deserts, , and when quality child care for many people just doesn’t exist. In many cases, this model can be a better fit for a family, depending on their needs and priorities.

Home Grown Child Care – supporting informal care as a quality child care option

“There is a bias around home-based childcare,” explains Natalie Renew, director of , which connects funders with child care providers, provides resources to home-based child care, and advocates for providers to policy makers. Home-based child care centers are typically less resourced and less visible than center-based child care centers, especially those centers connected to existing institutions, like a school system. They also receive fewer funds under the federal child care subsidy system, even for doing the same work as child care centers.

The current child care system uses quality metrics as part of a process to calculate reimbursement rates for providers who accept subsidies. These systems, too, disadvantage informal care centers. “The typical framework for quality is based on teacher qualifications, room arrangement and indoor environments,” Renew said. “When we talk to families who use home-based care, we learn that they are defining quality differently: intergenerational relationships between parents and families; flexibility; small groups; consistent routines; feeling of safety. These perceptions of qualities — while valued in the literature — are not present in the quality metrics.”

, too, supports what Renew says regarding families’ preference for unregulated home-based care. “A lot of prior thinking is that this was a second choice, but it’s not what families want. But now families are saying we want unregulated home-based care,” said Renew. They want kids to sleep in their own beds and eat meals with people in their immediate community.

“Because our framework is so oriented around the activities, and the way we define quality in the context of centers, a narrative has developed that this is a lower quality of care,” Renew said. “The standards as written are modeled on school and center-based operations. It looks different in home-based care. There is a routine: the natural routine of the family. And that is what builds stability for learning and curiosity. The desire to superimpose that center-based model creates unfair and unjustified burdens on the providers, and they don’t get appreciated for the incredible assets that exist in home-based care.”

Another problem with the existing subsidy system is the paperwork required for providers to accept funds. For a small, informal-care provider, the administrative burden can be too great. Ashli Carlock, a home-based provider in Nebraska wrote about the process in a : “It’s nerve wracking. You know you’re going to get paid something, but you don’t know what that will be exactly… You’re trying to calculate in your mind paying bills, keeping food stocked for kids, meeting your own personal needs, and paying a part-time employee.”

All Our Kin, Supporting Family Child Care Providers as Educators

Another group working to expand the role of family child educators is the Connecticut-based , a nonprofit that trains, supports and sustains family child care providers. “We built this organization to recognize that family child cares are left out of conversations and devalued,” said Jessica Sager, founder of All Our Kin.

Because family child care centers tend to be used and are , Sanger believes they have been devalued by systemic racism, which has rendered family child labor as worthless. “Children can succeed in any setting with stable, nurturing care,” said Sanger. That stable, nurturing environment isn’t restricted to the domain of child care centers, which can benefit from having more resources for reaching families.

What we need: better reimbursement rates, quality metrics and availability

Improving the current child care delivery system to meet the needs of more families and in more places will require improving the current reimbursement rates and availability of informal child care. Currently, informal care can vary widely from state to state with myriad licensing standards and subsidy reimbursement rates. For example, in Massachusetts, anyone watching a single, non-relative child in their own home requires a child-care license. In South Dakota, a caregiver can watch without requiring a license.

Additionally, both the quality metrics and subsidy reimbursements among states and informal care can vary widely. Renew has been outspoken for efforts to encourage decision-makers and others to recognize the value that home-based child care brings to children’s development, families and communities overall. A key way to support that care, she says, is to improve compensation for it.

There has been an influx of venture capital funding for innovations that make child care delivery more manageable and affordable, such as Wonderschool, Wee Care and Winnie, which connect families looking for child care with a provider. But while some may take into account licensed family-care providers, most are still concentrated on traditional child care delivery systems, particularly day care centers. While child care centers are an effective child care option for many families, they do not work for all families, especially those in child care deserts or those who work nontraditional hours. In addition, daycare centers often charge a set rate regardless of the number of hours used. For families that require only part- time or sporadic child care (such as those working unpredictable hours), the center-based care is not an ideal fit and .

