Emily Oster

24 min Read Emily Oster

Emily Oster

The Power of Local Politics

How Vermont is revolutionizing child care

Emily Oster

24 min Read

When I’m feeling particularly hopeless about the entire national discourse, I find it helpful to focus on local politics, where it often feels like things really can actually change, and where the people who are trying to make the changes feel approachable but, often, no less inspiring. That’s why I’m so excited to share my conversation with Aly Richards.

Aly is the CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, and they’re on a mission to ensure affordable access to high-quality child care for all Vermont families by 2025. They’re not just on a mission to do that, they’ve actually done a lot of it. In June of 2023, the Vermont Legislature made history by passing a child care bill into law, with overwhelming support from across the political spectrum. This is a comprehensive bill that supports child care through subsidies in both directions, to families and also to child care providers. It’s a first of its kind for Vermont and for the nation, and it provides a model for other states to hopefully follow. 

In this conversation, we talk about grassroots mobilization, about clipboards at county fairs, about knocking on doors and how important that is. We talk about the economics of change. We give the cold, hard capitalist case for child care and for child care subsidies. We talk about the importance of the quality of care for kids from zero to five, and we talk about what it means for child care to pay for itself, which it actually does if you take a long enough perspective. Get ready to be inspired. 

Here are three highlights from the conversation:

What is the main problem that Let’s Grow Kids solves?

Emily Oster:

Can you give us a big-picture overview of what was the problem that you thought about solving when you started Let’s Grow? Where’s the origin problem here?

Aly Richards:

Early childhood education and this infrastructure or lack thereof is one of those beautiful root-cause issues that when you make a positive impact on, it’s going to have this ripple effect. The big-picture problem is in Vermont and across this country, three out of five of Vermont’s youngest kids needed some form of child care out of the home and did not have access. And then those families who find what little child care is available, feel amazing about finding it, realize they’re paying 40% of their household income on it. So, it’s not accessible. There’s not nearly enough of it. It is not affordable.

If you want to flip over to those doing the work, early educators do not make a level wage. Honestly, $15 an hour without benefits is the average in Vermont before our work going up here. That just gives you a sense—it’s an absolute crisis in affordability, access, and quality of an essential infrastructure that we have ignored, for some reason, in this society. That is the problem. 

Another thing is it’s a market failure. And the reason why it’s a market failure is because parents cannot afford to pay more. Early educators cannot afford to make less. There is a solution. It is not rocket science, and it’s working in Vermont.

Also, the solution, I’m just going to jump right to the punchline is —

Emily:

Yeah, tell me the punchline.

Aly:

— money. I’m sorry to say.

What do families do when they can’t access child care?

Emily:

We see this statistic talked about, or versions of the statistic talked about, all the time that people can’t access child care. What are people doing when they can’t have child care?

Aly:

They’re doing all sorts of things. I think that’s a funny part about this work, and I’ve been at Let’s Grow Kids for nine years now. What we are saying is this is not the thing that everyone needs to do. We’re saying young families have zero choices right now. That’s the real situation on the ground across this country. So people are dropping out of the workforce in droves, especially women. This is for women who choose to be in a career, who would like to be in a career that they trained for, who don’t want to lose their earning power. By the way, a labor shortage, especially in rural parts of this country like Vermont, that we cannot recover from without mobilizing especially women into the workforce. You’ve got people dropping out of the workforce.

There are kids then falling through the cracks. You have to juggle, split shifts. What does that do for a family? Think about that. You don’t see each other ever when your kids are young.

Kids are falling through the cracks, families are falling through the cracks, the stress level is through the roof. We’re losing them in the workforce. What we know about this time in a child’s development is one thing. And then there’s the economic opportunity and workforce development piece. This is the smart thing and the right thing to do everything on the spectrum from child development and beyond. 

How can someone get involved in the fight for access to affordable child care?

Emily:

Okay, I want to end by you telling us a call to action. Imagine I’m a parent, and I want to make this happen. I’m a policymaker; I want to make this happen. How can we do that?

Aly:

Some people are afraid to play politics, especially in this arena, especially when you do deep policy work. But I am sorry, you can’t pass the law if you are not involved with politics.

Find out who in your community or your state is doing work in child care. Is there a coalition? Is there an organizing group? Is there an early educator association? Who is doing it? If no one’s doing it, then you can raise your voice — call your national and your local legislator and say, child care is essential infrastructure. We cannot afford to live without it in this country or in your state. And by the way, it pays for itself over a lifetime and immediately, so look into it.

