Today, Explained - New Mexico low-key fixes child care

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

The US has a child care crisis. But New Mexico just figured out a way to fix it (hint: they’re paying for it). This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Not long ago, I came across a New York Times article about child care that featured one of the most darkly funny charts I have ever seen. I don't usually find humor in charts, but this is a chart of how much rich countries spend on child care, on making sure families have it. Now, there are only rich countries on the chart, and Norway leads. It spends almost 30 grand a year per child on child care. Iceland, Finland, Denmark all spend over 20k per kid. And it's not just European countries on there. Israel, Chile, New Zealand, Oz. Friend of the show Hungary is down near the bottom. It spends a little over 7,000 a year per kid. And at the very bottom, United States, comma, the spends $500 per year per child.

The state of childcare is bad and you know that, but what if I were to tell you that an American state in a very low key way may have figured out a way to fix the problem. I am about to tell you that stay tuned coming up on today. Explained. BetMGM authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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Today Explained. Now you say, not Francis. Today, just say. Good job. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Melissa McGarity is a mom in New Mexico. I had my first daughter. I was bringing her to work with me just fine because my boss understood childcare was not an affordable option at all, especially making like $10 an hour.

Parents have learned to deal with the expense and the shortages. But about a decade ago, some residents of New Mexico started trying to change that. They wanted the state to fund early childhood education, which includes child care. Eli Kuna was one of the organizers. My name is Eli Kuna, and I live, I have raised my family in New Mexico. Eli told me that child care is especially difficult to find in New Mexico. You have a lot of like rural areas that do not have access to child care at all. And in the big cities that is in Las Cruces, Santa Fe and Albuquerque, where you have access to childcare, you are in waiting list.

This fight started like over 10 years ago. The Speaker of the House, Javier Martinez, at the same time with a bunch like for New Mexicans to have a high quality, accessible and free child care for all our families. We need to keep building the services and the programs that New Mexicans sorely need and desperately want. Early childhood education, inclusive of pre-K child care, home visitation and all of the other services that children need prenatal all the way to the age of five. And that's when the idea of tapping to the savings of the state will make it possible. Access to quality early childhood education is the long-term transformative strategy. So I joined the fight as a young parent, educating, activating for around two years to ensure our community have access to free childcare. And then in 2022, New Mexico's governor, Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham, used federal pandemic assistance to pay childcare providers more. She also expanded the number of families eligible for

free child care. The number of families who qualify is nearly doubled. In today's announcement, the governor's office estimated that more than 30,000 families will qualify for this program. We say to the rest of the world, our families deserve every bit of support. They are remarkable and resilient, and child care should be free. They are remarkable and resilient. And child care should be free. But that funding was temporary. New Mexico needed a way to make it permanent. The first thing is that we knew and identified that pocket of money that New Mexico can tap

and ensure that that's not going to increase our taxes because we are all majority working families. So we ensure that there is the land grant permanent school fund. And then the state can tap on those savings to invest in certain areas of development of the state. So this is what we identified that funding. The land grant that Ellie mentioned is something unique to New Mexico. When New Mexico become part of the state since 1912, this has become the trust fund. It's a trust fund that comes from two resources, oil and gas profits and interest. Despite a global price drop in oil and gas, New Mexico's production brought in $2.8 billion, representing almost

a third of our state's total budget. Most of that money goes toward public education. Right now, it has around $26 billion, and 5% of this amount of money goes to public school, hospitals, and universities. Every year, 11% of the growth of this fund continues increasing. So this means that there is an unlimited savings account that we have because we are investing this money in the stock exchange. And the best way to use this money in New Mexico is investing them back to our communities and to our children. So Ellie and others started knocking on doors all over the state.

We're talking about like colonias near to the border. We're talking about rural areas, big cities, all these folks that were already early childhood educators or young families that will benefit by this constitutional amendment. They took a role and they start like a saying, you know what? I want my kids to have the opportunity to have a better quality of life. And that means so much for our family. That means being able to, you know, potentially save for a home, to afford better health care, to save for college, and even just an emergency fund. So that was something that we mobilized over half a million of doors.

