Zohran Mamdani will have big questions to answer if and when he becomes mayor-elect.
One of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s signature campaign planks is universal, zero-fee child care. As a vision, this pledge is sound: Mamdani is embracing child care properly — not simply as a nice-to-have that helps parents work, but as essential social infrastructure that undergirds the health and strength of the city and even dictates whether families with children can remain here. His universal vision also stands as a welcome contrast to the administrative morass that characterizes America’s current means-tested, welfare-based approach to child care support that serves few families well; in New York, for instance, a mere 10% of eligible families receive public subsidies.
At the same time, Mamdani’s child care plan is heavy on goals and light on details. With Mamdani holding a wide lead in the polls, the success or failure of his vision will rest on policy and governance decisions that should be under discussion now.
In a video on his website, Mamdani lays out certain basic building blocks for his program: opening centers using city space and finding opportunities to co-locate them within existing educational institutions; easing regulatory burdens; boosting the workforce by ensuring all early childhood educators get paid a living wage on par with Department of Education-employed teachers; and helping existing child care providers stay in operation through steps like subsidizing commercial rent and guaranteeing on-time payment from the City.
Generally speaking, these ideas have good research backing and good precedent from other localities. For instance, cities in Montana and Indiana have repurposed municipal spaces to improve child care supply, while Washington, D.C.’s efforts to create pay parity between child care and K-12 practitioners have had a measurably positive impact on their early childhood workforce. The challenge is that New York City’s population is roughly equal to the combined populations of D.C., Indiana and Montana. As Mayor Bill de Blasio learned during what ended up being a successful rollout of universal pre-K (more on that in a moment), there are major questions and tensions that come with implementing a policy of this magnitude and complexity.
A fragmented system with large numbers of informal care providers who don’t even have to tell the City they exist poses a governance challenge.
Start with the relationship between child care providers and the Department of Education. Child care is offered by a diverse range of individuals and groups. In addition to licensed centers operated by nonprofits, for-profit companies and community-based organizations, there are licensed family child care homes and large amounts of care provided — especially for infants and toddlers — by family, friend or neighbor caregivers, as well as stay-at-home parents. While no hard numbers exist for New York City specifically, national-level data suggest that only half of 1-to-2-year-olds have a regular weekly care arrangement outside the home, meaning there’s a lot of informal care happening.
A fragmented system with large numbers of informal care providers who don’t even have to tell the City they exist poses a governance challenge. Mechanisms will need to be established or adapted in order to create smooth on-ramps for different types of providers who do not have experience interfacing with the City — and for the City to remit payments and ensure a measure of accountability. If not designed thoughtfully, one can easily see a clash between compliance-minded City administrators and autonomy-minded providers that ends up hurting the efficacy of the program.
At the same time, better contracting practices must be established to restore trust with existing providers who have struggled with persistently late payments under the Adams administration. This is especially important for licensed family child care providers — those who care for unrelated children in their homes, a type of care that has been shrinking rapidly — who will likely need stronger networks of support in order to remain open, much less expand to meet the needs of a universal system.
Similarly, places like D.C. have had to wrestle with difficult tensions with regards to workforce policies. “Pay parity” comes with a big question mark around credentials: Is the expectation that a toddler teacher only gets paid the same as a first-grade teacher if the toddler teacher has a bachelor’s degree? Either side of that answer has its proponents and detractors, which makes for messy politics once you get unions, advocates and other interest groups involved (indeed, divergent payment rates are already a source of intra-sector conflict). Workforce issues loom large over any universal child care plan because, due to adult-to-child ratio limits, child care supply can only scale as fast as educators are available. In New York, for example, the ratio for children between six weeks and 18 months of age is 1:4 — and building up a well-trained roster of educators takes time.
The valley between a policy vision and effective implementation, however, is a graveyard of good ideas.
These considerations, in turn, generate additional questions: How fast can universal child care realistically be achieved without sacrificing quality? Will the City impose some sort of profit cap in order to ensure that investor-backed for-profit chains don’t siphon off an undue amount of taxpayer money? Given that 40% of the city’s child care workforce is made up of immigrants, some percentage of whom are undocumented, how can the system be truly inclusive? And of course, there’s the matter of cost. As Bradley Tusk and Jamie Rubin wrote recently for Vital City, “Even at the estimated $5 billion annual price tag, universal child care can be paid for within the current City budget; but it may mean other priorities are less well funded.”
The good news is that Mamdani doesn’t have to start from scratch: He and his team can look both to the City’s universal pre-K precedent and to sophisticated policy analyses and plans that have been created over the past few years. As journalist Bryce Covert wrote in an extensive New York Magazine retrospective on the universal pre-K rollout, the effort required a Herculean amount of resources in terms of personnel, time and political capital:
Shortly after de Blasio won the general election, he created a working group of early-childhood experts … By his swearing-in in 2014, the group was meeting as often as ten times a week. “His mandate was, ‘How fast can you do it?’” [policy advisor Ursulina] Ramirez said. At first, the group pushed for three years, which seemed “aggressive but also achievable,” Ramirez said. But de Blasio decided they had to go faster, launching in the fall of that year and achieving full universality by September 2015. Most of the staff would, at one point or another, question that timeline and whether they could really pull it off. “He was just very dead set on it,” Ramirez said. The going joke was that the team could have anything it wanted except for more time. ... There were five core pieces to getting the program up and running in time: securing the funding, building the capacity, hiring the teachers, ensuring high quality, and putting kids in seats.
Mamdani doesn’t even have to wait until his potential swearing-in. Last year, the advocacy group New Yorkers United For Child Care produced an extensive phased plan for achieving universal, no-fee child care, some of which is already coming to fruition in the form of the $10 million “2K” pilot the City Council recently authorized. Also last year, the think tank 5BORO put forth a policy roadmap that, while not going all the way to universal, offers a series of concrete recommendations that map onto Mamdani’s stated principles. For instance, 5BORO details ways to streamline licensing and regulatory systems so providers have an easier time opening and hiring staff. If he taps those that have already been deep in thinking through the implementation weeds, Mamdani will have a much greater possibility of success.
Truly universal, free-for-families child care has the potential to be transformative not only for New York City’s children and parents, but the city writ large — to say nothing of setting a benchmark for the rest of the nation. The valley between a policy vision and effective implementation, however, is a graveyard of good ideas. If Mamdani wants his signature achievement, he’s going to need to start fleshing out his plan sooner rather than later.