Child care workers are protesting the latest example of Washington, D.C.’s flawed legislation. The Nation’s Capital recently became the first jurisdiction to require child care workers to get a college degree. By December 2020, lead teachers at child care centers will have to obtain an associate’s degree, and child care directors will have to obtain a bachelor’s. Even home-based providers and assistants will have to complete a Child Development Associate program.
It will be difficult for many current child care center employees to go back to school to comply with the new requirements. In response, child care workers are holding regular demonstrations against the new requirement, saying provisions are “overly prescriptive and seem out of touch to people who have built careers in the field.”
The unintended consequences are all too predictable. Some who do manage to complete their program and obtain the necessary degree will realize that they can take their new credentials and make more money working in public schools. Instead of increasing the number of skilled child care center workers, this requirement could lead some of the best and brightest to leave for a different sphere of education.
Families will pay a heavy price when this requirement takes effect, as it will make child care in the District even more expensive. According to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, D.C. already has the most expensive care of any state, pegging the average monthly cost for infant care at almost $1,900. Research from the Mercatus Center found that education requirements for lead teachers that were less stringent than the D.C. standards increased the price of infant care by 25 and 46 percent per child. Even if a lower price response would make child-care a prohibitive expense for many D.C. families.
As well as the expense, D.C. parents are also grappling with wait lists. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute estimates that in 2015 there were daycare slots for only one third of D.C. infants and toddlers. That is 7,610 licensed slots for 22,000 children under age three. Adding more requirements to child care center’s regulatory burden will not lead to the proliferation of more centers starting up and increasing the number of slots available to harried working parents.
The more likely scenario, and one which played out to some extent when a similar requirement was imposed on preschool teachers, is that the larger, more professional networks of child care centers will be able to weather these new requirements while smaller independent centers will struggle or shut down. A market for child care centers that becomes more concentrated does not seem like a recipe for reining in soaring child care costs.
Parents might respond to higher prices or more competition for slots by shifting away from center-based care to informal arrangements or home-based providers (although their prices will likely rise as well due to the requirements). This is not necessarily uniformly bad, if parents prefer these arrangements due to affordability or more flexibility, but it runs counter to one of the stated goals of the new requirement of increasing the provision of high quality center based care with more educated workers.
The new credential requirements will make care more expensive, and could cause some current child care centers and workers to leave the profession. These problems will be met for calls for higher child care subsidies for families or more scholarship funding for workers, which would lead to further price increases. Mayor Bowser already announced a $15 million proposal that includes competitive grants for child care providers to expand or open new centers, and additional proposals for increasing subsidies will likely follow.
Relaxing onerous zoning regulations that increase rents for child care centers could reduce another significant component of costs for child care centers. So would rethinking adult-child ratios or maximum group sizes, 4:1 and a maximum of 8 for centers caring for infants, which result in high personnel costs. One analysis of the D.C. child care landscape found that personnel expenses and rent accounted for 82 percent of provider spending.
No one wants hard-working parents to struggle to find child care options. Washington’s new requirements, an attempt to mandate affordability and quality without trade-offs, are a step in the wrong direction. They would start another cycle of mandates and subsidies that would keep qualified workers out of the profession and put affordable child care out of reach for more families.
Charles Hughes is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on twitter @CharlesHHughes.
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