To be sure, even an influx of home-based child care providers will not be enough without the shift in perceptions, quality standards and subsidy reimbursements that put such providers at a disadvantage. Elevating home-based providers requires a change in our country’s way of thinking about child-care delivery, and one that is immediately needed to support a growing workforce.

Read .

A Fleeting Universal Child Care Program During World War II

During War War II, New York City’s Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia funded a handful of already existing school-based nurseries so that women could work in factories, replacing men deployed to war. This inspired the federal government’s 1941 Lanham Act, which paid for wartime daycares in hundreds of cities. Historians argue this is the closest the country has come to universal child care.

Through a quirk of definition, New York City nurseries did not qualify for federal funding from the Lanham Act. But with local funding, the city grew the number of its nurseries offering child care. Women loved them. When the war ended, soldiers returned home, and women were expected to stop working for pay, working women in New York City and around the country rallied to keep the wartime daycares open, framing child care as a universal right and essential to women’s social citizenship. It was the first time “American parents directly expressed their need for child care in a visible and organized fashion,” wrote Sonya Michel in Children’s Interests/Mother’s Rights.

New York’s wartime programs remained open, but they were not available to all, as the activists had wanted. Instead, they were reserved for poor families. Nonetheless, it was “a massive victory,” wrote Black. California was the only other state to emerge from the war with its publicly-funded wartime daycares intact. New York City’s nurseries became the foundation for what would eventually become the largest publicly-funded child care system in the country.

New York City’s Daycare Workers Organize

In the 1960s, as support for universal child care continued to grow throughout the U.S., staff at these publicly-funded daycares organized into the country’s first union for child care workers, drawing attention to the working conditions of the child care workforce at a time when many middle class feminists were focused solely on making child care more available. “It was not just a demand for child care, but a demand for decent work conditions for a workforce made up disproportionately of women of color,” explained Black.

This union, which remains the largest daycare local in the country, won its workers a wage scale comparable to that of elementary school teachers in public schools. In the decade to come, these unionized workers would become some of the most steadfast activists in New York City’s second major push to win universal child care.

New York City’s Second Push for Universal Care

Around the time that New York City’s child care workforce was organizing, the number of families receiving welfare was ballooning and policymakers in D.C. began to eye , one with potential to reduce the growing welfare rolls. They made federal funding available for that purpose.

But among the public, support for publicly-funded universal child care available to all continued to grow. For middle-class white feminists entering the workforce, the dream of universal child care “expressed their dissatisfaction with gender and family norms that forced middle-class women to take care of children at home,” explained an from Bitchmedia. For welfare activists, it challenged the practice of using means-tested child care benefits “to surveil and control” welfare recipients. And for Black feminists, advocating for universal child care “disputed the common cultural narrative that blamed Black mothers and Black families for systemic poverty.”

In many of New York City’s low-income Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, parents began forming their own pockets of free or low-cost child care by organizing small community-run daycares for local children. Unlike most child care centers of the time that were overseen by large social service agencies as charity for poor families, these small daycares were an outgrowth of the civil rights movement and represented community empowerment, and the community looking out for itself. But some were financially precarious and began looking to the city for funding.

The community programs found a receptive ear in New York City’s Republican Mayor John Lindsay. By the end of the decade, the amount of federal funds available for child care had mushroomed, and Lindsay began using this money to lay the groundwork for the expansive publicly-funded child care system that feminists and advocates envisioned. As I described for , the city began funding many of the community-controlled child care programs while also opening new child care centers. In just three years — from 1971 to 1974 — the city tripled its child care programs, growing from about 120 programs to over 400, and providing child care for more than four times the number of children.

Lindsay created a new city agency to oversee the programs. The Agency for Child Development, as it was named, was staffed with feminists and “vocal advocates” who embraced an expansive child care vision of “as much quantity and quality as possible,” according to a . New York City’s network of public child care centers quickly became known for both the large number of children served as well as “its commitment to high quality care that set national benchmarks,” wrote Black. These standards included a 10-hour-day for working families, onsite nurses at many of the centers and family counselors.

