A Lesson on Leadership in Early Care and Education: President Biden’s Executive Order on Strengthening the Care Economy

Reforming our nation’s broken early care and education system will take an act of Congress; an act that we are not going to get anytime soon. The current system is badly broken with parents paying too much, child care professionals getting paid too little, and care in short supply in communities across the country. To solve our child care crisis, Congress needs to put in place new policies and to allocate significantly more funding to pay our child care professionals, make child care more accessible and affordable for working families, and improve the quality of care for our children. The President put his plan on the table under Build Back Better. It failed to pass, and there has been no serious alternative coming from this Congress.

This leaves the President no choice but to go it alone, using his power as Chief Executive to model what should be happening to address the nation’s crisis in early care and education.

This is what leadership looks like.?????

The field of early care and education struggles on three fronts: (1) there is not enough of it, which limits access to the care options families need, (2) it is expensive with the majority of the expense cast onto families, consuming a significant portion of household budgets; and (3) it often falls short of supporting young children’s potential because their caregivers are under-resourced and under-valued.

The President’s Executive Order addresses each of these struggles by: ??

• Giving license to government agencies to use their grantmaking as a lever to incentivize companies benefiting from federal funding to expand access to child care for their workers.
• Directing the federal government, as an employer, to examine how to provide child care subsidies and access to child care services to federal employees.
• Supporting Tribes in accessing funding for child care facilities and directing Health and Human Services to consider actions to increase reimbursement rates for child care providers and lower the cost for families receiving child care subsidies.?
• Increasing pay for at least one segment of the early childhood workforce serving our nation’s poorest children—Head Start teachers and staff.
• Supporting military families where emotionally supportive care is critical for children?experiencing the deployment of a parent or loved one.

Tonight, Senator Sanders and Senator Casey will host a Town Hall meeting where we will no doubt hear what we have been for years—the early care and education workforce is in crisis; programs can’t fully enroll children because they can’t find staff; individuals who would go into the early childhood profession choose a different field for better pay and benefits; and working families can’t find quality care for their children as a result.

The President’s Executive Order—which is limited to government agencies and programs—will not fix the nation’s child care crisis, as it applies to a small segment of the millions of families who are struggling to find a child care arrangement that works for them.?But we can’t do nothing. Leaders find ways to get it done and the President is once again showing leadership at the federal level. We need to do much more than this Executive Order, and we need Congress to follow his lead.