Quality Preschool Towns Perfect Solution

When the talk of the times turned to orphanages for nonorphans, I confess that a small, cartoon-like light bulb went on over my head. Here was an idea with great potential.

If we were going to take the children of poor mothers and raise them in group homes or centers, why not start modestly and cheaply? Why not start with part-time orphanages? Why not keep them open during working hours? We could call it day care.

After all, the folks who favor 24-hour care would certainly favor eight-or 10-hour care. Anyone who likes Boys Town would like Preschool Towns.

I know, I know, they might see through my ploy. It will be hard to get a child care subcontract into the Contract With America. For reasons that escape me, child care is considered a tired old liberal idea while orphanages are a bright new conservative idea. Maybe it’s a difference of day and night.

Still, the whole argument about poverty and work, welfare and workfare, hangs on a very familiar question: Who Will Take Care of the Children?

For decades now, many on the political right have believed that mothers with small children shouldn’t work outside the home, but that welfare mothers should get a job. Meanwhile many on the political left have defended working mothers but have been uneasy pushing poor women into their ranks.

Today, at the ideological core of this debate are the families, struggling and juggling with work and kids, who have come to the conclusion that if they can do it, so can welfare mothers. More to the point, if they have to do it, so should welfare mothers.

Into this emotional and heated debate now comes a new and critical study of the quality of child care. A team of psychologists and economists from four universities - Yale, UCLA, the Universities of Denver and North Carolina - examined 400 child care centers and tested children in four states.

They concluded that the vast majority of children in these centers were getting care that was “mediocre in quality, sufficiently poor to interfere with children’s emotional and intellectual development.” Only one in seven centers provided both the security and the stimulation that was worthy of a high rating.

The youngest of the children fare the worst. About 40 percent of the infant and toddler rooms were rated poor, and as Yale’s Sharon Lynn Kagan says, “When I say poor, I mean poor - broken glass on the playground, unchanged diapers.”

This study is one of the first to relate the cost of day care with the quality and with the outcome - how kids actually fare. It shows that “the ones that have more money do better.”

But the better centers didn’t cost the parents more. The extra money came to the centers from sources like block grants, private funds, corporations. The difference in the price tag of mediocre and good care was as little as 10 percent. But when they had the dollars, and had to live up to state standards, centers used the money in ways that matter - in the quality, quantity and constancy of staff.

While the researchers said most care was mediocre or poor, 90 percent of the parents said their child care was good.

The parents’ views may be a form of myopia brought on by guilt. How could I leave my kid at a place I didn’t think was good? Or it could be inexperience. How many parents have seen the kind of centers that are the norm in France or Japan?

But any way you look at it, this is a case of low consumer expectations. And a market that meets them.

For too long, child care has been tangled up in arguments about women’s roles rather than children’s lives. Middle class mothers felt that any criticism of day care was really criticism of them. Lower income and single mothers were forced to be grateful for any child care at all.

Now we may have a wave of AFDC mothers searching for places in an underfinanced system threatened even further by cuts in block grants. In this environment, researcher Kagan says that parents have to become much savvier and more demanding consumers.

The question isn’t just who will take care of kids, but how they’ll be taken care of.

Have you heard the promises from the orphanage fans? They insist that these won’t be Dickensian warehouses but warm, nurturing, highquality, group settings for children. Well, OK. Let’s give them a try. How about dawn to dusk, Monday to Friday?

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