 Welcome to the New America Foundation. Today's event is titled The Hell of American Daycare. Contrugeneration strategies bolster early education and workforce participation. For those watching online or in the room, you can tweet questions and reactions to assets NAF using the hashtag Fixing Daycare. And I'm Reed Kramer. I direct the asset building program here at the New America Foundation. And we develop policy ideas that are designed to help families with low incomes and fewer resources, access opportunities to promote financial security and economic mobility over time. We focus attention on identifying obstacles and helping families to overcome them. So today, we're very pleased to welcome Jonathan Cohn, senior writer for the New Republic, here to speak with us today about his very powerful piece in the latest edition called The Hell of American Daycare. And as soon as I read it, I knew it was really a great vehicle to launch a conversation that could connect a bunch of issues that we talk about here at the New America Foundation, not only in the asset building program, but also in our program on early education that my colleague Lisa Guernsey runs. And in our workforce and family program that my colleague David Gray runs. So we're all actually funded in part by the Annie E. Casey Foundation that has been doing a lot of excellent work on family economic security issues and early ed and some dual generation child care initiatives. So this was really a chance to explore some of the connections between our own work. And it's not surprising that Jonathan was the one that sparked this discussion. I've read his work for years, especially on health care. And he's thoughtful and he's informed. He's a good writer, great writer. But really, he's a policy wonk at heart, which is why I'm always drawn to his material. He captures the details. He shares them in language that is very accessible to a wide audience that can then participate in a public conversation. And really, his last article was an example of this. So our goal today is to hear about his recent work and then to launch this public conversation. The new Republic Magazine and website recently went under a redesign under the leadership of Chris Hughes and Frank Four. And we still, I think, have some copies available outside. You can take a look for yourself and maybe give them some feedback on their design work. I thought it was pretty effective. But my advice to Frank and Chris would be just to keep Jonathan busy in writing and employed because he does really important work. This latest long-form piece uses some very deeply tragic stories to highlight the mess that is our existing child care system. So here's what we know. We know that caregivers are poorly compensated. We know they're inadequately trained. We know facilities get little oversight, so very egregious safety violations might be commonplace. We know that quality varies and then cost continues to rise. Higher income families can often kind of buy their way out of this with a little bit of luck. But families who are poor face some very painful choices, very poor choices that they have to confront. Many families, it eats up a third to a full 100% of their earnings, especially if they're working at minimum wage. And the public assistance programs that are out there provide quite limited support, often with very high administrative burdens, long waiting lists and a lot of challenges in actually applying for assistance. So finding good care is hampered by unsteady work, fluctuating wages, little flexibility in the workplace, and unreliable transportation. It's very, very difficult. And the child care system becomes the source of financial instability, anxiety, and stress. So it's not really a system at all. I'd say it's more of a scandal. It's time to acknowledge that we need to look at early childhood as a critical time when children need to get a strong start that can pay off down the line when they get to school. Without this strong foundation, the disparities that are there in the economy and society, they widen, and they be harder to overcome. And then my other point is that this is really a missed opportunity. There's ways that we should be thinking about this to better approach it, to help families, not just to promote their child's educational outcomes and developmental outcomes, but to support families as they care for their children, and they work to climb up the economic ladder. So let's focus on ways that we can achieve these goals through two-generation approaches that promote child development and workforce participation. We've had some initial pilots and demonstration projects that are out there that are promising, but we need to see more. In the asset-building world, we've seen a lot of benefits we've observed when parents are able to actually save for their children's future, save for their education. Parents respond quite affirmatively. And then in a number of public assistance programs at the state level, some states are acknowledging that access to quality care is part of what helps people get to work. So there's a number of efforts at the state level that can be expanded upon. And then the Obama administration has recently proposed making pre-K universal for eligible families. And what was interesting to me is that they frame this in a way that was designed not just to serve kids, but to also lessen some of the financial stress on families. So they kind of got that there was a dual-generation approach here. So I think this was a really milestone event in the policy development process, even if its prospects for passage this year are mixed, let's just say. So we can talk more about all these developments as we move through the program. But the point here is this is an issue that's really at the heart of the social contract. What do we expect of parents? And what are we collectively going to do to help care for our children? So with that, I'm going to bring Jonathan up to the podium here. He's going to speak about his piece. Then we're going to have our panel offer some commentary. The bios are in your handouts. But let me also just say that I'm thrilled to have Karen Kornblue come back to New America to be part of this session today. She was a real leading light when the organization got started, I think 2002. She ran our work and family program initially, 2001, 2002, and really influential in getting us started here. Then she went off to help a young and inexperienced senator from Illinois find his way in the US Senate as his policy director, and more recently has been ambassador to the OECD. So really she's been working on these issues for years and we're really pleased to have her here. And also Brigitte Schulte will join us. She's a reporter for the Washington Post. But more importantly, she's a fellow at the New America Foundation this year. She's writing a book on time and the American family. So we're looking forward to her comments as well. And then my colleague Lisa Guernsey, who directs our early education initiative, is really one of the country's foremost experts on early ed and childhood. And she'll be part of this discussion as well. So you'll hear from each of them and then we'll be able to talk collectively. So with that, Jonathan. Thanks for that introduction and for keeping me busy. I'm sure my own work-family situation will appreciate the fact that I have more coming onto my plate. Childcare has been on my radar screen for a very long time. It was on my radar screen first as a journalist who was just generally interested in social policy. And then later as a father with a working spouse and two young children. And suddenly confronting this dilemma, I had read, who's going to watch our kids during the day? I didn't really, though, dive into this issue until a couple of years ago. And it started with a piece I had written about the developing, the new science of brain development, how we were understanding about how the very important role that those first few years, particularly those first two years, play in setting up people for success much later in life. And it was in the course of writing that article and researching that article, I kept hearing over and over again. People don't understand how bad the daycare system is in the United States. It's not a system, it's a scandal. And that is what first tuned me into this. And then I remember one day I was doing my usual job, half of which I think I spent looking on the internet for stories that come across my Google reader, which I guess won't be coming across my Google reader anymore in a few months, but looking for news clips and the story about a fire in Houston and something that happened there. And I thought, maybe this is a story I ought to pay attention to. Those of you who have read the article, you know what happened. There was a fire. Four young infants and toddlers died. Three more were very badly injured. Investigators quickly figured out that the woman who had been running the child care center was in her home. She had left during the day to go shopping while something was cooking on the stove. She ended up actually fleeing the country. And ended up, she went to Nigeria. She turned herself into the authorities there back in the United States. She faced charges of multiple charges, including felony murder. Prosecutors in the course of going through the case discovered that actually she'd had a criminal record that as a juvenile, she'd actually been arrested for starting a fire at her high school. And they found other instances where it appeared she had left the kids before. And all sorts of evidence that maybe this was not just a one-time incident that actually she had routinely neglected these kids. And the jury heard the evidence. They heard from the defense, which really didn't deny the facts but it's just that what had happened was a horrible accident but not a criminal act. The jury disagreed and found her guilty and she's currently serving time in prison. I remember hearing about that and I remember thinking from the very beginning when that story first made the news I thought, wow, this is gonna be a big story on the national news. I mean, you know, it had all those sort of elements. I mean, I don't do network news but if I were a network news producer, I sort of imagined this has gotta be the kind of story you jump all over, right? You had several heartbreaking story with children. There was a