But a contentious question loomed: who were the daycares for? The federal government had a ready answer: federally-funded child care was meant to be a support to move welfare recipients into the workforce. But it granted states and cities flexibility in interpreting the federal eligibility requirements. And so the community-run programs, which comprised a little less than half of all the city programs, used their own liberal definition of “community need” when enrolling parents. Some refused to ask families about their income, wrote Black, “considering such questions an invasion of privacy and a means of reinforcing class distinctions.” In essence, they were providing a form of on-demand universal, economically-integrated, community-controlled child care for whichever families expressed a need for daycare.

This brush with universal child care was brief. In 1971, President Nixon vetoed a plan for a national child care system. Soon after, federal funding for child care began to dry up. In response, the state set stricter eligibility requirements for government-funded child care. These changes outraged workers and parents at the community programs. Over many months, parents and workers staged protests. A coalition of community-based programs demonstrated on New York City’s Triborough Bridge (now officially known as the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge); they held a sit-in at the campaign headquarters of Mayor Lindsay, who was contemplating a run for president; and they organized a one-day model daycare in front of City Hall. , a daycare leader who would later co-found Ms. Magazine, was central to the movement and her pro-daycare arguments involved issues of racial, gender and social justice. Linking child care to welfare surveilled poor mothers, she said, and isolated their children.

At first, staff at the Agency for Child Development and Mayor Lindsay sided with the activists. But when the state threatened to cut funding, the city capitulated: the centers would serve only poor families. As federal and state funding continued to wither, the city began cutting services and even quality standards in the programs to save money. Working conditions worsened with the programs and staff stretched thin. When New York City entered a deep fiscal crisis in 1975, it began closing programs, laying off hundreds of workers while leaving working parents, and especially mothers, scrambling. “The dream of a universal child care system in New York City had once again been crushed,” wrote Black about the time.

And yet, many gains won by the activists persevere. New York City continues to have the country’s largest publicly-funded child care system for low-income families, “one recognized for its commitment to high-quality, center-based programming delivered by non-profit community agencies,” wrote Black. Much of this system’s workforce remains unionized and have continued to advocate for better wages and working conditions over the years. And Black sees New York City’s Universal Pre-K and 3K program as a direct outgrowth of the many years of this advocacy.

Today, during a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on child care programs and working parents nationwide, New York City hovers yet again on the verge of universal child care. Black is optimistic. Unlike in previous decades of activism, today’s advocates are armed with hard data demonstrating how quality care benefits children and also pays for itself through tax revenues generated by working mothers. Advocates are using that data to construct what Black calls “a different kind of narrative,” one more focused on economics. He’d like to see the earlier arguments of social justice and gender equality succeed, but he thinks the new ones will be what tip the scale. Regardless of the winning argument, Black added, today’s advocates “stand on the shoulders of previous generations of poor and working-class women who laid the foundation” for this moment.

I spoke to the courageous women on both sides of the camera. Clarissa Doutherd and Tamara Perkins were both solo parents when they met at an Oakland nonprofit that connects parents and families with child care providers.

Filmmaker Perkins had visited because she had been laid off from her job — thus losing her health insurance — when she was nine months pregnant. “I had never accessed any social services until I was suddenly thrown off the cliff and had to figure out health care,” she says. “I was in this very raw state of trying to understand how this had happened to me.”

She adds, “The stories that I told have been really tied to my own life experience.” Her other projects include and , which both deal with the consequences of mass incarceration.

At Bananas, Perkins and Doutherd commiserated and compared notes about the obstacles for single mothers trying to obtain benefits. “In Europe,” Perkins says, “All of this support is just expected. And here we are shaming the parents who need these services and subsidies to survive.”

For Doutherd, the story was all too familiar. She and her two siblings grew up in Sacramento with a single mother who relied on public benefits, and she still remembers the stigma and the challenges. Much of the time, her grandparents, who had escaped extreme racial violence in the deep South by joining the military, provided the child care. “They instilled in us our sense of history and purpose. I also learned how to address poverty and racism and gender injustice through humor and through art.”