I really think that’s what we have to do is that we need to elevate this issue in our communities and nationally to a fever pitch and then push it through. If you’re a business, become a policy advocate. I really think that businesses have a unique ability to do this. If you’re a parent, raise your voice. Write an op-ed, talk to your neighbors. It’s good old-fashioned organizing. We’re seeing this in the electoral work. It’s true for social issues as well. 

Full transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.

Emily Oster:

I am delighted to welcome Aly Richards to the ParentData Podcast. Aly, thanks for being here. Can you start by introducing yourself?

Aly Richards:

Absolutely. I’m Aly Richards. I live in Vermont, and I’m the CEO of Let’s Grow Kids where we really lead a statewide campaign to end Vermont’s child care crisis by 2025. I’m also the mother of identical twin boys who started kindergarten last week, Bo and Wesley. Emily, you must get this a lot, but it is absolutely a delight to be on this with you, and you were seminal in my pregnancy with these twins and the early stages of their lives, so thank you for that. Really appreciate how you revolutionized the younger generation having kids here.

Emily Oster:

That’s so nice. Tamar, definitely leave that part in. I am excited to talk to you because I feel like so much of our child care discussion is in a negative frame, what’s wrong and why things are broken. You have a vision that you are making a lot of progress on for how things could be different. Before we get into the nitty-gritty, can you just give us a big picture overview of what was the problem that you thought about solving when you started Let’s Grow? Where’s the origin problem here?

Aly Richards:

Oh yeah. Well, for me personally, I’m motivated to do the thing that’s going to have the biggest possible positive impact on the most amount of people. And it’s amazing because early childhood education and this infrastructure or lack thereof to me is our incredible opportunity of our time in society. It’s one of those beautiful root-cause issues that when you make a positive impact on, it’s going to have this ripple effect. The big-picture problem is in Vermont and across this country, I’m sure this is very familiar to you and your listeners, three out of five of Vermont’s youngest kids needed some form of child care out of the home and did not have access. Not even the whole population. For those who needed access, three out of five didn’t have it. And then those families who find what little child care is available, feel amazing about finding it, realize they’re paying 40% of their household income on it. So it’s not accessible. There’s not nearly enough of it. It is not affordable.

If you want to flip over to those doing the work, early educators do not make a level wage. Honestly, $15 an hour without benefits is the average in Vermont before our work going up here. That just gives you a sense, absolute crisis in affordability, access and quality of an essential infrastructure that we have ignored, for some reason, in this society. That is the problem. Another thing is it’s a market failure. I’m actually in D.C. today for —

Emily Oster:

It is a market failure.

Aly Richards:

One hundred percent. Hearing from folks who are finally starting to get this from the U.S. chamber side, from the economic advisor side, they’re finally talking about it the way we are in Vermont. This is essential infrastructure; it’s economic infrastructure. Anyway, the reason why it’s a market failure is because parents cannot afford to pay more. Early educators cannot afford to make less. There is a solution. It is not rocket science, and it’s working in Vermont.

Emily Oster:

Before we get into the solution, I want to talk a little specifically about what people do when they cannot find child care because we see this statistic talked about, or versions of the statistic talked about, all the time that people can’t access child care. There’s a child care desert. Where’s my child care? What are people doing when they can’t have child care?

Aly Richards:

They’re doing all sorts of things. I think that’s a funny part about this work, and I’ve been at Let’s Grow Kids for nine years now. What we are saying is this is not the thing that everyone needs to do. We’re saying young families have zero choices right now. That’s the real situation on the ground across this country. So people are dropping out of the workforce in droves, especially women. This is for women who choose to be in a career, who would like to be in a career that they trained for, who don’t want to lose their earning power. By the way, a labor shortage, especially in rural parts of this country like Vermont, that we cannot recover from without mobilizing especially women into the workforce. You’ve got people dropping out of the workforce. It does not pay. First, you can’t find the child care, and then it does not pay.

There are kids then falling through the cracks. You have to juggle split shifts. What does that do for a family? Think about that. You don’t see each other ever when your kids are young. We actually, we had a really amazing child care advocate in Vermont who came from Black River Produce, a business advocate, and he told the story of why he became an evangelist on this because he saw one of his employees pass their young child through the delivery service window between shifts from the mom to the dad, and they did a night shift and a day shift. They never saw each other, and they literally passed through the night through the delivery window. That’s what we are trying to avoid here. If you actually sat down and did this, you would never create the system that we have today. Anyway, that’s what they’re doing.

Kids are falling through the cracks, families are falling through the cracks, the stress level is through the roof. We’re losing them in the workforce. I’m sure we’ll talk more about this, but what we know about this time in a child’s development is one thing. And then there’s the economic opportunity and workforce development piece. This is the smart thing and the right thing to do everything on the spectrum from child development and beyond. When you ask, well, where are kids? They’re not in a safe, stimulating environment that we absolutely know they need to reach their full potential and success in life, which we can talk more about the data behind that.