criminal mystery to be unraveled. You even even had the sort of international manhunt. But the story, the story got a lot of coverage in the local press. The TV stations were all over it. The Houston Chronicle did some terrific coverage. They did a wonderful, thoroughly reported reconstruction of the day but it barely made a blip on the national radar screen. And I remember I watched, I waited and I kind of followed the story as I went along. I waited for the trial and I thought, all right, well maybe now it's gonna get a story. Maybe now 60 minutes will come down and never happened. And I think that's a shame because I actually, as I started to look into the story in more depth, there was a bigger story to tell here. I mean, the woman who owned the Child Care Center, her name was Jessica Tata, she stood trial. She was held accountable for what happened. But what about the system? What about the system that had led to these circumstances? You know, why was she allowed to operate a Child Care Center in the first place? Why had this behavior gone unchecked and uncaught by the regulators? What had driven these families to use her as a child care provider? You know, the stories of the parents in some ways, or those four parents of the four kids, I think are perfectly emblematic of the situation that lots of parents faced. In my article, I focused a lot on a woman named Kenya Meyer. And her story was pretty simple. She was a single mom. She had a steady job, and then she lost it when the recession began. And basically for the next two years, she bounced in and out of part-time work as she could find them while she was constantly trying to find a new permanent job. She was able to find good child care on a few occasions at accredited centers, but every time she did, she wasn't able to keep up with the payments. And so she had to pull her child. Eventually she got a new permanent job. She was very excited. This looked like this was something for real. It could grow into something she could do for a while, but she didn't have a lot of notice. She only had a couple of days. She had to find child care. She straightened out the issues with her local voucher. She went and paid off the balances at the center she had been before, but they didn't have any more slots. And she was looking around. She was looking around. She was desperate. And her mom called and said, hey, guess what? I was at Walmart. There was this nice woman passing out business cards and said she ran a child care center or home. Maybe this is your solution. And I remember talking to Kenya about this and she said, you know, I went over there and I thought this was a little weird. I'd never done a home day care before, but you know, I thought, all right, let's check this out. And she did what I think all of us would like to think we would do in that situation. She spent two hours there. She sort of watched. She said she wanted to see the dynamics with these kids being well taken care of. You know, were there toys? Was this a nurturing environment? And she asked all kinds of questions. You know, well, she asked Jessica, well, what is your philosophy of how you kind of like to treat kids? What are you gonna teach them? She asked just about everything she could think of. And there were a few disconcerting signs. She knows there were some dirty dishes piled up on the kitchen counter that hadn't been taken care of, but she thought, you know what, this seems okay. And he looked, this isn't forever. You know, I'll get some money, I'll get a job. One of those slots at one of the child care centers will open and then, you know, and then I can move my little girl and you know, she never got that chance. One of the other mothers was named April Dickerson. April worked at a hospital. She had a good job. The problem was the hospital shift ended at 7 p.m. She couldn't find a child care provider that would keep her kids that late. Kesha Brown, who was the mother of a little boy named Elias, she was balancing, but she was holding down two jobs. One is a cashier at McDonald's and one as a hostess at the local Hilton Garden Inn. She'd just gotten a new job that she could use to replace the Hilton job because the Hilton job started so early that she couldn't find daycare. But until she kind of found that job, she had to find someone who also had unusual hours. And then there was Betty Yucura Keijo. She actually, she was more middle-class. She was a public school teacher and she actually had, you know, she would have had more choices, but she had met Jessica Tata at her church and she thought, you know, this is somebody who I've gotten to know and seems trustworthy. And you know, she runs a licensed daycare in the state of Texas. It's gonna be okay. And that's the thing, all of these parents, I think they, sometimes they may have known, they may not have known, they may not have thought this was ideal, but they thought at the baseline, this was going to be a safe place to keep the kids because after all, the state of Texas had, you know, was doing inspections. The state of Texas was licensing this daycare provider. It would be safe enough, it would be nurturing enough. What they did not know was that the Texas regulatory system wasn't able to provide that. You know, when Jessica Tata applied to become a registered daycare provider, she had to pass a background check and she passed it. For reasons that no one has ever been able to figure out definitively, for some reason, the background check didn't catch that prior conviction on from the juvenile arson. She was also required by law to attend orientation ascension. And if you talk to the Texas regulators, we'll tell you, these sessions are designed to inform child care providers about all the laws they have to satisfy and also to give them some advice. Hey, this is how you wanna treat a child to be nurturing. And you know, and there's even some of the advice actually about how to run a business. You know, people forget they think, oh, I'm gonna run a child care center. All I have to do is take care of the kids. No, it's a business, it's hard. So they would teach all this. Well, it turns out the woman who had run the orientation session that Jessica Tata had attended, she remembered her. She remembered her because she spent a lot of time walking in and out of the room, texting on her phone, not listening, putting her head down on the table. But under the law, under Texas law, by attending, by being there at the beginning and being in there at the end, she was entitled to a license. And that theory theme came up again and again. When I went down to Houston Research District, I sat down with several of the regulators, several of the people who do child care inspections. And over and over again, they kept telling me, you know, we do our best to enforce these standards. These standards are not that high. They are really a bare minimum of what they should be. And you know, they gave me a stack of papers and said, these are the child care centers we have closed in the last year. And I read the reports and some of them were really, you know, startling. The one that stuck out in my mind was about a child care center where a caregiver had left an infant on a changing table unrestrained and sort of let her attention wander and the baby fell three feet onto a concrete floor. And she didn't report the incident and neither did her supervisor. Not even after the baby had what they described later as a mushy bump on her head and an injury. So they showed me stories like that about the place where the gas company had come in and basically said, this is an unsafe place and put the little padlock on the gas meter. They had broken the padlock so they could run the stove. Places like that. But the scarier stories were the places they didn't close because technically they were in compliance with the law. These were places where they would go and they would see the caregivers weren't doing a good job. They could see the kids weren't getting nurturing. They could see that this was not an ideal situation but they didn't really have the power to close it. And if they had tried to close it they would have had to run an incredible legal gauntlet. They would have had to get in a local attorney to prosecute the case. They would have had to get a judge to do it. And if all that happened they knew among the problems they would run into is they'd actually probably get a lot of resistance from parents. Some of them would just be like, hey, this place seems fine to me. I think it's okay. And some of whom maybe knew it wasn't fine but really had no other alternative. And for them, this other childcare center maybe it had problems but it was either keep that childcare center or find a new job which needless to say was not all that easy to do. Now what I saw in Texas and the reason I wrote the story is that I think what happened in Texas, that situation is very common. You're gonna hear from the other panelists and they'll give you more of a more background on how this system came to be and how prevalent these things are but I'll just sort of paint a very quick picture of what childcare in America looks like. And it's not an easy picture to paint in part because we don't have a lot of statistical data. You know, as Reid said, I'm a policy wonk. I live in statistics. I live in numbers. We are swimming in numbers about healthcare. We are swimming in numbers about K through 12. Now these numbers don't always tell you what you need to know and they're not always reliable and we all sit and argue about them but at the end of the day, we have no shortage of information. You know what, if you wanna go find a national census, a national evaluation of what childcare in the United States is like, good luck because it doesn't exist. We have some studies and some of them are pretty good but they're very minor. Probably the best known is a series of long-term studies from something called the National Institute of Child Health Development and just I'll pull out one of their numbers that sort of stuck with me is they went and observed childcare centers and said, what kind of caregiving are the kids getting? Is it positive? Are they getting positive caregiving? And they found that the majority were getting some positive caregiving or only a little positive caregiving and while 10% were getting excellent caregiving, 10% were getting none at all. We have a pretty good idea why that is