Doutherd had first come to Bananas for a child care subsidy and was waiting to meet her case manager when an organizer from Parent Voices Oakland, which is located in the same building, approached. “She asked me what I thought about the child care system,” Doutherd recalls. “How is it working for me as a parent? And that was really the first time anyone had asked me a question about what I thought or felt about any public service.” She volunteered with the organization for two years before joining the staff and now serves as executive director.

What originally politicized Doutherd, she explains, was “someone else making decisions about the health and well-being of my son. I was enraged by the fact that I didn’t know about services that were actually life preserving for my son and me. All I wanted to do was make sure that we were stable, that we had housing, that we had access to food, that our most basic needs were met.”

Doutherd discovered a network of what she calls in the movie “bad-ass, beautiful, fierce mothers” — including one named Tara, who took care of her son when he was sick and had no one else to watch him. “These women are really holding up society and not acknowledged or compensated for this labor. They do so much more than just babysit.” Parent Voices Oakland aims to build and nurture this community as well as organizing for policy reform.

The film captures Doutherd’s balancing act as an organizer, recognizing that while her experience of homelessness when she first had her son was a trauma that qualified her to speak on the issue, she had to build power in order to persuade voters and elected officials. She pushes herself through exhaustion and a diagnosis of high blood pressure, knocking on doors and speaking to organized labor and other stakeholders across the county.

Doutherd’s son Xavier steals the show nearly every time he’s on camera. We see him making calls for Parent Voices and interrogating his mother about her work. “He got pretty used to the cameras, but mostly he got used to me campaigning,” Doutherd says.

Clarissa’s Battle ends on a cautious high note, and though a well-funded anti-tax group has challenged the measure in court, Doutherd expects her side to prevail. Meanwhile, Parent Voices continue to organize. “As long as child development centers attached to schools are closing,” Doutherd says, “as long as more providers than ever are having to close their doors because they can’t pay rent, we have to ramp up our organizing to protect public institutions and the social safety net. We still have to fight very hard.”

The award coincided with a campaign in support of a $21 million millage (a kind of tax). The measure, which has the support of Mayor LaToya Cantrell, is up for a vote on April 30. Via email, I interviewed two leaders of the — the lead organization for the prize—about their work: Rhonda J. Broussard, the founder and CEO, and Lesley Brown Rawlings, vice president of strategy; they responded jointly to the questions.

What do our readers need to know about children and families in your community? And about your organization?

Collectively as a nation, families and communities have spent the last two years grappling with both the importance of child care, as well as the crippling impact of its absence. Within the City of New Orleans, our families have experienced a gap in child care that emerged long before COVID. Over 78% of our children are Black and Latinx, and our child care providers are predominantly Black and Brown as well. Yet the lack of access to capital and resources that these critical caregivers experience means that every year thousands of families are left unserved. In fact, recent data suggests that more than one third of Louisiana child care facilities are expected to close in the coming year due to insufficient funding and lack of operating capital.

What does this crisis mean for New Orleans?

As we have seen, when families are unable to find reliable, safe, high-quality care for their children, then guardians, disproportionately women, are forced out of the workforce as a result. Therefore in New Orleans, we are seeing a compounded effect. We’re observing BIPOC women who run small businesses suffer from structural racism that blocks their access to open and sustain child care facilities that serve the majority of children in the city. While, at the same time, we observe the guardians of those children, mostly Black and Brown women, losing access to employment opportunities in order to step into the full-time caregiver role. This results in a wholesale lack of economic mobility for BIPOC women across the city.

How is Beloved Community stepping up?

We are committed to supporting communities along a collaborative journey to advance economic mobility. Our work brings together transformative shifts around leader capacity, policy, data and research in order to support regions in achieving a tipping point towards equity. The project fully embodies our organizational mission and values. As we are headquartered in New Orleans, it is an honor to work in partnership with 11 other organizations over the next five years to seed changes that we believe will have a multigenerational effect on the city.

Your organization . How did the sabbatical change or influence your thinking?

Our February sabbatical is anchored in the transformational power of rest. We deeply believe that only through rest can we reach our fullest potential as individuals and as a team. We initiated this practice two years ago, and each year we have new learnings and ways to approach the season. One of the reflections that we had following our 2021 sabbatical is that rest does not need to be “earned.” All people deserve to rest, and this practice is inclusive of all members of our team.