Emily Oster:

Tell me what you did. You face this problem, many states, the whole country is facing versions of this problem. What did you do?

Aly Richards:

Basically, we built a campaign because one of the issues — this is a complex issue. Also, the solution, I’m just going to jump right to the punchline is —

Emily Oster:

Yeah, tell me the punchline.

Aly Richards:

— money. I’m sorry to say.

Emily Oster:

Oh, money. Okay.

Aly Richards:

The solution is money. Guess what? People don’t often have the courage to move large sums of money around, I have found out in my work in public service here. Let me just say one more piece of the foundational thing. A group of entrepreneurial people in Vermont did not set out to necessarily fix child care from the start. They set out to make Vermont a thriving economy, a great place to raise children. And it ended up that this became our focus, and it’s because of what we started to nibble around earlier. The most critical time of a child’s development, as you well know, is zero to five, zero to three especially, but zero to five. And I don’t think people really internalize yet, even though the science is so unequivocal, what do we actually mean by that? The foundation you build upon for the rest of your life, from everything from yes, read and write and arithmetic, that’s the sort of more intuitive stuff.

But even chronic disease, executive functioning, critical thinking, the ability to have healthy relationships with others over a lifetime, actual propensity for/against addictive behavior. If you think about all the things that plague us down the road in our society, they are being baked or supported in zero to five. Then the question is, so where the heck are these kids at this most critical time? They’re not in the place that they need or want to be. That’s why it’s an infrastructure problem. In Vermont, a bunch of entrepreneurs, over many years, did some grant making, did some experimenting, and honestly, did some public policy work and said, “We’re not moving the needle. We need to pool our efforts. We need a focus campaign with a laser-like focus on the most ambitious but achievable thing that we can do.”

So we launched Let’s Grow Kids. Basically, it was a 10-year campaign. Really, honestly, it’s a movement, Emily. A movement for high-quality, affordable child care in Vermont for all who need it by 2025. Boom. That’s the road we’ve been on. We’re a one-stop shop. And remember, Vermont is a pretty small place. We have 650,000 people, and we can talk more about, so is it relevant or not? Again, I won’t bury the lede. I think it’s 100% relevant. We are actually showing not only when you get this right, the sky doesn’t fall, but it’s absolutely doable, and great things happen to your people in your economy when you do it. As a model here that is transferable in many ways from strategy to the outcome in Vermont, we marched along and basically said people, policy, programs. That’s how we set ourselves up.

So, people, over 40,000 Vermonters, again, that’s 6% of our population, they’re actively involved in this campaign in Vermont. They’re families; they’re early educators.

Emily Oster:

That’s crazy.

Aly Richards:

Yeah, I know. That’s 10 years of clipboards at fairs and emails and canvassing and door knocking, neighbor-to-neighbor, peer conversations, grassroots mobilization. Also, putting early educators in the driver’s seat, putting parents in the driver’s seat. Nothing about us without us. You want this public policy to work, it has to be not just informed but led by those closest to it. So, engaging these 40,000 people in a very sophisticated way. These are folks who have stood up and said, “We must fix child care in Vermont. I believe it’s an imperative, and I believe it’ll take public investment to do it.” So it’s not just like, yeah, I like kids. It’s like, nope, we know this is hard work. We’re going to do the hard work it’s going to take to really get it done and bipartisan. We can talk more about that.

40,000 Vermonters, people power creates a public will. And by the way, I’ll just mention quickly, stepped over many years, we started with that brain science. Hey, what’s the value proposition? Do you know? And we polled, and people did not know. People did not realize zero to five was this incredible time, and there was such a crisis. Then we pivoted to emergency, that got people’s attention. Once we laid a foundation, we went to guess what, we are in a crisis level of access, affordability, and quality. And that resonated as you can imagine because everyone has a story, a parent, a grandparent, an early educator, an employer. Everyone connects to the child care crisis in America. All of a sudden, then, we had the value, we had the crisis, and that’s when we were able to pivot the solution. With these 40,000 people, we created this authorizing environment for policy change. The next big bucket, policy change.

I’m sorry to say, when you want to change systemic deep-rooted issues, there is no other way than policy of course, as you know. In this case, we worked for many years with this major coalition to just know what is it here, what is the policy change that fixes this? Like I said, early educators can’t afford to make less. Parents can’t afford to pay more. So you need public investment to fill that gap. There is no other way. It’s like if all of us said, Hey, we have young kids, let’s all pay out of our own pocket to make the school for them to pay for their teachers to pay for the rent, to pay for the HVAC, wouldn’t happen. You just cannot get around it without the public investment. We worked on the policy change.