because the crazy thing about this is it's not like it's some mystery. I mean, when we talk about healthcare, how do we make healthcare more efficient? Well, it's really hard and what do you need to do? You gotta get people preventative. It's a very complicated equation. Child care is not that complicated. We know what it takes and it starts with really good caregivers. People who have the right training, people who stand the job for a long time, who are treated like professionals and are environments where there's enough of them to care for the number of kids that there are. And there's some other things too like that, having good resource, having good curriculum, but that's not that hard to, you can see how to do that, but of course, what would it take to get better caregivers? Well, the first thing is you'd have to pay them better. The average salary for a childcare worker in the United States is $19,000 a year. So if you're gonna go into this line of business, you should be prepared to earn less than a janitor, than a driver for a trucking service, working in retail or a parking lot attendant. In fact, you should be prepared to make less money than almost anybody else in America. Of the 900 categories that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has for jobs, childcare worker is in the lowest 100. That's what we're gonna pay. How are we gonna get good caregivers? So the message to me is very clear. We have to put more resources into this. That's the first step. It's not sufficient, but it's necessary. We gotta get more money into the childcare system, but of course, then you run into the opposite problem, which is, wait a minute, it's already more expensive than most people can afford. You know, in Massachusetts, it's about $15,000 a year. In half the States, it's as much as rent. In California, a single mom trying to get childcare can expect to pay almost half of her income on that. So we got a problem here, because the only way to make the system better is to put more money into it, but the people paying for it right now don't have that money. Is there a better way? I think there is. I think we're gonna hear a little bit about that in a few minutes. Overseas, countries like France, where Karen has just come from not too long ago, they managed to do it. Right here in the United States, on US military bases, we've actually managed to come up with a pretty good childcare system. It's not perfect, and neither is the one in France, and neither is the one anywhere, but they managed to get that combination of more resources and better regulations. And why is that? Well, you know, there's gonna be, we're gonna talk about history I think a little later, but I don't wanna spoil the surprise, but I won't shock you guys to think that a big impediment to doing something on childcare is preconceptions this country has about the proper role of women and the proper role of government. And every time there has been an attempt to deal with childcare, it has run into those two. The military, for whatever reason, gets a free pass on those. If the military, if people run the military, say this is what the troops need, they get to do it. And that's what happened in the military. They realized that, you know what, we can't have all these soldiers who need childcare running around worried about their families. This is not good for morale, it's not good for the next generation of soldiers. And so they tried to fix the problem. I would like to think we're near that point now with the rest of society. You know, for a long time when we would debate childcare or daycare or whatever you wanna call it, the debate was, should we have childcare? Should we have daycare? Is it as good, better or worse for kids? And you know, that's not actually an easy question to answer. And I happen to be one of those people who thinks that exploring that question honestly is worth doing. As long as it's a conversation that talks about things like, well, if we want more people to have more time with their kids at home, then maybe we should look into things like paid parental leave. And as long as we say that, if we wanna encourage for very young children, for example, at least make it easier for parents to stay at home, then we realize that, hey, that doesn't have to mean just moms staying home. It can mean dad staying home. This is a conversation on the words that doesn't have to be about turning back the clock on gender equality. So we can have that conversation, but the fact of the matter is that however that conversation turns out, the reality today is that Americans need childcare. And we can either let it go like it is now or we can start a conversation with say, you know what, this is something we need to act on and it's something that can't just be left to individuals to navigate on their own, that this is a responsibility for all of us. It means establishing regulations, establishing standards and committing the resources that it takes to make that happen. And you know, I don't think it's gonna happen tomorrow. I like the president's pre-K proposal, but maybe we can start talking about things like that and maybe a few years from now we can get to that point. Thank you. People always say that when I'm about to speak. Oh yeah. Okay. Try it out. All right, I'm gonna try it out. Okay, I'm gonna eat up all my time with acknowledgments first. Thank you so much Reed for all your leadership. I'm calling us all together here, but also in the asset program. It's really an honor to appear up here with you. And I'm so encouraged that Jonathan Cohen is writing about this because he wrote about healthcare for years and now we have healthcare reform. So I'm very hopeful that now that he's writing about childcare we're finally gonna see some progress. And I don't know if there's still here, but there are two people I really wanted to acknowledge that I saw outside. Joan Lombardi and AJ Chaudhry are here. And they are as responsible as anybody for the president's initiative. Joan was one of the first people I talked to when I was trying to get educated about these issues. And AJ, I met through Shelley Waters Boots who was my colleague here. And I talked to him actually when I was in Paris and he was putting together some early background that went into the president's initiative. And anybody who's interested in that initiative and wants to thank them for their work should do so. Which is not to say that the president doesn't have his own personal commitment to these issues. And I want to remind everyone that a chapter in Audacity of Hope was about families. And I remember talking to him then Senator Obama and saying, are you sure you want to devote this whole chapter? And are you sure you want to sound so contrite to your wife? And he said, oh, I have no choice. But he understands these issues and I think feels them very personally. You know, as somebody who did not grow up, you know, grew up with a single mom, had a working spouse, raising his kids on a modest income. So I think he has a real commitment to it. So as Reid said, I was the ambassador to the OECD, which I tend to think of as being the ambassador to data. So I'm going to give you a little bit of data, try to stay awake because the more exciting presentations will come after me. But what I'd love to do because I think Reid is right that there's this general sense that this initiative while it's completely laudatory may not have the political wins at its back. And I'd like to inject just a little bit of urgency into it. I don't think any of us should take that lying down that there's not urgency right now. And I think one way to think about it is in terms of economic growth. And we're having this big debate about it, how to get the economy moving again. This, you know, in an era when human capital is everything, this is absolutely essential. So let me give you some data and see if I can make this work. First of all, this just confirms what Jonathan and everybody's been saying. There's just less early education in the US than in all these other industrialized countries. Make no mistake about it. This is students age three to four and school is a percentage of the population. We're way down there. The US spends more on average per student, not that we get great results, but significantly less in the early years. So for early childhood under six, that's all the way over at the left, much less. United States versus the OECD average. And then a little more background. This is the effect of early participation in pre-primary education for more than one year on future education abilities. So if you look at 15 year olds, the OECD is the source of those PISA studies that compare 15 year olds across countries and show that the US is doing terribly in terms of science and reading and math. And I had the honor to appear with Arnie Duncan when they released the last set because he said this should be a wake up call for us. Well, this shows that if you go to early education, you can improve your performance as a 15 year old. Now, interestingly though, the effect in the United States is less than in many other countries because our quality is so low. So you could see much bigger numbers for the US if we improved our quality and then got more kids into childcare. This is US child poverty compared to other countries. We're the ones, that's not good. So obviously that's a moral imperative, but also if you're just thinking about all those children in poverty and who's taking care of them and how their parents can afford any kind of development in their human capital, that should give you a lot of worry. And the reason it says Britain up there, I'm gonna get back to that. I got this from a study about Britain that I'll come back to. And then obviously over a quarter of kids in the US live in single parent households and there's new data out this week about this. We have a tremendous, that's us, all the way over the outlier again. And it's different than in other countries. You know, in Europe there are a lot more kids being born into single, into unmarried families. But first of all, those are unmarried, but often they're two adults in the house, but also all these supports that I'll come to in a second that we don't have. So if you're a single parent family, you really up a creek as Jonathan's story makes clear. And then this just gets to some of these issues that Jonathan was talking about at the end in terms