Mamdani and Hochul had delivered a political victory. The people delivering the actual service would be New York’s child-care workers, who number some forty thousand, seventy-five per cent of whom identify as nonwhite women. They earn less than workers in ninety-six per cent of other occupations in the city, often placing them just above the federal poverty line. The patchwork system in which they operate, a mix of public funding and private payment, can be confusing and frustrating to parents, and to the providers themselves. Many caregivers are hoping that the newfound attention to their field will be channelled into making it more stable and equitable.
To some degree, this will be a matter of revising previous efforts to expand access to early-childhood education. The widely lauded universal pre-K program that was Bill de Blasio’s signature achievement as mayor began rolling out in 2014; 3K (free preschool for three-year-olds) started in 2017. Both programs used a centralized enrollment system to allocate children among a wide variety of providers, ranging from small home-based facilities and large nonprofit networks to campuses run by the city’s public-school system. The locations that weren’t city-run received contracts with the Department of Education. But this created a pointed disparity: teachers directly employed by public schools received better pay and benefits than their peers elsewhere, even when they had the same duties and qualifications. This was bad for the caregivers, but also bad for the programs where they worked, which have faced destabilizing turnover as employees left in pursuit of better pay.
“We are directly competing with the D.O.E., and they fund us—which is a very odd place to be,” Tiffany Roberson, who oversees early-childhood education at Hudson Guild, a settlement house that runs several centers in Manhattan, told me. Community-based organizations like Roberson’s account for sixty per cent of the city’s pre-K seats, according to the Day Care Council of New York.
After de Blasio left office, Eric Adams pulled back on support for 3K, cutting outreach and funding. City payments were extremely slow to arrive; a number of day-care centers struggled to cover rent and payroll. “We had some providers who went an entire fiscal year without getting paid at all,” Nora Moran, of United Neighborhood Houses, which represents many settlement houses, told me. Some took out loans to meet operating expenses. “The city doesn’t pay interest,” Tara Gardner, the executive director of the Day Care Council, noted dryly. (Adams eventually reversed course, in the lead-up to last year’s mayoral election.) Understandably, providers remain wary. “They don’t have a very good taste in their mouths for how the city runs these programs,” Gutiérrez, the city councillor, said.
That’s not to say that caregivers aren’t wishing for the best. “Parents are going to be happy—because I would have been happy,” Stacy Byrd, a pre-K teacher at the University Settlement Children’s Corner in East New York, told me. On a recent Wednesday morning, her students were learning about wheels and transportation. Outside, trains rattled by on the elevated tracks above Livonia Avenue; inside, Byrd was reading “Bear on a Bike.” The kids were in the “Fox” classroom, and, when the titular bear came across foxes in the forest, the students practiced little fox howls. The natural world had made an unwelcome incursion on their habitat the previous fall: a storm in October had flooded the building, and downstairs, months later, repairs were ongoing. Upstairs, though, the Foxes were snug.
Seventeen years ago, before Byrd got her start in early-childhood education, she was a mom flummoxed by child care. “I even wrote to the City Council to try to find out, Why is it that I can’t find affordable child care?” she said. At a loss, she sent her children out of state to live with their grandparents for a year. With help from her church, she was eventually able to piece together care back in the city. Her daughter, who is now twenty-four, has followed her into the field—she teaches two-year-olds at the Children’s Corner. Byrd said that she is “hopeful” about the new mayor’s plans. “I’m happy and proud that child care is one of the considerations he’s fighting for,” she told me. “Because I do feel like that is overlooked.”