And by the way, every state that’s doing this and the federal work on this, we all have come to the same conclusion: This is a low-risk proposition. You push money into the system, it goes to families, so it’s more affordable for them. It goes to early educators, so they have higher wages, and they can meet their operational needs. That’s how you fix this. And then we did programmatic work. People, policy, programs. We were on the ground with early educators, readying the system for investment to make sure policy change would stick, increasing capacity, creating economies of scale, doing shared services, substitute pools, all of that. That was our secret sauce. And it didn’t click, I would say, until we started talking about the economics. I hate to say it, right, this is good for humans, it’s good for kids. But until we made the cold, hard capitalist case and not just we business leaders in Vermont said, “Can’t do this, we cannot function if we don’t have a workforce. Child care is the biggest barrier. It behooves us to be a part of this.”

They made the economic case that this pays for itself immediately and three times over. So we actually passed last year in Vermont Act 76, the most expansive child care bill in the country. It’s working. We’re one year in, 1,000 new spaces, 39 new child care homes, especially in rural places, wages for early educators going up, 7,000 more Vermont families eligible for tuition assistance by October. It’s absolutely working. What did we do? We created a payroll tax, a 0.44% payroll tax, 0.44, less than half a percent of a payroll tax, 75% employer, 25% employee. The employer can pick up the whole thing if they want, and many are. It basically puts $125 million of new money into the child care system to do the things I just mentioned.

Emily Oster:

There is lots to unpack about this, so let’s talk about it. First of all, this is amazing. I think it’s incredibly cool and really, really important. The thing you said, which feels really important to discuss to put on the table in this conversation is this costs money, that the problem here is, and I really like this framing around how would you think about public school? We have public schools which are financed by the government because there is not a system whereby everyone would be able to pay their portion of the school. That’s just not where we are. This is also like that. I think sometimes it’s easy to be like, why can’t people just get together and pool all their money and pay? That’s not going to work. And we know that doesn’t work because it doesn’t work with schooling. And this is actually a more expensive thing because you need a higher faculty-student ratio. So just the initial recognition that in order to make this work, we do have to subsidize it, period.

Aly Richards:

Yes.

Emily Oster:

In fact, many other countries, I noticed, do have heavy subsidies for this the same way they do for schools.

Aly Richards:

Exactly.

Emily Oster:

I think in some ways that’s almost the whole answer, which is just the question is people need to be ready to accept that this costs money. And then we need to figure out how are we going to get the money into the system and what’s the way to get people to understand that that’s important to recognize the importance of this, but there isn’t some secret option. Sometimes we say, here, there’s no secret option C. There’s no secret option C; it costs money.

Aly Richards:

Bingo. I will say what’s interesting, you’ll hear me preaching this up and down the seaboard here. I think my role these days as someone who’s done this now in Vermont as we’re moving towards this is to say, “Hey folks, I hope we can agree.” You should hear, folks are getting together on child care, on early child education across this nation all the time. People understand because of COVID, I would say what you just mentioned, people now understand like, whoa, why is this so different from K through 12? Why when we closed down for COVID, no question about K through 12, and money kept flowing to teachers, and zero to five all of a sudden, was in a total chaotic disarray when it was actually the most essential backbone to keep our economy going, our essential workers where they needed to be.

There’s this new awareness. People all getting together and saying, we got to do this, we got to do this, and everyone agrees it’s essential, it’s infrastructure, and it’s a market failure. And I don’t hear anyone talking about public investment. Basically, I’m just there as a broken record saying, “Hey folks, I hope we can agree that all these things equals public investment.”

Emily Oster:

More ParentData, including pushback against Aly’s campaign and how she’s handled it, advice for reaching across the political aisle, and a call to action for you, after the break.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. I want to talk about some of the pieces of pushback because I think in some ways what you’re saying is very straightforward, and once you have money, it is not that complicated to think about how to spend it. That’s not easy. It’s many things on the ground, but ultimately once there’s money, there’s money. Let’s talk a little bit about the kinds of things people would push back on here. One concern that I have heard is that when we have expansions of child care, the quality is not good. Have you guys thought about the question of how do we maintain quality child care when we are expanding in a meaningful way?