I name the importance of this learning because when we think about BIPOC womxn and caregivers in New Orleans, rest can present itself as a luxury. If you are inadequately resourced and supported, then rest is simply not an option, even if you understand its value. We believe that the work of the NOLA C.A.R.E.S. project is about expanding the access to resources and supports necessary to make rest a right, rather than a privilege for Black and Brown women throughout the city.

What is your plan for using the funds from JPMC’s Advancing Cities prize?

NOLA C.A.R.E.S. is a collaborative of 12 organizations from across the city and state who are committed to working together to foster Black and Latinx women-led child care businesses that value Black and Latinx women as caregivers, entrepreneurs, employees and mothers. Over the next five years, this collaborative will come together to implement two key interventions: one, introducing child care as a workplace benefit and two, providing capital and/or business and workforce training to support Black and Latinx women who provide child care for Black and Latinx families. To achieve this, we will advance three distinct pillars:

• Caregiver Growth & Support: Over the course of the three-year commitment, the collaborative will help at least 120 Black and Latinx women receive a Child Development Associate certification and establish an Early Learning Facilities Fund to make low- or no-cost child care facilities more widely available.
• Employer Capacity Building: Additionally we will create a cohort of 20 local hospitality businesses to develop and implement plans for racially equitable workplaces that help Black and Latinx women advance into management positions.
• Local Policy: Finally, we will engage at least 500 women in participatory research and support public policy to provide low-cost facilities to child care centers and increase public subsidies and worker compensation in New Orleans.

What role is Beloved playing in the upcoming millage on a property tax dedicated to funding high-quality preschool seats?

is a critical property tax millage for the future of our city. We’re proud to support the millage efforts because it will not only strengthen educational outcomes for our young people, but it will make it possible for more mothers to provide for their families. It’s encouraging to see so many of our local culture bearers, community leaders, elected officials and business leaders come out in support of adding 1,500 funded seats for early childhood education.

How does early childhood education fit into Beloved’s overall equity and anti-racism work?

Over the past several years, much has been said about the “preschool to prison pipeline.” That conversation stems from the knowledge that equitable access to a vibrant, thriving future is tied to the opportunities and experiences that the youngest members of our communities are able to access. When little people are trapped in cycles of poverty because their parents are locked out of the workforce, or when they enter kindergarten with a vocabulary deficit because they couldn’t attend a quality preschool, then they are beginning life at a disadvantage from which it can be incredibly difficult to recover. As Beloved Community works to create tipping points towards racial equity across the intersecting sectors of education, workforce and housing, we must consider our work holistically from our earliest experiences. Therefore we champion equity, not just when a child begins K-12 or when they graduate from college, but rather throughout every system that touches our lives.

As executive director of the Alabama Institute for Social Justice (AISJ), Lenice Emanuel sees her job as “selling freedom.” She’s more than willing to use protest, confrontation and the tools of a community organizer in the fight for freedom and justice. “Nothing of importance was ever changed in this country without upsetting the status quo,” she says.

AISJ originated in 1972 as the Federation of Child Care Centers of Alabama (FOCAL). With the name change, which occurred in 2017, Emanuel says, “We have become an advocacy organization focused on empowering women and minorities, but children remain our first love and our foundation.” It doesn’t make sense to focus on child care without addressing racial and gender equity or recognizing the interconnected historical, economic and political issues robbing children of their potential.

The State of Alabama presents more entrenched challenges than most other parts of the country. Emanuel points to the by Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, which compared living conditions in rural Alabama to those in the developing world. Although the state’s early education initiatives have been covered by Early Learning Nation and in a , she maintains, “Alabama is really not trying to make investments to dismantle poverty or to enfranchise marginalized people.”

She continues, “There is a culture here of, ‘We’d much rather look good than actually be good.’ It’s a Southern thing, right?”

Emanuel comes by activism naturally. Her parents attended Alabama State University during the Civil Rights movement and marched with Dr. King, and today her father pastors a church in the City of Prichard, in Mobile County, across from the former site of the Harlem Duke Social Club, where B.B. King, Ray Charles, Etta James and more performed. Growing up, Emanuel remembers, her parents took in homeless people and mothers running from domestic violence.