of women. And when I was here at the New America Foundation we talked about something called the Juggler family where now so many families over 70% have either two working parents or a single parent working. And so that's the norm that's the parent we have today. So as Jonathan says, it's very nice to think about is childcare bad or good, but we have all these parents working, nobody's at home. And what happens in the U.S. is we have a gender pay gap. When you have kids you earn less because you're working less because you have constrained hours, you can't move, you can't be promoted sometimes because you can't take on more hours. So you're getting paid less beyond the gender gap. There's the mommy tax. And then it's out of that that you're paying for childcare. This is a really complicated chart that I'm not gonna bother to explain to you, but what it tries to draw is a connection between childcare and social mobility. And just for a shorter time, I'm not gonna show you the chart on social mobility in the U.S., but it's not what we all think of. We all think that the U.S. is the land of opportunity that you're born to a poor family and you can become rich. And that's less and less true. We're behind France now. Only the U.K. is ahead of us in terms of not having social mobility in the developed world. And there's a connection. In the U.S., the U.S. is the only country that the OECD studies where our public school system exacerbates socioeconomic differences as opposed to correcting for them. And they believe that a big piece of this is early childhood, that you get into first grade and you're already behind. So this talks about the socioeconomic background of the school as influenced by early childhood. And then just to put it in the broader context, again, the need for it to, the mom's earning less, the school system isn't able to help as much. It's a, there's more poverty, there's single parent families, there are fewer adults around, and then we have less cash benefits. So that's us way down here next to Lithuania and Bulgaria in terms of just the cash benefits that families get. So I remember that, here I'll go back before I get into this. I remember that in the very early years of New America, we did this thing called, we did this thing on the State of the Union and we went around the country talking about the centerpiece that we had in the Atlantic Monthly. And right before we went out in Seattle at Town Hall to, you know, thousands of policy wonks waiting to hear us talk, Jim Fallows, his chairman of the board, said to us, now look, no one is allowed to start a sentence with the words in Sweden, they. He said, no one in America wants to hear what they do in Europe. So I'm a little abashed that I'm about to talk about Europe and what they do on childcare, but I just think, you know, in this case, we have to have a little hope. You know, in America I think we're so pessimistic about what government can do and the idea of trusting our children to strangers and institutions, we have to get a glimpse into the fact that it can work. And when I was in France, actually before I went to France, I remember when I had my child, I came across these pamphlets that the French American Foundation had put out. They had done these site visits and I started reading about French childcare and I was really hormonal. I just started sobbing, I was so jealous. It was really kind of amazing. So, and then I was there and anybody who tells you it's controversial is so not controversial. I mean, you know, whether you're a right-wing government or a left-wing government, you know, nobody touches childcare and all the payment systems that you have. And I tell you, they all got three kids because it's a lot easier. I mean, and again, in context, there's healthcare, there's free university education, you know, it's got budget problems but the childcare system, no one is thinking of touching. So just to make you a little jealous, I hope no one breaks into tears here, but there's the crash for children three months to three years. Parents pay based on income and it's, you know, cheap. It's staff with children's nurses who are assisted by educators of young children. Pediatrician and child psychologists are on staff or on call. They're open from 7.30 a.m. to 7 or 8 p.m. Now they are oversubscribed. It's hard to get in. This is really true. But I'll get to that. There are other ways that they help you out if you can't get into the crash. Then there are the A-Call Metronel and they are not oversubscribed. They have, you know, between 90, 95% depending on which studies you read. Enrollment, they're completely free except for meals and you would like to get these meals, let me tell you. They're staffed by educated people, increasingly by teachers who can teach in the primary schools. Kids learn soft skills as well as in the final year, reading, writing and basic math. You have a legal right to a place from the age of three that in many neighborhoods enrollment can begin at two. And then again, there's child support that can rise to more than $800 a month. There is mostly maternal leave. They don't have parental leave. They have 11 days of paternity leave. But the average duration of the maternity leave is 30 weeks. And then there's at-home care. So if you can't get into the crash, your nanny is subsidized. Yes, that's true. That's not a fairy tale. So there is another way. And then I won't go through Sweden because we all know Sweden is ridiculous. They're so good at things like this. But in Sweden, again, cop fees are directly proportional to parents' income. You have preschools from 6.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. Again, educated staff. They're just having a big debate about improving their curriculum. And then I just want to one Anglo-Saxon country because maybe we're just different from those continental Europeans. Tony Blair decided to cut child poverty. And this is what happened. I mean, he did it. He said, gee, let's cut child poverty. And sure enough, it was half as much after he was done with his initiatives. And they did a whole bunch of different things. But universal preschool was part of it for four-year-olds. There's also a national minimum wage, a tax credit like the EITC. But in addition to the EITC-like tax credit, another financial support for all families with children, whether or not they worked, paid maternity leave. And it was expensive. It cost nine billion pounds a year, or roughly 1% of Britain's gross domestic product. The equivalent for us would be 130 billion. But that's, if we're serious, that's the kind of thing that we could do. And I just want to leave you with the sense that we could actually, other countries have shown us that it's possible. And I would just argue that from an economic growth perspective, we don't really have a choice. And it's not expensive because it pays back with huge dividends in terms of women being able to work in terms of a better educated workforce. Thanks. Hi, everybody. I'm Brigid Scholti. I am a reporter with the Washington Post. I'm also a fellow at the New America Foundation. I'm a Schwartz fellow here where they've been absolutely wonderful supporting me as I've been doing some research and I've finished my manuscript and been now editing a book called Overwhelmed, Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, Looking at Time Pressure and Modern Life, Modern Families. I have, I've been writing a lot about childcare for the book and also for the Washington Post. And I thought, well, how can I summarize in about five to seven minutes that I've got here? Everything that I wanna tell you. And Jonathan and Karen just laid up such a beautiful foundation. So I thought, well, I'll tell you a couple stories. I'll tell you a story of Dylan, Andrea, Donna Reed, Welfare Queens, the Soviet Union and the Department of Defense. And let's see if I can pull all of those things together in five minutes. First of all, the story of Dylan. He was a seven-week-old baby. And that goes a lot to what Jonathan was talking about. This was in Virginia Beach, Virginia. And in Virginia, like a lot of states, about half the children are in unregulated childcare. A lot of that is our sort of policy point of view, which is this is something that mothers have always done. You know, why should the government get involved? When I spoke with one of the Virginia lawmakers, he said parents need to be aware, you know, sort of a buyer-beware kind of atmosphere. And I wouldn't put my children with anybody I didn't know. Well, a lot of parents don't have that opportunity. I certainly didn't have that opportunity. So a lot of parents, when they go out and look for childcare, they think that the places that they see that they spend two hours looking at, they think they're licensed, they think they're regulated. They assume that they are and they aren't. They often aren't. So Dylan's parents were too, they worked in the, they were Bosans on the Navy, both of them young folks down in Virginia Beach. Betsy had a six-week maternity leave unpaid. As all of you know, a family medical leave is unpaid for 12 weeks. She had to take six of it before she delivered because she was on bed rest. So that only gave her six weeks after her child was born. She looked all around for childcare. She found a place that she thought was good. She spent the time there. And two days later, Dylan was dead. The childcare workers put him to sleep in a utility closet, basically, where 15 other babies were. It was a place where it was very hot. They put him to sleep on foam pads, ill-fitting foam pads with ill-fitting sheets. They put him down to sleep on his stomach. Virginia regulations require one care worker for four children. There was one care worker for 15, and she left for two hours to go have lunch in another room. And when she came back, Dylan was blue and dead. And the janitor tried to give him CPR because no one else there knew how to do it, and they called 911, 911, 911, and he was, he was already, he was already dead. So what happened? The childcare facility was run by a religious institution. And in Virginia, like in a number of other states, religious institutions are exempt from childcare regulations. Even some very, very low standards, like Jonathan was saying. In Virginia, family childcare, you can have up to five unrelated children before you have to be licensed, which means you don't have to have any