Aly Richards:

Absolutely. You mentioned other places around the world. We are up north in Vermont, and Quebec is our neighbor. Although a lot of people don’t seem to want to hear about what Canada does, like the Vermont Legislature, it’s very instructive. They did literally what we did. They added money, expanded it, made it more affordable for families. They didn’t think about quality; it didn’t work. They said, oops. They went back, they thought about quality, and now they have subsidized high-quality child care just like we’re moving towards in Vermont. And guess what? Female participation in the labor force is skyrocketing. Their gross provincial product is going up. So we have, again, really good examples to show. This isn’t some zany theory. This is 100% tried and true, and the path is well trodden, and the outcomes are well researched.

Emily Oster:

The Canada example is a really good one because I think people do sometimes talk about this initial rollout in Canada was poor. They did not think about quality, and the quality was bad. What did they do to fix it?

Aly Richards:

That’s what we’re doing in Vermont. I would say the number one thing we have to keep at the center of this conversation is that quality is humans like any other business. The research is very clear on this. The quality is absolutely proportional to the level of support and preparation of the early childhood educator. That is the number one proxy for quality in this sector. That makes a lot of logical sense, right? Like in just how we go about the world. It is that human who was supporting that child in this time of their development, in this setting. For us, we have basically said any increased investment, it cannot go just to expand the demand, frankly. It can’t just go to make more child care more affordable to more Vermonters. It has to proportionally increase the reimbursement to the early educators, so they can pay a wage.

And by the way, the beauty of that, I will say, I feel like we feel a deep responsibility, as those folks who are steeped in the research and the quality of this, to be the first people to defend quality. You do not get the outcomes without the quality. You don’t get the return on investment that pays for the capital that you’re fronting here without it. You need the quality for all the reasons we know. The good news is we don’t necessarily have to be there fighting for quality in an antagonistic landscape because it also equals access. That’s the beauty of this market is for anyone who understands this is infrastructure and wants to make progress on it, the quality and the access are linked because if you do not pay a wage to an early educator, there’s no way you can recruit and retain them. That’s the quality. It’s also the supply. That’s what we have found in Vermont.

I will just tell you, we increased the reimbursement rates. Like I said, we’re seeing 1,000 new spaces, new programs opening, satellites of current programs. That’s amazing. We’re going to hit a brick wall any minute because we’re having a workforce crisis in this nation. You better believe that’s hitting early childhood education where this has been historically underpaid, undervalued, under-respected labor. So we’ve done a lot to move forward on that in Vermont. Again, 20 years on the ground where early educators have been in the driver’s seat saying, “This is a profession; this is a business.” It has not been seen as either. So we’ve developed supports for both, supporting this as an industry and as a profession. And we are one of the first in the country to be moving forward to actually establishing a recognized profession called early child education. You may find this, too, in your work, what is the name of this, child care provider?

Emily Oster:

Day care.

Aly Richards:

Day care. Right, exactly. Which I don’t know if you found that’s a dirty word, if you really dig into it.

Emily Oster:

I have found that, yes. But I try to be very careful about child care because people do not like day care. I hear that. Another piece of pushback that I will sometimes hear on this more from right than from the left, is, well actually, the thing that’s the best for kids is for their moms to stay home. So when we provide child care supports, we discourage women from staying home with their babies and that, in fact — I almost think, although I’m not sure that everyone would say it this way, that in some ways, the kind of like, well, there isn’t any child care, so people have to stay home, it’s not so bad. If that’s the solution that people come up with, maybe that would be better for their kids.

Aly Richards:

One of my favorite things in this job is going into conservative talk radio in Vermont, and the phones light up. You went right to how are people going to push back. That’s how you do real public policy work. And then you understand it, and you work with it. I will say, I don’t think we win on making the case that this is where all kids need to be or should be. It should be a choice. This is a very personal time in someone’s life.

Emily Oster:

It should be a choice.

Aly Richards:

I will just say, this is the first time in our civilization where there’s been an assumption that the mom is isolated by herself with a kid or two or three. We’ve had tribes, we’ve had clans, we’ve had multigenerational families. So, actually, it’s only in the 1900s that we started becoming more of a norm where, no, you’re a one-family unit and it’s usually the mom staying at home. Just to put that out there a little bit because I think philosophically about this a lot in this job, having kids myself having just moved through five years of child care and/or lack thereof with my two twins, so that I’ll just put that out there. However, no need to go down that road. It’s about choices like we started with.

Why wouldn’t we do whatever we can as a community to support young families? It seems like a pretty obvious place we can agree on for supports. They’re starting out in their careers. We need them in the workforce, critical time in their child’s development. As we’ve said, there are no choices. Either they’re single-family homes, two people have to work to make ends meet. There’s been a huge silo shift in women working that we just have put our heads in the sand for some reason from some infrastructure perspective. That’s the thing. The other piece of pushback. Should kids be at home or not? Who cares? Let’s give families some choices here, and we’re all going to benefit from that.

