Key Points
- Early-childhood education policy should provide relief for working families by subsidizing and stabilizing lower-cost early-childhood education options.
- It should also keep children connected to their families, even though early-childhood education often provides care while parents are absent.
- Early-childhood education policy should work with civil society and employers to maintain a nurturing, supportive array of early learning environments.
Introduction
Conservatives have struggled to put forward a substantive agenda when it comes to early-childhood education. On some level, this might speak to discomfort with the entire enterprise. Insofar as conservatives place the role of the family at the center of child development, particularly for young children, early-childhood education can seem like a clearly inferior option to keeping children home to be nurtured and taught.
While it would be wonderful if all parents had the wherewithal to keep their young children home, that’s not the world we actually live in. There are millions of single parents, millions of families in which both parents have to work, and millions of parents shouldering all manner of other challenges. Meanwhile, more parents reasonably look outside the home to aid with socialization, educational opportunities, or preparation for schooling.
This makes early childhood a crucial kitchen-table issue for parents and communities. Unfortunately, conservatives haven’t had much to offer. In too many instances, Republican officials have wound up going along with progressive calls for more spending and more bureaucracy. When conservatives have sought to offer an early-childhood education agenda of their own, it has mostly started (and ended) with two time-tested responses: deregulation and tax cuts.
Now, deregulation and tax cuts are a reasonable place to start. There is indeed a thicket of regulations with which providers and early-childhood educators must comply. Many of these drive up costs and empower interest groups without doing much to ensure quality, all of which makes it more difficult for families to find cheap or convenient options. Pruning those regulations can reduce the cost and increase the flexibility of early-childhood education, making it more affordable and more convenient for more families. And, to help families afford these newly affordable options, conservatives tend to suggest cutting taxes. More money in paychecks and pockets means more money to pay for early-childhood education.
In short, there’s value in emphasizing both deregulation and tax cuts; they’re sensible first steps. But they are only a beginning. Their shortcomings point to the need for a more robust agenda.
First, there are important dimensions of early-childhood education and childcare that just can’t be deregulated away. Young children need close adult supervision, and thus early-childhood education will always be a labor-intensive process. Removing regulations can certainly help on the margins, but that requirement won’t fundamentally change unless we want AI reading stories and robots monitoring playtime. Especially given the importance that all parents attach to safe and diligent supervision, we can’t deregulate our way out of that one. Free-market enthusiasts who hope we can are kidding themselves.
Similarly, tax cuts aren’t a sufficient solution. Most importantly, many of the people most in need of early-childhood care don’t pay that much in taxes. The bottom half of households in the United States pay an average federal tax rate of 3.4 percent, or about $626 per year.1 Even assuming that every single dollar saved by cutting taxes was put toward early-childhood education, the tax savings wouldn’t come close to covering the costs. More generally, the early-childhood marketplace has been stymied by policy, meaning more is needed to ensure that parents with money to spend can find convenient, reliable, and satisfactory options.
Notes
1. Erica York, “Summary of the Latest Federal Income Tax Data, 2021 Update,” Tax Foundation, February 3, 2021, https://taxfoundation.org/federal-income-tax-data-2021.
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