What can the Chicago strike teach us about child care ?

By: E. Tammy Kim

The need for public child care has emerged as a central, if unintended, lesson of the Chicago teachers’ strike. As the work stoppage enters a second week, the families of some 350,000 mostly low-income, Black and Latino students are struggling to find safe, quality child care—but the call for a reliable, publicly-funded system should be universal.

While the Chicago school district has offered no-cost, “contingency plan” child care at 147 schools and 200 community- and faith-based locations, most staff are not trained providers and afterschool care is not available. Still, the city’s offering points in the right direction. Imagine if all families could access publicly-funded daycare centers or in-home child care, just as they can public schools. Individual children would grow in a safe, productive environment, staffed by professional providers, and working parents, especially those with irregular schedules and lower-income jobs, would have one less worry. These economic and social benefits would redound, moreover, to society at large.

Urban Vineyard in Humboldt Park, one of Chicago’s publicly-funded centers, offers a portrait of quality child care. During the strike, the program has served an average of 40 children per day, mostly from first-generation Ecuadorian, Mexican, and Puerto Rican families. According to the director, Pastor Myrna Nodal, "Most people equate child care with babysitting, but we have trained staff that provides fitness, arts and crafts, music, and socialization."

Nodal’s comment underscores the overlap between child care and childhood education. Both concern safety and trust as much as cognitive, emotional, and physical development. And both should be accessible to families across the class divide.

It’s a matter of seeing child care as a social investment rather than an expense to be borne by families alone. Among advanced, industrialized nations, where universal child care and early education (pre-K) are the norm, the U.S. invests the least public money in this sector—only .5 percent of our GDP. Research shows, unequivocally, that this policy is short-sighted and unsustainable. Access to public child care would mean more flexibility and earnings for working families, safer and more productive children, and a good-jobs sector for providers and early educators.

In the midst of the public-education debate spurred by the Chicago strike, we should re-evaluate our commitment to families and prioritize access to publicly-funded, quality child care. How we care for our children, rich and poor, during and after school, will determine the future we share.

Media Ignore Record Poverty Among Women

Wednesday, in "Women: The Invisible Poor," the Daily Beast's Lindsay Bennett wrote: "When it comes to the latest economic data on women, the news is even worse than most people seem to realize. But you couldn’t learn that by reading The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, neither of which even mentioned women in their front-page stories about the rise in the poverty rate, which has soared to its highest level since 1993."

You said it, Lindsay. We couldn't believe it either. In its lead article covering the Census Bureau's new poverty data, the Times highlighted increases in poverty among men, children and youth, with not one mention of women, who are also facing record poverty levels this year (and, as always, are more likely to be poor than men). Here are some of the numbers:

• Poverty among women climbed to 14.5% in 2010, the highest rate in 17 years. 
• Women (7.5 million of them) are also experiencing the highest rate of extreme poverty on record. 
• Poverty rates among women of color (25.6% for Black women, 25% for Latinas) and single moms (40.7%) are even more staggering. 
• The child poverty rate climbed to 22%, and more than half of children in poverty lived in families headed by single mothers. 

And why is it so important to report this data? In part because it underscores how important it is to elevate women's solutions -- solutions based on lived experience and tremendously urgent need.

Solutions like paid sick days (just passed in Seattle) and quality, affordable child care, both of which help women in particular keep their jobs. Solutions like using federal dollars to prevent  teacher layoffs in states nationwide, one of many put forward by our grantees that were included in President Obama's recent jobs proposal. And solutions like those of the Caring Across Generations campaign, which would create 2 million new caregiving jobs and overwhelmingly benefit low-income, immigrant women of color.

This week's poverty numbers -- as well as growing numbers of those without health insurance, and a stagnant gender wage gap -- remind us just how badly women are reeling. How urgently change generated by women is called for. And how shameful it is that the 17.2 million women living in poverty -- particularly in a climate where women are bearing the brunt of the recession -- are not front-page news.

So, press, pundits and policymakers: do your job -- and your math! -- and consider the full story. Women are half of our nation's workforce, and two-thirds of families depend on women's earnings to survive. How can our country recover if we don't do everything we can to guarantee their visibility and well-being?

Photo: © Elizabeth Rappaport and the Ms. Foundation for Women.