An add-on to the pushback I get, Emily, a lot is I got through this phase, it was hard. I paid for my own kids or my wife quit the work to stay at home. I’m not going to pay for someone else’s kids. That’s the number one piece of pushback I get. And I just want to say, we had a really productive and positive conversation about that in Vermont. It was not contentious. It was not like us versus them. We had a really deep community conversation, and that’s where the business community really came in. Hey, look, you actually are paying for these kids. I’m not sure if you realize it. You pay taxes, right? You pay property taxes for their education. Well, mental health costs in Vermont through the roof. Opioid epidemic, through the roof. We pay dearly and in heartbreaking fashion for people when they fall into hard times. That’s much more expensive than helping them get a good start.

You sort of turn it on. Wait a minute. In Vermont, our special education costs in K through 12 have doubled over the last 15 years while we lost like 40,000 kids in that system. So the per child cost is going through the roof. Why? The vast majority of that increase is because kids enter kindergarten not ready to learn. They have not had social-emotional support; they do not have a foundation. So we’re going to be paying to support those kids over a lifetime instead of having them thrive to their full potential. So that’s the argument.

And the business community came in and said, “Guess what? In my business to grow and increase profit, I invest in myself. I do upfront capital improvements. We are asking Vermont to do that as a state.” We actually had this one seminal day early in January. I remember 10 people came into Senate economic development from all different sectors, a one-person contractor, a small restaurant, biggest solar company, a glove maker. We had them all come in, and they said, “This is my bottom line. If I paid a payroll tax, this is how much it would cost me in a year. I’d pay that back,” some of them said, “in four months, because I would get this one shift back because I could hire this person because they had child care.” They each basically explained it in a microcosm of, if I pay this payroll tax just like I do in my business, I benefit greatly.

Oh, and by the way, I’ll be paying more taxes. My employees will pay more taxes. The state of Vermont will have more organic revenue growth and my employees will all make more money. They’ll pay more taxes. It’s this virtuous cycle. I think what you’re seeing is we have a death spiral in Vermont and one thing is crushing another, crushing another. We got to cut ourselves out this. Increase population, increase our tax base, help our kids thrive, help make sure we give them the skills they need to not fall into our awful opiate epidemic. That’s the argument right against all of this sort of affordability and all the pushback we get, frankly.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. You’re very inspiring. I’m ready to —

Aly Richards:

I’m ready to go do this. Yes, I can only do this because you helped me get my kids into where they needed to be, right, in their healthy development. So, here we are.

Emily Oster:

I think that the data on zero to three feels really crucial here, and I think is actually sometimes a hard piece of this to talk about because so many of those conversations, I think, happen among people who are already doing all of the things. I guess when I talk to my audience, people ask me a lot of questions about their own kids. And most of my answer is, the thing you’re asking about doesn’t matter. You don’t need to rotate the toys with the spreadsheet. You don’t need to obsess about the color of the napkin. You don’t have to. These things are not the things that are important, but there are a set of things that are crucially important that we see showing up when kids hit kindergarten. You hit kindergarten, you talk to basically anybody who’s running kindergarten, they’ll tell you, we see the divergence in kids on day one, and then we can try to make some of that up, but it’s there when they arrive.

It’s there because there are basic things that kids are not getting that they need to, like a stable home environment, enough to eat, somebody reading to them, somebody interacting with them. Those are the things that are really important. Sometimes I find it hard to communicate this because the sort of person who is often making the policy, doesn’t worry so much about the little things you’re doing. But for many people, we are not allowing them to provide things that really matter because they don’t have the time and they don’t have the resources. And that’s what this kind of thing is about.

Aly Richards:

Oh, my goodness. Think about that for a second. How heartbreaking is that? Think about when you were in kindergarten, you could probably look around your class and say, oh my goodness, this person isn’t going to make it. And why, they’re five years old? How could you say that? It’s because they did not have the same opportunities in the first five years of their lives. Or like you say, they have been around adverse child experiences. This data is clear, by the way. This is shocking data. You actually will have more likelihood of diabetes or cardiovascular disease if you have been around a lot of violence, or shouting even, or stress, or on the flip side — that’s why it’s like, this is so awful. What can we possibly do about it? Oh, we actually know exactly what to do. And it’s not that hard to deliver.

You need a stable environment. You need a healthy relationship with at least one adult. You need to be outside some. You need to move your body. You need to have some healthy food. You know what I’m saying? You can tell I am an evangelist about this. I have dedicated my career to this because it’s so obvious the more you go into it. It almost makes you angry. Once we have this knowledge, we have this responsibility. And what is it going to take? Oh, just money for our kids, for our whole future. If that’s too cliché for you, dump it, go to the economic ROI, it’s amazing. It’s like none other you’ll ever see. That’s why you see people like Ben Bernanke talking about this. People are like, “Why is Ben Bernanke talking about child care?” Because it’s return on investment we have never seen before.