After graduating from Spring Hill College, Emanuel went to work for the Mobile YWCA, where she received her foundational training in racial and gender equity. Her work with AISJ, however, pushed her into next-level community engagement, where systems change centered her work and she began engaging in what she calls “hardcore, grassroots organizing, in the trenches, working with some of the poorest and most marginalized people in the state of Alabama.”

Along the way, she has learned to navigate rural poverty as someone from a marginalized community, but whose upbringing was more middle class, as her parents placed a premium on education, ensuring her competitive academic exposure. To that end, she acknowledges that, “There have been times I’ve had to check my own class at the door, to really understand what the true values of parents were, when observing the confidence some had in leaving their children in centers that, at times, operated in less than ideal conditions.”

“They want their children to be safe,” she says. “They care nothing about these rubrics that we want to invest so much money into.” She contends, “Quality is subjective, and for many Black and often poor families, quality is quantified in the personal character of those caring for their children.”

Given the opportunity to join AISJ in 2015, Emanuel jumped at the chance to follow in the footsteps of one of her idols, MacArthur fellow , who had integrated the previously all-white Wetumpka High School and gone on to found FOCAL with a group of activist women. “How do you stay in the game this long in a state like Alabama?” Emanuel marvels. In her first hundred days as executive director, she set out to meet a hundred people, including 80 child care providers. The conversations she’s had before and during the pandemic inform her approach and fuel her commitment to speak her truth. “I’m just not the kind of person that’s going to tell you that something is that is not,” she says.

In Emanuel’s view, the state’s leaders—including some praised by Early Learning Nation—“are in deep need of cultural competency. They’re so myopically focused on pushing their agenda through that they don’t listen to the people in the field.”

“It is morally wrong,” she asserts, “to just continue to exacerbate the conditions of people when you are in a position to make a difference. It is morally wrong to have American Rescue Plan money that was designed to help people in this pandemic used to build more jails.”

Invited to take part in budget conversations with the leaders she’s criticized so relentlessly, Emanuel almost declined, but ultimately decided to use her voice. “I’m going to stay at the table,” she says, “but at the same time, I’m going to continue to challenge them.”

AISJ collaborated with and the Children’s Funding Project to demonstrate how federal funding could make a much bigger difference for Alabama families.

“Everyone knows Lenice is a fighter,” says Gaines, “but it’s the way she uses data to tell the story of Alabama child care that makes her so effective.”

Rooted in , this method focuses on how to improve services rather than simply evaluate their effectiveness. Professor Green says it entails more of a partnership than traditional methods of evaluation, working with staff and families to design, carry out and interpret the research. Recently, she teamed up with the Perigee Fund on the Parent Voices Study, which supports efforts to help families with children prenatal-to-3 who have been affected by trauma, racism and poverty.

Elizabeth Krause, director of programs at Perigee Fund, said “COVID-19 disrupted the ability of early childhood and infant mental health programs to deliver services as they always have—with regular, in-person visits. With the switch to telehealth during the pandemic, families got to experience a different way of accessing services that not only offered many benefits but also changed the way that parents participate in these programs altogether. This research was an opportunity to hear directly from families what worked and what didn’t work as program providers and funders consider what a post-COVID landscape looks like.”

The project complements what the field is learning from the RAPID-EC Project, which relies on surveys (). “RAPID-EC and Parent Voices are both identifying important silver linings of the pandemic,” says University of Michigan’s Christina Weiland, lead author of . The field is learning new ways of engaging with parents, in ways that hopefully will stick after the crisis is over.

Families with infants and toddlers often participate in programs delivered in the home, rather than in a child care setting. How these services shifted during the pandemic was the focus of the . Professor Green’s team at Portland State University worked with colleagues at the University of Connecticut and Georgetown University to conduct in-depth interviews with 100 parents and caregivers at seven early childhood organizations across the country. Parents acted as consultants to help create the study’s methodology and to understand and share findings. Researchers provided a programmatic stipend to the partner organizations as well as gift cards to participants. Professor Green and her colleagues will present their research at in March.