We sent three millions of text messages and we did over 300,000 mailers. And this was incredible. And the community felt empowered. Their stories were aligned to what we see at the doors. There was this connection of wanting something better for their children. We asked them about their own experience. Well, I would prefer my, you know, younger child to be in a setting where he's able to have social skills and play with other peers and learn different building blocks and things like that. But I'm a full-time student right now, and I'm working part-time as well. There's just, there's no way. Their own experience with education, their own experience with their families,

and how they imagine a place where we don't see scarcity, but they see everything in abundance. An opportunity for us to decide what we want to do with our money. This is your money, and this money can go directly to working families that looks like you. And that was a moment that really changed a lot of the relationship and the conversation that we were having at the doors. So while you were knocking on doors,

did you meet anyone who told you a story that you found it difficult to forget? Like, what's a door that you knocked on and you came away thinking, wow, what I heard there was really interesting? I was in Sunland Park. It's a border town. And in Sunland Park, it's highly Latino, but also highly bilingual. And when I was door knocking in Sunland Park, there was one of the family, young family that opened up and they even give us water and they were having a, like a really nice conversation. They say, I wish I could have had this opportunity when I was younger, when I arrived. And when we were there and in Sunland

Park, I felt like a really compelling because at that moment I was pregnant, door knocking. And then I say, I want that also for my kid and for myself. That's the reason why I'm door knocking, in fact, because I do believe like any other woman, hardworking woman that is right now carrying a life, it deserves to have the certainty that their kid is going to have everything and beyond that we dream. And this is the first step. And so this is a 10-year effort to get this onto the ballot so that the people of New Mexico can vote. Are we going to spend our land-grant money on free child care? It does get onto the ballot, yes? Yes, it goes into the ballot in 2022.

And then New Mexicans vote. And what happens? Historical victory. We're going to fully fund child care for every New Mexican. We're going to keep getting world-class educators the pay and support they need to do the jobs they love. Over 70% of New Mexicans in favor. Never again in the history of New Mexico, a ballot question asking about education and early childhood education has performed this high. This means that 70% of New Mexicans in 2022 say,

yes, we want this. We deserve better. We want to do this for our children, and we want to use like this our money. So this was something historical in New Mexico. $140 million for early childhood education and $90 million for public schools in general. Now, as mentioned, this is a big deal. This amendment would make New Mexico the first state in the country to say early childhood education is a constitutional right. We're going to be hiring more teachers and raising the teacher's salaries. In that way, we provide also a high quality child care services. We will be expanding early childhood services like home visiting, high quality child

care, and pre-kindergarten all across the state. We also provide like a high quality supplying programming with technology and mental health services for a lot of these centers. And this is the opportunity for us to really ensure that families, working families, not only have access to early childhood services, but they have access for free. Ellie, this constitutional amendment, as you said, passed by a big majority, around 70%, and you almost sound astonished at how well it worked. Do you think that other states in America, maybe states that don't have land grants but do get money from other sources, could make this work? Do you think this is something that could only be done in New Mexico? No, I believe this is something that we

can get it done all across the nation. And I think this is something that we can get it done all across the nation. And I think this is something that is needed all across the nation. The Land-Grant Permanent Fund is just a way to put a title to a saving account and a revenue that the state has. Every single state has a revenue for the big industries. It can be from energy production. It can be from cinematography, even cannabis. All these different industries' revenue can be used to really invest in our education and early childhood education. Coming up, what New Mexico's success could or could not mean for the rest of the country. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday. And she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the order frame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message,

it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com, promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Our children are more capable of retaining and absorbing information than we are, and we insist on treating them like adorable little morons. My name is Dan Worre, and I am the Senior

Director of Early Learning at the Hunt Institute. We are an education policy resource to the nation's governors and state lawmakers founded by Jim Hunt, who is the four-term governor of North Carolina. What do you think about what has happened in New Mexico? The state is essentially guaranteeing early child education to every resident. How big a deal is this? From our national vantage point, right now, New Mexico is really leading, but also providing a model for the rest of the nation in terms of what it's doing to support child care. So very exciting. And while there are some aspects of the constitutional amendment that maybe make it a little more challenging, not every state has the natural resources, for example, that are helping to fund that in New Mexico.

I think we have found in other states that where there's a will, there's a way. And they put together a very compelling model for how to support young children and families. Some people would point out that we wouldn't necessarily expect a state like New Mexico to be a leader in this. Are we missing something about New Mexico specifically when we make that kind of assumption? The progress that New Mexico has made has been born of some very specific needs. For a number of years, including 2022, New Mexico was ranked 50th in the nation in measures of child well-being. And so it's for a reason that Governor Lujan Grisham and the legislature have really decided to make this a priority. We're going to get to universal early

childhood education. We said we wanted 285 million in five years. Well, you know, I just said I was impatient. Let's see if we can't get to universal. Dominic, I want it in three years. I think it is safe to assume that we're going to see those rankings change and likely pretty dramatically in short order. So the thing that New Mexico has, as you know, as we all know, working in its favor is that it has money from oil and gas revenues to make up for a lack of federal funding once the American Rescue Plan funds are gone. OK, good for New Mexico, right? But what about Delaware? What about Maine? What about Alaska? What about California? How likely is it that other states could pull off something like New Mexico has