That’s why I think we have to shift our frames. Look, we made this investment in Vermont. Guess what? It’s working. It was not some crazy experiment. The business community wasn’t just tagging along. They helped lead it. Nationally, can we change the conversation on this? It’s not like, oh, great, I get it, I get it, I get it. Let’s do a dependent care benefit for our employees. I’m such a child care champ. I’m going to give them $5,000 tax-free. No, I’m sorry. This is infrastructure. You could probably pay the same amount into a subsidized system that would actually fix the whole thing.

Emily Oster:

Do you feel, though, this has to happen? Turning to how we get this done elsewhere, do you feel like this has to happen at the state level?

Aly Richards:

Oh, man. Only because I don’t hold my breath for anything to happen at the national level. I hate to say that. I wish that was not the case. There are things we should have in this country that are hard to do by states that should be in this country. And one of them is paid family medical leave. The only, what, four in developed nations that doesn’t have this.

Emily Oster:

We might be gone for one of the only two. But yes, it’s bad.

Aly Richards:

There we go.

Emily Oster:

That is bad.

Aly Richards:

Getting worse by the day on that statistic. There are some things that are hard for states to do because of our economies of scale and to do them right. States are moving forward on that, and some aren’t doing the most robust policy because they’re sort of making compromises based on their budgets. I just want to be clear, we did not finish the job in Vermont. We broke it open. We’re showing the model; it’s working. Back to: Can Vermont maybe accelerate efforts? I hope the answer is yes, Emily, 100% because if we can be an accelerant, that would be my greatest dream. And what happened in Vermont, by the way, was we passed this bill with all the Dems, all the progs, a bunch of Republicans, a bunch of independents, and the only libertarian in our body.

So, quint-partisan, if that’s a phrase. This is a very nonpartisan, bipartisan, this is a unifying issue with real solutions that equals real results in a time that I think we’re hungry for that as a country. The problem is it’s because it’s so unifying, you can’t get a political win off of it. I cannot believe I’m saying that. We live in a world that because you can’t get a chip over the other party, you’re going to leave these kids and our economy behind. I’m very hopeful the feds will understand this is an economic imperative for our economy, and we’ll actually see some progress on this. I think the national business community could really, really help by saying, yes, I’m a champion. Yes, I get this. And then advocating for policy change and investment instead of just doing their own thing in their vacuum. I think that’s huge.

But what I will say is Republican states, Democrat states, conservative, liberal, et cetera, they’re calling us and saying, how did you do it? They’re getting copies of our bill, they’re getting copies of our strategy. Municipalities, cities, whole states. As I said earlier, every state that’s doing this is literally doing the same thing, finding revenue, pushing it into affordability and wages for early educators. I think that simplicity can build some momentum where we can break this loose. I think states should move forward on it, but I think the national government absolutely should come and make it easier for us. We are all agreeing on a lot of the policy principles too. We just need the money to come out.

Emily Oster:

Do you feel like the long-term solution to this, if you sort of had your perfect world, I understand we probably can’t get to this, but that we should in fact think about this exactly the way we think about public schooling, which is basically, from some early age, there is a national child care system where there’s a setup like you could have private, but there’s also a public child care system like our public schools?

Aly Richards:

Ideally, that’s cleanest, that’s equitable. Look, my kids just turned five and went into kindergarten. I don’t know who’s happier, them or me. We had the most amazing high-quality early educators, an amazing program. We were so lucky to get into it after 11 months and then a year and a half off where I lived in my parents’ house because of COVID. Like everyone else in America, the irony hurts since I’ve been the CEO of Let’s Grow Kids throughout that whole time. But I will just say, I don’t know if you can tell, I’m an extreme pragmatist. I want it to work. And I think we’re a long ways away from that for a lot of reasons.

And then I think it’s complicated in a couple ways. I don’t think we’re compromising a lot of quality or equity when you roll it out the way we are doing it in Vermont, and it’s actionable. Look, one big difference is that it’s voluntary. It’s not compulsory. The other thing is there’s so much variety in child development and family needs and preferences in this age. That’s why we find a mixed delivery system that offers flexibility is great, especially for rural America. A home-based provider for the youngest kids especially, a center, a school-based program, all good. There’s enough economies of scale that you’re not wasting money by doing it that way. You can scaffold shared services onto that, so you’re not wasting money, you’re not wasting quality, and it remains a melting pot as long as you are making sure your subsidies are most potent for the most vulnerable families, then it becomes a melting pot, which is great for quality.

