Childcare is incredibly expensive for parents — and yet the people doing the work are paid very little, w/15-25% below the poverty line nationwide. No one's getting rich.
It's a classic market failure — and has been for decades:
You know what we've historically done with other services, like K-12 education, road construction, sewage treatment, public park maintenance, that would also be massive market failures? We decide to fund them publicly!
This would've happened YEARS ago if not for regressive baggage about affordable care "incentivizing" women to work out of the home — and also the enduring expectation that women, and women of color in particular, should essentially do this work for free
Between 43 and 54 percent of early childhood workers are enrolled in some form of government assistance — so it's not like taxes aren't currently propping up the system as is.
Something I hadn't thought about: it's been historically v. difficult to get a lot of energy behind this movement b/c parents grit their teeth, endure the costs for a few years, and then move on — it's not an enduring hardship (for parents, at least; for teachers, it is)
Also, because of when and how the workforce expanded, there's not the same labor power as there is with public school teachers — but that's slowly changing! Child Care Providers United represents 45k workers in CA:
I started out reporting this piece by focusing on the high cost of childcare & how to lessen the burden; turns out there's one weird fix, but I was thinking about the entire problem the wrong way
What if we think of childcare not as a personal responsibility, something to endure and forget about when you get through it, but a public good, deserving of public funding — and, like other public school jobs, treat it as a "good job" & pathway to the middle class?
The percentage of early childhood educators living below the poverty line is *astonishing.* So is the pay gap between ECE workers w/degrees and K-8 teachers. The turnover rate is so expensive — plus you're driving so many people who love the work out of the profession
Wrote about how the future of remote, hybrid work is.....working with friends, working in co-working spaces, working in coffee shops, working, periodically, in the office, aka, the opposite of lonely
All of these arguments about "how will we cultivate friendship or fight loneliness if we don't have the office" are built on the very broken pre-pandemic supposition of the office as the center of our lives
And we should be very wary of conflating the desire to get out of our houses and be in the same space as other people with the desire to be back in the office:
Wrote a very loose and meandering essay in figures that somehow goes from the fact that a budget dress in 1935 was about $95 in today's dollars to the price of a 2007 Toyota Tacoma w/112,213 miles & average rent for a 1BD apt in Whitefish, MT ($1815):
Yes, it is quite a punchline that the Idaho Legislature had to shut down b/c of a COVID outbreak while.....trying to pass a bill that would prevent local govts from instituting mask mandates:
But as this was happening, a handful of far right legislators met and managed to advance a bill that would prohibit racism or sexism from being taught in school:
I asked teachers to tell me about their demoralization — and how it differs from burnout.
It’s about the pay, but it’s more than that. It’s about the effects of standardized testing, but it’s more than that. It’s about COVID, but it's more than that.
"I'd leave tomorrow if I could find a steady job w/benefits. I feel like the past year has really unearthed what the community thinks about teachers, & I'm going to find it very difficult to continue to work in that environment without succumbing to really paralyzing resentment"
"Many days I find myself unable to move through the rage I feel, my anger rising as our nation’s teachers are blamed for the failings of the downright cruel society we’ve built. Teachers are once again a scapegoat for all of the failures of all the systems in America."