training in CPR. You don't have to have any background check done. No, even if you are licensed, you don't have to have a fingerprint check. So if you've done anything bad in another state, you would never be found. Only, you know, it's only kind of within the state if you've, that you'll, any past infraction will be found. They found that the woman who ran this childcare facility, it was called Little Eagles Daycare, was run by the Bethel Temple Church of Deliverance. She had actually had previous infractions. She had been found to have had a very, you know, had been cited for having dangerous conditions before, but that didn't stop her from opening another facility. She had no problem getting a license. The local prosecutors did try to prosecute them like in the Texas case. The only differences in Virginia, since the facility was exempt, there was nothing they could do and the case was dismissed. And I was just gonna read you from the judge's decision. He said, the Commonwealth quite accurately argued that had Little Eagles Daycare been subject to the regulation and inspection required of secular daycare centers, many of the risk factors would not have been present. Meaning, if this had been a regulated place, they would never have been able to put a child in a utility closet with 15 other babies. They would never have been able to pass an inspection with unsafe cribs. They never would have been able to leave for two hours, or at least you'd like to think, you know, that somebody might have caught them. So none of these things needed to happen, this child did not need to die. But the judge goes on to write, while the court is certainly sympathetic, the remedy for this situation lies in the sound discretion of the general assembly, not with the judiciary. Washed their hands of it. And, you know, Betsy is now no longer in the Navy, she's been treated for depression. So there's a child loss, there's a life loss, there's a family disrupted and there's someone who is no longer really able to work at this point. The story of Andrea, it's the second story I'm gonna tell you very briefly. This is a story that I've been reporting for the Washington Post that should be coming out. I hope this week, placement is always above my pay grade when stories run. But I'm hoping it will come out this week. When I came back to the Post after book leave, one of the first stories that I came across were these parents protesting the childcare subsidy system in the district. And I thought, well, you know, I wanted to look into it. It's like, well, it doesn't the district, doesn't, nothing seems to work in the district and you know, it was in a horrible bureaucracy and I thought, oh, this is just another one of those stories. Well, come to find out, the district is actually quite representative of the rest of the country. The childcare subsidy system is a mess. It is the only thing, really, it's the only thing that the federal government does for anybody. The middle class families do have a childcare tax credit. Some companies get tax breaks if they give referrals to childcare. That was supposed to be an incentive for on-site childcare, but it never worked that way. So this is really the only thing the federal government does. Karen talked about an investment of $130 billion is what we need. What we spend is five. We spend $5 billion a year for the, it was called the Community Development Block Grant. Now they call it the Child Development Fund. And it covers, it's designed, it's supposed to help very low-income families. It's supposed to do two things, help low-income families find and keep jobs, give them the stability. And it's supposed to help children, which we're talking more about from Lisa, it's supposed to help give them a good start, give them quality early childcare, give them good start in life. Well, it really, it's a blessing for the parents who have it, who can get it, but it really doesn't work that well. And it doesn't work for an awful lot of people. We cover one in six children who are eligible. Unlike Medicaid and food stamps, which are programs that if you're eligible, you qualify. We never have had enough money in the system to cover all of the children who could qualify. So I think the National Women's Law Center says we have about 1.4 million children. In the District of Columbia, HHS estimates there's about 27,000 children who could qualify for this benefit. Well, they granted about 17,000 vouchers last year. And some of those are to the very same children because what happens is the system is so unbelievably difficult to get that voucher that once you get it, it's also very easy to be terminated. So I stood in line with Andrea. You, we showed up at 6.30 in the morning. The line was already snaking down the block. The first woman who had gotten there in line arrived at 3.45 in the morning because they only take the first 20 families. And then after that, you're turned away. Most families go back three and four times. Andrea has waited from 6.30 in the morning until four or five at the end of the day and been told to come back because no, the doctor's note isn't enough. You really need to get this universal healthcare form. No, one paste up isn't enough. We need three. Oh, come back, we need three in a row. Oh, you know, we need this, we need that. So there's just all these hoops that the parents have to jump through. And then they're often terminated quite easily. And when that happens, as has happened to Andrea, she was working, she goes to school, she's got two kids, she's a single mom. She also had a job at Adidas in Georgetown and she spent so much time trying to get this childcare voucher for her kids that she lost her job. Lost her job, lost her income, lost her apartment, her children lost their slots. She wound up in a shelter. So it's a system that really doesn't work. Very briefly, I've got one minute left. So Welfare Queens and the Soviet Union and Donna Reed, why are we like this? Very much like what Jonathan said, we haven't figured out what we think mothers and women should do. The reason why we don't have a good childcare system is we almost did in the 1970s. Majorities of people in polls said more women are working, families are working. We really need to have a national network of childcare centers. We need the government to be part of it. The majorities of both men and women supported it. Then what happened was Congress passed a bill that would have granted universal access, affordable, high quality childcare for everyone and Pat Buchanan and the rise of the right wing in the Republican and Nixon was all set to sign it until they got a hold of him and said, oh my God, this is the Soviet Union. This is terrible. You must veto it and then the veto language likened it to a totalitarian kind of regime, scared the Jesus out of everyone, likened then a childcare system to communism and said, really, moms should be home in the United States raising their kids and I would argue that we really have not moved our mindset much past that and that's a big reason why we're in this predicament today. Thank you, Bridget. So gosh, if we aren't thoroughly, I'm completely distressed and depression right now. Let me first introduce myself again and just say how thankful I am and honored to be up here with some amazing people talking about this. My name's Lisa Guernsey. I direct the Early Education Initiative here at the New America Foundation and what I think I'm gonna do with my five minutes and I'm really eager to get into some conversation here but I just wanna quickly put out there that it feels to me that we need to take this incredible urgency that we feel here and start resetting the conversation not so much around mothers and childcare but around education, teaching, early learning opportunities and parents, men and women because it feels to me that that is what we're gonna have to do to enable these kinds of stories to bubble up beyond just the audience of the moms who hear this and are like, oh my God, I totally know how that was and how awful that was to go through but to really get it elevated. So I'm just gonna talk for a couple of minutes about the early learning opportunities that we could have in a good childcare and early learning system in our country and then talk for a moment or two about what the federal government and the agencies have been trying to do over the past couple of years under John Lombardi's leadership and others that we've been watching closely at the New America Foundation where it's not at all what it should be but there are things that are happening under the radar screen that I think would be important for all of us to know in the conversation. So first, just to state the obvious and this is something that Jonathan brought up as well but children, even in infancy, they are learning from their environments and they are learning from the adult caregivers in their lives, every interaction, every back and forth joint engaged moment that they have with the adults in their lives is a learning moment. So every moment that they have a bad engagement, a negative experience, a non-engaged moment is a lost learning moment for those kids. And so that's the point of view that we take in our program at the Early Education Initiative is that starting at very, very young ages, children can be learning so much and affluent parents who have the resources, I mean so many parents know this, right? But the ones who have the resources can do something about it and make sure that they then surround their children with folks who can give them those rich engaging experiences and lead them to more rich language development, et cetera. So we need to almost kind of have this breakthrough where we're absolutely fixing the safety and affordability issues which are so dire and so in need of fixing but also recognizing that it's not just safety and affordability, it's learning that's happening, that we need high quality learning environments for our kids in this country across all of our income levels if we're gonna actually break through some of these horrible poverty numbers that we're hearing about. So what's happening a little bit here in D.C.? Well, like I said, under the radar screen, there have been, I mean for years, organizations have been focusing on making sure that young children are, that the workforce recognizes that they are really teachers and not just babysitters. And that in the early