BUILDing Strong Foundations

Almost four million babies are born in the United States every year. These infants require diapers, blankets, baby food, and countless other products, creating a large and profitable market for companies meeting this demand. However, the law of supply and demand fails to hold true for perhaps the most essential good for children, high-quality child care. Why does the child care supply fall so short and how can states close the gap and support families?

In 1990, a few state child care administrators started doing something similar. Using the same basic structure, they were rating the quality of programs and providing supports to programs for quality improvement. They made the ratings public with the goal of influencing consumers’ early care and education choices. Anne and others noticed this common structure across states and got involved in helping others to develop and revise the structure. It was such a powerful conceptual approach to making early care and education better that it spread organically among state leaders. In 2005, Anne wrote Stair Steps to Quality, which looked at the first ten states that adopted this approach. After that, the concept took off; today, every state but one has a QRIS or is in the process of creating one.

Teachers Face a Wage Penalty for Working with Infants and Toddlers Analysis of the 2012 National Survey of Early Care and Education, which represents the most recent comprehensive, national data on the ECE workforce, reveals shocking information. Among center-based infant and toddler teachers, 86 percent earned less than $15 an hour and more than one-half earned less than $10.10 an hour. At every level of education, infant and toddler teachers earn less than their counterparts who teach only preschool children: even among those with no college degree, infant and toddler teachers earn $1.05 less per hour.

The new Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funding represents an enormous opportunity to improve access to and quality of child care for infants, toddlers, their families, and the teachers and programs that work with them. With funding from the Pritzker Children’s Initiative, a project of the JB and MK Pritzker Family Foundation, the BUILD Initiative is organizing a series of webinars and blogs in partnership with ZERO TO THREE and the Center for Law and Social Policy for state policy leaders, decision makers and advocates. Information on the series, including blogs, webinar registration, archives, and CCDBG resources, can be found here.  

Advocates striving to ensure that all families—especially low-income families—have access to high-quality child care for their infants and toddlers should focus on strengthening their state’s core child care assistance system. It is a key determinant of both the quality of care that low-income children receive and their families’ economic stability. States now have a tremendous opportunity to improve their child care assistance policies and make them work better for infants and toddlers and their families, thanks to the historic increase in funding for the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) starting in FY 2018.