Short Week: The Main Thing with Kids is to Keep Them Alive

keep the pre-k, gimme that childcare

Duncan and Magnusson, 2013; people insist more recent findings are more positive, but as with all ed research, it can say what you want it to

This is the second post in (the first annual?) Short Week at freddiedeboer.substack.com. Since people constantly complain that my stuff is too long, this week all posts will be 500 words or less. We will return to our usual longwinded ways next week.

There’s been a big debate about childcare among the wonky set. This is good news, mostly; it reflects a very real chance at meaningful subsidy for an essential public good. But it also keeps touching on the unfortunate creep of teacher licensure into childcare and the growing tendency to see all childcare as equivalent to K-12 schooling. That’s bad for several reasons, though I get the political logic. Advocates want to justify the costs, and the term “pre-k” has a magical aura. People have convinced themselves that it’s a silver bullet. This is untrue, and as I’ve written before the returns from pre-k are probably somewhere between middling and negligible. But liberal wonks have clung to it like death because they need to believe that something works. And since they’ve made that claim relentlessly for a half-century, people hear “pre-k” and think that’s something we should fund. So childcare is out, and pre-k is in.

The trouble is that, when you call people teachers and say what they do is teaching, people want to license it. Licensure bids up the cost of that labor, at least theoretically, which is… well, I want people in childcare to earn a living wage, but imposing licensing requirements is a screwy way to do it, compared to a higher minimum wage and redistributive programs. And it devalues the true purpose of childcare, which is also an underrated aspect of public schools: keeping children alive when their parents can’t watch them.

American schools are incredibly safe. For some demographics, children are significantly safer at school than at home. Parents, likely driven by a sensationalistic media, think they’re more dangerous than they are. But in many ways the most important service provided by K-12 schools is warm, safe, stimulating environments for kids whose home lives are filled with deprivation and instability. This was an argument in my book - politicians and policymakers from both sides of the aisle dramatically overemphasize the educational purpose of school relative to the childcare aspect. (“Warehousing,” if you prefer the pejorative.) The existence of free safe warm places with subsidized meals for children to go to represents a vast human good that we have taken for granted for a long time. Since the educational benefits of early childhood education remain entirely unproven, I’d much rather we talk about childcare than pre-k. Keep the kiddos alive, and we can worry about schooling when they’re older. A staff that knows first aid working in buildings that won’t burn down that have food for hungry kids is what’s most important. Warm, safe, and fed comes first. Learning will be there when they’re old enough.