childhood field that very much is where the conversation has shifted and it's incredibly heartening that there's been a lot of effort made in states and in local communities and at the federal level to really shift the conversation away from just babysitting and just making sure that every single electrical outlet has a little plug in it, making sure that they got snack at 1145 to truly what does a learning environment look like and what kind of professional development do we need for teachers to do this? What's not followed is the resources to enable states and communities to build that out for more than just a select group of teachers and more than just a select group of caregivers. And so we need to be in recognizing that that takes resources to train an entire new workforce of teachers of very young children. I just wanna quickly note a few things. The states that, there are many states that are working on this and they're states that are not just led by Democratic governors, by any stretch of the imagination. They're states across the political spectrum where state leaders recognize how much it means to invest in this and are putting their kind of, also not necessarily big dollars but at least some dollars where their mouth is on this, we need more dollars. They're states like Alabama where they have really ratchet up quality and ensure that they really are hitting quality benchmarks for state funded preschool programs for young children. And then what the federal government has been able to do with some limited dollars is to create something like a race to the top program but it's called an early learning, many of you in the room know about this very well, right? The early learning challenge grant program that now has provided money to 14 states to help them build out their early childhood workforce and to start trying to fix a lot of problems within the childcare system and to build in some accountability structures as well so that childcare centers are rated and so that parents have a little bit more information to go on before they make a decision about where to enroll their children. So they're actually thinking about not just safety and affordability but also recognizing, hey, I could get safety, I could get affordability and I could enroll my child in a four star center with a really high learning potential, a highly educated workforce that can provide that learning potential. We've also been studying here at the New America Foundation the ability to use different kinds of observation tools that show caregivers what their interactions really mean with children, whether they're videotaped or if someone's taking the real detailed notes about what they're doing, when they're engaged with young children and then having coach and professional development moments where they talk together, the caregivers and the coaches talk about what did that really look like with that little girl and how could we have maybe even had a better moment of language development for that child or how could we have done something in our little center that was yet even more focused on some of the concepts they need to be learning. We have CCDBG of free authorization right now and there has been some work in the Senate to try to come up with some bipartisan proposals around this. I'm heartened because they are focused on quality and I just wanted to note, Jonathan, one of our colleagues here has been working with a lot of those folks and they have your article, like front and center on their desks. So it's making some waves there and I think that that is encouraging. I think that we again have to be pressing on the resources issue because when we talk about a federal system, the childcare subsidy system being broken, there's a lot of reasons it's broken on those eligibility sides and all the forms and the paperwork and there's a lot to focus on there but there's also just a small dollar amount that states are working with in the first place and that's Congress, that's Congress making a decision not to put as much money towards certain things as others. So that's where there's needs to be more political will to be pushing members of Congress to recognize what this means, not just for safety and affordability but also for children's learning. So, thank you. Oh and I didn't mention that much about Obama's proposal but there's a lot more to get into there as well. We can start there. I mean, obviously there's a lot to chew on here but in our federalist system, states are gonna provide oversight, they're gonna minister public benefits. There's also a challenge in kind of the variance and how they'll do that and how they'll take that but potentially it's an opportunity as well. You mentioned some of these efforts that are underway. So maybe we could look at that kind of, people have comments on that federalist landscape that would be interesting but let's go with the Obama proposal. What's in it? What's missing? Why it might be effective? And Lisa maybe you could start us off there. Yeah, just quickly just sketch it. So the people know, I mean for the most part people think, okay Obama said something about universal preschool. Well, it's absolutely there's a focus on four year olds but it's not just about four year olds being in preschool programs. So the idea is that over 10 years with a fairly significant, I would say quite impressive investment of if we could ever get this kind of dollars around of 75 billion over 10 years that we could do this proposal and it says preschool for four year olds for families that are at 200% of poverty or below but it's also looking at home visiting programs for mothers, infants and toddlers or parents, infants and toddlers as well as partnerships between early head start programs which are programs that are for the mothers of children who are yet to be born or infants and toddlers up to age three, partnerships with childcare centers and early head start as well as there's a nod to full day kindergarten to ensure that, and I think there needs to be a lot more done on the full day kindergarten side as well but to ensure that if children have a preschool experience then they also might be able to go to a full day of kindergarten because even that is not available to a lot of families in our country. Thank you. Jonathan do you wanna respond to those remarks or what you've heard so far? Yeah I'll actually just follow on the Obama proposal in part because I think when I was finishing up my talk I think I threw away a little line about how well we're not gonna get that anytime soon and I think that was actually, I was fired up by what you said not giving up and I actually think that was a little dismissive. You know first of all I do think that we see a commitment to these issues from this administration and I think for two reasons. One is this is a famously wonky administration they care about evidence and the evidence on these early interventions is really very strong particularly the home visiting stuff even more than the childcare. I mean the programs model on the nurse family partner I mean it's, I mean God I just as a wonk who reads this stuff you read the evidence on how well that programs works and you're sort of hitting yourself in the head like why don't we do this in every state all for everybody who could use it. So that is a commitment this administration has had the Affordable Care Act actually puts money into that one of the little things in there that people don't always know about. I also think it is significant I mean I think in the era of budget sequestration $75 billion over 10 years is going to be hard to come by but this number one it's important these are markers. You put out a proposal like this this is how a conversation starts. I mean you do it now a few years later this becomes the proposal and sometimes it takes a while but it's also this is not an all or nothing thing. I mean this is you can imagine this being scaled you can take pieces of this and you can do them and obviously it's a state federal partnership so some states may want to take this cause up some may not and so I actually think there is room for some optimism on this and certainly it's the worst case scenario is that nothing happens on this this year but maybe two years, three years from now something does. And clearly what I think one of the upsides here to this conversation is this is about children and early learning and development opportunities but it's also about families and their economic lives and the upside that this comes to families and then there's a larger macroeconomic economic growth story that Karen alluded to and what I was heartened by when the administration rolled out this proposal they made that very explicit that that's how they saw this piece it was about kids but it was also about families. So anything else to fill that story out Karen or should we open it up to the floor? Okay, great. So questions from all we have a mic that we can come around. Let's start there, give me a show of hands I can flag you from here, we'll start over there. Who you are in a short question. Got it. Don Mathis, Community Action Partnership and I'm one of the 11 million fans of Joan Lombardi as well so. All right. Maybe it'll get me in the door. I'm an old Head Start teacher, child development teacher, what have you Jonathan you kind of said child care whatever you want to call it I think the language could be important. My concern about the Obama plan is it's so focused on classroom and education and cognitive stuff that a lot of the lessons about family development, nutrition, dental care, healthcare, some of the stuff that Head Start if I'm allowed to say those two words here provides are kind of being overlooked or even short changed that as someone that started in childhood when it was like that if you have the best child care program for six hours, if the kid goes home to a deprived household how much difference can you make therefore you need the comprehensive stuff and I guess I'm not hearing as much about the comprehensive stuff as I am about the education cognitive stuff. Right. Can you help me feel better about that? Since Jonathan's piece was called the Hell of American Daycare and I think a lot of people have been fighting against the concept of daycare moving it in childcare and moving it into these other realms as well. Lisa. I'll just quickly note that the word comprehensive is in Obama's plan and the