Pandemic leads to rethinking of childcare - Commonwealth Magazine
By Shira Schoenberg
The shuttering of daycares last spring made apparent to workers and employers alike the importance of childcare to a functioning economy. Now, experts hope that one silver lining of the pandemic will be rethinking how the childcare system works – how it is structured and how it is paid for.
“What I hope is that we will hang on to some of the lessons we’ve learned, which is one very simple one — that early care and education is absolutely central to family life and to a functioning economy,” said Stephanie Jones, co-director of the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Jones and the initiative’s co-director, Nonie Lesaux, spoke on The Codcast about the changing childcare landscape. Both said they hope a new focus on childcare funding by President Biden can improve the historically underfunded industry.
“I think the Biden administration is onto something, which is that we need a real stimulus and we need to depart from traditional funding mechanisms and build in more flexibility and more innovation to bring more stability and continuity to the field,” Lesaux said. That might mean paying centers based on their capacity rather than on a per-child basis, so if a center loses a child for a few weeks, it does not automatically lose money, she said. The funding should match “the scale and the scope of the setting and its service to that community and those families,” she said.