To save Minnesota’s crumbling child care system, we must think big

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For years, advocates have been working on an incremental basis to improve child care and early education in Minnesota. We’ve had some important successes. Early Learning Scholarships have been funded for some children in low-income families, and child care subsidy rates have been increased.

As important as those improvements are, this incremental approach isn’t proving sufficient to fix a child care “system” that is completely melting down. Just look at the recent closure of three centers in Duluth (“Duluth in ‘near-crisis’ with child care shortage, task force says,” StarTribune.com, Sept. 18).

On the parent side, child care is utterly unaffordable. Under the Trump and Biden administrations there has been agreement that the amount families can afford to pay for child care is 7% of their household income. Recently Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, also came out in support of the 7% standard.

Currently, a Minnesota family earning the median income with a 4-year-old and infant is spending about 37% of its income for child care. Being forced to pay five times more than what is affordable is not feasible. That’s why so many Minnesota parents are dropping out of the workforce, going into debt and/or forgoing important investments in their futures.

On the child care provider side, early educators working in child care programs are earning an average of $16 per hour. This means the people who care for and education our youngest children could earn more working at a local gas station.

So, why aren’t child care providers decreasing prices to a point that parents find affordable? Providers with razor-thin profit margins and an already tragically underpaid workforce can’t do that. That’s why so many are closing.

Why aren’t parents agreeing to pay more for child care to allow providers to raise wages and stay in business? Parents struggling to make ends meet can’t afford to do that.

Clearly, incremental patching will not fix this sweeping problem which leaves the business of child care impossibly unsustainable. So, what should we do?

In 2021, the Minnesota Legislature established something called the Great Start Task Force with bipartisan backing. That group went on to issue recommendations for a comprehensive fix to the child care conundrum. My organization, Think Small, has worked with a former Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis economist to estimate the cost of the task force’s core recommendations.

What we found is that it would take an influx of about $2.5 billion per year to build the system we hear Minnesotans asking for. One that ensures that parents are able to afford high-quality programs, that providers have resources to offer such programs and that child care educators are paid a fair wage. Beyond giving Minnesota a more stable system, this investment would give us a much better one with programs that are more effectively preparing our youngest children for school, the workforce and life.

If you think that sounds like a lot, consider this: This level of investment would merely bring spending on the education of children under 5 to a level proportionate to what is invested in them in the K-12 years. Of course, those K-12 investments are extremely popular and offer parents in all parts of the state access to education at no cost.

Considering that up to 90% of brain development occurs by age 5 and that early learning builds the foundation for all future learning, our children are every bit as worthy of investment before they reach age 5 as they are once the cross the threshold to kindergarten.

This kind of comprehensive approach makes much more sense than wasting more time on well-intentioned stopgap fixes. Every year we delay implementing a comprehensive approach is another year where more parents get crushed with unsustainable bills, children start school unprepared to succeed and programs go out of business. We don’t have time for more tinkering.

I can’t tell you precisely how this can fit in an overall state budget. That’s what we elect state leaders to do. But I can tell you this: We’ve tried incremental fixes, and nothing short of a big, comprehensive investment will bring us the quality, accessibility and stability that Minnesota desperately needs.

So, let’s work together to fix this problem before Minnesota’s families, economy, child care providers and children suffer further.

Cisa Keller is president and CEO of Think Small, a Minnesota nonprofit with a mission to advance the quality care and education of children in their crucial early years.