The interviews yielded three noteworthy, even surprising, discoveries that might inspire further research or, better yet, changes in the ways early childhood home visiting services, and infant and early childhood mental health services, are delivered:

1. There are more similarities than differences among sites. “We designed the study purposefully,” Professor Green explains, “to discover the ways different types of programs have responded to the pandemic.” And yet, in spite of varied service models, geographic locations and family characteristics between, for instance, a program serving Native American families in Michigan and another serving Black children in urban D.C., a great deal of consistency emerged from the interview responses.

The pandemic impacted the health and pocketbooks of families in all different areas of the country, and maintaining a skilled workforce stood out as a challenge in every instance. Not only were the impacts on families similar, but families told similar stories about what did or didn’t work for them as programs pivoted to remote approaches.

2. Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility. Technology can do more than we expected. Parents, caregivers and professionals alike deeply appreciated the extent that teleconferencing liberated them from travel and other logistical challenges of home visiting. “Before the pandemic,” Professor Green says, “all the evidence-based home visiting programs had strict requirements for certain practices, but we discovered that inflexibility was driving away higher-needs families and jeopardizing retention of those families.”

3. Early childhood programs are a lifeline. The challenges experienced by parents and caregiver go beyond issues that directly affect their children. Work schedules fluctuated. Social services became both urgent and harder to access. Families without broadband were especially isolated. Through this period, clinicians and home visiting professionals provided far more support than what their job descriptions listed.

In Michigan, one tribal parent and caregiver reported, “To be honest, during the pandemic, I was like, I don’t know if I really even want to do this anymore. It’s just on the phone and I’m just telling them about him. They’re not really seeing him. So, I was contemplating ending the program. But I noticed, they do help a lot with just making sure he’s on track with his progress, making sure that he’s meeting the milestones… I don’t know how to explain it, they’re always willing to work with the kids.”

Another parent’s interview response highlighted the power of a brief text exchange: “When we’re not talking or whatever or I’m having a bad day, I get a text message from her.… It’s like, how’d she know I’m not doing too great?… I can talk to her like she’s my friend, but she’s not my friend. She’s my support person. It’s a big support for sure. I don’t trust a lot of people like I trust her.”

“[Gentrification] starts when people in low-status communities believe that there is no value there,” she writes. “It happens when we tell ourselves that there is no value in our own communities and act accordingly.” Meanwhile, “An entire industry banks, literally, on the current inhabitants in those communities not recognizing the value.”

How do these insights apply to early learning issues in America? Consider the book’s subtitle. There are many reasons why families with young children move into or away from a neighborhood, but the availability of affordable, reliable early child care education often comes near the top of the list, along with safe, delightful playgrounds where families can gather. And who takes these items off the wish list and into reality? The solution doesn’t start with real estate developers. It starts with neighbors.

The long and short of it is this: building wealth within communities is good for babies.

Carter’s justifiably angry but ultimately hopeful book calls on all of us — gentrifiers and gentrified alike — to support policies and projects that support quality of life within low-status communities. The key to quality of life is wealth creation, and the key to wealth creation is real estate.

Her modest proposal: “What if we made investments in the future wealth-generating capacity of low-status community members? This includes projects such as housing and business development that address aspirations for their lives, complete with lifestyle infrastructure such as nice bars, cafes and restaurants, as well as homeownership and local business development support for people who desire them.”

She draws some hope from a clear-eyed recollection of the past, including the history of relatives “taken up by chain gangs” in Georgia. They were walking through town, minding their own business, when they were arrested for “vagrancy” and then forced to “work off their fines” in quarries owned by local white men. Such outright racist and economic violence isn’t acceptable anymore, but the legal machinations deployed to extract wealth and labor from people of color is not merely an artifact of history.