focus if you read through the quality details of what they would want a preschool experience to be is very much in keeping with the child development perspective social emotional learning, comprehensive services, family supports, ensuring that there's the training for the really seen as professionals working with children and their families in those deeper ways that Head Start has carved out as a model that can make a lot of sense. I would also note that I think that on the language thing even so the word education does not ring to people in their ears when they think of the 18 month olds and that makes some sense, right? And so the word learning in the field has kind of taken some hold because obviously there's a lot of learning social emotional learning not just four year olds knowing their ABCs but I also think that if the education community does not see this as an issue that matters to them and if they won't read these things because it doesn't have the word education on it then we've really missed a huge opportunity for them to become advocates within this organization within this system building. Can I ask any first grade teacher would you rather have kids coming in that have been to Head Start or haven't been to Head Start and I assure you that 98% of the history is great teachers from what the Head Start gives. So they'll be on board, they'll be on board. Thank you. Here, and then next to you. My name is Kathy Sarri, I'm with the Service Employees International Union. We have about 2.1 million members in this country, a lot of which use child care assistance, go to Head Start programs, love Head Start, and but we also represent 150,000 child care workers. All settings, family, child care, schools, Head Starts, child care centers, and I just wanna say that I think that there's an incredibly important piece to this that we need to take account of and that is that the preschool Head Start program won't really address and that is we've got a 24-7 economy now where we've got people working non-standard hours, overnight shifts like hospital workers, we've got workers who get scheduled just in time just like at Walmart, and none of these programs are affordable in any way for most of those workers. And so I think there's a product, this is a product of work. This is a product of our economy and I wanna know what the panel thinks in terms of how do we get employers to step up and really make sure that there's a system of care and learning. Yeah, that's a great question. My colleague helped me prepare remarks for this and noted that a lot of times work moves to shifts and you don't know your schedule until right before and obviously that creates a lot of challenges for arranging care. Any stories from the field? Well, I think that you've hit it absolutely right. One of the big problems in child care is that the workplace itself, the structure, not just the attitudes, but the structure and the policies haven't changed really since the 1950s. And some of the things that Jonathan was talking about, kind of what are some of the solutions? Absolutely having flex time, absolutely having more parental leave, so that you're not necessarily forced to go back to work when your infant is six weeks old and you're worried about sudden infant death. And in terms of some of the things that you're talking about, 24 seven care, just in time work, in the larger picture on ramps, if you will, Sylvia and Hewlett just came out with a study that women in Brazil and India expect to have bigger jobs, kind of bigger careers than women in the United States do. And a lot of that is because of childcare and the way our workplace is set up. So how you get that buy in, I don't know if there's more and more evidence that fathers are feeling just as time pressed and stressed as mothers are, as they become more involved. Yeah, I don't know if this is gonna create kind of a critical mass of workers demanding change. I think that certainly technology is changing the way we work, when, how and why. I think that there are sort of things happening, but this notion that work is someplace you go and for a certain amount of hours and the policies are set kind of in an era when you had a breadwinner homemaker, that's been very stubborn and resistant to change. Yes, please. So something really important to happen in the healthcare debate that shook up people's traditional way of looking at it when all this work was done about quality. And it said, gee, we're not getting, not only are we paying more, but we're not getting quality. And if we made some changes in terms of prevention and quality, we'd actually see some savings and we could take those savings and put it into expanding access. And it really changed the conversation. If you look back at that moment when those wonky studies started coming out and Jonathan was part of that change in the conversation. Obviously, this is an issue where we need to change the conversation. And I think we've heard a lot of ways and that's from the wonk point of view and from the political point of view and those may not be the same thing. But some candidates for how to change the conversation are changing it to education, changing it to human capital development, changing it to the modern workforce and how it's different. But I think we obviously need to shake up the frame that's in people's heads. And I think there are a lot of candidates for how we do that. What kind of support is it gonna be and where is it gonna be? Is it gonna be in school buildings or somewhere else? So I think what you're talking about is a really important part of the conversation that we need to have. Let's go in the front here and then back and then to you. Hi, my name is Mary Beth Johnson. I'm with the Maryland State Department of Education working with the new Maryland Excel's grant that's part of the race to the top. The Maryland Excel's program is going to be highlighting quality, child care centers, preschools, early head start centers, head start, public pre-k's, all of that. Anyway, my comment is that part of one of the goals for this is to educate the public. Not just parents, but the community, get the business people involved of exactly what Lisa and Karen were just talking about. We need to change the message that we're giving to people. And this may sound crazy, but one of the things I do when I read things like Jonathan's article is I go down to the bottom and check the remarks from people. And if you check the remarks, a lot of them are, I'm not paying for so-and-so's child care. Why should I have to pay for that? I've seen that so many times. I think we need to get to those people. We're always talking to each other and we all agree, but we need to get to that. Also, if you live in Maryland, Project One of the Race to the Top grant has established early learning councils in each county. So I encourage anyone living in Maryland to get involved in that. Thank you. So behind here and then over there. Hi, my name is Amy Debsosky and I work for Early Head Start National Resource Center. I actually work as a trainer and writer and family child care is my content area. I want to make sure of a couple things that family child care is not lost in the dust because we're talking about institutions and family child care is a wonderful place for children and families. So let's not lose family child care. Another thing, I also live in Maryland and we hear about what happened in Virginia and what happened in Texas and what is just incredible to me. I was a family child care provider myself for 20 years in Maryland and the regulations are so vastly different. We really need to work on universalizing these health and safety standards for child care across the board and we need to work in partnerships. We're working really very diligently to work with child care and Early Head Start and we're seeing how that pays off and how that works and the child care subsidy is a huge piece of it and all of that, we need all those pieces working together. This is the example of how it touches on so many people's lives. There is a lot of feedback from experience, professional and life and not questions but just reactions and comments. So let's get one more comment or question here and then in the front and then we'll have some closing remarks. So assuming that the early education plan moves forward, the question becomes what will be the facilitator? Is it going to be the public school systems as been proposed? Will it be private institutions, these small daycare centers? How do you reconcile the interests of some who want it to be through the public school system versus I think it's a majority of private, the majority of the delivery model comes in private institutions, so how is that reconciled? Yeah, Lisa, do you have thoughts on that? Do you want to do closing? Actually, you can answer it. So actually, I don't know if I misspoke earlier. