Crafting fair entitlements? New York’s unrivaled child care experiment

A lightning bolt electrified progressives across New York—and the rest of the country—on New Year’s Day. This year, the source wasn’t the glittering ball at Times Square but rather Zohran Mamdani, who, at 34, became the Big Apple’s 111th mayor.

Now, for Mamdani, the real work begins. He must deliver on his most audacious promise, one never attempted by a state or city leader at New York’s gargantuan scale: extending free child care to all, beginning at six weeks of age.

A free child care entitlement presents a host of policy and political challenges. For example, Mamdani, a democratic socialist, aims to deliver power and opportunity to the voiceless and underrepresented, including the 25% of New Yorkers who survive below the poverty line. But many of the loudest voices on the subject of free child care belong to (relatively high-income) young professionals, some of whom are leaving the city due to affordability worries.

Mamdani’s vision of this expansive entitlement can appeal to all groups. The truth, though, is that not all entitlements are created equal, nor do they necessarily yield fair results. On child care, Mamdani confronts the daunting challenge of creating an expensive entitlement that eases financial pressure on the middle class, while narrowing—rather than widening—early learning gaps between the city’s poor and nonpoor children.

In this piece, I illuminate this challenge by discussing four bedeviling tradeoffs that await Mamdani’s team.

Tradeoff 1: Supporting parental work or child development?

Even a democratic socialist like Mamdani is attentive to the implications of child care for New York’s capitalist economy. After all, child care and pre-K frees the labor of parents and stokes productivity. “The lack of universal child care has cost our city’s economy more than $20 billion,” Mamdani argued in a campaign video.

But is child care more about economic productivity or child development? New York City—which already offsets the private cost of infant and toddler care for many families that earn up to $113,000—has almost any kind of day-care setting that you could imagine. This includes many small, private arrangements. This is where Mamdani proposes to begin his broad entitlement, first creating another 55,000 slots for 2-year-olds, expanding the city’s voucher program—portable chits that cover the cost of individual caregivers or licensed group homes.

But beyond being warm and fuzzy, these informal settings often fail to lift children’s early language and social skills, at least relative to center-based care. Unfortunately, some voucher-financed care arrangements are among the best equipped to ease family budgets but do the least in nurturing children’s growth.

Mamdani may instead decide to build formal centers for very young children. This will present tradeoffs of its own, from the financial cost to the likelihood of killing off licensed day-care homes, which now serve many toddlers. Shifting teachers to very young classrooms poses unexpected conflicts as well. The teachers’ union in Los Angeles, for example, has resisted making teachers responsible for changing diapers.

The new mayor may consider inventive options, too. He could follow California’s lead and finance longer periods of paid family leave. California created the nation’s first paid leave guarantee in 2004, allowing eight weeks after giving birth and ensuring that the parent retains 70% of their wages. Longitudinal studies from the Golden State reveal steadier immunizations, fewer hospital visits and infant deaths as periods of paid leave grow longer. City and state voucher funds in New York could award additional weeks of paid leave after a newborn arrives, offering an attractive option for parents and relieving pressure on Mamdani to build new centers for infants, a costly proposition.

Whatever path he chooses, it will be important to consider not just the economic implications but also the developmental and educational implications.  

Tradeoff 2: Build new programs or consolidate the fractured child care field?

Cities like New York are packed with thousands of pre-Ks, licensed day-care homes, and other care settings. Many lower-income families get access to these opportunities through publicly funded programs, like Head Start, that predate Mamdani’s administration. In fact, close to half the city’s children under 5 already benefit from publicly financed child care or pre-K. That’s around 200,000 kids, taking into account 3- and 4-year-olds.    

Still, the clarion call for “affordability” grows louder among generally comfortable families who face the sticker shock of child care—priced at around $22,000 per child in New York City. It was these families who mostly benefited when former mayor Bill de Blasio created tens of thousands of free preschool slots for 4-year-olds a decade ago. Children of most poor and blue-collar parents already had publicly financed options.

Progressive governors in California and Michigan made the mistake of sprinkling universal pre-K onto an already crowded landscape of providers, which sent fresh public dollars to more affluent families. My team’s research in Los Angeles details some of what transpired in California. This includes the closing of many community preschools that lost children to school-based pre-K programs. Evidence remains mixed on the comparative efficacy of school- versus community-based pre-Ks. In California, school districts are bumping-down “excess” elementary and middle school teachers to cover expanding pre-K classrooms.