if they don't have oil and gas revenue? What we're seeing across the country right now is that other states are finding their own ways of creating dedicated revenue sources for early childhood. Voters in Colorado passed a ballot initiative to create a new tax on tobacco and vaping products. A ballot measure aimed at driving down tobacco use and teen vaping while also funding preschool across the state. Louisiana has looked to sports

betting. The city of Philadelphia has taxed sugary beverages. To make pre-kindergarten available to all three and four-year-olds, Philadelphia's mayor has proposed a soda tax that requires beverage distributors to pay three cents for every ounce of sugary drink sold in the city. That is evidence that across the country that this is an important need and that when communities and states come together and really put their minds to it, you know, there are ways. It may not be through oil and gas revenues, but there are ways to advance this topic and this conversation in the states. The pandemic did offer Americans a lot in the way of federal funds that hadn't previously been there. When it came to funds that were

specifically allocated for child care to improve it, what did the federal government come up with? In a number of different tranches of money, you know, beginning with the CARES Act and sort of concluding with the American Rescue Plan Act, Congress has made available billions of dollars to the states designed to help to stabilize the child care industry. And ultimately, that's what we have seen is the bulk of that money has gone really to two things, grants to child care providers to help stabilize and help to keep their doors open. $39 billion that will go to states and tribes and territories. These funds will help child care centers and family child care providers

to reopen or stay open by helping to cover rent or mortgage payments, utility and insurance payments. The other thing that states have done to varying degrees of success, candidly, is try to expand access for families. So dedicated some of that money for child care subsidies to make the service even more available to children. It gives states enough funding to provide over 800,000 families with subsidies to pay for child care. The idea that states can invest in access alone has sometimes been a little bit stymied by the fact that there may not well be a workforce available to staff these classrooms.

The individuals who would otherwise be working in these child care settings have many more opportunities in front of them and frankly may have opportunity to make not only more, but substantially more working in a fast food restaurant. Who wants to come into this field right now? Like, no way. When you're seeing signs that Wawa will pay you $15, $17 an hour, I don't have to worry about children who need extra love, extra attention. Who would come here, honestly? In states where the minimum wage or where child care providers may be making $10 an hour or $11 an hour, it may be not a hard choice in terms of how they choose to take care of their families. The American Rescue Plan money,

the federal funding, some of which went to child care, it will run out. What happens at that point? For about a year or so, particularly as Congress was debating, you know, what was called the Build Back Better proposal from the Biden administration. So the average two-parent family with two young kids spends 26 percent of their income on child care every year. My Build Back Better plan is going to change that. We saw states take sort of a wait-and-see approach, right? They were expecting the possibility that there was going to be this large infusion, a historic infusion, frankly, of federal funds around child care and pre-K.

And so now that Build Back Better is off borrowing orgy that we don't need. But I understand my Democratic colleagues disagree. My observation is that we have states right now that have come to the conclusion that likely there is no one coming to save them on this topic. And so we're seeing really rapid and aggressive efforts on the parts of states to figure out how they're going to step in and fill that void. In the absence of action from either Congress and or state legislatures, you know, we are in serious peril as these dollars run out of seeing large parts of the child care sector

simply collapse and go out of seeing large parts of the child care sector simply collapse and go out of business. So I think it really is an imperative for policymakers to be thinking about this right now. I used to cover economics. And one thing that economists will tell you is that if there is a market for something and there are people who can pay for that thing, that thing will exist. And what is constantly puzzling about child care is that there are millions of people who need it. They can pay for it. They are willing to pay for it. And yet there never seems to be enough of it. Is there some way in which child care is not a regular industry and this is a situation where government funding is just going to have to be necessary,

or is there a way to make this business, this industry, economically sound, economically make sense? We've got a service. You guys want it. We're going to decide on a fair price. We'll have enough. There you go. The answer to that depends very much on your perspective on what child care even is. Child care ultimately is right now sort of a broken economic model. We talk about it as like a broken three-legged stool in which parents are paying more for child care than they would pay for their mortgages or even for in-state college tuition. Providers, on the other hand, are generally squeaking by on kind of the narrowest of profit margins. And the whole thing is being sort of subsidized and balanced on the backs of a low-income that the first three years of life and the period from

prenatal to age three in particular are this uniquely consequential period of human development during which the fundamental architecture of the brain is wired in ways that will either support or hinder the long-term success of children, both academically and in life. And so, you know, if you look at child care less as sort of an opportunity simply to ensure the physical safety of children while their parents are off at work, and more as a setting in which we are developing the human capital that will drive this nation's future and determine the success of the children enrolled, then that's a very different proposition and it becomes an even more costly service to provide. It is in the long term absolutely critical that the nation increase

public funding for child care, recognizing that it is an education service. It is a public good. Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and edited by Amin El-Sadi. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey and Patrick Boyd. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you