The housing market is confusing. Mortgage rates. Credit ratings. Points. Taxes. Maybe it’s intentionally confusing. Carter believes that demystifying the mumbo-jumbo will enable residents to participate in the market rather than allowing themselves to get fleeced by predatory speculators; she remains furious at the fate of the house she grew up in. Local business development also figures into the equation, and her experience launching and operating the Boogie Down Grind is revealing in this regard. While many residents appreciate having an independent café in the South Bronx, others accuse her of perpetuating… you guessed it, gentrification. To these critics, Carter has a ready retort: coffee is the Blackest beverage on earth.

Beyond real estate savvy, Carter offers encouragement and wisdom for anyone seeking to improve the neighborhood. You don’t always have to agree with everyone at the community board meeting, but you have to be able to have a conversation. If you happen to come up with ideas, you should expect negativity — even from your own peers. “It is very disturbing at the time it happens,” she writes, “but I promise you, it becomes less and less so as you just keep doing the work.”

As someone who has spent his entire career working at and with nonprofit organizations, I found Carter’s dismissal of the sector hard to take, mostly because her critiques are undeniable. There is too much bureaucracy. Too much money goes to organizations led by people who look like (or went to college with) foundation program officers. At the same time, while she draws helpful lessons from the corporate world — especially the idea of talent retention — she may put too much faith in business, which, after all, is also mired in racism and exploitation.

Whether you interact with your community as a resident or business owner, through a nonprofit mission or a business agenda, Reclaiming Your Community will enlighten you, provoke you and challenge you to do better.

����Dz԰�Ǵڴ�’s is called “Re-Envisioning Early Childhood Policy and Practice in a World of Striking Inequality and Uncertainty,” and bears the subtitle “New Science + More Diverse Voices = Greater Impact.” His overarching point is that the existing circumference of early childhood development — what he considered early childhood development or ECD “1.0” is absolutely correct, but drawn too narrowly. The way to build on these foundations, Shonkoff offers, is by embracing contemporary science around the interaction of a child’s body and surrounding environment—including exposure to literal toxins and structural inequities —with their brain development. He calls this both-and perspective “ECD 2.0,” and writes (emphases his):

• It’s still about the brain and it’s also about immune and metabolic systems.
• It’s still about readiness to succeed in school and it’s also about lifelong health.
• It’s still about the hardships of poverty and it’s also about the threats and burdens of racism.
• It’s still about nurturing relationships and it’s also about building a health-promoting society.

In my view, what this implies is that the early childhood field needs to further break down its silos. It should be said that, to its credit, compared to nearby fields like K-12 education, early childhood is already much better at taking a true whole-child approach; so there are certainly places where this is already happening. Child care policy, paid leave policy and home visiting policy — whereby a trained professional provides support to new parents — tend to be cousins, related yet distinct. Maternal and child health policy, such as access to doulas, can be another step removed. An ECD 2.0 lens suggests these are in fact inseparable parts of the same immediate family and should be treated as such.

ECD 2.0 also says that issue areas currently considered far afield from early childhood must be drawn closer in our metrics, advocacy, and philanthropic investments. Young children, it turns out, have gravitational pull: they bring a multitude of satellite priorities into orbit. For instance, mold and lead abatement are generally the purview of the housing sector, but given the impacts of environmental toxins on developing bodies and brains, early childhood stakeholders may need to join forces on a housing quality agenda.

Climate change is perhaps the most striking example. Shonkoff mentions air pollution, one of the more to children supercharged by climate change. With large swaths of America on fire for large portions of the year (witness December’s devastating Boulder County fire and the one currently raging in Big Sur, California), and air pollution trapped by heat, this is not a matter of small concern. And air pollution is only one of a rogue’s gallery of climate-enhanced dangers to which young children are . Again, ECD 2.0 demands an . (For what it’s worth, this should not be a one-way street: other fields need to embrace and invest in young children with far more alacrity than they currently do.)

What’s particularly stirring about ����Dz԰�Ǵڴ�’s call to action is that he is not asking the field to abandon its fundamentals, but instead to acknowledge both the value and limitations of those fundamentals along with the need to evolve. As he concludes: “The early childhood field is at a critical inflection point in a changing world. The opportunity to align new science and the lived experiences of families and decision makers across a diversity of sectors, cultures, and political values offers a powerful pathway forward. The need for shared leadership along that path is urgent.”