Georgia has implemented universal pre-K with, arguably, a steadier hand over the past quarter century. It focused first on low-income families, embraced community centers (not only public schools), and spread vouchers and pre-K slots evenly across age groups. Perhaps it offers lessons that could be useful to Mamdani’s team.

Tradeoff 3: Preach entitlements or close gaps in early learning?

Progressives hold faith that spreading public goods uniformly among families will result in fair results for children. Universal pre-K allegedly both lifts all children and narrows gaping disparities in children’s early growth. But given the lower starting point for poor children, this would require that toddler or pre-K programs yield steeper learning curves for poor children than their middle-class or wealthy peers. 

Evidence remains scarce that entitlements can yield this double-barrel punch at scale. We have learned from a half century of research that children from disadvantaged homes benefit most when public resources are concentrated on them. California represents a middle ground, offering targeted and high-quality pre-K for 3-year-olds from families earning under the state’s median income, followed by universal access for all 4-year-olds. This combination appears to lift poor children’s learning curves more steeply than middle-class youngsters, albeit from a lower baseline.

Regardless, it will be hard to close gaps in children’s early learning until the quality of child care is distributed more equitably. Enrollment in New York’s preschools remains highly segregated by race, with my team finding that classroom quality is markedly higher in preschools that serve mostly white or Asian-heritage children (in Manhattan and Queens), compared with preschools enrolling mostly Black and Hispanic children.

Mamdani has promised wage parity for caregivers, matching the earnings of teachers who staff pre-Ks in city schools. Earlier, Bill De Blasio invested heavily in quality improvement, sending pedagogical coaches into pre-K to enliven learning activities and develop caring and skilled teachers.

But no New York mayor has carefully evaluated which children benefit from public pre-K and at what levels of magnitude. Nor do we know a great deal about what is likely to work in New York when it comes to closing early learning gaps, especially through a universal entitlement.

Tradeoff 4: Simplicity or variety?

Entitlements connote simplicity—walking to your local school to register for kindergarten or receiving that tidy, yearly statement from Social Security. But navigating New York City’s vast assortment of child care options is anything but simple. And it’s unclear how hard the incoming administration will push to streamline offerings in a diverse constellation of caregivers and pre-K centers. When it comes to expanding care for infants and toddlers, Mamdani enters unchartered waters. Only the federal Early Head Start program has shown impressive benefits for very young children.

NYC actually has sufficient facilities to accommodate nearly all children under 5 across its existing pre-Ks and licensed day care homes. Some programs struggle to retain quality caregivers or teachers. But the problem is not supply, it’s matching families to desirable and affordable (or publicly financed) options close to home.

The colorful-yet-bewildering quilt of providers stems from the market history of child care. Families have purchased services of nannies, neighbors, and nursery schools on the private market since the mid-19th century. Public financing arose in the 1960s as Washington created Head Start and distributed child care vouchers. Meanwhile, Democratic and Republican governors have stoked financing of pre-K for low-income and middle-class families.

Today, the political economy of child care is complex and can be difficult for a leader to get their arms around. Public schools set one wage rate for pre-K teachers, while a subset of community centers negotiate another (much lower) pay scale in New York. The city’s teacher union bargains for many licensed day care homes as well. How to move, or conceive of, these disparate programs under one administrative roof will further challenge Mamdani’s team. But clarity and simplicity for parents are key to widening access.

Stepping back, I’m not suggesting that Mamdani must resolve all of these challenges before moving forward. I do, however, believe that an unbridled entitlement would concentrate new funding on upper middle-class families and fail to narrow gross disparities in children’s early vitality and learning.

So, how could a new entitlement serve what seem to be the progressive goals? Mamdani could initially expand both vouchers and centers serving 2-year-olds for families earning up to 150% of the city’s median income (which comes to about $120,000 yearly). Invest in two or three strategies to lift quality. Then, carefully assess which new families participate and what forms of care and quality improvement yield the strongest learning benefits for children.

These initial results could then guide downstream expansion for additional families. Without prudence and evidence, Mamdani runs the risk of spending more than $6 billion only to reinforce the terribly unequal futures that beset children in America’s largest city.