I don’t think we’re compromising a lot. I think it’s much more doable. I think things like the fact that it’s voluntary, the preferences, to be honest, parents pay a little bit. And a lot of the pushback we mentioned earlier is, people should have skin in the game. So, in Vermont, our goal is that no family pays more than 10% of their income is a max. That’s a very reasonable sliding fee scale that I think a lot of people can relate to. Okay, makes sense. You’re paying something, but you’re not paying more than you can afford, and it makes it $125 million instead of a billion dollars in Vermont. So, it helps.

Emily Oster:

Okay, I want to end by you telling us a call to action. Imagine I’m a parent, and I want to make this happen. I’m a policymaker; I want to make this happen. How can we do that?

Aly Richards:

I love it. I’ll summarize our secret sauce quickly to answer your question and end with a real CTA. People often ask, well, why did it work in Vermont? What did you guys do? I mentioned a couple of things. Got the business community to be leaders, put early educators in the driver’s seat, did some serious grassroots mobilization. The other thing I didn’t mention was politics. Some people are afraid to play politics, especially in this arena, especially when you do deep policy work. But I am sorry, you can’t pass the law if you are not involved with politics. We opened up 501(c)(4), that sister organization to our 501(c)(3), Let’s Grow Kids and Let’s Grow Kids Action Network. In essence, what did we do? We elevated the issue of child care. Politicians have never said the words child care before. They’ve not run on it. It’s not been a priority. So, no one’s going to do anything about it.

We elevated it to an essential priority coming out of the lips of our lawmakers. The way we did that was we got their attention when they were candidates, when they were running. They went to their communities, and they could not walk a block without hearing someone that they were accountable to saying, you must deliver on child care and housing. Those are the two essential priorities in a rural place like Vermont, child care and housing. We’ll elect you, but do not come home from the golden dome in Montpelier, Vermont, if you have not delivered on these. Then all of a sudden, we had this group of quint-partisan champions who are like, “Got it. I’m accountable to my constituents. I must deliver. Tell me what’s up on this.” So we had an educated and ready to rock crew of people that were ready to do some bold action that they knew would be controversial. Raising revenue is not for the faint of heart.

And guess what? We’re already seeing the primary, all of our child care champions got elected because we were there supporting them saying, thank you. You put your butt on the line to vote for this. Thank you. Those are the secret sauce elements. You can tease some CTAs in there. Find out who in your community or your state is doing work in child care. Is there a coalition? Is there an organizing group? Is there an early educator association? Who is doing it? If no one’s doing it, you can raise your voice and be part of this movement that I think it will take to make such huge transformative change in our states in this country. Call your legislator, your national and your local legislator, and say, child care is essential infrastructure. We cannot afford to live without it in this country or in your state, whatever. And by the way, it pays for itself over a lifetime and immediately, so look into it.

I really think that’s what we have to do, is that we need to elevate this issue in our communities and nationally to a fever pitch and then push it through. If you’re a business, become a policy advocate. I really think that businesses have a unique ability to do this. If you’re a parent, raise your voice. Write an op-ed, talk to your neighbors. It’s good old-fashioned organizing. We’re seeing this in the electoral work. It’s true for social issues as well.

Emily Oster:

Aly, this was a delight. I feel incredibly fired up, and I think everyone else is going to feel fired up also. You guys are doing amazing stuff.

Aly Richards:

I’m so happy to hear that. It should take off. This is an important one, and I just so appreciate you seeing that and elevating it and having the chance to talk with you.

Emily Oster:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Amazing. Thanks for being here.

Aly Richards:

Bye.

Emily Oster:

ParentData is produced by Tamar Avishai with support from the ParentData team and PRX. If you have thoughts on this episode, please join the conversation on my Instagram, @ProfEmilyOster. If you want to support the show, become a subscriber to the ParentData Newsletter at ParentData.org, where I write weekly posts on everything to do with parents and data to help you make better, more informed parenting decisions.

For example, I wrote last month about a new study that showed that parental leave has a significant positive impact on the health of infants, specifically on the rate of contracting RSV. We actually have a podcast episode coming up with the writers of that paper, but, in the meantime, you can read all about it at parentdata.org.

There are a lot of ways you can help people find out about us. Leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. Text your friend about something you learned from this episode. Debate your mother-in-law about the merits of something parents do now that is totally different from what she did. Post a story to your Instagram, debunking a panic headline of your own. Just remember to mention the podcast, too. Right, Penelope?

Penelope:

Right, Mom.

Emily Oster:

We’ll see you next time.

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