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to give the impression that the Obama proposal nor any of the other initiatives that are happening at the state level or at the federal level are through public schools as any kind of mandatory way that they're done. In fact, a lot of the programs and well a lot of the preschool programs are happening at childcare centers where they're getting grants from states to help build their workforce and to make sure that they're providing better quality experience. And a lot of these are childcare centers that very much want to be seen as preschools and very much are, I mean a lot of childcare centers are doing some really fantastic work in that area. So this is not an institutional public school sort of proposal and there's a lot of reason to make sure that the community based providers are part of the conversation. I want to address the family childcare piece because that too needs to be much more deeply knitted into the conversation and I've seen really good family childcare and I've seen, I mean, Jonathan's stories. And we have to be kind of finding ways to be able to kind of professionalize even the workforce within our family childcare center. So they're seen as part of that workforce and having to meet the same kind of standards as the rest of them. And some of that can be done with standards and regs and oversight and compliance but often it is also resources and pay and I think that is an important dimension but the other case to make is when you have these dual generation strategies, there are payoffs down the line payoffs to the economy, payoffs to the, not just the family and the child. Last question here in the front. Thank you, my name is Edna Rock. I live and work here in the district and I've been in the field of early care and education for almost 50 years. So I've seen a lot of work being done at every level and I appreciate every single statement that everybody has made because I've met, I've talked with Bridget on the phone. I've met Lisa at a Brookings event and I know that this topic goes back into the middle of the 19th century in this country when kindergartens began and they were seen as the solution to all the social ills that we could come up with and of course that didn't quite happen but ultimately I have come to conclude that we deal with belief systems and attitudes and what we really believe about ourselves, our families, women and men and children. A book was published about a year ago called Childism in which the psychiatrist who wrote it claimed that basically we are against children, we don't really want to help them. That's maybe true of some, it's certainly not true of all but it's something to be on guard with and to look at the Convention on the Rights of the Child which is a United Nations human rights treaty that only three countries out of 196 have not ratified and one of those countries is the United States. The other two are countries that barely exist, Somalia and South Sudan. What we need to do is keep these kinds of groups going, articles like Jonathan's and the work that all of you and many I'm sure in this room do, to keep the doors open and to convince people that children, especially very young children, matter a whole lot more than we have ever thought. Thank you very much. Final remarks or contributions? I'll just mention two quick things because I know time is of the essence but one of the things that you mentioned is the comments on the end of the stories and believe me, I get them too on the end of my stories. Why would I pay for somebody else and blah, blah, blah. I think that's a really common feeling and I think that changing the conversation is critical and changing that belief system and I think one of the best arguments you could make is the human capital argument because if your coworker sitting next to you is on the phone or coming in late because childcare's fallen apart or distracted or not doing their job, that hurts you as their coworker, that hurts the business. It's not just a family issue. It really radiates beyond that and I think the more we get data on that, the more we can make that kind of argument. I think that's one way you attack that head on and I do think you need to have that conversation but why it's important. Some of that goes back to the United States, our view that raising a child is a private good versus in the Europe where it's seen as more of a public good. That's a conversation that we can also open up and have because the irony is we end up paying about the same amount of money. There've been OECD studies about what the US pays versus some of these other systems that we think are so generous. It's just that more of it comes out of our own pockets for our own stuff rather than kind of a communal pocket and the second thing is on the childcare subsidies. There are, Gina Adams at the Urban Institute, I don't know if she's here or not but she's done some really fascinating research on some states who are trying to change the system, make it easier. It seems like there's very hopeful results from that that people who get the childcare subsidy with ease are much more likely to be employed to in three years later. So I think that the more we can highlight where it is working, where changes have mattered and change that conversation, I think that is really important. So I'll just be brief. I just wanted, going back to Jonathan's article, just note how important the stories that he's able to tell are in changing this conversation because I think a lot of the times, especially as we have widening golf now between rich and poor in our country, there's just people who may not recognize really what's going on and only by hearing stories like this is it really kind of wake people up a lot of the time. So I want to encourage writers like Bridget and others to keep doing those. I think they're a very, very important part of this whole thing. And then I just want to go back to the idea that this doesn't have to be about just institutional kind of childcare. We really do need a big, broader conversation that covers that whole continuum and that starts absolutely with parental leave and grappling with that issue and infant toddler care and home visiting and enabling kind of flexibility and having rich learning environments, we may call preschools for kids or maybe called childcare centers with pre-K for three hours, whatever we call them, but really enabling children to kind of be carried along that continuum. That's what's gonna break us out of these cycles of just despair. So just to inject like a tiny positive note, I think that the political conversation has progressed enormously since I was here working with Reid at the New America Foundation. I mean then, I remember the national review had a cover story with a picture of us crying, neglected baby because the mother wasn't home and there was this idea that a working mother was evil. And since then you have Republicans appealing to working mothers quite explicitly. There's been a real change. We were trying to raise awareness of the fact that so many parents didn't have, so many families didn't have a single parent at home anymore. I think that's generally understood now. So I think we've progressed in that sense that I don't think people now feel that at least for the upper income white mother it's not about keeping her home and keeping her raising children. I think there are all kinds of other issues that have to do with are you paying a woman to have a child out of wedlock, encouraging that with childcare. There are a whole bunch of other issues around women but I don't think that issue is still there. I think we've made a lot of progress there. But the paradox is that as that's become more acceptable and I think there's a more progressive attitude towards some of these things we're in the middle of this terrible budget deficit situation where we're debating cutting social programs. So just when we could possibly be having a fresh look at this, we're in a really difficult situation. So I think again, some of the things that have come up here about how we can change the conversation and inject new energy to it, talking about parents, talking about the workplace, talking about education. And I really believe that this conversation about economic growth and tying it to how many poor kids we have in this family, in this country and how many single kids being raised in single parent families and that how on earth can we hope to be competitive and to have economic growth when we have all these poor kids, all these kids with one parent at home and there's nowhere to leave them during the day that's high quality and affordable. So I hope that can be part of injecting new life into this conversation. So I think I realize I never actually said thank you to the New America Foundation for setting this up. And so there's the pro forma thank you but there's the sincere thanks. This is an incredible panel. I don't know about you guys. I learned an enormous amount. I already told Karen I want her PowerPoint slides and she's not giving them to me. But- They'll be on our website. There you go. I'll just take them from there. But I learned a great deal and I think it's, I do think this is a good sign that conversations are starting to take place and actually I was gonna kind of make a similar point which is that I actually would also inject a note of optimism and we've heard about the political obstacles that we know about. I mean there's no money. We live in a federalist style system where it's very difficult to get 50 states to do what someone else would like them to do. The Maryland, Virginia thing. I feel like I was having that exact conversation about Medicaid and healthcare reform like yesterday. And these are all very familiar problems. I do think politics are changing. I mean changing the conversation, coming up with good messaging. That's a very important thing. I'm not the guy to help you with that. I couldn't sell water in the desert. I have no idea what message works. But I do think attitudes are changing. Part of it is who's making the decisions in corporate board rooms and in politics. I mean if Congress looked like this, instead of this, I think this would, as you would have gotten more attention before. But it is looking, we see more women in Congress, more women in the corporate board rooms. And I also think among men, it's funny I have to go back and read the Obama book on that. But if you're my generation, most men I know we deal with these things too. And we're involved with our kids and we have a lot of us have working spouses and this is as much an issue for us as it is for women. So I think that's gonna change. I also think as in healthcare that as the cost becomes more of an issue for middle class families, as well as low income families, that's gonna raise the profile. That's not to say that middle class families and low income families face the same situation but I do think there's a broader sense that even middle class families, even affluent families, particularly here on the East Coast, I mean, let's face it, you want something to be important in politics, that means you want to be saying that personally affects TV producers. And I can tell you, I know lots of people who are TV producers or married to TV producers and they have trouble finding good childcare. And their problem situation may be very, very different from a single mom making $20,000 a year but in the broad sense, they're all thinking about it. And I do think at the end of the day, when we get around to solving this problem, we take a while in this country, it will be something that addresses everybody's needs, maybe something like they have it brought or maybe something uniquely American who knows but I actually am feeling a little bit optimistic. Great, well that's a great last word. Thank all of you for coming. Thank you for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Great.